Getting It Right

December 1, 1999 Topics: Society Tags: Islamism

Getting It Right

Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, Special Anniversary Edition (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

Like the term "post-Cold War era", the phrase "postindustrial society", coined by Daniel Bell over twenty-five years ago, was for many years more notable for defining an age in terms of what it was not rather than what it was. Back in 1973, when the first edition of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society was published, people had a sense that the industrial world in which they had grown up was undergoing profound change, that giant factories, manufacturing and labor unions were becoming passŽ, and that the class antagonism that such an economy produced was no longer the defining issue in politics. Bell's book was enormously influential in helping people understand that these changes were not small ones at the margin; rather, they represented the shifting of an entire economic paradigm.

Today we can define this new era in positive rather than negative terms: we speak of living in an "information society" rather than an industrial one. Indeed, futurist Alvin Toffler holds that this transition is as consequential as the shift from agriculture to industry. It is a mark of Daniel Bell's great insight about the age that was just passing, and his prescience about the one to come, that we can now fill in many of the details that he sketched out. It is therefore quite appropriate that Basic Books has brought out a third edition of Bell's famous book, together with a long new preface by the author that picks up where the second edition left off in 1976. Re-reading the book in 1999 makes one realize just how right Bell was in his social forecasting.

Bell's new preface begins by noting that many of the trends evident back in 1973 have continued apace. Manufacturing constitutes only 15 percent of the labor force in the United States, compared to 26 percent a generation ago. Occupations have shifted: today, more than 74 million people, or 60 percent of the U.S. labor force, are either professionals, managers or else in lower skill, white-collar jobs. Educational levels have risen dramatically: 81 percent of the population today has completed high school, compared to only 41 percent in 1960, while nearly a quarter of the population has graduated from college (against 7.7 percent in 1960).

What is driving these changes is ultimately technology. What it means to live in an information society is not simply that there is now an information technology sector and a personal computer on every desktop. The phenomenon is much broader and refers to the marginal substitution of information for material product in every sector of the economy: today's low-skill worker no longer breaks rocks in an open-pit mine, but operates a sophisticated rock crushing machine or passes a package of Pampers over a bar code reader at Wal-Mart. This has important consequences for social stratification: increasingly, the rewards go to the smart, educated designer of the rock crushing equipment or bar code reader rather than to the worker who operates them. Cognitive ability and education have become the keys to social mobility.

Much of the new introduction to Post-Industrial Society is devoted to bringing this story up to date. Bell is better at describing the forest than the trees, and gets some of the details wrong: he confuses bits and bytes, and credits Netscape with the invention of the web browser. But it is clear that he got the essence of the story right twenty-six years ago. Information technology, and behind it information itself, has become ubiquitous. This has drastically reduced the importance of geography, decreased the value of natural resources, and unified the world into a single market for capital, goods and services that we today label the "global economy." The old struggle between capitalists and the industrial proletariat that spawned communism and ultimately the Cold War has been made irrelevant by the "death of class"--the division of society into large blocks based on shared economic interest. There are too few workers to sustain a proletarian movement; all of the occupations comprising what is generically labeled the service economy, from clerical workers and teachers to bankers and software engineers, have few common interests and relate to one another via a myriad of complex and ever-changing identities. In the meantime, Bell notes, there is an increasing division of the political, economic and cultural into separate spheres.

Some of the hopes and fears entertained twenty-six years ago have proven to be unfounded. Bell recounts that predictions of technology producing an end of scarcity failed to take account of the fact that people often covet positional rather than distributional goods--i.e., relative status in a rat race that can never end. On the other hand, some of the fears expressed by Joseph Schumpeter, and by Bell himself in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), namely, that postindustrial societies would produce elites hostile to the very economic sources of their existence, have so far not panned out in the manner expected. Though Bell does not quite put it this way, the Reagan-Thatcher revolution has left its mark: the elites who are likely to pierce body parts or seek medical benefits for their same-sex partners also spend a great deal of time these days worrying about their stock portfolios and day-trading on the Internet. Outside an increasingly small working class, economic hostility to capitalism has all but disappeared in the United States; what remains is a cultural contempt for traditional values.

It is on this issue of culture that Bell's updating of Post-Industrial Society leaves a curious gap. He spends some time rehashing his earlier complaints against Irving Kristol's concept of a "new class"--liberal elites locked in a perpetual "adversary culture"--on the somewhat narrow, semantic grounds that this group does not constitute an economic class in a dictionary sense. But Kristol was clearly onto something: while the inhabitants of postindustrial society have by now reconciled themselves to capitalism, they are far from coming to terms with what used to be called "bourgeois values."
A very important part of the story of the postindustrial era concerns the breakdown of virtually all of the sources of moral authority that prevailed in the middle of the twentieth century: organized religion, large social institutions like corporations or labor unions, neighborhoods, families, and the nation itself, which after Vietnam became the object of considerable scorn. Social identities have become more complex, shifting, and perhaps even more numerous, but they have also gotten incontrovertibly shallower in a process of moral miniaturization. Between the first and third editions of Bell's book, there was a huge run-up (and then subsequent decline) in crime rates; the divorce rate increased 20 percent; births to single mothers went from 13 to 33 percent of all American children; and levels of trust in the U.S. government and other institutions plummeted.

Since similar changes were going on in other societies making the transition to postindustrialism in this period, one suspected that they might have been related to the broader socioeconomic changes that were occurring at the same time. And indeed they were. The kind of political and economic freedom that is required to produce a postindustrial economic order brings in its wake demands for similar freedom in the moral sphere. Individualism and a willingness to break rules, which is celebrated when practiced by Steve Jobs inventing the Apple computer, is less benign when practiced by your local mugger or drug addict. While economic freedom produces prosperity and technological innovation, moral freedom undermines community and detaches individuals from one another.

So the story about the shift to postindustrial society is not simply a story about personal empowerment and the steady climbing of the hierarchy of needs by increasingly prosperous individuals. It is also the story of social disorder, disrupted neighborhoods, growing poverty, loneliness and broken families. These stories are particularly common in those communities that used to constitute the heart of the old industrial order, but which after the 1970s were devastated by the loss of low-skill manufacturing jobs--Gary, Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York--and whose inner cities turned into hellholes.

There is another thread to the postindustrial story that is given somewhat short shrift in the new edition, which is the role of women. Bell spends only one page noting the degree to which women have entered the work force, which according to him is "one of the most remarkable features of change in American society in the past quarter century." I would say that this was the most important social transformation that occurred, and one that goes directly to the heart of the postindustrial order. For what does an information society mean, other than the substitution of mental for physical labor? In a world in which one gets ahead by patiently going to school and learning "symbolic manipulation" in front of a computer keyboard, it is only natural that female labor force participation should have increased dramatically. Medical technology--an aspect of technology that gets less attention than computers--was also critical in separating sex and reproduction (through birth control) and in enabling a vast expansion of human longevity. These changes made feminism all but inevitable by opening up large portions of a woman's life that would be free of family commitments, and had the paradoxical effect of liberating men from the constraints that kept them bound to families.

This shift in the role of women has had huge spillover effects in other social realms. It put paid to the traditional nuclear family, which was based on a sex-based division of labor, and put women in direct competition with men in the work place (where they often performed better). While women have been liberated from oppressive home lives, the increase in the number of households headed by single women has also accelerated the ongoing skewing of income distribution. Poverty and an increase in income inequality, in turn, have contributed to other social ills, like crime and low educational achievement, that worsened as the transition to postindustrialism was unfolding.

Important as these discontents of the transition to the postindustrial age were, they are, precisely, transitory in nature and should not detract from the book's importance to our contemporary self-understanding. Postindustrial society has arrived, as advertised. The kinds of ideas that Daniel Bell advanced as speculative propositions back in 1973 have now been accepted as the conventional wisdom of the information age. To his great credit, Bell was the Ur-information technology guru who saw wholesale social change being driven by technology a good twenty years before anyone in America knew what the Internet was. The fact that many of his predictions have proven to be much more accurate than anyone imagined at the publication of the first edition of his book is testimony to the power of social forecasting done right.

Essay Types: Book Review