is happening off stage – the profound, tectonic
transformation of the physical and economic realities
of daily life for ordinary people. With both
bangs and whimpers the modern, industrial world
is drawing to an end in America. In its place, a new
post-modern, post-industrial one is taking form.
Transformations like this have occurred before.
The human world has moved from hunting
and-gathering to fixed agriculture, and from
fixed agriculture to industry. In this larger context,
today’s transformation is striking only by the compressed
time frame within which it is taking place.
Society-shattering processes that took centuries
before may now be completed within the span of
one or two generations.
In a transformation like this, the basic “givens”
of life are redefined. For a moment consider the last
great transformation, from traditional, agrarian
life to modern, urban-industrial life. That transformation
eliminated self-sufficiency and for the
first time embedded ordinary people within the
unforgiving logic of market forces. It emptied the
country side and created cities, leaving individuals
absolutely dependent on institutions beyond their
immediate control for the basic necessities of life
– water, food, shelter, fuel, and even sewerage. It
dramatically weakened traditional sources of political
authority, including religion. It empowered
the modern bureaucratic, welfare state.
It resulted in the creation of entirely new politico
economic classes – capital and labor -- and
social divisions and identities. It undercut the primary
social institution of agrarian society – the
extended family -- and encouraged the nuclear
family. It upended demographic patterns, discouraging
large families and encouraging small ones.
It changed the attributes and skills and behaviors
that were valued and rewarded.
Transformation like this is not a consequence of
public policy. Neither Democrats nor Republicans –
nor, for that matter, any fringe movements of the
left or the right – can speed up or slow down what
is taking place to any significant degree, much less
halt it entirely. As Karl Marx observed, “men make
their own history, but they do not make it as they
please.” The public policy question is not whether
America will become a fundamentally different society
than it is at present or even how quickly this
will happen: the question is how best to adjust to
the new realities and, in the context of these altered
realities, to create the society and world in which
we would most like to live. We cannot hold back
history, but we can alter the future.
Two challenges that America faces
There are two immediate challenges that America
faces. The first is enormous, but relatively straightforward:
creating the infrastructure for this new
world. Just as industrial societies required fundamentally
different physical and social infrastructure
than agricultural ones, stable and healthy post-industrial
societies have different physical and social
infrastructural requirements than industrial ones.
The second challenge, more complex, is accommodating
the process of the creative destruction of
the world we know. The behaviors and activities that
are valued or regarded as meritorious by society are
becoming unfixed and unclear. Sources of authority
– moral, social, legal, cultural – are in flux. What
a just society looks like and what constitutes “the
good life” or a life well-lived is a matter of debate.
Geographic mobility means that physically separate
communities defined by their different answers
to these questions will emerge. (Indeed, in America
this process is already clearly visible, as culturally
“like-minded” individuals move to regions of the
country where they feel most at home and where
democratic processes are resulting in norms and
regulations that they find most comfortable.)
At the same time improvements in communication
technology are resulting in physically intermingled
communities that are, quite literally, not
speaking to each other. Making the investment and
adjustment process more challenging, of course, is
that America has to deal with three critical, unsolved,
left-over problems from the industrial-age -- proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction, climate
change, and pandemic disease – and with the fact
that, outside of Europe most of the world is not yet
making the jump to post-industrial social order.
There is real news happening in America. And
the news being reported from Washington may
even catch some partial, distorted, poorly focused
reflection of this real news. But the real news is not
the movement of the winds and storms, or even the
occasional hurricane: it is that, like the motion of
tectonic plates on the surface of the globe, America
itself is moving.
SAM MAGAZINE 3/21 | 25