The Lost Massey Lectures (11 page)

The most spectacular battle with American business-as-usual-and-more-so has been, of course, the belated movement for Negro emancipation. This has occurred, naturally, when the need to exploit field and unskilled labor has diminished and Negroes have joined the ranks of the simply excluded. Their refusal to be excluded has penetrated the moral obtuseness of some Americans, but the most far-reaching effect will be, in my opinion, the renewed political lesson, that people are taken seriously when they raise Cain and insist on managing in their own way. Any help given by government—it has been small—has been because of local pressure, threat of riot, and riot. And, at least in the South, the movement has given remarkable proof that decentralized grass-roots action, loosely co-ordinated, can exert political power.

The Negro movement is part of a tide of populist direct action rising throughout the nation. There are almost daily marches, boycotts, sit-ins, protest to the point of smashing chairs at City Council meetings, civil disobedience to the point of filling the jails. This populism is called lawless, but, as I shall argue in a later lecture, it is the alternative to anomie and crime. Most of the actions are not constructive, there is rarely a political program; but
they are necessary counter-actions to actions of the dominant system that are absurd, presumptuous, and finally intolerable. The protest against poisoning the milk with nuclear tests and boycott of the bomb-shelters were archetypal, and the mothers, high-school students, and famous scientists took to the streets, the principal's office, and the pages of
The New York Times
. So, neighborhoods rally en masse to stop high-handed Urban Renewal and Highway commissioners. Housewives picket super-markets because of inflationary prices. The League for Sexual Freedom parades with floats and dirty words. The hustlers and waifs of the Tenderloin in San Francisco organize for self-help and a voice in the local Economic Opportunity Council. Negroes march against a police outrage and end with a riot. Resentment at not being taken seriously by municipal social workers easily consolidates into organization à la Saul Alinsky. Students sit down around an Administration spokesman on foreign policy because he will not answer their questions. Seven hundred students are arrested in Berkeley because the college administration has lied to them. It is a ferment of populism occurring, under urban conditions, because finally there is no other way to exist. Naturally, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has proved that it is all a Communist plot. The serious question, to which I shall return later, is a different one: will this urban populism succeed in reviving democracy, or will it be manipulated like the Roman mob in the time of Caesar?

With a populist sounding-board behind them, finally, muck-raking intellectuals always sound more for real. Atomic scientists, Rachel Carson, or Ralph Nader write books, and there is a flurry of Congressional investigation. Ingenuous college students imagine that the social criticism that they read in paperbacks is supposed to lead to action as well as being entertainment.

The most portentous libertarian and populist counter-force is the youth movement, and I shall devote to it the remainder of this lecture, for it expresses with remarkable precision, point by point, the opposition to the over-centralized, interlocking, and empty society.

About half the Americans are under 26. Nearly 40% of the college age group go to college. Of the present collegians—there are now 6 million in 2,000 institutions—it is estimated that 5% are in some activity of the radical youth movement. This does not seem a great proportion, but it has increased at least tenfold in the last decade and it and the number of its alumni will certainly increase even more rapidly in the next years. More important, unlike the Negroes, the radical young are not only the middle-class collegians, graduate students, or graduates, but they are also disproportionately the best students and from the best schools. They are an economic force, looming large among the indispensable inheritors of the dominant power in society. And although—or perhaps because—they do not share a common ideology but rather a common sentiment and style, in showdown situations like the troubles in Berkeley they have shown a remarkable solidarity and a common detestation for the liberal Center, crossing even the apparent chasm between Extreme Right and Extreme Left.

A major reason for their solidarity and their increase is mass higher education itself. For most, this has little academic value, and one of the shared sentiments is resistance to being academically processed for the goals of the system; nevertheless, the colleges and universities are, in fact, many hundreds of physical and social communities of young people, with populations of a few thousand to 25,000, sharing a sub-culture, propagandizing one another, and learning to distrust anybody over 30. Such collections of youth are
a social phenomenon unique in history. Consider some details from San Francisco State College, where I was hired by the Associated Students last spring. With 15,000 students, the Associated Students have $300,000 annually in student dues, more than half of which is free and clear and which they use for untraditional purposes including organizing a tenants' organization, helping delinquents in a reformatory, running a tutorial program for Negro and Mexican children (with 300 collegian tutors), sponsoring a weekly television program, running an “experimental college” with twenty offbeat courses, and hiring their own professor. They apply on their own for grants from the Ford Foundation and the Poverty program!

Or consider the college press, with its fairly captive audience of several million, often daily. In a few cases, e.g. Harvard and Columbia, publication has gone off campus and is not under the tutelage of “faculty advisers.” Increasingly, the college papers subscribe to news services and print (and edit) national and international news, and they also use syndicated material, like Art Buchwald, Feiffer, Russell Baker. Occasionally, notably the Cornell
Sun
, the college paper is the chief daily of its town. More important, there is a national student press service that could be a powerfully effective liaison for mobilizing opinion on common issues. Last winter I wrote a fortnightly column on student matters for a tiny college in Vermont, which the enterprising editor at once syndicated to fifty other college papers. On this model there could spring up a system of direct support, and control, of the students' “own” authors, just as, of course, they now indirectly support them through magazines whose main circulation is collegiate.

Nor are these young people properly called “youth.” The exigencies of the American system have kept them in tutelage, doing lessons, till 23 and 24 years of age, years past when young
industrial workers used to walk union picket-lines or when farmers carried angry pitchforks, or soldiers are now drafted into the army. Another cause of their shared resentment is the foolish attempt to arrest their maturation and regulate their social, sexual, and political activity.

Unlike the suburban practice of making acquaintance by role, status, or caste, these young live a good deal by “interpersonal relations” and are unusually careless, in their friendships, about status or getting ahead. I do not mean by this that they are especially affectionate or compassionate—they are averagely so—but they have been soaked in modern psychology, group therapy, sensitivity training; and as a style they go in for direct confrontation and sometimes brutal frankness. Add to this the lack of embarrassment due to animally uninhibited childhood. They are the post-Freudian generation—their parents were analyzed from 1920-1940! The effect—for example, long sessions of mutual analysis or jabber about
LSD
trips—can be tiresome, but it is pretty fatal to suburban squeamishness, race and moral prejudice, and maintaining appearances. And still another cause of resentment at the colleges is the impersonality and distance of the teachers and the big classes that make dialogue impossible.

Middle-class privacy vanishes. An innovation of the Beats was the community use of one another's pads, and this spirit of sharing has persisted in off-campus university communities, which are very different from paternalistic dormitories or fraternity row. In big cities there are growing bohemian student neighborhoods, tending to be located in racially mixed sections; and such neighborhoods, with their own coffee-houses and headquarters for student political clubs, cannot be controlled by campus administration. In the famous insurrection of Berkeley, Telegraph Avenue could easily rally 3,000 students, ex-students, wives, and pals. The response of the administration of the University of California has
been, characteristically, to try to root up the neighborhood with Federally financed Urban Renewal!

The community meaning of the widespread use of hallucinogenic drugs is ambiguous. (Few students use addictives.) I have heard students hotly defend the drugs as a means of spiritual and political freedom, or hotly condemn them as a quietist opium of the people, or indifferently dismiss them as a matter of taste. But they do not operate like the chummy alcoholism of the fraternities, suburbs, and Washington; and, of course, being illegal and hard to procure, they tend to create conspiracy.

The
LSD
cult especially must be understood as part of a wave of religiosity that has included Zen, Christian and Jewish existentialism, a kind of psychoanalytic yoga, and the
Book of Changes
. We have seen that on the campus the young chaplain is often the center of action. Certainly the calculating rationalism of modern times is losing its self-evidence; and it is not the end of the world to go crazy temporarily.

The shagginess and chosen poverty of the student communities have nuances that are immensely important. We must remember that these are the young of the affluent society, used to a high standard of living and confident that, if and when they want, they can fit in and make good money. Having suffered little pressure of insecurity, they have little psychological need to climb; just as, coming from impeccably respectable homes, they feel no disgrace about sitting a few nights in jail. By confidence they are aristocrats—en masse. At the same time, the affluent standard of living which they have seen is pretty synthetic and very much of it useless and phony, and the poverty of the students is not degraded or insecure but decent, natural, and in many ways more comfortable than their parents' standard, especially if they can always corral obvious goodies like hi-fi equipment and motorcycles. Typically, they tour Europe on nothing, sleeping under bridges;
but if they get really hungry, they can drop in at American Express. Most of the major satisfactions of life, sex, paperback books, guitars, roaming, conversation, and activist politics, need cost little. Thus, they are the first generation in America selective of the standard of living; if this attitude became general, it would be a disaster for the expanding
GNP
. And there is an unmistakable tone of policy and defiance in their poverty and shagginess. They have been influenced by the Voluntary Poverty of the Beat movement, signifying withdrawal from the trap of the affluent economy. Finally, by acquaintance they experience the harsher tone of the involuntary poverty of the Negroes and Spanish Americans whose neighborhoods they visit and with whom they are friends.

The chief (conscious) drive of the radical young is their morality. As Mike Harrington has put it, “They drive you crazy with their morality,” since for it they disregard prudence and politics, and they mercilessly condemn legitimate casuistry as if it were utterly phony. When politically minded student leaders, like—sometimes—the Students for a Democratic Society, engage in “tactics” and the “art of the possible,” they swiftly lose influence, whereas indignation or a point of honor will rally the young in droves.

Partly this drive to morality is the natural ingenuousness of youth, freed of the role-playing and status-seeking of our society. As aristocrats, not driven by material or ulterior motives, they will budge for ideals or not at all. Partly their absolutism is a disgusted reaction to cynicism and the prevalent adult conviction that “nothing can be done, you can't fight City Hall, modern life is too complex.” But mostly, I think, it is the self-righteousness of an intelligent and innocent new generation in a world where my own generation is patently stupid and incompetent. They have been
brought up on a literature of devastating criticism that has gone unanswered because there is no answer.

The philosophical words are “authenticity” and “commitment,” from the existentialist vocabulary. And it cannot be denied that our dominant society is unusually inauthentic. Newspeak and double-talk are the
lingua franca
of administrators, politicians, advertisers, and mass media. These people are not even lying; rather, there is an unbridgeable chasm between the statements made for systemic reasons or the image of the corporation and what is intended and actually performed. I have seen mature graduate-students crack up in giggles of anxiety listening to the Secretary of State expound our foreign policy with his usual patient good humor; when I questioned them afterward, some said that he was like a mechanical man, others that he was demented. The trouble was that his personal aplomb was not related to his function and action; he was not engaged. And most campus blow-ups have been finally caused by administrators' animal inability to speak. The students have faithfully observed due process and manfully stated their case, but the administrators simply could not talk like human beings.

In principle, “commitment” proves authenticity. You must not merely talk but organize, collect money, burn your draft card, go South and be shot at, go to jail. And the young eagerly commit themselves. However, a lasting commitment is hard to achieve. There are a certain number of causes that are pretty authentic and warrant engaging in: give Negroes the vote, desegregate a hotel or bus, practice fair employment, commute Chessman's sentence to the gas chamber, abolish grading and get the
CIA
out of the university, get out of Vietnam, legalize marijuana and homosexuality, unionize the grape-pickers. But it is rarely the case that any particular authentic cause can really occupy the thought and energy of more than a few for more than a while. Students cool off and hop
from issue to issue. Then some become angry at the backsliders; others foolishly try to prove that civil liberties, for instance, are not so “important” as Negro civil rights, for instance, or that university reform is not so “important” as stopping the bombing of Hanoi. Others, disillusioned, sink into despair of human nature. And committed causes vanish from view at the June vacation, when the community disperses.