The Lost Massey Lectures (8 page)

Yet the chance for liberal revolutionary change in countries of this Model is by no means unfavorable. It accords with a profound instinct of the people. We make a great mistake in supposing, in the manner of American conservatives, that constitutional liberties are valued only by Anglo-Saxons of good character, some property, superior education and good personal hygiene. And although the surrender of non-functional power cannot be purchased, the surrender can be made less painful by payment. This is what was envisaged under the Alliance for Progress. It is by far the most desirable form of assistance for the Model II countries. This was the most progressive single policy of the Kennedy Administration. There should be no doubt as to why political conservatives and routine diplomats have regarded the policy with such suspicion.

One of the advantages of aid that is designed to facilitate social change is in showing that the United States is categorically on the side of such change and that reactionary or, more inimically, politically innocent officials in the United States will not act on the assumption that thrust toward change is Communist in inspiration.
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Should they be allowed to continue to do so, there is a very good chance that the ultimate such thrust will be Communist.

It goes without saying that not only moral but material support should be denied to non-functional ruling groups. In particular, support to Latin American armed forces has been, as earlier noted,
the most symmetrically self-defeating exercise in American foreign policy in the last half century. In the belief that power was being built up for resistance to Communism, a power was created that was strongly inimical to orderly political development and to economic progress. It helped make Communism increasingly attractive as a solution. Like most moderately well-paid and sedentary groups, members of these armies are averse to personal risk. So, as in Cuba, they are unlikely ever to interpose much physical opposition to the Communists. By surrender and possibly even by purchase, they are an excellent source of arms. One wonders if the Soviets have ever considered leaving the propagation of Communism to the more orthodox of our old-line Latin American hands and those who believe that wherever there is a soldier he should be given an American gun. If Communism must be encouraged, let it be done by proven talent.

In the Model III countries, prescription comes much closer to what we have come to consider the standard policy for underdevelopment. The cultural base in these countries being wide, this requires no urgent action. Education is important; no one would argue for a moment against its further development. But it does not remove the prime barrier to advance.
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The social structure is, as everywhere, imperfect. But the claims of non-functional groups and the absence of reward for those who have function are also not the decisive barrier to advance. One is spared the delicate task of recommending the right kind of revolution.

In these countries the simple fact is that too many people struggle to make a living from too few resources. As a further consequence, little can be saved to enlarge the capital base—factories, power plants, transport—by which production is increased. The
obvious remedy is to provide resources for immediate consumption if these are patently insufficient, to provide capital for expansion of existing agricultural and industrial plant, and, most urgently, to limit the number of people who must live from these perilously scarce resources.

Translated into specific measures, this means that all feasible steps must be taken—by encouraging individual savings, encouraging the retention and reinvestment of earnings, and by judicious use of taxation—to mobilize internal savings. The amount so made available will almost certainly be small. The country has the cultural resources to use considerable amounts. This is the meaning of the common statement that India, Pakistan and Egypt have large absorptive capacity for capital. So external capital assistance in generous amounts is of great importance in this Model.

The social structure of these countries makes poverty comparatively democratic. For a very large proportion of the population, accordingly, consumption will have a larger claim on resources than saving for capital formation, for this consumption is coordinate with life itself. This not only sets limits on what can be squeezed out of these economies for investment, but it also emphasizes the value, in these countries, of direct consumption assistance, such as the food provided by the United States under Public Law 480, provided, of course, that it is not a substitute for domestic effort to increase food production.

It is obviously important that capital, being scarce, be used effectively. This means that there must be a plan which establishes priorities and an administrative apparatus for carrying these priorities into effect. The administrative and technical resources from the wide cultural base make such planning feasible. It is both less essential and less feasible in the other two Models.

It is of the highest importance in this Model that the nexus between poverty and the birth rate be broken. A high birth rate is
a common attribute of poverty, but it is in Model III countries that action is most urgent. For years, men of modest foresight have been warning that, in the future, the dense populations of these lands would press alarmingly on the means for supporting them. Now the future has come. This is the meaning of the food riots in these last years in India.

It would be wrong to wait on more studies or a better contraceptive. Research on population has already been used to the limit as an alternative to determined action on birth control. Whichever contraceptive is now most practical must be provided in adequate quantity at the earliest moment to every village and with every possible encouragement and incentive to its use. Results must be measured not, as now, by pamphlets issued, speeches delivered and conferences attended, but by what happens to the birth rate. The moral choice is no longer between contraception and children, but between contraception and starvation. The provision of food from abroad—and by a long supply line that might be cut with disastrous consequences—is justified if it enlarges consumption for an existing population. It is not so easy to justify if it induces a Malthusian increase in population with the result that people are as hungry as before but there are more people to be hungry.

This brings me to the end of these lectures. It will be evident that in all of these Models we face problems of the most formidable difficulty. There can be no talk of the poor countries catching up with the rich. Nor can we hope to keep the gap between those that grow easily and those that grow only with difficulty from widening. Our best hope is that the people of the poor countries, in comparing their position in the given year with that of the year before, will have a sense of improvement. This is not a negligible
accomplishment; the basic comparison in economic affairs is with the position of very near neighbors and the year before. But to insure this improvement will require patience and great effort. It will also take a good deal of money. However, failure can surely be counted upon to cost more.

During Eisenhower's second administration, I wrote a book describing how hard it was for young people to grow up in the corporate institutions of American society. Yet statistics at that time indicated that most were content to be secure as personnel of big corporations; a few deviated in impractical, and certainly unpolitical, ways, like being Beat or delinquent. The system itself, like its President, operated with a cheerful and righteous self-satisfaction. There were no signs of its being vulnerable, though a loud chorus of intellectual critics, like myself, were sounding off against it. We were spoil-sports.

Less than ten years later, the feeling is different; it turns out that we critics were not altogether unrealistic. The system of institutions is still grander and more computerized, but it seems to have lost its morale. The baronial corporations are making
immense amounts of money and are more openly and heavily subsidized by the monarch in Washington. The processing of the young is extended for longer years and its tempo speeded up. More capital and management are exported, interlocking with international capital, and more of the world (including Canada) is brought under American control. When necessary, remarkable military technology is brought to bear. At home, there is no political check, for no matter what the currents of opinion, by and large the dominant system wreaks its will, managing the parliamentary machinery to look like consensus.

Nevertheless, the feeling of justification is gone. Sometimes we seem to be bulling it through only in order to save face. Often, enterprises seem to be expanding simply because the managers cannot think of any other use of energy and resources. The economy is turning into a war economy. There are warnings of ecological disaster, pollution, congestion, poisoning, mental disease, anomie. We have discovered that there is hard-core poverty at home that is not easy to liquidate. Unlike the success of the Marshall Plan in Europe in the Forties, it increasingly appears that poverty and unrest in Asia, Africa, and South America are not helped by our methods of assistance, but are perhaps made worse. There are flashes of suspicion, like flashes of lightning, that the entire system may be unviable. Influential senators refer to our foreign policy as “arrogant” and “lawless” but, in my opinion, our foreign and domestic system is all of a piece and is more innocent and deadly than that; it is mindless and morally insensitive. Its pretended purposes are window-dressing for purposeless expansion and a panicky need to keep things under control.

And now very many young people no longer want to co-operate with such a system. Indeed, a large and rapidly growing number—already more than 5% of college students—use language that is openly revolutionary and apocalyptic, as if in
their generation they were going to make a French Revolution. More and more often, direct civil disobedience seems to make obvious sense.

We are exerting more power and feeling less right—what does that mean for the future? I have heard serious people argue for three plausible yet drastically incompatible predictions about America during the next generation, none of them happy:

(1) Some feel, with a kind of Virgilian despair, that the American empire will succeed and will impose for a long time, at home and abroad, its meaningless management and showy style of life. For instance, we will “win” in Vietnam, though such a victory of brute military technology will be a moral disaster. Clubbing together with the other nuclear powers, we will stave off the nuclear war and stop history with a new Congress of Vienna. American democracy will vanish into an establishment of promoters, mandarins, and technicians, though for a while maintaining an image of democracy as in the days of Augustus and Tiberius. And all this is probably the best possible outcome, given the complexities of high technology, urbanization, mass education, and overpopulation.

(2) Others believe, with dismay and horror, that our country is over-reaching and is bound for doom; but nothing can be done because policy cannot be influenced. Controlling communications, creating incidents that it then mistakes for history, deceived by its own Intelligence agents, our system is mesmerized. Like the Mikado, Washington is captive of its military-industrial complex. The way we manage the economy and technology must increase anomie and crime. Since the war-economy eats up brains and capital, we will soon be a fifth-rate economic power. With a few setbacks abroad—for instance, when we force a major South American country to become communist—and with the increasing disorder on the streets that is inevitable because our cities are
unworkable, there will be a police state. The atom bombs may then go off. Such being the forecast, the part of wisdom is escape, and those who cultivate
LSD
are on the right track.

(3) Others hold that the Americans are too decent to succumb to fascism, and too spirited to remain impotent clients of a managerial elite, and the tide of protest will continue to rise. The excluded poor are already refusing to remain excluded and they cannot be included without salutary changes. With the worst will in the world we cannot police the world. But the reality is that we are confused. We do not know how to cope with the new technology, the economy of surplus, the fact of One World that makes national boundaries obsolete, the unworkability of traditional democracy. We must invent new forms. To be sure, the present climate of emergency is bad for the social invention and experiment that are indispensable, and there is no doubt that our overcentralized and Establishment methods of organization make everybody stupid from top to bottom. But there is hope precisely in the young. They understand the problem in their bones. Of course, they don't know much and their disaffection both from tradition and from the adult world makes it hard for them to learn anything. Nevertheless, we will learn in the inevitable conflict, which will hopefully be mainly non-violent.

I myself hold this third view: American society is on a bad course, but there is hope for reconstruction through conflict. It is a wish. The evidence, so far, is stronger for either our empty success or for crack-up. My feeling is the same as about the atom bombs. Rationally, I must judge that the bombs are almost certain to go off in this generation; yet I cannot believe that they will go off, for I do not lead my life with that expectation.

Let me stop a moment and make another comparison. Thirty years ago the Jews in Germany believed that Hitler did not mean to exterminate them; “nobody,” they said, “can be that stupid.” So
they drifted to the gas chambers, and went finally even without resistance. Now the nuclear powers continue stockpiling bombs and pouring new billions into missiles, anti-missile missiles, and armed platforms in orbit. You Canadians, like us Americans, do not prevent it. Afterwards, survivors, if there are any, will ask, “How did we let it happen?”