Roszak, Theodore. _Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society_. Garden City: Doubleday, 1973. > If we have not been accustomed to think of this harsh secularization of consciousness as a political issue, this has been— in part—because the damage suffered has overspilled the obvious class barriers; it has fallen as heavily on the social elite as on the masses, and so has lacked the invidious contrast politics normally requires. Universal evils are less actionable than partisan iniquity, though hardly for that reason less real. > We can now recognize that the fate of the soul is the fate of the social order; that if the spirit within us withers, so too will all the world we build about us. Literally so. What, after all, is the ecological crisis that now captures so much belated attention but the inevitable extroversion of a blighted psyche? Like inside, like outside. > Marxism has prided itself on its realism precisely because it raises no doubts regarding the worldview of western science and the essential lightness of industrialism. "Consciousness," as Marx wielded the term, meant "class" consciousness: the outraged recognition of injustice used to intensify group loyalty. Marx laid a deadly critical edge against bourgeois social values, but his blade barely scratched the mindscape of science and industrialism. > the burden of alienation weighs most heavily on the creative powers; because the beauties of science are not the beauties of art but their antithesis. Who recognizes a cage for what it is? Not canaries of careful Reason who value well-fortified shelter, but skylarks whose song needs the space and sunlight beyond the bars. > Deprived of bread or the equal benefits of the commonwealth, the person shrivels. Obviously. And that is a clear line to fight on. But when the transcendent energies waste away, then too the person shrivels— though far less obviously. Their loss is suffered in privacy and bewildered silence; it is easily submerged in affluence, entertaining diversions, and adjustive therapy. Well fed and fashionably dressed, surrounded by every manner of mechanical convenience and with our credit rating in good order, we may even be ashamed to feel we have any problem at all. Certainly from the viewpoint of the poor and excluded, we have nothing to complain about. > The world cries out for revolution—for the revolutions of bread, and social justice, and national liberation. Not for a moment do I deny that fact (though my own pacifist and anarchist instincts make me dubious that violent militancy can for a certainty achieve those ends). But it needs the next revolution too, which is the struggle to liberate the visionary powers from the lesser reality in which they have been confined by urban-industrial necessity. And I do deny that this liberation can be achieved automatically by a politics belonging to an earlier historical horizon. It requires a revolution in its own right. Only those of us who have reached the horizon of the technocratic society are ready for that postindustrial revolution. We alone can know the impoverishing price we have paid for the old ideals. We alone can untangle the terrible paradox of progress which gives us this world where things get worse as they get better. [This is a very metamodern statement.] > Out of despair, people rush to the counterfeit community of the totalitarian state. Out of despair, they invent themselves fantastic enemies that must be punished for their own failure. Out of despair, they grow burdened with moral embarrassment for themselves, until they must at last despise and crucify the good which they are helpless to achieve. And that is the final measure of damnation: to hate the good precisely because we know it is good and know that its beauty calls our whole being into question. > Humanism is the finest flower of urban-industrial society; but the odor of alienation yet clings to it— and to all culture and public policy that spring from it. That is a hard judgment, and not one I have arrived at easily in my own life. No one arrives there without making a severe reappraisal of what he takes to be sane, true, and real. Surely it is an anguish of the mind and no little humiliation of the ego to be driven so far back into the rudiments of experience, behind the consensual worldview, behind the security of personal identity. > One does not give over to the alternative realities without summoning up forces of nature and mind which urban-industrialism was designed to exclude, never to contain. There are dragons buried beneath our cities, primordial energies greater than the power of our bombs. Two thousand years of Judeo-Christian soul-shaping and three centuries of crusading scientific intellect have gone into their interment. We had assumed them dead, forgotten their presence, constructed our social order atop their graves. But now they wake and stir. Something in the mode of the music, in the mind-rhythms of the time disturbs them. > It will not be my conclusion that the industrial economy should be scrapped in favor of a paleolithic primitivism. I have no idea what such a proposition even means, though it is the straw man usually pressed forward as the single alternative to the status quo by those who will hear no evil of industrial progress. Yet science-based industrialism must be disciplined if it is to be made spiritually, even physically livable. There must be a drastic scaling down and decentralizing; altogether, a renunciation of excesses of power and production which have become sick necessities for so many people—but a renunciation which is experienced as a liberation, not a sacrifice. Of course we must be selective in our winnowing out of the industrial experiment Does that not go without saying? But selection requires a criterion of judgment. And here, the issue lies between those who believe that the culture of science can somehow generate its own principle of lifeenhancing selection (the ideal of secular humanism) . . . and those (like myself) who believe that hope is bound to finish a despairing vanity. > The only standard of selection that will apply in these matters must grow from a living realization of what human destiny is. Perhaps no single mind, no single culture can grasp that destiny whole. But of this much I feel certain: that such a realization lies on a plane of experience which mainstream science does not embrace, cannot embrace without turning back on its own distinctive commitment. Alienation means being sundered from that dimension of life. And the alienated person is far too small and uneven a mirror to reflect more than a distorted portion of that destiny. --- This would be an interesting quote to apply in the Singapore context: > At one horizon in time, the fully developed society glitters in the plains below like the promised land. At another, it proves to conceal within itself a wasteland of the spirit Then dignity begins to mean something besides (though not instead of) a full stomach . . and certainly something very different from equal access to an air-conditioned nightmare. --- > Even those who are clear-sighted enough to recognize that growth is of no guaranteed benefit to the wretched, for the most part limit their politics to the hard task of winning the excluded a secure place in the artificial environment They do not question the desirability of that environment, and less so its necessity. > In practice, the experts work within limits not of their own making. They are the chief employees and principal legitimators of power, not its possessors. > Successful experts know how to combine "technical boldness" with "social conservatism." Their guiding light is an ethically neutralized conception of "efficiency." > This does not mean that, like conscienceless automatons, the experts surrender all capacity to criticize or dissent There may well be hot debate among them about options and priorities and, quite sincerely, about "the public good." It is simply that their debate does not reach very deep, nor is it heard far off. Their disagreements do not extend to advocating major reallocations of social power, nor do they challenge the cultural context of politics. Above all, good experts confine their dissent to the seminar table and the corridors of power where their peers can understand the jargon and where they can avoid the painful simplifications of popular controversy. It is the one overarching value all experts share: the preservation of intellectual respectability against those who would vulgarize the mysteries of the guild.