Can technology and the environment save us from ourselves?
Andrew Sheng says the idealism found in a 1970 book is still relevant in today's materialistic world
The advantage of clearing up your library is that you get to re-read your old books. One such classic was Yale professor Charles Reich's The Greening of America. Charles Reich was Hillary and Bill Clinton's teacher in law at Yale. His book struck a chord amongst the angry generation of 1968, who felt that they needed to change the world. They did.
Over four decades later, after domestic protests forced America to leave Vietnam, the US is again leaving, this time from Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite all the wealth that the baby-boomer generation has created, the world has become less equal, with the top 1 per cent owning more wealth than ever. And instead of greening America and the world, the world is distinctly browner as carbon emissions and pollution reach critical levels.
The power of Reich's anger tempered with intellectual analysis can be seen from a section of the book entitled "Disorder, corruption, hypocrisy, war": "The front pages of newspapers tell of the disintegration of the social fabric and the resulting atmosphere of anxiety and terror in which we all live. Lawlessness is often associated with crime and riots, but there is lawlessness and corruption in all the major institutions of our society - matched by an indifference to responsibility and its consequences, and a pervasive hypocrisy that refuses to acknowledge the facts that are everywhere visible."
Sounds familiar?
Reading through today's internet blogs, I sense that Reich has echoed the anger of our youth, their feeling of alienation from the parents' generation and frustration about inequality, unemployment and the destruction of our environment.
Re-reading Reich this week, I was struck by his prescience. In the 1960s, America was at the peak of global power, and that generation underwent a mental revolution that brought hope to sustainable prosperity. Reich touched the nerve of a generation when he asked: what's happening to the individual in America? Is the individual going the way of the environment, being destroyed? In other words, were we becoming the creatures of the machine?