Paul Goodman Archive
Written: 1960.
Source: Text from RevoltLib.com.
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
Let us exaggerate the conditions that we have been describing. 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. There is a rigid caste system in which every one has a slot and the upper group stands for nothing culturally. The university has become merely a training ground for technicians and applied-anthropologists. 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 important ways 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 ignorant and willful human beings. Sympathy with suffering and the feeling for social justice are quite genuine in our country. We are 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, the Americans are not stupid; we have a saving sense built in, just like other peoples. 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 that 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.
When these disaffected find one another and form a subculture, 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 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 as we shall see, this formless ultimate experience is not irrelevant to the plight of being resigned, for there is no available world to give experience a form.
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 esthetic 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.
(As an artist I find this kind of public speech vaguely insulting. Do we need an esthetic? I cannot cope with the artistic tradition that we have, especially its modern triumphs, so that my own work is both unclassical and dated recording to standards right on my bookshelf. Does Dr. Douglass mean a popular esthetic? Is it news to him that the popular taste is systematically debauched by Hollywood, Broadway, Madison Avenue? that by the unanimity of publishers, producers, and broadcasters, aided by the censorship, it is almost impossible to get an honest or vivid word to the public? and that if something slips by it is swamped by trash and singled out for neglect by ignorant critics?)
D., 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, we are surprised 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 or wise, but they are 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, when they ape and envy 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; in the third generation they just “want their children to be happy.”
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. 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' 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 ongoing 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 hell; it is sufficient if there are simply possible ways for his activity and achievement, so that he knows the world is a world for him, if he is earnest. This condition of meeting the world is called being in a state of grace. In such a case the questions that are really asked are practical and specific to the task in hand. The question, “How am I justified? what is the meaning of my life?” is answered by naming the enterprise that one is engaged in, and by the fact that it is going on. As Kafka said, “The fact of our living is in itself inexhaustible in its proof of faith.”
(By analogy, if a young couple has had good sex without external or internal interruptions, they don’t feel guilty and are fortified against adult criticism. The behavior justifies itself. But if the sex has worked out badly, they are disappointed, resentful of one another, and vulnerable to being made guilty by the others.)
The sense that life is going on and the confidence that the world will continue to 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 “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 disastrously, this faith of its young as they grow up; for our society does not, for most, continue to provide enough worth-while 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 busy work, 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 brotherhood of Quietism plus stimulants. Or alternately, again, where the despair of abandonment is acute, as with many juveniles, they rush fatalistically to punishment, to have it over with and be received back.
Finding a new ethics or esthetics, 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 plenty of 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; for 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? What opportunity will it open?
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 calling. 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 the 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 congregational churches, to puritanical theocracies. (A modern enterprise with the identical philosophy is the Zionist kibbutz. There is no need of a particular “supernatural” sanction.)
Vocation is the way a man recognizes himself as belonging, or appoints himself, in the community life and work. We saw, in Jespersen, 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 may be equivalent to him (his real vocation is being a citizen). A man may do a job because he can, noblesse oblige. 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 worth while, useful, and honorable to do and be justified by. As such, vocations are neither traditional nor rationalistic in some system, but whatever happens to be the ongoing work of the particular community of human interests. The religious point is that a man can work hard, as every man 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.
I don’t know if this is what Luther had in mind when he spoke of “callings”; presumably he was referring mainly to farmers and guild craftsmen, who did have a community in their unquestionable callings, and the knights who were essential in the world as he saw it. Such callings are earnest; I fail to see why they should be ascetic, self-denying or self-abasing, though hopefully they are self-transcending. But by the time (1905) that Max Weber came to write, the notion of a human-centered community had so faded into the modern system of alienated production and distribution that he could think of calling only as an imposed discipline, more mild in the “traditional” Luther, more severe in the “rationalistic” Calvin. The irony is that in our decades, the combination of rationalism, asceticism, and individualism (the so-called Protestant Ethic) has produced precisely the system of boondoggling, luxury-consumption, and statuses (and rejection of the Protestant Ethic)!
To give up the religious community of work is a great loss. But even more terrible is that our society weakens the growing youth’s conviction that there is a Creation of the Six Days, a real world rather than a system of social rules that indeed are 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 is submerged in the Industrial System.
Airplanes and their 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 Supermarket 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. When the sciences are supreme, average people lose their feeling of causality. And all different timbres of music come from one loud-speaker (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 making decisions. 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. Later 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 task but by the role, the rules, the status and salary; and these are, then, what a man is. Typically, a man can’t accept a position at a lower salary and status, even though he may want that task and doesn’t care about money; it would give an altogether 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 suggests man of letters, for that is what he is, in the eighteenth-century meaning. But they can’t buy that because the word does not exist in Time-style; he cannot be that, and presumably the old function of letters cannot exist. But Time-style, alas, exists.
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 these licenses have 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? Freud pointed out long ago, in his Problem of Lay-Analysis, that it is extremely unlikely that a young man who would throw the best years of his life into the cloistered drudgery of getting an M.D. degree, could possibly make a good psychoanalyst; so he preferred to look for analysts among the writers, the lawyers, the mothers of families, those who had chosen human contacts. But in their economic wisdom, the Psychoanalytic Institute of Vienna (and New York) overruled him.
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 pork-barreling 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, and therefore out of this world, are the least likely to know the arts or have the connections to get any support at all. They cannot possibly be “safe”—how could they be? They will rarely have a smoothly continuous career résumé; years at a stretch might be lacking, or there might be a couple of years of working as a house painter, a taxi driver, a piano tuner—all wrong. (Let me mention an episode that made me see red when I heard of it: A young fellow, needing to eat, applied for a job as stock boy at a self-reputed and very successful Advance-Guard publisher in New York. He was hired and told to report; but the president, seeing his name, said, “Isn’t that the poet whose book we rejected last year? We can’t have a literary man as a stock boy, it wouldn’t be fitting. Phone and tell him not to come in.”!!)
There is, of course, a real and hard question: how to find these creative 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 incestuously 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 a board of trustees or regents 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.
Think of it. If the university is controlled by its board of trustees, the student, the pick of the youth in the final period of his training, is left high and dry with no contact with responsible men.
Or think of this: an important executive of a very large publishing house has carefully explained to me that the criterion of their printing books, and of the books they choose to print, is the need to keep their several huge printing-presses occupied. That is, will the book promise enough sales (200,000) to warrant setting one of these presses going? and on the other hand, they must manufacture some books or other to keep all their presses going. As an author, I think this example is remarkable; one can turn it like a beryl and examine its prismatic lights.
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 insightful 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 collections 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.
Nor does our present 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 psychotherapeutic practice: 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.)
Now shame is the only direct attack on conceit, the defensive image of oneself. Conceit is the common denominator of the Organization Man, the hipster, and the juvenile delinquent—this is why I have been lumping them together. The conceited image of the self is usually not quite conscious, but it is instantly woundable; and people protect it with a conformity to their peers (oneself is superior). But the conceited groups differ in their methods of confirming and enhancing conceit: the juvenile delinquent by surly and mischievous destructiveness of the insulting privileged outgroup; the hipster by making feels of them with token performances; the Organization Man by status and salary. To this inner idol, they sacrifice the ingenuous exhibition and self-expression that could make them great, effective, or loved in the world; but that can also be shamed if it is mistaken, out of place, or disproportionate.
Being ashamed ought to mean that a youth gives up some cherished error or conceited image of himself, and goes on, without loss of dignity, to achieve an ideal that is real; this is honor. Only the community can bestow honor, on those who enhance the community, who follow the useful callings, or bring new culture.
In New York, those who have kept out of jail for a generation are not made much of by a grateful and admiring citizenry. It is a hard achievement but, like other public goods, it is not esteemed.
Among cities, Venice had magnificence; but it is Florence that knew how to pay honor to her sons. She made it hard for them, with neglect and exile, to be themselves and serve her; but when nevertheless they achieved their ideals, her praise was loud.
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, suburban “good families” increasingly shun “bad families” that have had troubles, such as divorces or delinquency or even death of a parent(!), for that makes the family untypical.
(A few years ago an editorial in Life complained that our novels always contain alcoholics, jailbirds, addicts, crazy people, perverts, etc., and do not portray average families who have none such. James Farrell, pointing out that the combined numbers of these deviants come to much more than the number of families, dryly offered that the editor of Life probably did not have a material family, a very abnormal case.)
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, fearless souls that they invariably are, whether humble or arrogant, 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 of 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. (They are likely to be and do the damnedest things: Picasso is a communist; Einstein sponsored the atom bomb; Gandhi was a pacifist and vegetarian and dressed so oddly; Bernard Shaw was arrogant and peculiarly sexless; Frank Lloyd Wright was wildly arrogant and sexually immoral; Bertrand Russell was a convicted pacifist and has practically advocated free love; etc. Few great men could pass Personnel.) Or 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 do 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 come 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 death of 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, when we choose a man to beautify 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.
My belief is that one can easily put great men to work, even against their own freedom and advantage, for they allow themselves to be imposed on, noblesse oblige; but one must, of course, then take the consequences.
I understand that to consider powerful souls as if they were a useful public resource is quite foreign to our customs. In a small sense it is undemocratic, for it assumes that some people really know better in a way that must seem arbitrary to most. In a large sense it is certainly democratic, in that it makes the great man serve as a man. Either of these choices, to eschew them or to use them, however, is preferable to creating glamourous images with empty roles.
But let us return to our average folk.
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 installment 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 had gone 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 worth while. Our society is not abounding in highly worth-while 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 normalcy, yet to prove by notoriety that one is superior.
More interesting and likely is the religious effort of the Beat Generation, to which we shall shortly turn. They are older and are not willing to have given up one Rat Race to fall into another. Can they solve the problem of the nagging unanswerable questions of justification and vocation? Their principle is the traditional one of classical mysticism: by “experiences” (= kicks) to transcend the nagged and nagging self altogether and get out of one’s skin, to where no questions are asked—nor is there any articulate speech to ask them in. Resigning from society, they form peaceful brotherhoods of pure experience, with voluntary poverty, devotional readings, and a good deal of hashish.
These first seven chapters have described the “organized” economy, social plan, and moral atmosphere in which an average American boy grows up. Of course they do not constitute the whole environment; they do not constitute even a big fraction of it—or we should all have died of hunger, exposure, and boredom long ago. Mostly people go about their business more directly, produce real goods and get real satisfactions and frustrations. But the Organization does butt in everywhere, it does set the high style of how things are done. It dominates “big” enterprise, politics, popular culture; and its influence is molding enough to man the future with a new generation of dependent and conformist young men without high aims and with little sense of a natural or moral community.
In such an environment there operates an unfortunate natural selection. Since not only the rewards but also the means and opportunities of public activity belong to the organized system, a smart boy will try to get ahead in it. He will do well in school, keep out of trouble, and apply for the right jobs. It would follow from this that the organized system is sparked by a good proportion of the bright boys, and so it is. On the other hand, in sheer self-protection, smart boys who are sensitive, have strong animal spirits or great souls, cannot play that game. There are then two alternative possibilities: (1) Either the advantages of the organized system cause them to inhibit their powers, and they turn into the cynical pushers or obsessional specialists or timid hard workers who make up the middle status of the system. Or (2) their natural virtues and perhaps “wrong” training are too strong and they become Independents; but as such they are hard put, not so much hard put for money as for means to act; and so they are likely to become bitter, eccentric, etc., and so much the less effective in changing the system they disapprove.
(“Wrong” training can be a very innocent thing. Consider a father who allows his child to read good books. That child may soon cease to watch television or go to the movies, nor will he eventually read Book-of-the-Month Club selections, because they are ludicrous or dull. As a young man, then, he will effectually be excluded from all of Madison Avenue and Hollywood and most of publishing, because what moves him or what he creates is quite irrelevant to what is going on: it is too fine. His father has brought him up as a dodo.)
These two great groups—the bright young men wasted in the Rat Race and the bright young men increasingly unused and thwarted as Independents—are the vast wasted resources of our country. But they are not “problems”; they are just unhappy and unfulfilled.
The interesting groups, the Problems, are those who can neither operate in the organized system nor essentially disregard it. In the next chapter I try to define their various kinds. Then in the following chapters I choose two for special treatment: those who are qualified to run in the system but who balk, the Early Resigned; and those who are underprivileged and do not have a chance, the Early Fatalistic.