The Reenchantment of the World Read Free Page A

making;

the cosmos cares nothing for me, and I do not really feel a sense of

belonging to it. What I feel, in fact, is a sickness in the soul.

Translated into everyday life, what does this disenchantment mean?

It means that the modern landscape has become a scenario of "mass

administration and blatant violence,"2 a state of affairs now clearly

perceived by the man in the street. The alienation and futility that

characterized the perceptions of a handful of intellectuals at the

beginning of the century have come to characterize the consciousness of

the common man at its end. Jobs are stupefying, relationships vapid and

and transient, the arena of politics absurd. In the vacuum created by the

collapse of traditional values, we have hysterical evangelical revivals,

mass conversions to the Church of the Reverend Moon, and a general retreat

into the oblivion provided by drugs, television, and tranquilizers. We

also have a desperate search for therapy, by now a national obsession,

as millions of Americans try to reconstruct their lives amidst a pervasive

feeling of anomie and cultural disintegration. An age in which depression

is a norm is a grim one indeed.

Perhaps nothing is more symptomatic of this general malaise than the

inability of the industrial economies to provide meaningful work. Some

years ago, Herbert Marcuse described the blue- and white-collar classes in

America as "one-dimensional." "When technics becomes the universal form

of material production," he wrote, "it circumscribes an entire culture;

it projects a historical totality -- a 'world.'" One cannot speak of

alienation as such, he went on, because there is no longer a self to be

alienated. We have all been bought off, we all sold out to the System

long ago and now identify with it completely. 'People recognize themselves

in their commodities," Marcuse concluded; they have become what they own.3

Marcuse's is a plausible thesis. We all know the next-door neighbor who

is out there every Sunday, lovingly washing his car with an ardor that is

almost sexual. Yet the actual data on the day-to-day life of the middle

and working classes tend to refute Marcuse's notion that for these people,

self and commodities have merged, producing what he terms the "Happy

Consciousness." To take only two examples, Studs Terkel's interviews with

hundreds of Americans, drawn from all walks of life, revealed how hollow

and meaningless they saw their own vocations. Dragging themselves to work,

pushing themselves through the daily tedium of typing, filing, collecting

insurance premiums, parking cars, interviewing welfare applicants,

and largely fantasizing on the job -- these people, says Terkel, are no

longer characters out of Charles Dickens, but out of Samuel Beckett.4

The second study, by Sennett and Cobb, found that Marcuse's notion of

the mindless consumer was totally in error. The worker is not buying

goods because he identifies with the American Way of Life, but because

he has enormous anxiety about his self, which he feels possessions

might assuage. Consumerism is paradoxically seen as a way out of a

system that has damaged him and that he secretly despises; it is a way

of trying to keep free from the emotional grip of this system.5

But keeping free from the System is not a viable option. As technological

and bureaucratic modes of thought permeate the deepest recesses of our

minds, the preservation of psychic space has become almost impossible.6

"High-potential candidates for management positions in American

corporations customarily undergo a type of finishing-school education

that teaches them how to communicate persuasively, facilitate social

interaction, read body language, and so on. This mental framework is

then imported into the sphere of personal and sexual relations. One

thus learns, for example, how to discard friends who may prove to be

career obstacles and to acquire new acquaintances who will assist in

one's