LINCOLN AND MODERN AMERICA

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have, but even this is now virtually a universal matter of choice. Mass society has transferred decisions from tradition to control by the individual."

Like all freedoms, this freedom of choice is also a burden, and that is one reason why there is much "conformity." Few individuals in any society have the emotional security to base their choices only on their inner resources. If a fixed order is not available, a man can only seek out models and examples until, in time, he develops more of his own values. To expect every individual to take in all of life through a thinking man's filter—to have his own independent, personal convictions about politics, ethics, culture —is to ask the impossible. It is, in fact, to ask for a mass elite.

Moreover, mass living is not nearly so homogenized as it is often said to be. Much individual activity is carried on privately, undemonstratively. Countless people pursue their private crusades and crotchets. The U.S. has many subcultures. Creeds and races live unto themselves, often by choice. Parents and children often live worlds apart. There are innumerable social islands of different inter ests, occupations, tastes, hobbies, snobberies and ethics. There are countless voluntary organizations that provide a vital middle ground between two extreme possibilities—a chaotic agglomeration of isolated individuals on the one hand, a totally regimented society on the other.

There is a kind of privacy even in the mass. "You find it driving to work, alongside all those other people, but alone with your thoughts," says California's Sociologist Edward McDonagh. "The car has become a secular sanctuary for the individual, his shrine to the self, his mobile Walden Pond."

Beyond Business. Organization is the genius of modern man. He uses it in coping with life the way Medieval man used faith and the Humanists used experiment. Inevitably, he is also used by it. The most important organizing force in his world is the government. In the U.S., it has grown from the 37,000 federal bureaucrats of Lincoln's day to nearly 2,500,000, very few of them dedicated to Lincoln's (or Jefferson's) principle that the state should do for the individual only what he cannot do for himself. Many social critics deplore the prevalent complacency about this. Says Chicago Economist George Stigler: "The trouble is that hardly anybody in America goes to bed angry at night."

Big Government is counterbalanced by the Big Corporation, which has developed its own smothering bureaucracy. As W. H. Whyte sees the Organization Man, in the office he is engulfed by the team spirit, and in his suburb he is "imprisoned in brotherhood." The indictment, now seven years old, still has much validity, although Whyte admits that a tighter, more competitive economy has made for many sharper, less brotherly elbows. Besides, as automation displaces many straight clerical jobs, there is growing demand for skilled, creative people—and a growing willingness to take them as they are. There is a thriving washroom and cocktail-party folklore about corporate togetherness (the oil company chemist who is instructed to buy only company gasoline, the assistant vice president being told what car he should or should not drive). At the same time, businesses are becoming sensitive and corporations are

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