Books: Search for Civitas

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THE CULTURAL CONTRADICTIONS OF CAPITALISM

by DANIEL BELL

301 pages. Basic Books. $12.95.

The more that Sociologist Daniel Bell peers into the future, the more he seems to respect the past. It would be hard to find anyone more at home in such a variety of contemporary disciplines—economics, politics, the arts, popular culture. Yet Bell is not happy with the trends in any of them. Something precious has gone out of life, he feels. The deficiency makes people harsher, more inward, more aggrandizing. Bell yearns for a restoration of civitas: "The spontaneous willingness to obey the law, to respect the rights of others, to forgo the temptations of private enrichment at the expense of the public weal—in short, to honor the 'city' of which one is a member."

Bell is no mere nostalgia peddler sighing for antique worlds. With acerbic but civil scholarship, he blames today's honorless condition on what he calls "modernism": the cultural movement that started in the latter half of the 19th century and has gathered momentum ever since. Modernism rejects the old, the traditional, the bourgeois in favor of the new, the sensational, the revolutionary. As such, it has dissolved many conventions, and discredited most institutions and values. Today, says Bell, its victory is complete. There is a perpetual, unwholesome rage for the new. Instead of affirming a "moral-philosophical tradition against which the new could be measured," contemporary culture has an "unprecedented mission: an official, ceaseless search for a new sensibility."

Under these conditions, an avant-garde can hardly be said to exist. The most outrageous or destructive idea or art form becomes accepted overnight. "In fact," writes Bell, the chief characteristic of the Establishment "is its eagerness to repudiate its own existence." The condition of art is echoed in politics and the economy. Capitalists have lost faith in their enterprise and are listless about defending it. Capitalism's very success has created a paradox: hard work, discipline and organization make capitalism successful. But the goods it abundantly produces encourage a mindless pursuit of hedonism. Capitalism is thus deprived of any "moral or transcendent ethic." There is a further paradox. The greater the economic growth under capitalism, the higher the expectations. People demand more government services and more protection against adversity. Inflation results, savings diminish, and capitalism is undermined. The only solution is a restraint on private appetite and a return to a public philosophy—a tall order, as Bell acknowledges, in these roiled times.

Bell is skeptical about his fellow citizens, who, he feels, are ensnared by modernism. The once open American society is growing more rigid and confining. With few values and convictions to restrain them, people increasingly elbow one another aside as they push their rights and privileges to an extreme. Conveying an almost physical repugnance at this gathering chaos, Bell warns of the "megalomania of self-infinitization."