Book Reviews

Florman decided that academia was not a likely place to hunt for the truth. It somehow got under Mr. Flor man's skin when he heard a young man, with professorial encourage ment, disparage farm tractors in comparison with oxen. But Flor man's mood really soured when a young woman solemnly arose to an700 nounce that the building they were meeting in should never have been built since it was constructed on ter rain sacred years ago to an Indian tribe. Florman's adventures in acade mia provoked him into writing a second book, Blaming Technology: The Irrational Search for Scapegoats (St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Ave nue, New York, N.Y. 10010,206 pp., $12.95). It is a markedly gentle book considering some of the violent speeches that moved Florman to un dertake a work that had to be done. Florman concedes that we live in a world filled with ambiguities and paradoxes. The good points of oxen can be admitted: they don't consume gasoline, and they provide manure to enrich the soil. Their only draw back is that they are no longer ca pable of ploughing Kansas in a way to feed the world. As for the Indians who once hunted in Michigan woods, Florman does not quarrel with the idea that they were wronged. But BLAMING TECHNOLOGY 701 Hiawatha has been a long time dead.

Demolishing a modern building would not give him back his tepee. Whatever ails business in the United States today, it is not the fault of engineers. Simply by analyzing Who's Who in America Mr. Florman deftly refutes the notion that we are run by technocrats. Despite John Kenneth Galbraith, who thinks power resides with the planning staffs of a "technostructure," our in dustries are still guided by gradu ates of liberal arts colleges who, in many instances, have gone on to law school. During the past thirty years only 7 per cent of our college gradu ates have had engineering majors. Lawyers, not engineers, make our laws in Congress. Mr. Florman con cludes, quite sensibly, that "the myth of the technocratic elite is an expression of fear, like a fairy tale about ogres." The army engineers, who have a direct impact on the environment, have been called Public Enemy No. 1 by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Florman does not deny that there is such a thing as "big dam foolishness" in some parts of the West. But the environmentalist in him is pleased every time he sees a barge being propelled gently along a .man-made waterway. If we didn't have barge canals-and deepened rivers-we would have to compen sate by building more concrete high ways for roaring trailer trucks. On balance, the army engineers haven't done such a bad job in developing our inland waterway system. If they have done harm to wetlands, it was in a day when the worth of wetlands was not clearly qnderstood by any body.

Florman understands the phe nomenon of nuclear Angst. When, some three months before the Three Mile Island disaster, he visited the Connecticut Yankee nuclear plant in :Haddam, Connecticut, he felt that Angst as he gazed at the pale blue glow of the nuclear pool. It seemed unearthly. He recognized his dread as irrational, but he understood the general hysteria that was to come in the wake of Three Mile Island. With people thinking as they do, he takes the need for providing for the dis posal of nuclear waste very seri ously. The apprehensions of ordi nary people, he says, must be factored into our nuclear decisions. Florman is for mixing boldness and caution in going ahead 'with nuclear proj ects, but he would take it as a polit ical blessing if fusion (a safe process) would come alop.g to make power from fission academic. Small Is Dubious in an Age of Mass Production When Florman encounters small ness in the shape of a canal barge, he delights in it. :aut the whole "small is beautiful" ~ovement, which produced a book by E. F. Schu702 THE FREEMAN November macher that sold a million copies, does not impress him. "Small is du bious," he says, for it results in such silly business as installing wind powered pumps in India where they have long seasons of windlessness.

The ironies that attend the "small is beautiful" craze are practically lim itless. Large technologies and small are inevitably intertwined. The backpack, for example, is what Flor man calls "the very essence of the counterculture lifestyle." Yet the backpack is made of aluminum and nylon, both of which require very large energy-intensive, mass-pro duction technologies. Even the bi cycle depends on large-scale mining and metallurgy. Florman pays his attention to reg ulation as practiced by the Federal Trade Commission. He discovers that it is over-legislation, not over-regu lation, that is the basic cause of the FTC's troubles. If our Congress were not so "over-Iawyered" and "under engineered," the regulatory agen cies would be provided with better rules. They would not be compelled to keep plastic pipe out of buildings in deference to the plumbers' unions, which prefer the more labor-inten sive cast-iron pipes.

Florman thinks the Club of Rome, which was started by Aurelio Pec cei, an Italian industrialist, to give quantitative expression to such things as population growth, min eral resources, food supply, pollution and poverty as they affect each other, is well-intentioned. The Club is looking for nothing less than a mathematical model for the whole world. As a beginning, its first pub lication, The Limits to Growth, was designed as a report to the Club, not as a statement of Club policy. Un fortunately, the statement of expo nential growth trends was taken as a slap at the very desirability of growth. The Third World countries considered this an affront. "How," so the Third World nations asked, "can you have the effrontery to talk about limiting growth while we are starv ing and impoverished, just planning to embark on some growth of our own?" The Third World's fears are well taken. Florman considers the publi cation of The Limits to Growth to be valuable in a negative way. "Peo ple," he says, "will indeed take ac tion, not only because of automatic factors such as price changes (whose effect the report has possibly under estimated), but because of reasoned programs resulting from forecasts such as the report itself."

In other words, exponential curves are never a proof of the inexorable. Population trends can be reversed or be made static; new metals can be substituted for old; plant geneticists can give us higher corn yields, and so on. There is even a possibility that the world will cease to spurn the professorial engineer.

1982 OTHER BOOKS 703 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE by Herbert Spencer Foreword by Eric Mack; Introduction by Albert Jay Nock (Liberty Classics, 7440 North Shadeland, Indianapolis, Indiana 46250) 518 pages - $13.00 cloth, $6.00 paperback Reviewed by Edmund A. Opitz IT was Albert Jay Nock who ac quainted me with Spencer's book on the State. Nock used to appear reg ularly in Paul Palmer's old Ameri can Mercury, and in 1938 devoted one of his columns to Man versus the State. This book, Nock averred, was the best single volume ever written to counter the New Deal ideology, and it said little for the perspicacity of the conservative and business op ponents of the welfare state, he added, that they had let this book go out of print. Shortly after reading this essay on Spencer I wandered into a little bookshop on Copley Squareled by the invisible hand, no doubt-and for one buck picked up a copy of the last American edition of Man versus the State published in 1916 by the house of Mitchell Kennerley in New York.

This edition was edited by Truxton Beale, and Mr. Beale's personal card was still in the book, which ap peared to be unread. Herbert Spencer wrote four essays for The Contemporary Review in 1884 and brought them out in book form the same year, aqding a Preface and a Postscript. A ~econd edition ap peared in 1892. ,Americans had to wait twenty-four ~ears for their own version, and a vastly expanded ver sion it was. Mr. Beale not only added five more Spencer essays to the orig inal four, but he had each essay in troduced by a distinguished public figure: William Howard Taft, Charles W. Eliot, Elihu Root, Henry Cabot Lodge, David JalYne Hill, Nicholas :Murray Butler, Judge E. H. Gary, Harlan F. Stone, and Augustus P. Gardner. This blue ribbon crowd contributed 72 pages of text, which might be regarded as a representa tive sampling of American opinion in the pre-WorldiWar I era: the pub lication of this book in 1916 attests to the nation's individualism and its dedication to political and economic liberty.

The American mind was radical ized during the two decades between the wars; the oHler ideas were not rebutted, they were simply ignored as a new set of ideas swirled around them. A novel (for America) ideol ogy was grafted into place during the thirties, and men like Nock were be coming superfluQus. It was of little i consequence that I read Nock's praise of Spencer, but it was of great mo~ent that the Mer cury essay was also read by James Gipson of Caxton Printers in Boise, 704 THE FREEMAN Idaho. Many years after the event Gipson told me that he wrote to Nock, whom he did not know but admired, to say that he'd never heard ofSpen cer's book but that ifit was all Nock said it was he'd publish it-if Nock would edit and write a Preface. Nock agreed, added two essays to the orig inal four, and the Caxton edition came off the presses in 1940. It got several reviews, an especially fine one from a well known literary man of the period, Benjamin De Cas seres, who reviewed for the Hearst chain. The review took a full tabloid size page and appeared in papers coast to coast. And the book sold un der two dozen copies the first year!

The same dismal sales record was repeated each year until 1944 when the Los Angeles Chamber of Com merce under Leonard Read bought a thousand copies and laid its mem bers under heavy persuasion to buy. The book sold moderately well dur ing the fifties and sixties and went out of print a few years ago. This handsome new Liberty Clas sics edition thus comes at an oppor tune time, and at a time when more and more minds are attuned to what Spencer has to say. The binding and paper are superb, and the price is friendly. This edition adds six Spen cer essays to the original four, re tains the Albert Jay Nock Introduc tion and has a helpful new Foreword by philosophy professor Eric Mack. There is also a full index, which ear lier editions lacked. Spencer championed a laissez faire society, where personal relations are free from feudal domination, where political power is not available to some to enrich themselves at the ex pense of others, where industry and trade enjoy fair competition and op erate within the controls of the mar ket. Spencer wants a society of equal freedom for all persons, and demon strates that the needs of a commer cial and industrial nation turn it away from war and colonialism, both of which he denounces fiercely.

Freedom and justice within nations lead to peace between nations, and conditions are established wherein individual virtues may flourish.. I am impressed by the earnestness and moral passion which suffuse these pages. Spencer had caught a vision of what might be in store for mankind if its potential were free to realize itself. With this part of his mind he was an optimist and a be liever in some sort of a planetary surge carrying mankind onward and upward. But he also had premoni tions of bad times coming, and late in life he foresaw a process of rebar barization looming just ahead. His forebodings have been amply real ized in our time, but his great truths still await their day. , the Freeman VOL. 32, NO. 12 • DECEMBER 1982 Beyond the Christmas Story Clarence B. Carson 707 Christ exemplifies the message of freedom. The Key to Success: Do Unto Others Raymond Mi. Burnham II 714 To achieve one's aims through service to others.