The present essay is the second in a series, of which the third and last will appear in next month’s COMMENTARY.
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Let us exaggerate. Conceive that the man-made environment is now out of human scale. Business, government, and real property have closed up all the space there is. There is no behavior unregulated by the firm or the police. Unless the entire economic machine is operating, it is impossible to produce and buy bread. Public speech quite disregards human facts. The university has become merely a training ground for technicians and applied anthropologists for the monopolies and the state. Sexuality is divorced from manly independence and achievement. The FBI has a file card of all the lies and truths about everybody. And so forth. If we sum up these imagined conditions, there would arise a formidable question: is it possible, being a human being, to exist? Is it possible, having a human nature, to grow up? There would be a kind of metaphysical crisis.
Or put it another way. These conditions are absurd, they don’t make sense. And yet millions, who to all appearances are human beings, behave as though they were the normal course of things. For instance, we encourage economic lunacy by watching TV; we gossip about the new cars, though they will make our cities unlivable; we answer impertinent questions of investigators about our friends; we attend conventions, listen to public spokesmen, and smile a lot and shake hands. A man is put into doubt about his own sanity. Do they have the right of it, that there is nothing absurd? Then what kind of animal is oneself? Automatically one begins to use their words and think their thoughts, although one knows that they are absurd. One feels depersonalized.
It then becomes necessary to stop short and make a choice: Either/Or. Either one drifts with their absurd system of ideas, believing that this is the human community. Or one dissents totally from their system of ideas and stands as a lonely human being. (But luckily one notices that others are in the same crisis and making the same choice.)
The picture is an exaggeration. In reality the American system is not inhuman but human-all-too-human. The tone of dependency, for instance, is not servile but, like the diet of hamburgers and malted milk, a regression to childhood. The Americans can make fun of themselves. The top managers and the president are not calculating monsters, but narrow and wilful human beings. Sympathy with suffering and the feeling for social justice are quite genuine in our country. Our temper is empirical and experimental. Although the official spokesmen and the mass media present an impenetrable front, the speakers are confused persons and quickly betray it under personal questioning. For all the foolishness we are bombarded with, Americans are not stupid; we have a saving sense, just like other people. And there are carelessly swept corners full of Long-Haired Professors, Beat Generations, Winos, and other assorted fry who are officially conceded to exist. This does not add up to a metaphysical crisis. It is not even hard to see the economic and psychological causes of many of the existing absurdities and to think up expedients. But the difficulties are arduous; to persist as a man does require unusual moral character, intellect, or animal spirits.
For many young people, however, the difficulties of growing up have been so great that they do think they are faced with the critical choice: Either/Or. They have this picture of themselves and of the world. And then unfortunately, whichever way they choose tends to create in fact the very metaphysical crisis that they have imagined. If they choose to conform to the organized system, reaping its rewards, they do so with a crash, working at it, marrying it, raising their standard of living, and feeling cynical about what they are doing. If they choose totally to dissent, they don’t work at changing the institutions as radical youth used to, but they stop washing their faces, take to drugs, and become punch-drunk or slap-happy. Either way they lose the objective changeable world. They have early resigned.
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When these disaffected find one another and form a sub-culture, they tend to see their choice, fraught with crisis, as a religious movement. One of the favorite spokesmen of the Beat Generation announces:
For the crucifix I speak out, for the Star of Israel I speak out, for the divinest man who ever lived who was a person (Bach) I speak out, for the sweet Mohammed I speak out, for Buddha I speak out, for Lao-tse and Chuang-tse I speak out, for D. T. Suzuki I speak out.
This is typical public speaking; like an address by Eisenhower it includes all voting creeds and betrays a similar lack of acquaintance. (The bother is that the speaker is in his late thirties and ought to know better.)
But let me at once give a similar strain of rhetoric of a seasoned public spokesman in the organized system itself. I quote from an address to the National Recreation Congress of 1957 by Dr. Paul Douglass. He is concerned with the terrifying Problem of Leisure, namely that with a shorter work week and automation many millions of adults might simply goof off and get into mischief.
The assimilation of leisure into the folkway tomorrow makes essential the reconstruction of the goals and values of life, the evolution of a new ethics, and the definition of an aesthetic suitable for the upreaching of taste, the deeper comprehension and enjoyment of beauty in its many forms, and a more meaningful existence.
Of course this is not serious. A “new ethics” would, presumably, be the work of an Isaiah or Ezekiel or at least Socrates. It would be convenient for us if someone’s lips were touched with fire and he got himself rejected by us and swept our children in his wake. It would solve other problems than our leisure time. (The Beat Spokesman, surprisingly, seemed to be satisfied with the ethics that we have inherited.) Mr. Douglass cannot mean what he says, yet he does mean something. Under what conditions do public spokesmen use this kind of language, asking for new ethics and a meaning for existence, when there are concrete tasks glaring in the face?
The conditions are disappointment in oneself, according to a lofty ethics, and resignation about doing anything. Not early resignation, but after the profound disappointment of experience. The buoyant abstractions, spoken as if miracles were for the asking, ward off pain and uneasy conscience when one is no longer going to try to do anything practical. (The crisis will occur “tomorrow.”) The tone, if not the content, fits the American style, optimistic about expedients. And the disappointment is more profound because the American promise was so bright. Achieving most of what we set out to get, it is surprising to find that it’s useless and worse. For after the century of progress, the folk who are wealthy and pretty healthy are not only not happy nor wise, but uneasy. Their own writers hold them in contempt. Foreigners keep saying that the atom bombs were dropped for no good reason. The beautiful American classlessness is freezing into statuses. People ask for a stop to immigration.
In the modern world, we Americans are the old inhabitants. We first had political freedom, high industrial production, an economy of abundance. Naturally we are the first to be disappointed. Europeans, aping and envying us, are like children.
Disappointed and resigned, adults do not see a future for their own children, for they do not know the way themselves. Immigrants of the first generation wanted their children to make good and have careers; immigrants of the third generation just “want their children to be happy.”
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This public spokesman, then, asks for new inspiration to give us a “more meaningful existence.” But other public spokesmen say that the juvenile delinquents get that way because they don’t attend the churches we have. One explanation of this contradiction, of course, is that we are human and have new problems, but the boys are hardly human and ought to be better socialized to the appropriate institutions, which, to be sure, are useless for us. This is not serious.
What is the actual religious plight of a young man growing up in our society? Let us discuss it theologically, though I am aware that this vocabulary is at present puzzling.
If a person asks, “How am I justified? what is the meaning of my life?” he will surely find no rational answer. The bother is that the question has arisen and begun to plague him. If the question arises, as an important question, something is wrong; he will feel unworthy and damned, and wasted. Historically, appeal has then been had to psychological techniques of revivalism or physical techniques of sacramental magic. (Dr. Douglass’s intellectual approach cannot work.)
But it is possible to avoid the imputation of being damned if the question, as that question, never gets to be asked—if the matter is mentioned, if at all, as a moment of reflection in an on-going process of life. This non-asking can happen in two ways. First, if certain life behavior is necessary, no questions are asked. (We shall return to this first alternative.) But secondly, if a man’s developing needs and purposes do indeed keep meeting with real opportunities and duties, no “final” questions are asked. As Rabbi Tarfon said, “You do not need to finish the task, and neither are you free to leave it off.” The opportunities need not be such as to satisfy a man and make him happy—that would be paradise; the duties must not be such that he must succeed in performing them—that would be inevitable hell; it is sufficient if there are simply possible ways for his activity and achievement, etc. The sense that life is going on, and the confidence that the world will support the next step of it, is called faith.
It is hard to grow up without faith. For then one is subject to these nagging unanswerable questions: Am I worthless? how can I prove myself? what chance is there for me? did I ever have a chance? (These will be recognized as “the questions of a juvenile delinquent to his soul.”) Children, if we observe them, seem normally to be abounding in simple faith. They rush headlong and there is ground underfoot. They ask for information and are told. They cry for something and get it or are refused, but they are not disregarded. They go exploring and see something interesting. It is the evil genius of our society to blight, more or less seriously, this faith of its young as they grow up; for it does not, for most, continue to provide enough worthwhile opportunities and relevant duties, and soon it ceases to take them seriously as existing.
Desperately, then, people may try to fill the void of worthlessness-and-abandonment by seeking money or status, or by busywork, or by self-proving exploits, both to silence critics and to silence own doubts.
They substitute role-playing, conforming, and belonging for the grace of meeting objective opportunity. But there is no justification in such “works,” for they are not really the man’s own works, nor God’s providence for him. As the theologians have said, real works are the natural products of faith taking its next step. Or alternately, people may spurn the false roles that are available and try for formless mystical experiences. This seems to be the aim of the Beat Generation, which is a kind of quietism plus stimulants. Or alternately, again, where the despair of abandonment is acute, they rush fatalistically to punishment, to have it over and be received back.
Finding a new ethics or aesthetics, as Dr. Douglass asks, will not put us in a state of grace. Existence is not given meaning by importing into it a revelation from outside. The meaning is there, in more closely contacting the actual situation, the only situation that there is, whatever it is. As our situation is, closely contacting it would surely result in trouble and perhaps in terrible social conflicts, terrible opportunities and duties, during which we might learn something, and at the end of which we might know something, even a new ethics. (It is in such conflicts that new ethics are discovered.) But it is just these conflicts that we do not observe happening. Everybody talks nice. At most there is some unruliness and dumb protest, and some withdrawal.
So urging the juveniles to go to church is not serious, for how will the church give them faith?
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Drawing on the Bible, the early Protestants made a profoundly happy connection between justification and a man’s calling or vocation in worldly society. Max Weber famously drew attention to this, in his book on the Protestant Ethic, as an explanation of the acceptance of ascetic self-righteous capitalist enterprise and the modern rationalized “specialized division of labor,” which he equated with callings. I think that he missed the simple meaning of the connection and has thereby taken sociologists off on a wrong track. (Modern sociology can hardly stand much poor theology since it has so little at all.)
In the Bible, there are two kinds of prescription about callings. First, the simple proverbial wisdom, “Modestly attend to your business and you’ll do all right.” Second, the apocalyptic gospel advice that a man should carry on in his station in a damned world for a few years till the Second Coming, because he would be lacking in faith to make long plans. But the point of the Protestant connection was that, in a religious community, the various occupations in fact justify by giving people the right ongoing activity. This idea was accompanied by a whole spectrum of radical and sometimes violent programs to make the community religious, from anarchies and communities of love to puritanical theocracies. (The philosophy of the kibbutz, in our times, is quite identical; there is no need for a particular “supernatural” sanction.)
Vocation is the way a man recognizes himself as belonging, or appoints himself, in the community life and work. Jespersen showed us how a child takes on the languages of the peer-groups that he chooses because they are his ideals as he grows up. So his occupations. A good community has, for the most part, positions and callings that facilitate a man’s activity and achievement. It is a world for him.
A man might have the vocation, know it, in various ways: by childhood and family traditions; through his chosen peers; by interest and aptitude; through a teacher who brings him out; by inspiration; or even by recognizing that a certain job must be done and responsibly accepting the necessity as his own, because it is his community and various jobs are equivalent to him (his real vocation is being a citizen). Sometimes the community does not offer the needed opportunity, but has to make a place for it when it is wrested by the man: this is the case of original creative persons who appoint themselves to an ideal new for the community, a vocation not provided by the community but that finally the community accepts. A good community tries to provide every youth with his right calling, understanding, however, that its providence is not Providence.
Vocation, therefore, is a solid means of finding one’s opportunities, things worthwhile, useful, and honorable to do, and be justified by. The religious point is that in a right vocation a man can work hard, as every man sometimes wants to do; can do it boldly and “lose” himself, because his community supports him; and he can thereby miraculously satisfy the stringent demands of conscience. Such a man is in a state of grace. On this interpretation, the “Protestant Ethic” is correct; and when our society now turns against it, it is admitting that it has lost a saving grace.
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This is a great loss. But even more terrible is that our society weakens the growing youth’s natural conviction that there is a Creation of the six days, a real world rather than a system of social rules that are indeed often arbitrary. Many things conspire to weaken this conviction.
The trouble occurs, for instance, when city life turns into Urbanism, and when the use of our machines becomes submerged in the Industrial System. An aeroplane and its engines are beautiful, but consider how the ancient dream of man to fly among the stars and go through clouds and look down on the lands and seas has degenerated in its realization to the socialized and apathetic behavior of passengers who hardly look out the windows. City life is one of the great human conditions, but in Urbanism no one gives birth, or is gravely ill, or dies. Seasons are only weather, for in the super-market there is no sequence of food and flowers. We have seen how just with the maturity of the Industrial System, children cease to learn mechanical aptitudes; and just when the sciences are supreme, average people lose their feeling of causality. And all different timbres of music come from one loudspeaker (an earnest musician, therefore, resignedly composes with the tapes).
But this same socialized weakening of the sense that there is a nature of things corrupts the social nature itself. For instance, in the newspapers you will rarely read the words envy, spite, generosity, service, embarrassment, confusion, recklessness, timidity, compassion, etc.—the actual motives of life. They might occur, typically, in little items of “human interest,” as if the doings of politicians and financiers happened otherwise. But the doings of financiers, etc. do happen otherwise, by rational accommodations in the system; there is little room for “motives” in “decision-making.” The question is, what is occurring with the social animals who are, with other hats, the agents of the rational accommodations? This fascinating question used to be the great realistic subject of Balzac, Zola, Dreiser. Then suddenly it came to be treated “weirdly” by Kafka and Musil; and then not at all.
The big stories of crime and divorce are treated in stereotypes of “passions,” as if people were characters in movies. But nature soon imitates art, and people imitate the stereotypes and produce further big stories.
So with the workaday occupations of people. There are standards and categories of employment, certificates, and union cards, that may have little relation to the concrete tasks and capacities required, but they do make it easier for the tabulators, and they more or less guarantee that the ones chosen to fill the Roles will not be the ones peculiarly able to do the jobs, and they will initiate nothing. The work is determined not by the nature of the job, but by the role, the status, the salary; and these are then what a man is. Typically, a man cannot accept a position at a lower status and salary, even though he may want that task and doesn’t care about money; it would give a wrong notion of him and jeopardize his whole career.
Or again: a well-known magazine asks a man how they should refer to him, as Psychologist X., as Author X.? He naively thinks about it seriously and suggests, man of letters, for that is what he is, in the 18th-century meaning. But they can’t buy that because the word does not exist in Time-style; he cannot be that, and neither can the old function of letters exist. But Time-style, alas, exists.
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An organization has “high standards” if its members have diplomas and “accreditation.” A piece of research is important if it is sponsored or carried out by an Institute with a Regents license. In such cases these organizations and enterprises can get substantial tax-dodge foundation grants and perhaps public money. But often this has no relation to reality whatever. e.g., can you imagine that a chap who at thirty-five would make a splendid leader of youth or adult recreation, experienced in life and having decided to serve in this field, could possibly have majored at twenty in Physical Education? The notion that colleges are the right sponsors for creative research is quite disastrous: it both corrupts the right function of the school, to teach, and it guarantees that the research will be incestuously staffed by academics. The cynical porkbarreling of these “projects” is a scandal; but the damage is not that the worthless make a good thing of it, but that those who have been absorbed in real nature and creative thought are the least likely to know the arts and have the connections to get any support at all. They cannot possibly be “safe”; how could they be? There is, of course, a real and hard question, how to find these people and give them means and encouragement? but that is the task, and not processing certified and affidavited applications. (In order to make good bets on the best leader and the inspired research, somebody has got to take the risk of making concrete untabulated judgments, and perhaps even using his legs. But it is the essence of the organized system to sit on its behind and take no risks, and let the tabulator do the work, and strengthen its own position by staffing itself, and then fostering the lie that outside of the system nothing exists.)
We are so out of touch with the real work in the field that, in America, a dean is superior to a professor and the board of trustees is superior to a faculty. The editor knows better than the author what should be in a book, and the publisher knows better than either. Naturally everything sounds alike. And top managers and generals map out the lines of basic research.
In the elementary schools, children are tested by yes-and-no and multiple-choice questions because these are convenient to tabulate; then there is complaint later that they do not know how to articulate their thoughts. Now Dr. Skinner of Harvard has invented us a machine that does away with the creative relation of pupil, teacher, and developing subject matter. It feeds the child questions “at his own pace” to teach him to add, read, write, and “other factual tasks,” so that the teacher can apply himself to teaching “the refinements of education, the social aspects of learning, the philosophy of it, and advance thinking.” But who, then, will watch the puzzlement on a child’s face and suddenly guess what it is that he really doesn’t understand, that has apparently nothing to do with the present problem, nor even the present subject matter? And who will notice the light in his eyes and seize the opportunity to spread glorious clarity over the whole range of knowledge, for instance the nature of succession and series, or what grammar really is: the moments that are worth years of ordinary teaching. I wonder how Dr. Skinner’s machine would compare in efficiency with the method of Socrates in the Meno? Dr. Skinner proposes to organize the collection of “facts” by big-idea lectures of the type of the New School for Social Research. This appallingly fails to understand that philosophy and science occur in scrutinizing the concrete.
But the worst effect of losing the created world is that a young man no longer knows that he is a creature, and so are his friends creatures. This has three fatal consequences. He feels that the social roles are entirely learned and artificial; he cannot begin to belong and play a part just being himself and following the promptings of nature and ordinary human associations. Conversely, his own creaturely feelings then seem to him to be private and freakish. Instead of being a source of strength, they become a cause of guilt and of feeling worthless and excluded. Most important of all, not being a creature, with its awe and humility, he does not dare to be open to the creator spirit, to become himself on occasion a creator. If, by exception, he does create something, he is conceited about it and contemptuous of the others, as if it were his; and conversely, he is gnawed by fear that he will lose the power, as if it were something he had. A society that so discourages its young has nothing to recommend it.
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Nor does our society foster the noble need of honor.
One striking characteristic of modern education is the unanimous disapproval of exploiting the powerful feeling of shame, the hot blush and wanting to sink into the ground out of sight. It is claimed that this injures personal dignity and either makes a child vengeful and not belonging, or breaks his spirit. Youth-workers with delinquents make a fetish of protecting self-esteem, as contrasted with the cops’ “You young punk!” Yet in ancient education, e.g., in the Socratic dialogues, this very arousal of shame is a chief device; the teacher greets the hot flush as a capital sign that the youth is educable, he has noble aims. Such a youth has dignity in his very shame.
The difference seems to be that we cannot offer available opportunities of honor, we do not have them; and therefore we must protect what shreds of dignity the youth has. Since he has no future, if we make him ashamed of his past and present, he is reduced to nothing. In other ages, the community had plenty of chances of honor, and to belong to the community itself was honor. (Let me make an analogy from psychotherapy: When a patient is schizoid, you give reassurance, protect the weak ego; when he is neurotic and can take care of himself, you attack the character-resistances.)
Boys today hardly aspire to immortal honor, the honor of self-fulfilling achievement. It is highly disapproved of in the code of the organized system. Instead, they devote themselves to protecting their “personal honor” against insults; and conversely they dream of the transient notoriety which will prove that they are “somebody,” which they doubt. The personal honor that they protect does not include truthfulness, honesty, public usefulness, integrity, independence, or virtues like that. A reputation for these things does not win respect, it has no publicity value; it’s believed to be phony anyway, and if it’s true, the person is hard to get along with. A British disaffected young man, an Angry Young Man, can make his protest by simply being a Cad, like Osborne’s George Dillon; but that would not much distinguish him on this side of the sea. A bad reputation naturally makes people prudent in their personal dealings, but it generally doesn’t do much harm in the press or on TV, even to a public official, for the plug is more important than the content of it. On the other hand, any official bad mark that gets on an IBM card, like being arrested and fingerprinted—no matter what the charge and even if he was exonerated of it—can be disastrous to a young man, for his name can thereby drop out of the system. Nobody, but nobody, may disesteem a man for something, or he may even get wished-for notoriety for something, that at the same time makes him unemployable. Just try to imagine nowadays the administrator of old-fashioned juvenile fiction who says, “Young man, I don’t care what Personnel reports, you have an honest face and we’ll give you a chance!” Rather, a good man will be asked to resign for the sake of Public Relations. And correspondingly, it is the case that suburban “good families” increasingly shun “bad families” that have had troubles, such as divorces, delinquency, or even death of a parent, for that makes the family untypical.
There is an organized system of reputations that is calculated statistically to minimize risk and eliminate the unsafe; likely it succeeds in this. It may make the enterprise as a whole less efficient, for it guarantees excluding the best, but be that as it may; the important thing is that there has ceased to be any relation whatever between “personal honor” and community or vocational service.
Conversely, the way in which our society does do honor to its indubitably great and serviceable men—say, Gandhi, Schweitzer, Einstein, Picasso, Buber—is a study in immunizing people against their virus; it would be a remarkable and melancholy subject for a sociologist. They are transformed into striking images and personalities and we assign to them the role of being great men. We pay respectful attention to their birthday sayings. They are the menagerie of Very Important People who exist only for ceremonial occasions and to sponsor funds and drives for enterprises in which they will have no further function.
This effectually prevents the two practical uses that we could make of them. We neither take seriously the simple, direct, and fearless souls that they invariably are, to model ourselves after them because they make more sense as human beings; nor do we have recourse to them please to help us when we have need for exceptional purity, magnanimity, profundity, or imagination, giving them a free hand on the assumption that their action is really better. Though we publicize the image, we do not behave as though we really believed that there were great men, a risky fact in the world. (e.g. Picasso is a Communist; Gandhi was a pacifist; so was Russell; Einstein sponsored the atomic bomb; Wright was arrogant and involved in sexual scandals; etc. Few great men could pass Personnel.)
Alternatively, we do not behave as if we believed that the affairs of our world were significant enough for the intervention of great men. For instance, no one would think of looking for sages to intervene in our racial troubles—that is not their “field of competence” (though we did have the sense to get some good sociology on the subject from Gunnar Myrdal). We would not officially ask a man of letters, as the British used Bernard Shaw, to criticize the penal system. When it comes to improving the high schools, we choose a well-licensed administrator, we would not try to persuade some extraordinary scholar or natural philosopher, a man who has actually learned something and therefore perhaps knows how it is done; naturally we came out with an excellent administrative report, but no ideas. John Dewey was called on, by passionately interested people, to make an impartial inquiry into the charges against Trotsky; that seems a reasonable use of a judicious and incorruptible man; but we do not much imitate it. But even when there is no doubt of the field of competence, as in beautifying our towns, we do not automatically call on the major artists of the world; for instance, we now lavishly praise Frank Lloyd Wright, but we never made any community use of him, though he longed for the chance and kept badgering the country with community projects.
But let us return to our average folk.
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Balked, not taken seriously, deprived of great objects and available opportunities, and in an atmosphere that does not encourage service, it is hard to have faith, to feel justified, to have a calling, or win honor. But what then fills the places of these? For every experience that a human being has is a whole way-of-being-in-the-world.
First, necessity gives justification. Having something that you must do, solves the problem of having something to do. Necessary behavior may or may not be honorable. To wrest subsistence is necessary and honorable. If a young man falls in love, a temporary psychosis, his entire day is under the iron rule of necessity, foolishly and honorably; he has something to do, if only to watch under a window. When the class struggle against exploitation was lively, it was something necessary and honorable to engage in. Indeed, it is a major defect of our present organized system and the economy of abundance that, without providing great goals, it has taken away some of the important real necessities, leaving people with nothing to do.
The void is soon filled. Behavior like going into debt on the instalment plan gives an artificial but then real necessity, something to do, paying up. This is the Rat Race, but I doubt that it would be run if people did not need its justifying necessity, for the commodities themselves are not that attractive. Young fellows drift into narcotics, and then find that they have something they must do all day, looking for a connection and a fix, and how to get the loot. Compulsive sex-hunting is something to do. By dividing into rival gangs, as Clausewitz pointed out long ago, it is possible to create a state of uncertainty of what the enemy is up to, that keeps you constantly on your toes. This is a condition, also, apt to raise the ante, for no matter how you have planned to stay within limits, you can never be sure that the others won’t take advantage. Many of the apparently pointless repeated risks that juveniles take, where there cannot be any kick left in the exploit itself, make a little sense when we learn that there is a competition: Carlos has stolen twenty-six cars, Pedro twenty-three, and each is driven by necessity not to be worsted, especially since the others come along for the rides. But Carlos has an unfair advantage because he was sent as a punishment to a “Vocational High School” where he took auto-mechanics.
When psychologists like Lindner speak of the aimless, unconcentrated, unsequential behavior of “psychopathic personalities,” I wonder whether they enough take into account that it requires a real object and an interest in it to make a good gestalt of experience and growth. To structure the behavior of long hours and weeks requires a goal that, from some point of view at least, is pretty worthwhile. Our society is not abounding in highly worthwhile goals available to average gifts and underprivileged attainments. Many goals that are busily and perseveringly pursued by some might reasonably seem not worth the trouble to others who have more animal spirits or plain sense. These really might have “nothing to do,” and their aimless and sensation-seeking killing time might indicate nothing but chronic boredom. Yet they will be judged psychopathic personalities. But once they have hit on a necessitous and important activity like finding their dose of heroin or stealing twenty-six joy-rides (in the teeth of two arrests), they become models of purposiveness and perseverance.
Such are the justifications and callings. The honor is to protect one’s “masculinity” and prove it by notoriety.
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II
Given this world that seems so closed and critical to them, let us roughly describe the behavior of various kinds of disaffected young folk.
I have been showing that there is one prevailing system of ideas according to which the organized society behaves in all kinds of cases: whether the Governor of New York asks what to do with unruly boys, or universities embark on basic scientific research, or the press defends fundamental freedoms, or a slum block is rebuilt, or a man works in a factory, or social scientists think about human nature. Lever House, a Ford factory, and the Air Force academy are built in the same “functional” style, for there is apparently only one function, Public Relations.
So imagine as a model of our society: an apparently closed room in which there is a large rat race as the dominant center of attention. And let us consider the human relations possible in such a place. This will give us a fair survey of what disturbed youth is indeed doing: some running that race, some disqualified from running and hanging around because there is nowhere else, some balking in the race, some attacking the machine, etc.
(1) Start with those running the race. Of these, the most interesting are the middle-status Organization Men of various kinds, for. they are aware that it is a rat race; their literature declares it. But they are afraid to jump off. Since they think it is a closed room, they think there is nowhere else to go. And in the room, if they jump off, they fear they will be among the disqualified, that is they will be Bums. But besides, they are afraid of the disqualified, to mix with them, and this keeps them running. This important point is generally overlooked, so let us explore it for a few paragraphs.
Sociologists of class structure seem to think that the values of the middle class are not only hard to achieve and maintain, which they are, but also that they are esteemed as good by the middle class themselves. This is evidently no longer true in a status-structure within a closed system, the literature is self-contemptuous. Many a junior executive would now sincerely, not romantically, praise and envy the disqualified poor: their uncompetitiveness, animality, shouting and fighting, not striving for empty rewards; but he is afraid of such things for himself because they are too disruptive of his own tightly scheduled structure. Further, the upper class and the middle class have ceased to produce any interesting culture, and the culture of the organization is phony. The underprivileged have produced at least Negro jazz; and the strongest advance-guard artists move less and less in upper- or middle-status circles, and if they do they are corrupted.
A persistent error of the sociologists has been to regard middle-class and working-class values as coordinate rival systems. Rather, they are related vertically: each is a defense against some threat of the other. There are only human values. The middle-class “values” are reaction-formations to inhibit in themselves some human values still available to simpler people. Therefore under stress of life or disillusion, such inhibitions may give way. They may give way to an ambivalent opposite, like becoming a bum; but they may also simply relax to ordinary nature and community, spontaneity, non-conformity, etc. Conversely, the working-class “values” are nothing but ignorance, resignation, and resentment of classless human values of enterprise and culture, at present available only to the middle class; and many a poor boy escapes his petty class attitudes and achieves something. In brief, it takes effort to make a middle-class obsessional, and it takes effort to make a poor boy stupid.
It is inevitable that in a closed status-structure middle-class values will become disesteemed, for they were rewarded by upward “betterment.” And more philosophically, all value requires an open system allowing for surprise, novelty, and growth. A closed system cannot make itself valuable, it must become routine, and devoted merely to self-perpetuation. (When a mandarin bureaucracy is valuable it is because of the vastness of the underlying population and the absence of communication: each mandarin individually embodies the emperor.)
So the rat race is run desperately by bright fellows who do not believe in it because they are afraid to stop.
(2) Not running in the race are the Disqualified. First let us distinguish the average Corner Boys (the term is Wm. F. Whyte’s, not to be confused with Wm. H. Whyte, Jr.) The underprivileged Corner Boys have strong natural advantages over the College Boys, such as more community, a less repressive animal training, and in some ways more resourcefulness. These things happily help to disqualify them from the rat race, but the question is why they do not lead to a more honorable and productive life in some other set-up. It is that they are in an apparently closed room; they are mesmerized by the symbols and culture of the rat race. They have seen their parents running it on the instalment plan and in the usual trade-union demands, and their own schooling has urged them to nothing else. So they are reduced to hanging around, getting, with luck, enough easy-going satisfaction to keep them content. Ultimately they will take factory jobs and couldn’t care less, and then find themselves trapped, like their parents.
(3) Indeed, the group in society that most believes in the rat race as a source of value are the other underprivileged, the ignorant and resentful boys who form the delinquent gangs. In our model, we can conceive of them as running a rat race of their own, but not on the official treads. Now what is the style of their race?
A. K. Cohen has pointed out, in his Delinquent Boys, that the content of the delinquent sub-culture has classically been a direct counteraction to the middle-class culture from which these juveniles are excluded, and toward which they are spiteful. But here again, in recent years the likeness of the organized system and the delinquent culture has become more striking to my mind than their differences. Morally, both groups are conformist, one-upping, and cynical to protect their “masculinity,” conceal their worthlessness, and denigrate the earnest boys. And they learn these things from one another. Madison Avenue and Hollywood provide the heroes for the juveniles. (A member of the Connecticut Parole Board urges this as a dandy thing.) Yet these post-Hemingway heroes have in turn been drawn from tough adolescents with cajones or misunderstood adolescents with wavy hair. It is hard to tell whether the jackets and hair-do’s, profitable for the garment industry and the drug stores, were invented in Cherry Grove or Harlem; the flash and style is from Cherry Grove and percolates down through the good haberdashers, etc., but the ego-ideals of the homosexual designers are the young toughs. Both groups aspire to the same publicity and glamor. There have now been numerous cases of criminal delinquent acts performed to get a picture in the paper, just as a young man on Madison Avenue may work hard for a year to get two plugs on TV. The delinquents, perforce, take short cuts to glamor. Do they teach the junior executives to take short cuts or is it the other way? Intermediate between the two groups, remember, is the integral whole of politics-and-rackets staffed from the families of both groups. (Much evidence of this is given in the issue of the Nation, “The Shame of New York.”) This is, then, a powerful defensive alliance of the organized system and the delinquents against the good boys who naively try to make something of themselves.
But in the alliance, the juvenile delinquents get the short end of the stick, for they esteem the rat race, though they do not get its rewards. Naturally, their esteem has the effect of making them still more contemptuous of their own backgrounds, and all the less able to get real satisfactions that are attainable. To put this another way: the $11 billions of teen-age junk that is bought annually in America is not bought by these boys, but the entire pressure of the organized system is to teach everybody that only these things are worthwhile, therefore these boys do not emulate their hard-working fathers, and they do steal cars. I have not heard that those who ask for a Congressional investigation of comic books have asked for a Congressional investigation of Life and Esquire.
Unless we keep in mind this context, what is the sense of the concern about the narcotics? Poor people who have neither future prospects nor lively present satisfactions will always gravitate to this kind of euphoria. A youth worker tells me that the “heroin, although probably physically harmless (except in overdose), prevents the full realization of the kid’s powers—the people of China stagnated.” Seriously, is the general concern for the realization of any of these kids’ powers, or is it fear that the habit will spread to the middle class? I do not mean that the Youth Workers are not concerned for the kids, for they are.
(4) In our model, there are some who used to run the rat race but have broken down and flunked out, and fallen into the dreaded and ambivalently wished-for status of Bums. (I know a young man who works on Madison Avenue who dreams of looking for his father in the municipal dormitory.) Take as typical the Winos who lead a quiet existence in their small fraternities. It is easy, on the more blighted streets of New York, to pan-handle forty-eight cents for Thunderbird, and a man drinking sweet stuff doesn’t get very hungry. Talking to Winos, one often gets the first impression of a wise philosophical resignation plus an informed and radical critique of society (e.g. Wobbly; it is startling to hear a twenty-five-year-old spout statistics of 1910). But soon succeeds irrational and impotent resentment, and one realizes that these men are living in a closed room.
(5) The Beat Generation, however, are more genuinely resigned. They have more or less rationally balked in the race, or have not had the heart to start it. They therefore have some perspective and available energy to get personal satisfactions and even worthwhile cultural goods. As we saw, they slip easily into the Disqualified and make something of poverty—more than the underprivileged do.
Yet the apparently closed room and the central fascination of the rat race are pervasive in Beat thinking too. They are not merely going their own way, as they claim; they also feel “out,” and therefore they do not use for their own purposes many parts of standard academic culture that are available to them, so their own products are doomed to be childish and parochial. And they betray their best selves by seeking for notoriety and by cynical job attitudes. Politically, their onslaughts on the Air-Conditioned Nightmare, as Henry Miller, their John the Baptist, called it, sound very like the griping of soldiers who do not intend to mutiny. Talcott Parsons has a theory that the middle-class boy, dominated by his mother and with a weak identification with his father, is driven to prove himself by delinquent hell-raising. (This is the so-called “middle-class delinquency” that, of course, rarely gets to courts or social-agencies and is therefore not counted in the statistics.) But I rather think that it is these Beats who best illustrate Parsons’ thesis: they have resigned the effort to cope with father at all, and they are pacific, artistic, and rather easygoing sexually.
(6) Some in the closed room direct more vigorous attacks against the machine itself and try to stop it. They are more reminiscent of old-fashioned radical youth who, however, were not fascinated by the model of the rat race but had other definite social ideals. If the energy and values that are available are restricted to those in the closed room, the machine is very tough. This seems to me to be the behavior and plight of the English Angry Young Men. Angry are not resigned but disappointed.
Young Americans are old hands at modern life and too sophisticated to be disappointed in their fathers or their country. But the English, of course, are seeing from the perspective of the Battle of Britain, which must have held out enormous promise. Certainly their tone is not “angry”—attacking an obstacle to destroy it or make it see sense—but waspish and bitter; and a favorite method of attack is not to demand some good but to behave like a “cad.” Yet perhaps these young English can be effective, they have strong advantages. The system they are attacking is, unlike ours, very unsettled—the Empire lost, the class system weakening. They are better educated than our young men, and therefore not so ready nor able to resign their culture and history. They seem to remember what it is to act like human beings, and therefore they are surprised and indignant when people fall short. (This is the point of the exemplary caddishness.) Not least, in their oddly undemonstrative way, they seem to have more sexual security.
(7) French “existentialist” youth, on the other hand, have inherited a long recent tradition of public treachery. The spirit of the Resistance is no longer much apparent, and one is astonished at the cynical motives that seem to be taken for granted in quite standard theater like Anouilh. The tactics of youthful protest is to fraternize with the North Africans; but these are not an out-caste group like our racial minorities, but haughty and conceited enemies engaged in war. Yet the tone of protest is not social justice, as among the young in England, but disdain and self-disdain. So our model seems to fit them like a glove: Huis-Clos, No Exit, as their official writer put it.
But one must not judge at a distance. Self-disdain is already a very lofty motive; and maybe their existentialist theory of a closed crisis is a maneuver to produce a crisis. (One must not teach the inventors of modern revolution how to be revolutionary.) Genet, their philosopher of delinquency, is probably the best writer in Europe—and nothing comes from nothing.
(8) Finally, everywhere in the closed room is the spirit of the hipster, jumping, playing every role. The closed room is a very busy yet very limited world; there is no open or surprising possibility in it. If anything really happened, there would be a catastrophic explosion. The hipster wards off surprise by being ahead of every game and frantically active. Norman Mailer quotes Caroline Bird as saying, “The hipster contents himself with a magical omnipotence never disproved because never tested.” This is a fairly psychotic state of mind, and the coolness of the hipster is a necessity in order not to “flip.”
The hipster desperately stabs for some real experience; but, as Mailer describes him, in any orgasm there is the craving for some better orgasm beyond. This unfortunate disappointment is inevitable if one controls the orgasm, but of course the hipster cannot afford to let go since he has no faith or support, for nothing exists, he thinks, but the rat race. Love too is a rat race. So alternately cool and jumping, and raising the ante, he swings with the rat race. Naturally this fantasy of “proving” pervades every other group in the closed room, the organization men, the juvenile delinquents, the existentialists, but also the Beats, for whom it is a crippling error. On the other hand, by all providing a hipster sub-culture for one another, they do increase the boundaries of their closed world.
Our historical situation is ironical to the point of sarcasm. There is every reason why young people growing up should be baffled and confused; and the subjective response to it is that every teen-ager in a pool room is hip and knows the score like an IBM tabulator or a social scientist.
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The model of the apparently closed room of the rat race is far from the old model of progress. But it is also essentially different from the model of the class struggle. Like the rat race, the class struggle had a dominant and an underprivileged group, but the class struggle was conceived as taking place in an open field of history, in which new values were continually emerging and the locus of “human value” changing: gradually “human values” would be residing in the next rising class and make it powerful against the old dominant class.
In the closed room, however, there is only one system of values, that of the rat race itself. This is shared by everybody in the room and held in contempt by everybody in the room. This does not give much motivation for a fundamental change, since there are no unambiguous motives to fight for and no uncontaminated means. It is remarkable in our society at present how rarely one hears, even delivered unctuously, the mention of some lofty purpose; one has to go to the Ethical Culture Society or the Reform rabbis. Correspondingly, the most important practical objectives astoundingly go by default, for instance disarmament. “Everybody” is for disarmament, but nobody believes anybody.
Suppose our State Department sent to Europe a thousand earnest missionaries to ask in every hamlet and on every street corner if the Americans will have unanimous and enthusiastic support if we unilaterally disarm at once, as soon as the survey is over. If the popular demand is irresistible, we then do disarm—on the assumption that no enemy can withstand the united sentiment of the world.
If such a proposal is made, the immediate response is: “Don’t be naive. The Russians will at once attack them and they will give in.”
The existence of the closed room of one pervasive system of cynical values is expressed by the prevalent proposition: “There is no use of a fundamental change, for the next regime will be like this one.” Then it is hard to grow up.
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