mathematician and computer specialist at the University of Pittsburgh, suggested a system that would store a consumer's profile – data about his occupation and interests – in a central computer. Machines would then scan newspapers, magazines, video tapes, films and other material, match them against the individual's interest profile, and instantaneously notify him when something appears that concerns him. The system could be hitched to facsimile machines and TV transmitters that would actually display or print out the material in his own living room. By 1969 the Japanese daily
It is obstinate nonsense to insist, in the face of all this, that the machines of tomorrow will turn us into robots, steal our individuality, eliminate cultural variety, etc., etc. Because primitive mass production imposed certain uniformities, does not mean that super-industrial machines will do the same. The fact is that the entire thrust of the future carries away from standardization – away from uniform goods, away from homogenized art, mass produced education and 'mass' culture. We have reached a dialectical turning point in the technological development of society. And technology, far from restricting our individuality, will multiply our choices – and our freedom – exponentially.
Whether man is prepared to cope with the increased choice of material and cultural wares available to him is, however, a totally different question. For there comes a time when choice, rather than freeing the individual, becomes so complex, difficult and costly, that it turns into its opposite. There comes a time, in short, when choice turns into overchoice and freedom into un-freedom.
To understand why, we must go beyond this examination of our expanding material and cultural choice. We must look at what is happening to social choice as well.
Chapter 13
A SURFEIT OF SUBCULTS
Thirty miles north of New York City, within easy reach of its towers, its traffic and its urban temptations, lives a young taxicab driver, a former soldier, who boasts 700 surgical stitches in his body. These stitches are not the result of combat wounds, nor of an accident involving his taxi. Instead, they are the result of his chief recreation: rodeo riding.
On a cab driver's modest salary, this man spends more than $1200 a year to own a horse, stable it, and keep it in perfect trim. Periodically hitching a horsetrailer to his auto, he drives a little over one hundred miles to a place outside Philadelphia called 'Cow Town.' There, with others like himself, he participates in roping, steer wrestling, bronco busting, and other strenuous contests, the chief prize of which have been repeated visits to a hospital emergency ward.
Despite its proximity, New York holds no fascination for this fellow. When I met him he was twenty-three, and he had visited it only once or twice in his life. His entire interest is focused on the cow ring, and he is a member of a tiny group of rodeo fanatics who form a little-known underground in the United States. They are not professionals who earn a living from this atavistic sport. Nor are they simply people who affect Western-style boots, hats, denim jackets and leather belts. They are a tiny, but authentic subcult lost within the vastness and complexity of the most highly technological civilization in the world.
This odd group not only engages the cab driver's passion, it consumes his time and money. It affects his family, his friends, his ideas. It provides a set of standards against which he measures himself. In short, it rewards him with something that many of us have difficulty finding: an identity.
The techno-societies, far from being drab and homogenized, are honeycombed with just such colorful groupings – hippies and hot rodders, theosophists and flying saucer fans, skindivers and skydivers, homosexuals, computerniks, vegetarians, bodybuilders and Black Muslims.
Today the hammerblows of the super-industrial revolution are literally splintering the society. We are multiplying these social enclaves, tribes and minicults among us almost as fast as we are multiplying automotive options. The same destandardizing forces that make for greater individual choice with respect to products and cultural wares, are also destandardizing our social structures. This is why, seemingly overnight, new subcults like the hippies burst into being. We are, in fact, living through a 'subcult explosion.'
The importance of this cannot be overstated. For we are all deeply influenced, our identities are shaped, by the subcults with which we choose, unconsciously or not, to identify ourselves. It is easy to ridicule a hippie or an uneducated young man who is willing to suffer 700 stitches in an effort to test and 'find' himself. Yet we are all rodeo riders or hippies in one sense: we, too, search for identity by attaching ourselves to informal cults, tribes or groups of various kinds. And the more numerous the choices, the more difficult the quest.
The proliferation of subcults is most evident in the world of work. Many subcults spring up around occupational specialties. Thus, as the society moves toward greater specialization, it generates more and more subcultural variety.
The scientific community, for example, is splitting into finer and finer fragments. It is criss-crossed with formal organizations and associations whose specialized journals, conferences and meetings are rapidly multiplying in number. But these 'open' distinctions according to subject matter are matched by 'hidden' distinctions as well. It is not simply that cancer researchers and astronomers do different things; they talk different languages, tend to have different personality types; they think, dress and live differently. (So marked are these distinctions that they often interfere with interpersonal relationships. Says a woman scientist: 'My husband is a microbiologist and I am a theoretical physicist, and sometimes I wonder if we mutually exist.')
Scientists within a specialty tend to hang together with their own kind, forming themselves into tight little subcultural cells, to which they turn for approval and prestige, as well as for guidance about such things as dress, political opinions, and life style.
As science expands and the scientific population grows, new specialties spring up, fostering more and still more diversity at this 'hidden' or informal level. In short, specialization breeds subcults.
This process of cellular division within a profession is dramatically marked in finance. Wall Street was once a relatively homogeneous community. 'It used to be,' says one prominent sociological observer of the money men, 'that you came down here from St. Paul's and you made a lot of money and belonged to the Racquet Club and you had an estate on the North Shore, and your daughters were debutantes. You did it all by selling bonds to your exclassmates.' The remark is perhaps slightly exaggerated, but Wall Street was, in fact, one big White Anglo-Saxon Protestant subcult, and its members did tend to go to the same schools, join the same clubs, engage in the same sports (tennis, golf and squash), attend the same churches (Presbyterian and Episcopalian), and vote for the same party (Republican).
Anybody who still thinks of Wall Street in these terms, however, is getting his ideas from the novels of Auchincloss or Marquand rather than from the new, fast-changing reality. Today, Wall Street has splintered, and a young man entering the business has a choice of a whole clutch of competing subcultural affiliations. In investment banking the old conservative WASP grouping still lingers on. There are still some old-line 'white shoe' firms of which it is said 'They'll have a black partner before they hire a few.' Yet in the mutual fund field, a relatively new specialized segment of the financial industry, Greek, Jewish and Chinese names abound, and some star salesmen are black. Here the entire style of life, the implicit values of the group, are quite different. Mutual fund people are a separate tribe.
'Not everyone even wants to be a WASP any more,' says a leading financial writer. Indeed, many young, aggressive Wall Streeters, even when they do happen to be WASP in origin, reject the classical Wall Street subcult and identify themselves instead with one or more of the pluralistic social groupings that now swarm and sometimes collide in the canyons of Lower Manhattan.
As specialization continues, as research extends into new fields and probes more deeply into old ones, as the economy continues to create new technologies and services, subcults will continue to multiply. Those social critics who inveigh against 'mass society' in one breath and denounce 'over-specialization' in the next are simply
