Free The Lost Massey Lectures by Thomas King Page A

before but there are more people to be hungry.
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    This brings me to the end of these lectures. It will be evident that in all of these Models we face problems of the most formidable difficulty. There can be no talk of the poor countries catching up with the rich. Nor can we hope to keep the gap between those that grow easily and those that grow only with difficulty from widening. Our best hope is that the people of the poor countries, in comparing their position in the given year with that of the year before, will have a sense of improvement. This is not a negligibleaccomplishment; the basic comparison in economic affairs is with the position of very near neighbors and the year before. But to insure this improvement will require patience and great effort. It will also take a good deal of money. However, failure can surely be counted upon to cost more.

T HE M ORAL A MBIGUITY OF A MERICA

by

P AUL G OODMAN

I
T HE E MPTY S OCIETY
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    During Eisenhower’s second administration, I wrote a book describing how hard it was for young people to grow up in the corporate institutions of American society. Yet statistics at that time indicated that most were content to be secure as personnel of big corporations; a few deviated in impractical, and certainly unpolitical, ways, like being Beat or delinquent. The system itself, like its President, operated with a cheerful and righteous self-satisfaction. There were no signs of its being vulnerable, though a loud chorus of intellectual critics, like myself, were sounding off against it. We were spoil-sports.
    Less than ten years later, the feeling is different; it turns out that we critics were not altogether unrealistic. The system of institutions is still grander and more computerized, but it seems to have lost its morale. The baronial corporations are makingimmense amounts of money and are more openly and heavily subsidized by the monarch in Washington. The processing of the young is extended for longer years and its tempo speeded up. More capital and management are exported, interlocking with international capital, and more of the world (including Canada) is brought under American control. When necessary, remarkable military technology is brought to bear. At home, there is no political check, for no matter what the currents of opinion, by and large the dominant system wreaks its will, managing the parliamentary machinery to look like consensus.
    Nevertheless, the feeling of justification is gone. Sometimes we seem to be bulling it through only in order to save face. Often, enterprises seem to be expanding simply because the managers cannot think of any other use of energy and resources. The economy is turning into a war economy. There are warnings of ecological disaster, pollution, congestion, poisoning, mental disease, anomie. We have discovered that there is hard-core poverty at home that is not easy to liquidate. Unlike the success of the Marshall Plan in Europe in the Forties, it increasingly appears that poverty and unrest in Asia, Africa, and South America are not helped by our methods of assistance, but are perhaps made worse. There are flashes of suspicion, like flashes of lightning, that the entire system may be unviable. Influential senators refer to our foreign policy as “arrogant” and “lawless” but, in my opinion, our foreign and domestic system is all of a piece and is more innocent and deadly than that; it is mindless and morally insensitive. Its pretended purposes are window-dressing for purposeless expansion and a panicky need to keep things under control.
    And now very many young people no longer want to co-operate with such a system. Indeed, a large and rapidly growing number—already more than 5% of college students—use language that is openly revolutionary and apocalyptic, as if intheir generation they were going to make a French Revolution. More and more often, direct civil disobedience seems to make obvious sense.
    We are