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.We face a tempting and terrifying extension of freedom.THE IGNOBLE SAVAGEThe more subcultural groupings in a society, the greater the potential freedom of theindividual.This is why pre-industrial man, despite romantic myths to the contrary, sufferedso bitterly from lack of choice.While sentimentalists prattle about the supposedly unfettered freedom of the primitive,evidence collected by anthropologists and historians contradicts them.John Gardner puts thematter tersely: "The primitive tribe or pre-industrial community has usually demanded farmore profound submission of the individual to the group than has any modern society." As anAustralian social scientist was told by a Temne tribesman in Sierra Leone: "When Temnepeople choose a thing, we must all agree with the decision this is what we call cooperation."This is, of course, what we call conformity.The reason for the crushing conformity required of pre-industrial man, the reason theTemne tribesman has to "go along" with his fellows, is precisely that he has nowhere else togo.His society is monolithic, not yet broken into a liberating multiplicity of components.It iswhat sociologists call "undifferentiated."Like a bullet smashing into a pane of glass, industrialism shatters these societies,splitting them up into thousands of specialized agencies schools, corporations, governmentbureaus, churches, armies each subdivided into smaller and still more specialized subunits.The same fragmentation occurs at the informal level, and a host of subcults spring up: rodeoriders, Black Muslims, motorcyclists, skinheads and all the rest.This split-up of the social order is precisely analogous to the process of growth inbiology.Embryos differentiate as they develop, forming more and more specialized organs.The entire march of evolution, from the virus to man, displays a relentless advance towardhigher and higher degrees of differentiation.There appears to be a seemingly irresistiblemovement of living beings and social groups from less to more differentiated forms.Thus it is not accidental that we witness parallel trends toward diversity in theeconomy, in art, in education and mass culture, in the social order itself.These trends all fittogether forming part of an immensely larger historic process.The Super-industrialRevolution can now be seen for what, in large measure, it is the advance of human societyto its next higher stage of differentiation.This is why it often seems to us that our society is cracking at the seams.It is.This iswhy everything grows increasingly complex.Where once there stood 1000 organizationalentities, there now stand 10,000 interconnected by increasingly transient links.Where oncethere were a few relatively permanent subcults with which a person might identify, there noware thousands of temporary subcults milling about, colliding and multiplying.The powerfulbonds that integrated industrial society bonds of law, common values, centralized andstandardized education and cultural production are breaking down.All this explains why cities suddenly seem to be "unmanageable" and universities"ungovernable." For the old ways of integrating a society, methods based on uniformity,simplicity, and permanence, are no longer effective.A new, more finely fragmented socialorder a super-industrial order is emerging.It is based on many more diverse and short-lived components than any previous social system and we have not yet learned how to linkthem together, how to integrate the whole.For the individual, this leap to a new level of differentiation holds awesomeimplications.But not the ones most people fear.We have been told so often that we areheading for faceless uniformity that we fail to appreciate the fantastic opportunities forindividuality that the Super-industrial Revolution brings with it.And we have hardly begunto think about the dangers of over-individualization that are also implicit in it.The "mass society" theorists are obsessed by a reality that has already begun to pass usby [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]