an end.' The same appeared to be true in Washington, Newark, Philadelphia and elsewhere as well.
The disappearance of the violent street gangs has not, of course, led to an era of urban tranquility. The aggressive passions that led poor Puerto Rican and Negro youths in New York to wage war on rival gangs is now directed at the social system itself, and totally new kinds of social organizations, subcults and life style groupings are emerging in the ghetto.
What we sense, therefore, is a process by which subcults multiply at an ever accelerating rate, and in turn die off to make room for still more and newer subcults. A kind of metabolic process is taking place in the bloodstream of the society, and it is speeding up exactly as other aspects of social interaction are quickening.
For the individual, this raises the problems of choice to a totally new level of intensity. It is not simply that the number of tribes is expanding rapidly. It is not even that these tribes or subcults are bouncing off one another, shifting and changing their relationships to one another more and more rapidly. It is also that many of them will not hold still long enough to permit an individual to make a rational investigation of the presumed advantages or disadvantages of affiliation.
The individual searching for some sense of belonging, looking for the kind of social connection that confers some sense of identity, moves through a blurry environment in which the possible targets of affiliation are all in high-speed motion. He must choose from among a growing number of moving targets. The problems of choice thus escalate not arithmetically, but geometrically.
At the very instant when his choices among material goods, education, culture consumption, recreation and entertainment are all multiplying, he is also given a bewildering array of social choices. And just as there is a limit to how much choice he may wish to exercise in buying a car – at a certain point the addition of options requires more decisionmaking than they are worth – so, too, we may soon approach the moment of social overchoice.
The level of personality disorder, neurosis, and just plain psychological distress in our society suggests that it is already difficult for many individuals to create a sensible, integrated, and reasonably stable personal style. Yet there is every evidence that the thrust toward social diversity, paralleling that at the level of goods and culture, is just beginning. We face a tempting and terrifying extension of freedom.
The more subcultural groupings in a society, the greater the potential freedom of the individual. This is why pre-industrial man, despite romantic myths to the contrary, suffered so bitterly from lack of choice.
While sentimentalists prattle about the supposedly unfettered freedom of the primitive, evidence collected by anthropologists and historians contradicts them. John Gardner puts the matter tersely: 'The primitive tribe or pre-industrial community has usually demanded far more profound submission of the individual to the group than has any modern society.' As an Australian social scientist was told by a Temne tribesman in Sierra Leone: 'When Temne people choose a thing, we must all agree with the decision – this is what we call cooperation.'
This is, of course, what
The reason for the crushing conformity required of pre-industrial man, the reason the Temne tribesman has to 'go along' with his fellows, is precisely that he has nowhere else to go. His society is monolithic, not yet broken into a liberating multiplicity of components. It is what sociologists call 'undifferentiated.'
Like a bullet smashing into a pane of glass, industrialism shatters these societies, splitting them up into thousands of specialized agencies – schools, corporations, government bureaus, churches, armies – each subdivided into smaller and still more specialized subunits. The same fragmentation occurs at the informal level, and a host of subcults spring up: rodeo riders, Black Muslims, motorcyclists, skinheads and all the rest.
This split-up of the social order is precisely analogous to the process of growth in biology. Embryos differentiate as they develop, forming more and more specialized organs. The entire march of evolution, from the virus to man, displays a relentless advance toward higher and higher degrees of differentiation. There appears to be a seemingly irresistible movement of living beings and social groups from less to more differentiated forms.
Thus it is not accidental that we witness parallel trends toward diversity – in the economy, in art, in education and mass culture, in the social order itself. These trends all fit together forming part of an immensely larger historic process. The Super-industrial Revolution can now be seen for what, in large measure, it is – the advance of human society to its next higher stage of differentiation.
This is why it often seems to us that our society is cracking at the seams. It is. This is why everything grows increasingly complex. Where once there stood 1000 organizational entities, there now stand 10,000 – interconnected by increasingly transient links. Where once there were a few relatively permanent subcults with which a person might identify, there now are thousands of temporary subcults milling about, colliding and multiplying. The powerful bonds that integrated industrial society – bonds of law, common values, centralized and standardized education and cultural production – are breaking down.
All this explains why cities suddenly seem to be 'unmanageable' and universities 'ungovernable.' For the old ways of integrating a society, methods based on uniformity, simplicity, and permanence, are no longer effective. A new, more finely fragmented social order – a super-industrial order – is emerging. It is based on many more diverse and shortlived components than any previous social system – and we have not yet learned how to link them together, how to integrate the whole.
For the individual, this leap to a new level of differentiation holds awesome implications. But not the ones most people fear. We have been told so often that we are heading for faceless uniformity that we fail to appreciate the fantastic opportunities for individuality that the Super-industrial Revolution brings with it. And we have hardly begun to think about the dangers of over-individualization that are also implicit in it.
The 'mass society' theorists are obsessed by a reality that has already begun to pass us by. The Cassandras who blindly hate technology and predict an ant-heap future are still responding in knee-jerk fashion to the conditions of industrialism. Yet this system is already being superseded.
To denounce the conditions that imprison the industrial worker today is admirable. To project these conditions into the future, and predict the death of individualism, diversity and choice, is to utter dangerous cliches.
The people of both past and present are still locked into relatively choiceless life ways. The people of the future, whose number increases daily, face not choice but overchoice. For them there comes an explosive extension of freedom.
And this freedom comes not in spite of the new technology but very largely because of it. For if the early technology of industrialism required mindless, robot-like men to perform endlessly repetitive tasks, the technology of tomorrow takes over precisely these tasks, leaving for men only those functions that require judgment, interpersonal skills and imagination. Super-industrialism requires, and will create, not identical 'mass men,' but people richly different from one another, individuals, not robots.
The human race, far from being flattened into monotonous conformity, will become far more diverse socially than it ever was before. The new society, the super-industrial society now beginning to take form, will encourage a crazy-quilt pattern of evanescent life styles.
Chapter 14
A DIVERSITY OF LIFE STYLES
In San Francisco, executives lunch at restaurants where they are served by bare-breasted waitresses. In New York, however, a kooky girl cellist is arrested for performing avant garde music in a topless costume. In St. Louis, scientists hire prostitutes and others to copulate under a camera as part of a study of the physiology of the orgasm. But in Columbus, Ohio, civic controversy erupts over the sale of so-called 'Little Brother' dolls that come from the factory equipped with male genitalia. In Kansas City, a conference of homosexual organizations announces a campaign to lift a Pentagon ban on homosexuals in the armed forces and, in fact, the Pentagon discreetly does so. Yet American jails are well populated with men arrested for the crime of homosexuality.
Seldom has a single nation evinced greater confusion over its sexual values. Yet the same might be said for other kinds of values as well. America is tortured by uncertainty with respect to money, property, law and order, race, religion, God, family and self. Nor is the United States alone in suffering from a kind of value vertigo. All the techno-societies are caught up in the same massive upheaval. This collapse of the values of the past has hardly
