subsidized by employers or the government. Would not they be just as likely to defer maintenance on energy equipment if they had to pay for it themselves or on the acquisition of fuel supplies? What applies to individuals applies to neighborhoods and communities even more so. Today more wealthy sections of town may have their electricity restored more quickly after a storm, just as their streets are repaired more rapidly and frequently, but there is a limit to the extent to which public utilities can discriminate in the services which they provide different localities, even when the units of comparison are different utilities servicing different areas. But wealthier communities could easily provide themselves with better decentralized energy sources supported by local funds just as they have historically provided themselves with better schools. NEED FOR SYNTHESIS OF CONFLICTING PATHS As this cursory sketch indicates, then, even if one grants most of the arguments made by proponents about the direct social consequences of choosing their favored paths, the value implications of these consequences are highly mixed and ambivalent. Both the hard and soft energy paths have mixed consequences for the maximization of both freedom and equality. However, despite the claims which proponents of different energy paths — especially of the soft path — make, there seems to be a growing consensus that societies, including our own, are not faced with an either/or choice, and that it is technically and economically possible to have a mixed energy strategy for the future which involves a variety of energy sources — coal and solar, nuclear power along with cogeneration and conservation and windmills. Without being in a position to argue the point on its factual merits, let us assume that this is so. If so, we are doubly fortunate. Not only is it true that the choice of either path would be ambiguous and multifaceted as far as its implications for values is concerned, but, if a clear choice is not necessary, we are in an even better position to achieve a mix of value outcomes. Two questions then arise: (1) Do we wish to achieve such a mix of value outcomes and is such a mix socially possible? (2) How do we achieve a desired set of outcomes? The answer to the first question is relatively simple; the answer to the second question, highly complex. There is in the literature of social science as in common assumption a tendency to regard societies as consistently manifesting particular behavioral and cultural traits, related logically and causally to particular values. But in fact societies — like individuals — seek to embody in their activities and lives different and often conflicting values (36). Just as we as individuals usually seek some measure of security and also of adventure in our lives, or may be generous to strangers and niggardly to those nearby (or vice versa) so societies often seek simultaneously both freedom and equality, or both stability and change. Despite the historical drift toward equality at the expense of freedom in many areas of social life, American society today (and other Western societies as well) necessarily continues to strive for some balance between these two values, a balance which will be attained not only as a result of popular political and social choices between freedom and equality but as a result of changing emphases on the different types of freedom and equality and of changing perceptions (whether valid or invalid) of which political, social and technological choices are conducive to particular embodiments of freedom and equality. Thus just
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