61 

From Jacob Bronowski, Director of the Council for 
Biology in Human Affairs at the Salk Institute, some 
thoughts on "Technology and Culture in Evolution" 
(American Scholar, Spring): 

"The fact, the dreadful fact, is that the assertion 
by those who speak for a counterculture that tech-
nology distorts human nature is not only false, as 
biology and as history. It is a deliberate act of mis-
chief, for it is a recapitulation in modern dress of 
the anti-intellectual, irrational and illiberal prej-
udices that have always been endemic in America. 
In the past this homespun obscurantism has been a 
defensive faith for the old; now it is being sold to 
the young as a respectable brand of snake oil that 

will dull the itch of ignorance. . . . 
"What we have done, and should be proud to own, 

is to make the benefits of technology (in the sense 
of a high standard of health, convenience, privacy 
and information) a$ much a human right as life and 
liberty. . . . Of course, the proliferation of the ap-
paratus to do these things, the water mains and the 
sewers, the apartment houses, the roads and the tele-
phone wires, the tin cans and the gift wrappings, for 
a time has turned the landscape cockeyed. But that 
distortion is not the price of technology—it is the 
price of revolution anywhere, at any time, like the 
guillotine springing up in the Place de la Con-
corde. . . ." PAMPHILUS 

Correspondence 
[from p. 2] 

were too young to hear it will come 
to understand the truly radical and 
revolutionary meanings of it. 

Otherwise, change will be sought 
by "radicals" who are creatures of 
the culture's overemphasis of vi-
olence, and their "revolution" will 
produce no real change at all. 

Pat Watters 
Southern Regional Council, 
Atlanta, Ga. 

The End of Progress? 

To the Editors: Noel Perrin's "The 
End of Progress" (Worldview, April) 
brings to mind the story about the 
private tutor who tried to teach her 
wealthy charge about the life of the 
poor. The little rich girl sat down 
to write a story, which began: "Once 
upon a time there was a very poor 
family. Everybody was poor. The 
Papa was poor, the Mama was poor, 
the children were poor, the cook was 
poor, the maid was poor, the butler 
was poor, the gardener was poor— 
Everybody was poor." Members of 
one class cannot help judging mem-
bers of other classes in terms of their 
own class expectations and values. 
Of all forms of ethnocentrism, class 
ethnocentrism is one of the most dif-
ficult to restrain. 

The only two qualitative changes 
in social living that man has ever 
known are the agricultural and the 
industrial-scientific revolutions. Nei-
ther has attracted much or very fav-
orable attention from literary intel-

lectuals or pure scientists. . . . 
Although Perrin cautions that he 

doesn't feel confident of his abilities 
as prophet, he assures his readers 
that he thinks he can see correctly 
"the assumptions that Americans, 
and people of the developed world 
in general, have lumped together un-
der the name of progress." He main-
tains that we are at a transitional 
state in our history that will be 
noted as the "end of the age of lin-
ear movement known as progress, 
and the beginning of a new age of 
that universal recycling known as 
process." This new period will be 
a time when people recognize their 
animal instincts and enjoy the pro-
cess of living from day to day rather 
than pursue material goals that have 
proven to be hollow victories, once 
attained. . . . A bucolic Utopia like 
that enjoyed by the British poet of 
nature William Cowper and his 
American counterpart Henry David 
Thoreau awaits those willing to drop 
out of the race for material success. 
Cowper and Thoreau, however, 
made the choice voluntarily. . . . The 
world's underprivileged would also 
appreciate a choice. 

If Perrin, as a matter of personal 
choice, goes into the White Moun-
tains and exists the way much of the 
world's lower class does—half-
starved, frequently sick and dis-
eased, illiterate and prone to die 
prematurely—then he can use the 
editorial "we" and claim to be speak-
ing for mankind. What he does, 
however, is to propose that the 
choice be imposed upon others who 
are not free to choose. . . . Almost 

unanimously, in any country where 
they have had the chance, the poor 
have chosen to move from farm to 
factory. 

Instead of losing freedom to in-
dustrialization, the common man has 
gained it through this process, as 
witness Western Europe, the United 
States and Japan. The case of the, 
rural-Southern Negro can hardly be 
a better illustration. Although the 
Bostonian and the New Yorker may 
lament overcrowding and wish for a 
return to nature, he could hardly be 
forced to live in rural areas in the 
South and Midwest that have con-
sistently lost population to urban-
industrial areas. 

The historian Carl Becker once 
derided the proclivity of some of the 
younger members of his profession 
to predict "without fear—and without 
research." . . . I, too, lack confidence 
in my ability as a prophet. My sug-
gestion, nonetheless, is to look at 
the situation of the entire world pop-
ulation at present in terms of health, 
education, wealth and general well-
being and compare it with any other 
period in our history. One cannot 
escape the indisputable truth that 
the situation as a whole, rather than 
being catastrophic, is better than 
ever and that there still exists a great 
deal of room to expand. My es-
timation is that people looking back 
will see our day as one of a rapid in-
crease in the well-being of the 
world's dispossessed in spite of 
admonitions from the established 
classes that man has already ac-
quired so much power, knowledge, 
freedom, life expectancy and refine-



62 

ment that these benefits are begin-
ning to turn into a burden. 

Rolland Dewing 
Chairman, Division of 

Social Sciences, 
Chadron State College, Neb. 

Noel Perrin Responds: 
Mr. Dewing has a good point, that 
one should not renounce things on 
behalf of other people. An American 
who owns a car, as I do (a truck, 
anyway), looks rather odd telling 
Malays they will be happiest if they 
keep their water buffalo. 

Mr. Dewing's main point, how-
ever, that industrialization and prog-
ress have always produced net ben-
efits for the common man—and still 
do—will not bear scrutiny. The ex-
amples he offers are Western Eu-
rope, the United States, and Japan. 
Of course industrialization has pro-
duced benefits in all three places, or 
it would not have occurred. But if 
Mr. Dewing cares to examine the 
quality of life in England, say, in 
1772 and then in 1972, what will he 
find? He will find that the 50 million 
Englishmen now living do indeed 
have better medical care, a higher 
literacy rate, faster means of getting 
from London to Brighton. But he 
will also find that the 7 million En-
glishmen living in 1772 had a better 
diet—or at least one more to their 
taste—since present luxuries such as 
lobsters, oysters and roast beef were 
then available to the common man. 
He will also find that they had some-
what more sunlight (yes, literally), 
a humane noise level, easy access to 
open countryside, etc. etc. 

As for Japan, the great Japanese 
scholar at Columbia, Ivan Morris, 
has remarked that it took the Japan-
ese about 2,000 years to create their 
landscape and one generation (1945-
72) to destroy it. Certainly it is true 
that the Japanese are moving from 
farm to factory. How much choice is 
involved is another matter. I myself 
would explain a good deal of the 
move by the fact that because of in-
dustrialization it is no longer pos-
sible for most small farmers to make 
a comfortable living: Did American 
blacks want to leave the rural South 
and move to urban ghettos? Yes, 

plainly they sometimes did. But I 
do not think Mr. Dewing can safely 
ignore the role played by cotton-
picking machinery, by the battery 
chicken farm (which ended pin 
money for the black farmer's wife 
with thirty hens), by the effects 
tractors have had on mules. 

The example I want to end with, 
though, is India. Mr. Dewing thinks 
that "people looking back will see 
our day as one of a rapid increase in 
the well-being of the world's dis-
possessed." I presume he would 
agree with me that the most dis-
possessed large population in the 
world is to be found in Calcutta and 
throughout India. Are people there 
enjoying a rapid increase in well-
being? Not in their own estimation. 
I once heard the Indian ambassador 
to the U.S. make a speech to a large 
audience of American doctors in 
which he blamed most of the ills of 
India on Western science in general 
and English and American doctors 
in particular. He gave them credit 
for good and sometimes even noble 
intentions. But their intentions didn't 
alter the facts, he said. Which were 
(I quote from memory) that India in 
1750 had a stable population of 150 
million, enough food to go around, 
and sufficient surplus wealth to at-
tract the avarice of both England 
and France. Then British govern-
ment doctors and English and Amer-
ican medical missionaries began to 
introduce a rather lopsided "pro8~ 
ress" in death control. So that now 
there are around 500 million In-
dians, a large proportion of them 
underfed, underhoused, underevery-
thing. Some advance. 

If Mr. Dewing can really look at 
India (or Puerto Rico or Tahiti or 
New Jersey) and say that the lower 
class in these places is better off 
than it was a century ago, then he 
and I have very different ideas in-
deed of what it is to be well off. 

African Literature 
To the Editors: One cannot help 
but feel distressed at how "black" a 
picture Kofi Awoonor draws of cur-
rent African politics and ideology 
("Africa's Literature Beyond Pol-
itics," March). . . . His account of 

the genesis of negritude is accurate. 
But negritude has spawned a brood 
of interests in black cultural values, 
and some of these have proved both 
scientific and salutary. (I have in 
mind current interest in the nexus of 
cultural continuity between Africa 
and the "New World.") 

More crucial is Awoonor's view of 
pessimism in the post-colonial Af-
rican novel, and his dichotomy of 
(either?) political crusading and 
(or?) illuminating life for all people. 
There is much in current or past Af-
rican life worthy of disillusionment, 
sadness and anger, and sometimes 
the culprits are identifiable. All these 
can be mentioned, even stressed, 
without despair. They are, for ex-
ample, in Peter Palangyo's Dying in 
the Sun and Robert Serumaga's Re-
turn to the Shadows. Is description 
of the negative without proposing a 
program pessimism; is "fingering" 
the causes political crusading? Fur-
thermore, there are novels of tradi-
tional (Legson Kayira's Jingala), 
colonial (Mongo Beti's King Laz-
arus) and independent life (Gabriel 
Ruhumbika's Village in Uhuru) full 
of criticism, love and joy. 

Many of my examples may be tak-
en as too "light" for comparison with 
works of Armah, Awoonor or Soyin-
ka. Such dismissal will automatically 
distort our view of African literature. 
Furthermore it implies criteria of 
form and (individualistic) content 
derived from Euro-America's haute 
cuisine of Kultur. African novelists 
most attuned to this esthetic do in-
deed produce Fragments or Voices 
in the Dark—the Western fashion. 

Most literature which has ap-
pealed to the world at large was 
written to, for, and of a parochial 
culture; most written to illuminate 
life for all people has been unin-
spired nonsense. Let us reject even 
veiled calls to universalism. It is 
the reader's job to be "universal," to 
find illumination in books not writ-
ten with him in mind. How dis-
tressing it would be if Western read-
ers accepted only familiar, psyche-
delic light from black Africa. 

David F. Dorsey, Jr. 
Department of Classics, 
New York University