Bernard Asbell is a salesman for Progress. He believes that the "whole new thing happening in America" is a good thing that will get even better as soon as people learn to trust it. The "whole new thing" is automation, and the motto Asbell wants to inscribe over the escalator to the future is (freely rendered) "materialistic mind over matter."

Asbell argues that machines will improve the quality of human life rather than degrade it. By eliminating unskilled jobs, modern technology will release millions of men and women from bestial drudgery. Instead of dehumanizing their makers, machines will give people new dignity and new intellectual stature. They will, in short, create a new improved American, a citizen as superior to the old brand of American as Sugar Pops are superior to Kix. "The argument here," Asbell says, "is that our new machines are finally forcing more of us into the grand quest of trying to discover ourselves as human beings."

The New Improved American bulges with gusto and determination. "If anything," Asbell admits in his forward,

the book is too happy and optimistic. It will be criticized for that more than for anything else. But the gloomy side of automation has been amply presented and needs no help from me.

On the first two counts Asbell is right. The third is only half true; the other half is that the saccharine side of automation--facile reveling in the tangible gifts of technology--has also been amply presented and needs no repeating.

The Lowly Himalayas

Asbell's exaggerated faith in machines leads him to make a molehill out of a mountain. He rejoices in the obvious virtues of automation--the effects it is easy to be ecstatic over. Nobody doubts, for instance, that automation will prove a blessing to people who now have to earn their living by sweeping floors or working on assembly lines.

The warnings of intelligent pessimists he dismisses not because he can systematically refute them, but simply because he prefers not to think about them.

As you read through these pages about some of the consequences of robots and computers, you are asked to lay aside a passion so deeply ingrained it is almost instinctual. You are asked to suspend the fear of unemployment as the worst of economic fates.

You are asked as well to narrow your vision and your values to the immediate, physical future, and to forget about the long-range changes in culture and personality that blindly applied automation might cause. By vastly oversimplifying the case against automation, Asbell all but ruins the persuasiveness of his own reasoning. His optimism seems to be largely a function of his myopia.

Asbell's logic boldly slashes through the tangled economic and psychological problems of adjusting to modern technology. When machines replace men, you simply retrain the idled men and rehire them to run the machines. Production goes up, and the worker rises to a higher plane of self-fulfillment and self-sufficiency. If, as often happens today, the displaced worker cannot be retrained, that is the fault of a culture which has gotten into the habit of treating its poorer members as beasts of burden. The "relations of production," not the machines, are to blame.

The cause of today's unemployment is that we are emerging from a system of production--in the factory and on the farm--that required and produced millions of people of such inferior capability, such limited horizons, such faint ambitions, that they are too retarded to assume the more sophisticated tasks demanded of them today.

Rising by Degrees

As soon as we enable all of our citizens to perform skills needed in our mechanized economy, unemployment will shrink and the national intellect will grow. "Machines provide jobs for men if there are men capable of filling them." The great theme of the next few decades, and of The New Improved American, is education. The route to Paradise passes through the schools.

Asbell spends most of his pages talking about the educational deficiencies that keep us from taking full advantage of automation. He discusses illiteracy, hard-core poverty, and the rural areas and Negro ghettoes that breed the unemployable. A man who mines coal all day does not, reports Asbell, come out "an adventure-minded man. Most of his intellectual powers must go toward the discipline of accepting his dull, dank existence without questioning, without wondering, without upsetting the influence of ambition. To live, one's ambition must die." The "wretched tasks" and discrimination of the "pre-automation" age are, according to Asbell, destined to wither away with the help of the state and a concerned public.