Senator RIBICOFF. And I would like to place in the record two articles that bear greatly on the subject of this hearing, namely the shape and direction of the future of American society and American government. The first is, "Toward a Communal Society," by Daniel Bell, professor of sociology at Columbia University, which appeared in the May 12, 1967 issue of Life Magazine. The other is an address by Gunnar Myrdal, the distinguished Swedish sociologist who has been such an astute observer of the American scene. He spoke on "The Necessity and Difficulty of Planning the Future Society" at a meeting of the American Institute of Planners in Washington, D.C. on October 3, 1967.

(The articles referred to follow :)

[From Life magazine, May 12, 1967]
EXHIBIT 3

TOWARD A COMMUNAL SOCIETY

(by Daniel Bell)

The most salient fact about American society-the root fact necessary to comprehend so many other bewildering aspects which mark off our times from the past is the "change of scale" in our lives.

Urbanization, the population explosion, the pace of our activities, the constant bombardment of new ideas, new knowledge, new people, our very comprehension of the nature of the universe-all these factors are changing continually. The simple and crucial result for the individual is that no longer will any child be able to live in the same kind of world his parents and grandparent inhabited. For millennia, children retraced the steps of their parents, were initiated into stable ways and ritualized routines, and maintained a basic familiarity with place and family. Today, not only is there a radical ruputre with the past, but a child must necessarily be trained for an unknown future.

Not only is all this the defining characteristic of our times-it is the root of its disorientations. For, as the world becomes more open to us, there is a greater hunger for experience. There is a desire for change and novelty and the search for sensation. Out of it comes the erosion of old creeds, to be replaced by a mingling of all creeds and all styles, a jostling of primitive and classical modes. It is this syncretism of culture which so distinctly sets the rhythm of contemporary life, which underlies the restless feeling that afflicts so many individuals in their search for "meaning" in the contemporary world.

Every human society in the past has made some distinction between what is held to be sacred and what is considered profane. But ours is a secular age, and nowhere more so than in the U.S.

Some of our "nothing sacred" attitude derives from the lack of a past and of a continuity in time. The United States is, after all, a "created nation"; in fact it was the first new nation-long before the new nations of present-day revolutions. The disdain for the sacred is also part of the rough-and-ready egalitarianism of American life, with its lack of social caste and of respect for individual differences. Such casualness has its costs. When the rules of status and achievement are unclear, the result is often anxiety, even though the idea of reality, of meaning and achievement is a fairly simple one sociologically. Reality is a confirmation by "significant others." In the Jewish faith, traditionally, the bar mitzvah is a confirmation by the community; in a similar way, graduation from college is the confirmation of a new role and a new status, a judgment by one's teachers of maturity and manhood.

When a person is confirmed by others, there has to be some sign of recognition. Reality "breaks down" when confirming "others," for whatever reason, have lost their meaning for the person who seeks to locate himself as an individual, or to find a place in the society. Today, individuals have left old anchorages, no longer follow inherited ways, are constantly faced with the problem of choice and can no longer find authoritative standards or critics to guide them.

THE CHANGING NATURE OF THE FAMILY

Nowhere is this more evident than in the change in the nature of the family. In the traditional world, work and home life were one, and the family was both an economic and a social unit. Not only that, but it was the setting for almost all the other social functions as well-welfare, recreation, education and religious instruction.

The modern world has witnessed the separation of the family, as an institution, from most of these functions. There is, more radically, a separation of family from occupation, whether it be the breakup of the family farm, the family business, the family enterprise or the family tradition, such as medicine, law, carpentry, fishing. Education has been taken over almost entirely by the schools, recreation primarily by commercial enterprises, welfare by the government or by social institutions. The family is now focused largely on fulfilling psychological and emotional needs, and not sufficiently allowed to do this, according to some sound psychiatric thinking.

The change in the nature of the family-historically the most crucial of all human institutions-has had a contradictory effect on a person's sense of individualism. In a psychological sense, as the ties with a family have weakened or been cut altogether, the feeling of individualism has been enhanced. To the classic question of identity-"Who are you?"-a traditional person would answer: "I am the son of my father." But today a person says, "I am I. I come out of myself." The great thrust of the American character-the urge, the compulsion to strike out on one's own, to cut away from the father and even to surpass him-has been one of the richest of the sources of dynanism in American life.

But there has also been a deeper meaning to this change in the nature of identity: in striking out for oneself, experience, rather than tradition, authority, revealed utterance, and even reason, has become the touchstone of truth and understanding. To this extent, the sense of generation has become the focus of individual identity, leading in turn to strains and conflicts between generations in society, and opening the way to rebelliousness among the young.

Another defining characteristic of our time is that masses of persons will no longer concede their "exclusion" from society-a situation expressed most dramatically in our own decade by the Negro revolution. In a fundamental sense, this development grows out of the historic claims of individualism-the demand to be treated as a person, not as a category. Yet, paradoxically, this claim of the individual is being made by the group and is being realized by the government. Since inequality in our society arises from disproportions in power, privilege and talent, the effort to redress such disadvantages necessarily involves the individual only as a member of a group, or as possessing a particular statusas a worker, or a Negro, an aged person, or one of the poor. This social fact is reshaping our basic institutions.

It is only within the past few decades that the United States has become a truly National Society, in which economic or political or social action in one section immediately affects every other.

Beginning with the massive increase in regulatory agencies under the New Deal, and continuing with a massive involvement in science, armaments, and research and development which has reworked the economic map of the country, the federal government has become our most significant and conscious agent of social change and transformation. Today this is most visible in the area of civil rights and segregation, in the passage during 1964-65 of federal antidiscrimination and voting laws. Less dramatic but equally decisive are the federal government's recent large-scale support of education, medical care for the aged, subsidies for housing, innovations in transportation, the protection of natural beauty, extended income benefits for the poor, and the like.

The rise of the welfare state, which all this implies, necessarily prefigures a new role for the state governments, for such ambitious programs can succeed only with strong federal aid. Finally, among those factors that combine to create a national society, one must single out, for its overwhelming socio-psychological power, the national popular culture that has emerged out of modern mass communications and transportation. To the extent that one can date a social revolution, the evening of March 7, 1955 can perhaps be taken as a landmark: On that night, almost one out of every two Americans were watching Mary Martin perform in Peter Pan before the television cameras. Never before in history had a single person been seen and heard by so many at the same time. This was

what Adam Smith had called the Great Society-but "great" in a way that he could never have begun to imagine.

But obviously it is not in entertainment alone that such a gigantic visual impact can be felt. The close-ups of snarling police in Selma, Alabama chasing Negroes with gas, clubs, pistols and riot guns made that city an instantaneous symbol of moral indignation; within a week thousands of Americans poured from all over the country to protest the outrages. And the death of President Kennedy brought an estimated 85% of the television sets of the nation together in a common beholding of the funeral, and a common mourning of the late young President of the United States.

While the National Society is relatively new, the National Idea, of course, is not. It goes back directly to the very founding of this country, to the great political debates that went on in the first decades of its life. The debate over the National Idea, as Harvard Processor Samuel H. Beer has most recently reminded us, goes back to the theory of the Constitution itself: Was this country, as the Jeffersonians contended, a compact of states, each with its own sovereignty, or was it a union, as the Federalists argued, created not by the states but by "we the people"-a national community that formed the foundation of a national authority?

THE FOUNDING FATHERS AND THE "NATIONAL IDEA"

This was, Beer continues, the basis of the famous Webster-Hayne debate in 1830 over the propriety and necessity of the "general government" using federal funds to build roads and canals, improve rivers and subsidize education. From Hayne's point of view South Carolina had no interest in a canal in Ohio, because Ohio and South Carolina were different governments entering into a compact that could annul unconstitutional acts of the federal government. According to Webster, on the contrary, "Carolina and Ohio [were] parts of the same country; states united under the same general government, having interests, common, associated, intermingled."

Today the National Idea and the National Society are conjoined. But the vast centralization that has resulted poses the question, more significant than ever before, of the liberties of the individual. In order to create viable communities, the individuals must have a sense of participation in, and control over, the events that affect their lives. It is to this central problem that we now turn. In the National Society, highly intertwined, crowded and dense, a new social shape is emerging. It is what might be called the Communal Society. The Communal Society is characterized not only by greater interdependence, but by the fact that more and more of the things done to satisfy individual wants have to be undertaken through group or communal instruments, rather than by the individual.

Such a group basis for politics can easily lead to a conflict of objectives and a conflict of rights, and traditional theories based on the natural rights of individuals do not always offer clear principles with which to mediate the issues. And yet if the individual is to survive, it must be within this new and ill-defined context. In order to re-define the role of free men, therefore, we must first take a careful look at the coming shape of the Communal Society. Surely the extension of the idea of group rights is one of its inescapable consequences, and one of the coordinates of the welfare and planning state.

There is another coordinate. It is the simple fact that more and more of the goods and services required in our society will have to be purchased communally. Take something as simple, basic and necessary as air. In every economics textbook, air used to be the classic illustration of the only item that is a "free good." Everything else, including water, has a cost. Yet the irony is that in the next 35 years one of the scarcest natural resources we have, in terms of increasing costs, is clean air.

One cannot ask for and individually buy in the market place one's share of unpolluted air, even if one were willing to pay for it. We can seek to assign the costs of air pollution to its sources, whether industrial, municipal or individual. But these are coordinated actions that have to be taken through public channels.

A NEW SOCIAL SHAPE-COMMUNAL SOCIETY

Another context for communal action is the cities. By the year 2000 more than 80% of the increase in our population will live in urban areas. During the next 15 years, 30 million people will be added to our cities-the equivalent, as Presi

dent Lyndon Johnson said in his "Message on the Cities," of the combined populations of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit and Baltimore. "In the remainder of the century," he pointed out eloquently, "urban population will double, city land will double, and we will have to build in our cities as much as all that we have built since the first colonist arrived on these shores. It is as if we had 40 years to rebuild the entire urban United States."

When we add to these tasks the efforts to eliminate poverty, to provide better medical services for the population, to maintain open spaces, to purify our lakes and streams and have adequate water for a growing population, to provide an efficient and fast mass transportation system, it is evident that we need a coordinated balance sheet that specifies our national goals and charts our performance. How do we do it? And how do we know what resources are available for what purposes? Recently a book by Leonard Lecht, which was an outgrowth of his. survey for the National Planning Association, sought to "cost out" some national goals and to see how much could be done by 1975 in realizing them. His projected net spending added up to $1,127 billion. Even assuming a constant annual 4% increase in the gross national product, the total at that time would be about $981 billion, or a deficit of about $150 billion.

The projections are important for two reasons: One, they puncture a growing myth of "economic omnipotence”—the idea that our economic machine is a magic cornucopia that can always offer up all the goods that anyone might wish to produce. As the author of the study remarks:

"Concentration on our society's objectives in terms of individual goals overlooks the fact that our objectives make up a system of competing claims on resources. We could well afford the cost of any single goal at levels reflecting current aspirations, and we could probably afford the full cost for any group of goals over the next decade. We could rebuild our cities, or abolish poverty, or replace all the obsolete plant and equipment in private industry, or we could begin to develop the hardware to get us to Mars and back before the year 2000. We can make substantial progress on many of the nation's goals . . . but we cannot accomplish all of our aspirations at the same time."

Secondly, if we cannot meet all such goals simultaneously, we need some mechanisms that would allow us to balance competing claims and to make conscious choices: What proportion of added national income should go to private persons and what for public spending; within the public sector, what propor tion needs to go for defense and the conquest of outer space, and what for community needs; within community needs, what priority should be given to urban planning, to health, to the relief of poverty?

At present we have no mechanism for making these decisions properly. Nor do we know, for example, where within the complex of social ills that can be broken down into poor housing, low educational achievement, delinquency and family disruption the first steps should be taken. To say that they are all interrelated is commonplace. Like a diagnostician who must try to prescribe a remedy, we have to know where in the labyrinthine system one can enter if the maximum effective change is to come about. Our knowledge, unlike that of most diagnosticians, is slim.

But it should strike anyone that in a society confronting the kind of problems we have, the existing economic, political or social organization of 50 states is totally inadequate to solve them. What is the rationale for the boundaries of Delaware, Rhode Island, Maryland or New Jersey? (In his 1966 inaugural speech Governer Hughs stated that New Jersey was undergoing an "identity crisis." Well it might.) Under the federal Constitution, such concerns as education, welfare, local services and the like are powers reserved to the states and municipalities. But these are no longer competent entities for performing such services. Their tax bases are inadequate, their administrative structures archaic and inefficient.

Our problems are compounded when we go to a lower-level unit of government. The situation at the local level is chaotic. There is no decentralization but only disarray. The proliferation of government gives rise to serious problems in the coordination of public programs, in reducing public accountability, in making decisions affecting multi-unit areas, and in contributing to the wide disparities between available financial resources and community and human needs. The complexity of the problem can be seen from the fact that in 1962 the San Diego metropolitan area had 11 municipalities. Phoenix 17, Houston 25. Cleveland 75, St. Louis 163, Chicago 246. and the New York metropolitan region some 1,400 local governments-small villages, school districts, each with its own administrative powers.

These local-government boundaries-historic growths that could at one time adapt to local needs- are no longer meaningful. Clearly what is necessary in the next several years is a comprehensive overhauling and modernization of governmental structures to determine the appropriate size and scope of units than can handle the appropriate tasks.

The group of businessmen who have formed the Committee for Economic Development recommended, in their report, Modernizing Local Government, that the number of local governments in the United States, now about 80,000, should be reduced by at least 80%. They further recommended that "the 50 state constitutions should be revamped-either by legislative amendment or through constitutional convention concentrating on local government modernization-to provide for boundary revisions, extensions of legal authority, and elimination of needless overlapping layers." It would be absurd to aim at reducing the number of existing states-for historical, traditional, and political reasons. But all sorts of state functions could be "detached" and taken over by multistate or regional "compacts."

NEEDED A NEW WAY TO PLAN OUR GOALS

Clearly there are no easy answers. (Imagine the effort to reduce the number of local political jobs by some form of rationalization.) Even the favorite theme of regionalism would provide no real solution, for the defintion of a region is not hard and fast, but varies with different functions: A water region, a transport region, an educational region, and even an economic region have different "overlays" on the map of the United States. One must first determine what is to be centralized and what is to be decentralized.

Our present system of economic accounting does not allow us to reckon the social costs of change and to decide, rationally, who is to bear the costs. A new plant in an area may create new employment opportunities, yet its byproducts— water pollution and air pollution-may create additional costs to the community. The substitution of natural gas and diesel oil for coal has meant economic gains to certain producers, but also social debits in the distressed Appalachian areas, where the displaced coal miners, because of their age, cannot find employment elsewhere.

What all this adds up to is a need for planning-for priorities, and for the specification of goals. This is not to suggest, particularly in the use of the word "planning," that it would take the form of directives from a government to its people. Rather, what is needed is planning that anticipates change, can facilitate change and can adjust to change, once we have decided what we want, in the same sense that a corporation today plans on a five-year, 10-year and even 20-year basis to anticipate changes in markets, in products, in capital needs, and the like.

In the area of public needs and communal services, the case for a stronger national government rests upon a simple proposition-the fact, as Harry V. Jaffa, a political adviser of Barry Goldwater, has put it, that "the problems which face the American people, to an extent unprecedented, are national problems and can be dealt with . . . only by the common direction and close coordination of the efforts of all Americans."

But in such a vast, broad undertaking, what role can the individual citizenor even the individual community-hope to play? The question of the size and scope of the social unit-the creation of a "human scale" in a mass society-is the most crucial sociological problem created by the forces which have shaped our time. What, then, are the final considerations of this issue?

In contemporary sociology a debate has been raging that goes to the root of issues expressed in this series in LIFE and in this article. It is the effort to assess the impact of modern society on the individual. There are, on the one hand, writers who see contemporary society as providing greater opportunity for the individual because of new vistas, greater mobility, and the whole array of new ideas and new cultures. To be modern, writes one sociologist, means to see life as alternatives, preferences and choices. There are, on the other hand, writers who see human beings as more alienated, fragmented between home and job, and isolated than ever before-crowded, harassed, depersonalized.

How does one thread one's way through this confrontation, especially if one believes, as this writer does, that both points of view are correct? The resolution, perhaps, lies in understanding a number of different perspectives.

By opening up more windows onto the world, by making it more accessible in imagination and in practical fact, by creating new skills and higher education, a person can find greater individual fulfillment and autonomy through the