Technology and Education in an American Eden

Bernard Asbell is a salesman for Progress. He believes that the "whole new thing happening in America" is a good thing that will get even better as soon as people learn to trust it. The "whole new thing" is automation, and the motto Asbell wants to inscribe over the escalator to the future is (freely rendered) "materialistic mind over matter."

Asbell argues that machines will improve the quality of human life rather than degrade it. By eliminating unskilled jobs, modern technology will release millions of men and women from bestial drudgery. Instead of dehumanizing their makers, machines will give people new dignity and new intellectual stature. They will, in short, create a new improved American, a citizen as superior to the old brand of American as Sugar Pops are superior to Kix. "The argument here," Asbell says, "is that our new machines are finally forcing more of us into the grand quest of trying to discover ourselves as human beings."

The New Improved American bulges with gusto and determination. "If anything," Asbell admits in his forward,

the book is too happy and optimistic. It will be criticized for that more than for anything else. But the gloomy side of automation has been amply presented and needs no help from me.

On the first two counts Asbell is right. The third is only half true; the other half is that the saccharine side of automation--facile reveling in the tangible gifts of technology--has also been amply presented and needs no repeating.

The Lowly Himalayas

Asbell's exaggerated faith in machines leads him to make a molehill out of a mountain. He rejoices in the obvious virtues of automation--the effects it is easy to be ecstatic over. Nobody doubts, for instance, that automation will prove a blessing to people who now have to earn their living by sweeping floors or working on assembly lines.

The warnings of intelligent pessimists he dismisses not because he can systematically refute them, but simply because he prefers not to think about them.

As you read through these pages about some of the consequences of robots and computers, you are asked to lay aside a passion so deeply ingrained it is almost instinctual. You are asked to suspend the fear of unemployment as the worst of economic fates.

You are asked as well to narrow your vision and your values to the immediate, physical future, and to forget about the long-range changes in culture and personality that blindly applied automation might cause. By vastly oversimplifying the case against automation, Asbell all but ruins the persuasiveness of his own reasoning. His optimism seems to be largely a function of his myopia.

Asbell's logic boldly slashes through the tangled economic and psychological problems of adjusting to modern technology. When machines replace men, you simply retrain the idled men and rehire them to run the machines. Production goes up, and the worker rises to a higher plane of self-fulfillment and self-sufficiency. If, as often happens today, the displaced worker cannot be retrained, that is the fault of a culture which has gotten into the habit of treating its poorer members as beasts of burden. The "relations of production," not the machines, are to blame.

The cause of today's unemployment is that we are emerging from a system of production--in the factory and on the farm--that required and produced millions of people of such inferior capability, such limited horizons, such faint ambitions, that they are too retarded to assume the more sophisticated tasks demanded of them today.

Rising by Degrees

As soon as we enable all of our citizens to perform skills needed in our mechanized economy, unemployment will shrink and the national intellect will grow. "Machines provide jobs for men if there are men capable of filling them." The great theme of the next few decades, and of The New Improved American, is education. The route to Paradise passes through the schools.

Asbell spends most of his pages talking about the educational deficiencies that keep us from taking full advantage of automation. He discusses illiteracy, hard-core poverty, and the rural areas and Negro ghettoes that breed the unemployable. A man who mines coal all day does not, reports Asbell, come out "an adventure-minded man. Most of his intellectual powers must go toward the discipline of accepting his dull, dank existence without questioning, without wondering, without upsetting the influence of ambition. To live, one's ambition must die." The "wretched tasks" and discrimination of the "pre-automation" age are, according to Asbell, destined to wither away with the help of the state and a concerned public.

But does an unemployed truck driver retrained as a welder gain in self-respect? Or does he merely find it easier to get higher paying but still mindless jobs? Asbell's theory jars with his facts. He envisions an Athenian society of proud, liberally-educated citizens; but the reality he tells us about is the reality of unemployed unskilled laborers going to night school and eventually getting employment as semiskilled laborers. He ignores the larger, noneconomic contexts of modern life--particularly the spiritual dilemma of the ordinary man dwarfed and drained by the mass industrial society that engulfs him. Teaching a man to tend a machine that does automatically what he used to do by hand will not automatically make him contented.

At Rainbow's End

Asbell pities culturally deprived children who are "growing up unequipped to live in an urban, primarily middle-class, world of papers and pens, books and conversations, machines and desks and time clocks." He fails to note that culturally advantaged children born into that idyllic world frequently find it unsatisfactory, or downright repulsive. And he does not reflect on what a fully automated, fully rationalized world will be like. Of course it is necessary to feed and house people before attending to the neuroses of the well-fed and well-housed. But the wide psychological impact of automation cannot be isolated from its immediate material benefits, and the humane social planner must worry about both.

In the long run, will automation refine the whole texture of human life? Asbell does not seriously try to answer this question. His new improved American is an acquisitor of the near future, a man with a decent salary and job security and indeter- minate felings. One wonders whether the Madison Avenue cliche used to describe the near-future man is a clue to the sources or the content of his values.

The New Improved American is anything but a work of philosophy, so it may be unfair to criticize its author for his unphilosophical shortsightedness. But even on its home ground the book has serious flaws. What if the retrained truck driver-come-welder can't find work as a welder? And what if his aptitude is so low that he can't be made into a hirable welder in the first place? Asbell skips over these disturbing eventualities with disarming haste. His darling is the unemployed man who turns out to have above-average abilities, who is young enough to be attractive to employers, and who lives in a region where there are skilled jobs to be had. He leaves the slow-witted, elderly resident of a depressed town to his own devices--and probably to the relief rolls.

The Current Rages

If Asbell overlooks the cases in which automation is truly likely to victimize the worker, he neglects also to propose any coherent plan of therapy for the social ills he illustrates. Most of the time he seems to be banking on sheer optimism, Manifest Destiny, and old-fashioned Emersonian self-reliance. He also praises desultory federal organs like the Area Redevelopment Administration, and the miraculous powers of new teaching techniques. Nowhere, however, does he suggest concrete rules or steps for accommodating men to machines with a minimum of social waste. As bell's enthusiasm is like electricty without a power cable; it leaps and crackles ferociously but accomplishes next to nothing.

"To get at the root of the widespread human uselessness that we mistakenly ascribe to automation, we must look into a vast cultural chasm that separates the successfully employed from the so called unemployable ... Although city dwellers, these "unemployables" have the characteristics of the preurban, prefactory villager of the agrarian age." Asbell's themes deserve thoughtful, thorough treatment. It is a shame they are developed with so little insight or discipline in The New Improved American.