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Preface

In some respects, a preface is a conceit. It is the author’s reward to himself for the hard work invested in the pages that follow, an opportunity to reflect on the experience of having spent several years in an activity that is at once self-indulgent and self-denying. It is written in that special state of consciousness that derives from completing any large and intense project—an odd altered state, half elation and half depression, when defenses are exhausted on both counts. It thus gives the reader something of a special opportunity. My argument really begins with the Introduction, but those with a taste for eavesdropping may find this self-reflective interlude useful.

This book is both a highly personal statement and an extension of my scholarly work. Its style reflects its dual roots. Where I have quoted others or cited facts or trends, I have documented and provided references. But in many places its tone is informal, and throughout I hope the prose is considerably livelier than is usually expected from the pen of a professor.

The discerning reader will readily detect the influence of a number of venerable figures who are scarcely discussed in the text. Veblen, Tawney, Fromm, Weber, Marx, and others have been suggested to me by various readers of earlier drafts as candidates for more explicit attention. In the interest of reaching a wider readership, however, I have chosen not to provide the kind of detailed review of the literature that might be appropriate in a more strictly scholarly work. My intent is a serious one, not a “popularization,” but I do wish to limit the scholarly apparatus to what is strictly necessary to bolster or substantiate my contentions. I hope to contribute to the literature in a way that will prove useful to psychologists, economists, sociologists, and other professional scholars, but most of all I want to make my arguments accessible to the general reader. I believe the topic to be too urgent for scholarly discourse alone. I have no quick and easy remedy for the disillusionment and confusion that have gripped so much of our citizenry, but I do think I can offer the first step to such a remedy—a diagnosis of some of the basic assumptions that have led us astray.

I must confess, however, that concern with liveliness of presentation is not the only reason I have not reviewed in detail the prior scholarly work from which the present arguments derive. I am also simply less clear about the sources of the ideas in this book than I usually am about what I write. Given the breadth of the topic, practically everything I have read since my freshman course in Contemporary Civilization at Columbia twenty-five years ago might have contributed to the shape my thoughts have taken. In addition, at least some of the decisive influences have no doubt filtered down to me through conversations and secondary sources in a way that makes it impossible fully to reconstruct the origins of the lines of thought presented here.

In attempting to familiarize myself with the broad range of literature relevant to the present study, I have been heartened to find that the conclusions I had reached from a psychological starting point converge in important ways with those of a number of other writers who have approached the problems we face from the perspective of other disciplines. Among those who should be mentioned in this regard are, in particular, Robert Heilbroner, William Leiss, E. J. Mishan, Tibor Scitovsky, E. F. Schumacher, Jeremy Seabrook, and Philip Slater. It will be particularly apparent that the present work derived great nourishment from the continuing efforts of John Kenneth Galbraith to challenge our national fantasies about how our economy really works. Without his bold and authoritative analyses to lean upon I might well have shrunk back from the conclusions to which my own explorations led.

I am sharply critical in the book about the way most of us in America lead our lives. This does not mean that I offer myself as an exemplary exception. Indeed, a key point in the book’s argument is that the concrete realities of our society as it is today make it difficult for all but the most extraordinary individual to extricate himself from the temptations and exigencies of the consumer life on his own. From street crime to a shortage of public recreational facilities to peer influences on oneself and one’s children there are a range of forces that make individualistic and consumerist choices hard to eschew. Understanding how our present choices are self-defeating is a crucial step in the process of change, but so too is understanding how the social and political context makes such self-defeating choices seem almost inevitable.

One of the reasons that for a short time in the Sixties young people could so radically alter their lives is that they did so jointly, with mutual support and within informal social structures that made it easy (and one of the reasons that the change was so short-lived was that this crucial influence of context and mutuality was insufficiently recognized). If the ideas in this book make sense to readers, they will not be put into practice by individuals one at a time. It will require efforts to provide mutual support and persistent input counter to entrenched ideas and pressures, and it will require as well work on a still broader front aimed at social and political reforms that can reinforce changes in values and grounding ideas.

In presenting my arguments, I have stressed the American context and provided examples mostly from American life and culture. That is not because I believe the situation I describe is uniquely American, but only because it is easiest and safest to focus on the familiar. I believe that the present analysis and the recommendations that flow from it are relevant as well to such societies as those of Western Europe, Japan, Canada, and Australia, and hope that the book eventually finds a readership in those places. Recognizing the commonality of our situation will certainly increase the likelihood that benign changes can be achieved. I wish now to comment on a matter of style. There has been increasing concern in recent years that deeply ingrained linguistic habits may contribute to maintaining harmful stereotypes about men and women. The use of the male pronouns he, him, or his, for example, when one is referring to an abstract individual who could really be male or female (e.g., “when a surgeon faces his patient …”) may contribute to locking us into assumptions we need to transcend. I have struggled unsuccessfully to adapt my writing style to this concern. It will be readily apparent to the reader that my forte is not the simple declarative sentence. Something deep in my cortex has a fondness, or perhaps a need, for sentences with a fairly complex structure. When I try to change “he” and “his” to “he and she” and “his and her” what comes out sounds like German sentences with English words.

Other commonly offered solutions also have seemed to me to have an impact on how precisely and pleasingly the tool of language is employed. Use of “they” and “them” instead of “he” and “him” sometimes works, but often it lacks the immediacy that is required. Substituting “her” for “his” as the general form some of the time seemed to me at first the ideal way to reconcile aesthetic and moral concerns, but I found that when I encountered this form in reading others’ writing it was distracting. Locutions such as he/she or (s)he jumped off the page even more.

I am presenting my struggles with this issue in some detail because I do not want the linguistic choices I have made to be taken in any way as an endorsement of those who dismiss the seriousness of feminist concerns. Where the structure of particular sentences or the precise communicative intent permitted, I did use forms like “his or her” or shifted to the plural. In many places that did not seem possible without doing damage to what I wanted to get across. That is simply evidence of how deeply rooted in our aesthetic and linguistic sense are the very habits now being questioned. Let me ask the reader to be aware that there are numerous places in the text where words like “he” or “mankind” appear as the unfortunate legacy of centuries of bias and should be read as including that half of the human race that our language can seem to render invisible.

My work on this book was aided by a great many people (as well as a canine named Rascal, who seemed to know precisely when a visit from a creature of indomitable playfulness was precisely what was needed). At its inception, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities permitted me to spend a year at the Institute of Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Both time to reflect and stimulating people to argue with were provided aplenty in a heady interdisciplinary atmosphere. Will Gaylin and Dan Callahan, the President and Director of the Institute, were extremely gracious and supportive, and they, along with Ron Bayer, Ruth Macklin, and Marilyn Weltz, made very helpful comments on early drafts.

Because this book ventures into territory for which a clinical psychologist is not formally prepared, I found it necessary to conscript more than the usual number of friends and colleagues into the task of reading and commenting on the manuscript. The following all gave me valuable feedback on one or more chapters: Marsha Amstel, Arthur Arkin, Stephen Bendich, Marshall Berman, George Kaufer, Patricia Laurence, Stuart Laurence, Jane Lury, Ronald Murphy, Stanley Renshon, Oliver Rosengart, Lloyd Silverman, Robert Sollod, Deborah Tanzer, Michael Tanzer. My brother-in-law, Joel Finer, read every chapter with a commitment and energy that were especially appreciated.

Miles Orvell, in particular, helped shape this work during countless hours of conversation whose loops and byways no computer could track. To the degree that this book is “the real thing” it owes much to both the seriousness and the playfully bantering spirit of our dialogues.

I am grateful as well for the feedback offered by my students in seminars where portions of the manuscript were considered, as well as in more informal conversations. The PhD program in clinical psychology at City College is a remarkably open and intellectually fertile place. There are few clinical programs in the country where I could have received such consistent support for a project so disregarding of disciplinary boundaries, and none, I believe, where the commitment to critical thought at the very highest level is so ably carried through by students and faculty.

It is a pleasure to offer a very special note of thanks to Robert Coles, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Robert Heilbroner. The interest they showed in the book at a crucial stage was of inestimable value, and their comments were as perceptive as I had hoped. I wrote to them each as a stranger whose ideas I thought they might find congenial. The generosity of spirit they showed, in the face of extraordinarily busy schedules, is something I will long remember.

Very special thanks are also due Seymour Sarason, an inspiring teacher of mine at Yale, a friend to be counted on, and a mensch. Not the least of the many things I owe him is introducing me to Kitty Moore, my editor on this book but also a shrewd psychologist who managed my behavior with consummate skill and wrung from me a manuscript far better than the one that first caught her interest.

One final note of thanks: Once again my family has helped me to maintain the balance so many authors seem so proud of losing; they saved my evenings and weekends rather than my ruining theirs. We are all happier for it. But I cannot extend to them the ritual disclaimer I offer—with considerable truth, by the way—regarding all the others mentioned above: that what is meritorious in the book owes much to them and what is baneful owes to my stubbornness. The fact is, the heart and soul of this book comes from my experience with my wife, Ellen, and my children, Kenny and Karen. My view that feelings, relatedness, and human experience count more than the nonsense we are told today is “the bottom line” comes most of all from knowing and being with them; if that central idea is wrong, it is they who have led me astray!