Baron Wormser: Greening

 In 1970 a book entitled The Greening of America written by Charles A. Reich, a Yale University professor, and first excerpted in The New Yorker, made a big splash. Reich believed that a revolution was underway, a revolution of consciousness that promised a brighter human day. He called this revolution Consciousness III. It existed in contradistinction to Consciousness I, which revolved around individualism and thus wound up isolating people and creating a society in which people argued endlessly about their rights (now including the right to be a demagogue), and Consciousness II, which revolved around reformism and standard political uplift, the belief that the Corporate State can be tweaked through legislation and better oversight. Reich thought, to put it bluntly, that in a nation addicted to unreality, both those approaches were of little value and only made worse the dilemmas American society faced and, for that matter, continues to face.

   Yes, the contest between Trump and Biden represents an allegory come to life of the two forms of consciousness: one candidate who espouses a derisive and divisive let-it-rip individualism that is indifferent to, among other things, truth, and one candidate who has spent a lifetime ministering to the needs of the Corporate State. By “Corporate State” Reich meant the unholy alliance between private business and public government. If you think about the defense “contractors” who handle the nation’s military hardware needs, you get the picture, although the ties between the government and corporate enterprise are something like endless. Both species of consciousness, and surely we all feel that now, are characterized by powerlessness. Trump has seized upon this feeling with something like genius. Biden is left as the apologist for an outlook that seems only to know to spend more on so-called defense and security, not that Trump would do anything different. 

   It is easy to dismiss The Greening of America as the efflorescence of a unique cultural moment. Reich salutes Bob Dylan, hiking, marijuana, rock and roll, Black power, and the whole vibe of getting back to the garden that Woodstock came to stand for. At moments, he can seem silly as when he posits a world where people take time out from their jobs to go outside, lie down, and look at the sky. Not a professorial stance but that inclination, however buried it may be inside each of us, is not silly at all. It’s only silly in the light of the repression that we accept as reality and that defines our lives in a society driven by machines and profit, a society that assumes the Earth exists for the society to extract everything that it possibly can while ignoring the consequences. Going out and looking at the sky gets in the way of the agenda, an agenda none of us had any say in creating. Reich wrote his book to question that agenda and show another way to live.

   One can place the book in the line of various works by very various hands—Marx, Blake, and Thoreau, to name three—that sought to inform humankind about the numerous yokes that humankind has considered to be unassailable realities, yokes that humankind has suffered but also touted. These writers are connected with the coming of the industrial age and the growing awareness on the part of some that the promises that the machines made were tainted and that what came to be called “progress,” despite whatever technologies that concept manifested, was not an automatic good unto itself. The question that progress has brought to the fore is simple: Who is the master—humankind or the machine? I should note that Reich was writing before the advent of artificial intelligence, cloning, the Internet, the computer as we have come to know it, and the cellphone. If we want to brush the question aside and insist that we are in charge, that is our pleasure, but blind conceit has been known to accompany many a pleasure. 

   A concomitant that Reich singled out are our schools that are “the central American problem” since they exemplify “a failure of education.” What mattered to Reich is anathema to standardized education as we know it. He wrote: “A person should question what he is told and what he reads. He should demand the basis upon which experts and authorities have reached a conclusion. He should doubt his own teachers. He should believe that his subjective feelings are of value.” Reich believed in the “expansion of each individual” but understood that technology was ready and eager to fill in all the blanks for each of those individuals. What was at stake, however, was nothing less than the fate of the nation: “De Tocqueville and others expressed well justified skepticism about self-government by poorly educated masses.” It seems fair to say in the year 2024 that such skepticism is amply justified. 

   The issue that Reich was putting on the table, and again one that Marx, Blake, and Thoreau also put on the table, was materialism, as in: How much is a society willing to define itself wholly by material matters? In the United States, the answer is simple—a lot. It seems proper here, in pondering the question and the answer, to quote Reich at length. This passage comes from the book’s final chapter: “[Consciousness] I and II are more alike than they are different. They both represent the underlying form of consciousness appropriate to the age of industrial development and the market economy, beginning in the eighteenth century. Both subordinate man’s nature to his role in the economic system; Consciousness I on the basis of economic individualism, II on the basis of participation in organization. Both approve the domination of environment by technology. Both subordinate man to the state, Consciousness I by the theory of the unseen hand, II by the doctrine of public interest. Both see man as basically antagonistic to his fellow man; neither has any theory of a human community except in terms of consent to law, government, and force. Both deny the individual’s responsibility for the actions of society. Both define man’s existence in material terms, and define progress similarly. Both define thought in terms of the premises of science.” 

   He was far from done and went on to write this: “The new consciousness is utterly different. It seeks restoration of the non-material elements of man’s existence, the elements like the natural environment and the spiritual that were passed by in the rush of material development. It seeks to transcend science and technology, to restore them to their proper place as tools of man rather than as the determinants of man’s existence . . . . Since machines can produce enough food and shelter for all, why should not man end the antagonism derived from scarcity and base his society on love for his fellow man? If machines can take care of our material wants, why should not man develop the aesthetic and spiritual side of his nature?” I will stop here. The tenor of such remarks provoked plenty of snarky condescension. For my part, I find his words incisive, wishful, and painful. Reich reminds me that an open heart has ideals. It says everything about his heart that in the course of the book he quotes both R. Crumb and Wallace Stevens.

   Predicting a revolution of consciousness is a precarious endeavor. The reeds that supported Reich’s contentions concerning “the incredible vastness of the changes that are coming” were slim: “choosing a new life-style [his italics], the movement against the war in Vietnam, the predilections of hippies including dress and music, and the “promise of America.” Yet Reich was far from naive. He noted, for instance, that “in America capitalism is only a subordinate aspect of the larger evil of the uncontrolled technological state.” Also that “it has been a long, long time since we made any real choices; since the end of the Middle Ages, technology and the market have made our choices for us.” The issue of choosing is, indeed, the crux of his matter. He passionately believed that we could choose and that the basis for that choosing was present and was bound to grow. In certain ways, such as the acceptance of marijuana, he was correct. That acceptance has been a matter of consciousness that gradually came to the fore against a formidable front of propaganda and criminalization. The sustained engagement of many people with organic food, yoga, pollinator gardens, acupuncture, and meditation, the honest recognition of sexual orientation, also could be added to the list of matters of consciousness that have come to the fore since 1970. Not a revolution but societal changes that were and are significant. 

   Reich clearly underestimated both the power of mass media to direct the conversation about what we are doing with our lives and the enticements of seemingly endless consumerism. He believed that life was “intolerable” for the majority of Americans but it hasn’t turned out that way. Americans have shown themselves to be adept at wanting and then wanting more. Meanwhile, therapy has been there to smooth out the mental creases along with entertainments that can take up the hours not devoted to working a job, a job that may have to be two or three jobs as a person tries to stay afloat in an economy devoted to the interests of vast corporations. Meanwhile, drug abuse, overdoses, and all manner of homicide are accepted as facts of life. In the face of much misery, Reich appeals to that battered word–”humanity”–a word that provokes an avalanche of questions.  How do we exemplify humanity in a world devoted to mechanical uniformity? Do we care to even try? Is it only a notion? Are we merely instrumental beings, intent on our purposes as society dictates them?  Why don’t we talk more about how we might live? Are we, with our permanent war economy, only another page in the blind annals of empire?

   “Greening” remains the crucial word. Reich devoted pages to acknowledging how there is no substitute for living with the Earth. His bedrock belief was that we are meant to be natural creatures. Alas, that naturalness has included myriad forms of violence, of war, inquisition, slaving, rape, and kidnapping, all behaviors (largely male) that were endemic to the human pageant before machines became prominent. Those behaviors are not the sum of who we are, however. We can lie down and look at the sky and let the awe we feel get into our bones. We can live with that awe each day. It seems to me, as it seemed to Reich, we have to believe that and make as much room as we can for it. Otherwise, the way before us is, to use Reich’s word, “madness.” 

Copyright 2024 Baron Wormser

Baron Wormser’s many books include The History Hotel (CavanKerry, 2023).