Peter Marris
Social Change and Reintegration
Abstract
Planning is concerned both with the im-
pact of social changes and their causes,
but lacks a theoretical framework that
integrate these two concerns. Hence, it
often seems caught between palliating the
hardships of change or protesting against
hardships it is powerless to affect. The
paper puts forward a way of thinking
about adaptation and change in terms of
the structuring of meaning. Social pro-
cesses can be understood as reproducing,
reinforcing or disrupting the structures of
meaning on which each of us depends to
make sense of our lives. Hierarchies of
power, by the way they distribute uncer-
tainty, influence the kinds of meanings
which different sorts of people are able to
sustain, and whose lives will be most
vulnerable to the loss of the attachments
and purposes about which we construct
meaning. When these structures of mean-
ing break down, we experience grief.
Grieving is essentially a painful process
of retrieving and reconstructing a sense
of meaning, which has its collective
counterparts. Social changes can provoke
a process of rejection and redefinition of
relationships, as people work through a
shared sense of loss. The concept of
meaning relates the unique experience of
each individual to the structure of social
relationships, as the way this experience is
publicly acknowledged, supported or
disparaged. Planning is essentially con-
cerned with this mediation between public
and private meanings.
54
Part of this discussion is adapted from an
University of California, Los Angeles
Introduction
Intellectual history has divided the study
of change and loss between two disjointed
can and sometimes incompatible traditions.
Personal adaptation to change - the
experience of grief, the stress of innova-
tion - is the subject matter of psycho-
logy. But the social causes of those
changes, and the way institutions mediate
their impact, are matters for sociology.
Sociologists have, for the most part,
mistrusted the intrusion of psychological
understanding as a threat to their theore-
tical autonomy, while psychologists,
preoccupied with individual differences in
adaptability or with clinical problems, have
rarely turned their own analytic methods
on the sources of stress. This theoretical
division largely explains why we have no
coherent theory of social change.
For planners working with communities,
trying to help them understand and res-
pond to social changes, the division is,I
think, particularly troubling. What is the
connection between the immediate ex-
penence of urban renewal, plant closures,
cutbacks in social services and the
characteristically remote, general
internationally diffused causes of
events? Planners cannot, even if
want to, organize communities into
revolutionary cells: but at the same time,
merely working to palliate the disruptive
effect of large scale change seems to ac-
cept too much, to deny that planners can
or should have any influence on the fac-
tors which shape the way places, people,
work and social life come to be put
together or torn apart. The way people
think about what is happening to them
and learn from it, not only represents their
own adaptation. In the long run, it rein-
forces or changes the way social relation-
ships are reproduced. But this connection,
whichI believe is crucial to the usefulness
of planning as a public endeavor, is
scarcely articulated in our traditions of
social thought or the education of
planners.
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earlier paper entitled &dquo;The Uprooting of
Meaning&dquo; published in Coehlo, G. and
Ahmed, P. eds. 1980 Uprooting and
Development. New York- Plenum Press.
In this paperI suggest, as bestI can m a
few pages, a way of thinking about both
personal and social aspects of change
which tnes to relate them within a single
framework of ideas, reintegrating psy-
chological and sociological understand-
ing. For thisI need a language which is
not the conventional jargon of either
field -
a set of mediating concepts
through which both social and
psychological concepts can be reinter-
preted. The most basic of those concepts
is meaning.
Three ideas are central to my argument.
Firstly, people depend on structures of
meaning to interpret, act intelligently in
and survive the events they encounter,
and the stability of these structures is
therefore crucial to them. Secondly, to
sustain a structure of meaning they must
be able both to generalize order, and to
sustain the relationships which generate
and embody that order - especially the
relationships which bind people to each
other in love and intimate mutual
dependence, and in which the meaning of
and now life seems most fundamentally to be in-
these vested. Thirdly, the ability to sustain a
they stable structure of meaning is very
unevenly distributed throughout society
and is characteristically competitive: the
hierarchy of power is reflected in the
distribution of uncertainty, by which the
more powerful displace the burden of
unpredictability onto the weaker. Later in
the paper,I give an example of the way
planning can contribute to this displace-
ment of uncertainty, when it becomes an
instrument of central government policy.

The competition for control over uncer-
tainty not only deprives some people of
the ability to sustain a strong sense of
meaning, and disrupts the meanings
others have striven for, but it establishes
patterns of ideological dominance which
make it impossible for them even to artic-
ulate these losses or acknowledge the
grief they suffer. The victims come to be
seen, and even to see themselves, as in-
competent this incompetence is then
regarded as the cause of their inability to
sustain a strong, autonomous structure
of meaning. To change this process of
victimization, therefore, the first step is
to see how the meaning of people’s lives
has been suppressed or disrupted, to
acknowledge the loss and the gnef it
causes, so that they can assert their right
to restore and sustain their own structures
of understanding and control - however
hard it may be to achieve this in practice.
Planning, though it has often contributed
to the reinforcement of dominant
ideologies, can,I believe, be an influential
means of counteracting these effects of
power. It can help people articulate and
assert their own meanings and it can help
resolve these meanings into a collective
strategy of action which imposes more
constraints upon the powerful.
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The Construction of Meaning
From the beginning of life, children act
upon their surroundings, discovering that
there are objects which stand in a regular
relationship to their wants and
movements. Babies soon find out that
they can make things happen. As they
grow up, they begin to identify, classify,
group and compare, evolving notions of
space, of speed, time, cause and effect,
of reversability and conservation. This pro-
gress has been studied most fully in the
work of Piaget and his collaborators. Ac-
tion and the co-ordination of actions
evolve into a perception of structure
which becomes increasingly logical,
abstract and generalizable; until m matu-
nty we may begin to articulate them as
theories or ideologies - systems of
thought which define reality in terms of its
possible transformations. Unless we were
able to structure reality in this way, we
could not grasp it at all. Our reality is what
we are able to take hold of - in infancy
literally, in maturity metaphysically: a set
of actual or potential operations, organiz-
ed by increasingly self-conscious prin-
ciples of logic. So by our interaction with
our surroundings, we give them form and
meaning, creating the intelligible,
generalizable regularities which enable us
to predict, manipulate and outwit the
dangers which beset us.
This construction of an operational frame-
work of comprehension has a paradoxical
quality. Its power to assimilate an enor-
mous variety of new events, none exactly
like another, depends upon its stability.
Our versatility, our ability to learn and
adapt rests on an underlying conser-
vatism, lose confidence in
since once we
our interpretive framework, we lose the
only frame of reference we have to make
sense of anything.
Mature structures of meaning are capable
of many transformations, by virtue of the
generalization and abstraction of their
operating principles; we can sustain their
continuity through complex manipulations
and between a variety of contexts. In part,
they can be represented as the common
knowledge into which the members of a
society are inducted by the language they
learn, the principles of classification and
causality they are taught - its science,
cosmology, ideology, the realization in a
particular culture of a universal, underlying
logic of transformations. But they also in
part elaborate and confirm a particular
personal history.
In his work on attachment and loss, John
Bowlby (1971, 1980) has discussed the
crucial importance of a baby’s attachment
to a nurturing figure for its psychic
development.I do not have space here to
review attachment theory, and its inter-
pretation in adult love and grief; but this
childhood attachment evidently predis-
poses us, when we grow up, to form
intimate ties to people - and by associa-
tion, perhaps, to places - whose value to
us is not generic but unique. That is, we
experience love or intimate friendship as a
relationship to a particular person who is
irreplaceable and for whom no substitute
is conceivable - not as a relationship to a
source of generalizable satisfactions. The
most important of these bonds are,
typically, to a sexual partner, a parent, a
child, or to intimate friends of the same
sex. Societies differ greatly in which they
customarily regard as most central. But it
seems that everywhere the search for
such bonds, and their protection once
formed, become the crucial organizing
purposes of most people’s lives. The
growing frequency of divorce does not
contradict this: divorce is experienced as
profound reorganization of the meaning of
one’s life, which can provoke grief as in-
tense as a bereavement.
55

For each of us, therefore, our sense of
reality is compounded of principles of
classification, causal generalizations,
beliefs and customs which we share with
most other members of our culture, but
which are organized around relationships
and purposes whose importance is uni-
que, and so generate unique experiences
and a unique pattern of life. As we grow,
we are more and moreable to choose and
control The interpretive
relationships.
structures of classification and explanation
we derive from exploring events and trying
out actions become the structures we im-
pose, eliminating possibilities. The social
relationships of our lives, the purposes
with which we identify, the skills we are
led to develop, and the relationships, pur-
poses and skills which then serially evolve
are discriminated from amongst many
possible choices. Each choice further
elaborates and defines the structure as a
whole, refining the possibilities of the
future. Each person’s understanding
of life is unique, because it derives from
experiences which no one else has exactly
shared.
The structure of meaning each of us
develops is, therefore, embedded in the
social and physical relationships which it
interprets and forms, and loses its opera-
tional value apart from them. Our adap-
tability, and so our confidence that we can
survive, is limited to the range of events
which our structure of meaning can inter-
pret. It is largely for this reason that slum
clearance and urban renewal have been
determinedly resisted, even when they
seem to offer material advantages.
56
Loss and Reintegration
The loss of any of the elements upon
which a structure of meaning depends -
the predictability or intelligibility of
events, the continuity of attachments, the
realizability of its central purposes, or the
compatibility of its principles of organiza-
tion - causes anxiety: and if the disrup-
tion seems irreparable, we experience
grief. The death of the person you most
love, the breakdown of a marnage, loss of
an apparently stable job, the disappoint-
ment of ambition may all undermine the
sense of life’s meaningfulness by robbing
the structure of a crucial integrating rela-
tionship. So, too, shared losses - of a
neighborhood through slum clearance, of
a way of life through colonization or
economic change - can overwhelm the
continuity of purpose and structure, leav-
ing people bewildered and demoralized.
The sense of meaning may also decay
without any readily identifiable loss of re-
lationship, through the emergence of con-
tradictions within the structure itself: as a
career unfolds, the latent incompatibilities
within its purposes become manifestly ir-
reconcilable ; or a society develops
flicts to which its institutional and
ideological structures cannot accom-
modate without radical transformation.
The characteristic symptoms of grief have
been studied in the work of John Bowlby
(1971, 1980), Colin Murray Parkes (1973),
Robert Weiss (1975), myself (1958, 1974),
and others. In Loss and Change (1974), I
interpret grief as a reaction to loss which
so not only expresses the despair and intense
anxiety of being without a viable structure
of meaning, but restlessly searches to
recover it. The process of grieving, if it is
successful, leads the bereaved to abstract
crucial attachments and purposes from
the irretrievably lost relationships and cir-
cumstances in which they were embodied,
so that they can be reintegrated with pre-
sent and possible future relationships. This
process involves an ambivalent interplay
of impulses, at once to cling to what has
been lost and to escape from the tragedy
of loss, which is compelling, painful,
and finally healing, as it drives the gnef-
stncken towards a reformulation of
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their purposes, attachments and sense
of the world which they expenence
as once again meaningful. In Loss and
ChangeI suggest that this process,
which appears most dramatically, per-
haps, in the gnef of bereavement, under-
lies all kinds of individual and collective
reactions to loss. I will not try to re-
produce that argument here. For the
present,I want to emphasize only one im-
plication of it: the recovery from loss is
not a process of substitution, by which a
lost object is given up and an equivalent
replacement accepted, but a process of
reformulation, by which the unique mean-
ing of what has been lost is retrieved and
consolidated in a new context. So, for in-
stance, if a widow remarries in hope of
finding a substitute for the husband she
has lost, she may never resolve her grief
and the marriage is likely to be unsuc-
cessful. But once she feels secure that the
meaning of her relationship to her dead
husband can survive his death - that the
purposes, ideals, feelings of love it
represents to her have not died with
con- him -then she can form a new relation-
ship with its own meaning. Similarly, if
people are forced to leave a home and a
community that they have grown to
love - perhaps because of a slum
clearance scheme, or to make way for a
motor way - rehousing them in
equivalent, or better accomodation, will
not save them from grief.

Unless we understand this, we nsk con-
tinually trying to solve the disruptions of
change and loss by substitutions, and the
nsk is all the greater in those situations
where we do not even recognize that peo-
ple have been bereaved. In public discus-
sion, we tend to treat a home, a
neighborhood, a group of colleagues as if
the generalizable need for shelter, work,
recognition were the meaningful struc-
tures, and their particular expression
merely instrumental. Even in our own
lives, we assume that actions which are
rational in terms of general principles of
career advancement will lead to structures
which are meaningful. Yet, though it may
indeed make sense to move house, take a
new position, we will have to undergo the
transformation of the emotional attach-
ments that must be given up. When those
for whom changes make sense are other
than those who must live with them, the
risk that these changes will be grieviously
disruptive is obviously much higher.
The nature of gneving shows that mean-
ing, as a structure which sustains life, is
vulnerable to the loss of any crucial rela-
tionship. Yet the ability to recover from a
crucial loss shows, too, that these at-
tachments can be transformed: the pnn-
ciples of abstraction and reformulation
operate at many different levels to ensure
the continuity of meaning. Planning con-
stantly involves this search for continuity
through transformation. The physical form
of the city, the networks of social relation-
ships and their economic base are con-
tinually evolving, decaying, being rebuilt.
Historic preservation, growth policies,
economic planning cannot usually arrest
these processes. But they can help to
adapt, reinterpret and reuse the crucial
forms which have given meaning to the
life of a community - its street patterns,
its aesthetic style, its public social life, its
skills. To understand planning in this
sense, we have to recognize that continui-
ty of meaning and attachment is vital to
us. The rationalism which has until recent-
ly dominated the profession of planning
tends to be insensitive to this.
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The Social Organization of Meaning
The dominant structure of thought, and
therefore of organization, in modern in-
dustrial society operates characteristically
by reducing content to undifferentiated
elements, which can then be recombined
to represent any complex actual events
according to the formal properties of the
relationships abstracted from it. Physical
science is only the most sophisticated
achievement in our pursuit of an in-
vulnerable ordering of reality. In every
aspect of experience - in economic and
political relationships, the psychology of
human behaviour, in social organiza-
tion - we look for the elements of a
generalizable system: a system that in the
end will merge with every other in a com-
pleted cosmology. So, unique ex-
penences - learning something, loving
someone, making something - are reduc-
ed to elements of the universal structure
from which they can be compounded.
The power of this mode of understanding
stems from the most fundamental prin-
ciples of human learning. But it does not
by itself create meaning, unless it is in-
formed by the bonding of purpose to
specific attachments. Whenever this
scientific method of understanding is ap-
plied in social action, it requires
substitutability: any event must be treated
as equivalent to any other event in its
class. The more scientific social interven-
tion seeks to be, the more it treats
behaviour and satisfactions as inter-
changeable. So, for instance, scientific
management tries to break work down in-
to discrete processes which can be ac-
complished indifferently by a class of
workers; rational administration concep-
tualizes relationships as a formal interac-
tion of roles, where people are
substitutable; comprehensive policy
analysis reduces actual choices to a
universal calculation of costs and benefits.
Even when this science recognizes that
people will not willingly be regimented as
undifferentiated units, its response is
simply to incorporate another
generalizable satisfaction, and mass-
produces &dquo;personalized&dquo; products,
management techniques, and
environments.
The prevalence of scientific rationality in
conceptions of social organization has
grown with industrial capitalism; and the
founders of modern sociology were all
preoccupied with its central paradox.
Marx, who could write lyrically of the pro-
ductivity and resourcefulness of
capitalism, saw it also as profoundly
alienating, reducing the meaning of labour
to an exchangeable commodity. Weber
traced the progress of rationality, as a
liberating understanding which ended by
imprisoning society in an &dquo;iron cage&dquo; of
bureaucratic control. Durkheim perceived
the division of labour as a potentially
anomic disintegration of collective moral
purpose (Giddens 1971 ). HereI am con-
cerned with the formal correspondence
between structural principles which
underlies this economic and political
evolution. The exploitation of science
generates forms of organization which,
like a factory, correspond to its conceptual
order, creating generalizable hierarchies of
relationship out of undifferentiated units.
These organizations, as they command
more resources, create the context in
which scientific enquiry is then further
divided and applied. Hence the concentra-
tions of power which derive from and ex-
ploit the possibilities of science create
a social order dominated by an operational
57
logic of differentiation, abstraction and ag-
gregation, incorporating within a more
and more inclusive framework elements
whose random variations cancel each
other out. The outcome is an ideology of
rational control where, to make fullest use
of its theoretical grasp, people must be in-
terchangeable within a universal order. If it
makes sense to close a factory here, open
another there, to shift resources from
region to region, nation to nation, human
labour must be substitutable from one
place to another. The workers must either
move or be replaced. If inflation or reces-
sion is to be regulated in accord with
monetary theory, people must be reduced
to units of consumption whose aggregate
behaviour can be predicted. If someone
has suffered a loss, then the solution is to
find a replacement. Any generalizable
system of operating to maximize benefits
presupposes that outcomes can be ex-
pressed in the sum of equivalent units -
of profit or economic growth or welfare.
This preoccupation with aggregate results
discounts the significance of personal at-
tachments. Our distress at changes is
blamed on our unadaptiveness, not on the
changes themselves. We ought to accept
whatever is more profitable, efficient or
productive, however it upsets our lives.
Grief is sickness; love of the familiar,
ignorance. We should retrain, relocate, re-
main flexible. Such an ideology of respon-
siveness to change is persuasive, because
it represents qualities which are valuable in
individual learning. But as a societal at-
titude, it implies that people should con-
tinually adapt to the logic of management
- that large-scale, aggregate problem
solving must always set the conditions
of any response. Such an ideology
clearly benefits the greatest concentra-
tions of economic and political power,
since to realize that power, to manage
successfully such huge and complex
enterprises, a systematic reduction of
reality to relatively simple, aggregable
elements is crucial.
58
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Correspondingly, the more sophisticated
the techniques and theones of manage-
ment, the wider becomes the possible
scope of concentrated control. In so far as
planning came to be understood as a
method for making rational decisions
about the allocation and use of resources
of reducing all factors to aggregations of
cost or efficiency in equivalent terms, it
reflected and contributed to this ideology.
I have argued that our sense of meaning is
the product of both a capacity to
generalize order and of unique, specific at-
tachments which endow order with pur-
pose. The progressive sophistication of
applied science has at once stimulated and
been adapted to forms of control which,
in extending generalizable principles of
order to every aspect of life, overwhelm a
crucial aspect of meaning in both thought
and action. It uproots people from the
context of their lives by its indifference to
the specific nature of attachment. Personal
relationships come to be understood
systematically as relationships of ex-
change, in which the need for sex, com-
panionship, nurturing or support become
objects of psychic barter. and as such,
their fulfillment would still leave us deeply
lonely. Their true nature remains un-
protected in the scheme of adaption. So,
paradoxically, the very power to unders-
tand and manipulate, which generates so
powerful an instrument of purpose, ends
by undermining the contexts within which
individual purposes are realizable.
In a celebrated essay, Truth, Love and
Social Change, Roland Warren (1971)
characterizes this tension between
the impersonal rationality of science
and the meaning embodied in our at-
tachments. Those who approach prob-
lems of social change m the spirit of
truth, he argues, seek to find and assert
the one, true, demonstrably rational solu-
tion ; those who follow the spirit of love
try, rather, to understand how each per-
son expenences the meaning of their lives,
and help them realize it. The interplay bet-
ween these modes of thought is crucial to
the usefulness of our understanding. In
our personal lives they are balanced by the
intensity of our attachments, on the one
hand, and our anxiety, on the other, not
to fail through ignorance or misinterpreta-
tion of our situation. But m the collective
expression of social understanding, there
is no equivalent balance, because -
except in times of extreme social crisis,
when collective needs overwhelm personal
affairs - the purposes which underly col-
lective action remain largely pnvate. In
practice, therefore, the form of collective
understanding comes inevitably to reflect
the purposes and attachments of those
who have most influence over the produc-
tion of ideas, even though that understan-
ding is presented as if it were impartial (as
those who produce it may sincerely
believe it to be)
The Distribution of Uncertainty
Let me turn now to another aspect of the
collective organization of meaning, which
makes this ideology of scientific positivism
so dangerous. I have tried to show how
our ability to sustain the meaning of our
lives depends on the continuity of relation-
ships. There are essentially two ways
to secure that continuity-one is to
organize relationships at a level of abstrac-
tion and generalizability which is so com-
prehensive, the chances of encountering
events which cannot be interpreted and
adapted to is minimized; the other is to
control relationships, so that they must
conform to expectations. These strategies
are interdependent - understanding often
leads to control - but the second, unlike
the first, is socially competitive. The more
powerful people and institutions control
relationships at the expense of the
weaker, for whom the circumstances of
life become less predictable. This fun-
damental principle of organization tends to
reproduce a self reinforcing hierarchy of
autonomy, through which the least for-
tunate are mentally and emotionally as
well as matenally impoverished.
Let me illustrate this principle through the
example of a neighborhood of Coventry,
where the Coventry Community Develop-
ment Project worked for five years: the
analysisI summanze here is derived largely
from the Project’s final report (1975).
Coventry is a manufacturing city
economically dominated by a few large
firms. As is characteristic of most patterns
of manufacture, the largest firms contract
out work to smaller ones, who are depend-
ent on them. These smaller firms act as a
buffer, protecting the large firms from the
consequences of economic fluctuations:
the amount of work contracted out can be
varied according to circumstances, with-
out disrupting the larger company. The
burden of adjusting to uncertainty falls on
the smaller firms. Correspondingly, these
small firms pass on this burden to their
work force, protecting themselves against
the unpredictability of demand by offering
the least security to their employees.
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A similar hierarchy operates within the
work force: the lowest paid, least skilled
workers, and the most recently hired, are
likely to enjoy the least security of employ-
ment. In the neighborhood of Coventry
with which the Community Development
Project was concerned, there was both a
concentration of people in these relatively
insecure jobs, and of people working for
small firms.
But this was not only kind of insecun-
the
ty to which the people of the neighbor-
hood were exposed. Soon after the war,
the area was designated for comprehen-
sive redevelopment. Twenty-five years
later, these plans were far from com-
pleted : some of the old housing was still
in use, awaiting its indeterminate demoli-
tion ; some was boarded up, but not pulled
down; some streets had been cleared, but
nothing built; and here and there, some
new blocks of flats stood out amongst the
surrounding decay. The physical surround-
ings in which people lived were as full of
unresolved uncertainties as their economic
circumstances. Here again, the burden of
uncertainty had been displaced down a
hierarchy of control. National government,
in its attempt to regulate the economy as
a whole, manipulates public expenditures
to secure its policies - and in doing so,
displaces onto departments of state and
local government the burden of adjusting
to these changes. Local government, in
turn, looks for the adjustments which will
be least disruptive - politically or
organizationally. Housing programs are
particularly vulnerable, because they are
relatively easy to postpone or revive, and
provide immediate savings in expenditure.
Yet from the point of view of those who
have been living for years in deteriorating
housing, under constant notice that they
can expect to be rehoused within a few
months, or a year or two - and so their
present homes are not worth repair - this
cumulative uncertainty is profoundly
demoralizing.
What is more, uncertainty over the pro-
gress of the development plan came in
time to be overlaid by a question whether
the plan should be carried out at all. As
the centre of Coventry expanded, land in
this neighborhood began to attract notice
as possible sites for centre city needs -
nng roads, industry, hostels for students
and inner city workers. This represents
another kind of insecurity to which the
poorest people are characteristically ex-
posed. The land they live on is being held
by its owners for its potential rather than
its present value, and therefore no invest-
ment will be made in its present use,
which might pre-empt its future exploita-
tion in some more profitable way.
The pattern of relationships, through
which uncertainties are manipulated and
displaced, is of course variable: for in-
stance in Europe, guest workers, and in
the United States illegal immigrants are
charactenstically employed as a variable
workforce to whom no commitment of
security need be made, who thus absorb
the fluctuations of economic demand. The
kinds of public expenditures used to
regulate economic cycles vary from coun-
try to country. But the general principle is,
I believe, the same: the more powerful
groups and institutions will tend to in-
crease the reliability of their control over
the future by securing commitments from
others, without subjecting themselves to
equivalent, reciprocal constraint. The
simplest instance is a hierarchy of com-
mand, where the junior ranks are commit-
ted to obey orders, without any right to
know what those orders will be. But it is
represented again and again, more subtly
and insidiously, in the ordering of govern-
ment, in the organization of work, in the
economy of households and patterns of
family life.
It follows that those who have least power
also have least assurance that they can
pursue purposes of their own: the mean-
ing of their lives is constrained by their in-
ability to command the future or even to
59

know what it will be. This constraint is
characteristically perceived by those who
rule over them as a cultural failing or
tempermental incompetence, which is
then used to justify their inferiority. So,
for instance, Colonial officials used to
believe, quite sincerely, that Afncans were
&dquo;like children,&dquo; too immature to govern
themselves; social welfare reformers
believed in the 1960s that poor people
could not &dquo;defer gratification&dquo; or plan
ahead, and perpetuated their own misfor-
tunes by a culture of poverty; and patnar-
chal men still believe that women are too
fickle-minded and emotionally unstable to
exercise responsibility.
Inequalities of power impose, therefore,
three injuries on the weak: they are more
exposed to loss; to protect themselves
against intolerable stress and grief, they
are forced to limit the scope of their pur-
poses, even of their attachments, im-
poverishing the meaning of their lives; and
they are then despised for their cultural in-
feriority and lack of planning by those
who have displaced upon them the burden
of so much uncertainty.
The greater the concentration of power,
the more people may be exposed to these
kinds of injury. The progressive im-
poverishment of the majority, which Marx
foresaw, as economic power grew more
and more concentrated in capitalist
societies, isI suggest becoming evident as
a psychological rather than material
deprivation - a sense of being controlled
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by remote, disembodied forces with enor-
mous powers to disrupt our lives, and to
which we are urged to adapt as a matter
of economic necessity, with less and less
assurance of stability This concentration
of economic being accompanied
power is
by a corresponding concentration of con-
trol over the production of ideas and infor-
mation. Increasingly, a few huge con-
glomerates own the production and
distribution of films, news, television pro-
grammes and all kinds of books, while the
sophisticated new systems of information
retrieval being developed are, almost
everywhere, being designed and installed
to serve the needs of large corporations,
with little regard for public access to
them. The public sources of our social
understanding are coming under more and
more homogenized control; and that kind
of control tends not so much to censor
ideas, as to submit them to the same prin-
ciples of packaging, marketing and
economies of scale as obtains in the pro-
duction of anything else.
Conclusion
I have tned to suggest how the prevailing
ideologicalstructure of society, its
economic and governmental structures,
and the meaning of life for each of us, as
members of society, are inter-related. The
kind of sense we can make of our lives -
the breadth of our attachments, the
far-sightedness and continuity of our pur-
poses, the confidence of our social
understanding - depends on the predict-
ability of our circumstances. No one can
be certain of the future, but he or she can
hope to foresee the possibilities, and
prepare to meet them, so as to take care
of the relationships and purposes which
give their lives meaning. But in the social
competition to achieve this security, the
burden of uncertainty comes to be very
unequally distributed. Despite the
emergence of democratic political and
social nghts, this distribution is m some
ways as unequal as at any time in human
history, because the development of
science has made possible extremely
sophisticated systems of control, capable
of handling information in quantities and
at a speed beyond the reach of human
brains. Degrees of concentration are now
possible which, in earlier ages, would have
collapsed from the over extension of their
channels of information and command.
These concentrations of power therefore
have an extraordinary ability to disrupt
social relationships, as they manipulate
their vast resources to make the best of
their circumstances. At the same time,
they have acquired a correspondingly con-
centrated control over the production of
information and ideas, which gives them
great influence over the prevailing
understanding of social issues. Social
disruption tends, therefore, to be seen as
the inevitable consequence of progress -
where progress is defined as the continual
rationalization and concentration of
economic resources in the interests of in-
creased production - and inability to
adapt to it successfully is personal failure
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