But does an unemployed truck driver retrained as a welder gain in self-respect? Or does he merely find it easier to get higher paying but still mindless jobs? Asbell's theory jars with his facts. He envisions an Athenian society of proud, liberally-educated citizens; but the reality he tells us about is the reality of unemployed unskilled laborers going to night school and eventually getting employment as semiskilled laborers. He ignores the larger, noneconomic contexts of modern life--particularly the spiritual dilemma of the ordinary man dwarfed and drained by the mass industrial society that engulfs him. Teaching a man to tend a machine that does automatically what he used to do by hand will not automatically make him contented.
At Rainbow's End
Asbell pities culturally deprived children who are "growing up unequipped to live in an urban, primarily middle-class, world of papers and pens, books and conversations, machines and desks and time clocks." He fails to note that culturally advantaged children born into that idyllic world frequently find it unsatisfactory, or downright repulsive. And he does not reflect on what a fully automated, fully rationalized world will be like. Of course it is necessary to feed and house people before attending to the neuroses of the well-fed and well-housed. But the wide psychological impact of automation cannot be isolated from its immediate material benefits, and the humane social planner must worry about both.
In the long run, will automation refine the whole texture of human life? Asbell does not seriously try to answer this question. His new improved American is an acquisitor of the near future, a man with a decent salary and job security and indeter- minate felings. One wonders whether the Madison Avenue cliche used to describe the near-future man is a clue to the sources or the content of his values.
The New Improved American is anything but a work of philosophy, so it may be unfair to criticize its author for his unphilosophical shortsightedness. But even on its home ground the book has serious flaws. What if the retrained truck driver-come-welder can't find work as a welder? And what if his aptitude is so low that he can't be made into a hirable welder in the first place? Asbell skips over these disturbing eventualities with disarming haste. His darling is the unemployed man who turns out to have above-average abilities, who is young enough to be attractive to employers, and who lives in a region where there are skilled jobs to be had. He leaves the slow-witted, elderly resident of a depressed town to his own devices--and probably to the relief rolls.
The Current Rages
If Asbell overlooks the cases in which automation is truly likely to victimize the worker, he neglects also to propose any coherent plan of therapy for the social ills he illustrates. Most of the time he seems to be banking on sheer optimism, Manifest Destiny, and old-fashioned Emersonian self-reliance. He also praises desultory federal organs like the Area Redevelopment Administration, and the miraculous powers of new teaching techniques. Nowhere, however, does he suggest concrete rules or steps for accommodating men to machines with a minimum of social waste. As bell's enthusiasm is like electricty without a power cable; it leaps and crackles ferociously but accomplishes next to nothing.
"To get at the root of the widespread human uselessness that we mistakenly ascribe to automation, we must look into a vast cultural chasm that separates the successfully employed from the so called unemployable ... Although city dwellers, these "unemployables" have the characteristics of the preurban, prefactory villager of the agrarian age." Asbell's themes deserve thoughtful, thorough treatment. It is a shame they are developed with so little insight or discipline in The New Improved American.