The Accidental Century - (Pelican Books A880)

"This is a hopeful book about decadence." With these words, the author, whose "The Other America" stirred our nation's conscience, begins his thoughtful, highly provocative dissection of the cultural and intellectual crisis confronting the United States in this, the Accidental Century. This crisis has been brought about by the "accidental revolution," in which an unplanned social and creative technology has casually generated radically new human environments. As a result, every Western creed is in doubt. Businessmen are unwittingly subverting capitalism, and socialists are confronted by a revolution without revolutionists. Many theologians agree with Nietzsche that God is dead, but atheists are not particularly joyous about the fact. Some democrats are fearful because the masses have learned to read and threaten, they say, to pull culture down. Economists can no longer console themselves with the sad wisdom that there is not enough for all and now must face up to the bewildering potential of abundance. A few great artists have made a "magnificent decadence" by using all this chaos as a unique vantage point, but that hardly compensates for the wars, depressions, and breakdowns that have implicated the over!whelming majority. The issue is not, Mr. Harrington argues, whether the future will be radically different from the past but, rather, how it will differ. Either men will consciously and democratically choose a new society or a new society will rudely choose them, destroying the Western ideal of freedom in the process. But if the Accidental Century is made purposive by the political intervention of man, then the various decadences described in this book will be, like the waning of the Middle Ages, the prelude to -renaissance.