Henry Ford would build you a car in any color you wanted, so long as it was black. Now we buy white cars, 24 percent of us, or red -- or green, the year's hottest color rave. Blue is losing popularity, but purple and gold may be the next auto-color sensations.
In Henry Ford's day we worried about mass society. T.S. Eliot saw an ant-colony world in which a mass of alarm clocks simultaneously woke the sleepy masses, who, moving like clockwork figures, performed a synchronized mass ritual of putting on the tea kettle, washing and dressing and scurrying off to work. From "The Waste Land:"
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
How we dreaded the sanding-off of our square pegs to fit the round holes of mass society. Book titles of the '50s: "The Organization Man," "The Lonely Crowd," "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit." A song described suburbs where the houses were "little boxes . . . all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same." A slogan of the '60s struck back at the computer punch cards with which we paid our bills: "I am a human being; please do not bend, fold, staple, spindle or mutilate me."
The totalitarian societies and the Madison Avenue wizards understood that people were fungible units, easily herded. The sheep in George Orwell's dystopic novels could be made to bleat out love for Big Brother. Advertisers waving the magic wand of sex could sell soap or beer to the consumer sheep.
But now, with more people on the earth than ever, mass society is melting away. The totalitarian societies have mostly collapsed, and it's getting harder to mass-market beer, even with sex, as tipplers turn to home-brew and microbreweries.
One size fits all? Not much longer: In the world of virtual reality, your body measurements will be scanned into a computer, which will hand-tailor clothes to your size.
Small is beautiful. The mighty corporate empires like IBM and General Motors brought Americans the world's highest standard living. They pursued efficiency through large, hierarchical, centrally directed organizations. Now they pursue efficiency by "down-sizing" -- they dump workers and devolve to outside contractors functions that used to be handled in-house, from janitorial services to the sales force.
A few dinosaurs survive, but they no longer rule the planet. Pundits worry needlessly about the concentration of media power in the hands of a few tycoons, like Rupert Murdoch. The real media action is in the 14,000 specialized newsletters being published, and on the radio talk shows and the Internet computer links. The real media problem is that nobody controls this action. People can say any irresponsible thing they please, free of the discipline of truth squads or dollar hunters.
And some functions have devolved to me. When I began workinfor The Sun, I assumed that if I lived long enough to retire the company would pay me a pension. Well, so it will, but a big chunk of it will depend on my savings and investment management.
Increasingly, we are being freed from mass, bureaucratisociety. This is good if it makes me more self-reliant, bad if it makes me forget my civic obligations. But anyway, it is happening.
If "liberals" are progressive and "conservatives" are traditionalist, then we might expect liberals to be embracing the free-form future and conservatives to be clinging to the bureaucratic structures of the past.
Instead, big business (conservative?) liked Bill Clinton's (liberal?) health-care plan. It was big and bureaucratic and centralizing. Big business likes some of Labor Secretary Robert Reich's ideas about "industrial policy," too.
And the (conservative?) followers of Newt Gingrich demand (radical?) experiments with welfare and education reform.
Liberals seek mass solutions to social problems, in the interest of liberating each person's individuality. Conservatives would get government off our backs, but want everybody to conform to personal standards defined by the mass.
Advice for the liberals: Adapt or die!
Advice for conservatives: Don't throw out baby with bathwater.
D8 Hal Piper edits The Sun's Opinion * Commentary page.