ABSTRACT
Vickers raises, as I suspect he intended, a great many issues that deserve more penetrating discussion than they have hitherto received or seemed likely to receive. It is characteristic of our times that we are too often unwilling—or unable—to go beyond the short view, or the simplistic answer, as we face the complex and interrelated problems of our technological post-industrial society. As a student of welfare policy and administration, I can only comment on some aspects of my problems, as I see them, in the light of his perceptive analysis. Therein lies the first overall lesson that I think is to be gleaned from Sir Geoffrey's paper. He makes it abundantly clear that one of our major disabilities in discussing the dysfunctions that haunt us is that we cannot—and do not try hard enough to overcome our disablement—perceive what we are not equipped to perceive. As he says in his paper:
The dead hand of the scientific past still lies heavy on the word "communication." The word still implies the sending of something complete in itself, which has only to be dropped into the appropriate receptor. The receiving is taken for granted. These implications are false and dangerous, leading to extravagant claims, supported by nothing but the breezy Zeitgeist of the McLuhan age. The limitations on communication are at the receiving end and will continue to be located there so long as communication serves any human purpose. And our capacities as receivers have not increased for several centuries. The overload of offered input does not increase by one iota what we can receive. It is more likely to reduce our receiving capacity. For it makes us grudge the time needed to comprehend the unfamiliar, whilst greatly increasing its volume; and by increasing our problem of selection, it makes this process even more random than it would otherwise be.
Realization of this limitation of our capacity to receive would begin to help us to work more effectively at the problems we now face in our urban industrial conurbations than we can hope to do in our present unrewarding ignorance. They are not truly—or at least not mainly—welfare problems. They are problems of perception. We are not, to put it quite simply, we are not "getting the messages" that are being freely, sometimes violently, sent to us from the ghettos, from the poor, from the young people of America.