Coping with the Future
GITLIN, TODD
BOOKSCoping with the Future TODD GITLIN Robert Heilbroner's new book, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, is in the grand tradition of courageous social forecast associated with Karl Marx, Max...
...Two solutions, Heilbroner notes, are possible: the upper middle class could relinquish a good deal of its income, or growth could take place in the realm of services, not material production...
...In the short run, socialism could manage a steady-state economy more easily than capitalism, but in the long run there would be no difference between socialism and capitalism...
...The question is: What attitude is one to take toward this likelihood...
...In bluntest terms," Heilbroner writes, "the question is whether the Hobbesian struggle that is likely to arise in such a strait-jacketed economic society would not impose intolerable strains on the representative democratic political apparatus that has been historically associated with capitalist societies...
...It has the virtue of honesty that fights with the implications of one's own argument...
...Heilbroner argues that the scarcity of resources, energy shortages, and pollution "are likely to exert their throttling effect long before a fatal, impassable barrier of irreversible climatic change is reached...
...The biologically irremediable immaturity of human development explains "the perplexing readiness, even eagerness, with which authority is accepted by the vast majority...
...This speaks to the "inescapable need to limit industrial growth...
...Because of apparently biological limits to the pace of intentional character change, "the outlook is for what we may call 'convulsive change'—change forced upon us by external events rather than by conscious choice, by catastrophe rather than by calculation,"—in other words, by war and environmental disaster...
...But what is also necessary is the will to change...
...Norton...
...converge...
...The former is unlikely, and, as for the latter, shrinking material production would generate "goods hunger" and, thereby, a new, intense form of "Hobbesian competition...
...Man makes himself, though not, of course, in conditions of his own making...
...but he can still learn...
...When so much of what ordinarily passes for scholarship is obsessed with minutiae, it pays attention to the big issues of war, ecology, authority, and freedom...
...there is that strand of working-class culture which resists industrial stupefaction...
...Yet "human nature" obstructs this possibility...
...I am not disagreeing with Heilbroner's claim that "if radicalism is to go to the roots, as the term implies, it must be prepared to examine the 'nature' of man in ways much more courageous and much less pietistic than those it uses in the name of humanism...
...A healthy stoicism, in the face of what we know about contemporary civilization, is necessary...
...Shall it be Heilbroner's stoicism, symbolized by his evocation of the image of Atlas, or shall it be the attempt to remedy as well...
...5.95...
...One useful form of prophecy is the self-negating kind: that which, because of its implicit or explicit preferences (like Heilbroner's for liberty), helps to reverse the direction which it itself anticipates...
...150 pp...
...The "lopsided manner" in which scientific technology has developed is common to both capitalist and state-socialist societies, to the "rhythms of industrial production," and the problems of East and West are likely to AN INQUIRY INTO THE HUMAN PROSPECT, by Robert L. Heilbroner...
...I do not want to counter Heilbroner's pessimism with an equally abstract, giddy optimism which is foreign to both my beliefs and my temperament, but Heilbroner's critique of critiques is a prophecy of doom, when what we need most, I believe, is advice on next steps...
...Just as no one can say how little, no one can say how much...
...BOOKSCoping with the Future TODD GITLIN Robert Heilbroner's new book, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, is in the grand tradition of courageous social forecast associated with Karl Marx, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, and Herbert Marcuse...
...Economist Heilbroner's pessimism about the human prospect is well grounded...
...of head that fights with heart...
...What is needed throughout the industrialized world is a steady-state economy, which is "imaginable...
...Gitlin teaches at the New College of California State University in San Jose...
...there is that strand of the counterculture with its anti-commercial, anti-gigantic, parsimonious thrust...
...He is the author of "Busy Being Born: Poems for Survivors of the Sixties," just published by Straight Arrow, and is co-author of "Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago...
...and he cannot, thank God, be anything he likes...
...Population growth, especially in the Third World, is likely to bring about either upper class military-economic dictatorship, which will solve nothing, or totalitarian economic development, which can, at least, successfully impose birth control...
...There are counter trends at work, in America at least, and they should be explored and, where appropriate, amplified, not condemned to oblivion...
...The factors he points to have weight...
...To deplore the industrial mentality is one thing, and necessary, but to deflate the chances for constructive, intentional change is neither necessary nor desirable...
...It is well to be reminded, as Freud and more recently Kenneth Keniston have reminded us, that humanity is not infinitely malleable...
...The only chance to avert this doom would be a transvaluation of values: the rampages of production and consumption must be replaced by "new frugal attitudes...
...But in the condensation and sweep of its argument, it has the vice of categorical overreach and an unintended resignation...
...While Heilbroner believes that decentralization of industrial production, and de-megalopolizing, might help, he doubts that these reforms "can wholly undo the de-humanizing requirements of an industrial system...
...There are also limits to the human capacity for submission to authority, but Heilbroner is not so sensitive to them...
...Then there is the "ultimate certitude" of ecological catastrophe if the world continues on its present course...
...There is much common sense in Heilbroner's argument—"common sense" that highly deserves that label in an age of crackpot realism and self-fulfilling idiocy...
...Certainly, other things being equal, his forecast is the likely one...
...Even polemics against economic growth are counter-productive, since we need certain forms of growth to mitigate the social consequences of unplanned, cancerous growth...
...We need a "capacity to form a collective bond of identity with . . . future generations...
...In either case, there is the risk of war against the industrialized world, whether capitalist or state-socialist: war for redistribution of limited resource-wealth, whether all-annihilating or "limited...
...Though "all the dangers . . . are social problems, originating in human behavior and capable of amelioration by the alteration of that behavior," an adequate response is unlikely...
...Mr...
...But then how are social tensions to be managed...
...Perhaps this is, finally, Heilbroner's intention...
...Thus the solution, if there is to be one, must be political in the broadest sense...
...The counter-tendency is the human capacity for love, sympathy, and fellow-feeling, but there are limits to this...
...Before criticizing Heilbroner's lucid argument, let me try to summarize it...
...Because the classical valve for social discontent is economic growth, "a stationary capitalism is thus forced to confront the explosive issue of income distribution in a way that an expanding capitalism is spared...
...He adds: "I do not see how one can avoid the conclusion that the required transformation will be likely to exceed the capabilities of representative democracy...
...Heilbroner's self-admitted conservative view of "human nature" is not a justification for the status quo...
...If Heilbroner's book can be taken as a counsel of change more than as defeatism, if the kernel of realistic hope can be extracted from the nut of doomsday-ism, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect might have a useful effect...
...There is that strand of feminism with its anti-hierarchical mood...
...This could be mitigated somewhat by recycling and reducing wastes in production and by the discovery of new resources and technological extraction methods, but the factor that sets an absolute ceiling to the present industrial civilization is the ecosphere's limited toleration for heat production, a consequence of all energy generation...
Vol. 38 • May 1974 • No. 5
