Pitkin (standard:other, 986 words)
Author: GXD	Added: Aug 08 2007	Views/Reads: 3396/2167	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
The view from last century -- has anything really changed?

THE PROPHECIES OF PITKIN 

Walter Boughten Pitkin (1878 to 1953) was a Professor of Journalism at
Columbia University when he wrote most of his books.  Among other 
achievements, he was Associate Editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. 

Pitkin's capacity for prophecy has gone unnoticed, and might well be
examined closely.  A few examples here suffice to illustrate the value 
in a study of Pitkin's work. 

In "The Twilight of the American Mind" (August, 1928), he states: 

"....by 1975, fully nine-tenths of the superior brains of America will
own or otherwise control about nine-tenths of the continent, its cash 
and its credit, its governments and their institutions, its lands and 
all the factories thereon.....The present type of politician who now 
infests the halls of Congress with his brass cuspidors and his ivory 
dome will have been driven into the backwoods.....and the present super 
salesman and high-power executive will have gone the way of the gorilla 
and the ass.....Some quiet spinster with a world radio telephone at her 
elbow and an automatic statistical computer in her office will handle 
more big business in a morning hour than such gentlemen get through in 
a week of golf and highballs at their country club." 

Is Pitkin writing satire? 

He compares two theses: 

1. It should be the first aim of enlightened statesmen ... to enlarge
and multiply opportunities for superior people ... 

2. Give as much work as possible to machines and to systems.  Give as
little as possible to men.  Never give to any man work, which another 
man of less ability can do equally well, so far as the finished product 
is concerned. 

These diametric opposites, according to Pitkin, will have a profound
effect on our society well into the turn of next century.  He laments: 

"Our culture is fatally at odds with our economic system.  And so, too,
are most of our professions.  Our colleges and our technical schools 
are training men and women toward one goal while our industrialists and 
business men are organizing society toward an opposite goal. 

"Intellectual evolution ... will not be in the direction of higher
individual minds, but rather in the direction of a wider variety and 
better quality of specialized personalities.  As a matter of both 
natural and artificial selection ... it is certainly the trend of our 
own epoch. 

"By 1975, the geographical unit of operation in most businesses,
professions and welfare work will be the county, if not a larger area. 
Highways and automobiles will bring the remotest fringes of the typical 
county within forty-five minutes of a centrally located county seat and 
within five or ten minutes of any sort of service station, be it 
service for gasoline, or antitoxin, or a Red Cross nurse.  Every house 
and store will be linked by telephone with every other one in the 
entire United States, as is almost the case right now.  There will be 
county ambulance and fire service, county first aid, county quarantine 
service, and so on -- just as there is today in the more progressive 
districts.  I am fully prepared to see cheap airplanes and better radio 
facilities......" 

Pitkin was so furious with lawyers, he couldn't keep a civil tongue in
his pen: 

"Immersed in the petty but necessary details of court routine, research
in the interests of clients and the arduous task of finding new 
business, they lack time to purge the body of the law of its lice and 
leprosy.*  And, alas, most of them also lack intelligence and 
initiative.  For to clean both our law books and our courts and the 
legal profession of their poisonous blend of nonsense and vice, the 
world needs a genius in whom are combined the passion of Savonarola, 
the ruthlessness of Mussolini, and the legal intelligence of Charles 
Evans Hughes.  Savonarola for moral fervor; Mussolini for a mass murder 


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