PERSONAL COLUMN

Higher Drivel man on Lower Drivel from the BBC

JOHN VAIZEY

The Reith Lectures this year are given by Dr Donald Schon, described by the BBC as a forty year old American industrial and social consultant and academic philosopher. He is President of OSTI (Organisation for Social and Technical Innovation). The lectures, called 'Change and Industrial Society', will go out on Radio 4 on six successive Sundays beginning 15 November. Professor John liaizey attended the recording of the lectures.

The annual festival of drivel is here again. It is the season of the Reith Lectures. This year there were two innovations. The first was that it took place before an invited audience. The second was that the annual com- memoration of Lord Reith, who is after all a great man, has graduated from the Higher Drivel to the Lower Drivel. This is an im- portant development of which no previous notice had been given.

A few days before, I was rung up and asked to be part of the audience so I went, as I usually do. Apart from a few friends who, like me, felt a bit out of things, it was clear that the Higher Drivel was grossly under- represented. The audience consisted, in fact, of the soft underbelly of the English in- telligentsia, architects and town planners and the like. The reason for this became sadly obvious once it began.

Nobody, even in the soft underbelly, had the least idea who the lecturer was. The BBC said he had been chosen 'at the highest level', but yielded no more. Persistent inquiry elicited only the fact that he was the youngest Reith lecturer ever—not much help as the only one I could remember was the Provost of Kings who is ageless—and that he was American, which was not much help either, as most people are. He was also Jewish. Ditto. After a bit of a to-do about drinks (allegedly a shortage of glasses) we all sat down and it began.

Andrew Shonfield, very much (like myself) a Higher Drivel man, was chairman, and it was apparent as he read out his bit about the lecturer that he, too, laboured under much the same difficulty as the rest of us. Mr Schon, Mr Shonfield, said, was head of an institute that he had himself founded. It was to do with industrial, social, technological, intellectual change and all that. Yale, or perhaps Harvard, but mrr certainly.

A fuzzy haired, middle-aged man in a tweed suit and flesh coloured glasses, got up and read his talk into the microphone. It only lasted about half an hour. Then there were a few desultory questions. The Higher Drivel exchanged looks. Some before, and some after, the chicken mousse, stole away, and did not stay for the second lecture, nor for the pudding, which was bullets made of melon. There were to be third, fourth, fifth and sixth performances to follow and then it all goes out repeatedly on the air, echoing down the ages and across the continents.

At least, in the past, you could have a good laugh. All Provosts of Kings are ex- Meted to be a bit odd, at least while they hold the office. A good choice—a good laugh, and lots of sixth form general studies essay questions (Is the family doomed?' etc.). But, oh dear, not this year. It was bor- ingly clear from the first paragraph what the last grinding, remorseless paragraph would be. We all craved stability. Yet, because of technology, we were living in an unstable en- vironment. So our dreams were unfulfillable. Old institutions were being challenged in a New way etc. Some words—envelope curve. exponential, square—revealed a certain familiarity with the New Mathematics. But what do we do to be saved? Obviously, adapt etc. Institutions refer to the Past but ought to look to the Future. Etc.

That all this could go on at the public ex- pense was not unexpected. It is, after all, not so long since the 'sixties ended. That such a manifestation of the modern American social sciences should be invited was indeed an object lesson, but it may not be that which was in the BBC's mind when the in- vitation was given and Mr Schon was flown here to be exposed to the English.

As we stole out into the night, back to our dear old Higher Drivel, we remnants of the swinging 'sixties were forced to reflect on the latest defi americain. Here was a lecturer, self-assured, the bearer of a message, whom the representatives of a once-proud institu- tion, dedicated to certain standards, had brought over to tell the British public about the ideas that they ought to be concerned with. There were—and this was the significant, even startling, innovation—no ideas at all. This is the distinction between the Higher Drivel—our ideas may be ob- vious and wrong, but they are ideas—and the Lower Drivel. It was a happening.

What is it, then, that the Lower Drivel stands for? I suspect that it is the BBC"S answer to Muggeridge. It is obviously im- possible for the BBC to transmit for more than a few days Without putting Malcolm Muggeridge on. They feel it a public duty.

Yet what he has to say—trite though it may seem—is uncomfortable. We are all going to Hell and may be there already.

The Reith lecturer could not be accused of being ignorant of or opposed to technology. He showed, rather, a terrible knowingness about it. The diffusion rate of innovation, for example--the speed with which it sped round the world—was a key part of his talk. From it flowed the apparent conclusion that no part of the world was free from technological innovation and consequently (apparently) that all old cultures would die and new cultural values would emerge. Far from regarding this as a catastrophe, however, it had to be regarded not merely as a challenge but as the very texture of life itself. Man seeks stability, he held, and resents change. As change is endemic in modern technology, man gets instability and is consequently unhappy.

This is one of the most enduring themes of nineteenth-century popular thought. It has a certain obvious truth. But it also has a cer- tain obvious untruth. Many people like change. Indeed, it is a sign of maturity to be able to cope with change, to discriminate between what is permanent and what is transient. To deny this is to ignore any sense of permanent human values. The great issues of liberty and equality, of art, and truth, have little direct relevance to the transient technologies of different generations. The notion that out of the technology, out of the dissolution of human relationships that ap- pears to go with it, a new set of values that has as its essential characteristic transience, a lack of permanence, that such a notion is either a desirable or a possible alternative to discrimination and choice is itself so banal—and expressed in such banal terms—that one despairs. It is, in essence, a doctrine that is deeply reactionary, because it identifies protest at—let us say—tyranny with a neurotic quest for stability. Op- position to the scientific-military dominance of Soviet and American culture is defined as evidence of inability to cope with any kind of change. Clearly 'change' has at least two senses—one that is technological, so that yesterday's bicycle is in today's science museum, and the other that we all grow up, leave home, see our parents die and face death ourselves. To identify hostility to the organs that stimulate technological change with a neurotic quest for a permanent childhood is a slick trick.

One despairs at this sort of thing because the lecturer came from a society on whose changes, on whose crisis, he professed to be an expert. But the crisis in the United States—and the other countries with which it shares a military-scientific culture—is not a crisis of responding to technology. It is a crisis of wickedness. The shattering thing about America is the seeming inevitability with which the military-scientific elite has dragged the country into a defiance of almost every human value, and in such a way that even the language of protest itself is trivialised and made to seem contemptible. It is frightening to see the opposition to United States policy described in these lectures as inevitably unstable, inevitably alienated. What is even more frightening is the lack of conservative criticism—criticism from the older permanent America—of what has taken place. If the BBC"S Reith Lectures are designed to show the difficulty of serious criticism of the scientific-military nexus, they have indeed succeeded. If they are intended to be that serious criticism we must look elsewhere.