Griffith Edwards
For a culture to evolve it has to pass through many stages of crisis yet experts are almost forming a queue to prophesy doom for American society.
They seem unable to accept that man co-exists with crisis, pain and guilt and that there can be no instant recipe for salvation.
Philip Slater, formerly chairman of the Department of Sociology, at Brandeis University, Massachusetts, is clearly a sensitive and concerned man who is pained and perplexed by the state of his country. He feels responsibility not only for making the diagnosis but also for proposing some of the solutions; he is not an academic content to remain in an ivory tower. His central proposition is that American culture is ‘at the breaking point’, and he aims to identify the forces that are tearing that culture apart.
Why should a book written with such humane and excellent purpose read rather like a volume of sermons destined to be ‘remaindered’ for 5p? The secondhand bookshops are packed with works of nineteenth-century divines who were moved to put their pious words into print. In time the works of Professors of sociology will join those of doctors of divinity - there’s going to be no end of a space Problem.
Slater’s writing lacks credibility chiefly because, time after time, some complex social problem is oversimplified to the point of utter falseness. One cannot, ?t course, interrupt a sermon ?and Slater’s style somehow has exactly that pulpit air - but there is n?thing to stop one muttering after church.
Here is one example of the totally unsubstantiated and largely questionable, presented in the guise of gospel truth. It is stated (p. 105) that ‘drug users are behaving like good American consumers’. Slater Suggests that the mass media has conditioned.
The Pursuit of loneliness: American culture at the breaking Point ^ Philip E. Slater, ‘en Lane, The Penguin Press, ?2.25 Americans to believe that material products can fulfil every emotional need. This conditioning is seen to be responsible for the scale of the country’s drug problem. All so facile, all such welcome support for an underlying thesis which is going to find support come hell or high water, and all based on a blithe dismissal of many relevant facts. Thailand has a heroin problem which makes the American narcotic problem look like a beginners’ class. In parts of India cannabis has been used for centuries and the licensed shops still sell the drug to anyone.
In the USA, long before the mass media became a popular evil for ‘pulpit denunciation’, there was a substantial opiate problem-in 1918 the Treasury Department made an estimate of 237,655 cases. Faced with facts like these, what really is the worth of the simplistic and confident assertion that Slater makes about the relationship between drug use and what he dislikes in American culture?
Much of this book is a matter of an assertion called in to back up an early assertion which in turn is backed up by yet another assertion … American culture ‘deeply and uniquely’ frustrates the desire for community. Therefore the flight to the suburb and the do-it-yourself movement ‘both attempt to deny human interdependence and pursue unrealistic fantasies of self sufficiency’. The Americans ‘suffer mass impersonal injuries from mechanical forces’ and it is suggested that America’s difficulty in fighting back at the computer and at the impersonal corporation may be a frustration somehow related to the Vietnam war and the ‘uniquely American characteristic’ of ‘killing from a distance’.
In later chapters this leads on to the assertion that the major characteristic of the American housewife is that she has been desexualized; that ‘the recruitment of physicians selectively favours cold, ungiving, exploitative, competitive and mercenary personality types’; that nuclear war holds an unconscious attraction ‘because it offers a final explosive release from the tensions that afflict us’; and .that ‘the only obstacle to Utopia is the persistence of the competitive motivational patterns that past scarcity assumptions have spawned’.
The talk of ‘crisis’ in itself is very reminiscent of the sermon technique. If you can persuade the congregation that they are in imminent danger of damnation and that you are the merchant of salvation, then you are most certainly in business. The crisis, says Slater, is ‘self evident’ and he then goes swiftly on, with a swipe at any who would disagree with him - ‘the blandness exhibited by old-culture adherents in the face of it [crisis] is difficult to explain without recourse to psychopathology’.
So, to contribute some personal psychopathology, I would like to know what factual evidence or wellreasoned argument can be put forward to persuade me that America is at a greater stage of crisis now than it has been at many times since Columbus. What about the Civil War? And what about the Wall Street crash?
Surely an evolving culture is one which is likely to be in a more or less continuous state of ‘alarm’ and had not this better be accepted - without too great a presumption that the world will come to an end in 1981?
The second point is that the relationship between the quality of individual human life and the structure of society is extremely uncertain - to propose that this or that change in social structures and institutions or cultural assumptions will make for greater personal happiness may well be true ?but it may equally well be false. Utopia is not quite so easily built as Slater would have us believe.
Is this book worth reading? The answer is undoubtedly ‘yes’, and the verdict goes that way not because it offers shimmering new truths and great new insights, but because it so clearly illustrates one particular aspect of the American scene today - that the American citizen who is deeply and responsibly concerned about the problematical quality of life in his own country feels pain and guilt, and then demands an instant recipe for salvation. He feels, in his bones that there must be a radical and absolute solution. To accept that man co-exists with crisis, pain and guilt - to suggest that there is no Utopia - is intolerable to one of the best sorts of American conscience.
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