The European Dream by Jeremy Rifkin Read Free Book Online Page A

thin to withstand the media invasion. The penetration of MTV (Music Television), rock music, and Western lifestyles behind the iron curtain, via the new information and communication technologies, proved too much for a creaky governmental apparatus whose methods of governance were borrowed from technologies and organizational styles popular in the early twentieth century.
    The old centralized forms of governance—both in the Soviet Union and in the West—were modeled after Frederick Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management. Taylor, whom we touched on in chapter 4, was the first to introduce a rationalized, hierarchical command-and-control mechanism into American industry in the first decade of the twentieth century. His model was quickly taken up by governments around the world.
    Taylor argued that management should assume complete authority over how work is carried out on the factory floor and front office. He reasoned that if laborers retained some control over how their work was to be executed, they would conspire to work as little as necessary to perform the tasks assigned to them. Taylor’s organizational model depended on severing any independent judgment on the part of the workers and giving them exact orders along with precise instructions on how they were to perform their work.
    The work of every workman is fully planned out by the management at least one day in advance, and each man receives in most cases complete written instructions, describing in detail the task which he is to accomplish, as well as the means to be used in doing the work. . . . This task specifies not only what is to be done, but how it is to be done and the exact time allowed for doing it. . . . Scientific management consists very largely in preparing for and carrying out these tasks. 2
    Governments, like companies, relied on this kind of top-down bureaucratic model of governance for most of the twentieth century. In this schema, the ideas, feelings, and expertise of those delivering government services, as well as the affected citizenry, are largely ignored. The most efficient organization is deemed to be the one where the civil servants perform like soldiers and the citizenry are treated as passive recipients. The old form of rationalized command-and-control mirrored the machine mentality of the era. Both machines and men were thought of as passive instruments wound up by an outside prime mover and made to repeat simple actions over and over again. The rationalized model made little or no room for input from those executing the tasks or from those receiving the services. It was assumed that they had little value to contribute up the line of command.
    The introduction of intelligent information and communication machines with feedback loops changed the nature of technology and created new metaphors for rethinking the art of governance.
    The philosophical inspiration for the new technology revolution dates back to the early years of the twentieth century and the scientific writing of Alfred North Whitehead, the father of process philosophy. He was the first to eliminate the ancient wall separating space and time—being and becoming—and reduce all phenomena to pure activity. Before Whitehead, most philosophers believed that phenomena was divided into two realities: what something was and what it did. There was structure and function, the “being” of a thing and its “becoming.” Whitehead, one of the first modern philosophers to live during the transition to electricity, came to view behavior as pure process in which space and time melded together into a single extended field of pure activity. What something is, proclaimed Whitehead, can’t be differentiated from what it does. All phenomena represent continuous patterns of activity responding to changes in the patterns of activity around them. Because everything is in continuous flux, novelty is present at every instant. Whitehead believed that all living things are continuously