It makes no difference, of course, whose kid comes up to which parent to announce that he has no cavities. Close relations, in a rigorously over- competitive society, are an anachronism. Technological change destroys these bonds in further ways, fracturing the relationships and community by which an individual once defined himself. Encounters with other individuals are abrasive and unsought.

It is easy to produce examples of the very ways in which Americans attempt to minimize, circumvent, or deny the interdependence upon which all human societies are based. We seek a private house, a private means of transportation, a private garden, a private laundry, self-service stores, and do-it-yourself skills of every kind. An enormous technology seems to have set itself the task of making it unnecessary for one human being ever to ask anything of another in the course of going about his daily business. Even within the family Americans are unique in their feeling that each member should have a separate room, and even a separate telephone, television, and car, where economically possible. We seek more and more privacy, and feel more and more alienated and lonely when we get it. What accidental contacts we do have, furthermore, seem more intrusive, not only because they are unconnected with any familiar pattern of interdependence.

Our society has few common goals. "Our encounters with others tend increasingly to be competitive as a result of the search for privacy." Contacts with one another have so degenerated that, if they occur, they tend to be abrasive, and we meet our fellow being not to share and exchange but encounter him as an impediment or nuisance-"making the highway crowded when we are rushing somewhere, cluttering and littering the beach or park or wood, pushing in front of us at the supermarket, taking the last parking place, polluting our air and water, building a highway through our house, blocking our view."

And, because our contacts with our compatriots are so abrasive, we seek more apartness and join a vast competitive struggle to be unusual. We search for rarer and more expensive symbols by which we can announce our uniqueness. But, as Slater says, this quest to be individual is increasingly futile since individualism itself is to blame, producing a strangely disquieted uniformity of symbol-consumers.

Slater goes on to describe the escape into the suburbs and the do-it-yourself movement as attempts "to deny human interdependence and pursue unrealistic fancies of self-sufficiency."

His argument demolishes any notion that we possess a well-knit social fabric. His fears are much the same as Fromm's in Escape from Freedom. His solution to our dangerous discontents- calling for a reintegration of ourselves into a community-is remarkably similar. Slater criticizes our compulsive inability to confront important issues and chronic social problems. He notes wittily that our approach to transportation problems has had the effect of making it easier to travel to more and more places that have become less and less worth diriving to-that is, if one can afford the luxury of a private automobile.

Our solutions make a noticeable effort to avoid the problems they purportedly seek to solve. Americans, supposedly a very pragmatic people, naively continue to hope "that our transportation crisis will be solved by a bigger plane or a wider road, mental illness with a pill, poverty with a law, slums with a bulldozer, urban conflict with a gas, racism with a goodwill gesture."

Slater is harsh with our half-hearted attempts at solution:

The avoiding tendency lies at the very root of American character. This nation was settled and continuously repopulated by people who were not personally successful in confronting the social conditions of their mother country, but fled these conditions in the hope of a better life. This series of choices (reproduced in the westward movement) provided a complex selection process- repopulating America disproportionately with a certain kind of person.

FROM THIS follows Slater's description of a major rule in our lives-the Toilet Assumption. The Toilet Assumption is "the notion that unwanted matter, unwanted difficulties and obstacles will disappear if they are removed from our immediate field of vision." Our approach to social problems, he says, is to decrease their visibility. Thus, we see the populace angered at press and mass media for keeping unwanted difficulties in front of us.

The Toilet Assumption, however, frequently bogs down in jaded theories about Vietnam (napalm and saturation bombing, of course, are simply brutal forms of the Toilet Assumption), discussions about various forms of child-rearing, and theories of the generational combat between old culture and new culture. He unfairly sets up David Riesman (circa 1954) as an apologist for the demented individualism.

He discusses the oppression of women, noting the chauvinist ideas of Dr. Benjamin Spock. The suburban American woman, Slater says, is imprisoned in the emotional and intellectual poverty of the housewife's role.

The idea of imprisoning each woman alone in a small, self-contained, and architecturally isolating dwelling is a modern invention, dependent upon an advanced technology. In Moslem societies, for example, the wife may be a prisoner but she is at least not in solitary confinement. In our society the housewife may move about freely, but since she has nowhere to go and is not part of anything anyway her prison needs no walls.

ON THE STATUS of the suburban housewife, Slater is brilliant. When the society demands-and Dr. Spock declares-that the mother become the primary child-rearing instrument, her sexuality must be muted. The American housewife, Slater writes, has become thoroughly desexualized. In most societies, a woman does not become full-fledged sexual being until she is married. In America, the erotic standard is based upon mindless nymphets and (does the term betray the childlessness of our preoccupations?) glossy playmates.

"Stylistically, it is only young unmarried girls who are allowed to be entirely female," says Slater. "Their appearance is given strong sexual emphasis even before there is anything to emphasize, but as soon as they are married they are expected to mute their sexuality somewhat, and when they become mothers this neutralization is carried even further."