THE GREENING OF AMERICA by CHARLES A. REICH

[islandboy]

CONSCIOUSNESS  I

is the traditional outlook of the American farmer, small businessman, and worker who is trying to get ahead.

CONSCIOUSNESS  II

represents the values of an organizational society.

CONSCIOUSNESS   III

is the new generation.

[islandboy]

The three categories are, of course, highly impressionistic and arbitrary; they make no pretense to be scientific. And, since each type of consciousness is a construct, we would not expect any real individual to exhibit in symmetrical perfection all the characteristics of one type of consciousness.

The concept of consciousness gives us the elements from which we can fashion an argument about what has happened and is happening to America. For the chaos we have just described is not chaos at all, but part of a coherent pattern of history, values, and thought. In the paragraphs that follow, we set forth the logic that emerges from behind the crisis of our contemporary life.
The great question of these times is how to live in and with a technological society; what mind and what way of life can preserve man's humanity and his very existence against the domination of the forces he has created. This question is the root of the American crisis, beneath all the immediate issues of lawlessness, and war. It is this question to which American's new generation is beginning to discover an answer, an answer based on a renewal of life that carries the hope of restoring us to our sources and ourselves.

[islandboy]

At the opening of the industrial era, western society underwent a major change of values in which scientific technique, materialism, and the market system became ascendant over other, more humanistic values. Although the contradiction was not recognized at the time, these industrial values were inconsistent with the democratic and spiritual ideals of the new American nation, and they soon began to undermine these American ideals.
every stage of human civilization is accompanied by, and also influenced by, a consciousness. When civilization changes slowly, the existing consciousness is likely to be in substantial accord with underlying material realities. But industrialism brought sudden uprooting and rapidly accelerating rate of change. Consciousness then began to lag increasingly far behind reality, or to lose touch with a portion of reality altogether. Today a large segment of the American people still have a consciousness which was appropriate to the nineteenth-century society of small towns, face-to-face relationships, and individual economic enterprise. Another large segment of the people have a consciousness formed by organized technological and corporate society, but far removed from the realities of human needs.

[islandboy]

In the second half of the twentieth century, this combination of an anachronistic consciousness characterized by myth, and an inhuman consciousness dominated by the machine-rationality of the Corporate State, have, between them, proved utterly unable to manage, guide, or control the immense apparatus of technology and organization that America has built. In consequence, this apparatus of power has become a mindless juggernaut, destroying the environment, obliterating human values, and assuming domination over the lives and minds of its subjects. To the injustices and exploitation of the nineteenth century, the Corporate State has added depersonalization, meaninglessness, and repression, until it has threatened to destroy all meaning and all life.

Faced with this threat to their very existence, the inhabitants of America have begun, as a matter of urgent biological necessity, to develop a new consciousness appropriate to today's realities and therefore capable of mastering the apparatus of power and bringing it under human control. This new consciousness is based on the present state of technology, and could not have arisen without it. And it represents a higher, transcendant form of reason: no lesser consciousness could permit us to exist, given the present state of our technology.

[islandboy]

This transcendent reason has made its first appearance among the youth of America. It is the product of the contradictions, failures, and exigencies of the Corporate State itself, not of any force external to the State. It is now in the process of rapidly spreading to wider and wider segments of youth, and by degrees to older people, as they experience the recovery of self that marks conversion to a different consciousness. The new consciousness is also in the process of revolutionizing the structure of our society. It does not accomplish this by direct political means, but by changing culture and the quality of individual lives, which in turn change politics and, ultimately, structure.

When the new consciousness has achieved its revolution and rescued us from destruction, it must go about the task of learning how to live in a new way. This new way of life presupposes all that modern science can offer. It tells us how to make technology and science work for, and not against, the interests of man. This new way of life proposes a concept of work in which quality, dedication, and excellence are preserved, but work is nonalienated, is the free choice of each person, is integrated into a full and satisfying life, and expresses and affirms each individual being.
The new way of life makes both possible and necessary a culture that is nonartifical and nonalienated, a form of community in which love, respect, and a mutual search for wisdom replace the competition and separation of the past, and a liberation of each individual in which he is enabled to grow toward the highest possibilities of the human spirit.

[islandboy]

The task of learning how to live in this way represents the chief philosophic undertaking for man after he saves himself from his present danger. It requires man to create a reality---fiction based on what can offer men the best hope of a life that is both satisfying and beautiful. The process of that creation, which has already been started by our youth in this moment of utmost sterility, darkest night, and extremest peril, is what we have undertaken to describe in this book.

[islandboy]

CONSCIOUSNESS I, LOSS OF REALITY

To the American people of 1789, their nation promised a new way of life: each individual a free man; each having the right to seek his own happiness; a republican form of government in which people would be sovereign; and no arbitrary power over people's lives. Less than two hundred years later, almost every aspect of the dream has been lost.

Every form of consciousness is a reaction to a way of life that existed before, and an adaptation to new realities. In the case of what we call Consciousness I, there was a liberation from the constraints of class status and the settled village life that still existed in the old world. Consciousness I had its moment of exhilaration. Facing a new and vast land, a new freedom, and seemingly limitless riches, its reality centered on the truth of the individual effort. America would prosper if people proved energetic and hard working. The crucial thing was to release the individual energy so long held back by rigid social customs and hierarchical forms. Each newly sovereign individual could be the source of his own achievement and fulfillment. One worked for oneself, not for society. But enough individual hard work made the wheels turn. Consciousness I focused on self, but it saw self in harsh and narrow terms, accepting much self-repression as the essential concomitant of effort, allowing self to be cut off from the larger community of man, and from nature (defined as an enemy) as well. This uniquely American consciousness expressed the realities of the new nation.

[islandboy]

To the people who came here, America represented a new beginning. They had been granted freedom from the past----a second chance. They believed that the earth belongs to the living, and that they need not be bound by traditions, customs, or authority from other lands. America would be, for them, a new community. They had an idealistic view of what man could be in the new community. The American dream was not, at least in the beginning, a rags-to-riches type of narrow materialism.

Here was a search for adventure and challenge, for man-in-nature, for the nonspecialized individual able to do many different kinds of work. What sort of man was the hero of this new land? R.W.B. Lewis tells us that the hero was not worldly, cunning, overly learned, or intellectual. His triumph would be due to the ordinary virtues----plainness, character, honesty, hard work. The innocent was the pioneer, the settler, the westerner, the boy who makes good. He was a moral being, and ultimately it would be his goodness, not his knowingness, that would triumph.  Emerson, in his essays on self-reliance and politics, put his emphasis not on the forms of government but on individual character---spiritual and moral---as the basic source of the national being. The belief that character of the people is what ultimately matters retains its strength to the present day. But innocence has its great drawbacks, as America was eventually to discover. When it encounters the more worldly (view), it risks disaster.

[islandboy]

There was another side to the American character---the harsh side of self-interest, competitiveness, suspicion of others. Each individual would go it alone, refusing to trust his neighbors, seeing another man's advantage as his own loss, seeing the world as a rat race with no rewards to losers. Underlying this attitude was the assumption that "human nature" is fundamentally bad, and that a struggle against his fellow men is man's natural condition. "There'll always be aggression and a struggle for power, and there'll always be a pecking order," says Consciousness I. There is a deep isolation and suspicion of others in Consciousness I and more faith in winning than in love. The belief in self-interest led to the corruption of American life and government by venality, dishonestly, the sale of offices, favors and votes, all under the theory that each man has a right to pursue his opportunities wherever he finds them, that "the game" is winning and getting rich and powerful, and nothing else, and no higher community exists beyond each individual's selfish appraisal of his interests.

[islandboy]

But it was not merely corruption that undermined the America of Consciousness I. Consciousness I proved unable to change with the changing realities of America. Today it still sees America as if it were a world of small towns and simple virtues. invention and machinery and production are equivalent of progress; material success is the road to happiness; nature is beautiful but must be conquered and put to use. Competition is the law of nature and man; life is a harsh pursuit of individual self-interest. Consciousness I believes  that the  American dream is still possible, and that success is determined by character, morality, hard work, and self-denial. It does not accept the fact that organizations predominate over individuals in American life, or that social problems are due to something other than bad character, or that the possibility of individual success, based on ability and enterprise, is largely out of date. Consciousness I still thinks that the least government governs best. It votes for a candidate who seems to possess personal moral virtues and promises a return to earlier conditions of life, law and order, rectitude, and lower taxes. It believes that the present American crisis requires reducing government programs and expenditures, greater reliance on private business, forcing people now on welfare to go to work, taking stern measures to put down subversion at home and threats from abroad, and, above all, a general moral reawakening in the people. Today Consciousness I includes a great variety of Americans: farmers, owners of small businesses, immigrants who retain their sense of nationality, AMA-type doctors, many members of Congress, gangsters, Republicans, and "just plain folks."
In the second half of the twentieth century the beliefs of Consciousness I are drastically at variance with reality. But they are held in a stubborn, belligerent, opinionated way against all contrary evidence.

[islandboy]

The great problem concerning Consciousness I is this: it is understandable how Consciousness I led to corruption, inequality and self-interest. But how did it lose contact with reality? How did it lose the ability to comprehend, or to govern?
American history, as it is usually taught, makes today's reality of failure and crisis a mystery and a paradox. After two hundred years of brilliant, unmatched progress, how can it be possible that we are beset by vast problems and desperate impoverishment? After watching the steady improvement of all our institutions, the development and preservation of our Constitution, and the limitless expansion of individual opportunity, why do our institutions, our personal lives, the whole character of America suddenly seem changed beyond recognition? And if Americans had always been the most independent and self-reliant people, the most jealous of their liberties, how have they permitted themselves to be reduced to the impotent "little man" of today, dominated by public and private power?

What was it in our history that Consciousness I failed to refused to see? Where was it that the American dream began to be eroded? Where did democratic values run into trouble, where and to whom did the little man begin to lose his power and independence? What caused the transformation of America? What were the new realities that went unacknowledged so long that Consciousness I was left as the repository and supporter of myth?

[islandboy]

Soon after Americans began their experiment in a new community, the assumptions upon which the nation was based were threatened by the rise of two powerful forces, worldwide in influence: the competitive market economy and scientific technique. The forces came as benefactors (as in large part they were), offering men in all countries the possibility of liberation from static toil. The market system transforms all men into competitors in order to get them to be more aggressively productive; it does this by defining man's labor, his environment, and his culture as commodities which can be valued in money and exchanged for money, and by permitting "successful" competitors to accumulate "profit" and "surplus" in return for the exploitation of labor and resources. Scientific technique is a philosophy concerned with the basic values of life; it asserts that all activities should be carried on in that manner which is scientifically or technically "best" and "most efficient." It is technique which dictates specialization of labor, the use of machinery, systems of organization, and mass production. These forces threatened the most fundamental aspects of the American dream: the physical-human environment that made possible the pursuit of happiness, and the form of government that rejected arbitrary power.

[islandboy]

Prior to the coming of the industrial revolution, most people were born, lived, and died in the same place, among people they knew and saw every day. There was no separation between work and living. Ties to the community were strong and seldom severed; each man lived within a circle which did not depend upon his own action, began before him, and lasted beyond him. Food and shelter were communal enterprises; no one grew fat or starved alone. The scale of everything was smaller: tools, houses, land, villages. There were no large, impersonal institutions----apartment houses, factories, or hospitals. Scale and activity were influenced by nature (for example, time was measured by the daily sun and the seasons). Laws were administered by visible local people. Most important of all, man's economic activity was rooted in, and subordinate to, his social system. That is, there were no purely economic or scientific "laws." Customs or religion---communal traditions, in short---were the regulators of life. Play, art, ritual, ceremony, and the spiritual were not separated from the other aspects of life; they were an integral part of the whole. Activity of all kinds was rooted in folk and religious culture which developed "irrationally" and without conscious design, in response to human needs. This world, both in Europe and in frontier America, was destroyed in the making of our modern world.

[islandboy]

The impact of technology, market, and capitalism is written on our landscape, our culture, our faces. Perhaps the landscape shows it most vividly. In all societies prior to the modern, no matter how diverse in other ways, there existed an essential harmony between the people and the land, a harmony in which nature was not violently altered or violated. Modern society makes war on nature. A competitive market uses nature as a commodity to be exploited---turned into profit. Technology sees nature as an element to be conquered, regulated, controlled.
In England the two forces brought about the destruction of the countryside, the raising of hideous and unhealthy slums and mill towns. When the forces seized the once beautiful  eastern states of America, they left forests denuded; rivers, harbors, and seacoasts polluted; the cities sterile; the land ripped by highways, high tension wires, and suburban swaths. They left little of the country unblighted, not even the miraculous and seemingly limitless beauty of California where today the devastation seems most wanton and cruel of all.

[islandboy]

What happened to the land also happened, in Europe and America, to the basic social fabric. The village community was broken as men were forced to seek jobs in factories or cities. Family ties shattered for the same reason. The separated apartment replaced the village and the family home. The bonds of affection and concern between men were broken by the harsh imperatives of competition. As pecuniary relationships replaced ties of tradition, custom, religion, and respect, men obeyed authority only when forced to by economic necessity or penal laws, and in consequence modern crime became the obverse face of society. Man was uprooted from his supporting physical and social environment and, like a polar bear in a zoo, he would from then on suffer an alienated existence.