Introduction

The Present in Perspective

The most recent decades in Western civilization are particularly difficult to evaluate. They are so much a part of the present that it is almost impossible to gain a perspective on them. While most of the basic trends of the postwar era examined in the previous chapter continued, some changes have become apparent. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union has diminished in intensity. Europe, and indeed much of the world, has pursued an increasingly independent course from the two superpowers. In the 1960s and early 1970s, radical political and social activism held center stage, but persistent economic problems have dominated people's concerns recently. New technological accomplishments, ranging from space exploration to the production of computers, affect our civilization in many ways. Numerous other familiar trends and events could be added to this necessarily brief list.

This chapter is not organized in the usual way, for the sources are so much a part of the present that the usual distinctions between primary and secondary documents are no longer useful. The selections deal with five recent developments. The first concerns the spread of American institutions in Europe and the spread of Western institutions in the non-Western world. How do Europeans perceive American influence in Europe? In what ways are Western ideas, values, and products spreading over the non-Western world despite the fall of the colonial empires? What is the significance of the modernization initiated in the West and now spreading to the rest of the world? The second has to do with three social movements: the movement for the liberation of women over the past three decades, the growth of student activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the increase of terrorism during the 1970s and 1980s. How has the position of women been analyzed? What kinds of demands were made by feminists, and how have these demands been justified? What were some of the views of student revolutionaries, and how did these views reflect events of the 1960s? How do terrorist groups justify their views? The third development involves modern communications and their impact. What is the nature of television? In what ways can it affect our lives? The fourth development involves important cultural and intellectual trends. What are some of the characteristics of modern art? What is existentialism? How has the role of ideologies changed in Western civilization since the 1950s? Should the present era be characterized as the "age of the psychological man [woman]" in light of the new stress on the inner life of the individual? The fifth involves connections between the present and the future. What are some of the main problems facing us today? What are the prospects for dealing with those problems?

Here, more than in any other chapter, it will be hard to come to conclusions. There is much ambivalence about recent developments. Our own involvement in these developments makes evaluation of the present even more difficult. At best, the selections in this chapter can throw elements of the present into historical perspective.

The American Challenge

Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber

By the mid-1960s there was a growing sense among many Europeans that the United States, although friendly, was becoming overbearing in a variety of ways. Her economic institutions, her capital, and her culture were invading Europe even though Europe had by this time recovered from the devastation of World War IL This sense was particularly strong in France, as evidenced by the following selection from The American Challenge, a widely popular book first published in 1967. The author, JeanJacques Servan -Schreiber, was the publisher of the highly influential magazine L'Express and was later elected to France's Chamber of Deputies. Here he suggests that Europe's best hope is to compete and beat Americans at their own game.

Consider: How Servan-Schreiber's plan relates to the Cold War and other trends toward European integration; alternative strategies that might be useful; what this document indicates about the perception that many throughout the world have of the United States.

Europeans can regain control over their destiny in this confrontation with the American challenge only by taking stock of themselves and, as we will now try to describe, by hard work and patience. What we must do is not so hard to explain, for the path of our counterattack can be clearly marked out.

1.      Creation of large industrial units which are able both in size and management       to compete with the American giants.

2.      Carrying out "major operations" of advanced technology that will insure an         independent future for Europe.

3.    At least a minimum of federal power to protect and promote European business.

4.      Transforming the relationship between business, the university, and the           government.

5.      Broader and more intensive education for young people; specialized and         continuing education for adults.

6.      Finally, as the key to everything else, the liberation of imprisoned energies by       a revolution in our methods of organization -a revolution to revitalize the         elites and even relations between men. . . .

To build a powerful and independent Europe means strengthening the economic and political bonds of the Common Market. No single nation is strong enough to support efficient production in all areas of advanced technology, for the national framework is too narrow and cannot provide adequate markets for such products. Also, the growing diversification of these products demands a specialization that makes any attempt at national selfsufficiency virtually impossible. . . .

Our back is to the wall. We cannot have both economic self-sufficiency and economic growth. Either we build a common European industrial policy, or American industry will continue taking over the Common Market.

The Dynamics of Modernization

Cyril Black

Although almost all areas of the world that were once colonies of the Western powers gained independence during the quarter century following World War II, the penetration of the rest of the world by Western ideas, values, institutions, and products has been extremely widespread. This is illustrated in this photograph showing a citizen of Kuwait, an oil-rich sheikdom of the Persian Gulf, carrying a Western television set across a road. He is wearing Western-style tennis shoes that were probably manufactured in the Far East. In the background are a bilingual store sign and Western automobiles. Reflected in the glass of the television set is a

modern building probably designed by a Western architect and built under the direction of an international construction firm using both foreign and domestic labor and materials.

This photograph suggests that some of the formerly colonized areas are taking economic, political, and social steps in the same direction as Western industrialized states. Scholars, often strongly influenced by the social sciences, have analyzed these broad, international developments that are sometimes termed "modernization. " Cyril Black, professor of history at Princeton, is an outstanding proponent of modernization theory. In the following excerpt from his Dynamics of Modernization, he analyzes the historical significance of modernization.

Consider: The effects of Westernization on non-Western culture as illustrated by this photo; why modernization is such a revolutionary transformation; the ways this analysis reflects a primarily Western point of view; how someone from a non-Western culture might react to this analysis.

We are experiencing one of the great revolutionary transformations of mankind. Throughout the world in widely differing societies man is seeking to apply the finding of a rapidly developing science and technology to the ageold problems of life. The resulting patterns of change offer unprecedented prospects for the betterment of the human condition, but at the same time threaten mankind with possibilities of destruction never before imagined. The search for an understanding of these forces of change is compelling, for failure may lead to catastrophe. The mastery of this revolutionary process has become the central issue of world politics -the ultimate stake for which peoples struggle in peace and risk annihilation in war. The initiative in guiding this transformation in a manner beneficial to human welfare belongs to those who understand most clearly the ways in which different societies around the world are affected, what must unavoidably be changed, and what must at all costs be preserved.

The change in human affairs now taking place is of a scope and intensity that mankind has experienced on only two previous occasions, and its significance cannot be appreciated except in the context of the entire course of world history. The first revolutionary transformation was the emergence of human beings, about a million years ago, after many thousands of years of evolution from primate life. . . .

The second great revolutionary transformation in human affairs was that from primitive to civilized societies, culminating seven thousand years ago in three locations, the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates (Mesopotamia), the valley of the Nile, and the valley of the Indus. . . .

The process of change in the modern era is of the same order of magnitude as that from prehuman to human life and from primitive to civilized societies; it is the most dynamic of the great revolutionary transformations in the conduct of human affairs. What is distinctive about the modern era is the phenomenal growth of knowledge since the scientific revolution and the unprecedented effort at adaptation to this knowledge that has come to be demanded of the whole of mankind. Man perceives opportunities and dangers that for the first time in human existence are global in character, and the need to comprehend the opportunities and master the dangers is the greatest challenge that he has faced.

The New Revolutionaries

Tariq Ali

The period between the mid-1960s and early 1970s was marked by considerable political, social, and even revolutionary activism. Perhaps most striking was a series o radical actions by university students throughout Western civilization. Although it is difficult to characterize all these actions, the following excerpt from The New Revolutionaries indicates some of the more extreme and activist attitudes among those most deeply involved. The author is Tariq Ali, born in Pakistan and a student at Oxford University, where he became a leading revolutionary socialist.

Consider: The ways in which Ali's views are revolutionary; the developments of the 1950s and 1960s that are reflected in this analysis; to whom such views might be appealing and why.

What is absolutely clear is that the revolutionary movement is in a period of upswing throughout the world. The war in Vietnam, the events of May 1968 in France and the invasion of Czechoslovakia symbolize this upswing. Vietnam is at the moment the battle-front against imperialism. France showed the extreme vulnerability of monopoly capitalism and the strength of the working class. Czechoslovakia has initiated the struggle for political revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself. . . .

Those of us who form the hard core of today's new revolutionaries are still Marxists, but we abhor Stalinism; we believe in Leninism but prefer the emphasis to be upon 'democracy' rather than 'centralism'; we are Guevarist but can appreciate and analyse the mistakes made by Che. We are puzzled by the tendency among many Left factions in the developed countries to devote as much time and energy to attacking each other as to attacking capitalism. The new revolutionaries fight against sectarian tendencies. And what is most important of all, we are not to be bought off by the State. WE mean business.

The Urban Guerrilla Concept

The Red Army Fraction

While the radical political and social activism that marked the 1960s diminished sharply during the 1970s and 1980s, terrorism practiced by relatively small groups grew to become a major problem in several countries. In Spain, Basque terrorists threatened the authority of the government. In Italy several groups, such as the Red Brigades, created a general sense of insecurity. In Northern Ireland, the Irish Republican Army helped create a civil-war atmosphere. Germany was the site of several terrorist incidents and produced one of the earlier terrorist groups, the Red Army Fraction (sometimes referred to as the Baader-Meinhof Gang). The following is an excerpt from "The Urban Guerrilla Concept."

Consider: The meaning of being an urban guerrilla; the rationale for the position and activities of the urban guerrilla; who this group perceives as its enemies and its allies and why; similarities and differences between this and the excerpt from The New Revolutionaries.

If we are correct in saying that American imperialism is a paper tiger, i.e., that it can ultimately be defeated, and if the Chinese Communists are correct in their thesis that victory over American imperialism has become possible because the struggle against it is now being waged in all four corners of the earth, with the result that the forces of imperialism are fragmented, a fragmentation which makes them possible to defeat -if this is correct, then there is no reason to exclude or disqualify any particular country or any particular region from taking part in the anti-imperialist struggle because the forces of revolution are especially weak there and the forces of reaction especially strong. . . .

The concept of the "urban guerrilla" originated in Latin America. Here, the urban guerrilla can only be what he is there: the only revolutionary method of intervention available to what are on the whole weak revolutionary forces.

The urban guerrilla starts by recognizing that there will be no Prussian order of march of the kind in which so many so-called revolutionaries would like to lead the people into battle. He starts by recognizing that by the time the moment for armed struggle arrives, it will already be too late to start preparing for it; that in a country whose potential for violence is as great and whose revolutionary traditions are as broken and feeble as the Federal Republic's, there will not - without revolutionary initiative - even be a revolutionary orientation when conditions for revolutionary struggle are better than they are at present -which will happen as an inevitable consequence of the development of late capitalism itself.

To this extent, the "urban guerrilla" is the logical consequence of the negation of parliamentary democracy long since perpetrated by its very own representatives; the only and inevitable response to emergency laws and the rule of the hand grenade; the readiness to fight with those same means the system has chosen to use in trying to eliminate its opponents. The "urban guerrilla" is based on a recognition of the facts instead of an apologia of the f acts. . . .

The urban guerrilla can concretize verbal internationalism as the requisition of guns and money. He can blunt the state's weapon of a ban on communists by organizing an underground beyond the reach of the police. The urban guerrilla is a weapon in the class war.

The "urban guerrilla" signifies armed struggle, necessary to the extent that it is the police which make indiscriminate use of firearms, exonerating class justice from guilt and burying our comrades alive unless we prevent them. To be an "urban guerrilla" means not to let oneself be demoralized by the violence of the system.

The urban guerrilla's aim is to attack the state's apparatus of control at certain points and put them out of action, to destroy the myth of the system's omnipresence and invulnerability.

The "urban guerrilla" presupposes the organization of an illegal apparatus, in other words apartments, weapons, ammunition, cars, and papers. A detailed description of what is involved is to be found in Marighella's Minimanual for the Urban Guerrilla. As for what else is involved, we are ready at any time to inform anyone who needs to know because he intends to do it. We do not know a great deal yet, but we do know something.

What is important is that one should have had some political experience in legality before deciding to take up armed struggle. Those who have joined the revolutionary left just to be trendy had better be careful not to involve themselves in something from which there is no going back.

The Red Army Fraction and the "urban guerrilla" are that fraction and praxis which, because they draw a clear dividing line between themselves and the enemy, are combatted most intensively. This presupposes a political identity, presupposes that one or two lessons have already been learned.

In our original concept, we planned to combine urban guerrilla activity with grass-roots work. What we wanted was for each of us to work simultaneously within existing socialist groups at the work place and in local districts, helping to influence the discussion process, learning, gaining experience. It has become clear that this cannot be done. These groups are under such close surveillance by the political police, their meetings, timetables, and the content of their discussions so well monitored, that it is impossible to attend without being put under surveillance oneself. We have learned that individuals cannot combine legal and illegal activity.

Becoming an "urban guerrilla" presupposes that one is clear about one's own motivation, that one is sure of being immune to "Bild-Zeitung" methods, sure that the whole anti- Semite-criminal -subh um an-m urdererarsonist syndrome $ they use against revolutionaries, all that shit that they alone are able to abstract and articulate and that still influences some comrades' attitude to us, that none of this has any effect on us.

The Second Sex

Simone de Beauvoir

A Feminist Manifesto

Redstockings

It is increasingly recognized that women, both individually and in organizations have been struggling for changes for a long time. The effort to gain consciousness and understanding of what it means to be a woman -politically, socially, economically, and sexually - has become central to women's struggles for change in the mid-twentieth century. The most important book in Europe and probably all of the West to explore this effort is The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir, first published in France in 1949. In this book, de Beauvoir, a well-known French novelist, social critic, and existential philosopher, argues that women have been forced into a position subordinate to men in numerous obvious and subtle ways. During the 1960s and 1970s women's struggle for change spread and took on a new militancy. Throughout the West, women were arguing for change in what came to be known, especially in the United States, as the women s liberation movement. Numerous women s organizations formed, and many issued publications stating their views.

The first of the following two selections on the liberation of women is from The Second Sex. De Beauvoir stresses the status and role of women as the "Other" in comparison to man. The second selection is an example of one of the more radical statements of feminism. It was issued in July 1969 by Redstockings, an organization of New York feminists.

Consider: How de Beauvoir relates women to "Negroes" and proletarians; the handicaps facing women according to de Beauvoir; the primary demands of the Redstockings; how this group justifies its demands; how men might react to this selection; how this relates to student activism and the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

The parallel drawn ... between women and the proletariat is valid in that neither ever formed a minority or a separate collective unit of mankind. And instead of a single historical event it is in both cases a historical development that explains their status as a class and accounts for the membership of particular individuals in that class. But proletarians have not always existed, whereas there have always been women. They are women in virtue of their anatomy and physiology. Throughout history they have always been subordinated to men, and hence their dependency is not the result of a historical event or a social change - it was not something that occurred. The reason why otherness in this case seems to be an absolute is in part that it lacks the contingent or incidental nature of historical facts. A condition brought about at a certain time can be abolished at some other time, as the Negroes of Haiti and others have proved; but it might seem that a natural condition is beyond the possibility of change. In truth, however, the nature of things is no more immutably given, once for all, than is historical reality. if woman seems to be the inessential which never becomes the essential, it is because she herself fails to bring about this change. Proletarians say "We"; Negroes also. Regarding themselves as subjects, they transform the bourgeois, the whites, into "others." But women do not say "We,"' except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say "women," and women use the same word in referring to themselves. They do not authentically assume a subjective attitude. The proletarians have accomplished the revolution in Russia, the Negroes in Haiti, the Indo-Chinese are battling for it in Indo-China; but the women's effort has never been anything more than a symbolic agitation. They have gained only what men have been willing to grant; they have taken nothing, they have only received.

The reason for this is that women lack concrete means for organizing themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the correlative unit. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat. They are not even promiscuously herded together in the way that creates community feeling among the American Negroes, the ghetto Jews, the workers of SaintDenis, or the factory hands of Renault. They live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men - f athers or husbands - more firmly than they are to other women. If they belong to the bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity with men of that class, not with proletarian women; if they are white, their allegiance is to white men, not to Negro women. The proletariat can propose to massacre the ruling class, and a sufficiently fanatical Jew or Negro might dream of getting sole possession of the atomic bomb and making humanity wholly Jewish or black; but woman cannot even dream of exterminating the males. The bond that unites her to her oppressors is not comparable to any other. The division of the sexes is a biological fact, not an event in human history. Male and female stand opposed within a primordial Mitsein, and woman has not broken it. The couple is a fundamental unity with its two halves riveted together, and the cleavage of society along the line of sex is impossible. Here is to be found the basic trait of woman: she is the Other in a totality of which the two components are necessary to one another. . . .

Now, woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shared the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change. Almost nowhere is her legal status the same as man's, and frequently it is much to her disadvantage. Even when her rights are legally recognized in the abstract, long-standing custom prevents their full expression in the mores. In the economic sphere men and women can almost be said to make up two castes; other things being equal, the former hold the better jobs, get higher wages, and have more opportunity for success than their new competitors. In industry and politics men have a great many more positions and they monopolize the most important posts. In addition to all this, they enjoy a traditional prestige that the education of children tends in every way to support, for the present enshrines the past - and in the past all history has been made by men. At the present time, when women are beginning to take part in the affairs of the world, it is still a world that belongs to men -they have no doubt of it at all and women have scarcely any. To decline to be the Other, to refuse to be a party to a deal -this would be for women to renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by their alliance with the superior caste. Man-the-sovereign will provide woman-the-liege with material protection and will undertake the moral justification of her existence; thus she can evade at once both economic risk and the metaphysical risk of a liberty in which ends and aims must be contrived without assistance. Indeed, along with the ethical urge of each individual to affirm his subjective existence, there is also the temptation to forgo liberty and become a thing. This is an inauspicious road, for he who takes it-passive, lost, ruined-becomes henceforth the creature of another's will, frustrated in his transcendence and deprived of every value. But it is an easy road; on it one avoids the strain involved in undertaking an authentic existence. When man makes of woman the Other, he may, then, expect her to manifest deep-seated tendencies toward complicity. Thus, woman may fail to lay claim to the status of subject because she lacks definite resources, because she feels the necessary bond that ties her to man regardless of reciprocity, and because she is often very well pleased with her role as the Other.

Now, what peculiarly signalizes the situation of woman is that she - a free and autonomous being like all human creatures -nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other. They propose to stabilize her as object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and forever transcended by another ego (conscience) which is essential and sovereign. The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego) - who always regards the self as the essential - and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential.

I. After centuries of individual and preliminary political struggle, women are uniting to achieve their final liberation from male supremacy. Redstockings is dedicated to building this unity and winning our freedom.

II. Women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives. We are exploited as sex objects, breeders, domestic servants, and cheap labor. We are considered inferior beings, whose only purpose is to enhance men's lives. Our humanity is denied. Our prescribed behavior is enforced by the threat of physical violence.

Because we have lived so intimately with our oppressors, in isolation from each other, we have been kept from seeing our personal suffering as a political condition. This creates the illusion that a woman's relationship with her man is a matter of interplay between two unique personalities, and can be worked out individually. In reality, every such relationship is a class relationship, and the conflicts between individual men and women are political conflicts that can only be solved collectively.

III. We identify the agents of our oppression as men. Male supremacy is the oldest, most basic form of domination. All other forms of exploitation and oppression (racism, capitalism, imperialism, and the like) are extensions of male supremacy: men dominate women, a few men dominate the rest. All power structures throughout history have been male-dominated and male-oriented. Men have controlled all political, economic, and cultural institutions and backed up this control with physical force. They have used their power to keep women in an inferior position. All men receive economic, sexual, and psychological benefits from male supremacy. All men have oppressed women.

IV. Attempts have been made to shift the burden of responsibility from men to institutions or to women themselves. We condemn these arguments as evasions. Institutions alone do not oppress; they are merely tools of the oppressor. To blame institutions implies that men and women are equally Victimized, obscures the fact that men benefit from the subordination of women, and gives men the excuse that they are forced to be oppressors. On the contrary, any man is free to renounce his superior position provided that he is willing to be treated like a woman by other men. We also reject the idea that women consent to or are to blame for their own oppression. Women's submission is not the result of brainwashing, stupidity, or mental illness but of continual, daily pressure from men. We do not need to change ourselves, but to change men. The most slanderous evasion of all is that women can oppress men. The basis for this illusion is the isolation of individual relationships from their political context and the tendency of men to see any legitimate challenge to their privileges as persecution.

V. We regard our personal experience, and our feelings about that experience, as the basis for an analysis of our common situation. We cannot rely on existing ideologies as they are all products of male supremacist culture. We question every generalization and accept none that are not confirmed by our experience.

Our chief task at present is to develop female class consciousness through sharing experience and publicly exposing the sexist foundation of all our institutions. C onsciousness- raising is not "therapy," which implies the existence of individual solutions and falsely assumes that the male-female relationship is purely personal, but the only method by which we can ensure that our program for liberation is based on the concrete realities of our lives. The first requirement for raising class consciousness is honesty, in private and in public, with ourselves and other women.

VI. We identify with all women. We define our best interest as that of the poorest, most brutally exploited woman. We repudiate all economic, racial, educational, or status privileges that divide us from other women. We are determined to recognize and eliminate any prejudices we may hold against other women. We are committed to achieving internal democracy. We will do whatever is necessary to ensure that every woman in our movement has an equal chance to participate, assume responsibility, and develop her political potential.

VII. We call on all our sisters to unite with us in struggle.

We call on all men to give up their male privileges and support women's liberation in the interests of our humanity and their own.

In fighting for our liberation we will always take the side of women against their oppressors. We will not ask what is "revolutionary" or "reformist," only what is good for women.

Thetime for individual skirmishes has passed. This time we are going all the way.

Televised Violence

Most observers agree that television has had a great impact on the lives of people within Western civilization and throughout the world, but exactly what that impact has been is open to debate. This picture illustrates one of the most controversial issues that have been raised. It shows a television camera crew filming the live action in Vietnam. The images filmed by such crews were displayed on daily newscasts in America and elsewhere, giving civilians a virtual firsthand, up-to-the minute, perhaps overly realistic, impression of what the war was like. However, critics argue that because such images became so common, because they were displayed just before and just after the most mundane of other television shows (typically, situation comedies) and because they were viewed so often from the comfort of a living room, the image of a very real war may have come to seem unreal. Indeed, one must wonder whether this picture itself is not part of a staged

scene for a movie (as was the case with a scene the audience sees being filmed in Apocalypse Now, a major movie of 1979-1980).

Consider: Other ways in which the media in the twentieth century have affected people's perception and understanding of war.

Number 1

Jackson Pollock

Twentieth-century artistic styles have tended to become increasingly removed from popular tastes and from what the general public has been used to expecting from art. This was particularly the case with the style of action painting or abstract expressionism, which came to the fore shortly after World War II. The leading painter in this school of art was Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), who executed the work shown here, entitled Number 1, in 1948. In 1950 Pollock was interviewed by Francis V. O'Connor, a well-known art critic; a selection from that interview follows.

Consider: How Pollock's statements and this painting reflect some of the trends of twentieth-century history.

Mr. Pollock, in your opinion, what is the meaning of modern art?

Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we're living in.

Did the classical artists have any means of expressing their age?

Yes, they did it very well. All cultures have had means and techniques of expressing their immediate aims - the Chinese, the Renaissance, all cultures. The thing that interests me is that today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source. They work from within.

Would you say that the modern artist has more or less isolated the quality which made the classical works of art valuable, that he's isolated it and uses it in a purer form?

Ah -the good ones have, yes.

Mr. Pollock, there's been a good deal of controversy and a great many comments have been made regarding your method of painting. Is there something you'd like to tell us about that?

My opinion is that new needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements. It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique.

Which would also mean that the layman and the critic would have to develop their ability to interpret, the new techniques.

Yes - that always somehow fo'Jows. I mean, thhe strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.

I suppose every time you are approached by a layman they ask you how they should look at a Pollock painting, or any other modern painting - what they look for - how do they learn to appreciate modern art?

I think they should not look for, but look passively -and try to receive what the painting has to offer and not bring a subject matter or preconceived idea of what they are to be looking for.

Would it be true to say that the artist is painting from the unconscious, and the-canvas must act as the unconscious of the person who views it?

The unconscious is a very important side of modern art and I think the unconscious drives do mean a lot in looking at paintings.

Then deliberately looking for any known meaning or object in an abstract painting would distract you immediately from ever appreciating it as you should?

I think it should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed -after a while you may like it or you may not. But - it doesn't seem to be too serious. I like some flowers and others, other flowers I don't like. I think at least it gives - I think at least give it a chance.

Well, I think yc u have to give anything that sort o chance. A person isn't born to like good music, they have to listen to it and gradually develop an understanding of it or liking for it. If modern painting works the same way - a person would have to subject himself to it over a period of time in order to be able to appreciate it.

I think that might help, certainly.

Mr. Pollock, the classical artists had a world to express and they did so by representing the objects in that world. Why doesn't the modern artist do the same thing?

H'm - the modern artist is living in a mechannical age and we have a me

chanical means of representing objects in nature such as the camera and photograph. The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.

Would it be possible to say that the classical artist expressed his world by representing the objects, whereas the modern artist expresses his world by representing the effects the objects have upon him?

Yes, the modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.

The Philosophy of Existentialism

Jean-Paul Sartre

One of the most popular and provocative philosophies to emerge in the midtwentieth century was existentialism. Although the origins of existentialism can be found in nineteenth-century writers such as Sdren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, its most popular exponent was the French novelist, playwright, philosopher, and political activist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980). Sartre's interpretation of existentialism reflects the dilemma of a twentieth-century atheist who can no longer accept traditional ways for determining standards of conduct. The following excerpt is from a lecture given by Sartre in Paris in 1945. In it he is describing the nature of existentialism and responding to critics.

Consider: What Sartre means when he says that man [or woman] chooses himself [or herself]; the ethical implications of this philosophy.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism. It is also what is called subjectivity. The name we are labeled with when charges are brought against us. But what do we mean by this, if not that man has a greater dignity than a stone or table? For we mean that man first exists, that is, that man first of all is the being who hurls himself toward a future and who is conscious of imagining himself as being in the future. Man is at the start a plan which is aware of itself, rather than a patch of moss, a piece of garbage, or a cauliflower; nothing exists prior to this plan; there is nothing in heaven; man will be what he will have planned to be. Not what he will want to be. Because by the word "will" we generally mean a conscious decision, which is subsequent to what we have already made of ourselves. I may want to belong to a political party, write a book, get married; but all that is only a manifestation of an earlier, more spontaneous choice that is called "will." But if existence really does precede essence, man is responsible for what he is. Thus, existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him. And when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not only mean that he is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.

The word subjectivism has two meanings, and our opponents play on the two. Subjectivism means, on the one hand, that an individual chooses and makes himself; and, on the other, that it is impossible for man to transcend human subjectivity. The second of these is the essential meaning of existentialism. When we say that man chooses his own self, we mean that every one of us does likewise; but we also mean by that that in making this choice he also chooses all men. In fact, in creating the man that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be. To choose to be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.

If, on the other hand, existence precedes essence, and if we grant that we exist and fashion our image at one and the same time, the image is valid for everybody and for our whole age. Thus, our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind. If I am a workingman and choose to Join a Christian trade-union rather than be a communist, and if by being a member I want to show that the best thing for man is resignation, that the kingdom of man is not of this world, I am not only involving my own case-I want to be resigned for everyone. As a result, my action has involved all humanity. To take a more individual matter, if I want to marry, to have children; even if this marriage depends solely on my own circumstances or passion or wish, I am involving all humanity in monogamy and not merely myself. Therefore, I am responsible for myself and for everyone else. I am creating a certain image of man of my own choosing. In choosing myself, I choose man.

The End of Ideology

Daniel Bell

Numerous scholars have argued that the period since World War II constitutes one of fundamental change. In the 1950s many scholars pointed to a declining faith in ideologies and a general convergence of goals and assumptions in Western civilization. An outstanding statement of this view is that of Daniel Bell, a Columbia University and Harvard sociologist with extensive experience in editing magazines such as Fortune, The New Leader, and The Public Interest. The following is an excerpt from Bell's End of Ideology.

Consider: What Bell means when he argues that "ideologies are exhausted" and the evidence he uses to support this view; trends of the past few years that confirm or contradict Bell's views.

The two decades between 1930 and 1950 have an intensity peculiar in written history: world-wide economic depression and sharp class struggles; the rise of fascism and racial imperialism in a country that had stood at an advanced stage of human culture; the tragic self-immolation of a revolutionary generation that had proclaimed the finer ideals of man; destructive war of a breadth and scale hitherto unknown; the bureaucratized murder of millions in concentration camps and death chambers.

For the radical intellectual who had articulated the revolutionary impulses of the past century and a half, all this has meant an end to chiliastic hopes, to millenarianism, to apocalyptic thinking - and to ideology. For ideology, which once was a road to action, has come to be a dead end. . . .

The ideologies, therefore, which emerged from the nineteenth century had the force of the intellectuals behind them. They embarked upon what William James called "the faith ladder," which in its vision of the future cannot distinguish possibilities from probabilities, and converts the latter into certainties.

Today, these ideologies are exhausted. The events behind this important sociological change are complex and varied. Such calamities as the Moscow Trials, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the concentration camps, the suppression of the Hungarian workers, form one chain; such social changes as the modification of capitalism, the rise of the Welfare State, another. In philosophy, one can trace the decline of simplistic, rationalistic beliefs and the emergence of new stoic-theological images of man, e.g. Freud, Tillich, Jaspers, etc. This is not to say that such ideologies as communism in France and Italy do not have a political weight, or a driving momentum from other sources. But out of all this history, one simple fact emerges: for the radical intelligentzia, the old ideologies have lost their "truth" and their power to persuade.

Few serious minds believe any longer that one can set down "blueprints" and through "social engineering" bring about a new utopia of social harmony. At the same time, the older "counter-beliefs" have lost their intellectual force as well. Few "classic" liberals insist that the State should play no role in the economy, and few serious conservatives, at least in England and on the Continent, believe that the Welfare State is "the road to serfdom." In the Western world, therefore, there is today a rough consensus among intellectuals on political issues: the acceptance of a Welfare State; the desirability of decentralized power; a system of mixed economy and of political pluralism. In that sense, too, the ideological age has ended.

And yet, the extraordinary fact is that while the old nineteenth-century ideologies and intellectual debates have become exhausted, the rising states of Asia and Africa are fashioning new ideologies with a different appeal for their own people. These are the ideologies of industrialization, modernization, Pan-Arabism, color, and nationalism. In the distinctive difference between the two kinds of ideologies lies the great political and social problems of the second half of the twentieth century. The ideologies of the nineteenth century were universalistic, humanistic, and fashioned by intellectuals. The mass ideologies of Asia and Africa are parochial, instrumental, and created by political leaders. The driving forces of the old ideologies were social equality and, in the largest sense, freedom. The impulsions of the new ideologies are economic development and national power.

Our Psychological Age

Philip Rieff

One of the greatest changes occurring in recent decades may lie not in the external economic, social, or political developments usually pointed to by historians but in the internal life and cultural ideals of Western people. An extremely bold and provocative interpretation along these lines is that of American sociologist Philip Rieff. An admirer of Freud, Rieff has written an extraordinarily perceptive critical analysis of Freud's work in Freud, the Mind of the Moralist. In the following excerpt from that work, Rieff argues that the present age is one of "psychological man [or woman], " as distinct from the preceding ages of "economic, " "religious, and "political man [woman].

Consider: The characteristics of "psychological man [woman]"- how "psychological man [woman]" differs from earlier character types or ideals; how Rieff's interpretation reflects other intellectual developments of the twentieth century.

In this age, in which technics is invading and conquering the last enemy - manŐs inner life, the psyche itself - a suitable new character type

has arrived on the scene: the psychological man. Three character ideals have successively dominated Western civilization: first, the ideal of the

political man, formed and handed down to us from classical antiquity; second, the ideal of the religious man, formed and handed down to us from Judaism through Christianity, and dominant in the civilization of authority that preceded the Enlightenment; third, the ideal of the economic man, the very model of our liberal civilization, formed and handed down to us in the Enlightenment. This last has turned out to be a transitional type, with the shortest life-expectancy of all; out of his tenure has emerged the psychological man of the twentieth century, a child not of nature but of technology. He is not the pagan ideal, political man, for he is not committed to the public life. He is most unlike the religious man. We will recognize in the case history of psychological man the nervous habits of his father, economic man: he is anti-heroic, shrewd, carefully counting his satisfactions and dissatisfactions, studying unprofitable commitments as the sins most to be avoided. From this immediate ancestor, psychological man has constituted his own careful economy of the inner life.

The psychological man lives neither by the ideal of might nor by the ideal of right which confused his ancestors, political man and religious man. Psychological man lives by the ideal of insight -practical, experimental insight leading to the mastery of his own personality. The psychological man has withdrawn into a world always at war, where the ego is an armed force capable of achieving armistices but not peace. The prophetic egoist of Western politics and Protestant Christianity who, through the model with which he provided us, also laid down the lines along which the world was to be transformed, has been replaced by the sage, intent upon the conquest of his inner life, and, at most, like Freud, laying down the lines along which those that follow him can salvage something of their own. Turning away from the Occidental ideal of action leading toward the salvation of others besides ourselves, the psychological man has espoused the Oriental ideal of salvation through self-contemplative manipulation. Ironically, this is happening just at the historic moment when the Orient, m-hose westernmost outpost is Russia, has adopted the Occidental ideal of saving activity in the world. The West has attempted many successive transformations of the enemy, the world. It now chooses to move against its last enemy, the self, in an attempt to conquer it and assimilate it to the world as it is. For it is from the self that the troublesome, world-rejecting ideal of the religious man came forth.

Freudianism closes off the long-established quarrel of Western man with his own spirit. It marks the archaism of the classical legacy of political man, for the new man must live beyond reason - reason having proved no adequate guide to his safe conduct through the meaningless experience of life. It marks the repudiation of the Christian legacy of the religious man, for the new man is taught to live a little beyond conscience - conscience having proved no adequate guide to his safe conduct through life, and furthermore to have added absurd burdens of meaning to the experience of life. Finally, psychoanalysis marks the exhaustion of the liberal legacy represented historically in economic man, for now men must live with the knowledge that their dreams are by function optimistic and cannot be fulfilled. Aware at last that he is chronically ill, psychological man may nevertheless end the ancient quest of his predecessors for a healing doctrine. His experience with the latest one, Freud's, may finally teach him that every cure must expose him to new illness.

An Inquiry into the Human Prospect

Robert Heilbroner

In recent years scholars commenting on our present condition and future prospects have been quite pessimistic. They point to a series of developments in the twentieth century in general and since the 1960s in particular to support their views. One of the most popular of these scholars is Robert Heilbroner, an economist from the New School for Social Research. While personally favoring some form of democratic socialism, Heilbroner questions the ability of either capitalism or socialism to solve problems o the immediate future that are so serious that they threaten our f very existence. This is reflected in the following selection from An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (1980), in which Heilbroner emphasizes the need to end industrial growth while questioning whether we have the ability to do this.

Consider: Why Heilbroner is pessimistic about the ability of both capitalism and socialism to end industrial growth; why Heilbroner feels that the problems facing civilization are so difficult to solve.

What is needed now is a summing up of the human prospect, some last reflections on its implications for the present and future alike.

The external challenges can be succinctly reviewed. We are entering a period in which rapid population growth, the presence of obliterative weapons, and dwindling resources will bring international tensions to dangerous levels for an extended period. Indeed, there seems no reason for these levels of danger to subside unless population equilibrium is achieved and some rough measure of equity reached in the distribution of wealth among nations, either by great increases in the output of the underdeveloped world or by a massive redistribution of wealth from the richer to the poorer lands.

Whether such an equitable arrangement can be reached - at least within the next several generations-is open to serious doubt. Transfers of adequate magnitude imply a willingness to redistribute income internationally on a more generous scale than the advanced nations have evidenced within their own domains. The required increases in output in the backward regions would necessitate gargantuan applications of energy merely to extract the needed resources. It is uncertain whether the requisite energyproducing technology exists, and, more serious, possible that its application would bring us to the threshold of an irreversible change in climate as a consequence of the enormous addition of man-made heat to the atmosphere.

It is this last problem that poses the most demanding and difficult of the challenges. The existing pace of industrial growth, with no allowance for increased industrialization to repair global poverty, holds out the risk of entering the danger zone of climatic change in as little as three or four generations. If that trajectory is in fact pursued, industrial growth will then have to come to an immediate halt, for another generation or two along that path would literally consume human, perhaps all, life. That terrifying outcome can be postponed only to the extent that the wastage of heat can be reduced, or that technologies that do not add to the atmospheric heat burden - for example, the use of solar energy - can be utilized. The outlook can also be mitigated by redirecting output away from heat-creating material outputs into the production of "services" that add only trivially to heat.

All these considerations make the designation of a timetable for industrial deceleration difficult to construct. Yet, under any and all assumptions, one irrefutable conclusion remains. The industrial growth process, so central to the economic and social life of capitalism and Western socialism alike, will be forced to slow down, in all likelihood within a generation or two, and will probably have to give way to decline thereafter. To repeat the words of the text, "whether we are unable to sustain growth or unable to tolerate it," the long era of industrial expansion is now entering its final stages, and we must anticipate the commencement of a new era of stationary total output and (if population growth continues or an equitable sharing among nations has not yet been attained) declining material output per head in the advanced nations.

The Fate of the E arth

Jonathan Schell

The last few years have been marked by a rekindled arms race between the superpowers, a chilling of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, and an increasing proliferation of military weapons throughout the world. At the same time there has been some growing awareness of the threat to everyone if a nuclear war breaks out and a new drive among groups within several countries to get governments to limit arms production or proceed toward disarmament. Probably more than any other book, Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, which first appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker magazine, served to heighten the consciousness of Americans about the realities of nuclear war and nuclear armaments. The following is an excerpt from that book.

Consider: How one might explain the apparent failure of people to do much about the nuclear peril; why national interest may lead to "planetary doom;" what Schell feels must be done; how one might respond to Schell's argument.

Since July 16, 1945, when the first atomic bomb was detonated, at the Trinity test site, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, mankind has lived with nuclear weapons in its midst. Each year, the number of bombs has grown, until now there are some fifty thousand warheads in the world, possessing the explosive yield of roughly twenty billion tons of TNT, or one million six hundred thousand times the yield of the bomb that was dropped by the United States on the city of Hiroshima, in Japan, less than a month after the Trinity explosion. These bombs were built as "weapons"' for "war," but their significance greatly transcends war and all its causes and outcomes. They grew out of history, yet they threaten to end history. They were made by men, yet they threaten to annihilate man. They are a pit into which the whole world can fall - a nemesis of all human intentions, actions, and hopes. Only life itself, which they threaten to swallow up, can give the measure of their significance. Yet in spite of the immeasurable importance of nuclear weapons. the world has declined, on the whole, to think about them very much. We have thus far failed to fashion, or to discover within ourselves, an emotional or intellectual or political response to them. This peculiar failure of response, in which hundreds of millions of people acknowledge the presence of an immediate, unremitting threat to their existence and to the existence of the world they live in but do nothing about it - a f ailure in which both self-interest and fellow-feeling seem to have died -has itself been such a striking phenomennon that it has to be regarded as an extremely important part of the nuclear predicament as this has existed so far. Only very recently have there been signs, in Europe and in the United States, that public opinion has been stirring awake, and that ordinary people may be beginning to ask themselves how they should respond to the nuclear peril.

We live with one foot in each of two worlds. As scientists and technicians, we live in the nuclear world, in which whether we choose to acknowledge the fact or not, we possess instruments of violence that make it possible for us to extinguish ourselves as a species. But as citizens and statesmen we go on living in the pre-nuclear world, as though extinction were not possible and sovereign nations could still employ the instruments of violence as instruments of policy -as "a continuation of politics by other means," in the famous phrase of Karl von Clausewitz, the great philosopher of war. In effect, we try to make do with a Newtonian politics in an Einsteinian world. The combination is the source of our immediate peril. For governments, still acting within a system of independent nation-states, and formally representing no one but the people of their separate, sovereign nations, are driven to try to defend merely national interests with means of destruction that threaten not only international but intergenerational and planetary doom. In our present-day world, in the councils where the decisions are made there is no one to speak for man and for the earth, although both are threatened with annihilation.

Two paths lie before us. One leads to death, the other to life. If we choose the first path -if we numbly refuse to acknowledge the nearness of extinction, all the while increasing our preparations to bring it about - then we in effect become the allies of death, and in everything we do our attachment to life will weaken: our vision, blinded to the abyss that has opened at our feet, will dim and grow confused; our will, discouraged by the thought of trying to build on such a precarious foundation anything that is meant to last, will slacken; and we will sink into stupefaction, as though we were gradually weaning ourselves from life in preparation for the end. On the other hand, if we reject our doom, and bend our efforts toward survival -if we arouse ourselves to the peril and act to forestall it, making ourselves the allies of life -then the anesthetic fog will lift: our vision, no longer straining not to see the obvious, will sharpen; our will, finding secure ground to build on, will be restored; and we will take full and clear possession of life again. One day - and it is hard to believe that it will not be soon - we will make our choice. Either we will sink into the final coma and end it all or, as I trust and believe, we will awaken to the truth of our peril, a truth as great as life itself, and, like a person who has swallowed a lethal poison but shakes off his stupor at the last moment and vomits the poison up, we will break through the layers of our denials, put aside our fainthearted excuses, and rise up to cleanse the earth of nuclear weapons.

Chapter Questions Modernism

1 .   The closeness of the last twenty years makes it difficult to know what trends and developments will be the most significant historically. Those selected for this chapter are just a few of the possibilities. What others might have been selected? What evidence would demonstrate their importance?

2.    It is possible to argue that most of what is claimed to be new about the last twenty years is not really so new, that it is just our impression that it is new because we have been living through it. How might this argument be supported? How might it be refuted?