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.One response to the loss of control, for example, is a revulsion against intelligence.Science first gave man a sense of mastery over his environment, and hence over the future.By making the future seem malleable, instead of immutable, it shattered the opiate religionsthat preached passivity and mysticism.Today, mounting evidence that society is out ofcontrol breeds disillusionment with science.In consequence, we witness a garish revival ofmysticism.Suddenly astrology is the rage.Zen, yoga, seances, and witchcraft becomepopular pastimes.Cults form around the search for Dionysian experience, for non-verbal andsupposedly non-linear communication.We are told it is more important to "feel" than to"think," as though there were a contradiction between the two.Existentialist oracles joinCatholic mystics, Jungian psychoanalysts, and Hindu gurus in exalting the mystical andemotional against the scientific and rational.This reversion to pre-scientific attitudes is accompanied, not surprisingly, by atremendous wave of nostalgia in the society.Antique furniture, posters from a bygone era,games based on the remembrance of yesterday's trivia, the revival of Art Nouveau, the spreadof Edwardian styles, the rediscovery of such faded pop-cult celebrities as Humphrey Bogartor W.C.Fields, all mirror a psychological lust for the simpler, less turbulent past.Powerfulfad machines spring into action to capitalize on this hunger.The nostalgia business becomesa booming industry.The failure of technocratic planning and the consequent sense of lost control also feedsthe philosophy of "now-ness." Songs and advertisements hail the appearance of the "nowgeneration," and learned psychiatrists, discoursing on the presumed dangers of repression,warn us not to defer our gratifications.Acting out and a search for immediate payoff areencouraged."We're more oriented to the present," says a teen-age girl to a reporter after themammoth Woodstock rock music festival."It's like do what you want to do now.If you stayanywhere very long you get into a planning thing.So you just move on." Spontaneity, thepersonal equivalent of social planlessness, is elevated into a cardinal psychological virtue.All this has its political analog in the emergence of a strange coalition of right wingersand New Leftists in support of what can only be termed a "hang loose" approach to thefuture.Thus we hear increasing calls for anti-planning or non-planning, sometimeseuphemized as "organic growth." Among some radicals, this takes on an anarchist coloration.Not only is it regarded as unnecessary or unwise to make long-range plans for the future ofthe institution or society they wish to overturn, it is sometimes even regarded as poor taste toplan the next hour and a half of a meeting.Planlessness is glorified.Arguing that planning imposes values on the future, the anti-planners overlook the factthat non-planning does so, too often with far worse consequence.Angered by the narrow,econocentric character of technocratic planning, they condemn systems analysis, cost benefitaccounting, and similar methods, ignoring the fact that, used differently, these very toolsmight be converted into powerful techniques for humanizing the future.When critics charge that technocratic planning is anti-human, in the sense that itneglects social, cultural and psychological values in its headlong rush to maximize economicgain, they are usually right.When they charge that it is shortsighted and undemocratic, theyare usually right.When they charge it is inept, they are usually right.But when they plunge backward into irrationality, anti-scientific attitudes, a kind ofsick nostalgia, and an exaltation of now-ness, they are not only wrong, but dangerous.Just as,in the main, their alternatives to industrialism call for a return to pre-industrial institutions,their alternative to technocracy is not post-, but pre-technocracy.Nothing could be more dangerously maladaptive.Whatever the theoretical argumentsmay be, brute forces are loose in the world [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]