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GROWING UP ABSURD
BOOKS BY PAUL GOODMAN
Communitas (with Percival Goodman)
Gestalt Therapy (with F. S. Perls and Ralph Hefferline)
Art and Social Nature
The Structure of Literature
Kafka's Prayer
The Empire City
Parents' Day
The Facts of Life
The Break-Up of Our Camp
Stop-Light
Growing Up Absurd
PROBLEMS OF YOUTH IN THE ORGANIZED SYSTEM
Paul Goodman
Random House New York
SECOND PRINTING
Copyright, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, by Paul Goodman
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copy-
right Conventions. Published in New York by Random House,
Inc., and simultaneously in Toronto, Canada, by Random House
of Canada, Limited.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-12137
Manufactured in the United States of America
The author wishes to thank the following for .permission to re-
print material included in this book:
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City by Paul Goodman. 1942, 1946, 1959 by Paul Goodman.
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of Academic Freedom in the United States by Richard Hofstadter
and Walter P. Metzger; for selections from Academic Freedom
in Our Times by Robert M. Maclver.
Commentary for "Youth in the Organized Society," "The Calling
of American Youth," and "In Search of Community" by Paul
Goodman.
Dissent for article entitled "Growing Up Absurd" by Paul
Goodman.
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For
LORE PERLS
Preface
1.
In every day's newspaper there are stories about the two
subjects that I have brought together in this book, the dis-
grace of the Organized System of semimonopolies, gov-
ernment, advertisers, etc., and the disaffection of the grow-
ing generation. Both are newsworthily scandalous, and for
several years now both kinds of stories have come thicker
and faster. It is strange that the obvious connections be-
tween them are not played up in the newspapers; nor, in
the rush of books on the follies, venality, and stifling con-
formity of the Organization, has there been a book on
Youth Problems in the Organized System.
Those of the disaffected youth who are articulate, how-
ever for instance, the Beat or Angry young men are
quite clear about the connection: their main topic is the
"system" with which they refuse to co-operate. They will
explain that the "good" jobs are frauds and sells, that it is
intolerable to have one's style of life dictated by Person-
nel, that a man is a fool to work to pay installments on a
useless refrigerator for his wife, that the movies, TV, and
Book-of-the-Month Club are beneath contempt, but the
x Preface
Luce publications make you sick to the stomach; and they
will describe with accuracy the cynicism and one-upping
of the "typical" junior executive. They consider it the part
of reason and honor to wash their hands of all of it.
Naturally, grown-up citizens are concerned about the
beatniks and delinquents. The school system has been
subjected to criticism. And there is a lot of official talk
about the need to conserve our human resources lest Rus-
sia get ahead of us. The question is why the grownups do
not, more soberly, draw the same connections as the
youth. Or, since no doubt many people are quite clear
about the connection that the structure of society that has
become increasingly dominant in our country is disastrous
to the growth of excellence and manliness, why don't more
people speak up and say so, and initiate a change? The
question is an important one and the answer is, I think, a
terrible one: that people are so bemused by the way busi-
ness and politics are carried on at present, with all their
intricate relationships, that they have ceased to be able
to imagine alternatives. We seem to have lost our genius
for inventing changes to satisfy crying needs.
But this stupor is inevitably the baleful influence of the
very kind of organizational network that we have: the
system pre-empts the available means and capital; it buys
up as much of the intelligence as it can and muffles the
voices of dissent; and then it irrefutably proclaims that it-
self is the only possibility of society, for nothing else is
thinkable. Let me give a couple of examples of how this
works. Suppose (as is the case) that a group of radio and
TV broadcasters, competing in the Pickwickian fashion of
semimonopolies, control all the stations and channels in
an area, amassing the capital and variously bribing Com-
munications Commissioners in order to get them; and
the broadcasters tailor their programs to meet the require-
ments of their advertisers, of the censorship, of their own
Preface x*
slick and clique tastes, and of a broad common denomina-
tor of the audience, none of whom may be offended: they
will then claim not only that the public wants the drivel
that they give them, but indeed that nothing else is being
created. Of course it is not! not for these media; why
should a serious artist bother? Or suppose again (as is not
quite the case) that in a group of universities only facul-
ties are chosen that are "safe" to the businessmen trustees
or the politically appointed regents, and these faculties
give out all the degrees and licenses and union cards to the
new generation of students, and only such universities can
get Foundation or government money for research, and
research is incestuously staffed by the same sponsors and
according to the same policy, and they allow no one but
those they choose, to have access to either the classroom
or expensive apparatus: it will then be claimed that there
is no other learning or professional competence; that an
inspired teacher is not "solid"; that the official projects
are the direction of science; that progressive education is
a failure; and finally, indeed as in Dr. James Conant's
report on the high schools that only 15 per cent of the
youth are "academically talented" enough to be taught
hard subjects. This pre-empting of the means and the
brains by the organization, and the shutting out of those
who do not conform, can go so far as to cause delusions,
as when recently the president of Merck and Company
had the effrontery to warn the Congress that its investiga-
tion of profiteering in drugs might hinder the quest of sci-
entific knowledge! as if the spirit of Vesalius and Pasteur
depended on the financial arrangements of Merck and
Company.
But it is in these circumstances that people put up with
a system because "there are no alternatives." And when
one cannot think of anything to do, soon one ceases to
think at all.
xii Preface
To my mind the worst feature of our present organized
system of doing things is its indirectness, its blurring of the
object. The idea of directly addressing crying objective
public needs, like shelter or education, and using our im-
mense and indeed surplus resources to satisfy them, is
anathema. For in the great interlocking system of corpora-
tions people live not by attending to the job, but by status,
role playing, and tenure, and they work to maximize prof-
its, prestige, or votes regardless of utility or even public
disutility e.g., the plethora of cars has now become a
public disutility, but automobile companies continue to
manufacture them and persuade people to buy them. The
indispensable premise of city planning, according to a vice
president of Webb and Knapp, is to make a "modest long-
term profit on the promoter's investment." (His exact sen-
tence, to a meeting of young planners, was, "What we're
going to have built will be built only if some developer is
going to make a profit from it."!) Obviously he is not di-
rectly interested in housing people or in city convenience
and beauty; he is directly interested in being a good vice
president of Webb and Knapp. That is his privilege, but
it is not a useful goal, and an idealistic young fellow would
not want to be such a man. Another example: Some earn-
est liberal Congressmen are baffled "how to give Federal
aid to education and not interfere in the curriculum and
teaching." But when the teaching function is respected
and assayed by the teacher's peers-in-skill, no one can
interfere, no one would dare (just as Harvard tossed out
McCarthy). The sole function of administration is to
smooth the way, but in this country we have the topsy-
turvy situation that a teacher must devote himself to satis-
fying the administrator and financier rather than to doing
his job, and a universally admired teacher is fired for dis-
obeying an administrative order that would hinder teach-
ing. (See Appendix A.) Let me give another example,
Preface xm
because I want to make this point very clear: These same
Congressmen are concerned "how to discourage low-level
programming in private TV stations without censorship."
Their question presupposes that in communication the
prior thing is the existence of networks and channels,
rather than something to communicate that needs diffusing.
But the prior thing is the program, and the only grounds for
the license to the station is its ability to transmit it. Noth-
ing could be more stupid than for the communications
commission to give to people who handle the means of
broadcasting the inventing of what to broadcast, and then,
disturbed at the poor quality, to worry about censorship.
We live increasingly, then, in a system in which little
direct attention is paid to the object, the function, the pro-
gram, the task, the need; but immense attention to the
role, procedure, prestige, and profit. We don't get the shel-
ter and education because not enough mind is paid to
those things. Naturally the system is inefficient; the over-
head is high; the task is rarely done with love, style, and
excitement, for such beauties emerge only from absorption
in real objects; sometimes the task is not done at all; and
those who could do it best become either cynical or re-
signed.
2.
In the light of this criticism, the recent scandalous ex-
posures of the advertisers, the government, and the cor-
porations are heartening rather than dismaying. (I am
writing in the winter of 1959-60 and we have been hear-
ing about TV, the FCC, Title I, and the Drug Industry;
by the time this is published there will be a new series.)
The conditions exposed are not new, but now the public
skepticism and disgust are mounting; to my ear there is
even a new ring; and the investigations are being pushed
xlv Preface
further, even further than intended by the investigators.
The effect of this must be to destroy for many people the
image of inviolability and indispensability of the kind of
system I have been discussing, to show its phony workings
and inevitable dangers. It is the collapse of "public rela-
tions."
When the existing state of things is suddenly measured
by people against far higher standards than they have
been used to, it is no longer the case that there are no al-
ternatives. People are forced by their better judgment to
ask very basic questions: Is it possible, how is it possible,
to have more meaning and honor in work? to put wealth to
some real use? to have a high standard of living of whose
quality we are not ashamed? to get social justice for those
who have been shamefully left out? to have a use of lei-
sure that is not a dismaying waste of a hundred million
adults? The large group of independent people who have
been out of the swim, with their old-fashioned virtues, sud-
denly have something admirable about them; one is sur-
prised that they still exist, and their existence is relevant.
And from the members of the Organized System itself
come acute books criticizing the shortcomings of the Or-
ganized System.
It is my belief that we are going to have a change. And
once the Americans can recover from their mesmerized
condition and its astounding political apathy, our country
will be in a most fortunate situation. For the kinds of
radical changes we need are those that are appropriate to
a fairly general prosperity. They are practicable. They can
be summed up as simply restoring, in J. K. Galbraith's
phrase, the "social balance" that we have allowed to be-
come lopsided and runaway in the present abuse of the
country's wealth. For instance, since we have a vast sur-
plus productivity, we can turn to finding jobs that will
bring out a youth's capacity, and so really conserve human
Preface xv
resources. We can find ways to restore to the worker a
say in Ms production, and so really do something for
manly independence. Since we have a problem of what to
do with leisure, we can begin to think of necessary com-
munity enterprises that want doing, and that people can
enthusiastically and spontaneously throw themselves into,
and be proud of the results (e.g., beautifying our hideous
small towns). And perhaps thereby create us a culture
again. Since we have the technology, the capital, and the
labor, why should we not have livable cities? Should it be
hard to bring back into society the 30 per cent who are
still ill fed and ill housed, and more outcast than ever?
What is necessary is directly addressing definite objective
needs and using available resources to satisfy them; doing
things that are worth while just because they are worth
while, since we can. Politically, what we need is govern-
ment in which a man offers himself as a candidate be-
cause he has a new program that he wants to effectuate, and
we choose him because we want that good, and judge
that he is the best man to effectuate it. Is that outlandish?
3.
The present widespread concern about education is only
superficially a part of the Cold War, the need to match
the Russian scientists. For in the discussions, pretty soon it
becomes clear that people are uneasy about, ashamed of,
the world that they have given the children to grow up in.
That world is not manly enough, it is not earnest enough;
a grownup may be cynical (or resigned) about his own
convenient adjustments, but he is by no means willing
to see his children robbed of a worth-while society. With
regard to the next generation, everybody always has a
higher standard than the one he is used to. The standard
is ceasing to be one of money and status and is becoming
xvi Preface
a standard of the worth of life. But worth, like happiness,
comes from bona-fide activity and achievement.
My stratagem in this book is a simple one. I assume
that the young really need a more worth-while world in
order to grow up at all, and I confront this real need with
the world that they have been getting. This is the source
of their problems. Our problem is to remedy the dispro-
portion. We can. Our inheritance, our immense productiv-
ity, has been pre-empted and parceled out in a kind of
domainal system; but this grandiose and seemingly impreg-
nable feudalism is vulnerable to an earnest attack. One
has the persistent thought that if ten thousand people in
all walks of life will stand up on their two feet and talk
out and insist, we shall get back our country.
Contents
PREFACE IX
INTRODUCTION: "Human Nature" and
the Organized System 3
I Jobs 17
II Being Taken Seriously 3 6
III Class Structure 52
IV Aptitude 71
V Patriotism 96
VI Social Animal 119
VII Faith 133
VIII An Apparently Closed Room 159
IX The Early Resigned 170
X The Early Fatalistic 191
XI The Missing Community 2 1 6
CONCLUSION 237
APPENDICES 243
GROWING UP ABSURD
Introduction:
"Human Nature" and
the Organized System
1.
Growing up as a human being, a "human nature" assimi-
lates a culture, just as other animals grow up in strength
and habits in the environments that are for them, and that
complete their natures. Present-day sociologists and an-
thropologists don't talk much about this process, and not
in this way. Among the most competent writers, there is
not much mention of. "human nature." Their diffidence
makes scientific sense, for everything we observe, and
even more important, our way of observing it, is already
culture and a pattern of culture. What is the sense of
mentioning "human nature" if we can never observe it?
The old-fashioned naive thought, that primitive races or
children are more natural, is discounted. And the classical
anthropological question, What is Man? "how like an
angel, this quintessence of dust!" is not now asked by
anthropologists. Instead, they commence with a chapter on
Physical Anthropology and then forget the whole topic
and go on to Culture.
On this view, growing up is sometimes treated as if it
were acculturation, the process of giving up one culture
4 GROWING UP ABSURD
for another, the way a tribe of Indians takes on the cul-
ture of the whites; so the wild Babies give up their "in-
dividualistic" mores and ideology, e.g., selfishness or magic
thinMng or omnipotence, and join the tribe of Society;
they are "socialized." More frequently, however, the matter
is left vague: we start with a tabula rasa and end up with
"socialized" and cultured. ("Becoming cultured" and "be-
ing adjusted to the social group" are taken almost as syn-
onymous.) Either way, it follows that you can teach people
anything; you can. adapt them to anything if you use the
right techniques of "socializing" or "communicating." The
essence of "human nature" is to be pretty indefinitely
malleable. "Man," as C. Wright Mills suggests, is what suits
a particular type of society in a particular historical stage.
This fateful idea, invented from time to time by philoso-
phers, seems finally to be empirically evident in the most
recent decades. For instance, in our highly organized sys-
tem of machine production and its corresponding social re-
lations, the practice is, by "vocational guidance," to fit
people wherever they are needed in the productive sys-
tem; and whenever the products of the system need to be
used up, the practice is, by advertising, to get people to
consume them. This works. There is a man for every job
and not many are left over, and the shelves are almost al-
ways cleared. Again, in the highly organized political in-
dustrial systems of Germany, Russia, and now China, it
has been possible in a short time to condition great masses
to perform as desired. Social scientists observe that these
are the facts, and they also devise theories and techniques
to produce more facts like them, for the social scientists
too are part of the highly organized systems.
Introduction
2.
Astonishingly different, however, is the opinion of experts
who deal with human facts in a more raw, less highly
processed, state. Those who have to cope with people in
small groups rather than statistically, attending to them
rather than to some systematic goal parents and teachers,
physicians and psychotherapists, policemen and wardens
of jails, shop foremen and grievance committees these
experts are likely to hold stubbornly that there is a "hu-
man nature." You can't teach people some things or
change them in some ways, and if you persist, you're in
for trouble. Contrariwise, if you don't provide them with
certain things, they'll fill the gaps with eccentric substi-
tutes.
This is immediately evident when something goes wrong;
for instance, when a child can't learn to read because he
has not yet developed the muscular accommodation of his
eyes; if you persist, he withdraws or becomes tricky. Such
a case is clear-cut (it is "physical"). But the more im-
portant cases have the following form: the child does
take on the cultural habit, e.g., early toilet training, and
indeed the whole corresponding pattern of culture, but
there is a diminishing of force, grace, discrimination, in-
tellect, feeling, in specific behaviors or even in his total
behavior. He may become too obedient and lacking in
initiative, or unpractically careful and squeamish; he may
develop "psychosomatic" ailments like constipation. Let
me give an instance even earlier in life: an infant nurtured
in an institution without a particular nurse attending him
during the first six months, does not seem to develop ab-
normally; but if during the end of the first year and for
some time thereafter he is not given personal care, he will
later be in some ways emotionally cold and unreachable
6 GROWING UP ABSURD
either some function has failed to develop, or he has al-
ready blocked it out as too frustrated and painful. In such
examples, the loss of force, grace, and feeling seems to be
evidence that somehow the acquired cultural habits do
not draw on unimpeded outgoing energy, they are against
the grain, they do not fit the child's needs or appetites;
therefore they have been ill adapted and not assimilated.
That is, on this view we do not need to be able to say
what "human nature" is in order to be able to say that
some training is "against human nature" and you persist
in it at peril. Teachers and psychologists who deal practi-
cally with growing up and the blocks to growing up may
never mention the word "human nature" (indeed, they
are better off without too many a priori ideas), but they
cling stubbornly to the presumption that at every stage
there is a developing potentiality not yet cultured, and yet
not blank, and that makes possible the taking on of cul-
ture. We must draw "it" out, offer "it" opportunities, not
violate "it" except for unavoidable reasons. What "it" is,
is not definite. It is what, when appealed to in the right
circumstances, gives behavior that has force, grace, dis-
crimination, intellect, feeling. This vagueness is of course
quite sufficient for education, for education is an art. A
good teacher feels his way, looking for response.
5.
The concept of "human nature" has had a varied political
history in modern times. If we trace it, we can see the
present disagreement developing.
In the eighteenth century, the Age of Reason and the
early Romantic Movement, the emphasis was on "human
nature," referring to man's naturally sympathetic senti-
ments, his communicative faculties, and unalienable dig-
nity. (Immanuel Kant immortally thought up a philosophy
Introduction *
to make these cohere.) Now this human nature was pow-
erfully enlisted in revolutionary struggles against courts
and classes, poverty and humiliation, and it began to in-
vent progressive education. Human nature unmistakably
demanded liberty, equality, and fraternity and every
man a philosopher and poet.
As an heir of the French Revolution, Karl Marx kept
much of this concept. Sympathy recurred as solidarity.
Dignity and intellect were perhaps still in the future. But
he found an important new essential: man is a maker, he
must use his productive nature or be miserable. This too
involved a revolutionary program, to give back to man his
tools.
During the course of the nineteenth century, however,
"human nature" came to be associated with conservative
and even reactionary politics. The later Romantics were
historical minded and found man naturally traditional and
not to be uprooted. A few decades later, narrow interpre-
tations of Darwin were being used to support capitalist
enterprise; and racial and somatic theories were used to
advance imperial and elite interests. (The emphasis was
now on "nature"; the humanity became dubious.) It was
during this later period that the social scientists began to
be diffident about "human nature"; for, politically, they
wanted fundamental social changes, different from those
indicated by the "natural" theory of the survival of the
fittest; and, scientifically, it was evident that many an-
thropological facts were being called natural which were
overwhelmingly cultural. Most of the social scientists be-
gan to lay all their stress on political organization, to bring
about reform. Nevertheless, scientifically trained anar-
chists like Kropotkin insisted that "human nature" which
had now become mutual-aiding, knightly, and craftsman-
like was still on the side of revolution.
In our own century, especially since the Twenties and
8 GROWING UP ABSURD
Thirties, the social scientists have found another reason
for diffidence: it seems to them that "human nature" im-
plies "not social" and refers to something prior to society,
belonging to an isolated individual. They have felt that
too much importance has been assigned to Individual
Psychology (they were reacting to Freud) and this has
stood in the way of organizing people for political reform.
It is on this view, finally, that growing up is now inter-
preted as a process of socializing some rather indefinite
kind of animal, and "socializing" is used as a synonym
for teaching him the culture.
4.
Let us now proceed more carefully, for we are approach-
ing our present plight. Is "being socialized/' no matter
what the society, the same as growing up and assimilating
human culture? The society to which one is socialized
would have to be a remarkably finished product.
There are here three distinct concepts, which some-
times seem the same but sometimes very different: (1)
society as the relations of human social animals, (2) the
human culture carried by society, and (3) a particular
society, like ours, formed by its pattern of culture and
institutions, and to which its members are socialized or ad-
justed.
In ordinary, static circumstances, and especially when a
dominant system in a society is riding high (as the organ-
ized system is with us) , socializing to that society seems to
provide all valuable culture. But as soon as we think of a
fundamental social change, we begin to say that people
are being adjusted, "socialized," to a very limited kind of
human society; and our notion of "human culture" at
once broadens out to include ancient, exotic, and even
Introduction 9
primitive models as superior to the conventional standards
(as, e.g., our disaffected groups lay store by the Japanese
or the Samoans and Trobriand Islanders). Then at once
"human nature" is again invoked to prove the necessity of
change, for "human nature" has been thwarted or insulted
by the dominant system. "Man" can no longer be defined
as what suits the dominant system, when the dominant
system apparently does not suit men.
I think many social scientists have been making
an error in logic. Certainly only society is the
carrier of culture (it is not inborn). But it does
not follow that socialized and cultured are syn-
onymous. What follows, rather, is that, since
culture is so overwhelmingly evident in observ-
ing mankind, social properties must be of the
essence of original "human nature" and indeed
that the "isolated individual" is a product of
culture.
This, of course, was just the line that Freud
really took. Far from having an Individual
Psychology, he tended to exaggerate the social
nature of the baby by reading into it pre-
formed traits of his own society. From the
earliest infancy, imitation and emulation, love,
striving to communicate, rivalry, exclusiveness
and jealousy, punishment, introjected authority,
identification, growing up on a model, finding
safety in conforming these were among the
conflicting elementary functions of the "human
nature" that must grow into culture. And Freud,
with magnificent originality, tried to show that
by their very conflict they made it possible
to assimilate culture; only such a social animal
could become cultured. Every step of education
was the resolution of a difficult social conflict.
10 GROWING UP ABSURD
As might have been expected, from this hectic
theory of human nature were drawn the most
various political implications. Some, in the
interests of community and sex reform, have
wanted fundamental social changes, like Feren-
czi and Reich. Others, to save religion, have
been ultratraditionalist, like Jung or Laforgue.
The run of orthodox psychoanalytic practice has
been quietist, as the social scientists claimed.
But the most surprising implication has been
drawn by the social scientists themselves, when
they finally got around to making use of mod-
ern psychology: they have found in it tech-
niques for harmoniously belonging to the organ-
ized system of society!
A curious thing has occurred. Unlike the majority of
their predecessors for a century and a half, most of our
contemporary social scientists are not interested in funda-
mental social change. To them, we have apparently
reached the summit of institutional progress, and it only
remains for the sociologists and applied-anthropologists to
mop up the corners and iron out the kinks. Social scientists
are not attracted to the conflictful core of Freud's theory
of human nature; a more optimistic theory, like Reich's,
is paid no attention at all. But they have hit on the theory
I mentioned at the beginning: that you can adapt people
to anything, if you use the right techniques. Our social
scientists have become so accustomed to the highly organ-
ized and by-and-large smoothly running society that they
have begun to think that "social animal" means "harmoni-
ously belonging." They do not like to think that fighting
and dissenting are proper social functions, nor that rebel-
ling or initiating fundamental change is a social function.
Rather, if something does not run smoothly, they say it
has been improperly socialized; there has been a failure in
Introduction 1 1
communication. The animal part is rarely mentioned at
all; if it proves annoying, it too has been inadequately so-
cialized.
5.
Nevertheless, we see groups of boys and young men disaf-
fected from the dominant society. The young men are
Angry and Beat. The boys are Juvenile Delinquents.
These groups are not small, and they will grow larger. Cer-
tainly they are suffering. Demonstrably they are not get-
ting enough out of our wealth and civilization. They are
not growing up to full capacity. They are failing to assimi-
late much of the culture. As was predictable, most of the
authorities and all of the public spokesmen explain it by
saying there has been a failure of socialization. They say
that background conditions have interrupted socialization
and must be improved. And, not enough effort has been
made to guarantee belonging, there must be better bait or
punishment.
But perhaps there has not been a failure of communica-
tion. Perhaps the social message has been communicated
clearly to the young men and is unacceptable.
In this book I shall therefore take the opposite tack and
ask, "Socialization to what? to what dominant society and
available culture?" And if this question is asked, we must
at once ask the other question, "Is the harmonious organi-
zation to which the young are inadequately socialized,
perhaps against human nature, or not worthy of human
nature, and therefore there is difficulty in growing up?"
If this is so, the disaffection of the young is profound and
it will not be finally remediable by better techniques of
socializing. Instead, there will have to be changes in our
society and its culture, so as to meet the appetites and
capacities of human nature, in order to grow up.
12 GROWING UP ABSURD
This brings me to another proposition about growing up,
and perhaps the main theme of this book. Growth, like
any ongoing junction, requires adequate objects in the en-
vironment to meet the needs and capacities of the growing
child, boy, youth, and young man, until he can better
choose and make Ms own environment. It is not a "psy-
chological" question of poor influences and bad attitudes,
but an objective question of real opportunities for worth-
while experience. It makes no difference whether the
growth is normal or distorted, only real objects will finish
the experience. (Even in the psychotherapy of adults one
finds that many a stubborn symptom vanishes if there is a
real change in the vocational and sexual opportunities, so
that the symptom is no longer needed.) It is here that the
theory of belonging and socializing breaks down miserably.
For it can be shown I intend to show that with all the
harmonious belonging and all the tidying up of back-
ground conditions that you please, our abundant society
is at present simply deficient in many of the most elemen-
tary objective opportunities and worth-while goals that
could make growing up possible. It is lacking in enough
man's work. It is lacking in honest public speech, and peo-
ple are not taken seriously. It is lacking in the opportunity
to be useful. It thwarts aptitude and creates stupidity. It
corrupts ingenuous patriotism. It corrupts the fine arts. It
shackles science. It dampens animal ardor. It discourages
the religious convictions of Justification and Vocation and
it dims the sense that there is a Creation. It has no Honor.
It has no Community.
Just look at that list. There is nothing in it that is sur-
prising, in either the small letters or the capitals. I have
nothing subtle or novel to say in this book; these are the
things that everybody knows. And nevertheless the Gov-
ernor of New York says, "We must give these young men
a sense of belonging."
Introduction 13
Thwarted, or starved, in the important objects proper
to young capacities, the boys and young men naturally
find or invent deviant objects for themselves; this is the
beautiful shaping power of our human nature. Their
choices and inventions are rarely charming, usually stupid,
and often disastrous; we cannot expect average kids to
deviate with genius. But on the other hand, the young men
who conform to the dominant society become for the most
part apathetic, disappointed, cynical, and wasted.
(I say the "young men and boys" rather than the
"young people" because the problems I want to discuss
in this book belong primarily, in our society, to the boys:
how to be useful and make something of oneself. A girl
does not have to, she is not expected to, "make some-
thing" of herself. Her career does not have to be self-justi-
fying, for she wiE have children, which is absolutely self-
justifying, like any other natural or creative act. With this
background, it is less important, for instance, what job an
average young woman works at till she is married. The
quest for the glamour job is given at least a little substance
by its relation to a "better" marriage. Correspondingly, our
"youth troubles" are boys' troubles female delinquency
is sexual: "incorrigibility" and unmarried pregnancy. Yet
as every woman knows, these problems are intensely inter-
esting to women, for if the boys do not grow to be men,
where shall the women find men? If the husband is run-
ning the rat race of the organized system, there is not
much father for the children. )
5.
This essay is on "Youth Problems." But the reader will
find, perhaps to his surprise, that I shall make little dis-
tinction in value between talking about middle-class
youths being groomed for ten-thousand-dollar "slots" in
14 GROWING UP ABSURD
business and Madison Avenue, or underprivileged hood-
lums fatalistically hurrying to a reformatory; or between
hard-working young fathers and idle Beats with beards.
For the salient thing is the sameness among them, the
waste of humanity. In our society, bright lively children,
with the potentiality for knowledge, noble ideals, honest
effort, and some kind of worth-while achievement, are
transformed into useless and cynical bipeds, or decent
young men trapped or early resigned, whether in or out of
the organized system. My purpose is a simple one: to show
how it is desperately hard these days for an average child
to grow up to be a man, for our present organized system
of society does not want men. They are not safe. They do
not suit.
Our public officials are now much concerned about the
"waste of human resources." Dr. Conant, the former
president of Harvard, has surveyed the high schools. But
our officials are not serious, and Dr. Conant's report is
superficial. For the big causes of stupidity, of lack of
initiative and lack of honorable incentive, are glaring; yet
they do not intend to notice or remedy these big causes.
(This very avoidance of the real issues on the part of our
public officials is, indeed, one of the big causes.) Our so-
ciety cannot have it both ways: to maintain a conformist
and ignoble system and to have skillful and spirited men to
man that system with.
7.
It is not my purpose in this essay to outline a better world.
But I think it requires no deep wisdom or astonishing
imagination to know what we need, and in a later chapter
of this book I shall even list some points of a rough pro-
gram. The prevalent sentiment that it is infinitely impracti-
cal to follow the suggestions of common reason, is not
Introduction 15
sound. If it is impractical, it is because some people don't
want to, and the rest of us don't want to enough.
For instance, there is a persistent presumption among
our liberal statesmen that the old radical-liberal program
has been importantly achieved, and that therefore there
is no familiar major proposal practical to remedy admit-
tedly crying ills. This is a false presumption. Throughout
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the radical-liberal
program was continually compromised, curtailed, some-
times realized in form without content, sometimes swept
under the rug and heard of no more. I shall later list more
than twenty fundamental liberal demands that have gone
unfulfilled which would still be live and salutary issues to-
day if anybody wanted to push them. This has occurred,
and keeps occurring, by the mutual accommodation of
both "liberals" and "conservatives" in the interests of creat-
ing our present coalition of semimonopolies, trade unions,
government, Madison Avenue, etc. (including a large bloc
of outlaw gangsters) ; thriving on maximum profits and full
employment; but without regard for utility, quality, ra-
tional productivity, personal freedom, independent enter-
prise, human scale, manly vocation, or genuine culture. It
is in this accommodation that our politicians survive, but
it does not make for statesmanship. Even so mild a critic
as Henry Steele Commager, in the New York Times,
judges that we have had only three reputable statesmen,
in fifty years, the last of whom died fifteen years ago.
While one may not agree with his number and examples,
there is no doubt that we have been living in a political
limbo.
Naturally this unnatural system has generated its own
troubles, whether we think of the unlivable communities,
the collapse of public ethics, or the problems of youth. I
shall try to show in this essay that these ills are by no
means inherent in modern technological or ecological con-
16 GROWING UP ABSURD
ditions, nor in the American Constitution as such. But
they have followed precisely from the betrayal and neg-
lect of the old radical-liberal program and other changes
proposed to keep up with the advancing technology, the
growth of population, and the revolution in morals. Im-
portant reforms did not occur when they were ripe, and
we have inherited the consequences: a wilderness of un-
finished situations, unequal developments and incon-
sistent standards, as well as new business. And now, some-
times the remedy must be stoically to go back and carry
through the old programs (as we are having to do with
racial integration), e.g., finally to insist on stringent mas-
ter-planning of cities and conserving of resources, or on
really limiting monopolies. Sometimes we must make
changes to catch up e.g., to make the laws more con-
sistent with the sexual revolution, or to make the ex-
penditure on public goods more commensurate with the
geometrically increasing complications of a more crowded
population. And sometimes, finally, we have to invent
really new devices e.g., how to make the industrial tech-
nology humanly important for its workmen, how to use
leisure nobly, or even how, in a rich society, to be de-
cently poor if one so chooses.
This book is not about these great subjects. But they
hover in the background of the great subject that it is
about. For it is impossible for the average boy to grow
up and use the remarkable capacities that are in every
boy, unless the world is for him and makes sense. And a
society makes sense when it understands that its chief
wealth is these capacities.
I
Jobs
1.
It's hard to grow up when there isn't enough man's work.
There is "nearly full employment" (with highly signifi-
cant exceptions), but there get to be fewer jobs that are
necessary or unquestionably useful; that require energy
and draw on some of one's best capacities; and that can
be done keeping one's honor and dignity. In explaining
the widespread troubles of adolescents and young men,
this simple objective factor is not much mentioned. Let
us here insist on it.
By "man's work" I mean a very simple idea, so simple
that it is clearer to ingenuous boys than to most adults.
To produce necessary food and shelter is man's work.
During most of economic history most men have done
this drudging work, secure that it was justified and worthy
of a man to do it, though often feeling that the social con-
ditions under which they did it were not worthy of a man,
thinking, "It's better to die than to live so hard" but they
worked on. When the environment is forbidding, as in the
Swiss Alps or the Aran Islands, we regard such work with
poetic awe. In emergencies it is heroic, as when the bakers
18 GROWING UP ABSURD
of Paris maintained the supply of bread during the French
Revolution, or the milkman did not miss a day's delivery
when the bombs recently tore up London.
At present there is little such subsistence work. In Com-
munitas my brother and I guess that one-tenth of our
economy is devoted to it; it is more likely one-twentieth.
Production of food is actively discouraged. Farmers are
not wanted and the young men go elsewhere. (The farm
population is now less than 1 5 per cent of the total popula-
tion.) Building, on the contrary, is immensely needed.
New York City needs 65,000 new units a year, and is get-
ting, net, 16 5 000. One would think that ambitious boys
would flock to this work. But here we find that building,
too, is discouraged. In a great city, for the last twenty
years hundreds of thousands have been ill housed, yet
we do not see science, industry, and labor enthusiastically
enlisted in finding the quick solution to a definite prob-
lem. The promoters are interested in long-term invest-
ments, the real estate men in speculation, the city plan-
ners in votes and graft. The building craftsmen cannily see
to it that their own numbers remain few, their methods
antiquated, and their rewards high. None of these people is
much interested in providing shelter, and nobody is at all
interested in providing new manly jobs .
Once we turn away from the absolutely necessary sub-
sistence jobs, however, we find that an enormous propor-
tion of our production is not even unquestionably useful.
Everybody knows and also feels this, and there has re-
cently been a flood of books about our surfeit of honey,
our insolent chariots, the follies of exurban ranch houses,
our hucksters and our synthetic demand. Many acute
things are said about this useless production and advertis-
ing, but not much about the workmen producing it and
their frame of mind; and nothing at all, so far as I have
noticed, about the plight of a young fellow looking for a
Jobs 19
manly occupation. The eloquent critics of the American
way of life have themselves been so seduced by it that
they think only in terms of selling commodities and point
out that the goods are valueless; but they fail to see that
people are being wasted and their skills insulted. (To give
an analogy, in the many gleeful onslaughts on the Popular
Culture that have appeared in recent years, there has
been little thought of the plight of the honest artist cut off
from his audience and sometimes, in public arts such as
theater and architecture, from his medium.)
What is strange about it? American society has tried
so hard and so ably to defend the practice and theory of
production for profit and not primarily for use that now
it has succeeded in making its jobs and products profitable
and useless.
2.
Consider a likely useful job. A youth who is alert and
willing but not "verbally intelligent" perhaps he has quit
high school at the eleventh grade (the median), as soon
as he legally could chooses for auto mechanic. That's a
good job, familiar to him, he often watched them as a kid.
It's careful and dirty at the same time. In a small garage
it's sociable; one can talk to the customers (girls). You
please people in trouble by fixing their cars, and a man is
proud to see rolling out on its own the car that limped in
behind the tow truck. The pay is as good as the next fel-
low's, who is respected.
So our young man takes this first-rate job. But what
when he then learns that the cars have a built-in obsoles-
cence, that the manufacturers do not want them to be re-
paired or repairable? They have lobbied a law that re-
quires them to provide spare parts for only five years (it
used to be ten) . Repairing the new cars is often a matter of
20 GROWING UP ABSURD
cosmetics, not mechanics; and the repairs are pointlessly
expensive a tail fin might cost $150. The insurance rates
therefore double and treble on old and new cars both.
Gone are the days of keeping the jalopies in good shape,
the artist-work of a proud mechanic. But everybody is
paying for foolishness, for in fact the new models are only
trivially superior; the whole thing is a sell.
It is hard for the young man now to maintain his feel-
ings of justification, sociability, serviceability. It is not sur-
prising if he quickly becomes cynical and time-serving,
interested in a fast buck. And so, on the notorious Reader's
Digest test, the investigators (coining in with a discon-
nected coil wire) found that 63 per cent of mechanics
charged for repairs they didn't make, and lucky if they
didn't also take out the new fuel pump and replace it with
a used one (65 per cent of radio repair shops, but only
49 per cent of watch repairmen "lied, overcharged, or
gave false diagnoses") .
There is an hypothesis that an important predisposition
to juvenile delinquency is the combination of low verbal
intelligence with high manual intelligence, delinquency
giving a way of self-expression where other avenues are
blocked by lack of schooling. A lad so endowed might well
apply himself to the useful trade of mechanic.
3.
Most manual jobs do not lend themselves so readily to
knowing the facts and fraudulently taking advantage one-
self. In factory jobs the workman is likely to be ignorant
of what goes on, since he performs a small operation on a
big machine that he does not understand. Even so, there
is evidence that he has the same disbelief in the enterprise
as a whole, with a resulting attitude of profound indiffer-
ence.
Jobs 21
Semiskilled factory operatives are the largest category
of workmen. (I am leafing through the U. S. Department
of Labor's Occupational Outlook Handbook, 1957.) Big
companies have tried the devices of applied anthropology
to enhance the loyalty of these men to the firm, but ap-
parently the effort is hopeless, for it is found that a thump-
ing majority of the men don't care about the job or the
firm; they couldn't care less and you can't make them
care more. But this is not because of wages, hours, or
working conditions, or management. On the contrary, tests
that show the men's indifference to the company show also
their (unaware) admiration for the way the company has
designed and manages the plant; it is their very model of
style, efficiency, and correct behavior. (Robert Dubin, for
the U. S. Public Health Service.) Maybe if the men under-
stood more, they would admire less. The union and the
grievance committee take care of wages, hours, and con-
ditions; these are the things the workmen themselves
fought for and won. (Something was missing in that vic-
tory, and we have inherited the failure as well as the suc-
cess.) The conclusion must be that workmen are indiffer-
ent to the job because of its intrinsic nature: it does not en-
list worth-while capacities, it is not "interesting"; it is not
his, he is not "in" on it; the product is not really useful.
And indeed, research directly on the subject, by Frederick
Herzberg on Motivation to Work, shows that it is defects
in the intrinsic aspects of the job that make workmen "un-
happy." A survey of the literature (in Herzberg's Job At-
titudes) shows that Interest is second in importance only
to Security, whereas Wages, Conditions, Socializing, Hours,
Ease, and Benefits are far less important. But foremen,
significantly enough, think that the most important thing
to the workman is his wages. (The investigators do not
seem to inquire about the usefulness of the job as if a
primary purpose of working at a job were not that it is
22 GROWING UP ABSURD
good for something! My guess is that a large factor in "Se-
curity" is the resigned reaction to not being able to take
into account whether the work of one's hands is useful for
anything; for in a normal life situation, if what we do is
useful, we feel secure about being needed. The other larg-
est factor in "Security" is, I think, the sense of being
needed for one's unique contribution, and this is measured
in these tests by the primary importance the workers as-
sign to being "in" on things and to "work done being ap-
preciated." (Table prepared by Labor Relations Institute
of New York.)
Limited as they are, what a remarkable insight such
studies give us, that men want to do valuable work and
work that is somehow theirs! But they are thwarted.
Is not this the "waste of our human resources"?
The case is that by the "sole-prerogative" clause in un-
ion contracts the employer has the sole right to determine
what is to be produced, how it is to be produced, what
plants are to be built and where, what kinds of machinery
are to be installed, when workers are to be hired and laid
off, and how production operations are to be rationalized.
(Frank Marquart.) There is none of this that is inevitable
in running a machine economy; but if these are the cir-
cumstances, it is not surprising that the factory operatives'
actual code has absolutely nothing to do with useful serv-
ice or increasing production, but is notoriously devoted to
"interpersonal relations"; (1) don't turn out too much
work; (2) don't turn out too little work; (3) don't squeal
on a fellow worker; (4) don't act like a big-shot. This is
how to belong.
4.
Let us go on to the Occupational Outlook of those who
are verbally bright. Among this group, simply because they
Jobs 23
cannot help asking more general questions e.g., about
utility the problem of finding man's work is harder, and
their disillusion is more poignant.
He explained to her why it was hard to find a
satisfactory job of work to do. He had liked
working with the power drill, testing the rocky
envelope of the shore, but then the employers
asked him to take a great oath of loyalty.
"What!" cried Rosalind. "Do you have scruples
about telling a convenient fib?"
"No, I don't. But I felt uneasy about the sanity
of the director asking me to swear to opinions
on such complicated questions when my job was
digging with a power drill. I can't work with a
man who might suddenly have a wild fit"
. . . "Why don't you get a job driving one of
the big trucks along here?"
"I don't like what's in the boxes," said Horatio
sadly. "It could just as well drop in the river
and Td make mistakes and drop it there"
"Is it bad stuff?"
"No, just useless. It takes the heart out of me to
work at something useless and I begin to make
mistakes. I don't mind putting profits in some-
body's pocket but the job also has to be useful
for something"
. . . "Why don't you go to the woods and be a
lumberjack?"
"No! they chop down the trees just to print off
the New York Times!"
(The Empire City, III, i, 3.)
24 GROWING UP ABSURD
The more intelligent worker's "indifference" is likely to
appear more nakedly as profound resignation, and his
cynicism may sharpen to outright racketeering.
"Teaching," says the Handbook, "is the largest of the
professions." So suppose our now verbally bright young
man chooses for teacher, in the high school system or, by
exception, in the elementary schools if he understands
that the elementary grades are the vitally important ones
and require the most ability to teach well (and of course
they have less prestige). Teaching is necessary and useful
work; it is real and creative, for it directly confronts an im-
portant subject matter, the children themselves; it is ob-
viously self-justifying; and it is ennobled by the arts and
sciences. Those who practice teaching do not for the most
part succumb to cynicism or indifference the children are
too immediate and real for the teachers to become callous
but, most of the school systems being what they are,
can teachers fail to come to suffer first despair and
then deep resignation? Resignation occurs psychologically
as follows: frustrated in essential action, they nevertheless
cannot quit in anger, because the task is necessary; so the
anger turns inward and is felt as resignation. (Naturally,
the resigned teacher may then put on a happy face and
keep very busy.)
For the job is carried on under impossible conditions of
overcrowding and saving public money. Not that there is
not enough social wealth, but first things are not put first.
Also, the school system has spurious aims. It soon be-
comes clear that the underlying aims are to relieve the
home and keep the kids quiet; or, suddenly, the aim is to
produce physicists. Timid supervisors, bigoted clerics, and
ignorant school boards forbid real teaching. The emotional
release and sexual expression of the children are taboo. A
commercially debauched popular culture makes learning
disesteemed. The academic curriculum is mangled by
Jobs 25
the demands of reactionaries, liberals, and demented war-
riors. Progressive methods are emasculated. Attention to
each case is out of the question, and all the children the
bright, the average, and the dull are systematically re-
tarded one way or another, while the teacher's hands are
tied. Naturally the pay is low for the work is hard, use-
ful, and of public concern, all three of which qualities
tend to bring lower pay. It is alleged that the low pay is
why there is a shortage of teachers and why the best do
not choose the profession. My guess is that the best avoid
it because of the certainty of miseducating. Nor are the
best wanted by the system, for they are not safe. Bertrand
Russell was rejected by New York's City College and
would not have been accepted in a New York grade
school.
5.
Next, what happens to the verbally bright who have no
zeal for a serviceable profession and who have no particu-
lar scientific or artistic bent? For the most part they make
up the tribes of salesmanship, entertainment, business
management, promotion, and advertising. Here of course
there is no question of utility or honor to begin with, so an
ingenuous boy will not look here for a manly career.
Nevertheless, though we can pass by the sufferings of
these well-paid callings, much publicized by their own
writers, they are important to our theme because of the
model they present to the growing boy.
Consider the men and women in TV advertisements,
demonstrating the product and singing the jingle. They
are clowns and mannequins, in grimace, speech, and ac-
tion. And again, what I want to call attention to in this
advertising is not the economic problem of synthetic de-
mand, and not the cultural problem of Popular Culture,
26 GROWING UP ABSURD
but the human problem that these are human beings
working as clowns; that the writers and designers of it are
human beings thinking like idiots; and the broadcasters
and underwriters know and abet what goes on
Juicily glubbily
Blubber is dubbily
delicious and nutritious
eat it, Kitty, it's good.
Alternately, they are liars, confidence men, smooth talkers,
obsequious, insolent, etc., etc.
The popular-cultural content of the advertisements is
somewhat neutralized by Mad magazine, the bible of the
twelve-year-olds who can read. But far more influential
and hard to counteract is the fact that the workmen and
the patrons of this enterprise are human beings. (Highly
approved, too.) They are not good models for a boy look-
ing for a manly job that is useful and necessary, requiring
human energy and capacity, and that can be done with
honor and dignity. They are a good sign that not many
such jobs will be available.
The popular estimation is rather different. Consider the
following: "As one possible aid, I suggested to the Senate
subcommittee that they alert celebrities and leaders in the
fields of sports, movies, theater and television to the help
they can offer by getting close to these [delinquent] kids.
By giving them positive 'heroes' they know and can talk
to ? instead of the misguided image of trouble-making bud-
dies, they could aid greatly in guiding these normal aspira-
tions for fame and status into wholesome progressive
channels." (Jackie Robinson, who was formerly on the
Connecticut Parole Board.) Or again: when a mass cross-
section of Oklahoma high school juniors and seniors was
asked which living person they would like to be, the boys
Jobs 27
named Pat Boone, Ricky Nelson, and President Eisen-
hower; the girls chose Debbie Reynolds, Elizabeth Taylor,
and Natalie Wood.
The rigged Quiz shows, which created a scandal in
1959, were a remarkably pure distillate of our American:
cookery. We start with the brute facts that (a) in our
abundant expanding economy it is necessary to give-
money away to increase spending, production, and profits;
and (b) that this money must not be used for useful pub-
lic goods in taxes, but must be plowed back as "business;
expenses," even though there is a shameful shortage of
schools, housing, etc. Yet when the TV people at first
tried simply to give the money away for nothing (for hav-
ing heard of George Washington), there was a great Cal-
vinistic outcry that this was demoralizing (we may gamble
on the horses only to improve the breed). So they hit on
the notion of a real contest with prizes. But then, of
course, they could not resist making the show itself profit-
able, and competitive in the (also rigged) ratings with
other shows, so the experts in the entertainment-com-
modity manufactured phony contests. And to cap the cli-
max of fraudulence, the hero of the phony contests pro-
ceeded to persuade himself, so he says, that his behavior
was educational!
The behavior of the networks was correspondingly
typical. These business organizations claim the loyalty of
their employees, but at the first breath of trouble they
were ruthless and disloyal to their employees. (Even Mc-
Carthy was loyal to his gang.) They want to maximize
profits and yet be absolutely safe from any risk. Consider
their claim that they knew nothing about the fraud. But
if they watched the shows that they were broadcasting,
they could not possibly, as professionals, not have known
the facts, for there were obvious type-casting, acting, plot,
28 GROWING UP ABSURD
etc. If they are not professionals, they are incompetent.
But if they don't watch what they broadcast, then they are
utterly irresponsible and on what grounds do they have
the franchises to the channels? We may offer them the
choice: that they are liars or incompetent or irresponsible.
The later direction of the investigation seems to me
more important, the inquiry into the bribed disk-jockey-
ing; for this deals directly with our crucial economic prob-
lem of synthesized demand, made taste, debauching the
public and preventing the emergence and formation of
natural taste. In such circumstances there cannot possibly
be an American culture; we are doomed to nausea and
barbarism. And then these baboons have the effrontery
to declare that they give the people what the people de-
mand and that they are not responsible for the level of
the movies, the music, the plays, the books!
Finally, in leafing through the Occupational Outlook
Handbook, we notice that the armed forces employ a large
number. Here our young man can become involved in a
world-wide demented enterprise, with personnel and ac-
tivities corresponding.
6.
Thus, on the simple criteria of unquestioned utility, em-
ploying human capacities, and honor, there are not
enough worthy jobs in our economy for average boys and
adolescents to grow up toward. There are of course thou-
sands of jobs that are worthy and self-justifying, and thou-
sands that can be made so by stubborn integrity, espe-
cially if one can work as an independent. Extraordinary
intelligence or special talent, also, can often carve out a
place for itself conversely, their usual corruption and
waste are all the more sickening. But by and large our
economic society is not geared for the cultivation of its
Jobs 29
young or the attainment of important goals that they can
work toward.
This is evident from the usual kind of vocational guid-
ance, which consists of measuring the boy and finding
some place in the economy where he can be fitted; chop-
ping him down to make him fit; or neglecting him if they
can't find his slot. Personnel directors do not much try to
scrutinize the economy in order to find some activity that
is a real opportunity for the boy, and then to create an
opportunity if they can't find one. To do this would be an
horrendous task; I am not sure it could be done if we
wanted to do it. But the question is whether anything less
makes sense if we mean to speak seriously about the
troubles of the young men.
Surely by now, however, many readers are objecting
that this entire argument is pointless because people in
fact don't think of their jobs in this way at all. Nobody
asks if a job is useful or honorable (within the limits of
business ethics). A man gets a job that pays well, or well
enough, that has prestige, and good conditions, or at least
tolerable conditions. I agree with these objections as to the
fact. (I hope we are wrong.) But the question is -what it
means to grow up into such a fact as: "During my pro-
ductive years I will spend eight hours a day doing what is
no good."
7.
Yet, economically and vocationally, a very large popula-
tion of the young people are in a plight more drastic than
anything so far mentioned. In our society as it is, there are
not enough worthy jobs. But if our society, being as it is,
were run more efficiently and soberly, for a majority there
would soon not be any jobs at all. There is at present
nearly full employment and there may be for some years,
30 GROWING UP ABSURD
yet a vast number of young people are rationally unem-
ployable, useless. This paradox is essential to explain their
present temper.
Our society, which is not geared to the cultivation of its
young, is geared to a profitable expanding production, a
so-called high standard of living of mediocre value, and
the maintenance of nearly full employment. Politically,
the chief of these is full employment. In a crisis, when
profitable production is temporarily curtailed, government
spending increases and jobs are manufactured. In "nor-
malcy" a condition of slow boom the easy credit, in-
stallment buying, and artificially induced demand for use-
less goods create jobs for all and good profits for some.
Now, back in the Thirties, when the New Deal at-
tempted by hook or crook to put people back to work and
give them money to revive the shattered economy, there
was an outcry of moral indignation from the conserva-
tives that many of the jobs were "boondoggling," useless
made-work. It was insisted, and rightly, that such work
was demoralizing to the workers themselves. It is a ques-
tion of a word, but a candid critic might certainly say that
many of the jobs in our present "normal" production are
useless made-work. The tail fins and built-in obsolescence
might be called boondoggling. The $64,000 Question and
the busy hum of Madison Avenue might certainly be
called boondoggling. Certain tax-dodge Foundations are
boondoggling. What of business lunches and expense ac-
counts? fringe benefits? the comic categories of occupation
in the building trades? the extra stagehands and musicians
of the theater crafts? These jolly devices to put money
back to work no doubt have a demoralizing effect on
somebody or other (certainly on me, they make me green
with envy), but where is the moral indignation from Top
Management?
Suppose we would cut out the boondoggling and gear
Jobs 31
our society to a more sensible abundance, with efficient
production of quality goods, distribution in a natural
market, counterinflation and sober credit. At once the
work week would be cut to, say, twenty hours instead of
forty. (Important People have akeady mentioned the fig-
ure thirty.) Or alternately, half the labor force would be
unemployed. Suppose too and how can we not suppose
it? that the automatic machines are used generally,
rather than just to get rid of badly organized unskilled
labor. The unemployment will be still more drastic.
(To give the most striking example; in steel, the annual
increase in productivity is 4 per cent, the plants work at
50 per cent of capacity, and the companies can break
even and stop producing at less than 30 per cent of ca-
pacity. These are the conditions that forced the steel
strike, as desperate self-protection. (Estes Kefauver, quo-
ting Gardiner Means and Fred Gardner.)
Everybody knows this, nobody wants to talk about it
much, for we don't know how to cope with it. The effect is
that we are living a kind of lie. Long ago, labor leaders
used to fight for the shorter work week, but now they
don't, because they're pretty sure they don't want it. In-
deed, when hours are reduced, the tendency is to get a
second, part-time, job and raise the standard of living, be-
cause the job is meaningless and one must have some-
thing; but the standard of living is pretty meaningless,
too. Nor is this strange atmosphere a new thing. For at
least a generation the maximum sensible use of our pro-
ductivity could have thrown a vast population out of work,
or relieved everybody of a lot of useless work, depending
on how you take it. (Consider with how little cutback of
useful civilian production the economy produced the war
goods and maintained an Army, economically unem-
ployed.) The plain truth is that at present very many of
us are useless, not needed, rationally unemployable. It
32 GROWING UP ABSURD
is in this paradoxical atmosphere that young persons grow
up. It looks busy and expansive, but it is rationally at a
stalemate.
8.
These considerations apply to all ages and classes; but it is
of course among poor youth (and the aged) that they
show up first and worst. They are the most unemployable.
For a long time our society has not been geared to the cul-
tivation of the young. In our country 42 per cent have
graduated from high school (predicted census, 1960);
less than 8 per cent have graduated from college. The
high school trend for at least the near future is not much
different: there will be a high proportion of drop-outs
before the twelfth grade; but markedly more of the rest
will go on to college; that is, the stratification will harden.
Now the schooling in neither the high schools nor the col-
leges is much good if it were better more kids would
stick to it; yet at present, if we made a list we should find
that a large proportion of the dwindling number of un-
questionably useful or self-justifying jobs, in the humane
professions and the arts and sciences, require education;
and in the future, there is no doubt that the more educated
will have the jobs, in running an efficient, highly technical
economy and an administrative society placing a premium
on verbal skills.
(Between 1947 and 1957, professional and technical
workers increased 61 per cent, clerical workers 23 per
cent, but factory operatives only 4Y2 per cent and la-
borers 4 per cent. Census.)
For the uneducated there will be no jobs at all. This is
humanly most unfortunate, for presumably those who
have learned something in schools, and have the knack
of surviving the boredom of those schools, could also make
Jobs 33
something of idleness; whereas the uneducated are useless
at leisure too. It takes application, a fine sense of value,
and a powerful community-spirit for a people to have seri-
ous leisure, and this has not been the genius of the Ameri-
cans.
From this point of view we can sympathetically under-
stand the pathos of our American school policy, which
otherwise seems so inexplicable; at great expense compel-
ling kids to go to school who do not want to and who will
not profit by it. There are of course unpedagogic motives,
like relieving the home, controlling delinquency, and
keeping kids from competing for jobs. But there is also
this desperately earnest pedagogic motive, of preparing
the kids to take some part in a democratic society that
does not need them. Otherwise, what will become of
them, if they don't know anything?
Compulsory public education spread universally during
the nineteenth century to provide the reading, writing, and
arithmetic necessary to build a modern industrial econ-
omy. With the overmaturity of the economy, the teachers
are struggling to preserve the elementary system when the
economy no longer requires it and is stingy about paying
for it. The demand is for scientists and technicians, the 15
per cent of the "academically talented." "For a vast ma-
jority [in the high schools]," says Dr. Conant in The
Child, the Parent, and the State, "the vocational courses
are the vital core of the program. They represent some-
thing related directly to the ambitions of the boys and
girls." But somehow, far more than half of these quit.
How is that?
9.
Let us sum up again. The majority of young people are
faced with the following alternative: Either society is a
34 GROWING UP ABSURD
benevolently frivolous racket in which they'll manage to
boondoggle, though less profitably than the more privi-
leged; or society is serious (and they hope still benevolent
enough to support them) , but they are useless and hope-
lessly out. Such thoughts do not encourage productive life.
Naturally young people are more sanguine and look for
man's work, but few find it. Some settle for a "good job";
most settle for a lousy job; a few, but an increasing num-
ber, don't settle.
I often ask, "What do you want to work at? If you have
the chance. When you get out of school, college, the serv-
ice, etc."
Some answer right off and tell their definite plans and
projects, highly approved by Papa. I'm pleased for them*
but it's a bit boring, because they are such squares.
Quite a few will, with prompting, come out with
astounding stereotyped, conceited fantasies, such as
becoming a movie actor when they are "discovered"
"like Marlon Brando, but in my own way."
Very rarely somebody will, maybe defiantly and defen-
sively, maybe diffidently but proudly, make you know that
he knows very well what he is going to do; it is something
great; and he is indeed already doing it, which is the real
test.
The usual answer, perhaps the normal answer, is "I
don't know," meaning, "I'm looking; I haven't found the
right thing; it's discouraging but not hopeless."
But the terrible answer is, "Nothing." The young man
doesn't want to do anything.
I remember talking to half a dozen young fellows at
Van Wagner's Beach outside of Hamilton, Ontario; and
all of them had this one thing to say: "Nothing." They
didn't believe that what to work at was the kind of thing
one wanted. They rather expected that two or three of
them would work for the electric company in town, but
Jobs 35
they couldn't care less, I turned away from the conversa-
tion abruptly because of the uncontrollable burning tears
in my eyes and constriction in my chest. Not feeling sorry
for them, but tears of frank dismay for the waste of our hu-
manity (they were nice kids). And it is out of that inci-
dent that many years later I am writing this book.
II
Being Taken Seriously
1.
The simple job plight of these adolescents could not be
remedied without a social revolution. Therefore it is not
astonishing if the most well-intentioned public spokesmen
do not mention it at all. In this book we shall come on
other objective factors that are not mentioned. But it is
hard to grow up in a society in which one's important
problems are treated as nonexistent. It is impossible to be-
long to it, it is hard to fight to change it. The effect must
be rather to feel disaffected, and all the more restive if
one is smothered by well-meaning social workers and
PAL's who don't seem to understand the real irk. The
boys cannot articulate the real irk themselves.
For instance, what public spokesman could discuss the
jobs? The ideal of having a real job that you risk your
soul in and make good or be damned, belongs to the
heroic age of capitalist enterprise, imbued with self-right-
eous beliefs about hard work, thrift, and public morals.
Such an ideal might still have been mentioned in public
fifty years ago; in our era of risk-insured semimonopolies
and advertised vices it would be met with a ghastly still-
Being Taken Seriously 37
ness. Or alternately, to want a job that exercises a man's
capacities in an enterprise useful to society, is Utopian an-
archo-syndicalism; it is labor invading the domain of man-
agement. No labor leader has entertained such a thought
in our generation. Management has the "sole prerogative"
to determine the products and the machines. Again, to
speak of the likelihood or the desirability of unemploy-
ment, like Norbert Wiener or J. K. Galbraith, is to be po-
litically nonprofessional. Yet every kid somehow knows
that if he quits school he won't get ahead and the ma-
jority quit.
During, let us say, 1890-1936, on Marxist grounds, the
fight for working conditions, for security, wages, hours,
the union, the dignity of labor, was mentioned, and it gave
the worker or the youth something worth while. But be-
cause of their historical theory of the "alienation of labor"
(that the worker must become less and less in control of
the work of his hands) the Marxist parties never fought
for the man-worthy job itself. It is not surprising now if
workmen accept their alienation, and are indifferent also
to Marxist politics.
2.
When the objective factors cannot be mentioned, however,
other rhetoric is used instead, and in this chapter let us ex-
amine its style, as applied, for instance, to juvenile de-
linquency, on which there is a good deal of oratory.
In our times the usual principle of such speech is that
the others, the delinquent boys, are not taken seriously as
existing, as having, like oneself, real aims in a real world.
They are not condemned, they are not accepted. Instead
they are a "youth problem" and the emphasis is on their
"background conditions," which one can manipulate; they
are said to be subject to "tensions" that one can alleviate.
38 GROWING UP ABSURD
The aim is not to give human beings real goals that war-
rant belief, and tasks to share in, but to re-establish "be-
longing," although this kind of speech and thought is
precisely calculated to avoid contact and so makes belong-
ing impossible. When such efforts don't work, one finally
takes some of the boys seriously as existing and uses force
to make them not exist.
Let me give a childish but important illustration of how
this works out. A boy of ten or eleven has a few great sex-
ual adventures he thinks they're great but then he has
the bad luck to get caught and get in trouble. They try to
persuade him by punishment and other explanations that
some different behavior is much better, but he knows by
the evidence of Ms senses that nothing could be better.
If he gives in, he lives on in a profound disbelief, a disbe-
lief in their candor and a disbelief even of Ms own body
feelings. But if he persists and proves incorrigible, then
the evidence of Ms senses is attached to what is socially
punished, explained away; he may even be put away.
The basic trouble here is that they do not really believe
he has had the sexual experience. That objective factor is
inconvenient for them; therefore it cannot exist. Instead,
tMs is merely a case of insecure affection at home, slum
housing, comic books, and naughty companions: tensions
and conditions. My hunch, as I shall discuss later, is that
tMs kind of early sexual adventure and misadventure is
fairly common in delinquency. It is called precocious, ab-
normal, artificially stimulated, and so forth an index of
future delinquency. In my opinion that's rubbish, but be
that as it may; what is important in a particular case is
that there is a stubborn new fact. Attempting to nullify it
makes further growth impossible (and creates the future
delinquency). The sensible course would be to accept it
as a valuable part of further growth. But if tMs were done,
Being Taken Seriously 39
they fear that the approved little hero would be a rotten
apple to his peers, who now would suddenly all become
precocious, abnormal, artificially stimulated, and prone to
delinquency.
The sexual plight of these children is officially not men-
tioned. The revolutionary attack on hypocrisy by Ibsen,
Freud, Ellis, Dreiser, did not succeed this far. Is it an ec-
centric opinion that an important part of the kids* restive-
ness in school from the onset of puberty has to do with
puberty? The teachers talk about it among themselves, all
right. (In his school, Bertrand Russell thought it was bet-
ter if they had the sex, so they could give their undivided
attention to mathematics, which was the main thing.) But
since this objective factor does not exist in our schools, the
school itself begins to be irrelevant. The question here is
not whether the sexuality should be discouraged or en-
couraged. That is an important issue, but far more impor-
tant is that it is hard to grow up when existing facts are
treated as though they do not exist. For then there is no
dialogue, it is impossible to be taken seriously, to be un-
derstood, to make a bridge between oneself and society.
In American society we have perfected a remarkable
form of censorship: to allow every one his political right
to say what he believes, but to swamp his little boat with
literally thousands of millions of newspapers, mass-circu-
lation magazines, best-selling books, broadcasts, and
public pronouncements that disregard what he says and
give the official way of looking at things. Usually there is
no conspiracy to do this; it is simply that what he says is
not what people are talking about, it is not newsworthy.
(There is no conspiracy, but it is not undeliberate. "If
you mean to tell me," said an editor to me, "that Esquire
tries to have articles on important issues and treats them in
such a way that nothing can come of it who can deny
40 GROWING UP ABSURD
it?" Try, also, to get a letter printed in the New York
Times if your view on the issue calls attention to an essen-
tial factor that is not being generally mentioned.)
Naturally, the more simply true a statement is in any
issue about which everybody is quite confused, the less
newsworthy it will be, the less it will be what everybody
is talking about. When the child in the story said, "But
the Emperor has no clothes!" the newspapers and broad-
casts surely devoted many columns to describing the beau-
tiful new clothes and also mentioned the interesting psy-
chological incident of the child. Instead of being proud of
him, his parents were ashamed; but on the other hand
they received $10,000 in sympathetic contributions to-
ward his rehabilitation, for he was a newsworthy case. But
he had a block in reading.
Where there is official censorship it is a sign that speech
is serious. Where there is none, it is pretty certain that the
official spokesmen have all the loud-speakers.
3.
But let us return to our theme of vocation and develop it a
step further. Perhaps the young fellows really want to do
something, that is, something worth while, for only a
worth-while achievement finishes a doing. A person rests
when he has finished a real job. (The striking illustration of
this is that, statistically, the best mental health used to be
found among locomotive engineers, and is now found
among air-line pilots! The task is useful, exacting, it sets in
motion a big machine, and when it is over, it is done with.)
If the object is important, it gives structure to many a day's
action and dreaming one might even continue in school.
Unfortunately our great society balks us, for it simply does
not take seriously the fact, or the possibility, that people
want this; nor the philosophic truth that except in worth-
Being Taken Seriously 41
while activity there is no way to be happy. For instance, in
a standard questionnaire for delinquents, by Milton Bar-
ron, in a hundred headings there do not appear the ques-
tions, "What do you want to be? What do you want to work
at? What do you want to achieve?" (But Donald Taft's
Criminology, which Barrpn is adapting, has the sentence:
"Absence of vocational interest at the age when it is nor-
mal . . . is tell-tale of a starved life.")
In despair, the fifteen-year-olds hang around and do
nothing at all, neither work nor play. Without a worth-
while prospect, without a sense of justification, the made-
play of the Police Athletic League is not interesting, it is
not their own. They do not do their school work, for they
are waiting to quit; and it is hard, as we shall see, for them
to get part-time jobs. Indeed, the young fellows (not only
delinquents) spend a vast amount of time doing nothing.
They hang around together, but don't talk about any-
thing, nor even if you watch their faces do they pas-
sively take in the scene. Conversely, at the movies, where
the real scene is by-passed, they watch with absorbed
fantasy, and afterward sometimes mimic what they saw.
If there is nothing worth while, it is hard to do any-
thing at all. When one does nothing, one is threatened by
the question, is one nothing? To this insulting doubt, how-
ever, there is a lively response: a system of values center-
ing around threatened grownupness and defensive con-
ceit. This is the so-called "threatened masculinity," not in
the sense of being called a girl, but of being called, pre-
cisely, "boy," the Negro term of insult. With this, there is
an endless compulsion to prove potency and demand es-
teem. The boys don't talk about much of interest, but
there is a vast amount of hot rhetoric to assert that one-
self is "as good as anybody else," no more useless, stupid,
or cowardly. For instance, if they play a game, the in-
terest in the game is weak: they are looking elsewhere
42 GROWING UP ABSURD
when the ball is served, there are lapses in attention,
they smoke cigarettes even while playing handball. The
interest in victory is surprisingly weak: there is not much
glow of self-esteem. But the need for proof is overwhelm-
ing: "I won you, didn' I? I won you last week too, didn*
I?"
During childhood, they played games with fierce in-
tensity, giving themselves as a sacrifice to the game, for
play was the chief business of growth, finding and making
themselves in the world. Now when they are too old
merely to play, to what shall they give themselves with
fierce intensity? They cannot play for recreation, since
they have not been used up.
The proving behavior is endless. Since each activity is
not interesting to begin with, its value does not deepen
and it does not bear much repetition. Its value as proof
quickly diminishes. In these circumstances, the inevitable
tendency is to raise the ante of the compulsive useless ac-
tivity that proves one is potent and not useless. (This
analysis applies equally to these juveniles and to status-
seeking junior executives in business firms and on Madi-
son Avenue.)
It is not surprising then, that, as Frederic Thrasher
says in The Gang, "Other things being equal, the imagina-
tive boy has an excellent chance to become the leader of
the gang. He has the power to make things interesting
for them. He 'thinks up things for us to do/ "
At this point let us intervene and see what the Official
Spokesmen say.
4.
Last summer, after a disastrous week when there were
several juvenile murders, the Governor of New York made
Being Taken Seriously 43
the following statement (New York Times, September 2,
1959):
We have to constantly devise new ways to bring about a
challenge to these young folks and to provide an outlet
for their energies and give them a sense of belonging.
The statement is on the highest level of current states-
manship that is why I have chosen it. It has been coached
by sociologists and psychologists. It has the proper thera-
peutic and not moralistic attitude, and it does not mention
the cops. (The direct appeal to force came a couple of
weeks later, when there were other incidents.)
The gist of it is that the Governor of New York is to
play the role that Thrasher assigns to the teen-age gang
leader. He is to think up new "challenges." (The word
could not have been more unfortunate.) But it is the word
"constantly" that is the clue. A challenge can hardly be
worth while, meaningful, or therapeutic if another must
constantly and obsessively be devised to siphon off a new
threat of "energy." Is not this raising the ante? Solidly
meeting a real need does not have this character.
("The leader," says Thrasher, "sometimes controls the
gang by means of summation, i.e., by progressively urg-
ing the members from one deed to another, until finally
an extreme of some sort is reached.")
My guess is that in playing games the Governor will
not have so lively an imagination as the lad he wants to
displace as leader; unlike the grownups, the gang will
never select him. One of the objective factors that make
it hard to grow up is that Governors are likely to be men
of mediocre humane gifts.
The psychology of the Governor's statement is puzzling.
There are no such undifferentiated energies as he speaks
44 GROWING UP ABSURD
of. There are energies of specific functions with specific
real objects. In the case here they might be partly as
follows: In adolescents a strong energy would be sexual
reaching. For these boys, as for other adolescents, it is
thwarted or imperfectly gratified, but these have probably
not learned so well as others to cushion the suffering and
be patient; so that another strong energy of the delin-
quents would be diffuse rage of frustration, perhaps di-
rected at a scapegoat. If they have been kept from con-
structive activity making them feel worth while, a part of
their energy might be envious and malicious destructive-
ness of property. As they are powerless, it is spite; and as
they are humiliated, it is vengeance. As they feel rejected
and misunderstood, as by governors, their energy is woe;
but they react to this with cold pride, and all the more
fierce gang-loyalty to their peers. For which of these
specific energies does the Governor of New York seriously
plan to devise an outlet? Their own imaginative gang leader
presumably does devise challenges that let off steam for a
few hours.
What is the sociology of "belonging" here? In the great
society they are certainly uprooted. But in the gang their
conformity is sickeningly absolute; they have uniform
jackets and uniform morals. They speak a jargon and no
one has a different idea that might brand him as queer.
Since they have shared forbidden behavior, they are all
in the same mutually blackmailing plight and correspond-
ingly guilty and suspicious toward the outsider. It is a
poor kind of community they have; friendship, affection,
personal helpfulness are remarkably lacking in it; they
are "cool," afraid to display feeling; yet does the Gov-
ernor seriously think that he can offer a good community
that warrants equal loyalty?
Being Taken Seriously 45
5.
More aware of what challenging means, the New York
Youth Board has had a policy more calculated to succeed.
Its principle is provisionally to accept as given the code of
the gang and the kids' potency-proving values and preju-
dices; and then, as an immediate aim, to try to distract
their overt behavior into less annoying and dangerous
channels. This immediate aim is already valuable, for it
diminishes suffering. For instance, there is less suffering
if a youth's addiction is changed from heroin to alcohol, so
long as heroin is illegal and alcohol is legal; the youth is
less in danger and the store that he would rob to pay for
the criminally overpriced narcotic is out of danger.
Then there is the further hope that, accepted by the
wise and permissive adult, the adolescents will gradually
come to accept themselves and the spiral of proving will
be arrested. Further, that the friendship of the trusted
adult will evoke a love (transference) that can then be
turned elsewhere. I take it that this is the Youth Worker
philosophy. In many cases it should succeed.
I am skeptical that it can widely succeed. For here
again the young people are not taken seriously as existing,
as having real aims in the same world as oneself. To the
Youth Board, in their own real world (such as it is), the
code is not acceptable, and the teen-age vaunts and preju-
dices cannot lead to growth in any world. To pretend
otherwise is playing games and continuing to exclude
them from one's own meant world. How then can the boys
be trusting and feel they are understood? Not being
morons, they know they cannot be understood in their
own terms, which are empty to themselves. They know
there is another world beyond, as square and sheepish as
they might please to rationalize it, but which is formida-
46 GROWING UP ABSURD
ble and enviable. (Actually, apart from the code itself
and the sphere of their delinquencies, the kids are models
of conventionality in their tastes, opinions, and igno-
rance.) And though they have a childish need for sym-
pathetic attention and are proud of having compelled it
"We're so bad they give us a youth worker" they are
too old not to demand being taken seriously.
There is a valuable nondirective approach which makes
no judgments or interpretations and gives no advice, but
which simply draws the patient out and holds up a mir-
ror; and this is no doubt also part of the philosophy of the
Youth Board. But then, it must be a therapy, it must hold
up the mirror and risk the explosion of shame and grief,
or the impulsive defenses against them, violent retaliation
or flight. In youth work this is very impractical. It is a
different thing to go along with the patient, or worse to
seem to go along with him, and provide only the reas-
surance of attention.
The philosophy of the Youth Board can succeed only
if the worker can hold out some real objective opportunity,
something more than "interpersonal relations," and make
the boy finally see it. (E.g., at P.S. 43 in New York there
has been an experiment of simply urging the kids to go to
college a far-off goal showing that it is economically
possible for them, and promising that the school will fol-
low up. This alone has resulted in rapid academic ad-
vance, increases in I.Q., and less truancy.)
My hunch is that the occasional spectacular success oc-
curs not because of the "accepting" method, but because
the youth worker does not really belong to the world of
the Youth Board either, and his acceptance is bona fide.
For whatever motive, he confronts the young people as
real. He may be a covert accomplice with the same inner
dilemma as Ms gang, and can pass on a more practical
worldly wisdom. He may be emotionally involved with
Being Taken Seriously 47
some of them, so they are in fact important. He may be
so deeply compassionate or so inspired a teacher that he
creates new interests and values altogether, not the meant
world of the Youth Board which is, after all, just what
had proved unsatisfactory to begin with.
6.
Our society has evolved a social plan, a city plan, an
economy and a physical plant, of which this delinquent
youth is an organic part. The problem is not to get them
to belong to society, for they belong a priori by being the
next generation. The burden of proof and performance is
quite the other way: for the system of society to accom-
modate itself to all its constituent members. But can it be
denied that by and large the official practice is to write
these boys off as useless and unwanted and to try to cajole
or baffle them into harmlessness?
Suppose we look at it the other way. Like any other
constitutional group, they exert an annoying pressure, but
they are inarticulate. In some dumb way they are surely
right, but what the devil do they want? Has much effort
been made to ask them and help them find words? We can
guess that they want two broad classes of things: changes
in the insulting and depriving circumstances that have
made them ornery, spiteful, vengeful, conceited, ignorant,
and callous unable to grow; and objective opportunities
in which to grow.
Let us go back to the Governor. On the same occasion
mentioned above, he issued to the press the following
formal statement:
The problem of juvenile delinquency has no easy rem-
edy. There is no quick or overnight solution. It is com-
pounded of neglect by parents, broken homes, poor
48 GROWING UP ABSURD
living conditions, unhealthy background, economic de-
privation, mental disturbance, and lack of religious
training.
This is not a bad list of background conditions; it satisfies
every popular and scientific theory of etiology. The ques-
tion is, does the Governor seriously not understand how
organic these conditions are in our society? They cannot
be remedied by gimmicks or the busy kind of social work
that offers no new vision or opportunity. He speaks of
broken homes; has he some plan to improve the institu-
tion of modern marriage, especially among folk for whom
it is hardly an institution? The present-day urban poor
are largely Negro and Spanish, they are excluded from
many unions, they often earn less than the minimum
wage, they are unschooled; naturally there is economic
deprivation, poor living conditions. How is their religion
relevant if it is irrelevant to the basic community func-
tions of vocation and war, and wrong on sex? There is
no community and not even a community plan; natu-
rally there is unhealthy background.
What great concerted effort is being led by the Gov-
ernor to remedy these conditions, not overnight, but in
the next five, ten, or twenty years?
Indeed, official policy has often worked to increase de-
linquency rather than remedy it. For instance, in a char-
acteristically earnest analysis, our best authority on hous-
ing, Charles Abrams, has shown how the public-housing
policy has had this effect. Slums have been torn down
wholesale, disrupting established community life. By not
building on vacant land and by neglecting master plan-
ning, our officials have created insoluble problems of
relocation and have vastly increased the number of one-
room flats, making decent family life impossible. (Sup-
Being Taken Seriously 49
pose you were fifteen years old and returned home at 1 1
P.M., as the Mayor urges, to a room with Mama and Papa
in one bed and two little brothers in your bed and a baby
yowling; you might well stay out till four in the morning. )
Also, families are ousted from public housing when their
incomes increase, thus eliminating and penalizing the bet-
ter models; and on the other hand, other families are ex-
pelled on irrelevant moral criteria, without thought of
what becomes of them. And the original income segrega-
tion in large blocks was itself bound to increase tension,
like any segregation. All of this has been official policy.
The picture gets even grimmer if we turn to the quasi-
official graft in Title I that for two- and three-year stretches
has stalled either demolition or construction, while families
pay rent in limbo.
The trouble with Abrams' analysis is that he, Mumford
and others have been saying it aloud for twenty years,
while the New York City Planning Commission has gone
on manufacturing juvenile delinquency.
7.
Now finally (January 1960), the Governor's practical
antidelinquency youth program is offered for legislation.
Let me summarize its chief points: (1) Reduce the age of
felonies to fifteen. (2) Space for 390 more in the forest
camps (added to the 110 now there). (3) Admit a few
older to these camps. (4) Establish "Youth Opportunity
Centers" residences for youths "on the verge of delin-
quency." (5) Provide "halfway houses" for those in tran-
sition from institutions to freedom. (6) Certified board-
ing houses to which the court can direct youngsters. (7)
Ease compulsory continuation school. (8) Permit after-
school work from fourteen to sixteen. (9) Encourage
50 GROWING UP ABSURD
work-and-study programs "to keep potential drop-outs in
school long enough to prepare for employment." (10)
Centralize probation services. (11) Increase probation
staff.
Of these eleven points, eight seem to be aimed primarily
at punishment or control: the boys are really unwanted,
the problem is to render them harmless. Only two (8
and 9) envisage, very unimpressively, any substantive
change whatever. What on earth has happened to the
program of "constantly devising new ways to challenge
these young folks"? But let me call attention to the forest
work-camps (2 and 3). There is good evidence that these
are excellent and have provided a rewarding experience.
But then certainly they should be made available not for
convicted delinquents as such, but for all kids who want
to work there a year. Naturally, however, there is no
money not even for more than five hundred delinquent
boys altogether. The question is whether or not such a
program of camps for many thousand boys is less impor-
tant than one of the Park Commissioner's new highways
to Westchester. Until they will face that question, our pub-
lic officials are not serious.
8.
Positively, the delinquent behavior seems to speak clearly
enough. It asks for what we can't give, but it is in this
direction we must go. It asks for manly opportunities to
work, make a little money, and have self-esteem; to have
some space to bang around in, that is not always some-
body's property; to have better schools to open for them
horizons of interest; to have more and better sex without
fear or shame; to share somehow in the symbolic goods
(like the cars) that are made so much of; to have a com-
munity and a country to be loyal to; to claim attention and
Being Taken Seriously 51
have a voice. These are not outlandish demands. Cer-
tainly they cannot be satisfied directly in our present sys-
tem; they are baffling. That is why the problem is baffling,
and the final recourse is to a curfew, to ordinances
against carrying knives, to threatening the parents, to re-
formatories with newfangled names, and to 1,100 more
police on the street.
Ill
Class Structure
L
In our economy of abundance it is still subject to discus-
sion whether or not there is as much poverty as there was
in the Thirties when "one-third of a nation was ill housed,
ill clothed, ill fed." Some say 20 per cent are poverty-
stricken, some as many as 40 per cent. Census, 1958:
3 1 per cent.
(But it is hard to determine a criterion of poverty. E.g.,
a Negro family in the rich county of Westchester, New
York, might have an income of $4000, yet have to pay so
much rent for substandard housing that it can't make both
ends meet. In New York City novice Puerto Ricans are
fleeced four times as much for a quarter of the space that
experienced citizens manage to find in the same neighbor-
hood.)
Nevertheless, all students would agree on two proposi-
tions: (1) The composition of the poor has changed im-
mensely; it now consists mainly of racial and cultural
minorities, including migrant farm labor. (2) And the
economic relation of the poor to the system has impor-
tantly changed: simply, the earlier minorities, Irish, Jews,
Class Structure 53
Italians, Slavs, poured into an expanding economy that
needed people; the new come into an expanding economy
that does not need people. I would add another important
difference: (3) The relation of the other classes to the
poor has changed. For instance, many readers are no
doubt surprised that there are so many poor and, reading
about it, feel that it is a mere lag, a matter of mopping up,
in our general productive advance. Everything looks
pretty streamlined.
The income pyramid has changed in shape. It used to
be that the most were the poor at the bottom and then,
evenly, fewer and fewer at each level up to a few at the
top. But the meaning of the economy of abundance is
that there are now very many, perhaps even a bulge, at
the lower-middle-income level. These are the people with
semiprofessional and service jobs, the occupational cate-
gory that has grown the most, and who get status salaries;
the skilled and semiskilled in semimonopoly factory jobs,
strongly unionized; the families in which, in our artificially
maintained nearly full employment, the man has two jobs
or the woman also has a job; and families in newly in-
dustrialized areas in the South and Middle West. But
conversely, the poorly paying unskilled jobs have dimin-
ished. It is here that simple automation (e.g., sweeping
the floor in a factory) is allowed full development. Many
categories are not unionized. Sometimes even the mini-
mum wage does not apply. Migratory farm labor, mostly
Negro, is not covered by social insurance. By the conniv-
ance of union and management, Negroes and the new
Spanish minorities are often rejected for apprenticeship.
These poor groups, behindhand to begin with, get less
schooling.
That is, the economy of abundance, the bulge in the
pyramid, means also that those at the bottom tend to fall
out of "society" altogether.
54 GROWING UP ABSURD
Consider it. There is a higher standard of living, more
to conform to in order to be "decent"; it is more expen-
sive to be decently poor. Yet there is a tighter organiza-
tion above that is harder to belong to, so that the stand-
ard is increasingly unattainable for the underprivileged.
So far as economic and vocational causes, poverty and
job uselessness, are factors and they are mighty impor-
tant factors when they add up to being "out" of society
this is a sufficient explanation for juvenile delinquency.
One need go no further. For in such hopeless conditions,
any grounds, of family hostility, unusual childhood frus-
tration, or a gang on the street, will tip the balance. The
question is whether or not this structure is organic in our
present system.
(Let me say at this point, however, that many of the
humble jobs of the poor are precisely not useless, morally.
Farm labor, janitoring, messenger, serving and dish wash-
ing these jobs resist remarkably well the imputation of
uselessness made against the productive society as a
whole. In the potency-ideology of teen-age delinquents,
of course, such jobs are contemptible and emasculating.
But we shall see that they are important for the poverty-
mystique of the more thoughtful of the Beat Generation.)
2.
Recently I attended a conference (Student League for
Industrial Democracy) where poverty was the theme.
Eminent and earnest labor leaders spoke. As the day
wore on I became eerily disturbed at the difference in
tone from such discussions in the Thirties. At last I hit it:
they were talking not political economy but philanthropy.
Partly, maybe, this tone crept in because they were talk-
ing about our poor black and brown brothers. Mostly,
however, it was because their attitude toward poverty is no
Class Structure 55
longer part of their fighting economic theory. As labor
economists, they do not have solidarity with these poor.
When poverty used to be discussed by socialists
these same men younger the theory was that in the
capitalist system labor as a whole must be at the bottom
and must become poorer, because of the falling return on
investment and its pressure on wages, because of the con-
centration of ownership and control and the increase of
inequality, and the periodic crises and unemployment.
Therefore the fight against poverty was solidary; it was
the fight to improve the whole system in order to improve
the position of labor. But now the rate of interest does not
fall; the system cushions its crises; there is high employ-
ment (with significant exceptions) or insurance. There is
certainly a concentration of monopolistic control, but
either inequality is less (that is debatable) or, certainly,
workers on a fairly high standard don't much bother who
has millions. Thus, nostalgic solidarity with poverty turns
into philanthropy and even into exclusion, on issues
where the poor are unassimilable into the abundant
system.
One of the speakers, a portly labor leader, was asked
whether the new income pyramid did not resemble a
middle-aged gentleman with a bulge beneath the middle.
I did not once hear the word "proletariat," and that
made sense. For the word had been used, bitterly and
nobly, in a different theory: "producers of offspring" paid
by the iron law of wages just enough to reproduce labor.
Our present poor are more like the ancient Roman prole-
tariat, producers of offspring kept on the dole for political
reasons. It was clear, too, why the word "do-gooder"
has fallen into mild disrepute. It used to refer, like "muck-
raking," to quixotic attempts to reform the system; now it
is diminishing suffering, accepting the system. (Muck-
raking, in turn, has become the protest of Angry Young
56 GROWING UP ABSURD
Men. My own tone in this book sounds like an Angry
Middle-Aged Man, disappointed but not resigned.)
5.
For those excluded from the high standard and its organ-
ization, it is becoming harder to maintain any American
standard at all. It is characteristic of systems geared to
high pay that it is hard to work for low pay. There are
fewer such jobs; those there are are subject to grueling ex-
ploitation without benefit of union. Low pay generally
means harder work under worse conditions. Prices are,
of course, geared to the high standard; and the use of any
commodity tends to be increasingly tied up with the use of
many other commodities and services that cost money.
For instance, it is very grim to be poor and run a
jalopy. The insurance costs three times as much as the car.
The old car, which is safe at 50 m.p.h., is effectually
barred from parkways made for cars at 65 m.p.h. The
price of gasoline pays for the parkways. The price of re-
pairs is geared to the new cars.
It costs money to have any job at all, but transportation
and lunches, presentable clothes and laundry, are priced
for good wages.
Unless he is capable of a different, inventive or com-
munity culture altogether, a poor person can afford lit-
tle recreation. The popular culture is high priced and he
gets the dregs of it. His poverty tends to degenerate into
stupidity. He cannot afford presentable shoes for the kids
to go to school; they are ashamed and won't go. Thus, in
Peguy's phrase, poverty becomes misery, and the poor be-
long to society less and less.
Class Structure 57
4.
There is little agreement in the sociology of delinquency.
(As I shall discuss later, this is because the concept itself
is confused and so leads to confusing statistics.) But one
correlation that is generally agreed on is that: Juvenile
delinquency, unlike adult crime, is more frequent in years
of economic prosperity than in years of depression. Now,
this would seem to contradict the other, and rather prima
facie, theory of poverty as the important condition. The
paradox is softened by pointing out that in prosperity
there is more employment of women, more divorce, more
money to buy liquor and drugs. These factors make sense,
but let me raise some further considerations.
First, there is the possibility that the prosperous well-
paying jobs do not filter down evenly to the poorest
groups, who tend much more to be unemployable. This
certainly seems to be our situation today. Second, in a
high-standard economy, there is a vast difference between
having a little extra money and being accustomed to the
well-paid standard. As our Manchester forefathers used
to say, you do a disservice to the undeserving poor by
giving them money, because they will get into trouble.
Consider the concrete situation: Even if the parents are
suddenly getting better pay, the young are getting merely
a little extra spending money, and this, in a society in
which there is suddenly a lot of money, must work out as
follows: (1) The underprivileged kids get around more
and are exposed to the expensive glamour, but (2) this is
precisely not attainable by them unless they take short
cuts. (3) Meantime, those who have the new money are
more careless with it: they leave their cars unlocked,
buy sex, drink too much. And (4) the spiteful feeling is
increased, that those who are better off are squares, en-
58 GROWING UP ABSURD
emies, and fair victims of the gang. In boom time, that is,
there is effectually more exclusion than ordinarily.
During depression, contrariwise, there is more commu-
nity because many others are in the same boat. The street
is occupied by kids used to other mores, to whom the
gang values are pointless. This leads to friction, but also
to other friendships and other "things to do," But above
all, as everybody knows who was unemployed during the
Great Depression, it is easier to be decently poor when
prices are low and the pressure to maintain appearances
is diminished. Things get nearer to a human scale and life
makes more sense. Likewise, at such times political ac-
tivity is more common, an education that increases self-
esteem in a worth-while way.
This whole picture would be quite different if the un-
derprivileged and somewhat unemployable families had a
pretty good secure income over a long period. They would
then be members of society at least as consumers, and
would eventually become as employable as the average.
Such a condition would at once diminish certain kinds of
underprivileged delinquency, e.g., thefts, malicious mis-
chief, certain spiteful assaults, and maybe truancy. Simply
to subsidize the poor might be the cheapest way of coping
with their juvenile delinquency. To re-establish in general
what he calls the social balance, J. K. Galbraith proposes
such a high long-time subsidy for all unemployed. He
assures us that this would not be inflationary, and as the
one-time director of price controls for the OP A he should
know.
The popular bright idea to diminish delinquency is to
penalize the parents; and perhaps the effective method
would be, rather, to give them money to spend, a kind of
prize!
Class Structure 59
5.
At present, however, our society is settling for the first
time in its history into a rigid class system. (Somewhere
we missed out on equality, and this is now threatening our
flexibility and stability.) It is not that individuals may not
move from grade to grade there is perhaps even more
individual mobility than ever. But the statuses themselves
are more rigid; there is less easy gradation, and there is
less opportunity to make one's unique "classless" place.
One is more definitely in or out, and in a more definite
rank.
At the bottom are the poor, "outside" of society. Next
are those groups who are in the organized system of pro-
duction: (1) Those who are "in" but couldn't care less
about the production and distribution, like the factory
operatives mentioned in the first chapter. These are paid the
lower-middle-income wages, say $4,000 to $6,000. They
buy on credit and have to keep on the job to make both
ends meet. If the work week is shortened to thirty hours,
without a commensurate loss of income, there is evidence
that they get other, part-time, jobs to buy still more re-
frigerators. (2) The next status who are "in" are the
Organization Men proper, whose hours, thoughts, families,
play, and peace of mind are dedicated to maintaining
their positions in their particular firms and pushing upward
there or in some other firms. Salary $7,500 to $20,000. It
is this group the junior executives, for instance that we
have compared to the juvenile delinquents for their safe
conformity and competitive individuality. We shall see
that another important trait in common is having no real
activity, but living by role playing.
(W. H. Whyte, Jr., the Hesiod of this tribe, pleads for
individuality to offset the conformity of organization life.
60 GROWING UP ABSURD
He, rather cynically, fails to see that such polar "in-
dividuality" is the conformity by which a man advances; it
is one-upping, The only offset to the organization is na-
ture or worth-while objects; but the necessary, useful, and
pleasant, and the good, true, and beautiful are not much
mentioned in his book.) (3) At the top, finally, are the
nine hundred managers figure from Fortune magazine
whose task is to minimize risk and maximize production
and sales. Also the fifty governors, the federal staff, heads
of foundations, etc.
It will be seen that these three statuses in the organized
system (which includes bigger business, organized labor,
entertainment, government, bigger education, etc.) are
engaged primarily in keeping the system itself running
and slowly expanding. The most self-aware of its mem-
bers are the middle-status intellectuals, among the ad-
vertising men, salesmen, and junior executives; and they
describe the system as the Rat Race. So W. H. Whyte,
Jr. J. K. Galbraith, however, describes it differently:
"Among the many models of the good society, no one has
urged the squirrel wheel." It is interesting to contrast the
different species of imagined rodents between those who
are running the race and the scholar who is contemplating
it with wonder.
But there is another large class: those who do not
properly belong to the system and are not yet submerged
into the poor "outside" of society: this is the vast herd of
the old-fashioned, the eccentric, the criminal, the gifted,
the serious, the men and women, the rentiers, the free-
lances, the infants, and so forth. This motley collection
has, of course, no style or culture, unlike the organization
that has our familiar American style and popular culture.
Its fragmented members hover about the organization in
multifarious ways running specialty shops, trying to teach
or to give other professional services, robbing banks, land-
Class Structure 61
scape gardening, and so forth but they find it hard to
get along, for they do not know the approved techniques
of promoting, getting foundation grants, protecting them-
selves by official unions, legally embezzling, and not blurt-
ing out the truth or weeping or laughing out of turn. They
have no style at all, and it is understandable that neither
they nor their usually rather irrelevant enterprises make
much headway in the market, the universities, entertain-
ment, politics, or labor. Besides, they often speak a mi-
nority language, English.
This is roughly the class structure of America in the
middle of the twentieth century. It seems most func-
tional to speak of three classes, the Poor, the Organiza-
tion, and the Independents; and of three statuses within
the dominant class, the Organization. Viz. :
I. Organized System:
1 . Workers
2. Organization Men
3. Managers
II. Poor
III. Independents
6.
Let us return now to our alert young man of average to
good attainments and imagine him growing up in and
into this arena. Most likely he will go to work for an Or-
ganization, in a factory or service job, manual or clerical,
with the corresponding job attitude and way of life. But if
he has been to college, he will likely be in the second status
of the organized system, in business management, com-
munications, sales or technology, with its job attitude and
way of life.
After a few years, many such young men will perceive
that they are in a Rat Race. The young workers will per-
62 GROWING UP ABSURD
ceive it as the work speeds up, when they get married, as
their installment payments fall due. The Organization Man
will perceive it as competition, company pressure to con-
form, etc. Of these, most will race on, but a few will balk
and stop running. Now what becomes of these few?
They are not likely to choose the other, motley, alterna-
tive of trying to remain in society independent of the or-
ganization. For their experience has been disillusioning.
They have become hip. (We shall see later that this is a
profoundly organizational attitude.) They know that the
independent unorganized are up against it; for they
have learned techniques of promotion and they don't
think much, or much think, of other methods and kinds of
results. But to be hip and cynical are not attitudes that
prompt one to make a go on one's own. It is not surprising
then that many of those who balk in the Rat Race will
voluntarily choose the other remaining possibility, poverty
"outside" society (whether they choose it, or fall into it,
comes to the same thing). These, not boys, but early dis-
illusioned, hip, and resigned young men, are the Beat
Generation. The organization they have quit may be the
armed forces or a university that they cannot compound
with; these tend to be more naive. Those who have had
experience of working for a firm and making a pretty good
living tend to be more cynical.
Naturally this cataclysmic transition, between being in
and being "outside" society, does not occur without strong
accompanying emotional moments: betrayals in love,
binges, blow-ups at the boss, addiction to forbidden
haunts and vices. But at this point let us stick to the social
structure of it.
Class Structure 63
7.
It is relevant to introduce the Beat Generation in this con-
text of present-day poverty because the present-day com-
position of the poor in America Negroes, Puerto Ricans
and Mexicans, migrant farm labor, with large urban ju-
venile delinquency has been fateful for the particular
culture of these young folks. Let us try to analyze the ac-
cidental and essential influences, as an interesting ex-
ample of acculturation.
Artists and bohemians have always gravitated to the
bottom of the income pyramid. It is cheaper there. There
is less timetable. Life is simpler and more factual. These
factors operate somewhat today too, but less so, because
in some ways it now costs more to be poor than modestly
lower-middle; and in many of their tastes, e.g., clothes,
cars, recreation, and even food, the poor are even more
idiotic than the average. So let us see what is particular in
the cultural effect of present-day poverty on present-day
bohemians.
(1) The Afro-Negro and Spanish, and a part of the
migrant and delinquent, influence on Beat culture is in-
evitable but accidental. Resigning, the Beats have chosen
to be outside, and the present poor happen to be those
who, as unorganized minorities, are outside when they ar-
rive. The poor might have been Chinese; the narcotics might
have been different, or there might have been some kick
other than narcotics; the music might have been some-
thing other than Negro jazz; the jargon might not have
had a Negro base; and perhaps there might be less going
on the road though this ants-in-the-pants moving about
is pervasive in American society. (See Appendix E.)
What I am saying here will be defined by the Beats them-
selves, for to them every aspect of their scene is equally
GROWING UP ABSURD
relevant and precious. But if these aspects of their culture
were not accidental, such bright and inventive fellows
would by now have made more out of them. As they
practice them, the bongo drums and jazz are childish, in
the light of their knowledge and abilities. The jazz-and-
poetry is feeble compared even to the TV commercial
jingles that they have turned away from. The jive lan-
guage embarrasses their poetry. The style of the particu-
lar drugs remains crude and experimental. Much of the
delinquency rouses in them guilt and fear, instead of de-
fiant approval or calm righteousness (contrast the style
and depth of Jean Genet with similar material) .
(2) On the other hand, the structural characteristics
of present-day poor society those that did not especially
belong to the poor of older bohemias are essential in
the culture of those who gravitate to these poor, for they
too do not "belong." These include: Outcastness and
being objects of prejudice. Giving up trying to explain to
those who, often literally, do not speak the same lan-
guage. Protective exclusiveness and in-group loyalty. Fear
of the cops. Economic and job uselessness. Courageously
taking up, or remaining with, substitutes for community,
rather than sinking in mere resignation (but this courage
is common to many kinds of poor) . Exotic, or at least not-
standard-American, arts and folkways.
These structural characteristics of the present-day poor
are essential in Beat culture. As, contrariwise, are the
organizational characteristics of being hip and convinced
that society is a Rat Race. This combination, we shall see,
mesmerizes them into behaving as though they were
trapped in a Closed Room and must live on their own
guts, without available environment.
(3) But finally, there are essential traits of Beat cul-
ture that go counter to the social traits of the poor whom
they have chosen. These comprise the essential morality,
Class Structure 65
and morals are acculturated least. One striking trait is
nonconformism and tolerance in sexual and racial ques-
tions and behavior. The poor Negroes or Puerto Ricans
may be estranged from the standard customs and preju-
dices, but they are all the more narrow about their
own. In the case of the delinquents, of course, this narrow
conformity is so extravagant as to be dangerous: they
cannot inwardly tolerate anything that hints that their own
image of perfection is questionable. It is hard to be sure,
but my impression is that the poor of other times, at
the bottom but in society, were among the most tolerant.
Hard knocks had taught them to live and let live; and they
did not need to protect their repressions so much as the
outcast poor. In this respect the Beats are more like the
old-fashioned poor, and this of course makes it easier and
more profitable for them to be poor.
This brings us to another striking difference. Despite
having minority traditions of their own, our present poor
are absolute sheep and suckers for the popular culture
which they cannot afford, the movies, sharp clothes, and
up to Cadillacs. Indeed, it is likely that the popular culture
is aimed somewhat at them, as the lowest common de-
nominator. I do not mean that this is not a reasonable
compensation, like the Englishman's liquor and the Irish-
man's betting on the horses. Everybody has got to have
something, and so poor people show off and feel big by
means of the standard of living. But in these circumstances
it is immensely admirable that the Beat Generation has
contrived a pattern of culture that, turning against the
standard culture, costs very little and gives livelier satis-
faction. It is a culture communally shared, in small
groups. Much of it is handmade, not canned. Some of It
is communally improvised. We shall speak later about
the limitations of this procedure and the weakness of its
products; but the fact of it, of a culture that is communal
66 GROWING UP ABSURD
and tending toward the creative, is so capital that it must
have a future, and it is worth while to study its ground-
ing and economy.
8.
Beat economics underline human difficulties peculiar to
the modern-American-standard economy. The Beats have
a mystique of Voluntary Poverty. But how to get along at
all in a high-standard economy if one has dropped "out-
side" and has no incentive to work and "make good"?
In our times, the distinction between Case Poverty, due
to illness, accidents, or personality defects, and Class Pov-
erty, due to social underprivilege, doesn't amount to
much. Personal and social play into each other. For it
could be asked: Why wasn't the accident insured? What
social conditions formed such a careless personality? Or,
conversely, Doesn't the poor class have, economically, a
personality defect? (Just as in the Protestant Ethic the
poor had a theological defect; but of course it is also per-
sistently true that "only the poor are saved.") Likewise,
the old monastic concept of voluntary poverty is no
longer much distinguishable from either case poverty
or class poverty, for it happens that a person cannot con-
tinue the Rat Race, it makes him sick; and he chooses out,
to survive. Another man would like to be rich and famous
and he works hard; but he cannot work otherwise than
the work demands, but such work might not be market-
able; so he could be said to "choose" poverty. In an organ-
ized system, all poor tend to be the same poor. (The same
blurring of distinctions has occurred between "political**
and "common" criminals. As society becomes more close-
knit and total, a criminal act may well be a dumb political
gesture, and political protest is certainly taken as criminal.
So the anarchist philosopher refused to distinguish be-
Class Structure 67
tween these and said, "As long as one of these is in jail,
I am not free.")
It makes little difference, then, whether a young fellow
chooses his lot or is cast among the poor; especially if,
being there, he soon takes on habits which make it diffi-
cult for him, or unattractive to him, to belong to the
system.
Suppose, then, that with pretty good awareness our
scarred young man is now confirmed poor. He must still
face the problem of vocation and money. On these points
the writers on the Beat Generation are confused. For one
thing, they have a false notion that the kind of artistic
activity that proliferates among the Beats is art, and gives
the justification of art as a vocation. It is not art but
something else, and they do not behave as if they were
justified by it. (We shall return to this later at length.)
The problem of money, again, seems simple, but is not.
In voluntary poverty the problem is to get enough to
subsist. (Money is called "bread.") But how? In his book
The Holy Barbarians, Lawrence Lipton gives a considera-
ble list of jobs that Beats take, generally temporarily. The
principle is that anything will do. A fellow might work in
the organized system, e.g., dressing a window at Macy's;
but, it is argued, he would not thereby be in the Rat Race,
because he just wants "bread" and will quit. Naturally
Macy's didn't know this when they hired him, so he's using
them, not they him. This might come to pretending to
conform rather elaborately, for the system is total; e.g., a
fellow will get the job if he shaves off his beard. Work is no
different from shoplifting. One plays roles and is hip.
(Money is now called "loot.")
What is not understood in this form of reasoning is that
playing roles and being hip in this way is very nearly the
same as being an Organization Man, for he doesn't mean
it either. Obviously the Holy Barbarian is here on shaky
68 GROWING UP ABSURD
ground. Getting his "loot/* he is an exploiter of labor, but
only a little bit. (The integral aim of useful man's-work is
not mentioned by Lipton.)
Let me make a close analogy so close that it is prob-
ably an identity between the job in voluntary poverty
and the service in wartime that a pacifist can agree to per-
form. Nearly any civilian job that a man does advances
the war. If he picks beans he replaces a farmer for the
war factory. Pacifists have commonly accepted such a job
as attendant in a hospital, which is understaffed anyway.
This is not a petty problem, for when the evil, as they see
it, is general and close-knit, it is necessary to preserve
one's personal integrity if only to influence the future
when the emergency is past. Anyone who does not un-
derstand this and the hairsplitting involved, will not un-
derstand ingenuous youth. During the last great war many
a young fellow went to a conscientious-objector's camp
in order to avoid war work, and then left the camp in dis-
gust and went to jail because the camp work was boon-
doggling.
Among some of the Beats, such a principle of integrity
is clearly operating in the choice of job. To recapitulate
an earlier paragraph in this chapter: Many of the hum-
ble jobs of the poor are precisely not useless (or exploit-
ing). Farm labor, hauling boxes, janitoring, serving and
dish washing, messenger these jobs resist the imputation
of uselessness (or exploitation) made against the produc-
tive society as a whole. These are preferred Beat jobs.
For one thing, in them no questions are asked and no
beards have to be shaved. Nor is this an accidental
connection. Personal freedom goes with unquestioned
moral utility of the job, for at the level of simple physical
effort or personal service, the fraudulent conformity of the
organized system sometimes does not yet operate; the job
speaks for itself.
Class Structure 69
But on the other hand, such jobs, being hard and use-
ful, are the most miserably exploited. E.g., hospital work-
ers who struck for a union in 1959 in New York City
were getting $34 a week the minimum wage not apply-
ing because they were in eleemosynary institutions! Mi-
gratory farmers average less than $900 a year and are not
welcome in the neighborhood. The big money is in the
system. So unorganized wages are low. Yet the price of
subsistence at the market is standard high. Taking such a
job, a man loses his freedom, he never stops working. He
is used and made a fool of by the system, and this is in
itself dishonorable. This is the dilemma of voluntary pov-
erty in our society: either to compromise one's integrity
(but then why bother?), or to be abused and made a
fool of.
(As one way out, let me recommend Scheme III of
Communitas, by my brother and myself. We suggest
dividing the economy into two parts: the subsistence
economy and the high-standard economy. In the sub-
sistence part, run absolutely for use, everybody will work
less than one year in seven and be guaranteed his sub-
sistence for life. The rest of the time he can work in the
high-standard economy for high wages, or do nothing at
all, as he pleases. This plan would seem exactly to meet
the need of voluntary poverty: to work with perfect in-
tegrity at the absolutely necessary, and to have the
maximum of freedom for noneconomical activity.)
9.
To sum up: In these first chapters our youth is already
fairly grown-up (fifteen to twenty-five years old), and
confronting the external and definite problems of jobs and
money. We have seen what kinds of opportunities are
open to Mm, either in or out of the organized system, and
70 GROWING UP ABSURD
what kind of public attention he can expect if he makes a
nuisance of himself.
My emphasis so far has been on underprivileged con-
ditions, because we have been discussing "problematic"
cases "outside" of society. In the following chapters, how-
ever, when we turn to the earlier and character-molding
factors that impede growth, we shall see that they apply
even more particularly to "unproblematic" youth,
whether growing up in the middle class or the working
class. (I do not mention the upper class simply because
its numbers are few and it stands for nothing. All ideology
and culture in America at present springs from the mid-
dle status of the organized system.)
My thought is that the average adjusted boy is, if any-
thing, more humanly wasted than the disaffected. So let us
go on to discuss his stupidity, his lack of patriotism, his
sexual confusion, and his lack of faith.
IV
Aptitude
Our subject is the present waste of human resources. Yet
this waste is nothing new. Considering our wonderful fac-
ulties and powers, people on the average have never ac-
complished much. Regarded just as machines of virtue,
pleasure, wisdom, battle, or friendship, we have always
operated at a tiny fraction of capacity. TTiis is evident if
we contrast how people usually hang around with how peo-
ple come across in emergencies, or when they are en-
thusiastic, or when they are calmly absorbed. Children
find the average inactivity very painful and they nag,
"What can I do? Tell me something to do." Adolescents
are restive hanging around, and they think up ways to
make trouble. Adults are inured to it, and Schopenhauer
claimed that boredom is a metaphysical attribute of the
World as Will.
Psychologically, we define boredom as the pain a per-
son feels when he's doing nothing or something irrele-
vant, instead of something that he wants to do but won't,
can't, or doesn't dare. Boredom is acute when he knows
the other thing and inhibits his action, e.g., out of polite-
72 GROWING UP ABSURD
ness, embarrassment, fear of punishment or shame. Bore-
dom is chronic if he has repressed the thought of it and no
longer is aware of it. A large part of stupidity is just this
chronic boredom, for a person can't learn, or be intelligent
about, what he's not interested in, when his repressed
thoughts are elsewhere. (Another large part of stupidity
is stubbornness, unconsciously saying, "I won't, you can't
make me.")
Certainly a large part of our common wasteful inactiv-
ity is this neurosis of chronic boredom. Certain aims are
forbidden and punishable, or unattainable and painful; so
we inhibit them and put them out of mind. In a vicious
circle, the repression then makes the idea of the aims
seem threatening: the aims are now rejected also in our-
selves. So we are bored and inactive. We see how boredom
easily turns into apathy, the lack of incentive. (The next
chapter, on Patriotism, will try to show that it is hard to
grow up when the community lacks big incentives.)
At first this Sunday-afternoon neurosis, of lively chil-
dren brought to a pause, is worse among the middle
class than among the poor, for the middle class is less
permissive, it has stricter standards to maintain and more
expensive furniture to protect. But by adolescence it is
generally evident in all classes of the young, hanging
around, reading comic books, or watching TV. It is evi-
dent in their notion of what is acceptable behavior in their
groups, in their sexual paranoia, in their inability to think
up anything interesting. Their hearts are elsewhere and
they don't remember where. Many boys are afraid to be
alone with themselves, because they might masturbate,
which in itself may be an activity of boredom.
All this has long been with us, and formerly perhaps it
was worse than it is now, for now there is more permissive-
ness for small children and more rationality about sexual-
ity. In this chapter, however, I want to discuss another
Aptitude 73
factor altogether: ineptitude, npt knowing how; the situa-
tion In which, even if they know their aims, children
don't know the means or can't manage the means. I pro-
pose that in this respect our present system is uniquely
bad and getting worse. For ironically, just in our times,
when science and technology are so advanced, this factor
of ineptitude also increases, and children become practi-
cally more stupid.
2.
It is notorious that the physical plant and social environ-
ment have grown out of human scale. To achieve sim-
ple goods it is often necessary to set in motion immense
masses. In scarcity, where the means are unavailable,
we wistfully renounce the ends. In an abundant economy,
there is a plethora of means of what a person doesn't
really want. Middle-class parents know from bitter experi-
ence that billions of dollars are spent annually for chil-
dren's toys and teen-age junk that are not really wanted
and lie idle. But furthermore, even if the end is desira-
ble, the means often become so complicated that one
is discouraged from starting out. For instance, it's too
complicated on a hot day to travel two hot hours to get to
a cool place when so many others have had the same idea
that it's hot there too. To adults, such complicated means
are irritating and take the joy out of life. To children
growing up, they are disastrous because they make it im-
possible to learn by doing. The sense of causality is lost.
Initiative is lost. And one ends with the idea that noth-
ing can be changed.
We must remember that to children the city plan and
social plan we present them with are like inevitable facts
of nature. Unless they have architects or builders in the
family, they cannot realize that the buildings were drawn
74 GROWING UP ABSURD
by somebody on a piece of paper and could have been
different. Unless their parents teach them otherwise, they
believe that compulsory school attendance is a divine
creation and it is a sin to be absent.
It is, of course, very difficult to judge the environment
concretely from the child's point of view. Thus, living in
a big city does not as such make a child inept, though
any city has very complicated means. The city is short on
farm work, swimming holes, and animals to trap; but
it has docks, freight-car yards, labyrinthine basements,
pavements to chalk up, and subway trains to play tag on.
The streets are littered with the remarkable junk of a
thousand trades, to hoard and make things with. The in-
genuity of New York ball games adapted to various im-
probable fields and obstacles is a model of rule making
and rational debate that any senate might emulate: it
sizes up the situation, argues, decides, and gets things done
that work. The London Street Games compiled by Norman
Douglas is no contemptible manual of traditional culture.
History teaches that cities have made people smart be-
cause of their mixed peoples, mixed manners, and mixed
learning. On the whole, cities have probably trained more
intelligent children than the country. But we must re-
member, too, that until recently cities have been continu-
ally replenished from the country. City people had coun-
try cousins, and drew on both influences. There could be
a powerful educative effect if a country boy came to the
city and was exposed to bewildering new ways, or if a
city boy visited the country and was exposed to space,
woods, and cows.
5.
There is probably a point of complexity at which, cut off
from the country, the city ceases to advance beyond
Aptitude 75
country backwardness; it becomes impractical and begins
to induce its own kind of stupefaction and ineptness. The
endless city-spread of suburbs makes the real farming and
open country unavailable. The city becomes the only
world, getting duller as one leaves the center, through first
the inner ring of blight and then the deadly dormitories
and suburbs.
Within the big metropolises at present, industry and
commerce are shut off and concealed. The freight yards go
underground. Manufacture is in great walled plants on the
outskirts. In New York, even the Hudson River and its
ships are cut off by impassable through-highways, and
stupid planning has provided a mile of child-useless land-
scaping, so that few kids get down to the river any more
to fish. The newer high dwellings make the streets inac-
cessible to small children. The automobiles make the
streets dangerous.
Also the streets are strange, because there is a loss of
neighborhood. This is due not only to bad planning but to
the greatly increased mobility of families. Children are
torn from their school chums and this destroys culture.
For instance, the street games and game songs that I re-
member, in New York 1911-1921, were the ancient Lon-
don (Dublin?) games; and this tradition has now consid-
erably faded. But it is not easily that a new child-tradition
could develop, especially among minorities of various cul-
tures. Quite the contrary, history and bad social planning
have conspired to create in New York huge income and
cultural ghettos it makes no difference whether low-in-
come or high-income; children of all classes are equally
deprived of the human community. Whereas mixing
sharpens intelligence, any segregated differences create
prejudice and make people stupid.
The very space has been crushingly pre-empted. The
cars in New York seem finally to have discouraged many
76 GROWING UP ABSURD
of the ball games; we see boys going a mile to find a Sun-
day-deserted parking lot to play stickball which previously
they played on their own street with the small children
chosen in. With increasing traffic, the policing is more
strict. In Los Angeles 40 per cent of the area will be
swallowed up by the cloverleaves and express highways
so that people can drive bumper to bumper in and out
of Los Angeles! This is certainly out of human scale and is
a dead loss for skating and bicycles. In Northern cities,
the snow is never allowed to pile up; city sleighing is
finished. The streamlined functional architecture is bare
of useful stoops.
In brief, concealed technology, family mobility, loss of
the country, loss of neighborhood tradition, and eating up
of the play space have taken away the real environ-
ment. The city, under inevitable modern conditions, can
no longer be dealt with practically by children.
Consider the dehumanizing complexity of the
city just as a problem in municipal adminis-
tration. In New York City "in charge of hous-
ing are many agencies, some for housing the
poor, some for housing generally, some agents
of the city, but others agents of the state and
federal governments. They are, in part, the
Housing Authority, the Mayor's Commission
on Slum Clearance and Urban Renewal, the
Comptroller's Office, the Board of Estimate, the
Bureau of Real Estate, the Department of
Buildings, and the State and Federal Housing
Agencies. Meantime, unco-ordinated with these,
there are agencies in charge of location of
schools (Board of Education), and playgrounds
and parks (Parks) . Transportation by rail falls
to the Transit Authority, but if it is automotive
it may fall to the Port Authority (for certain
highways, tunnels, and bridges) or the Tribor-
Aptitude 77
ough Authority (for other highways, etc.).
When cars are moving or parked in the streets
they belong to the Traffic Department, and
safety in general belongs to the Police. Nobody
as such attends to the specific relation of work-
ers and their particular industries, the cause of
all this commuting, but there are zoning laws
for broad kinds of occupancy, under the City
Planning Commission. Neighborhood quarrels,
family disruption, delinquency, etc., might be
handled by the Police and various social agen-
cies. Other departments, too, have a hand in the
community planning of New York, e.g., Public
Works; Gas, Water and Electricity; etc.
It seems reasonable to ask if the integration of
these functions is not relevant? but nobody is in
charge of that. To give a partial list: housing,
slum clearance, location of industries, adequate
schools and teachers, transportation, clear
streets, traffic control, social work, racial har-
mony, master planning, recreation. The list
could be long extended, not to speak of a beau-
tiful city and local pride. Apart from such a uni-
fied view, the solution of this or that isolated
problem inevitably leads to disruption else-
where. Escape thoroughfares must aggravate
central traffic. Slum clearance as an isolated
policy must aggravate class stratification and
delinquency. New subways aggravate conurba-
tion. "Housing" makes for double-shift and
overcrowded classrooms. No master plan guar-
antees foolishness like the Lincoln Square proj-
ect. These consequent evils produce new evils
among them. . . .
(Communitas, Appendix D.)
Even so, confusing as these factors are and much as
they cut down the available child-games and child-objects.
78 GROWING UP ABSURD
it is hard to know what things look like from the child's-
eye view. For instance, the new public housing seems
after a few years to swarm like any old-fashioned slum
and is perhaps developing its own worth-while child cul-
ture. At first, active boys shunned the official playgrounds,
but now, driven by necessity, they have agreed to take
them over and turn them to thek own uses, games, adven-
ture, necking, and battle.
4.
My guess is that, in city, suburb, and small town, the chief
unambiguously retarding influence of the complicated
technology acts on the children through the ineptitude of
the grownups just as the stultifying effect of the movies
is not that the children see them but that thek parents do,
as if Hollywood provided a plausible adult recreation to
grow up into.
People use machines that they do not understand and
cannot repair. For instance, the electric motors: one can-
not imagine anything more beautiful and educative than
such motors, yet there may be three or four in a house,
cased and out of sight; and when they blow they are
taken away to be repaked. Thek influence is then retard-
ing, for what the child sees is that competence does not
exist in ordinary people, but in the system of interlocking
specialties. This is unavailable to the child, it is too ab-
stract. Children go shopping with Mama; but supermar-
ket shopping for cellophane packages is less knowledge-
able and bargainable than the older shopping, as well as
providing tasteless Texas fruit and vegetables bred for
nonperishability and appearance rather than for eating.
Cooking is more prefabricated. Few clothes are sewn. Fire
and heat are not made. Among poor people there used to
be more sweated domestic industry, which didn't do the
Aptitude 79
adults any good but taught something to small children.
Now, on the contrary, the man and perhaps the woman of
the house work in distant offices and factories, increas-
ingly on parts and processes that don't mean anything
to a child. A child might not even know what work his
daddy does. Shop talk will be, almost invariably, griping
about interpersonal relations. If the kid has less confidence
that he can make or fix anything, his parents can't either;
and what they do work at is beyond his grasp.
Parents, especially fathers, feel that this way of life
offers too little to their children, especially the sons. They
tend to blame it on the city just as many dog lovers will
not keep dogs in the city. Some guiltily give the kids more
money to go to the movies. Others choose the suburbs,
where they can putter and fix, even though they thereby
limit their own lives in other ways. We must return to
the meaning of this fateful move.
5.
Let me give a dismal illustration of the case at its worst.
At an underprivileged school in Harlem, they used to test
the intelligence of all the children at two-year intervals.
They found that every two years each advancing class
came out ten points lower in "native intelligence." That is,
the combined efforts of home influencing and school edu-
cation, a powerful combination, succeeded in making the
children significantly stupider year by year; if they had a
few more years of compulsory home ties and compulsory
education, all would end up as gibbering idiots. In this
same school a new principal, with a better staff, more
personal attention to the kids, and more progressive meth-
ods and also willing to give his own time for social work
among the parents has reversed the trend. One method
to remedy stupidity that he swears by is to invite the
80 GROWING UP ABSURD
free expression of criticism and hostility, e.g., "Write a
composition telling why you hate your father why you
hate school why you hate me."
6.
It was just to this deepening crisis of boredom, lack of
personal engagement, cultural irrelevance, and ineptitude,
in conditions of mass industry and mass education, that
the movement called progressive education addressed it-
self. It is now moribund, but it can be revived. Its history
in our century, however, is immensely instructive.
The pragmatism, instrumentalism, and technologism
of James, Dewey, and Veblen were leveled against the
abuses and ideals of the then dominant class: the Four
Hundred and the Robber Barons academic culture,
caste morals and formal religion, unsocial greed. The
philosophers were concerned about abundant production,
social harmony, practical virtues, and more honest per-
ception and feeling, which would presumably pertain to
the rising group of technicians, social-scientific adminis-
trators, and organized labor. (As a symbol of the "leisure-
class culture" that they were attacking, they chose the
"classical" culture of Greece, founded on slavery.) In that
early turn of the century, these philosophers failed to pre-
dict that precisely with the success of the managers, tech-
nicians, and organized labor, the "achieved" values of
efficient abundant production, social harmony, and one
popular culture would produce even more devastatingly
the things they did not want: an abstract and inhuman
physical environment, a useless economy, a caste sys-
tem, a dangerous conformity, a trivial and sensational
leisure, (So that now we tend to think of the Greek polis
as an "integral community," making a public use of lei-
Aptitude 81
sure and having a perfected education of the whole man,
whereas we have fragments.)
Yet midway in this transition from the old tycoon-and-
clergyman culture to the new managerial organization,
there was crystallized a practical method of education
with the defects of neither extreme (and in many ways
strangely like Greek education); and it was given a
sounding board especially by the daring Twenties. Pro-
gressive education drew on every radical idea since the
middle of the eighteenth century, in pedagogy, politics,
socialist and communitarian theory, epistemology, esthet-
ics, anthropology, and psychiatry. It was as if progressive
education resolved that in the education of the children
there should be no missed revolutions and no unfinished
situations.
In its heyday, progressive education was not sectarian.
Diiferent schools laid the emphasis in different places
Dewey was more experimental, Russell more rational,
Neill more sex-reformist, the people around Goddard and
Antioch more communitarian, Berea more "handicrafts,"
Black Mountain more "creative," Muste and Fincke more
political-economical, and so forth. But I think that almost
all schools would have accepted, in varying degrees, all
of the following positions:
To learn theory by experiment and doing.
To learn belonging by participation and self-rule.
Permissiveness in all animal behavior and interper-
sonal expression.
Emphasis on individual differences.
Unblocking and training feeling by plastic arts, eurhyth-
mies and dramatics.
82 GROWING UP ABSURD
Tolerance of races, classes, and cultures.
Group therapy as a means of solidarity, in the staff
meeting and community meeting.
Taking youth seriously as an age in itself.
Community of youth and adults, minimizing "au-
thority."
Educational use of the actual physical plant (buildings
and farms) and the culture of the school community.
Emphasis in the curriculum on real problems of wider
society, its geography and history, with actual partic-
ipation in the neighboring community (village or
city).
Trying for functional interrelation of activities.
This is not a perfect educational program. It lacks
grandeur and explosive playfulness. It lacks religious
quiet. And it is weak in the models of the humanities. But
there cannot be a "perfect" educational system, for each
system must meet its social situation. In a period like ours,
of transition, uprootedness, inhuman scale, technical ab-
stractness, affectlessness, and conformity, no lesser pro-
gram is seriously conservative of human resources. Our
official public educators are not serious in their concern
for human resources, or they would use this program.
There has always been one criticism of progressive ed-
ucation that must be answered, namely, that it is weak in
curriculum, in cultural and scientific content. I think this
is a misunderstanding. There is only one curriculum, no
matter what the method of education: what is basic and
universal in human experience and practice, the under-
lying structure of culture. (Cf. Appendix D, page 256.)
This philosophic content fans out as speech, as finding
Aptitude 83
where you are in space and time, as measuring and struc-
turing, and being a social animal. It may be called Eng-
lish, geography and history, arithmetic, music and physi-
cal training; or Greek, history, logic, and Rugby; or
trivium and quadrivium (plus games); or literature, social
studies, science, and eurhythmies. It is the same basic
curriculum; the differences are in method, and they con-
cern how to teach the curriculum and make it second na-
ture to the students, unblocking rather than encumbering,
and bringing out the best. The curriculum is only super-
ficially what "a man ought to know"; it is more funda-
mentally how to become a man-in-the-world. The method
must vary with what good or bad habits and powers the
young have come with in various situations. The curricu-
lum certainly cannot vary with what is temporarily con-
venient for a bad society (the definition of a bad society
being one that is not educational). Not to teach the
whole curriculum is to give up on the whole man.
For instance, in our present Cold War debate about
teaching science, Dr. Kvaraceus, the National Education
Association's expert on delinquency, warns us that geome-
try is "too hard" for most, and that to insist on it for all
will produce failure and truancy. But this is not the pro-
gressive educator's way of looking at it. Is it that geome-
try is too hard, or that the aim of teaching is not bona fide,
being rapid technical know-how rather than humane un-
derstanding? Is it that the method is irrelevant to the apti-
tude and ineptitude that the children have come with?
What dismays me in thinking like that of Dr. Kvaraceus
is that it disregards our duty to geometry as such as a
worth-while human object, our duty to Euclid, Kepler, and
Einstein. The result of his attitude is that these champions
will not be champions for all men. We are in a sad di-
lemma if, as is the case, kids don't learn because it is not
humanly worth while to learn, they have no deep motiva-
g4 GROWINGUPABSURD
tion; and then, to keep them in school we have to cut
down on the few subjects that are humanly worth while.
The question cannot be whether to teach science or to
whom, for what is man without science? but how to teach
it in various circumstances.
At the other pole from Dr. Kvaraceus, the recent pub-
lic alarm about Sputnik has led to Dr. Conant's quasi-
official and vastly circulated reports on the high schools.
But because the concern is not serious but is simply fear of
the Russians, the reports show such little pedagogic imag-
ination that they are a minor national disaster. Dr. Co-
nant's philosophy is expressed in the sentence:
Attention has been centered for so long on the individ-
uality of each child that [educators] resist any idea
that a new national concern [defense against Russia]
might be an important factor in planning a high school
program. [From The Child, the Parent, and the State.]
What an extraordinary thought, that there could be a con-
flict between the unfolding individuality and the achieve-
ment of habits of science! When Dr. Conant proposes that
the bright upper fraction of the students be somehow in-
duced to take hard programs for everywhere large per-
centages of the brightest shirk the hard courses or quit
school he does not ask what is at present lacking in their
motivation. He objects to treating education in a vacuum,
but he treats our national needs in a vacuum. Will the
incentive to fight an atomic war, or a Cold War, match
the social apathy and cynicism of these boys? More im-
portant, Dr. Conant does not seem to wonder why there
are so few (15 per cent) who are "academically talented."
Does he think that the general dullness of the high school
population has occurred in a void? Contrast a remark on
the same subject by the Dean of Teachers College, John
Aptitude 85
Fischer: "I have a strong suspicion that we have learned
little about the abilities of human beings. I suspect they
are greater than most people assume." If one is concerned
about conserving human resources, this would seem to be
the obvious first approach: to find why most are so inept
and to invent techniques to unblock them, to increase the
pool of the "academically talented." Perhaps the conven-
tional school itself is not such a good idea, especially if
the "national need" is for creative scientists; for at the
point in their careers at which these boys are tested (say
ages twelve to fifteen), the "brightness" of the 15 per cent
might or might not indicate a profound feeling for the
causes of things; it is largely verbal and symbol-manipula-
ting, and is almost certainly partly an obsessional device
not to know and touch risky matter, just as Freud long
ago pointed out that the nagging questions of small chil-
dren are a substitute for asking the forbidden questions.
If these are the important kinds of issues motivation,
unblocking ability, deep-rootedness of learning a little
more attention to the individuality of the child, and some
more progressive education, might suit the national need.
It might even speed up the invention of rockets.
(The nadir of the recent pedagogic wisdom is, I suppose,
the logic of our fierce Dr. Edward Teller of Berkeley. If
the Russians continue to outpace us, he informs us, they
will land on the moon first, they will control weather, per-
fect irresistible weapons, lead the world in everything, and
"then freedom will be lost here and everywhere." Yet a
couple of paragraphs later we learn that "in science any-
body's success is your success . . . scientific people can,
and do, co-operate no matter what their nationalities are/'
they speak an international language, and they belong to
an international community "who practice the brotherhood
of man." "A healthy sign," rejoices Dr. Teller, "is that
salaries for scientists are edging upward"; the universities,
86 GROWING UP ABSURD
private research laboratories, industrial concerns and the
government "assure to scientists a comfortable, secure
life." "Not," however, "that money should be a factor in
deciding on a scientific career," for the Professor's con-
cluding theme is that "science is fun." The essay, "Should
You Be a Scientist?" appeared as a public service adver-
tisement in the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies' Home
Journal, Life, and Scholastic magazines,)
7.
The revolutionary program of progressive education
missed out, or I should not be writing this gloomy book.
The most vocal and superficial objections to it came from
the conservatives who said that it flouted the Western
Tradition, the Judaeo-Christian Tradition, the Three R's,
Moral Decency, Patriotism, and the Respect for Author-
ity. But the damaging, and indeed fatal, blows to progres-
sive education have come from those timid within the
movement itself, who feared that the training did not pro-
vide an easy adjustment to life, meaning by "life" taking
one's role in the organized system. This opinion has gradu-
ally prevailed, and now the doctrines of progressive edu-
cation that have made headway in the public schools are
precisely learning to get along with people, tolerance, and
"real life problems" such as auto driving and social danc-
ing. They are not those that pertain to passionately testing
the environment rather than "adjusting" to it. What would
one expect? There is nothing special about the failure of
progressive education to make its way; it has suffered the
same compromises as twenty other revolutions that I shall
list in this book. The dominant class in society sees to it
that it gets likewise the "progressive education" that suits.
Aptitude 87
8.
Let us return to the thread of our argument. Besides the
out-of-scale physical environment and its complicated
techniques, the social environment too is baffling and
produces ineptitude and loss of the sense of causality.
Think of a child trying to cope with Property Rights, a
most abstract notion. There is no problem when it is a
case of something being used by somebody else, when
Jack tries to take Bobby's shovel out of his hand and
Bobby clouts him over the head with it or complains to
authority in no uncertain terms. The puzzlement comes
when the shovel is idle and Mama says, "You mustn't use
that shovel, it's Bobby's." What impresses the child is no
precise idea, but the grownup's tone of conviction. The
child "believes," though there is no evidence of his senses.
It is the beginning of what Marx called the fetishism of
commodities. What is sickening is that it is just this kind of
influencing that is wanted by priests, mayors, and tavern
philosophers who declare that more home influence is the
remedy for our troubles of youth.
But the social relationships of the grownups themselves
are out of human scale, for in the corporate system of or-
ganization the puzzling has become altogether mysterious.
It is disturbing to a child to sense that his mother is under
the unseen thumb of religion or his father of the boss. But
the top managers in our semimonopolies are quite anony-
mous. This is part of the new managerial code, as de-
scribed by Fortune itself. A child cannot use them as
model heroes, for they are invisible. This is why Jackie
Robinson's proposal to import the TV personalities as
ersatz models is so unfortunate, for these visible "heroes"
are puppets. With the increasing concentration of manage-
88 GROWING UP ABSURD
ment and control, as A. A. Berle has pointed out, there is
less relation even to Property Rights.
Consider it. If one is put upon or abused, with whom
shall he be angry? One cannot vent rage against an ab-
stract system. But there is no need to vent feeling, for it is
a matter of the grievance committee and other regular
channels. In the Middle Status, the heart of the organized
system, the situation is not the same as in a bureaucracy,
with which it is usually compared; for a bureaucracy has a
written code and a definite pecking-order; but the organi-
zation protects everybody's personal dignity, and its subtle
interpersonal feuding and competition cannot be codified,
for it is without any objective utility to give a principle.
Even that mighty system the State is more material: it has
banners, soldiers, elections, postmen, police. In a child it
rouses awe and fear. But the organized system exists only
in the bland front of its brand-name products and adver-
tising. There is no knowing how it is run or who deter-
mines.
It is in these circumstances that young persons grow up
convinced that everything is done with mirrors, by "influ-
ence." Not even the personal influence of nepotism, but
something more like the astrological influence of the plan-
ets. The sense of initiative, causality, skill has been dis-
couraged. Merit is a trait of "personality." Learning is the
possession of a Diploma. Usefulness is a Union Card.
Justification is Belonging.
9.
We are now in a position to understand the Hipster as
Role Player.
The Role Player is the fellow who, without any real
aptitude or training to do anything, and without a com-
mitment to any goal, can skillfully fit the expectations that
Aptitude 89
people have of him, and give typical performances to
prove that he can do the job. The Roles of society are the
capitalized nouns in Time style, e.g., Philosopher Russell
or Very Important Person. There are great advantages in
being a hipster in this sense. First, it is a way of getting by.
If a man feels that he is not anything, he is at least taken
for something, and he belongs. Then he can feel contempt
for the others because they are fools, they are taken in;
and so he satisfies his spite. And he can feel more confi-
dent that the so-called worth-while aims are empty
because he can give a token performance, and this calms
his own gnawing feelings of frustration and worthlessness.
Finally, Role Playing protects a deep conceit of one's ab-
stract powers: one "could" if one wanted, but in fact is
never tested. The hipster in this sense must be distin-
guished from the industrious confidence man who wants to
get the swag and vanish, and does not thrive on publicity.
The hipster will often boast: he knows the score, he is
ahead of the game.
This cool attitude of the hipster is endemic in the or-
ganized system. But on the other hand, the committed
Organization Man also really belongs, he has status and
salary and must protect them. Therefore the junior execu-
tive is in a terrible contradiction. He is cynical about the
aims of the firm, yet he fears that his own ineptitude will
be found out. He has no recourse to concrete performance,
for there is little contact with unambiguous material and
there are no objective standards. How to meet a purely
subjective demand? In pain (even ulcers) he has to get
by by role playing, interpersonal relations abstracted from
both animal desire or tangible achievement. He meets ex-
pectations, he conforms, he one-ups, he proves he must
know how by attaining a higher status.
"The trainee," says William H. Whyte, Jr., "believes
managing is an end in itself technique is more vital than
90 GROWING UP ABSURD
content," Compare the identical remark in a memorandum
of the Liberal Project in Congress: The past few years
"have given rise to a particular brand of politician. He is
completely method-oriented. The substance of a bill is not
important, it is rather the process of passing the bill that is
paramount." The new-type salesman does not sell the
product but the man: by the expense account he proves
that he is a right guy and he confirms the buyer's image of
himself 5 whatever that happens to be.
For many bright young fellows, I think, the Organiza-
tion has taken the place that the Communist Party had in
the Thirties. At that time young men who were frustrated
in their creative lives, perhaps because unable to stand the
gaff, took out their self-hatred on the capitalist system,
and often with sublime self-contempt accepted jobs with
high salaries. In our decade, the young men believe they
belong to the governing board, and their resentment has
turned to cynicism. The standard of human integrity is
equivalent.
The type situation of Role Playing is the Air Force
questionnaire asking who is Giotto or Vivaldi: if the can-
didate gives the right answer, he is disqualified, he will not
belong. The Role Player has no difficulty.
I was recently at another convention (National Recrea-
tion Congress, 1959), and striking was the difference be-
tween the working stiffs, the actual directors of play and
group activities, and the administrators. The actual di-
rectors were human beings, often enthusiastic and proud of
happy improvisations and strokes of good judgment that
they wanted to report. But the administrators were con-
cerned about standards, certificates, avoiding complaints
and offending, and proving their dedicated service; it was
clear that they wanted above all to diminish the factor of
risk for themselves and create a front to get bigger appro-
Aptitude 91
priations. At the same time they kept asking how to re-
cruit Leaders; but it was evident that the more strictly
they applied their standards, the more surely they would
eliminate the leaders.
We must contrast the concept of Role, meeting expec-
tations by playing it cool and knowing the technique for
a token performance, with the concept of Identity that
Harold Rosenberg so well describes in The Tradition of
the New. One discovers, fights for, appoints oneself to
one's Identity. Identity is defined by its task, mission,
product; role depends on the interpersonal expectation of
the others.
Naturally, statesmen and public spokesmen are the role
players, hipsters, par excellence. They exist by Front and
giving symbolic satisfaction, so it is not to be hoped that
their speech be serious, relevant to what objectively ex-
ists. But it is dismaying to find the same symbolic relations
in enterprises of production and the distribution of goods.
One cannot help distrusting the goods, thinking they are
only packages and brand names. And so, becoming dis-
affected from these enterprises, the Beat Generation
sometimes comes to despise real goods. It takes goods to
be merely commodities that must be spurned: this is the
fetishism of commodities in reverse.
Let us sum up. The factory operatives who couldn't
care less about their jobs are not much aware of what they
produce; causality is built into the machinery. The junior
executives, advertising men, salesmen are role players and
have little causal relation to the products. Presumably the
technicians and top managers know something about and
produce the products, since the products do come to exist.
And the evidence is that the top managers do work very
hard on production and sales; they work a sixty-hour
week and are proud of their work. But even they have to
92 GROWING UP ABSURD
devote an increasing majority of their time to interpersonal
games of no productive use 90 per cent, says one, men-
tioned by W. H. Whyte, Jr.
(Let me give a typical illustration. There is a well-
known monthly magazine that five editors used to put out
with a week's work. It was pretty good. Unfortunately it
made a reputation for itself and its wealthy sponsors
hired a staff of ten secretaries and assistants to the editors.
Soon the editors found themselves working all month, and
quit. The magazine lost all its spark.)
Considering the technical possibilities, we must say that
our physical environment changes very slowly. This is
not surprising, for so little thought is given to it.
10.
We have in America a mystique of "production" and a
man engaged in "production" is highly esteemed. In The
Affluent Society, J. K. Galbraith shows that this attitude is
entirely specious. Of five ways in which production can be
increased: (1) except in wartime we do not try to in-
crease the labor supply; (2) we do not try to encourage
new enterprises; (3) in most industries, we do not try for
technological innovation. All the stress is laid on (4) full
employment, and (5) efficient use of present capital.
But this economist does not even bother to mention the
factor of productivity that concerns us here: (6) to in-
crease the aptitude and skill of each lad. Indeed, as we
have tried to show, rather than encouraged it is systemati-
cally retarded. It would not today be said, as it used to be,
that the Americans are born mechanics. Among the model
heroes of the young we do not think of Edison, Burbank,
Ford, Steinmetz, and so forth. It is anachronistic to men-
tion their names.
The juvenile literary and pictorial image of the inventor
Aptitude 93
and scientist has correspondingly changed. Two genera-
tions ago it was a kindly bumbling old fool, unkempt but
stubborn and brave, and with a light of divine truth in his
eyes. A generation ago science began to be altogether
strange and the scientist began to be a surgeon with rub-
ber gloves or a cold maniac with diabolic power in his
eyes. But this stereotype is forbidden today, for strategic
reasons, and the scientist is now a young, neatly dressed,
co-operative Organization Man holding up some appara-
tus that proves his role, but nothing in his eyes at all, at
all. But he is having fun.
The claim of the organized system is that research and
invention are in their nature increasingly corporative and
anonymous, and this produces great results. That is de-
batable. I doubt that very much is corporatively invented
which is not pretty directly dictated by managerial need
and policy, whereas the essence of invention is to be hith-
erto-unthought-of though, of course, there occurs the
rich comedy of administrators anxiously waiting for math-
ematicians to turn up with something "useful," and never
knowing what goes on behind those spectacles. (I have a
mathematician friend who bills his firm for overtime be-
cause he tends to think of things in bed about 2 A.M.
and his attitude is that they can take it or leave it.)
Certainly the folio whig example is not untypical: A gifted
food chemist puts in six months developing a formula; he
is successful and the product is going to be pushed with
a million-dollar campaign; it is, in Ms opinion, identical
Mayonnaise, the popular brand. (In this case
the scientist suddenly decided to quit and to set himself
up as an independent consultant, hoping that people
would come in with real problems.)
Proof on this kind of issue is difficult. On the one side,
the corporations, having pre-empted much of the talent,
point proudly to inventions made under their auspices, as
94 GROWINGUPABSURD
if they might not have been made anyway. On the other
side, their opponents argue from inventioris-that-have~not~
been-made, a peculiar metaphysical category, e.g., "If all
the capital and research had not gone into internal com-
bustion engines, by now we should have much superior
steam or electric cars." It may be said definitely that re-
search entailing million-dollar equipment and vast sam-
plings of the populace cannot be carried on without corpo-
rative or state sponsorship; yet many would deny that
this style of research, and expense of social wealth, is
so fruitful as the old American shoestring operator or
the seventeenth-century gentleman-philosopher with his
dumb-bunny apparatus and towering intellect. We cer-
tainly have at present the dismal situation that the most
imaginative men are directed by a group, the top managers,
who are among the least, hard-working though they may
be. Also, inventions made outside the organization are no-
toriously bought up and withheld or otherwise sabotaged
by the organization. (To my conscience, this practice, of
keeping basic new ideas in limbo until it is profitable to
exploit them, is immoral and disruptive of the community
of mankind far more than rigged quiz shows, but it comes
from the same box, whose label is Intellect Bought.)
So we return to the President of Merck and Company,
who, hauled before a Senate investigation on charges that
Merck and its semimonopolistic "competitors" were crim-
inally overpricing drugs, warned the Senators that they
might "upset the delicate balance we have been able to de-
velop over the years between the quest for scientific
knowledge on the one hand and the drive for financial
success on the other."!! Quo usque tandem.
The situation of a young fellow is ironical. If he has
reached college age and has technical aptitude, the most
desperate attempts are made to get him for this or that
ftrm. They pay for his schooling and guarantee him a job.
Aptitude 95
Meantime, the systematic behavior of those firms has
been to baffle aptitude in the young and to limit it where it
has survived.
It is in this context that we must listen to Dr. Conant's
recommendations for the high school: the selection of the
academically talented, the top 15 per cent, to major In a
program of mathematics and sciences. No effort is made
to increase the pool of ability; and the public schools are,
effectually, to be used as apprentice training grounds for
the monopolies and the armed forces.
V
Patriotism
1.
In 1783 Washington sent a circular letter to the States,
describing the situation of the new nation as he saw it.
"We have equal occasion to felicitate ourselves," he said,
"on the lot which Providence has assigned to us, whether
we view it in a natural, a political, or moral point of light."
He pointed to the natural resources of the new nation, its
independence and freedom, the Age of Reason during
which it had come of age, an age of "the free cultivation
of letters, the unbounded extension of commerce, the pro-
gressive refinement of manners, the growing liberality of
sentiment, and above all the pure and benign light of Rev-
elation. ... If these citizens," he concluded, "should not
be completely free and happy, the fault will be certainly
their own. Such is our situation and such are our pros-
pects."
It is hard to read these sentences without agitation and
tears, for they are simply true and simply patriotic.
In the next generations, almost to our own times, patri-
otic rhetoric did not cease to sound, more pompously and
falsely, but never without a core of truth. There was al-
Patriotism 97
ways something special in the American destiny to be
proud of. In 1825 it was the broad democracy. In 1850
it was the magnificent spread and settlement from coast to
coast. In 1875, the material progress, the cable and the
Pacific railroad, the building of modern industrialism. In
1900, America was the melting pot, the asylum of the
poor and the oppressed.
In our century, the patriotic rhetoric began to be unbe-
lievable not by accident, for foreign wars (1898 and
1917) are incompatible with reasonable rhetoric. In re-
cent decades there has been almost a surcease of such
speech. Even references to the American Way, free enter-
prise, high production, and the economy of abundance
have finally died out, because they call up the idea of
tail fins and TV commercials. Highbrow journalists men-
tion the American Way with scorn.
Our case is astounding. For the first time in recorded
history, the mention of country, community, place has lost
its power to animate. Nobody but a scoundrel even tries
it. Our rejection of false patriotism is, of course, itself a
badge of honor. But the positive loss is tragic and I cannot
resign myself to it. A man has only one life and if during
it he has no great environment, no community, he has
been irreparably robbed of a human right. This loss is
damaging especially in growing up, for it deprives outgo-
ing growth, which begins with weaning from Mother and
walking out of the house, of the chance of entering upon
a great and honorable scene to develop in.
Culture is, first of all, city and patriotic culture. I shall
try to show that patriotism is the culture of childhood and
adolescence. Without this first culture, we come with a
fatal emptiness to the humane culture of science, art, hu-
manity and God; and this emptiness results in the best
people not turning back, like Plato's philosopher who has
emerged from the cave, to serve their country. Many of
98 GROWING UP ABSURD
the best Americans have a strong philanthropic and local-
community zeal, yet it would seem odd for somebody now-
adays to put himself to a big and hard task just to serve
his country, to make her better, and be proud of that.
Young people aspire mightily to appearances on television
and other kinds of notoriety, but I doubt that many now
think of being honored by a statue in the park and win-
ning "immortal" fame, the fame of big culture.
Let me make the same point by analyzing a remarkable
proposition of Otto Jespersen, the grammarian. He shows
that, contrary to expectation, a child does not learn his
mother tongue at home from his mother and immediate
family, he does not pick up their accent. The accent, vo-
cabulary, syntax, and style that form his speech are
learned from his first peer groups, outside the home. Jes-
persen does not explain it, but the psychology seems evi-
dent. Speech occurs at the stage of the developing of the
"I," it is a forming of the image of the self, it is a self-ap-
pointment to one's ideal and putting on its uniform.
Changes occur as we appoint ourselves to one peer group
after another. At a certain stage a lad appoints himself or
commits himself to a band of friends and puts on its jargon,
jacket, tattoo, and masculine ring on the fourth finger of
the left hand. If he is insecure and disturbed, this con-
formity is a cowering protection and the band is a delin-
quent gang, but in every case it is also, we see by the
blazon, an achievement. And one way in which the Gov-
ernor of New York does not take the juveniles seriously,
when he speaks of giving them a sense of belonging, is
that he does not offer an ideal that promises equal manli-
ness. He has none to offer.
It is tragic when there is no great adult peer group to
meet growth. Consider the case of an artist, my own case.
To have simple and sounding language, rather than
merely the lovely colloquialism of Sherwood Anderson or
Patriotism 99
William Carlos Williams, it is necessary to believe in the
great national culture of one's people. Our popular cul-
ture does not warrant the belief, even to make the sacri-
fice that Virgil made when he sadly gave up his best
vision because strife-torn Rome needed a national poet.
True, an artist can then jump to the international and uni-
versal, for mankind and God do not let him down (man-
kind is the fellow on one's own block), but this is at the
loss of pomp and glitter, of the glancing present. Without
a patriotic peer group, it is impossible to have the bril-
liance of Handel, the material grandeur of Venice. With
us the style of the big bright sensation belongs to cheap
musical dramas on Broadway.
2.
The area of patriotism is intermediate between childhood
and adulthood. We must delimit it carefully or we play
into the hands of fools and rogues who have done our
country plenty of damage.
To what can we correctly attach the adjective "Ameri-
can"? There is no "American" animal, sexual, or primary
family life. The idea of American child-rearing or Ameri-
can medicine is idiotic, and the thought of an "American
family" is abominable. At the further extreme, there is
no "American" university, "American" science, religion,
or peace. In only an equivocal sense is there an "Ameri-
can" art: the subject matter may be American, but the
art is international and the aim is universal.
In between, however, there is an American landscape,
an American primary and secondary education, an Amer-
ican classlessness, an American Constitution, an Anglo-
American language, and an American kind of enterprising.
That is, just where a child ventures from home and grows
up through adolescence, the great environment becomes
100 GROWING UP ABSURD
his scene, and this is American, a characteristic geography
and history, place and community. It is just in growing up,
which is the subject of this book, that a patriotic oppor-
tunity is essential. It is just this opportunity that, for in-
genuous youth, is corrupted. And so it is hard to grow up.
Let us be quite clear what this American landscape and
community is. I quote from a recent issue of Life:
[Teen-agers] own 10 million phonographs, over a mil-
lion TV sets, 13 million cameras. Counting only what
is spent to satisfy their special teen-age demands, the
youngsters and their parents will shell out about $10
billion this year, a billion more than the total sales of
GM. Until recently businessmen have largely ignored
the teen-age market. But now they are spending mil-
lions on advertising and razzle-dazzle promotional
stunts (right). If parents have any idea of organized re-
volt, it is akeady too late. Teen-age spending is so im-
portant that such action would send quivers through the
entire national economy.
This is a description of the landscape, and the prose of
Life is part of the landscape.
5.
Equal to our businessmen, our government and public
spokesmen have a knack for debasing the noble and
making the excellent trivial. The current disease is to
make Cold War capital out of everything, no matter what,
We cannot dedicate a building of Frank Lloyd Wright's
in New York without our Ambassador to the United Na-
tions pointing out that such an architect could not have
flourished in Russia. This is tasteless; the matter becomes
serious when our freedoms are involved.
Patriotism 101
Not long ago there was a great to-do about the Russian
censorship of Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago. The editorials and
the rhetoric of organized friends of culture kept repeating
freedom of speech, freedom of culture. (You would think
that we did not have our own means of censoring, by com-
mercial selection and by swamping.) But the outcry about
Pasternak was not sincere, it was propaganda in the Cold
War. In the same year, for instance, the Archbishop of
Dublin effectually banned the spring theater festival be-
cause of plays of O'Casey and Joyce. (He refused to say
the festival Mass if those plays were to be given. The di-
rector then canceled the plays. But the actors manfully
struck and would not play at all, and this resulted in an
important loss of tourist revenue. Such admirable behav-
ior is inconceivable in my country.) On this theme, the
New York Times ran no editorials, no, nor the New York
Herald Tribune. For we are not at cold war with the
Catholic hierarchy. (I wrote a letter to the Times asking
that this and Zhivago be coupled for mention, but no one
was interested.) But such behavior is patriotically disas-
trous; it teaches that our spokesmen are not earnest; they
pick and choose when to stand up for freedom of thought.
How then can a boy be proud? (But to be sure, we have
little such freedom, compared with the British, for our
mass media are not, like theirs, open to fundamental con-
troversy. It is not surprising, therefore, that for English
Angry Young Men an important topic is thek outraged
patriotism, whereas our Beats do not care about that.)
4.
Consider the behavior of our professors and universities
during the Dies, McCarthy and Feinberg Law investiga-
tions. It is hard to say which set the worse example to the
students during those hearings: the Communist professors
102 GROWING UP ABSURD
fearful for their jobs, or the colleges that with magnifi-
cent exceptions, like Harvard supinely received the in-
vestigators. A monumental blunder was being made
which did us desperate damage among thoughtful Euro-
peans and our professors shivered in their boots and our
"radicals" hid like roaches. (Cf. Appendix D.) The im-
portant thing is not which group betrays the ideal in any
particular case, but that young people become cynical
about political action and resigned about the possibility
of making a change. Following a party line, Communist
teachers, e.g., at New York's City College, denied their
membership. This was a disastrous betrayal of the stu-
dents. Not that it is wrong to avoid insolent force with
fraud, but that young students can grow only by politi-
cally affirming themselves. With the young, honor is more
important than tactics or even than prudence. Leaders of
youth must be knightly a grisly identity, but there it is.
We have now passed through a decade in which the
students in our colleges showed a political apathy prob-
ably unexampled in student history. Several causes have
conspired to it. First, simple shell shock: the war and the
atom bomb aroused such deep anxiety that the only de-
fense against it was conventionality. (I remember lectur-
ing on Kafka in 1948 to a hall of collegians consisting
largely of veterans on the G.I. bill, and they frantically
protested that Kafka was psychotic and should be paid no
attention, he had no relation to reality they who had
lived through some of the Trial and were even then roam-
ing under the Castle! )
Secondly, the students have been seduced by business
firms, which tempt and reward them for conformity; but
as W. H. Whyte, Jr. points out, they are eager to conform
even before they are paid. Correspondingly, in its appeal
to lower-class boys, the Army has found it wise to accept
Patriotism 103
the stirring slogan, "Retire at 37." If you question a boy
draftee who has re-enlisted, he will explain that it is a
"good deal." That is, the Army has become the IBM of
the poor boy.
But finally, is there any doubt that an important cause
of the present political apathy of the young is the dishon-
orable radical leadership that they had in the Thirties and
Forties? They now believe that all political thinking is a
sell just as those bright Catholic lads who stop believing
the superstitions of scholasticism now believe that all phi-
losophy is an intricate fraud, including the truths of scho-
lasticism.
This hipster skepticism is pervasive. It is partly, of
course, resignation that a revolution has failed and the
way is too thorny; but students are usually more resilient.
I think that a more important factor is disgust that the
radicals were not bona fide; the students were had. But
also, I fear, it is cynical superiority, an identification with
either the fraudulent or the powerful.
I referred above to the similarity between some of the
Communists and young Organization Men today, in their
lust for control apart from any objective good and, more
deeply, in their use of an organized power-system in or-
der to make the ingenuous and worthy not exist. In the
Thirties it came about that Communists had high status
in Hollywood and somewhat in publishing, so the two
kinds of organized systems worked in the same offices
nor do I doubt that many of the refinements of present-
day organization life were learned during this cohabita-
tion. But it has remained for our own decade to enjoy the
brutal comedy of McCarthy and the FBI investigating
the Communists in Hollywood, so we had on one stage
the three most cynical tribes in the country.
But let us go back to more simple ignobility.
1Q4 GROWING UP ABSURD
5.
Certainly the most thrilling and romantic happening of
these years is the adventure in space, surpassing in prom-
ise the voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
This adventure makes life worth the trouble again. When
the Russians beat us out, we are miffed but we can be
proud that these exploits have been performed by men
and man is great; Copernicus was a Pole, Galileo an
Italian, Kepler a German, Newton an Englishman and
the rockets were Chinese; and we hope that we shall win the
next round, for it belongs to America to achieve first in this
kind of enterprise. The experiments are expensive, but it
seems mean-spirited to question the appropriations and
few have done so. So far, grand. But now we have cor-
rupted even the exploration of space into the Cold War.
Against an agreement of the International Geophysical
Year, we, like the Russians, withheld the wave length
of a satellite for strategic reasons. (I was ashamed and
again I wrote dutifully to the New York Times, but they
again had no space for such an odd way of viewing the
news*) Next, we carried out a secret nuclear experiment in
the ionosphere, and this one was kept secret not from the
Russians for military reasons, but from the American peo-
ple, because of possible objections to the fall-out. The
Times kept the secret till the Russians were about to pub-
lish it, explaining (March 19, 1959), that "it had learned
of the plans for Project Argus last summer, some weeks
before it took place. Nevertheless, scientists associated
with the government said they feared that prior announce-
ment of the experiment might lead to protests that would
force its cancellation." A. J. Muste, an editor of Libera-
tion magazine, asked them for an apology for this unex-
Patriotism 105
ampled betrayal of journalistic responsibility, and got the
astounding reply:
It seems to me that you are suggesting that the Times
enter the propaganda field and, in effect, set its judg-
ment above that of military men and scientists as to
what can be published. . . . After all, the Times is
a responsible newspaper. [!!] [Robert Garst, Assistant
Managing Editor. In Liberation, May, 1959.]
But what is the effect on our people when we are told that
our chief newspaper does not print the news? Constitu-
tionally, for instance, how in a democracy do they then de-
serve their mailing privileges, to circulate their official
press releases and advertisements for department stores?
[The purpose of second-class mail is to circulate informa-
tion.] When Muste wrote a letter for publication about
the Times' handling of the story, the Times found no space
for that letter.
But to my mind, even more important is the effect of
cutting people off from the adventure of science, no mat-
ter what the risks. What an illiberal and dishonorable
policy to pursue! Our government cannot see that noble
things must not be made base, romance must not be
turned into disillusion, or what will become of the young
people? Take another example. This glorious enterprise of
space! And now we have chosen seven astronauts for
special training. But the nemesis of the organized sys-
tem haunts us. All prove to be white Protestant, in their
early or middle thirties, married, with small children, and
coming from small towns in brief, models of salesmen
or junior executives for International Business Ma-
chines. And these seven have now made a solemn pact,
reported in the press, that whichever one goes aloft will
106 GROWING UP ABSURD
split evenly with the others Ms take from syndicated sto-
ries and TV appearances. Concerning them, Dr. George
Ruff, the Air Force psychiatrist who tested them, has ex-
plained, "Knowing the qualities that made them this way,
and working hard at applying those qualities in your
daily life, can help you [too] to come closer to achieving
what they have become: comfortable, mature, and well-
integrated individuals. It's a worth-while goal."
Of course, by this writing (June 1960), it is commonly
accepted that our new Midas satellite has the function of
espionage. But it has remained for a proper scientist to
hit the bottom; the professor who has advised us not to
reply to any signals we might receive from outer space,
because the astral beings are likely to be technically more
advanced than we and they will come down and eat us up.
This projection of the Cold War into the starry vault was
favorably reported by the science editor of the Herald
Tribune,
6.
In the time of Washington, the public men Adams, Jef-
ferson, Madison, Marshall, Henry, Franklin, Hamilton,
Jay were a fair sampling of the good spirits in the coun-
try, humane, literate, brave, not self-seeking. (There is
a remarkable letter of Jefferson's to David Rittenhouse,
urging him to waste no more time in mere politics, for
the world needed him more in his capacity as a scientist.)
By and large, it could not be said of our presidents and
governors at present, the symbols of the country, that they
are a fair sampling of the best of us. It would not be diffi-
cult to make a list of a hundred, or two hundred, who are
superior to them in every relevant way, in whom a boy
could feel pride and trust.
Of course this is not a new trouble among us. Just as the
Patriotism 107
European writers of the eighteenth century idolized our
statesmen as if they were demigods, so in the nineteenth
they spoke of their inferiority. This is the consequence of
another missed revolution, the democratic revolution. A
man of sense obviously cannot waste his life learning to
sue to an ignorant electorate and coming up through politi-
cal ranks in which disinterestedness and pure convictions
are not the most handy virtues, Yet the fault is not with
democracy, but that we have failed to have enough of it.
For instance, if our emphasis had been on perfecting the
town meeting and the neighborhood commune, there
would not be ignorant electors and they would choose
great officers. If people had the opportunity to initiate
community actions, they would be political; they would
know that finally the way to accomplish something great is
to get together with the like-minded and directly do it.
But the men in power do not think politically either.
For instance, this year we have had the usual spectacle of
politicians going about the country looking for nominators
for the Presidency, presumably (why else?) because they
have important new programs to offer. But as soon as it
becomes clear that the county leaders of the party do not
want them, they retire from the race and rally to elect
whomever. What becomes of the programs? Since this is
what political responsibility means to a politician, why
should the electorate respect politics, and how could an
honest boy be inspired to enter on such a career?
In a recent essay, the historian Henry Steele Commager
asks how it is possible that we have an absolute dearth of
statesmen at present in America (he cannot think of one) .
Characteristically, we have an immense amount of formal
training in flourishing institutes for public administration
at Harvard, Princeton, Syracuse, Tufts, etc., as if we
could get the thing by learning the role. Commager sen-
sibly concludes that that training does not begin early
108 GROWING UP ABSURD
enough and it lacks the content of actual experience. The
environment does not encourage public service, it does not
esteem public goods. Few fathers give much thought to
the distant generations of posterity, and children do not
take fire in reading about the great men of history and
thinking "Why not I?" as a plausible purpose. And finally,
says Commager, the narrow chauvinism and energetic
hostility to subversive ideas that are now the test of our
politicians are precisely disastrous to patriotism, for that
must be spacious, disinterested, and broad-based, other-
wise it is intolerable foolishness. Let me quote a fine pas-
sage:
The men who won our independence and laid the foun-
dations of the American nation were devoted patriots
but they were, too, men of the world. They were chil-
dren of the enlightenment. Reason taught them that all
men were brothers, that purely national distinctions
were artificial, that there existed a great community
of arts and letters and philosophy and science cutting
across and transcending mere national boundaries. . . .
The nationalism of the eighteenth century did not rest
on a narrow base but on a broad one. It did not find
nourishment in fear and suspicion but in faith and
confidence. Perhaps one reason for the decline in states-
manship is that we have hemmed our potential states-
men in, we have denied them tolerant and spacious
ideas.
As it is, what must be the effect on a boy when he
comes to realize that the public spokesman up there is not
even speaking his own words, but repeating, like a per-
former, something written for him by a staff from Madi-
son Avenue? The boy must learn to shout, "Shame! make
your own speech at least!"
Patriotism 109
Our present President (Mr. Eisenhower) is an unusu-
ally uncultivated man. It is said that he has invited no real
writer, no artist, no philosopher to the White House.
Presumably he has no intellectual friends; that is his priv-
ilege. But recently he invited the chief of the Russian gov-
ernment to a banquet and musicale. And the formal music
of that musicale was provided by a Fred Waring band
playing "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" and such other
numbers. This is disgraceful.
7.
The American landscape has been badly corrupted. Euro-
pean writers no longer even notice the natural wonder of
it, they are so put off by the ugliness and conformity of
the towns. But worse than the ugliness and conformity is
the neglect that baffles pride of place. Our poets try to
move themselves by nostalgically repeating the names of
towns: "Biloxi and Natchez, Pascagoula and Opelousas"
but beware of paying a visit.
The Americans disesteem public goods, and improving
the landscape is a big expense. Historically, the neglect of
appearance and plan of our scores of thousands of villages
and small towns, especially in the Middle West and South
the diner, the Woolworth's, and two filling stations
can be analogized to the neglect of the present-day poor.
In the tide of expansion, appearance was disregarded as
not essential; later, the matter would be mopped up. But
the neglect rigidifies, it is a hard core not easy to change.
Instead, the present tendency is to impose on the coun-
tryside a new corporation style altogether, in the form of
shopping centers (^national chain supermarkets) on the
highway. This works out disastrously for the communities,
for these "centers" are not centers of villages, and there
cease to be villages at all, simply scattered family houses.
HO GROWING UP ABSURD
This is the end of a long process of disruption, for in any
case the industry is gone, the men work in plants thirty
miles away. It is possible to travel many miles even in
New England and not see a single activity a man could
make a living at, except automobile agencies and filling
stations; not even a food store. The schools too are large
and centralized. The families tend to move away fre-
quently, but even while they are put, they are driving
around. This does not make much community to grow up
in.
In more primitive societies, a chief community activity
is working together, thatching a roof, net fishing. But with
us, precisely this co-operative labor, for instance the work
in a factory, is removed from its community setting and
emptied, by the relations of production, of any community
spirit.
Places that have no shape have no face-to-face func-
tioning, for the shape is the functioning community. The
loveliness of so many hamlets in Europe is that they have
shape and are built of local materials by local craft. Per-
haps the people had to cluster to attend early masses. In
Ireland, where they farm out the back door, the rows of
thatched houses line both sides of a little street. In France,
where men go off to their farms, there may be a square.
In our own early New England villages, where congrega-
tional and political spirit was strong, there was a common
green with public buildings, though the families lived scat-
tered on the farms they worked. There was the shape of
a community, with its economy, its crafts, and its ideas.
The advantage of growing up in such a community in
one's early years is evident. It is not family supervision,
on which the physicians of juvenile delinquency are now
laying such stress; quite the contrary! it is that the family
does not have to bear the burden of teaching the culture.
In a community, everybody knows the child face to face.
Patriotism 111
There is an easy grading of overlapping ages, right up to
the adults who are going about their business in a going
concern, and not paying too much attention to children. A
good city neighborhood works in the same way.
From this point of view, the swarm of kids in a city
housing project form a better community than present-day
country boys or the kids on Park Avenue. Therefore they
have more local patriotism. The bother with this commu-
nity chain, however, is that it terminates abruptly before
it reaches the adults, who belong to a different world; so
the kids are a gang and the local community spirit turns
into loyalty to a Code; it does not eventuate in anything
socially cohesive and culturally worth while. And such a
gang is prone to be delinquent because, as we shall see, in
such conditions it is the forbidden that best cements loy-
alty.
Politically, a delinquent gang is not lawless and not in
the state of nature. Balked in its growth, the local loyalty
turns on itself and simply reinvents the feud-code of Al-
fred the Great, marking out safe territories and making
provision for special classes of revenge. On this view, if
one teen-age gang, pursuing its vendetta, falls on another
and murders a kid, it would not be our business to inter-
fere in the law of that differently constituted society. Also,
like Danes or Vikings of Alfred's time, they regard our
larger society merely as a field of sport and plunder; they
have not yet reinvented International Law. But we, of
course, cannot view it so, for we live in an advanced state
of politics and law: they are members of our community.
We are not children but more experienced and somewhat
wiser, and therefore responsible, so we cannot simply an-
nihilate them like pirates (they are small in size, few in
numbers, and armed with primitive weapons); and we
cannot let them hurt themselves.
(I think it is wise sometimes to regard disaffected
112 GROWING UP ABSURD
groups as if there were plausibly these two viewpoints,
rival patriotisms. It is better humanity and it might make
better law. The advantage is that it takes the disaffected
seriously as disaffected, rather than merely pathological;
it keeps in the foreground the question of allegiance. We
must deserve allegiance.)
8.
But they are children. Let us consider rather the peculiar
patriotic problem of an older disaffected group, the Beat
young men, for then we can see that it is a patriotic prob-
lem.
Here too, I think, there has often been a strong com-
munity influence of growing up together. For instance,
fellows who went to Black Mountain College, which was
oriented to community and creative arts a powerful, and
powerfully disaffecting, combination are pillars of Beat
society. Other fellows were buddies in the armed services."
However it was, as Beat their community spirit is strong.
They barge in to sleep, they share property, they share a
culture. Now think of this community, disaffected from
America, as engaged in a pathetic quest for some other big
patriotism, an adult peer group.
We saw how, appointing themselves outcast, they af-
firm the accidental symbols of other outcast groups: Ne-
gro, Puerto Rican, and criminal. But this is pretty thin
gruel for intellectual young men, many of whom have
been to college. On the other hand, they are unable to
make the jump to the great international humanist com-
munity because, simply, they don't know anything, nei-
ther literature nor politics. (I once taught at Black Moun-
tain College, and to my astonishment I found that the
students had never read the Bible, Milton, Dryden, Gib-
bon, etc., etc., nor did they feel as a lack that such
Patriotism 113
things existed. But they knew odd facts about Mayan hi-
eroglyphics which their teacher had been interested in.)
What then? Since it is necessary for grown fellows to
have some major allegiance or other, they have latched
on to the dead Japanese masters of Zen Buddhism. (This
is a late effect of the early-century discovery of Japan by
Fenollosa, Frank Lloyd Wright, the Misses Lowell and
Ayscough, and Ezra Pound, suddenly reinforced by the
postwar occupation under General MacArthur.) Now, as
we shall see, Zen is not irrelevant to these young men's
needs, for it is a theology and style of immediate experi-
ence. But the pathos is that Zen was the flower of an in-
tensely loyal feudal system that fed, protected, and hon-
ored its masters, and to which the Zen masters in turn
had fealty. For example, it is said that the haiku was in-
vented by a poet as a public service when he was suicid-
ally despondent because his Emperor had died. But Zen
without farmers and servants is an airy business; and the
young men, as we have seen, are betrayed into dubious
devices to keep body and soul together, nor do they have
a flag to salute.
9.
I have tried broadly to paint some of the background con-
ditions that discourage patriotism: the lack of bona fides
about our liberties, the dishonorable politics in the univer-
sities, the irresponsible press, the disillusioning handling
of the adventure in space, the inferior and place-seeking
high officers of the State, the shameful neglect of our land-
scape and the disregard of community; later I shall speak
of our trivial leisure which has no community meaning.
But besides these not usually mentioned background con-
ditions, there are of course the persistent immediate ugli-
nesses that everybody talks about and every child sees: the
114 GROWING UP ABSURD
cases of graft, social injustice, stupid law, and injustice to
persons. Yet in an important sense, these scandals do not
discourage patriotism, so long as there is the feeling of a
persistent effort against them. My guess is that more pride
of country is engendered by one good decision, or even a
good powerful dissenting opinion, of the at least tradi-
tional Supreme Court, than by billions of repetitions of the
pledge of allegiance.
Racial segregation and prejudice destroy community by
definition, and we need not discuss them. Here again the
revolution commenced in Jefferson's time and recom-
menced by the abolitionists, went unfinished; and we
have inherited the consequences.
But it is perhaps useful to point out again that, when
there is prejudice, the community of the dominant class
is equally destroyed. The whites in the South, for instance,
used to talk a blatant patriotism and a specious region-
alism grounded in nothing but keeping the blacks under.
The result is that flag and cross have become contemptible
in their own eyes. (Real regionalism, that finds its culture
and satisfaction in its own geography and economy and
can withstand the temptations of the national cash-nexus,
has long ago succumbed to Madison Avenue, Hollywood,
and Wall Street.) Now that law and religion side against
them, the Southerners are maniac with wounded con-
ceit and sexual fear; their behavior on integration should
be referred not to the Attorney General but to the Public
Health Service. All this has come banging down on the
children as the battleground. Yet, paradoxically, among
all young people it is perhaps just the young people in the
South, whites and Negroes both, who most find life worth
living these days, because something real is happening.
During the Montgomery bus boycott against Jim Crow,
there was little delinquency among the Negro boys.
(In Northern cities and towns, also, the children are
Patriotism 115
thrown into a central position in the community crisis of
exclusion and prejudice, but sometimes as peacemakers.
Let me give an interesting architectural example. It has
become common to use the new centralized school build-
ing as the community building for meetings and recreation.
One reason is economy. But another reason that is given
is that the school is the one community function that
brings together the otherwise discordant elements in
the neighborhood, so maybe the adults can get together in
the school. It is a curious situation when the grownups
have to rely on the children to make sense for them, and
when the school building is the chief community building.
But it is better than nothing.)
10.
Deep in the organized system itself there has been an im-
portant new effort toward community. The postwar boom
in young marriages and the sensational rise in the urban
birth rate that for the first time promises to surpass the
rural birth rate, have been accompanied by the moving of
affluent workmen to suburban projects and of the middle
status to ranch houses. These new settlements devote time
and energy to common interests. Do they do anything for
local patriotism?
They are communities for small children, one to five,
and for women as the mothers of small children. These
are the groups in society unequivocally benefited by high
production, full employment, and the high standard of
living. They thrive on animal security. Labor-saving de-
vices make the world of the infants much pleasanter.
Morally and vocationally, there is no question that hav-
ing and caring for the children is justified work for the
mothers, necessary, honored, and using good human ca-
pacities. Nearly forty years ago, H. L. Mencken pointed
116 GROWING UP ABSURD
out in his book on women that women had real jobs,
whereas men were likely to be certified public accountants
or politicians. Today, when so many work in the Rat Race,
few would deny that he was right. So now men too try
earnestly to devote themselves to the small ones as a sec-
ondary but real career. This is called the New Father-
hood.
The child world, in the suburbs and surrounding coun-
try, and somewhat less in the city, is the best that small
children have had in modern times. The new psychology
of belonging is feeble stuff, but the new psychology of in-
fant care has been radical: no toilet training, permissive
thumb sucking and pregenital sexuality, free crying and
movement, exposure to the grownups' nakedness, hon-
est answers to questions. The new medicine gets them
quickly over the usual diseases (though there is debate
about the later consequences). The school system as a
whole is poor, but the nursery schools are often first-rate,
progressive, and have intelligent and dedicated young
teachers. It is said that children's toys and games are ex-
cellent, practical and imaginative, up to the age of six,
when the commercial criteria of the eleven-billion-dollar
market begin to operate.
For the adults, the improvement of this child's world
results in genuine community participation, committee
meetings and lectures on psychology, concern for traffic
and zoning, and even extension courses in cultural sub-
jects to create the proper atmosphere for growing up. It
seems astonishing, given so much active participation, that
these community activities have not much developed into
other important political and social action. But courage
gives out at the political issues relevant to age six. The
sponsorship and control of the organized system are ev-
erywhere apparent.
Patriotism 117
(For instance, in a recent agitation that has prevented
Negroes from moving into Deerfield, a suburb of Chicago
average income $9,000-10,000 an "attractive young
married couple" explained that most of their friends had
most of their money tied up in their houses: "We don't ex-
pect to live in them very long. Some of the junior execs
expect to become seniors and move to the real North
Shore, and a lot of us will be transferred all over the
United States. When this happens, we want to be sure our
houses have resale value." [Reported in the New York
Times, April 17, I960.] The spiritedness of this speaks
for itself.)
Unfortunately, when the adults devote themselves thus
to the child's world, there isn't much world for the child
to grow up into in the next stage. For Father to guide his
growing son, it is necessary for him to have a community
of his own and be more of a man. In the circumstances
this is difficult. But if there is no big environment, there
are no grounds for patriotism.
The corporations, however, have now entered into this
arena too, to organize the next stage of growing up. This
is the meaning, surely, of the publicity that has been
trumped up for the Little League, the baseball teams of
subteen-agers sponsored and underwritten by various
business firms. What value the Little League has as play,
I don't know, I haven't watched games. The high-pressure
advertising has been violently denounced by the older
sports writers as giving kids an unsportsmanlike taste for
publicity. As a school of rule making, responsibility, and
impersonality, the Little League certainly cannot compare
with the free games of the street, but we saw that these
have been passing away. Economically, however, the func-
tion of the Little League is clear-cut: it is child la-
bor, analogous to ten-year-olds picking hemp in the fac*
118 GROWING UP ABSURD
tory a century ago: it keeps idle hands out of mischief; it
is not profitable as production, but it provides valuable
training in attitude and work habits.
Viewed so, the suburban and exurban trends are the
formation of a new proletariat, producers of offspring.
11.
Naturally the Public Relations have been unable to re-
strain themselves from invading the public schools. The
classes are flooded with pamphlets and documentary films
on electronics and the introduction Of cows into New
Zealand, put out by Consolidated Edison, Ford, Shell,
Westinghouse, the National Dairy Council, Union Car-
bide, Bell, etc., and even Merrill Lynch. These proclaim
their sponsorship with more or less discreet plugs.
In the ninth grade, however, at a New York City
school I know well, they have spent class time with an
item called The Educational ABC's of Industry, a col-
lection of advertisements interlarded with reading matter;
and the class was actually required, by a teacher dis-
tracted by overwork, to copy out jingles in which C stands
for Orange-Crush, "taste it and see," and F for the Ford
Motor Company, "where the first car grew." I would
gladly share this literature with the reader, but its publisher
has not given me permission.
VI
Social Animal
1.
Let us next talk about marriage and so-called "animal"
functions of the social animal.
Everyone agrees that an important condition for the
troubles of growing up is the troubles between the parents
at home, brutal quarrels and drunkenness., coldness, one
or the other or both parents getting away as often as possi-
ble and being withdrawn while present, and marriages
breaking up. The most common popular, and mayoral,
prescription for delinquency is "more parental supervi-
sion." In the usual circumstances this would likely in-
crease the tension and the trouble, but be that as it may:
the question remains, how? how to have reasonable super-
vision when the marriages themselves are no good? for
presumably the good marriages don't have the problem
children. (The frequent recommendation to fine or jail the
parents is a lulu.)
I do not think the public spokesmen are serious. For
powerful and well-known modern reasons, some of them
inevitable, the institution of marriage itself, as we have
known it for several hundred years, cannot work simply
120 GROWING UP ABSURD
any longer, and is very often the direct cause of intense
suffering. Urbanism, the economic independence of
women, contraception, relaxing the inhibitions against un-
married and extramarital sexuality, these are inevitable.
A dispassionate observer of modern marriage might sensi-
bly propose, Forget it; think up some other form of mating
and child care. The pastor of a large church in an ordinary
Midwestern town told me that, in his observation, not one
marriage in twenty was worth while; many were posi-
tively damaging to the children. If very many marriages
could simply let themselves dissolve after a few years, the
partners would suddenly become brighter, rosier, and
younger. But of course, in this field there are no dispas-
sionate observers. We are all in the toils of jealousy of our
own Oedipus complexes, and few of us can tolerate lone-
liness and the feeling of being abandoned. Nor do we
have any other formula for secure sex, companionship,
and bringing up children.
This is not a newsy story. Is it kept in mind by the
Mayor of New York whose canned voice says every night
on the radio that parents who are not affectionately su-
pervising the children are failing in responsibility? Has
the Mayor not seen an harassed mother hysterically and
unmercifully whacking a three-year-old in the sand pile?
Does he think it is some different parent he is now appeal-
ing to? (I heard one mother scream, "I ask you only one
simple thing, to obey me!")
"Most of the children we see [in King's County Do-
mestic Relations Court] have been so seriously damaged
by their environment that they need 24-hour-a-day cor-
rective treatment. I'll say unequivocally that most of the
children we see should be separated from their parents for
their own health and welfare." (Dr, J. M, Fries.)
Social Animal 121
2.
Consider some incidents of sex and marriage in a more
"privileged" and a more "underprivileged" situation. For
the first, we can return to the remarkable boom in early
marriages and child bearing that we mentioned in the last
chapter, occurring especially among the economically
privileged who previously would have married late. No
doubt this has been partly due to the war and Cold War,
clinging to life and clutching to something safe in an era of
anxiety. But it seems to be also partly a strong reaction to
the drift toward formlessness which these young persons
could observe in their own parents.
These young-marrying, contemporaries or juniors of
the Beat Generation, have often expressed themselves as
follows: "My highest aim in life is to achieve a normal
healthy marriage and raise healthy [non-neurotic] chil-
dren." On the face of it, this remark is preposterous. What
was always taken as a usual and advantageous life-condi-
tion for work in the world and the service of God, is now
regarded as an heroic goal to be striven for. Yet we see
that it is a hard goal to achieve against the modern obsta-
cles. Also it is a real goal, with objective problems that a
man can work at personally, and take responsibility for,
and make decisions about unlike the interpersonal rela-
tions of the corporation, or the routine of the factory job
for which the worker couldn't care less.
But now, suppose the young man is achieving this goal:
he has the wife, the small kids, the suburban home, and
the labor-saving domestic devices. How is it that it is the
same man who uniformly asserts that he is in a Rat Race?
Either the goal does not justify itself, or indeed he is not
really achieving it. Perhaps the truth is, if marriage and
children are the goal, a man cannot really achieve it. It is
122 GROWING UP ABSURD
not easy to conceive of a strong husband and father who
does not feel justified in his work and independent in the
world. Correspondingly, his wife feels justified in the small
children, but does she have a man, do the children have a
father, if he is running a Rat Race? Into what world do
the small children grow up in such a home?
It is advantageous to the smooth functioning of the or-
ganized system if its personnel are married and have
home responsibilities. (E.g., it's much harder for them to
act up and quit.) But the smooth functioning of the organ-
ized system may not be advantageous to the quality of the
marriage and the fatherhood. It is a troubling picture. On
the one hand, early marriage is excellent and promising,
especially in the probable case that both the young people
have had sexual experiences and could have others, and
they have chosen the marriage as a reasonably steady and
jealousy-free alternative. And having the children early is
admirable, rather than delaying for the empty reasons
that middle-class people used to give. On the other hand,
to take on such early responsibilities indicates an early
resignation: the marriage seems partly to be instead of
looking ambitiously for a worth-while career.
If the highest aim in life is to achieve a normal mar-
riage and raise healthy children, we can understand the
preoccupation with Psychology, for the parents do not
have much activity of their own to give rules to the family
life. The thousand manuals of sex technique and happy
marriage, then, have the touching dignity of evangelical
tracts, as is indeed their tone; they teach how to be saved,
and there is no other way to be saved.
On the children is lavished an avalanche of attention.
They cannot possibly reward so much attention, and the
young father, at least, soon gets pretty bored and retires
to his Do-It- Yourself . Now it used to be said that middle-
class parents frustrate the children more, to meet high
Social Animal 123
standards, but the frustration is acceptable because it leads
, to an improved status, esteemed by the children; the lower
classes, on the contrary, are more permissive; nor would
the discipline be accepted, because the father is dises-
teemed. What then is the effect, in the ranch houses, if the
discipline is maintained, because the standard is high, but
the status is disesteemed, first by the father himself, who
talks cynically about it; then by the mother, who does not
respect it; then by the growing children? Is ft possible to
maintain and pass on a middle-class standard without be-
lief in its productive and cultural mission?
1 wonder if we are not here describing the specific
genesis of a Beat Generation; young men who (1) cannot
break away from the father who has been good to them,
but who (2) simply cannot affirm father's values; and (3)
there are no other dominant social values to compensate.
If this is the case, where now there are thousands of these
young men, there will be hundreds of thousands. The or-
ganized system is the breeding ground of a Beat Gen-
eration.
3.
Among poor young men, quitting school early and per-
haps meeting discrimination in the better unions, or other
obstacles to making something of themselves, the more
permitted and widely stimulated sexuality can work as a
deadly trap. For there is desire and sexual opportunity at
the same time as the older adolescent's sense of personal
worth is diminishing. He must act the man when he does
not feel like a man. This may come to the impotence of
the unemployed or the self-disapproving alcoholic. It is
not helped, either, if the desirable women seem to choose
"successful" fellows, or if a young man has the conven-
tion that dating costs money. The contrary alternative is
124 GROWING UP ABSURD
that sex itself become a proof of manly worth, a form of
conquest without lust or love, or not even conquest, but
simply potency proving potency. For instance, young
Navy sailors who on the ship are griping but docile chil-
dren, on shore regard the women as their "pigs" and do
not let themselves get "involved." Among the Spanish
poor, too, the tradition of macho, masculinity, that they
have brought with them, seems to be especially a means
of proof that a young man is not a contemptible boy.
On either alternative, his sexual need can get a fellow
into plenty of trouble. To get the money and be a success,
he may steal. If he proves himself by sex, brutality or
promiscuity will get him into sexual scrapes. If sex gets him
into too much trouble or if his doubt of potency is too
strong, he may withdraw altogether, into gambling or be-
ing a tough guy, or passively into narcotics.
4.
There are class differences; but through all classes, it is
Jiard to grow up when the general social attitude toward
sexuality is inconsistent and unpredictable. (It is hard to
exist as an adult too.) In this respect our society is
uniquely problematical Broadly speaking, there are three
universally widespread and incompatible attitudes toward
sexual behavior, and two of these are inconsistent in
themselves.
In the ideal theory and practice, sexuality is one of the
most important natural functions and the attitude toward
it ranges from permissive to enthusiastic. This is the posi-
tion of all Thinking, of public spokesmen and women's
magazines, and of the Supreme Court in its decisions on
classics of literature; and it is somewhat put into prac-
tice by psychological parents, mental hygienists, nursery
schools, and bands of adolescents and adults. Yet there
Social Animal 125
are puzzling inconsistencies. What applies to brother does
not apply to sister, though every girl is somebody's sis-
ter. What is affirmed and tacitly condoned, must still not
be done overtly. For instance, although all Serious Thought
is agreed on the simple natural function and there are
colorful little abstract treatises for children, it is incon-
ceivable for a publisher to print a sober little juvenile story
about, say, playing doctor or the surprising discovery of
masturbation. A character in a juvenile (or adult) adven-
ture story may not incidentally get an erection as he may
wolf a sandwich or get sleepy. It seems obvious that, here
as everywhere else, the only antidote for the sadistic-
sexual comic books that are objected to, is the presenta-
tion of factual truth and a matter-of-fact tone; whereas
what we have, permissiveness combined with withdrawal
from real contact, precisely produces the sadistic-sexual
need. This is the bread-and-butter of psychological theory;
why is it not said in the annual investigations of the comic
books? Again, although most public spokesmen are for a
"healthy frankness," the public schools are run quite
otherwise. Let me recall a typical incident recently in
California (spring of '59). A high school science teacher
employed the bright-idea project of tabulating the class's
sexual habits as an exercise in fact finding. This got him
into terrible hot water, and the School Board carefully ex-
plained, "What we teach is human reproduction, much as
we discuss the functions of the human eye or ear, 3 ' that is,
without mentioning light or sound, color or harmony, or
any other act or relation.
(I am writing this equably and satirically, but the stu-
pidity of these people is outrageous.)
The treatment of sexuality in the popular culture and
the commodities and advertising is less puzzling: it is to
maximize sales. Existing lust is exploited and as far as pos-
sible there is created an artificial stimulation, with the jus-
126 GROWING UP ABSURD
tified confidence that the kind of partial satisfactions ob-
tainable will involve buying something: cosmetics, sharp
clothes, art magazines, dating entertainment. And since,
for very many people, lust is at present accompanied by
embarrassment, shame, and punishment, these too are ex-
ploited as much as possible. I do not think there is here
any inconsistency. One simply goes along with the wide-
spread melodramatic fantasy of lust and punishment. E.g.,
the public sentiment for Caryl Chessman's execution, 70
per cent, expressed itself with terrifying frequency in-
sadistic, pornographic, and vindictive language: the plays
of Tennessee Williams are the deep poetry of these people.
It would be inconsistent if the popular culture tried to be
factual, analytic, or compassionate. But there is an absolute
incompatibility between this sexuality of popular culture
and the ideal theory and practice of the "simple natural
function."
If we ask, however, what is acceptable public behavior
in the neighborhoods or with the neighbors, the confusion
is baffling. There are islands of contradictory practice,
even though these may have the identical Culture and al-
most the same Thought. Kids masturbating may be smiled
on or ignored, or they may be barred from one's home, or
they may be arrested as delinquent. Among the boys
themselves, up to the age of thirteen mutual masturba-
tion is a wicked thrill, but after thirteen it is queer and ab-
solutely to be inhibited. Adolescent couples must pet or it
is felt that something is wrong with them; but '"how far?"
Sometimes they may copulate, if they can get away with
it; or they absolutely must not. You may admire and speak
to strange girls on the street, it is flattering and shows
spirit; or you may not, it is rude and threatening. But if
you whistle at them while you huddle in your own group,
that's bully. You may pet in public like the French; you
may not pet in public, it's disgusting; you may on the
Social Animal 127
beach but not on the grass. Among the boys, to boast of
actual or invented prowess is acceptable, but to speak
soberly of a love affair or a sexual problem in order to be
understood is strictly taboo; it is more acceptable among
girls. It is assumed that older teen-agers are experienced
and sophisticated, but they are legal minors who must not
be corrupted. More important, any relation between an
older teen-aged girl and a man even in his twenties, or be-
tween an older teen-aged boy and an experienced woman,
is shocking or ludicrous, though this is the staple of sexual
education among the civilized.
In this tangle of incompatible and inconsistent stand-
ards, one strand is sure and predictable: that the law will
judge by the most out-of-date, senseless, and unpsycho-
logical convention, even though it is against the consensus
of almost every family in the neighborhood and the con-
fessional attitude of the parish priest. They will arrest you
for nude bathing a mile away on a lonely beach. (But this
tendency to maintain the moral-obsolete is, of course, in-
evitable in our kind of democracy. A legislator may be-
lieve what he pleases, but how can he publicly propose the
repeal of a statute against sin?)
I am describing again an interrupted revolution, the so-
called Sexual Revolution. We see again how the organized
system of production and sales manages to profit by the
confusion of the interruption, whereas a finished revolu-
tion would be economically a dead loss, since good sexual
satisfaction costs nothing, it needs only health and af-
fection.
5.
Special mention must be given to male homosexuality,
which preoccupies adolescents and young men of every
class from bottom to top. The preoccupation appears
128 GROWING UP ABSURD
either as gnawing doubts that oneself might be a "latent
homosexual," or as reactive contempt and ridicule, or hos-
tility and even paranoia. Among young people every kind
of nonconformism in a contemporary tends to be thought
of as homosexual, whether it be a passion for music or a
passion for social justice.
Inevitably in the stimulating and hectic sexual atmos-
phere, including overtly expressed homosexuality, re-
pressed homosexual thoughts also begin to break through.
Remnants of unfinished normal homosexual situations re-
appear, and one is sharply aware of new temptations in
the culture. The shared narcissism of dandy hair-do's is
astonishingly prevalent; the affectionate body-contact of
buddies is obsessionally inhibited or immediately com-
mented on and "interpreted"; and one sees queers every-
where.
The question must be asked why the breakthrough into
awareness seems to balk and circle at just this point on
just this issue? why, in the present, just the homosexual
temptations and threats loom so large? One important an-
swer, I think, is the theme I have been developing in this
book. The fellows are interrupted in growing up as men;
their homosexuality threatens them as immaturity. They
are afraid of going backward to boyhood status, admiring
the model penises and powers of their seniors and adults.
Or they regress further to a safe narcissism and would
want their own penises and bodies to be loved as their per-
sonal worth, but this reversion to infantilism is fiercely
resisted.
In the difficulty of growing up, the young man psycho-
logically regresses to an earlier stage because it is easier,
he cannot take on the responsibilities of heterosexual love
and masculine conflict. But then, doubting his potency and
to avoid ridicule and danger, he becomes obsessionally
Social Animal 129
heterosexual and competitive; or alternatively, he may be-
come apathetic and sexually not there.
6.
Other "animal" expressions, besides the sexual, are also
problematical. Let us sum them up by some more philo-
sophical considerations.
As our organized system perfects itself, there is less
"open" environment. It is hard for a social animal to grow
when there is not an open margin to grow in: some open
space, some open economy, some open mores, some ac-
tivity free from regulation and cartes d'identite. I am re-
ferring not to a war between the "individual" and society,
or to a wild animal that has to be acculturated for there
is no such individual or animal but to a deepening so-
ciological flaw in the modern system itself .A. society can-
not have decided all possibilities beforehand and have
structured them. If society becomes too tightly integrated
and pre-empts all the available space, materials, and
methods, then it is failing to provide for just the margin
of formlessness, real risk, novelty, spontaneity, that makes
growth possible. This almost formal cause importantly
drives young people out of the organized system altogether
and makes creative adults loath to co-operate with it.
When time, clothes, opinions, and goals become so regu-
lated that people feel they cannot be "themselves" or cre-
ate something new, they bolt and look for fringes and mar-
gins, loopholes, holes in the wall, or they just run.
Our society pre-empts literally too much of the space.
For instance, it is impossible in the Eastern United States
to pitch a tent and camp for the night without registering
with the National Parks and its list of regulations. You
cannot go off somewhere for a sexual bout without paying
130 GROWING UP ABSURD
rent. Almost any stone that a kid picks up and any target
that he throws it at, is property. People hygienically adopt
a permissive attitude toward the boisterousness and hyper-
kinesis of children, and meantime we design efficient
minimum housing. Under modern urban conditions, it is
impossible for an old woman to be a harmless lunatic, as
was commonplace in country places; she would hurt her-
self, get lost among strangers, disrupt traffic, stop the sub-
way. She must be institutionalized. If you roam the street
late at night doing nothing, and looking for something to
do, the cop who is protecting you and everybody else
doesn't want you to be going nowhere and to have nothing
to do; and you ask him, Does he have any suggestions?
7.
There is something attractive in the forbidden as such. I
think that the theme of this chapter explains this puzzling
attraction.
On the usual psychological theory, to do the forbidden
is to attack the forbidding authority, ultimately the oedi-
pal father. This explains the obvious fear of punishment,
and also the stronger, often quite irrational, fear of trans-
gressing the due order of things. (E.g., "Are we allowed
to climb up there on that ladder?" "Naw! of course not!"
"Then we'd better not" even though there is nobody to
catch them at it. But they then climb up anyway.) On this
theory, what would the attraction be? The forbidden ob-
ject itself, resonant with the other repressed things forbid-
den by the oedipal authority; and secondly, more subtly,
a teasing of the authority, to win his personal attention, for
he is so impersonal. I think there is a good deal to this sec-
ond point, for it has somewhat the feel of the attraction of
the forbidden. (E.g., "Will the watchman wake up?"
hoping that he will thrillingly wake up, even if he bites.)
Social Animal 131
But I should like to suggest still a third fundamental at-
traction in doing the forbidden: the animal need to trans-
gress the limit in order to finish the situation. Consider,
People are continually stimulated and set in motion, but
they come up against limits and cannot fully go or let go.
Typically, because of inhibitions and circumstances, the
orgasm is not total and not altogether without "self-con-
sciousness." The spontaneous acceleration toward an un-
limited goal seems evident in the way one forbidden
achievement emboldens the next, until the process comes
to a natural end, rather than an imposed limit. The free-
dom that beckons in the forbidden attraction is not, nega-
tively, merely a freedom from constraint, but a relief of
internal pressure as one arrives and finishes the experi-
ence. There is a quiet satisfaction even if there is not much
satisfaction in the forbidden object achieved. (E.g.,
there is nothing up on the roof and the kids soon climb
down and go home.) But there is no disappointment, be-
cause the action has reached its natural end: you have
climbed to the top of the mountain and that's the furthest
you want to go.
This spontaneous acceleration to the goal is not the
same as "raising the ante" characteristic in purely de-
linquent behavior. Raising the ante has a fragmented and
desperate tone that comes from finding that each daring
act has not paid off, and therefore the next tune one must
stab more wildly. The end of raising the ante is clearly
self-destruction, to be "extreme"; it is not to finish a proc-
ess. Doing the forbidden is a normal -function of growth;
raising the ante is a sign that a person is not in contact
with his real needs.
The same twelve-year-olds I have been describing re-
turned to the same building the next week a pleasant
spot overlooking the Hudson where they came to smoke
forbidden cigarettes. They directly climbed onto the roof,
132 GROWING UP ABSURD
for it was now the established routine, and they came
down. But there was a new boy with them whose be-
havior was different. He promptly dared the others to
jump off the roof a ten-foot drop to a concrete pave-
ment, guaranteed to break both ankles. He himself
climbed over the ledge and hung by his hands and said he
was going to drop. He would have let go, too, except that
we men intervened, shouting. The other kids were in-
dignant and disgusted at his senselessness; they did not
seem challenged. One of the men said to him, "That
wasn't smart." He, grinning: "Aw, I thought youse'd think
it was smart."!! Had he been playing, after all, for our
attention? He got it.
VII
Faith
1.
Let us exaggerate the conditions that we have been de-
scribing. 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 cul-
turally. The university has become merely a training
ground for technicians and applied-anthropologists. Sex-
uality is divorced from manly independence and achieve-
ment. The FBI has a file card of all the lies and truths
about everybody. And so forth. If we sum up these im-
agined conditions, there would arise a formidable ques-
tion: Is it possible, being a human being, to exist? Is it pos-
sible, having a human nature, to grow up? There would
be a land of metaphysical crisis.
Or put it another way. These conditions are absurd,
they don't make sense; and yet millions, who to all ap-
134 GROWING UP ABSURD
pearances are human beings, behave as though they were
the normal course of things. For instance, we ^ncourage
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 spokes-
men, 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 ab-
surd. One feels depersonalized.
It then becomes necessary to stop short and make a
choice: Either/Or. Either one drifts with their absurd sys-
tem of ideas, believing that this is the human community.
Or one dissents totally from their system of ide*as 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-hu-
man. The tone of dependency, for instance, is not servile
but, like the diet of hamburgers and malted milk, a regres-
sion to childhood. The Americans can make fun of them-
selves. The top managers and the president are not cal-
culating 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 care-
lessly swept corners full of Long-haired Professors, Beat
Faith 135
Generations, Winos, and other assorted fry who are offi-
cially conceded to exist. This does not add up to a meta-
physical 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 ardu-
ous; to persist as a man does require unusual moral char-
acter, intellect, or animal spirits.
for manj 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 un-
fortunately, whichever way they choose tends to create in
fact the very metaphysical crisis that they have imagined.
Ifjthey choose to conform to the organized system, reap-
ing 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.
2.
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 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.
136 GROWING UP ABSURD
This is typical public speaking; like an address by Eisen-
hower 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 hot irrele-
vant to the plight of being resigned, for there is no availa-
ble 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 it-
self. 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 ex-
istence.
Of course this is not serious. A "new ethics" would, pre-
sumably, 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 in-
sulting. Do we need an esthetic? I cannot cope with the
artistic tradition that we have, especially its modern tri-
umphs, so that my own work is both unclassical and dated
Faith 137
according 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 Holly-
wood, Broadway, Madison Avenue? that by the unanim-
ity 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 igno-
rant critics?)
Dr. Douglass cannot mean what he says, yet he does
mean something. Under what conditions do public spokes-
men 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 disappoint-
ment 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 any-
thing practical. (The crisis will occur "tomorrow.") The
tone, if not the content, fits the American style, optimistic
about expedients. And the disappointment is more pro-
found 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 say-
ing that the atom bombs were dropped for no good rea-
son. The beautiful American classlessness is freezing into
statuses. People ask for a stop to immigration.
In the modern world, we Americans are the old in-
habitants. We first had political freedom, high industrial
production, an economy of abundance. Naturally we are
J38 GROWING UP ABSURD
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."
3.
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 ex-
planation 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 grow-
ing up in our society? Let us discuss it theologically,
though I am aware that this vocabulary is at present puz-
zling.
If a person asks "How am I justified? What is the
meaning of my life?" he will surely find no rational an-
swer. The bother is that the question has arisen and begun
to plague him. If the question arises, as an important ques-
tion, 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' intellec-
tual 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
Faith 139
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 op-
portunities 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 ac-
tivity 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 spe-
cific to the task in hand. The question, "How am I justi-
fied? what is the meaning of my life?" is answered by nam-
ing 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 with-
out external or internal interruptions, they don't feel guilty
and are fortified against adult criticism. The behavior jus-
tifies 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 sub-
ject 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 rec-
ognized as "questions of a juvenile delinquent to his
soul.") Children, if we observe them, seem normally to
140 GROWING UP ABSURD
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 exist-
ing.
Desperately, then, people may try to fill the void of
worthlessness-and-abandonment by seeking money or sta-
tus, 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 Mm. As the theologians
have said, Real works are the natural products of faith tak-
ing 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 Genera-
tion, 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. D6uglass 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 ac-
tual 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
Faith 141
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?
4.
The early Protestants made a profoundly happy connec-
tion between Justification and a man's Calling or Voca-
tion in worldly society. Max Weber famously drew atten-
tion to this, in his book on the Protestant Ethic, as an
explanation of the acceptance of ascetic self-righteous capi-
talist 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. (Mod-
ern 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 connec-
tion was that, in a religious community, the various occu-
pations 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
142 GROWING UP ABSURD
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 "su-
pernatural" sanction.)
Vocation is the way a man recognizes himself as be-
longing, or appoints himself, in the community life and
work. We saw, in Jespersen, how a child takes on the lan-
guages of the peer groups that he chooses because they are
Ms 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 recogniz-
ing that a certain job must be done and responsibly ac-
cepting the necessity as his own, because it is his com-
munity and various jobs may be equivalent to him (his
real vocation is being a citizen). A man may do a job be-
cause 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 tra-
ditional nor rationalistic in some system, but whatever
happens to be the ongoing work of the particular commu-
Faith 143
nity 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 de-
mands 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 commu-
nity 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-deny-
ing or self-abasing, though hopefully they are self-tran-
scending. 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)!
5.
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
144 GROWING UP ABSURD
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, chil-
dren cease to learn mechanical aptitudes. When the sci-
ences are supreme, average people lose their feeling of
causality. And all different timbres of music come from
one loud-speaker (an earnest musician, therefore, resign-
edly 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 accommo-
dations 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
Faith 145
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 pecul-
iarly 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 posi-
tion 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 Ms
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 TYme-style; he can-
not be that, and presumably the old function of letters
cannot exist. But Time-styls, 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 im-
agine that a chap who at thirty-five would make a splen-
did 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
146 GROWING UP ABSURD
it is extremely unlikely that a young man who would
throw the best years of Ms 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 crea-
tive 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 con-
tinuous career resume; years at a stretch might be lack-
ing, 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 Ms 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 en-
couragement? 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.
Faith 147
somebody has got to take the risk of making concrete un-
tabulated 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. Natu-
rally 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 Ms 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 manu-
facture 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
148 GROWING UP ABSURD
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 under-
stand, 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 knowl-
edge; 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 ap-
pallingly 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 conse-
quences. 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 be-
come a cause of guilt and of feeling worthless and ex-
cluded. 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
Faith 149
power, as if it were something he had. A society that so
discourages its young has nothing to recommend it.
6.
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 be-
longing, or breaks his spirit. Youth workers with delin-
quents make a fetish of protecting self-esteem, as con-
trasted 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 availa-
ble 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 him-
self, you attack the character resistances.)
Now shame is the only direct attack on conceit, the de-
fensive image of oneself. Conceit is the common denomi-
nator of the Organization Man, the hipster, and the ju-
venile delinquent this is why I have been lumping them
together. The conceited image of the self is usually not
150 GROWING UP ABSURD
quite conscious, but it is instantly woundable; and people
protect it with a conformity to their peers (oneself is su-
perior) . But the conceited groups differ in their methods
of confirming and enhancing conceit: the juvenile delin-
quent by surly and mischievous destractiveness of the in-
sulting privileged outgroup; the hipster by making fools of
them with token performances; the Organization Man by
status and salary. To this inner idol, they sacrifice the in-
genuous 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 dispropor-
tionate.
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 use-
ful 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 admir-
ing citizenry. It is a hard achievement but, like other pub-
lic goods, it is not esteemed.
Among cities, Venice had magnificence; but it is Flor-
ence 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 in-
sults; 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 in-
clude truthfulness, honesty, public usefulness, integrity, in-
Faith 151
dependence, 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 dis-
esteem 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 ad-
ministrator 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 fam-
ilies" increasingly shun "bad families' 9 that have had
troubles, such as divorces or delinquency or even death of
a parent ( ! ) , f or 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, drily offered that
the editor of Life probably did not have a material family,
a very abnormal case.)
152 GROWING UP ABSURD
There is an organized system of reputations that is cal-
culated statistically to minimize risk and eliminate the
unsafe; likely it succeeds in this. It may make the enter-
prise 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 im-
munizing people against their virus; it would be a re-
markable 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 be-
cause 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 publicke 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; Ber-
nard Shaw was arrogant and peculiarly sexless; Frank
Lloyd Wright was wildly arrogant and sexually immoral;
Bertrand Russell was a convicted pacifist and has practi-
Faith 153
caily 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-li-
censed administrator, we do not try to persuade some ex-
traordinary 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 com-
munity 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 cus-
toms. 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
154 GROWING UP ABSURD
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 glamorous images with
empty roles.
But let us return to our average folk.
7.
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 hon-
orably; 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 en-
gage in. Indeed, it is a major defect of our present organ-
ized system and the economy of abundance that, without
providing great goals, it has taken away some of the im-
portant 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,
Faith 155
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 en-
emy 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 ex-
ploit 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 at-
tainments. 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
|56 GROWING UP ABSURD
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.
8.
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 nag-
ging unanswerable questions of justification and vocation?
Their principle is the traditional one of classical mysti-
cism: 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.
9.
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 mote directly, produce real goods
and get real satisfactions and frustrations. But the Organ-
ization does butt in everywhere, it does set the high style
of how things are done. It dominates "big" enterprise, poli-
Faith 157
tics, 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 lit-
tle 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 or-
ganized 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 ad-
vantages of the organized system cause them to inhibit
their powers, and they turn into the cynical pushers or ob-
sessional specialists or timid hard workers who make up
the middle status of the system. Or (2) their natural vir-
tues 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 disap-
prove.
("Wrong" training can be a very innocent thing. Con-
sider 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 publish-
ing, 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.)
158 GROWING UP ABSURD
These two great groups the bright young men wasted
in the Rat Race and the bright young men increasingly un-
used 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 dis-
regard 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.
VIII
An Apparently Closed Room
Given, then, this illusion of a closed world that seems so
critical to young folk, let us make a new beginning and
collect our sentences about their various kinds of reaction.
I have been showing that there is one prevailing system
of ideas according to which our 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 funda-
mental 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.
(If in fact we lived in the World of Public Relations and
America were that world, there would be no bread to eat
but only colorful cellophane wrappers with brand names,
and there would be no water to drink but only Public
Works Sponsored by Governor X, Mayor Y, and Chief
Engineer Z.)
So imagine as a model of our Organized Society: An
160 GROWING UP ABSURD
apparently dosed 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 it
and hanging around because there is nowhere else, some
balking in the race, some attacking the machine, etc.
L
Start with those, running the race. Of these, most interest-
ing are the middle-status Organization Men of various
kinds, for they are aware that it is a rat race, their litera-
ture proclaims it. But they are afraid to jump off. Since
they think it is a closed room, they think there is nowhere
to go. And in the room, if they jump off, they fear they
will be among the disqualified, they will be Bums. But be-
sides, they are afraid of the disqualified, to mix with them,
and this keeps them running. This important point is gen-
erally overlooked, so let us explore it.
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 es-
teemed 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 uncompeti-
tiveness, 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 sched-
uled 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 underpriv-
ileged have produced at least Negro jazz; and the strong-
An Apparently Closed Room 161
<est 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 co-ordinate rival
systems. Rather, they are related vertically: each is a de-
fense against some threat of the other. Primary values are
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, nonconformity, etc. Con-
versely, the working-class "values" are nothing but ig-
norance, 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 such values are
rewarded by upward "betterment." And more philosophi-
cally, all value requires an open system allowing for sur-
prise, novelty, and growth. A closed system cannot make
itself valuable, it must become routine, and devoted
merely to self-perpetuation. (When a mandarin bureauc-
racy is valuable it is because of the vastness of the under-
lying 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) v Not running in the race are the Disqualified. First
let us consider the average nondeliquent Corner Boys
(the term is William F. Whyte's, not to be confused with
162 GROWING UP ABSURD
William 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 setup. It is that the boys 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 installment 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, in the rat race.
(3) Indeed, the group in society that most believes
in the rat race as a source of value is the other underpriv-
ileged: the ignorant and resentful boys who form the de-
linquent 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, the author of Delinquent Boys, has
pointed out that the content of the delinquent subculture
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 de-
linquent culture has become more striking than their dif-
ference. Morally, both groups are conformist, one-upping,
and cynical, to protect their "masculinity," conceal their
worthlessness, and denigrate the earnest boys. Perhaps
even more important, they learn these things from one
another. Madison Avenue and Hollywood provide the he-
roes for the juveniles. (A member of the Connecticut Pa-
An Apparently Closed Room 163
role 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 to the popular stores; but
on the other hand, the ego ideals of the homosexual de-
signers are the young toughs who finally wear the fashions.
Both groups aspire to the same publicity and glamour.
There have now been numerous reported 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 five-second plugs on TV. The delin-
quents, perforce, take short cuts to glamour. Do they
teach the junior executives to take short cuts or is it the
other way? Intermediate between the two groups, remem-
ber, 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 called "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 them-
selves.
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 eleven billion dollars of teen-age junk is not bought
by these boys, but the entire pressure of the organized
system is to teach everybody that only these things are
worth while; therefore these boys do not emulate their
154 GROWING UP ABSURD*
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 investiga-
tion 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: quick satisfaction
because a slower climax is in fact cut short by external
difficulties and internal anxiety. A Youth Worker tells me
that the "heroin, although probably physically harmless
(except in overdose), prevents the full realization of the
kids' 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 as
such 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 sta-
tus of Bums. (I know a young man who works on Madi-
son 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 panhandle
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 resig-
nation 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) IhfiJBeat.. Generation, however, are more genu-
inely resigned. They have more or less rationally balked
An Apparently Closed Room 165
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 worth-while cultural
goods. As we saw, they slip easily into the Disqualified
and make something of poverty more than the under-
privileged do.
Yet the apparently closed room and the central fas-
cination of the rat race are pervasive in Beat thinking
too. They are not merely going their own way, 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-atti-
tudes. 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 him-
self by delinquent hell raising. (This is the so-called "mid-
dle-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 ef-
fort to cope with father at all, and they are pacific, artistic,
and rather easy-going sexually.
(6) Some in the closed room direct more vigorous at-
tacks 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
166 GROWING UP ABSURD
Young Men. Angry are not resigned, but disappointed.
For instance, they complain that their elders have failed
to provide them with good leadership. They are disap-
pointed that England has degenerated into a phony Wel-
fare State that provides no welfare and has ceased to pro-
vide a patriotic ideal. Compare Colin Maclnnes:
In this moment, I must tell you, I'd fallen right out of
love with England. And even with London, which I'd
loved like my mother, in a way. As far as I was con-
cerned, the whole dam group of islands could sink un-
der the sea, and all I wanted was to shake my feet off
them, and take off somewhere and get naturalized, and
settle . . . They all looked so dam pleased to be in
England at the end of their long journey, that I was
heartbroken at all the disappointments that were in
store for them. And I ran up to them through the wa-
ter, and shouted out above the engines, "Welcome to
London! Greetings from England! Meet your first teen-
ager!"
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 "an-
gry" 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 attack-
ing is, unlike ours, very unsettled the Empire lost, the
class system relatively weakening. They are better edu-
cated than our young men, and therefore not so ready nor
able to resign their culture and history. They seem to
An Apparently Closed Room 167
remember what it is to act like human beings, and there-
fore 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 are to fraternize
with the North Africans; but these are not an outcast
group like our racial minorities, but haughty and con-
ceited enemies engaged in war. Yet the tone of protest is
not "social justice," as among the young in England, but
disdain and self-disdain. They stand aside in the closed
room and comment cuttingly on the closed room they are
in. 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 al-
ready a very lofty stance; 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 de-
linquency, 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 surpris-
ing possibility in it; if anything really happened, it would
be a catastrophic explosion. The hipster wards off surprise
by being ahead of every game. 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
168 GROWING UP ABSURD
the coolness of the hipster is a necessity in order not to
"flip," (We shall see that it is the aim of the Beats pre-
cisely 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 disappoint-
ment 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 ju-
venile delinquents, the existentialists, but also the Beats,
for whom it is a crippling error. On the other hand, by all
providing a hipster subculture for one another, they do in-
crease the boundaries of their closed world.
Our historical situation is ironical to the point of sar-
casm. There is every reason why young people growing
up should be baffled and confused; and the subjective re-
sponse 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.
2.
The model of the apparently closed room of the rat race
is far from the old model of Progress, But it is also es-
sentially different from the model of the Class Straggle.
Like the rat race, the class struggle had a dominant and
an underprivileged group, but the class struggle was con-
ceived 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 value" would
An Apparently Closed Room 169
reside 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 re-
markable in our society how rarely one hears, even de-
livered unctuously, the mention of some lofty purpose;
one has to go to the Ethical Culture Society or the Re-
formed rabbis. Correspondingly, the most important prac-
tical objectives astoundingly go by default, for instance
disarmament. "Everybody" is for disarmament, but no-
body believes anybody.
Suppose our State Department sent to Europe a thou-
sand 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
and the Americans will give in."
The existence of the closed room of one pervasive sys-
tem of cynical values is expressed by the prevalent prop-
osition: "There is no use of a fundamental change, for the
next regime will be like this one." Then it is hard to grow
up.
IX
The Early Resigned
1.
The Beat Generation, in our model, are those who have re-
signed from the organized system of production and sales
and its culture, and yet who are too hip to be attracted to
independent work. They are a phenomenon of the after-
math of World War II, and even more of the Korean war.
Their number is swelled by youths whose careers, hesitant
at best, have been interrupted by the draft.
This group is socially important out of proportion to its
numbers, and it has deservedly and undeservedly attracted
attention and influenced many young people. The impor-
tance of the Beats is twofold: first, they act out a critique
of the organized system that everybody in some sense
agrees with. But second and more important in the long
run they are a kind of major pilot study of the use of
leisure in an economy of abundance. They are not, as such,
underprivileged and disqualified for the system; nor are
they, as such, emotionally disturbed or delinquent. Some
young men might be driven to this position by personality
disturbances, but the subculture they have formed has
The Early Resigned 111
made sense and proved attractive to others without those
disturbances, but who have the identical relation to the
organized society.
In many ways the Beat subculture is not merely a re-
action to the middle class or to the organized system. It is
natural. Merging with the underprivileged, the Beats do
not make a poor go of it. Their homes are often more liv-
able than middle-class homes; they often eat better, have
good records, etc. Some of their habits, like being un-
scheduled, sloppy, communitarian, sexually easy-going,
and careless of reputation, go against the grain of the
middle class, but they are motivated by good sense rather
than resentment: they are probably natural ways that
most people would choose if they got wise to themselves
at least so artists and peasants have always urged. Their
rejection of the popular culture, Broadway theater, status
commodities, bespeaks robust mental health. (It is, oddly,
just these reasonable and natural ways that have won un-
deserved attention as outrageous. For Madison Avenue
boys are miffed and fascinated that the Beats get away
with it, and so they keep writing them up.)
We pointed out in Chapter Three that the Beat culture
shares specific traits of the "outside" class to which they
have appointed themselves. Some of these are accidental,
belonging to the particular minorities who form the pres-
ent-day poor just as in France, it is the North Africans
who set the tone. Others are essential, pertaining to being
"outside" of society, such as being outcast and objects of
prejudice; defying convention rather than just disregard-
ing it; in-group loyalty; fear of the cops; job uselessness.
Besides these natural traits and present-day poor traits,
Beat culture is strongly suffused with the hipsterism that
belongs to the middle status of the organized system.
This appears in some of the Beat economic behavior that
172 GROWING UP ABSURD
we described in Chapter Three; in a defensive ignorance
of the academic culture; and in a cynicism and neglect of
ethical and political goals.
Balked in their normal patriotism and religious tradi-
tion, the Beats seek pretty far afield for substitutes, in
D. H. Lawrence's red Indians or feudal Zen Buddhists.
(But I was delighted, the other night, to hear Allen Gins-
berg, one of their best spokesmen, speak with wonder
about visiting the Grand Canyon and boast of going to
Walt Whitman's house. Soon, I trust, he will take the
cruise up our lordly Hudson to Bear Mountain.)
As a typical genesis for a Beat Generation we have sug-
gested (1) attachment to a middle-class home but (2)
withdrawing from its values, (3) without growing into
other worth-while values. They are on speaking terms with
their families but dissent from all their ways. They experi-
ence the University, for instance, as a part of the worth-
less organized system rather than as Newton and Virgil.
Finally, we saw that the Beats regard themselves as in
a metaphysical crisis: they have to choose between the
system and eternal life; and therefore their more philo-
sophic utterances are religious and strewn with references
to the apocalypse and saints of yore, as when Allen Gins-
berg, again, calls Time "the Whore of Babylon" but
indeed she is very like the Whore of Babylon.
This is not, on the whole, a strong position: to be re-
signed and still attached, and therefore to have recourse
to apocalyptic means. But let us see what can be made of
it, and turn first to the jargon, a variant of a Negro jargon
of English, jive,
2.
In this talk there is a phrase "make it," meaning "to estab-
lish oneself in some accepted relation to something." One
The Early Resigned 173
can make it as a writer, as a counter boy, with a girl. The
word comes from the common English "make it against
difficulties," as, "They kept shooting at him but he made
it across the field." It is akin to "make good as a lawyer, a
writer," but it is not so strong and positive. (We should
not say "Make good as a counter boy.") The difficulties
overcome are those that confront anyone who has
dropped "out" of the ordinary social functions when he
tries to establish himeelf as anything at all, to be a some-
thing, a something or other. The usage is an acceptance
of withdrawal. (The notion of Norman Mailer, in The
White Negro, that this and most other jive terms express
positive energy or manliness, is quite idiotic.) Consider
the series: "He wrote the book he was a writer he
made good as a writer he made it as a writer." Very
common is the encouraging, or self-encouraging, exclama-
tion, "You've got it made!" or "I'll have it made!" This
refers almost exclusively to the future-improbable. When
it is said in the past perfect, "He had it made," it refers,
somewhat wistfully, to some other third person. To ex-
press a neutral or proud past fact about oneself, one says
simply, "I wrote the book."
This usage, of establishing an acceptable social relation
against obstacles, draws from the Role Playing that is the
chief function of the middle status of the organized system
(just as, in any period, a Negro would see the white so-
ciety as a closed system with roles to be aped). One can
say, "He made it, I made it, with IBM," indicating no
specific job, for that is unimportant.
Now a more general withdrawal, from experiencing al-
together, is expressed by the omnicapable word "like."
E.g., "Like I'm sleepy," meaning "if I experienced any-
thing, it would be feeling sleepy." "Like if I go to like
New York, I'll look you up," indicating that in this
definite and friendly promise, there is no felt purpose in
174 GROWING UP ABSURD
that trip or any trip. Technically, "like" is here a particle
expressing a tonality or attitude of utterance, like the
Greek /*&, verily, or ty, now look. "Like" expresses ado-
lescent embarrassment or diffidence. Thus, if I talk to a
young fellow and give him the security of continued at-
tention, the "like" at once vanishes and is replaced by
"You know," "I mean," "you know what I mean," simi-
larly interposed in every sentence.
The vocative expletive "Man," however, has different
nuances in different groups. Among the Beats it is used
diffidently and means, "We are not small children, man,
and anyway like we are playing together as like grown-
up." Among Negroes it is often more aggressive and
means, "Man, now don't you call me boy or inferior."
Among proper hipsters it means, "We are not sexually
impotent." So far as I can hear, it never means acceptance
of the speakers as adult males, nor does it have the ring of
respect or admiration (Mensch), as a woman or hero
worshiping boys might use it. When the interlocutor is in
fact respected or feared, he would not be called "man."
(Perhaps "boss"?)
"Cool," being unruffled and alert, has the same
nuances. In standard English a man "keeps cool in an
emergency." If there is always an emergency, it must
imply that the danger is internal as well as external: the
environment is dangerous and feeling is dangerous. As
spoken and enacted by a young Beat, maintaining a
mask-face and tapping his toe quietly to the jazz, it means,
"I do not feel out of place, I am not abandoned and
afraid, I am not going to burst into tears." In the original
Negro the nuance is rather, "I'll stay unruffled and keep
out of trouble around here; I won't let on what I feel,
these folk are dangerous." With the hipster, the jaw is
more set and the eyes more calculating, and it means, "I'm
on to your game, you can't make me flip." In general,
The Early Resigned 175
coolness and mask-face are remaining immobile in order
to conceal embarrassment, temper, or uncontrollable anx-
iety.
To make a remark about the language as a whole as
used by the Beats: Its Negro base is, I think, culturally
accidental; but the paucity of its vocabulary and syntax
is for the Beats essentially expressive of withdrawal from
the standard civilization and its learning. On the other
hand this paucity gives, instead of opportunities for
thought and problem solving, considerable satisfaction in
the act and energy of speaking itself, as is true of any
simple adopted language, such as pig Latin. But this can
have disadvantages. One learns to one's frustration that
they regard talk as an end in itself, as a means of self-
expression, without subject matter. In a Beat group it is
bad form to assert or deny a proposition as true or false,
probable or improbable, or to want to explore its mean-
ing. The aim of conversation is for each one to be able,
by speech, to know that he is existing and belonging. So
among perfectly intelligent and literate young men, some
movie or movie star will be discussed for an hour, giving
each one a chance to project his own fantasies; but if
someone, in despair, tries to assert something about the
truth or worth of the movie, the others will at once sign
off.
(Among all American adolescents and even fellows in
their late twenties, however, there is an embarrassment
about "what to say" "I never have anything to say to a
girl," or "They keep talking about painting and I have
nothing to contribute." Speaking, that is, is taken as a
role. They do not have confidence that if they are inter-
ested in the subject, they'll say something, and if they're
not, why bother? Here too the Beats have helped formal-
ize and make tolerable a common difficulty; one contrib-
utes just by saying, "Like," "Cool," and "Man.")
176 GROWING UP ABSURD
3.
Let us interrupt discussing the jargon and look at the re-
lated problem of the artistic activities that are carried
on in resignation. These are multifarious and voluminous,
including painting, poetry, reading to jazz, decorating the
pads, and playing on drums. Everybody engages in crea-
tive arts and is likely to carry a sketchbook, proving what
the psychologists and progressive educators have always
claimed, that every child is creative if not blocked. Re-
signing from the rat race, they have removed the block.
They work at these arts honestly, with earnest absorp-
tion, and are not too immodest about the modest products,
even if they do continually subject one another and pass-
ers-by to listening to readings, and encourage the com-
munity by exclaiming, "It's the greatest!" Such creative
activity sharpens the perceptions, releases and refines feel-
ings, and is a powerful community bond.
In itself it has no relation to the production of art
works or the miserable life of sacrifice that an artist leads.
It is personal cultivation, not much different from finger
painting. Like the conversation just described, its aim is
action and self-expression and not the creation of culture
and value or making a difference in the further world.
There is, of course, no reason why it should be. All men
are creative but few are artists. Art making requires a
peculiar psychotic disposition. Let me formulate the artis-
tic disposition as follows: it is reacting with one's ideal to
the flaw in oneself and in the world, and somehow making
that reaction formation solid enough in the medium so
that it indeed becomes an improved bit of real world for
others. This is an unusual combination of psychological
machinery and talents, and those who, having it, go on
to appoint themselves to such a thankless vocation, are
The Early Resigned 111
rarer still. These few are not themselves Beat, for they
have a vocation, they are not resigned. (My observation
is that if artists are blocked in their vocation, they cannot
resign themselves to seeking other experiences, and cer-
tainly they do not do finger painting, for if they can do
finger painting they can make art.)
Nevertheless, living among the Beats, there will be a
disproportionate number of artists, for the same reason
that artists gravitate to any bohemia. Also, some of these
genuine unresigned artists will make works that speak -for
the Beat community that they live among. That is, the
"Beat" artists are not themselves Beat, for they are artists;
but their art works tell us about the Beat.
This situation raises interesting questions about the re-
lation of an artist and his immediate audience, and it is
worth exploring.
It is both an advantage and a disadvantage for an art-
ist to have around him an intensely creative gang of
friends who are not rival artists. They provide him an im-
mediate audience that helps assuage the sufferings of
art loneliness and art guilt. On the other hand, it is a
somewhat sickening audience because it has no objective
cultural standard, it is not in the stream of ancient and
international tradition. So its exclamations, "It's the
greatest!" or, "Go, man, go!" don't give much security.
The artist finds that he is a parochial group hero, when the
reassurance that he needs, if he is diffident, is that he is a
culture hero for the immortal world. Let me tell a few
anecdotes to illustrate this fascinating dilemma of the re-
lation of the "Beat" artist both to the Beats and to the ob-
jective culture in which he must finally exist.
An incident at a party for Patchen. Patchen is a poet of
the "previous" generation, of long-proven integrity, with
an immense body of work, some of which is obviously
good, and the importance of the whole of it (may much
178 GROWING UP ABSURD
still be added! ) not yet clear. The point for our anecdote
is that Patchen has the respect of writers but has received
no public acclaim, no money, no easy publication. Now
at this party, one of the best of the "Beat" writers, a
genuine young artist, came demanding that the older poet
give some recognition to the tribe of Beat poets, to "give
them a chance." This was ironical since, riding on the
Madison Avenue notoriety that we have mentioned, they
had all got far more public acclaim, invitations to univer-
sities, night-club readings, than all of us put together. But
Patchen asked for the names. The Beat spokesman reeled
off twenty, and Patchen unerringly pointed out the two
who were worth while. This threw the younger poet into
a passion, for he needed, evidently, to win artistic recog-
nition also for his parochial audience, among whom he
was a hero, in order to reassure himself that he was a
poet, which he was and as Patchen would at once have
said. So he insulted the older man. Patchen rose to his
height, called him a young punk, and left. The young man
was crushed, burst into tears (he was drank), and also
left. At this, a young woman who often accompanied him,
came up to me and clutched me by the knees, pleading
with me to help him grow up, for nobody, she said, paid
him any attention.
That is, the Beat audience, having resigned, is not in
the world; yet being an eager creative audience, it wins
the love and loyalty of its poet who becomes its hero
and spokesman. But he too, then, doubts that he is in the
world and has a vocation. As a Beat spokesman he re-
ceives notoriety and the chance of the wide public that
every poet wants and needs; but he cannot help feeling
that he is getting it as a pawn of the organized system.
Here is a simpler illustration of the relation of the
spokesman-artist to the objective culture. This fellow is a
much weaker poet, more nearly Beat himself, and quite
The Early Resigned 179
conceited. At a reading of some other poet who is not a
Beat spokesman, he tries to stop the reading by shouting,
"Don't listen to this crap! let's hear from X." His maneu-
ver is to make the parochial the only existing culture; then,
by definition, he himself is an artist.
And here is an illustration of the most elementary re-
sponse. A Beat spokesman, not ungifted but probably too
immature to accomplish much, gives a reading in a thea-
ter. During the intermission, he asks a rather formidable
and respected critic what he thinks of a particular poem,
and the critic says frankly that it's childish. At this the
outraged poet, very drunk, stands in the lobby scream-
ing, "I hope you die! I hope art dies! I hope all artists
die!"
These illustrations and the analysis of Beat conversa-
tion bring out the same point: In a milieu of resigna-
tion, where the young men think of society as a closed
room in which there are no values but the rejected rat
race or what they can produce out of their own guts, it is
extremely hard to aim at objective truth or world culture.
One's own products are likely to be personal or parochial,
4.
Shared creative expression has a therapeutic effect, and
so results in transference, unconscious attachment. The
striking, and often amusing, example of this is the young
ladies who take modern dancing, with its beautiful exer-
cises that release tense muscles; they are all head over
ears in love with Martha or Doris, and fiercely loyal and
sectarian.
The same occurs among the young Beats, except that,
since there is no "leader," the emerging love attaches
either to the community or to each one's self-image
narcissistically. This makes for a powerful warmth of life
180 GROWING UP ABSURD
"the warmth of assembled animal bodies," as Kafka
said but it makes it even harder to get into the world.
It gives the young men a daily interpersonal excitement,
more satisfactory than the empty belonging or conformity
of the organization, and happier than the loneliness of art.
But it does not give them "something to do."
5.
So we return to our crucial problem: What to do that is
self-justifying when the great social world is pretty un-
available?
The essential Beat answer is: to heighten experience,
and get out of one's usual self.
To heighten experience is a common principle of Beat,
Hipster, and Delinquent, but the differences are marked.
Among the Hipsters, as Mailer points out, the craving for
excitement and self-transcendence is darkly colored with
violence and death wish, and they therefore dread flip-
ping, which they interpret as weakness, castration, and
death. Among the younger delinquents, we shall see, it is
fatalism, the wish is to get caught and be brought back
into society. But for the Beats, it is a religious hope that
something new will happen, a revival.
In my observation, the Beats do not seem to be self-
destructive. The risks of delinquency, criminality, and in-
jury rouse in them a normal apprehension, and they ex-
press a human amazement at the brutality and cruelty of
some with whom they keep company. In taking drugs
for the new experience, they largely steer clear of
being hooked by an addiction. On the other hand, if the
aim is to get out of this world, one can hardly play it safe.
So it is not surprising if they push their stimulants, sleep-
lessness, and rhythmic and hallucinatory exercises to the
point of having temporary psychotic fugues, or flipping.
The Early Resigned 181
In his book, Lipton speaks touchingly of someone who
goes off to the municipal psychiatric hospital as an ex-
pected and regular occurrence. Perhaps this is the feudal
support which I have claimed to be lacking in Beat Zen
Buddhism: the young sages seek enlightenment, and the
city hospital succors them when they break down.
Let us now go back to the jargon. The supreme words
are "crazy," u far out," "gone," "high," "gas," "sent."
These mean not in this world but somewhere, not rational
but something. "Flip" is generally used with enthusiastic
self -deprecation.
When the crazy or far-out moment can be maintained
for long enough to be considered a something and some-
where, it is "groovy," that is, one is like somebody else's
phonograph record. One is "with it" or "falls in." The "it"
or the understood "where" is not, of course, definite, for
pure being has no genus and differentia. "Swinging with
it" is the condition of passing from here and now to the
heightened experience of "it."
Contrariwise, it is bad and painful to be "nowhere," to
"fall out" (take an overdose), or to be "drug" (dragging).
The way of being-in-the-world, that is, is to be either
cool and mask-faced, experiencing little; or to be sent far
out, experiencing something. However, since the cool
behavior of these usually gentle middle-class boys looks
like adolescent embarrassment and awkwardness rather
younger than their years, one wonders whether ordinary
growth in experience would not be a more profitable en-
terprise and ultimately get them much further out.
A possibility that has interestingly dropped from Beat
culture is the exploitation of shared athletic or wildly
physical agitation, which belonged grandly to the old jazz-
for-dancing and revival meetings. This is certainly an
important truth in Mailer's proposition that jive is ener-
getic, in words like "go" and "dig."
182 GROWING UP ABSURD
(To the jazz-for-listening one is not supposed to re-
spond overtly by more than a quietly tapped toe. It can
then be hypnotic and speak to the listener like a crystal
ball or a fountain or a hearth &e. As music it is remarka-
bly thin gruel (no doubt I am tone deaf). For the per-
former, of course, it provides the deepening absorption of
any simple improvised variations, plus the solidarity of the
group.)
I can think of two reasons why the overtly shared crazy
physical rhythms are spurned. First is that this motion is
in fact too much in the extremities of the body rather than
in the solar plexus, it is too superficial an excitement and
more fit for teen-agers. The difference is between the lost-
ness in juvenile jitterbugging and the "central" experi-
ence of Oriental dance or Mary Wigman. Some young
men have taken to the Oriental dance, but most Beats do
not practice this physiological yoga either, just as their
Zen is without breathing-exercises or correction of pos-
ture. So perhaps another reason for their dropping the old
physical jazz and revival is just the opposite, that the dis-
play of energy would upset their coolness, it would be
embarrassing and make them feel too young. I wonder
if this is not the simple explanation of their disdain of
social dancing as "dry" sex; for certainly one of the
reasonable uses of social dancing is body contact and
sometimes sexual foreplay. But these boys are embar-
rassed to get an erection, to betray feeling, in public,
though they are more than willing to take their clothes
off and exhibit themselves, or to beat a drum wildly in
public as an exhibition for the others, but not as contact
with them.
The Early Resigned 183
6.
An awkward consequence of heightening experience
when one is inexperienced, of self-transcendence when
one has not much world to lose, is that afterward one
cannot be sure that one was somewhere or had newly
experienced anything. If you aren't much in the world,
how do you know you are "out of this world"? This
problem has been fateful for Beat literature. (The classi-
cal mystic who loses this world knows well, on returning
to it, that it is a poor thing; and also that it is pointless to
try to describe the Reality in terms of this world.)
The Beat novelist does not say, "Like when we left Chi-
cago, we went to like New York." (Samuel Beckett does,
of course, do just this in principle, and mighty strange and
dull his novels are. ) The Beat novelist wants to say that
we did leave Chicago and did go to New York. But how
would one know? When there is not much structure for
the experience no cause to leave Chicago, no motive to
go to New York these things become very doubtful and
it is hard to make the narrative solid. So incidents are
multiplied without adding up to a plot; factual details are
multiplied that do not add up to interpretation or char-
acterization; and there are purple passages and exclama-
tions. The point of the perseveration is to insist that some-
thing happened. (Cf., Appendix E of this book, a review
of On The Road.)
(This narrative difficulty of more or less articulate
grownups is important in reminding us of what might
otherwise be dark about the juvenile delinquents: that in
the immense multiplicity of their exploits and kicks, in-
cluding even horrifying deeds, it is not necessarily the
case that they experienced what they were doing. It is
184 GROWING UP ABSURD
therefore beside the point to judge or treat them as if they
were performing acts.)
Similarly the Beats make a social ritual of reminiscing
and retelling. Meeting in a group, they retell exactly what
happened, each one adding his details, with the aim of
proving that something indeed happened, and perhaps
they can recapture the experience of it, if indeed any-
thing was experienced; just as at a later date, this meet-
ing at which the retelling is occurring will be retold. It is
like a man who dreams in exact detail of the fight he had
with the boss; what could be the wish in such a dream? It
is that when the event occurred he failed to get angry,
but dreaming it he is angry. Except that in the Beat re-
telling, they are not angry this time either.
In such circumstances, it seems to me inevitable that
heightened experiences too will pall, for they do not trans-
form enough natural and social world to create experience
and new experience. They do not accumulate knowledge,
establish better habits, make hypotheses probable, and
suggest further projects, all the things that constitute
seasoned experience. A Beat will tell you a remarkable
vision that he had under peyote, but you do not feel that
it was a vision for him; it is as useless as the usual experi-
ence of extrasensory perception that is irrelevant to any-
body's practical affairs. So in their creative activity young
Beats compile thick notebooks of poems and drawings,
but since there are no problems of art, these do not add up
to a body of work. What might then occur, unfortunately,
is that, when the flesh is not better nourished, the spirit
fails. Since better habits are not developed, the young
men simply succumb to bad ones, relying more and more
on the drugs, and becoming careless about meaning
anything. Then other young fellows who chose this way
of life because it suited and solved a problem, quit it be-
cause of the bad company.
The Early Resigned 185
The word "Angry," we saw, was a misnomer for "bit-
ter and waspish." The word "Beat," however, is exquis-
itely accurate, meaning "defeated and resigned." Public
spokesmen of the Beats have, as the result of various
visions, assured us that the word means Beatus, blessed;
but this too soon comes to the same thing, "punchy."
7.
Lawrence Lipton tells us that the word "work" always
means copulate. (A job of work is a "gig.") This is a good
thought, for it means that the sex is feelingful and pro-
ductive, even though effortful.
My impression is that leaving out their artists, who
have the kind of sex that artists have Beat sexuality in
general is pretty good, unlike delinquent sexuality, which
seems, on the evidence, to be wretched. Animal bodies
have their own rhythms and self-limits; in this, sex is com-
pletely different from taking drugs; so if inhibition is re-
laxed and there is the courage to seek for experience,
there ought to be good natural satisfaction. One sees many
pretty young Beat couples. (I think they are pretty; some
people think they are hideous.) Since conceit and "prov-
ing" are not major factors, there is affection. Homosex-
uality and bisexuality are not regarded as a big deal.
But the question remains, What is in it for the women
who accompany the Beats? The characteristic Beat cul-
ture, unlike the American standard of living, is essentially
for men, indeed for very young men who are "searching."
These young fellows are sweet, independent, free-think-
ing, affectionate, perhaps faithful, probably sexy these
are grand virtues, some of them not equally available
among American men on the average. But Beats are
not responsible husbands and fathers of children.
There are several possible sexual bonds. Let us recall
186 GROWING UP ABSURD
the woman at the Patchen party, who pleaded for some-
one to help the young man. Her relation to him is ma-
ternal: she devotes herself to helping him find himself and
become a man, presumably so that he can then marry
her. (Typically; I do not mean actually in this case.)
Another possible relation is Muse or Model: her Beat
is her poet and artist and makes her feel important. This
is a satisfaction for her feminine narcissism or penis envy.
But it comes, often, to ludicrously overestimating the
young man's finger painting and laying on him an impos-
sible burden to become the artist that he is not.
One sometimes sees a pathetic scene in a bar. Some
decent square young workingmen are there, lonely, look-
ing for girls or even for a friendly word. They feel that
they are "nobodies"; they are not Beats, they are not
artists. They have nothing to "contribute" to the conversa-
tion. The girls, meantime, give their attention only to the
Beats, who are sounding off so interestingly. But these
Beats will not make any life for the girls, whereas the
others might make husbands and fathers. If a square
fellow finally plucks up his courage to talk to a girl, she
turns away insultingly.
Lipton suggests that women follow Beats as they fol-
lowed roving Gypsies. But this makes no sense, for the
Gypsy was an independent who moved with Ms tribe,
his wife, his kids, his animals, and he was (in the ballads)
a masterful character. A Gypsy is not a resigned young
man, searching.
Finally, of course, there are the young women who are
themselves Beats, disaffected from status standards. Per-
haps they have left an unlucky marriage, have had an il-
legitimate child, have fallen in love with a Negro, and
found little support or charity "in" society. They might
then choose a life among those more tolerant, and find
The Early Resigned 187
meaning in it by posing for them or typing their manu-
scripts.
8.
To repeat, Beat is not a strong position and it can hardly
work out well. The individual young man is threatened
either with retreating back to the organized system or
breaking down and sinking into the lumpen proletariat.
Nevertheless., culturally there is a lot of strength here; let
us try to see where it is.
Considered directly, their politics are unimpressive.
They could not be otherwise since they are so hip and sure
that society cannot be different. Explicitly, they are pac-
ifists, being especially vocal about the atom bomb. The
Bomb is often mentioned by themselves and other com-
mentators as an explanation of their religious crisis; but
it's not convincing. Their own diatribes seem to be mostly
polemical self-defense, as if to say: "You squares dropped
the atom bombs, don't you dare criticize my smoking
marijuana." In the play The Connection this is openly
stated as a defense for heroin. On the whole one does
not observe that the Beats are so concerned about nuclear
weapons as many mothers of families or squares who
have common sense. One of the Beat spokesmen wrote
a long dithyramb about the Bomb, of which the critic
George Dennison remarked: "He seems miffed that people
pay attention to the atom bomb instead of to him."
At the same time, their peacefulness is genuine and
their tolerance of differences is admirable, extending also
to the squares, except for loathsome class enemies like
Time, Housing, or gouging employment agencies. Their
ability to occupy themselves in poverty on a high level of
cultural and animal satisfaction is remarkable, with pa-
188 GROWING UP ABSURD
per-back books, odd records, and sex. Their inventing of
community creativity is unique. If we consider these
achievements, we see that they are factual evidence for a
political proposition of capital importance: People can go
it on their own, without resentment, hostility, delinquency,
or stupidity, better than when they move in the organized
system and are subject to authority. (To be sure, the Beats
were not among the underprivileged to begin with; they
had some useful education and their poverty is in part
voluntary; but these are not circumstances unavailable
to others.) They do not go far, they invite degeneration,
they seem hard put to assume responsibility; but they do
exist interestingly and peacefully.
In one important respect, their community culture
could be made far more effective. I am referring to the
jazz and drums in a community setting. They have chosen
too primitive a model, e.g., Haiti. If they would ponder on
the Balinese dances, they might learn something not
the Bali dances on a stage on Broadway, but as they exist
in their home villages where, to the music of the gamelan,
the onlookers suddenly become entranced and fall down
or become possessed and would do violence to themselves,
except that they are rescued one and all by their friends
of the community. (Cartier-Bresson has excellent pictures
of these sessions; and of course Artaud, who is becoming
scriptural among the Beats, was an ardent champion of
them.)
9.
Beat literature and religion are ignorant and thin, yet they
have two invaluable properties. First, they are grounded
in the existing situation, whatever the situation, without
moralistic or invidious judgment of it. It is in this sense
that Henry Miller is their literary father. Their experi-
The Early Resigned 189
ence is admittedly withdrawn. (Miller's too does not add
up.) Their religion is unfeasible, for one cannot richly
meet the glancing present, like Zen, without patriotic
loyalty, long discipleship, and secure subsistence. Never-
theless, their writing has a pleasant bare surface, and it is
experience. It is often bombastic, but on the average it is
more primary than other writing we have been getting in
America.
A second valuable property of the Beat style is that it
tries to be an action, not a reflection or comment. We saw
that, in both their conversation and heightened experi-
ence, this action doesn't amount to much, for they do not
have the weight or beauty to make much difference. But
their persistent effort at the effective community reading,
appearing as themselves in their own clothes, and willing
to offend or evoke some other live response; and also their
creative playing (especially if it would become more like
the Bali dances), are efforts for art and letters as living
action, rather than the likeness to literature that we have
been getting in the Kenyon Review and the Partisan Re-
view.
Religiously, they are making a corrigible error. What
they intend, it seems to me, is not the feudal Zen Bud-
dhism, which is far too refined for them and for our times,
but Taoism, the peasant ancestor of Zen. Tao is a faith for
the voluntary poor, for it teaches us to get something from
the act of wresting a living with independent integrity. It
is, as Beat intends to be, individual or small-group an-
archy. If the Beats would think this through, they would
know how to claim their subsistence under better condi-
tions, and perhaps they would have more world. Tao
teaches, too, divine experience from the body and its
breathing. In this it is like the doctrine of Wilhelm Reich,
much esteemed by the Beats but not followed by them.
The magic they are after is natural and group magic,
190 GROWING UP ABSURD
and they need not be so dependent on ancient supersti-
tions and modern drugs.
Most important, Tao teaches the blessedness of confu-
sion. Tao is not enlightened, it does not know the score.
Confusion is the state of promise, the fertile void where
surprise is possible again. Confusion is in fact the state
that we are in, and we should be wise to cultivate it. If
young people are not floundering these days, they are
not following the Way.
The sage is murky, confused. As it says, "Block the
passage. Shut the door. ... I droop and drift as though
I belonged nowhere. ... So dull am I. All men can be
put to some use, I alone am intractable and boorish."
It's square to be hip.
The basic words of our jargon are "Search me," "Kid,"
"I couldn't give you a clue," "I'm murky." "Creator
spirit, come."
X
The Early Fatalistic
1.
From the subjects of our last chapter, the Beat Genera-
tion, we could learn something culturally useful. If we
turn now to the big-city juvenile delinquency of the un-
derprivileged, e.g., new immigrants economically mar-
ginal, we are dealing with uneducated children. Their
legal arrests and convictions occur at average age fifteen
to sixteen, but their delinquencies date from twelve and
thirteen, if not earlier; and of course they attend school
the least and get the least out of it. The so-called "de-
linquent subculture" has a few flashing and charming
traits, but nothing in it is viable or imitable. On the other
hand, the fight these kids put up, the record of their de-
linquencies, does test and explore our society.
The accounts and statistics of delinquency come mostly
from social agencies, the police, and reform schools. In a
sense we know about juvenile delinquency only from its
failures, the lads who are most disturbed and have the
least general ability except the one important ability of
getting caught. I do not believe this gives us a valid pic-
ture; so in the following discussion, I shall persistently
192 GROWING UP ABSURD
try to distinguish Delinquent Behavior as doing-the-for-
bidden-and-even-dejfiant from Delinquent Behavior in-
order-to-get-caught. (Naturally I shall often have to say,
"I guess.")
2.
Thus far we have been using a fairly standard theory of
delinquency, though better rounded, I think, than the
usual statement of it. Let us recapitulate it: The early
childhood of juvenile delinquents is "permissive" or
"neglected," depending on the point of view. They play
truant and quit school as soon as they can. This is not
necessarily a failing in them, for the schools are poor, and
the policy of keeping them there to educate them for some
viable life or other in modem society, is benevolent but
largely doomed.
Their escape from school proves that they are less
supervised at home, and in turn it gives them more free-
dom, at first, to sharpen their wits on the streets. Less re-
stricted, they probably have more elaborate early sexual
experience than the middle class or the more regulated
poor boys. This may get them into early and repeated
trouble, and it may, therefore, result in repression and
becoming less sexually adventurous than the average boy
later. Such an outcome is, I think, common and when it
occurs it is certainly disastrous, for repressed sexuality will
drive them to more and more frantic excitement to break
through.
(My guess is that the delinquent older adolescents who
are active with the girls are not the lads who are caught
and get counted. For one thing, important sexual adven-
ture is rarely a gang activity. For another, sexual success
diminishes the need to raise the ante and be punished.
And it always gives "something to do." That is, my guess
The Early Fatalistic 193
is that sexual expression is compatible with, and perhaps
favorable to, "delinquent acts"; but is incompatible 'with
delinquency-in-order-to-get-caught. This is speculation;
but consider the following two statements of F. M.
Thrasher: "Sex represents a decidedly secondary activity
in the gang. In the adolescent group in particular it is sub-
ordinated to the primary interests of conflict and ad-
venture." But "groups of this [sexually very active] type
are probably far more common than is ordinarily sup-
posed" that is, such kids don't get caught and counted.)
Mostly these kids have nothing to do and mil have
nothing worth while to do. They feel worthless and guilty,
and these feelings are often enhanced by unusual hostility
at home, both taken and given. (The psychological mech-
anism is that some of the child's hostility against his par-
ents turns against himself and is felt as guilt.) As a re-
action to these feelings, they develop the characteristic
conceited self-image that has to keep proving itself:
proving that they are men and not boys, potent and not
impotent, and that they are good as anybody else.
It is this syndrome, of conceit and hostility, which then
meets their social situation of being underprivileged and
deprived, and finds it so insulting; whereas other poor
boys in a less hostile home, more tolerant of school, and
perhaps more lucky in keeping out of sexual trouble
make an easier adjustment. In the case of racial minori-
ties, there is certainly real insult as well as fantasy insult;
and there is real insult when a fresh kid is treated as a
young punk. The combination of family hostility, conceit,
and the insult of underprivilege now makes the kids dis-
affected, at war with ordinary society, and they have their
sport and triumph by breaking its laws.
They appoint themselves to a gang. Positively, this
gives them pride and something to belong to; negatively,
it protects each one's conceit by conformity. The find-
194 GROWING UP ABSURD
ing of the Gluecks and others that the delinquent juveniles
are more unconventional than the average applies, of
course,, to their standard behavior and their disturbed
personalities; but all the more they are undeviatingly
conformist in their own peer groups. The gangs have
highly satisfactory communal features: living and work-
ing together (e.g., a boy angry at home can sleep at his
friend's), often sharing such sexuality as there is, and as
careless of one another's property as they are of the
world's. But it is a community, we have seen, that lacks
personal affection and that stops abruptly at the adults,
and therefore provides no grounds for growth. This abrupt
divide is of course sharper in the usual case of first-gener-
ation immigrant parents.
In our model of the closed room and the rat race, we
pointed to a clandestine alliance between juvenile delin-
quents and the middle status of the organized system,
exchanging culture heroes, norms of cool behavior, and
the values of cynicism, against the earnest boys in the
middle class and working class. This view seems to me
more currently realistic than A. K. Cohen's proposition
that, whereas the nondelinquent "corner-boy culture tem-
porizes with middle-class morality, the delinquent sub-
culture does not: it permits no ambiguity in its negation
of the respectable status-system, and so sets the delinquent
above the most exemplary college boy." On the contrary.
It is likely, rather, that the nondelinquent comer boy,
less conceited, has not cut himself off from ordinary poor
satisfactions, and therefore does not need to run in gangs
and get caught; he is not "temporizing" with middle-class
morality but is not much bothering about it. Conversely,
it is obvious that the juvenile delinquents, like the hus-
tlers (male prostitutes), fancy themselves as movie heroes
in sports cars; and it is importantly the inner conflict be-
The Early Fatalistic 195
tween their dreams of American glamour and their own
impotent resources that exacerbates their resentment.
It is perhaps only the juvenile delinquents who take the
American way of life fully earnestly. This is what is im-
plicitly hinted at by those students, e.g., Barron, who
speak of the juvenile in delinquent society: it is the hipster
attitude of the organized system that provides the model
for delinquent behavior: the short cut, the empty sensa-
tion, raising the ante, and contempt of honest effort and
earnest goals.
In sum, we have a picture of early freedom, under-
privileged frustration, reactive conceit, and gang conform-
ity. If we now consult the personality picture of caught
delinquents given in for instance, the painstaking study
by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck we see it is quite identi-
cal with that of the young hero of our story:
He is: vivacious, extroverted, less self-controlled, more
manually inclined, more aggressive, less fearful of fail-
ure and defeat, more independent, more initiating, less
submissive, less amenable to conventional expectations.
These are positive powers and must therefore be early
survivals, for only physical nature has such energies. But
the frustration appears in responses like "impulsive, oral,
narcissistic," and the reactive conceit appears as "hostile,
resentful, defiant, suspicious, destructive, socially as-
sertive, not feeling recognized or appreciated, defensive,
unco-operative." And finally he is more sociable in play
in the sense of "needing supportive companionship,"
which we can take as both a positive and a negative trait.
5.
But these are, let us not forget, the characteristics of be-
low-average kids in a reformatory compared with those of
196 GROWING UP ABSURD
carefully matched nondelinquents, equally below average
and underprivileged. Accordingly, they tell us very little
about more gifted or favored kids either prone or not
prone to delinquent behavior. In the nature of the case,
such statistics are hard to collect. E.g., it is essential for
the intelligent performance of forbidden deeds to keep
them under your hat and not have too many accomplices;
then how can we know how many gifted kids are per-
forming how many misdemeanors? And middle-class de-
linquents don't end up in reform schools but in military
academies and other schools that promise "to make a
man of your boy."
From this point of view, it must be said that the essen-
tial property of juvenile delinquency as defined is: such
personality and behavior as guarantee getting caught,
punished, and tabulated. I do not think that this property
is a tautology: it has important content that distinguishes
the delinquency of doing-the-forbidden-and-defiant from
the delinquency to-get-caught. Getting caught is guaran-
teed by:
(1) Compulsive repetition of a behavior because it is
not really giving satisfaction. This tends to allay the alert-
ness and prudence of the routine tries, as well as to
multiply the chances of being caught. And it leads to:
(2) Raising the ante, in order to force feeling. This
must result in disaster.
(3) Conversely, in place of mischief or the attraction
of the forbidden or rebelliousness or even malice, the
caught delinquent exhibits a profound fatalism, indicating
an unconscious need to be saved from his compulsive
round or not worth-while experience and brought back
into the "meaningful" structure of authority and pun-
ishment. It looks as though the caught delinquent has
done the forbidden and defiant deed in order to tease and
provoke the authority, to compel his attention. Psycho-
The Early Fatalistic 197
logically, then, though he thinks and operates on his own,
he is not "independent."
(Let me mention the touching case of an English boy
who stole a watch and then returned it, saying he had
found it, "in order that somebody should say he was a
good boy." The next best thing is for somebody to say that
one is a bad boy.)
(4) The gang is used as a structure for psychological
support. But running with the gang also guarantees get-
ting caught, both because it is conspicuous and because
its in-group concentration and habits soon get quite out
of touch with the surrounding mores. Aping his friends, a
lad forgets what safe behavior is, what ought to be con-
cealed because people are outraged by it. A lad who is
infinitely secretive and suspicious gives himself away by
his slouch, his clothes, and every word he utters. Also,
they dare one another to excesses that each individual
would avoid. Naturally this is all the worse with cultural
minorities who do not know the "right" behavior to begin
with; e.g., Spanish boys might be badly judged for be-
havior that to them is perfectly acceptable.
I propose that these four guarantees of getting caught
make juvenile delinquency an interesting cultural study.
For it is: the powerless struggling for life within, not re-
signed from, an unacceptable world. At first inspection
this does not seem a promising lesson. But on reflection,
we see that this fatalism is a deeply religious position, not
far from what Dostoevski was trying to tell us. Many of
his characters are adult delinquents. In our time, Genet
has made of the doomed delinquent culture a powerful
thought and poetry. The fatalism of juvenile delinquency
is a kind of adolescent religious crisis, with a religious pas-
sion and content, whereas the conventional religion is
empty. On the streets, they feel worthless-and-aban-
doned; in the reformatory, they are accepted back home.
198 GROWING UP ABSURD
This fatalism in the face of the overwhelming and 'un-
acceptable is a commentary on the poignant remark of the
criminologist:
It must be confessed that it is much easier and hence
more "practical" to deal with superficial symptomatic
behavior or its immediately observable causes than to
strive to cut the deeper roots of delinquency. When
those deeper roots are made evident, however, we have
to ask ourselves how deep we wish to go in the attack
on crime. Are we willing, for example, to sacrifice
many of our material satisfactions or to give up our
racial prejudices? [Donald Taft]
4.
As ordinarily used, the term "juvenile delinquency" is
thoroughly confused. First, as we have said, we must dis-
tinguish forbidden-and-defiant-acts from behavior-to-get-
caught. Then, among the socially forbidden acts we must
obviously distinguish those that any lad of sense and spirit
will perform if he has to and whenever he can, from
those that are indeed harmful to others or disruptive of
good society. And again, as many authorities have
pointed out, with respect to any of these acts there is an
immense discrepancy in their adjudication and our in-
formation: delinquent acts of middle- and upper-class boys
almost never get to courts or social agencies; white boys
are dismissed or put on probation where Negro or Spanish
boys are put away; the incorrigibility and sexual offenses
of boys are treated lightly, of girls severely, and so forth.
It is not surprising, then, if many statistics and analyses of
delinquency disagree. Apart from the one factor of get-
ting caught, there is no real concept of delinquency. Yet
obviously this factor is not sufficient by itself, for getting
The Early Fatalistic 199
caught does have some essential relation to forbidden
acts.
Let us therefore take a different tack. Instead of look-
ing for a concept of delinquency, let us expand the subject
matter as a series of possible punishable relations obtain-
ing between the boy struggling for life and trying to grow
up, and the society that he cannot accept and that lacks
objective opportunities for him. Roughly, we can name
six importantly distinct stages in the series:
( 1 ) Acts not antisocial if society had more sense.
(2) Acts that are innocent but destructive in their conse-
quences and therefore need control.
(3) Acts antisocial in purpose.
(4) Behavior aimed at getting caught and punished.
(5) Gang fighting that is not delinquency yet must be con-
trolled.
(6) Delinquency secondarily created by society itself by
treating as delinquents those who were not delinquent,
and by social attempts at prevention and reform.
5.
(1) Acts not antisocial that are punished are most
animal expression and some spirited enterprise. These in-
clude a lot of trespassing and hell raising with annoyance
and minor damage. Most sexual behavior. Running away
and truancy. But even certain important "theft."
The trespassing and hell raising speak for themselves.
Where everything has become property and order, it is
quite impossible to be vivacious, aggressive, undeliber-
ate, exploratory and venturesome, without being out of
order and sometimes smashing things. This is generally
agreed and the police are usually not unreasonable. But
the bother comes when emotional heat is generated and
meets incipient deeper grounds of delinquency, the ex-
200 GROWING UP ABSURD
change of insults and the need for revenge. E.g., a cop is
rude and the boys get angry; or a chap foolishly drives
away the kids who are diving from his cruiser, so they
retaliate by boring holes in the bottom of it and sinking it.
Most sexual behavior would give more satisfaction and
do lasting good, and certainly result in far less damage,
if any, if it were completely ignored by the police and not
subject to any social disapproval qua sexual. There may
be grounds for debate about the harmfulness or indiffer-
ence of "corrupting the morals of a minor" many so-
cieties have managed handsomely without such notions;
but all competent authority would agree that, in most
cases, more damage is done by the fear and shame ac-
companying a sexual act than can possibly follow from
the simple act itself. (Typically, "Masturbation is a habit
without deleterious effects in itself, yet a source of be-
havior difficulties because of strong social disapproval.
... [It is hard] to find a rational reason for commit-
ting mere sex delinquents to an institution. To be effec-
tive, [help for these girls] must be divorced from restraint
and stigma." Donald Taft, Criminology.}
In truancy, the burden of proof lies on the schools,
which are demonstrably stupefying to many children,
whose truancy is therefore a kind of self-preservation.
Naturally, these kids get nothing from hanging around the
streets either. The solution is hard but simple: decide
that the kids are in the right and make good education
at whatever cost.
The same thinking applies to vagabondage. If a kid is
a lonely runaway without domicile or means of support, it
takes no great wisdom to infer that he has left a cruel or
drunken home or a situation of intolerable uselessness
and boredom, or that he is ashamed. Then provide him
with something worth while, and give him solace.
But consider the principle of the burden of the proof in
The Early Fatalistic 201
even an important crime like auto theft, important solely
because cars are expensive. (The real social danger,
from wild driving, occurs with all car-crazy adolescents,
not only those who steal cars.) Almost all juvenile auto
theft in 1959, 68 per cent of all auto theft is for joy
riding. For example, a band of Spanish kids, now mostly
locked up, made it a point of their game to return the car
to the identical spot, a foolhardy gesture. Now we live in a
society where for all classes these cars are the chief means,
and the Madison Avenue symbols, of power, manliness,
freedom to go and do. Kids of other periods drove the
horses at an early age; in rural places they drive cars at
fourteen. In urban traffic conditions young adolescents
cannot be licensed to drive. Underprivileged kids may
never have the means to drive. What then? When an ab-
surd social pattern has created an insoluble dilemma, is
it the case that the kids must be the ones punished? Cer-
tainly from such a crime as auto theft I fail to see, with
Bloch and Flynn's Delinquency, that "youthful offenders
under eighteen years have become our greatest single
threat to law-abiding security." But as it is, our dilemma
works out as follows: "A couple and their three-year-old
son were killed in Queens last night when their car hit
a telephone pole after it was struck by a stolen car being
chased by the police. Five shots were fired in the pursuit
and two hit the car.")
(2) Auto theft takes us into the second category of
"innocent acts destructive in their consequences and
needing control." Of course none of these acts, except
vagabondage, is innocent in the sense that the kid does
not know it is forbidden, unless he is a moron. But to do
the forbidden, in order to transgress limits that seem un-
natural, is normal and innocent; and if the limits are un-
natural it is often necessary and admirable.
But I want especially to call attention to acts whose
202 GROWING UP ABSURD
motivation is strongly approved socially, but where the
frustrating conditions or the boys' ignorance or ineptitude
in handling the baffling means, gets them into trouble.
An obvious cause of innocent trouble is playing. Some
wise authorities have compared delinquent behavior to
play. So when A. K. Cohen, again, speaks of the "useless-
ness" of much delinquent destractiveness and thievery as
a counteraction to middle-class ethics, he is surely ex-
aggerating. All play is "useless," and since everything is
property, underprivileged kids are bound to play with
other people's property. This can be very serious. A band
of kids decide it would be bully to remove the blocks and
set a huge truck in motion downhill, resulting in $10,000
worth of damage. But of course it is bully. (/ think so.)
But let us go on to a much more thorny illustration,
which would not generally be viewed in the light I want
to place it in: the plight of a present-day poor boy with
regard to earning money and having a little money.
First, let me quote an official spokesman, the Superin-
tendent of Schools of Rochester, New York:
Many parents have long since given up the struggle to
encourage youths to share in the few remaining home
duties that still require physical effort. Yet, no school
program can provide the discipline, the maturity, or
the self-respect that comes from performing real work
that is highly valued and fairly paid for by the adult
world.
Well said. Now this quotation is taken from a Sunday-
supplement article praising newsboys and containing the
joyful report that "over one half of today's newspaperboys
belong to our middle- or upper-middle-income groups."
This is not a surprising fact; in present conditions, it takes
a good deal of arranging, and living in the suburbs, to get
The Early Fatalistic 203
such a news route going. Does it not raise the question
as to how the poor boys, who have not learned such ex-
pert management, will get their discipline, maturity, self-
respect?
This matter is highly important; let us be clear about
the usual thinking. Eugene Gilbert, the census taker of
teen-age economics, says: "Within a decade the number
of teen-agers holding steady jobs has doubled. . . .
Some four and one-half million do part-time work or odd
jobs throughout the year." That sounds promising; but he
then goes on to explain that "Typical [!] of most Ameri-
can youngsters today are the students and graduates of
the Pearl River High School in Rockland County, N. Y.,"
nearly 100 per cent of whom are going on to college,
though in the country at large barely a half graduate from
high school, and only 15 per cent enter college. The
poor, the working-class, and even the lower-middle-class
boys seem to have vanished from society; they do not
contribute enough to the ten- to eleven-billion-dollar an-
nual teen-age sales. This is not a promising attitude for
giving serious attention to the young of America.
For a child, to get money is a major part of Ms notion
of being grown-up and independent, for this is what all
grown men do: they make money and are thereby free to
act. (This has very little connection with Max Weber's
version of the Protestant Ethic or middle-class ideology.)
Let me give a precise, if annoying, illustration. In coun-
tries where it is not too antipathetic to the mores, young
fellows will engage in homosexual activity; but they might
ask for a few pennies, enough to buy five cigarettes. This
sum is not the wages of prostitution; such a thought would
outrage them, for if they did not enjoy what they were
doing they would not do it. It is, rather, a way of making
the act legitimate, justified, not merely pleasure. The
money serves exactly the same symbolic function as the
204 GROWING UP ABSURD
wedding ring for a young woman. Earning some money
affirms that a young fellow is a man. (In America, how-
ever, this youth would at once be driven to "proving"
and delinquency. Having engaged in the sex, he is vulner-
able to contempt and therefore may react by robbery and
assault. "Rolling queers" is the ideal delinquent calling
better than auto mechanic for it combines pleasure,
profit, morality, and grounds for boasting; and it is pretty
safe from follow-up by the police.)
As our system becomes more tightly organized and
highly urbanized, it is the poor city kids who are squeezed
out. We no longer have a neighborhood tradition of
small after-school jobs fewer shops make occasional de-
liveries; to deliver for the chain stores is a full-time job
(except perhaps on Saturdays); messengers are hired full
time; there are no lawns to mow, there is no snow to
shovel; there are fewer news routes in the city; baby
sitting is a middle-class business and anyway belongs to
girls. An early teen-ager is caught in the following trap:
he gets nothing out of school and does not do his home-
work; on the other hand, he is too young to get working
papers. (We saw that one of the few practical proposals
in the Governor of New York's antidelinquency program
was aimed at this situation.) The youth cannot continue
to beg from his parents, for the sums now come to three
or four dollars and he feels degraded by being dependent.
How will he get some money to prove his legitimacy and
independence?
Many petty thefts and burglaries that seem "useless"
risks to the sociologist, and therefore he interprets them as
counteraction to bourgeois values are desperate efforts
to feel grown-up. They are compelled by an objective
dilemma. Naturally, subjectively, they are not innocent;
they are energized by frantic excitement, cold sweat and
terror, and finally the need to be caught, to escape the
The Early Fatalistic 205
anxiety; but we must look at the whole picture. They are
"short cuts," but maybe there is no long way round. The
question is this: if these kids had socially acceptable op-
portunities to earn money, would they avail them-
selves of them? Some would. It is worth trying. They might
learn discipline, maturity, self-respect.
(Consider the following by the Executive Director of the
New York City Mission Society: "We have experimented
for two summers with employment of 100 to 150 teen-
agers from high delinquency areas. . . . Our $10-per-
week employees all stayed out of trouble. [But] on the
occasions we tried what were essentially "made work"
jobs, the young people understood this immediately and
lost all interest.")
(3) It is with the next category, acts intentionally anti-
social, that we come to the delinquents who largely fill
the courts and the reformatories. Malicious destructive-
ness, theft and burglary for real money (often for nar-
cotics), vengeful assaults, sexual attacks. In these, the
reactive hostility of the standard delinquent syndrome
has begun to operate, and it inevitably leads to getting
caught. An illustration: some fifteen-year-olds hold up a
crippled old man; the loot is too small and their disap-
pointment at once triggers the deep passion: that his de-
bility is an intolerable threat to their own glorious perfec-
tion, so they stomp him to death.
A less horrible illustration: The behavior of a pedestrian
or of another motorist that happens to inconvenience the
youth in the slightest degree is at once interpreted as a
deliberate insult or at least as a proof that that person
ought not to exist; and this may easily lead to a case of hit
and run.
An absolutely typical economic illustration: If a fellow
offers to walk half a mile in order to save fifteen cents
carfare, his mates will at once contemptuously say that he
206 GROWING UP ABSURD
is "cheap." Once the "proving" syndrome is present, the
boys are quite out of touch with the simplest realities; and
vice versa, because they are out of touch with the simplest
realities, they are called on to "prove."
(4) So we come to behavior-to-get-caught: compulsive
repetition, increasing negligence, raising the ante, giving
way to irrational rage. We can see the fatalism on the
surface.
Here is a scrap of conversation with one of the auto
thieves mentioned above, not caught:
"How is it you weren't caught?"
"I got scared the other time, the time the cop pulled up
and I got away. So I wouldn't go with them."
"Isn't Carlos [the leader] scared?"
"No."
"What do you mean? Isn't he scared they'll catch him?"
"No. He don't care if he gets caught."
"Is that what he says? or is that what you think?"
"That's what he said, and I think so too."
"Why did you go ten rides?"
"What else is there to do? I can't just hang around
when they all go."
The problem, that is, is the fatalism that the one has,
whereas the other experiences fear and prudence. (In
this particular case the fatalist is the more able boy and
has a better home background.) One part of the fatalism
is certainly apathy: life has no interesting prospect e.g.,
there might be a sexual block. Another part is certainly
the need to be caught, to get out of the anxious round of
risks.
6.
(5) I doubt, despite Thrasher, that there is a nondelin-
quent "gang." The gang begins like the primitive frater-
The Early Fatalistic 207
nity of boys who live in the boys' house; but in the primi-
tive culture this is done by social sanction, whereas the
defining property of the gang, as we customarily use the
term, is that it is a community abruptly cut off from
the adults and their sanction. The full-blown gang suits its
members not as a fraternity in which to learn growing up,
but essentially in so far as they are "grown up" or have
ceased to grow: it is a sharing of a common conceit. The
members consider it their identity, they appoint themselves
to it. But since it is only a conceit, it is vulnerable, and
therefore all the more must be protected by strict con-
formity of behavior and opinions, it does not tolerate in-
dividual interests or wandering off by oneself. Existing
instead of the adult society, the gang is in principle an
extraterritorial enclave in society, and therefore it has de-
veloped a feud Code. It is this extraterritorial loyalty that
is powerfully cemented by the shared danger of the de-
linquencies: all are in the same boat of having partici-
pated in punishable deeds; anyone who would get out is
tacitly or explicitly blackmailed.
But it does not follow from this that the gang is de~
linquent-to-get-caught. On the contrary. Finding one's
gang is a haven from the fatalistic drive toward disaster.
One is caught by the gang; the gang provides a supportive
structure; it is not so necessary to provoke the old au-
thority. (But of course, as we have seen, running with the
adolescent gang accidentally increases the certainty of
getting caught. Adult criminal gangs have learned the
ropes.) It could be said that belonging to the gang dimin-
ishes the delinquent behavior of the members of the gang.
The chief activity of the gang becomes war against other
groups; it is no longer a straggle for the growth of the
self by forbidden acts. And correspondingly, the persist-
ing "delinquencies" of the gang members begin to look
very much like crime, war against society. They are no
208 GROWING UP ABSURD
longer merely incidents of growing up, but self-conscious
acts of a responsible achieved-identity.
Some such analysis as this is necessary to explain the
puzzling predominance suddenly assumed by gang fight-
ing. Adolescent gang wars are not, as such, delinquent,
any more than international wars are. Gang wars are
significant nowadays mainly because of the technological
improvement of the weapons, which used to be mainly
sticks and stones. (The same could be said of the inter-
national wars.)
If the rest of society did not exist, the gang wars would
continue as the absorbing interest of these youths. Since
the rest of society exists, it becomes a background for
plunder as an army lives on the land. Irate magistrates,
trained in Hobbes and on Leviathan, are impatient at
having to deal with young punks as if they were citizens
of a foreign power with its war chief and other grand
viziers and its territorial rights. The Youth Board, as we
have seen, accepts the situation as it is and tries to win
over the youth's allegiance.
In this framework of analysis, it is clear why the gangs
war on one another. The entire structure, and most of the
loyalty, of each gang is grounded in the vulnerable con-
ceit of its members, now socialized and immeasurably
strengthened by the gang name, uniform, and territory.
So there at once begins to operate, on the gang level, what
Freud beautifully called the "narcissism of small differ-
ences": that it is the smallest difference from one's own
self-image of grandeur and perfection that is most threat-
ening and most arouses rage. Living on the other block
is quite sufficient to make an enemy. Being a slightly dif-
ferent color is guaranteed. We must remember that the
gang has almost no real social or cultural resources to
support its tight structure and intense loyalty; it has to
make everything out of "points of honor," out of the
The Early Fatalistic 209
formal fact that its territory has been invaded. (Thus, if
it is publicly acknowledged that Joe is no longer a mem-
ber of the Dragons, he can safely walk down X Street.)
Into this formal insult pours all the accumulated real
frustration, the undischarged stimulation, the thwarted
growing up, and the natural insult that is endemic in our
society. In our truly remarkable and unexampled civil
peace, where there are rarely fist fights; where no one is
born, is gravely ill, or dies; where meat is eaten but no
one sees an animal slaughtered; where scores of millions
of cars, trains, elevators, and airplanes go their scheduled
way and there is rarely a crash; where an immense pro-
duction proceeds in orderly efficiency and the shelves are
duly cleared and nevertheless none of this comes to joy
or tragic grief or any other final good it is not surprising
if there are explosions. They occur at the boundaries of
the organized system of society: in juvenile gang fights, in
prison riots, in foreign wars.
These conditions are almost specific for the ex-
citement of primary masochism. There is con-
tinual stimulation and only partial release of
tension, an unbearable heightening of the un-
aware tensions unaware because people do
not know what they want, nor how to get it.
The desire for final satisfaction, for orgasm, is
interpreted as the wish for total self-destruction.
It is inevitable, then, that there should be a
public dream of universal disaster, with vast ex-
plosions, fires, and electric shocks; and people
pool their efforts to bring this apocalypse to an
actuality.
At the same time all overt expression of de-
structiveness, annihilation, anger, combative-
ness, is suppressed in the interests of civil order.
Also, the feeling of anger is inhibited and even
210 GROWING UP ABSURD
repressed. People are sensible, tolerant, polite,
and co-operative in being pushed around. But
the occasions of anger are by no means mini-
mized. On the contrary, when the larger move-
ments of initiative are circumscribed in the
competitive routines of offices, bureaucracies,
and factories, there is petty friction, hurt feel-
ings, being crossed. Small anger is continually
generated, never discharged; big anger, that
goes with big initiative, is repressed.
Therefore the angry situation is projected afar.
People must find big distant causes to explain
the pressure of anger that is certainly not ex-
plicable by petty frustrations. It is necessary to
have something worthy of the hatred that is un-
aware felt for oneself. In brief, one is angry
with the Enemy.
(Gestalt Therapy, H, viii, 8.)
7.
(6) Last, but not least, by its own response to annoy-
ance, society creates delinquent behavior and delinquents.
If a child, who does not know what he is, is authorita-
tively told that he is a delinquent, he obediently conforms
to this role too, especially when it involves exclusion from
nondeliquent playmates. A spell in a "reform" school in-
creases the chances of returning to some other correctional
institution on a more serious charge, and almost guaran-
tees belonging to a gang, for it deepens fatalism and
throws one in with congenial companions. For a long time
philosophers have been pointing out that if there were
no jails there would, in time, be less crime; but the popu-
lar wisdom will not buy it.
The social creation of the delinquent character is a mat-
The Early Fatalistic 211
ter of the very highest importance and deserves a book to
itself. Consider what happens. There are a number of
quite different behaviors, some really harmful and anti-
social, some indifferent and even performed innocently,
yet all forbidden. When, however, they are all tarred with
the same brush, the salient fact about them all becomes
their defiance, culpability, and punishability. Vice be-
comes "vertical": if a boy masturbates, smokes, plays
truant, he might as well steal, joy ride, hustle, use nar-
cotics, commit burglaries, etc. Such a boy no longer has
friends, but mutually blackmailing accomplices. A spec-
tacular example of this social creation of felony is the il-
legality of marijuana, which increases contact with push-
ers of addictive drugs; and the intransigent attitude toward
heroin as a criminal rather than a socio-medical problem
guarantees worse consequences still.
8.
The delinquent fatalism is the feeling of no chance in the
past, no prospect for the future, no recourse in the pres-
ent; whence the drive to disaster. It is a religious crisis.
We spoke of the French writer Jean Genet as its literary
prophet. Let us conclude this chapter by some remarks
about his work.
Genet writes, sometimes explicitly but always es-
sentially, as a juvenile delinquent. The criminals with
whom he empathizes are not fully grown like those of
Dostoevski or Shakespeare, like the Possessed or lago and
Edmund. They are not adequate, they do not have pre-
tensions, to the independent social identities of kingship,
marriage, fatherhood, politics, wealth. Genet's heroes are
young hustlers, sailors dependent on the mother ship,
young men in jail, soldiers of occupation. His thieves do
not rob to get rich, but to get spending money or money
212 GROWING UP ABSURD
to squander and show off. This thwarted juvenilism is the
same thing as the exclusive homosexuality of his world,
with its phallic proving and phallic adoration. Yet with
this unpromising material, he performs a poetic miracle.
He does it by stripping away the conceit, the conformity
and the one-upping. He accepts, fully and fundamentally,
the true situation of degradation, humiliation, uselessness,
and terror in which his fellows live. In this he is like
Dostoevski. He does so with perfect awareness and even,
as a writer, with deliberate calculation. For instance, he
begins Les Pompes Funebres as if he had asked: What is
the most degrading and offensive episode possible for
middle-class French readers? Yet his aim is not to offend,
he is not defensive; it is that, like a classical playwright,
he wants to establish his premises at once: that in the
situation in which he finds himself, these are the things
that work for him as an artist, that are still alive.
In a speech on delinquency (banned from the radio),
he explained that if he tried to write about the bourgeois
and their important doings, his pen stuck, he had nothing
to say; but if he turned to these young criminals (really
juvenile delinquents), his thoughts took wing, his style
glowed. Therefore he knows they are more heroic, they
are the superior people.
That is, he drops the defenses of the underprivileged
boy-man and gives himself completely to his own riches
as an inspired artist; and the effect is not sensational nor
even bravado but, as the images soar and the feeling
becomes more tender and anguished and the thought
more profound, our normal valuation of things is indeed
swept away, and is succeeded by a living confusion.
Naturally, then, his book is rewarded by coming to the
cataclysmic little sentence: "Tas ete malheureux, hein?"
(You been unhappy, haven't you?) This truth is, of
The Early Fatalistic 213
course, precisely what the tough juvenile delinquent could
in fact never say but neither could most adults. We are
back to total abandonment, and there is nothing to do but
bawl.
When the conceit, the being cool, the mask-face, are
taken away, the kids at once appear in their variety,
color, lyric speech, and graceful and vigorous poses, very
different from either the usual delinquent sullenness or
the conventionality of the resigned Beats. Having himself
no achieved independent perspective to view them from,
Genet cannot, of course, treat them fully as characters
in their real place in nature. But again his art does not
fail them. What he presents is his own and their existent
fact: how these shapes appear as fantasy-objects for him-
self and one another. (He is writing as an heir of Proust)
He uses as the basis of his narrative manner the evoked
serial daydreams of schoolgirls and adolescent boys, that
are often masturbation fantasies. This is a literary innova-
tion.
The importance of Genet for our purposes is this: By
a scrupulously honest artistic method he creates from this
unpromising material a world that has interest and value.
Without being phony, he makes the doings of ignorant and
self-destructive kids glow with nobility and religious sig-
nificance; he makes them more worth while than the
apparently adult doings in our standard writers. Now an
artist demonstrates his world. If Genet can write more
beautiful books about them, then they have more love and
nature in them, for nothing comes from nothing. Like Mil-
ler and the Beat writers, Genet also accepts what is,
whatever it is; but in their world "whatever it is" is ashen
dull, whereas at the level of Genet's disaffected juveniles,
it begins to glow a little; some live embers are uncovered.
And indeed, the fatalistic self-destruction of the kids
214 GROWING UP ABSURD
straggling for life in an environment not suited to produce
great human beings, is more interesting than the success-
ful doings of that society.
9.
It is not interesting enough; for they are juvenile delin-
quents and do not have enough world. As soon as we ask
questions from the world of great culture and society,
these boys begin to be, in Robert Lindner's phrase, rebels
without a cause, and that is not interesting.
Here is the pathos of literary critics like Lionel Trilling
who demand that our novels illuminate the manners and
morals of prevailing society. Professor Trilling is right, be-
cause otherwise what use are they for us? But he is wrong-
headed, because he does not see that the burden of proof
is not on the artist but on our society. If such convenient
criticism of prevalent life does not get to be written, it is
likely that the prevailing society is not inspiring enough;
its humanity is not great enough, it does not have enough
future, to be worth the novelist's trouble.
The history of contemporary novel-writing tells the
story very clearly. Hemingway, for instance, is a pretty
good writer and he caught the spirit of the young men of
a whole generation; but this ideal, we have seen, turns
out to be the conceited "proving" of tribes of junior ex-
ecutives and juvenile delinquents. Faulkner is a pretty
good writer but his world is resigned (this is the meaning
of its parochialism), and his work turns out to be a very
complicated way of being Beat. In my own The Empire
City, I undertook the task of not giving up any claim of
culture and humanity, but my characters then turn out to
be far out of this world. Meantime there has developed a
counterstream of writing that has given up the task of in-
The Early Fatalistic 215
tegrating, and depicts Instead the situation as it is, what-
ever it is: so Celine, Miller, Genet, Burroughs. But among
the many virtues of this school, conspicuously absent is
edification.
XI
The Missing Community
1.
The use of history, Benjamin Nelson used to say, is to
rescue from oblivion the lost causes of the past. History is
especially important when those lost causes haunt us in
the present as unfinished business.
I have often spoken in this essay of the "missed revolu-
tions that we have inherited." My idea is that it is not
with impunity that fundamental social changes fail to
take place at the appropriate time; the following genera-
tions are embarrassed and confused by their lack. This
subject warrants a special study. Some revolutions fail to
occur; most half-occur or are compromised, attaining
some of their objectives and resulting in significant social
changes, but giving up on others, resulting in ambiguous
values in the social whole that would not have occurred if
the change had been more thoroughgoing. For in general,
a profound revolutionary program in any field projects a
new workable kind of behavior, a new nature of man, a
new whole society; just as the traditional society it tries to
replace is a whole society that the revolutionists think is
out of date. But a compromised revolution tends to dis-
The Missing Community 217
rupt the tradition without achieving a new social balance.
It is the argument of this book that the accumulation
of the missed and compromised revolutions of modern
times, with their consequent ambiguities and social im-
balances, has fallen, and must fall, most heavily on the
young, making it hard to grow up.
A man who has attained maturity and independence
can pick and choose among the immense modern ad-
vances and somewhat wield them as his way of life. If he
has a poor society, an adult cannot be very happy, he will
not have simple goals nor achieve classical products, but
he can fight and work anyway. But for children and ado-
lescents it is indispensable to have a coherent, fairly sim-
ple and viable society to grow up into; otherwise they
are confused, and some are squeezed out. Tradition has
been broken, yet there is no new standard to affirm. Cul-
ture becomes eclectic, sensational, or phony. (Our present
culture is all three.) A successful revolution establishes a
new community. A missed revolution makes irrelevant
the community that persists. And a compromised revolu-
tion tends to shatter the community that was, without an
adequate substitute. But as we argued in a previous
chapter, it is precisely for the young that the geographical
and historical community and its patriotism are the
important environment, as they draw away from their
parents and until they can act on their own with fully de-
veloped powers.
In this chapter, let us collect the missed or compromised
fundamental social changes that we have had occasion to
mention; calling attention to what was achieved and what
failed to be achieved, and the consequent confused situa-
tion which then actually confronts the youth growing up.
218 GROWING UP ABSURD
2.
Let us start with the physical environment.
Technocracy. In our own century, philosophers of
the new technology, like Veblen, Geddes, or Fuller, suc-
ceeded in making efficiency and know-how the chief ethi-
cal values of the folk, creating a mystique of "production,"
and a kind of streamlined esthetics. But they did not suc-
ceed in wresting management from the businessmen and
creating their own world of a neat and transparent physical
plant and a practical economics of production and distribu-
tion. The actual results have been slums of works of engi-
neering, confused and useless overproduction, gadgetry,
and new tribes of middlemen, promoters, and advertisers.
Urbanism, As Le Corbusier and Gropius urged, we
have increasingly the plan and style of functional architec-
ture; biological standards of housing; scientific study of
traffic and city services; some zoning; and the construction
of large-scale projects. But nowhere is realized the ideal of
over-all community planning, the open green city, or the
organic relation of work, living, and play. The actual re-
sults have been increasing commutation and traffic, seg-
regated ghettos, a "functional" style little different from
packaging, and the tendency to squeeze out some basic
urban functions, such as recreation or schooling, to be
squeezed out altogether.
Garden City. The opposite numbers, the Garden
City planners after Ebenezer Howard, have achieved some
planned communities protected by greenbelts. But they
did not get their integrated towns, planned for industry,
local commerce, and living. The result is that actual sub-
urbs and garden cities are dormitories with a culture
centering around small children, and absence of the wage
earner; and such "plans" as the so-called shopping cen~
The Missing Community 219
ters disrupts such village communities as there were. The
movement to conserve the wilds cannot withstand the cars,
so that all areas are invaded and regulated.
5.
Let us proceed to economic and social changes.
New Deal. The Keynesian economics of the New
Deal has cushioned the business cycle and maintained
nearly full employment. It has not achieved its ideal of
social balance between public and private works. The re-
sult is an expanding production increasingly consisting of
corporation boondoggling.
Syndicalism, Industrial workers have won their un-
ions, obtained better wages and working conditions, and
affirmed the dignity of labor. But they gave up their ideal
of workers' management, technical education, and con-
cern for the utility of their labor. The result is that a vast
majority couldn't care less about what they make, and the
"labor movement" is losing force.
Class Struggle. The working class has achieved a
striking repeal of the iron law of wages; it has won a mini-
mum wage and social security. But the goal of an equali-
tarian or freely mobile society has been given up, as has
the solidarity of the underprivileged. The actual result is
an increasing rigidity of statuses; some of the underpriv-
ileged tending to drop out of society altogether. On the
other hand, the cultural equality that has been achieved
has been the degradation of the one popular culture to the
lowest common denominator.
Production for Use. This socialist goal has been
missed, resulting in many of the other failures here listed.
Sociology. During the past century, the sociologists
have achieved their aim of dealing with mankind in its
natural groups or groups with common problems, rather
220 GROWING UP ABSURD
than as isolated individuals or a faceless mass. Social
science has replaced many prejudices and ideologies of
vested interests. But on the whole, social scientists have
given up their aim of fundamental social change and an
open-experimental method determining its goals as it
went along: the pragmatist ideal of society as a laboratory
for freedom and self-correcting humanity. The actual re-
sult is an emphasis on "socializing" and "belonging,"
with the loss of nature, culture, group solidarity and group
variety, and individual excellence.
4.
Next, political and constitutional reforms.
Democracy. The democratic revolution succeeded
in extending formal self-government and opportunity to
nearly everybody, regardless of bkth, property, or
education. But it gave up the ideal of the town meeting,
with the initiative and personal involvement that alone
could train people in self-government and give them prac-
tical knowledge of political issues. The actual result has
been the formation of a class of politicians who govern,
and who are themselves symbolic front figures.
The Republic. Correspondingly, the self-determina-
tion won by the American Revolution for the regional
states, that should have made possible real political ex-
perimentation, soon gave way to a national conformity;
nor has the nation as a whole conserved its resources and
maintained its ideals. The result is a deadening central-
ism, with neither local patriotism nor national patriotism.
The best people do not offer themselves for public office,
and no one has the aim of serving the Republic.
Freedom of Speech. Typical is the fate of the hard-
won Constitutional freedoms, such as freedom of speech.
Editors and publishers have given up trying to give an
The Missing Community 221
effective voice to important but unpopular opinions. Any-
thing can be printed, but the powerful interests have the
big presses. Only the safe opinion is proclaimed and other
opinion is swamped.
Liberalism. The liberal revolution succeeded in
shaking off onerous government controls on enterprise,
but it did not persist to its goal of real public wealth as the
result of free enterprise and honestly informed choice on
the market. The actual result is an economy dominated by
monopolies, in which the earnest individual entrepreneur
or inventor, who could perform a public service, is ac-
tively discouraged; and consumer demand is increasingly
synthetic.
Agrariaiiism. Conversely, the Jeffersonian ideal of a
proud and independent productive yeomanry, with natu-
ral family morals and a co-operative community spirit,
did in fact energize settling the West and providing the
basis for our abundance. But because it has failed to cope
with technological changes and to withstand speculation,
"farming as a way of life" has succumbed to cash-
cropping dependent on distant markets, and is ridden with
mortgages, tenancy, and hired labor. Yet it maintains a
narrow rural morality and isolationist politics, is a sucker
for the mass culture of Madison Avenue and Hollywood,
and in the new cities (e.g., in California, where farmers
have migrated) is a bulwark against genuine city culture.
Liberty. Constitutional safeguards of person were
won. But despite the increasing concentration of state
power and mass pressures, no effort was made to give to
individuals and small groups new means easily to avail
themselves of the safeguards. The result is that there is no
longer the striking individuality of free men; even quiet
nonconformity is hounded; and there is no asylum from
coast to coast.
Fraternity. This short-lived ideal of the French Rev-
222 GROWING UP ABSURD
olution, animating a whole people and uniting all classes
as a community, soon gave way to a dangerous national-
ism. The ideal somewhat revived as the solidarity of the
working class, but this too has faded into either philan-
thropy or "belonging."
Brotherhood of Races. The Civil War won formal
rights for Negroes, but failed to win social justice and
factual democracy. The actual result has been segregation,
and fear and ignorance for both whites and blacks.
Pacifism. This revolution has been entirely missed.
5.
Let us proceed to some more general moral premises of
modern times.
Reformation. The Protestant Reformation won the
possibility of living religiously in the world, freed individ-
uals from the domination of the priest, and led, indi-
rectly, to the toleration of private conscience. But it
failed to withstand the secular power; it did not cultivate
the meaning of vocation as a community function; and in
most sects the spirit of the churches did not spring from
their living congregations but was handed down as dogma
and ascetic discipline. The final result has been secularism,
individualism, the subordination of human beings to a ra-
tional economic system, and churches irrelevant to practi-
cal community life. Meantime, acting merely as a negative
force, the jealous sectarian conscience has driven religion
out of social thought.
Modern Science. The scientific revolution associ-
ated with the name of Galileo freed thinking of supersti-
tion and academic tradition and won attention to the ob-
servation of nature. But it failed to modify and extend its
method to social and moral matters, and indeed science
has gotten further and further from ordinary experience.
The Missing Community 223
With the dominance of science and applied science in our
times, the result has been a specialist class of scientists and
technicians, the increasing ineptitude of the average per-
son, a disastrous dichotomy of "neutral" facts versus "ar-
bitrary" values, and a superstition of scientism that has
put people out of touch with nature, and also has aroused
a growing hostility to science.
Enlightenment. The Enlightenment unseated age-
old tyrannies of state and church and won a triumph of
reason over authority. But its universalism failed to sur-
vive the rising nationalisms except in special sciences and
learning, and its ideal of encyclopedic reason as the pas-
sionate guide to life degenerated to the nineteenth-century
hope for progress through science and learning. And we
now have an internationalism without brotherhood or
peace, even concealing science as a strategic weapon; and
a general sentiment that the rule of reason is infinitely im-
practical.
Honesty. The rebellion for honest speech that we
associate with Ibsen, Flaubert, etc., and also with the muck-
rakers broke down the hypocrisy of Victorian prudishness
and of exploiting pillars of society; it reopened discussion
and renovated language; and it weakened official censor-
ship. But it failed to insist on the close relation between
honest speech and corresponding action. The result has
been a weakening of the obligation to act according to
speech, so that, ironically, the real motives of public and
private behavior are more in the dark than ever.
Popelar Culture. This ideal, that we may associate
in literature with the name of Sam Johnson and the Fleet
Street journalists, in the plastic arts with William Morris
and Ruskin, freed culture from aristocratic and snobbish
patrons. It made thought and design relevant to everyday
manners. But it did not succeed in establishing an imme-
diate relation between the writer or artist and his audi-
224 GROWING UP ABSURD
ence. The result is that the popular culture is controlled
by hucksters and promoters as though it were a saleable
commodity, and our society, inundated by cultural com-
modities, remains uncultivated.
6.
Finally, some reforms directly connected with children
and adolescents.
No Child Labor. Children have been rescued from
the exploitation and training of factories and sweat shops.
But, relying on the public schools and the apprentice-
txaining in an expanding and open economy, the reform-
ers did not develop a philosophy of capacity and voca-
tion. Nor, since there were many small jobs, did they face
the problems of a growing boy needing to earn some
money. In our days, the result is that growing youths are
idle and vocationally useless, and often economically des-
perate; and the schools, on the contrary, become appren-
tice-training paid for by public money.
Compulsory Education. This gave to all children a
certain equality of opportunity in an open expanding
industrial society. Formal elementary discipline was suffi-
cient when the environment was educative and provided
opportunities for advancement. In our circumstances,
formal literacy is less relevant, and overcrowding and
official interference make individual attention and real
teaching impossible; so that it could be said that the
schools are as stupefying as they are educative, and com-
pulsory education is often like jail.
Sexual Revolution. This has accomplished a freeing
of animal functioning in general, has pierced repression,
importantly relaxed inhibition, weakened legal and so-
cial sanctions, and diminished the strict animal-training
of small children. The movement has not so much failed
The Missing Community 225
as that it Is still in process, strongly resisted by inherited
prejudices, fears, and jealousies. By and large it has not
won practical freedom for older children and adolescents.
The actual present result is that they are trapped by in-
consistent rules, suffer because of excessive stimulation
and inadequate discharge, and become preoccupied with
sexual thoughts as if these were the whole of life.
Permissiveness. Children have more freedom of
spontaneous behavior, and their dignity and spirit are not
crushed by humiliating punishments in school and in
very many homes. But this permissiveness has not ex-
tended to provide also means and conditions: Young folk
might be sexually free but have no privacy; they are free
to be angry, but have no asylum to escape from home,
and no way to get their own money. Besides, where
upbringing is permissive, it is necessary to have strong val-
ues and esteemed behavior at home and in the commu-
nity, so that the child can have worth-while goals to struc-
ture his experience; and of course it is just these that are
lacking. So permissiveness often leads to anxiety and
weakness instead of confidence and strength.
Progressive Education. This radical proposal, aimed
at solving the dilemmas of education in the modern cir-
cumstances of industrialism and democracy, was never
given a chance. It succeeded in destroying the faculty psy-
chology in the interests of educating the whole person, and
in emphasizing group experience, but failed to introduce
learning-by-doing with real problems. The actual result of
the gains has been to weaken the academic curriculum
and foster adjustment to society as it is.
7.
Let us consider the beginning, the ending, and the middle
of these little paragraphs.
226 GROWING UP ABSURD
The headings printed in bold type are, in their sum-
mation, a kind of program of modern man. It is evident
that every one of these twenty-odd positions was in-
vented-and-discovered as a response to specific historical
conditions. The political positions were developed to op-
pose the absolutism of the kings who had unified the war-
ring feudal states; the program for children and adoles-
cents has been a response to modern industrialism and
urbanism; and so forth. But it does not follow, as some so-
ciologists think, that they can therefore be superseded and
forgotten as conditions change.
Consider the following of C. Wright Mills: "The ideals
that we Westerners associate with the classic, liberal, bour-
geois period of modem culture may well be rooted in
this one historical stage of this one type of society. Such
ideals as personal freedom and cultural autonomy may
not be inherent, necessary features of cultural life as
such." This is like saying that tragic poetry or mathematics
was "rooted" in the Greek way of life and is not "inher-
ently" human. This kind of thinking is the final result of
the recent social-scientific attitude that culture is added
onto a featureless animal, rather than being the invention-
and-discovery of human powers. This is effectually to give
up the modern enterprise altogether. But we will not give
it up. New conditions will be the conditions of, now, this
kind of man, stubbornly insisting on the ideals that he has
learned he has in him to meet.
Yet the modern positions are not even easily consistent
with one another, to form a coherent program. There have
been bitter conflicts between Liberty and Equality, Sci-
ence and Faith, Technology and Syndicalism, and so forth.
Nevertheless, we will not give up one or the other, but will
arduously try to achieve them all and make a coherent
program. And indeed, experience has taught that the fail-
ure in one of these ideals at once entails failure in others.
The Missing Community 227
For instance, failure in social justice weakens political
freedom, and this compromises scientific and religious au-
tonomy. "If we continue to be without a socialist move-
ment," says Frank Marquart, "we may end up without a
labor movement." The setback of progressive education
makes the compulsory school system more hopeless, and
this now threatens permissiveness and sexual freedom;
and so forth. So we struggle to perfect all these positions,
one buttressing another, if we are to fulfill our unique
modern destiny.
There is no doubt, too, that in our plight new modern
positions will be added to these, and these too will be com-
promised, aborted, their prophetic urgency bureaucratized
and ironically transformed into the opposite. But there it
is.
8.
If we now collect the actual, often ironical, results of so
much noble struggle, we get a clear but exaggerated pic-
ture of our American society. It has: slums of engineering
boondoggling production chaotic congestion tribes
of middlemen basic city functions squeezed out gar-
den cities for children indifferent workmen under-
privileged on a dole empty "belonging" without nature
or culture front politicians no patriotism an empty
nationalism bound for a cataclysmically disastrous finish
wise opinion swamped enterprise sabotaged by mo-
nopoly prejudice rising religion otiose the popular
culture debased science specialized science secret the
average man inept youth idle and truant youth sex-
ually suffering and sexually obsessed youth without
goals poor schools.
This picture is not unjust, but it is, again, exaggerated.
For it omits, of course, all the positive factors and the on-
228 GROWING UP ABSURI>
going successes. We have a persisting grand culture. There
is a steady advance of science, scholarship, and the fine
arts, A steady improvement in health and medicine. An
economy of abundance and, in many ways, a genuine civil
peace and a stubborn affirming of democracy. And most
of all there are the remarkable resilience and courage that
belong to human beings. Also, the Americans, for all their
folly and conformity, are often thrillingly sophisticated
and impatient of hypocrisy.
Yet there is one grim actuality that even this exagger-
ated picture does not reveal, the creeping defeatism and
surrender by default to the organized system of the state
and semimonopolies. International Business Machines and
organized psychologists, we have seen, effectually deter-
mine the method of school examinations and personnel
selection. As landlords, Webb and Knapp and Metropoli-
tan Life decide what our domestic habits should be; and,
as "civic developers" they plan communities, even though
their motive is simply a "long-term modest profit" on in-
vestment while millions are ill housed. The good of Gen-
eral Motors and the nation are inseparable, says Secretary
Wilson even though the cars are demonstrably ruinous
for the cities, ruinous for the young, etc. Madison Avenue
and Hollywood not only debauch their audiences, but they
pre-empt the means of communication, so nothing else can
exist. With only occasional flagrant breaches of legality,,
the increasingly interlocking police forces and the FBI
make people cowed and* speechless. That Americans can
allow this kind of thing instead of demolishing it with a
blow of the paw like a strong lion, is the psychology of
missed revolutions.
The Missing Community 229
9.
For our positive purposes in this book, it is the middle
parts of our paragraphs that warrant study: the failures,
the fallings-short, the compromises. Imagine that these
modern radical positions had been more fully achieved:
we should have a society where:
A premium is placed on technical improvement and on
the engineering style of functional simplicity and clarity.
Where the community is planned as a whole, with an or-
ganic integration of work, living, and play. Where build-
ings have the variety of their real functions with the
uniformity of the prevailing technology. Where a lot of
money is spent on public goods. Where workers are tech-
nically educated and have a say in management. Where
no one drops out of society and there is an easy mobility
of classes. Where production is primarily for use. Where
social groups are laboratories for solving their own prob-
lems experimentally. Where democracy begins in the town
meeting, and a man seeks office only because he has a
program. Where regional variety is encouraged and there
is pride in the Republic. And young men are free of con-
scription. Where all feel themselves citizens of the univer-
sal Republic of Reason. Where it is the policy to give an
adequate voice to the unusual and unpopular opinion, and
to give a trial and a market to new enterprise. Where peo-
ple are not afraid to make friends. Where races are factu-
ally equal. Where vocation is sought out and cultivated as
God-given capacity, to be conserved and embellished, and
where the church is the spirit of its congregation. Where
ordinary experience is habitually scientifically assayed by
the average man. Where it is felt that the suggestion of
reason is practical. And speech leads to the correspond-
ing action. Where the popular culture is a daring and
230 GROWING UP ABSURD
passionate culture. Where children can make themselves
useful and earn their own money. Where their sexuality
is taken for granted. Where the community carries on its
important adult business and the children fall in at their
own pace. And where education is concerned with foster-
ing human powers as they develop in the growing child.
In such an Utopian society, as was aimed at by modern
radicals but has not eventuated, it would be very easy to
grow up. There would be plenty of objective, worth-while
activities for a child to observe, fall in with, do, learn, im-
provise on his own. That is to say, it is not the spirit of
modern times that makes our society difficult for the
young; it is that that spirit has not sufficiently realized it-
self.
In this light, the present plight of the young is not sur-
prising. In the rapid changes, people have not kept enough
in mind that the growing young also exist and the world
must fit their needs. So instead, we have the present phe-
nomena of excessive attention to the children as such, in
psychology and suburbs, and coping with "juvenile de-
linquency" as if it were an entity. Adults fighting for some
profoundly conceived fundamental change naturally give
up, exhausted, when they have achieved some gain that
makes life tolerable again and seems to be the substance
of their demand. But to grow up, the young need a world
of finished situations and society made whole again.
10.
Indeed, the bother with the above little Utopian sketch is
that many adults would be restive in such a stable modern
world if it were achieved. They would say: It is a fine
place for growing boys. I agree with this criticism.
I think the case is as follows: Every profound new pro-
posal, of culture or institution, invents and discovers a
The Missing Community 231
new property of "Human Nature." Henceforth it is going
to be in these terms that a young fellow will grow up and
find his identity and his task. So if we accumulate the
revolutionary proposals of modern times, we have named
the goals of modern education. We saw that it was the aim
of Progressive Education to carry this program through.
But education is not life. The existing situation of a
grown man is to confront an uninvented and undiscov-
ered present. Unfortunately, at present, he must also try
to perfect his unfinished past: this bad inheritance is part
of the existing situation, and must be stoically worked
through.
11.
Let me repeat the proposition of this chapter: It is the
missed revolutions of modern times the fallings-short
and the compromises that add up to the conditions that
make it hard for the young to grow up in our society.
The existing local community, region, and nation is the
real environment of the young. Conversely, we could de-
fine community spirit and patriotism as the conviction in
which it is possible to grow up. (An independent and not
too defeated adult confronts a broader historical, inter-
national, and cosmic scene as his environment for ac-
tion.)
Modern times have been characterized by fundamental
changes occurring with unusual rapidity. These have shat-
tered tradition but often have not succeeded in creating a
new whole community. We have no recourse to going back,
there is nothing to go back to. If we are to have a stable
and whole community in which the young can grow to
manhood, we must painfully perfect the revolutionary
modern tradition we have.
This stoical resolve is, paradoxically, a conservative
232 GROWING UP ABSURD
proposition, aiming at stability and social balance. For
often it is not a question of making innovations, but of
catching up and restoring the right proportions. But no
doubt, in our runaway, one-sided way of life, the pro-
posal to conserve human resources and develop human ca-
pacities has become a radical innovation.
Right proportion cannot be restored by adding a few
new teachers formally equivalent to the growth in popula-
tion. Probably we need a million new minds and more
put to teaching. Even Dr. Conant says that we must
nearly double our present annual expenditure on educa-
tion for teaching alone, not counting plant and the central
schools he wants. And this does not take into account es-
sentially new fields such as making sense of adult leisure.
It must be understood that with the increase in popula-
tion and crowding, the number and variety of human
services increase disproportionately, and the laissez-faire
areas, both geographical and social, decrease. Therefore
the units of human service, such as school classes or the
clientele of a physician (and even political districts?),
ought to be made smaller, to avoid the creation of masses:
mass teaching, mass medicine, mass psychotherapy, mass
penology, mass politics. Yet our normal schools and medi-
cal schools cannot cope with even the arithmetic increase.
Right proportion requires reversing the goal in voca-
tional guidance, from fitting the man to the machine and
chopping him down to fit, to finding the opportunity in the
economy that brings out the man, and if you can't find
such an opportunity, make it. This involves encouraging
new small enterprises and unblocking and perhaps under-
writing invention. Again, if at present production is inhu-
man and stupid, it is that too few minds are put to it:
this can be remedied by giving the workman more voice
in production and the kind of training to make that voice
wise.
The Missing Community 233
Probably, right proportion involves considerable decen-
tralizing and increasing the rural-urban ratio. Certainly it
involves transforming the scores of thousands of neglected
small places, hopelessly dull and same, into interesting
villages that someone could be proud of. A lot of the
booming production has got to go into publicly useful
goods, proportionate to the apparently forgotten fact that
it is on public grounds, because of public investment, and
the growth of population, that private wealth is produced
and enjoyed. We have to learn again, what city man al-
ways used to know, that belonging to the city, to its
squares, its market, its neighborhoods, and its high cul-
ture, is a public good; it is not a field for "investment to
yield a long-term modest profit." A proportionate alloca-
tion of public funds, again, is not likely to devote more
money to escape roads convenient for automobiles than
to improving the city center. (If I may make a pleasant
suggestion, we could underwrite a handsome program for
serious adult leisure by a 10 per cent luxury tax on new
cars; it would yield over a billion.)
Since prosperity itself has made it more difficult for
the underprivileged immigrant to get started, right propor-
tion requires devoting all the more money and ingenuity
to helping him find himself and get started. (In such cases,
by the way, ingenuity and friendly aid are more important
than money, as some of our settlement houses in New
York have beautifully demonstrated.) And some way
will have to be found, again, for a man to be decently
poor, to work for a subsistence without necessarily choos-
ing to involve himself in the total high-standard economy.
One way of achieving this would be directly producing
subsistence goods in distinction from the total economy.
In arts and letters, there is a right balance between the
customary social standard and creative novelty, and be-
tween popular entertainment and esthetic experience.
234 GROWING UP ABSURD
Then, to offset Hollywood and Madison Avenue, we must
have hundreds of new little theaters, little magazines,
and journals of dissenting opinion with means of circula-
tion; because it is only in such that new things can develop
and begin to win their way in the world.
It is essential that our democratic legislatures and pub-
lic spokesmen be balanced by more learned and honor-
able voices that, as in Britain, can thoughtfully broach
fundamental issues of community plan, penal code, mo-
rality, cultural tone, with some certainty of reaching a pub-
lic forum and some possibility of being effective. For
there is no other way of getting the best to lead, to have
some conviction and even passionate intensity, to save
America from going to managers, developers, and politi-
cians by default.
Certainly right proportion, in a society tightly organ-
ized and conformist, requires a vast increase in the jealous
safeguard of civil liberties, to put the fear of God back
into local police, district attorneys, and the Federal Bureau
of Investigation.
Here is a program of more than a dozen essential
changes, all practicable, all difficult A wiser and more
experienced author could suggest a dozen more.
12.
Let me expand one of these: Making sense of adult leisure.
What are the present goals of the philosophers of
leisure, for instance, the National Recreation Association?
and now imagine those goals achieved. There would be a
hundred million adults who have cultured hobbies to oc-
cupy their spare time: some expert on the, flute, some
with do-it-yourself kits, some good at chess and go, some
square dancing, some camping out and enjoying nature,
and all playing various athletic games. Leaf through the
The Missing Community 235
entire catalogue of the National Recreation Association,
take all the items together, apply them to one hundred
million adults and there is the picture. (This costs at
present forty billion dollars a year, according to the guess
of Robert Coughlan in Life.) The philosophy of leader-
ship, correspondingly, is to get people to participate ev-
erybody must "belong."
Now even if all these people were indeed getting deep
personal satisfaction from these activities, this is a dis-
maying picture. It doesn't add up to anything. It isn't im-
portant. There is no ethical necessity in it, no standard.
One cannot waste a hundred million people that way.
The error is in the NRA's basic concept of recreation.
Let me quote from a recent editorial in Recreation: Rec-
reation is "any activity participated in ... merely for
the enjoyment it affords. . . . The rewards of recrea-
tional activities depend upon the degree to which they
provide outlets for personal interests." (Outlets again, as
in the Governor's prescription for the juvenile de-
linquents.) But enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling
that accompanies important ongoing activity; pleasure, as
Freud said, is always dependent on function.
From the present philosophy of leisure, no new cul-
ture can emerge. What is lacking is worth-while commu-
nity necessity, as the serious leisure, the o-%oX^ of the
Athenians had communal necessity, whether in the theater,
the games, the architecture and festivals, or even the
talk.
That we find it hard to think in these terms is a pro-
found sign of our social imbalance. Yet we do not need,
as Dr. Douglass claimed in the passage we quoted above,
"a new ethics, a new esthetic." For the activities of serious
leisure are right there, glaring, in our communities, to
avoid shame and achieve grandeur.
But the question is: If there is little interest, honor, or
236 GROWING UP ABSURD
manliness in the working part of our way of life, can we
hope for much in the leisure part?
13.
The best exposition of what I have been trying to say in
this chapter is the classic of conservative thinking, Cole-
ridge's On the Constitution of the Church and State. His
point in that essay is simply this: In order to have citizens,
you must first be sure that you have produced men. There
must therefore be a large part of the common wealth
specifically devoted to cultivating "freedom and civiliza-
tion/' and especially to the education of the young grow-
ing up.
Conclusion
1.
It is normal for sober adult citizens to take the wildness
and absurdities of the younger generation tolerantly and
with a touch of envious admiration, just as those adults
who are more inhibited and insecure always must deplore
them and feel that things are going to the dogs. In solidly
established Augustan ages, such as the period in England
between 1688 and the Industrial Revolution, the excesses
of well-brought-up young men are even socially obligatory,
under the style of sowing wild oats. In outrageously bad
ages, such as the period in Russia during the last half of
the nineteenth century, rebellious youth is esteemed as the
hoped-for agent of change.
These attitudes all make sense and apply in our times
too. In this book I have no doubt been variously tolerant,
envying, deploring, approving, and esteeming. It is not
an interesting question whether or not our present Youth
Problems are fundamentally different from those of other
times, whether or not they will blow over; whether the
Beats are a fad and the Delinquents no worse than in
1850. What I have tried to show, rather, is this: that such
238 GROWING UP ABSURD
problems, by their form and content, test and criticize
the society in which they occur. The burden of proof, as
to who is "wrong," does not rest with the young but always
with the system of society. Some societies bear it easily;
our society is not outrageously bad, but it is far from
adequate, and it stands the test poorly.
A poor showing is proved by the fact that young people
are paid attention to as a group, as they must be if they
are importantly "in the right"; and there are Fathers and
Sons, or Flaming Youth, or Youth Problems. In America,
our Flaming Youth and Youth Problems have occurred
after great wars, for then the adults really disgraced them-
selves. (Appendix F contrasts these two periods.)
2.
We must distinguish between two kinds of special atten-
tion paid these days by the Americans to their young. The
first is the effect of the disappointment and resignation of
the older generation it is a kind of Lear complex: they
themselves have failed to be men and women; they are
therefore both timid and guilty before the young. With
respect to children, this adult resignation results in the
child-centered suburb and the emphasis on "psychol-
ogy." With regard to the adolescents, it appears as a
craving for youth for oneself, to act like youth, to give in
to youth, meaning by youth the teen-age foolishness that
still has some vitality. This comes to the eleven-billion-
dollar sales to teen-agers, for what can these kids think
up except to imitate the customs of their elders? Naturally,
once there is such a vast market, sales-minded publicists
give most earnest attention to youth. This kind of youth
is far from "problematic." It seems that it will be even
more worthless than its parents, and God pity us.
But the second kind of attention is that claimed by the
Conclusion 239
problematic who are importantly in the right. They are
problematic because they try to vomit up the poisonous
mores. They won't eat them they are sick because they
have eaten too many of them. And they are "in the right"
because they are obviously in the right, everybody knows
it.
3.
Flaming Youth of the twenties had salutary effects. It
speeded the sexual revolution and the new permissive
psychology of child care. It put the seal on the new simple
prose. Our present round of Youth Problems has been
dampened and delayed by war anxiety and disillusion-
ment, yet even so it will have, it has already had, positive
successes.
The young people have latched on to the movement in
art that is the strongest in our generation, the so-called
Action Painting or New York School. In music, the match-
ing numbers are the percussive atonalists like Varese, or
the musique concrete made of the tapes. There is an Ac-
tion Architecture. Artaud preached an Action Theater. I
have tried to show that this disposition to go back to the
material elements and the real situation, is intrinsic and
spontaneous in the art action and poetry action of some of
the young groups. This means that they are not off the
main track. It can be said that this Action art lacks con-
tent, it does not carry enough humanity. I think this is
true. But it is just its eschewing of a stereotyped or cor-
rupt content while nevertheless affirming the incorruptible
content of the artist's own action, that is its starved and
brave humanity a step beyond the nihilism of Dada a
beginning.
Young people have hit, too, on rituals of expression in
face-to-face groups, and in provoking the public audience
240 GROWING UP ABSURD
as a face-to-face group, that are clearly better than the
canned popular culture or the academic culture. But these
things are in line with what the best sociologists and com-
munity planners are also after. It is a move against
anomie and the lonely crowd. Naturally it is drunken and
threadbare.
The English Angry Young Men, again, have specialized
in piercing the fraudulent speech of public spokesmen and
in trying to force them to put up or shut up. They have
learned to cry out "Shame!" When a million Americans
and not only young men can learn to do this, we
shall have a most salutary change.
Disaffected young groups in America, England, and
France have also flatly taken direct action in race rela-
tions. They present racial brotherhood and miscegena-
tion as a fait accompli.
More generally, all the recent doings of problematic
youth, whether in the middle class or among the under-
privileged juvenile delinquents, have had a stamp of at
least partly springing from some existent situation, what-
ever it is, and of responding with direct action, rather
than keeping up appearances and engaging in role play-
ing. There is also among them a lot of phony role playing,
but no more than in present acceptable society, and rather
less than in the average young man or adolescent who
has a "line." I think that the existential reality of Beat,
Angry, and Delinquent behavior is indicated by the fact
that other, earnest, young fellows who are not themselves
disaffected and who are not phony, are eager to hear
about them, and respect them. One cannot visit a univer-
sity without being asked a hundred questions about them.
Finally, some of these groups are achieving a simpler
fraternity, animality, and sexuality than we have had, at
least in America, in a long, long time.
Conclusion 241
4.
This valuable program is in direct contrast to the mores
of what we have in this book been calling "the organized
system," its role playing, its competitiveness, its canned
culture, its public relations, and its avoidance of risk and
self-exposure. That system and its mores are death to the
spirit, and any rebellious group will naturally raise a con-
trasting banner.
Now the organized system is very powerful and in its
full tide of success, apparently sweeping everything be-
fore it in science, education, community planning, labor,
the arts, not to speak of business and politics where it is
indigenous. Let me say that we of the previous generation
who have been sickened and enraged to see earnest and
honest effort and humane culture swamped by this muck,
are heartened by the crazy young allies, and we think
that perhaps the future may make more sense than we
dared hope.
Appendices
APPENDIX A
December 12, 1959
Commissioner of Education
Albany
Dear Dr. Allen,
I understand that the case of James Worley of Croton
Falls has come to you for review. Allow me to say something
in his behalf.
In content, his original protesting action (refusing to pre-
pare a two-week lesson plan) seems to me beyond doubt cor-
rect. I myself have taught every age from ten-year-olds
through Ph.D. candidates and older adults; it has been my
universal experience that formal preparation of a lesson
plan beyond the next hour or two is not only unrealistic but
can be positively harmful and rigidifying, for it interferes
with the main thing, the contact between the teacher and his
class. Worley *s disagreement with the administrative order is,
to me, simply evidence that he is a good teacher and knows
what the right teaching relation is. A teacher who would
seriously comply with the order would likely be a poor
teacher. (Our model must always be the Socratic dialogue,
246 GROWING UP ABSURD
for the aim is not to convey some information but to get the
information across as part of the student's nature and second
nature, so he can make an individual and creative use of it.)
On the other hand, if the compliance is not serious it is a
waste of time; and, as you know well, teachers are burdened
with paper work, much of which is absolutely necessary.
In form, Ms protest was certainly insubordinate. But obvi-
ously each of us has the moral and social duty to draw the
line somewhere against obedience to error. Worley has drawn
it at a very crucial point, namely, where the order interferes
with the right performance of the job. In the end this is the
sacred and final obligation of every professional, to do the
work and to defend the conditions under which the work can
be done well,
The issue is of immense importance. Our country is being
systematically emasculated by a sickening waste of human
resources. The efforts of a Dr, Conant to salvage some sci-
entific talent are ludicrously inadequate to the main problem,
which is precisely the difficulties created by our social rela-
tions that keep the inventor from his materials, the workman
from honest labor, the teacher from his students and subject
matter, and the artist from his public. We cannot afford to
throw away good teachers to save face for mistaken ad-
ministrators. It is the glory of good administration precisely
to smooth the path for objective work to proceed. There-
fore I urge you to intervene in this case and reinstate Mr.
Worley.
Copy to Gov. Rockefeller Sincerely,
Paul Goodman
New York City
(The appeal of Mr. Worley was rejected by the Commis-
sioner who said that, though he was much in the right, he
ought to have acted through the proper channels.)
Appendices 247
APPENDIX B
New Theater and the Unions*
I want to discuss a mistaken policy of certain theater craft-
unions, and suggest a remedy. The matter has an importance
in itself, because in recent years there has been a growth in
new theater "off Broadway" that may, if it is encouraged,
come to some real living theater. The union policy has been
a discouragement almost as bad as the unavailability of
real estate and it has been attacked with the usual jeering
debater's points by the tribe unsympathetic to unionism as
such. But especially I want to discuss this question because
it is, in parvo, a remarkably apt case of what is becoming the
chief problem of our contemporary culture: how to live and
breathe creatively in a society whose technology and or-
ganizations unavoidably make for conformity.
Without mentioning names, let me tell the story con-
cretely in a case where I happen to know the facts. Here is a
company devoted to new theater that has now for nearly ten
years kept at work under arduous conditions, in larger or
smaller quarters as it could get or build them by their own
and their friends' voluntary labor. The nucleus of the com-
pany is a group of theater-people, actors, musicians, dancers,
and writers some of them of great reputation who have
all of them, for from ten to fifty years, given themselves,
often financially unrewarded, to the development of our
modern art. They are a constellation comparable, for ex-
ample, to the fine group that co-operated as the Province-
town Players. Nobody would question that they are devoted
to the growth of theater and not to making money; they try
to make enough to sustain themselves.
Now in casting their productions, they want to employ
Equity actors. Many of those who voluntarily built the place
they now occupy are Equity actors, and naturally, having
* From Dissent, Autumn, 1959.
248 GROWING UP ABSURD
laid the bricks, they want to act. By and large, professional
actors belong to Equity and most of the best actors are pro-
fessional, so you want to cast them. Now the situation
among actors is as follows: (1) About 95 per cent are chroni-
cally unemployed. (2) Actors have a kind of hunger, a need,
to act. (3) Understanding this, Equity permits its members to
work, in certain circumstances, for as little as $40 a week,
regarding this figure, I guess, as pretty near the decent sub-
sistence minimum that a person must have, no matter what
his enthusiasm or other satisfaction in the work. When, then,
this company sends out a casting call in the professional
journals, there are hundreds of responses from actors eager
for any part, hoping to advance their careers by appearing
and getting notices, and many of them glad to work in a cul-
tured noncommercial atmosphere on intrinsically more inter-
esting material, where they can learn something. That is,
small noncommercial theaters of high standards, and trained
professional actors, are mutually useful to one another; and
Equity recognizes this obvious fact.
The professional theater, however, is organized also on
the principle that Equity players may not act in a non-
union play, a play whose staff is not union. In my opinion
this principle is a correct one (for reasons I shall briefly
mention in a moment). But unfortunately it works out as
follows; When the director of the company goes to the vari-
ous craft and staff unions to get a countersignature to allow
Equity players to play, he is told that he must employ 1
union stagehand at $137 a week, 1 union press agent at
$145, 1 union scene-designer at $40 per day (for at least 3
days); and whenever there is to be a little live music, there
must be union musicians at similar figures. All this amounts
to a financial burden out of all proportion to the company's
other expenses, and to the profits they expect or even hope
for; it is quite unfeasible. (The theater has less than 175
seats; some are kept at $1, so students can come; figure it
out.) In the case here, the burden happens to be particu-
larly galling because the director himself is a gifted and
well-known scenic designer; like all other artistic groups,
Appendices 249
they prefer to couch their press releases and other public re-
lations in their own style; the work done by stagehands is
what almost everybody connected with a little theater is
skilled at and does with pleasure; and everywhere in integral
theater there is a need for live music it can never be
omitted, and canned music is deathly.
The unions are inflexible in their demands; the company
cannot fulfill them. In this impasse there is at once generated
enormous heat and idiotic remarks. "If you don't have the
money, stay out of the theater!" says a distinguished func-
tionary of one of the unions. "You're a painter," he says to
the director, "why don't you stick to pictures?" On the other
side, the Equity actors connected with the company are in a
rage and about to tear up their cards. Those who are politi-
cally hep point out that organized labor has fallen into the
hands of racketeers. And the paranoid demonstrate that
there is a conspiracy among the unions, the critics, and the
owners of theater real estate, to prevent anything new and
better from happening.
NECESSITY OF THE UNIONS
Let me insist that the principle of total theater unionism, in-
cluding Equity, seems to me to be correct. This is simply be-
cause of the nature of the theater arts and crafts. Our city
abounds in people of artistic talent, eager to exercise their
separate talents. By disposition such people are free lances;
and the state of serious art in our society is such that, until
they make a lot of money, free artists have little status or se-
curity and cannot easily maintain their rights and dignity. As
a group, then, they are peculiarly subject to being taken ad-
vantage of and exploited by producers who can give them
any work at all; and when taken advantage of, they act ef-
fectually as scabs and lower the standards of honest employ-
ment. That is, it is precisely the intrinsic virtues of the tal-
ented, their hunger to work and their solitariness, that make
them socially weak and liable to lower social standards. Poor
gifted musicians, painters, poets, dancers, and actors are sev-
erally weak indeed; by insisting, even inflexibly and intran-
250 GROWING UP ABSURD
sigently, on their union, one can give them collectively some
strength.
What then? The principle of unionism lays an unbearable
burden on any new noncommercial company; it works to the
disadvantage of Equity actors; and yet the principle itself is a
necessary one. Nevertheless, dispassionately considered, the
solution to this dilemma is easy. Briefly, if we carefully con-
sider the nature of theater, we shall see that new theater in
general cannot make money and must overcome great ob-
stacles in order to exist; and yet eventually it must in turn be-
come immensely popular and make a lot of money, becom-
ing the exciting novelty in commercial theater. The process
has two steps, and mindful of their own interests the unions
must have a dual attitude: positively to foster the new and
noncommercial, and to protect their standards in the com-
mercial; and there ought to be a definite rule to mark the
passage from the first stage of the process to the second.
There is no doubt that it is a vague or clear understanding of
this that, in part, has led Equity to its own more flexible
policy.
THE NATURE OF NEW THEATER
Reflect a moment on the following commonplace observa-
tions:
( 1 ) The theater is a fine art for an immediate present pub-
lic; and it is also a collaboration of many skills. Therefore,
theater requires a large social effort, setting many people in
motion, and a certain amount of social capital. (Not neces-
sarily a large capital, compared, say, with architecture,
where the very medium is expensive; but an even larger so-
cial eifort than architecture.)
(2) Radically new theater, like any new art, cannot expect a
mass popular response, for it presents what is unfamiliar and
is even actively resisted as meaningless, perverse, or danger-
ous. The sign of successful new theater is that the audience is
torn between fascination and the impulse to walk out in dis-
gust. The anxiety of new theater is greater than with other
Appendices 251
new art because theater demands a response in public, and
its medium is exceptionally close to the animal and social be-
havior of life. The same anxiety, by the way, is felt even
more by the players than by public, as any one who has re-
hearsed new theater with conventional actors can testify.
Therefore, it is only from small, intensely personally involved
groups, and a small public of the like-minded, that we can
expect new theater to emerge.
(3) But conversely, once a new theatrical advance has been
made, it is likely to become immensely popular, for it is
shared excitement. A new advance in some other art need
not become popular in this way, for, although humanly im-
portant, it may be specialist and learned; but theater art is
common and simple.
(4) So-called "little theater" groups, making a great social
effort and overcoming great obstacles, from real estate to in-
terpersonal relations, and with little income to ease the path,
are driven by an artistic fatality into the daring and the radi-
cally new. They are not dilettantes or amateurs; their aim
is to achieve at least the excitement of the big professional
entertainment otherwise, why bother? Yet their means are
limited. Therefore they explore new ways of handling limited
means, to get as much meaning as if they had extensive
means; this creates startling effects. Or alternately they make
daring simplifications, and this creates startling effects.
Let me sum up these familiar propositions in a formula:
The task of new theater is to find out and invent what must
be unpopular and yet will soon be immensely popular; it is in
this thorny task that it makes a great social effort against
many obstacles. Naturally people are not too attracted by
this prospect. Like most of the "off-Broadway" theater at
present, people prefer the easier task of performing modern
classics (the new theater of one or two generations ago); of
importing European successes that are exotically safe; or of
giving museum-like revivals, more properly the function
of university players and dedicated amateurs. All that is off
Broadway and fairly noncommercial, but it is not new
252 GROWING UP ABSURD
theater. (I do not mean, by the way, that the company I am
discussing is a pure model of new theater, but it is one of the
best of a bad lot, and nothing is perfect here below.)
A PROPOSAL TO THE UNIONS
Bearing aH this in mind, would not the wise, the statesman-
like, attitude of the unions be for them to say something like
this: "New theater! go to it and we hope you succeed. For if
you do, there will be a new kind of immensely popular and
paying theater; and if you don't, there will be only a dying
theater. The policy of Equity, distinguishing a commercial
and a noncommercial theater, is a sound one; but we, of
course, are in a different situation from the actors: for our
carpenters, electricians, press agents, musicians, and so forth,
there is no psychological necessity to perform in theaters; un-
employed in the theater, they could get other jobs; and we
see no reason, therefore, to lower their standards in any way.
But as for the actors, directors, and creative artists of scene,
word, movement and music, who need the theater public to
exercise their talents, we shall not stand in their way. On the
other hand, as soon as you free artists begin to get into the
money, then the situation is entirely different, and we have a
right to take our place in the enterprise and exact our fair
shares. We have the right because all wealth is social wealth,
produced by society as a whole, and it must be apportioned
according to the rules that society has come to at the present
time, to achieve which we in labor have fought and suffered
much. Therefore we shall, by some reasonable rule of thumb,
set a figure, perhaps an income figure, perhaps a profit ratio,
at which we think your free art has entered the cash nexus, a
dividing line, at which the excitingly unpopular is beginning
to be the immensely popular; and when any of your enter-
prises crosses that line, it must be total union. We reserve the
right to examine your qualifications and check your books,
and so you affiliate with us as your friends and pay a nominal
dues."
This, I submit, is the wise, the statesmanlike, attitude that
loses nothing for the unions, and that encourages the growth
Appendices 253
of theater. It can set a definite rule that fits the real nature of
the case, unlike the present abstract "policy" or alternative
nonpolicy of making "exceptions"; of sometimes being intran-
sigent and sometimes shutting the eyes; of acting de facto as
powerful critics and censors far beyond their competence. In-
stead, it gives the theater crafts a noble and protective role in
the growth of the culture of the people.
A NEW RESPONSIBILITY
I said at the outset that this small question contains a great
question; without further ado, let me generalize. The case is
with us in America that, by and large, vast organizations, of
state, capital, production, labor, communications, education,
urbanism, etc., etc., have pre-empted the means of life. This
is currently inevitable and doubtless in many ways desirable,
though not so unquestionably desirable as most people think.
(When everything is done according to a certain pattern, it
is hard to imagine how some other pattern could work at
all.) At the same time, it is resulting in a conformity that is
by now inane and boring and will soon be dangerous, for
nothing revitalizing can occur in an organizational plan, and
when something occurs outside the plan it may not have
space to grow. All this has become a familiar complaint.
I want to suggest simply that with their power, these or-
ganizations have acquired a new, strange, and troublesome
responsibility: to limit the exercise of their power more intel-
ligently than they are accustomed to, to stand out of the way
in order that there can be a future also for themselves.
AP PE NDIX C
The Freedom to Go*
I haven't read John Keats' The Insolent Chariots, but I can
see that it and Manfred Macarthur's critique of it provide an
excellent example of a dual approach in recent sociology that
* From Liberation, January, 1959.
254 GROWING UP ABSURD
is inevitable because we have a dual economy that is being
analyzed. We have one society but two kinds of money: hard
money and soft money, as somebody has called them (I don't
know who first) . Hard money is the old-fashioned money that
you "really" work for, that is measured by labor time and
surplus value, and that applies on the market, including the
market for labor according to an iron law of wages. Soft
money is mad money or sailor money that has at present,
however, skyrocketed in amount; it is not only given away on
TV for "personal appearances" or for nothing, and as wild
salaries on Madison Avenue and in Hollywood; but also, very
generally, it pours into fringe benefits, into long vacations
with pay, giveaway foundations to avoid upper-bracket taxes,
and even, in an important aspect, social insurance. Naturally
these two moneys have different moralities, and contrasting
moralists like Macarthur and Keats.
It is inevitable that we have these two kinds of money, be-
cause we have a surplus technology. The American machine
is working at a small fraction of its productivity, and never-
theless there is a vast surplus of not very desirable wealth
produced that simply must be bought up with the soft money.
At the same time there is always a core of subsistence pro-
duction, for men need bread and shelter, and to get this you
have to pay, and work for, hard money. It does not seem to
me sufficient to discuss this unique historical monster in terms
of class exploitation, reinvestment, and the falling rate of in-
terest for the soft money pours to all classes. Yet, in power
and control, our institutions still do work according to the
old economic principles. If you omit the old economic analy-
sis, in either your theory or your behavior, you lose out; but
if you think and behave in those terms, you are quite out of
touch with the facts of life, where bureaucratic and leisure
values are paramount.
So we have two grand streams of social writing that are
fantastically uncommunicating. There are the more academic
and post-Marxist analysts of institutions, say, Mills or Ben
Seligman or Lerner or Lundberg or Farrell; and there are
the more journalistic and Freudian analysts of mass culture,
Appendices 255
like Riesman or Leites or Larrabee and Lynes or Spectorsky.
Curiously, each group would probably think the other group
is rather conservative and neglects the most important levers
of social change. I myself don't know, I have not heard, a
unified theory that avoids the overdetermination of these dual
interpretations; and frankly, I don't see the need for one, so
long as each author honestly works at what seems to him
to be the main problem. There is plenty of injustice and folly
for all.
My bias is that Keats and Macarthur both are perfectly
right about the automobiles with their huge girth and long
tails. I do think, however, that by overlooking the crucial
factor of our surplus productivity the President's anguished
outcry that it is un-American not to buy, still rings in my soul
both authors are unfair and uncharitable toward our
American problem. Keats seems (I have not read him) to
neglect, or not sufficiently to stress, the basic need of the
market for fashion and novelty that underlies the pandering
to sex, speed, and prestige. There has to be some difference
to make the year's model saleable. Put out the most efficient
machine you want, and you will still have the problem of
how to sell more of it than anybody needs. The experts at
this problem are not engineers but "industrial designers."
And if you say, stop making the needless cars, then what are
you going to do with the productivity of America? I don't
mean that there is no answer, but that this is the question,
Macarthur, on the other hand, seems to me to be very far
from the reality with his puritanical remark about saving
money and labor and taking trains and buses. Such Veblen-
morals apply to an economy of scarcity. Why save the money
and labor? To increase the time of leisure? But surveys (e.g.,
in Larrabee and Meyersohn's anthology Mass-Leisure) show
that it is precisely for leisure that precisely a workingman's
car is his chief salvation from absolute inanition. What if the
car stands idle outside the plant because the lonely half -hour
drive to and from work is the man's most precious hour of
the day at either work or leisure? The car is his share in the
superabounding wealth; what share would this author give
256 GROWING UP ABSURD
him? On sunny holidays, the workingman will spend long
hours "fixing the car" it is his freedom to Go, though in-
deed he has nowhere to go, but parks outside the movie.
"The waste," concludes Macarthur, "is caused by lack of
responsible over-all planning." If by planning he means so-
cialist planning of production and distribution, I think that
this is nonsense (for the American scene) . We are already too
efficient for our cultural resources. If, however, he means by
planning an organic consideration of means and ends, and
the education of the souls of men to be able to use practi-
cally the wealth of God and man, then, to his surprise, he
will have to begin to think of sex and speed and power and
all that.
AP P ENDIX D
The Freedom to be Academic*
A special committee at Columbia University has worked for
three years on the study of academic freedom, and here now
are two books, by Richard Hofstadter and Walter Metzger,
and by Robert Maclver, a history of the academic "freedom
of inquiry" and a polemical defense of it against current at-
tacks, especially in the social sciences. "Inquiry" is a term
from the pragmatic vocabulary and denotes, roughly, a
search to solve problems in the ongoing process of life; real,
not "academic" problems, though not, of course, narrowly
utilitarian problems. The question I want to raise is, to what
extent do these authors seriously mean this and mean to de-
fend it?
L
Let me start by taking an annoying and apparently unfair
tack. In discussing the case of Bertrand Russell, Professor
* From i.e., The Cambridge Review, Number 5.
Appendices 257
Maclver says, "Actually . . . Russell was dealing, forth-
rightly and sincerely, with the most problematic of all areas
of social relationship [sex]." (AF 156) 1 This is an innocent
passing remark in a relatively minor context in the book, but
let us suddenly stop at it short and take the sentence at face
value. If sexual relations is the most problematic of all areas
of inquiry, we should expect that most or very many social
scientists are inquiring and teaching here, or at least that the
chairmen of departments are falling all over themselves to
enlist experts for their staffs in this novel field; in the nature
of the case much that these people are hypothesizing and
affirming must be unconventional and socially unacceptable,
for "in no other area of human behavior is there so un-
bridgeable a gulf between the officially sanctioned ethics and
the socially accepted ways" (AF 157); and so there must here
be lots of cases of infringement of academic freedom. But
no such thing. In the three hundred pages of Maclver's book,
six are somewhat (mostly indirectly) concerned with such
cases; in the five hundred pages of the history, none. Now
this is not, I am convinced, because our authors are preju-
diced on the subject or afraid of it; Professor Maclver, by his
tone and remarks and the few times I have seen him, seems
to me sensible and unusually frank. It is because indeed the
most problematic area is not much an area of inquiry in the
universities. Consider the following statement:
We know of no cases where an educator, clearly con-
victed of flagrantly immoral behavior, defended his posi-
tion by appealing to the principle of academic freedom.
Apart from the fact that such defense would be irrelevant,
it is certain that his case would receive no support from
his institution or from his colleagues. (AF 150)
1 Throughout, AF refers to Academic Freedom in Our Times f by
Robert M. Maclver. N. Y., 1955. Columbia University Press. 304
pp.
Dev. refers to The Development of Academic Freedom in the
United States, by Richard Hofstadter and Walter P. Metzger.
N. Y., 1955. Columbia University Press. 506 pp.
258 GROWING UP ABSURD
If his case would certainly receive no support, the educator
would certainly be a fool to press it. But I should like to
question the "fact" that such a defense would be irrelevant.
The Professor Emeritus knows as well as I that it is not
sexual immorality that gets teachers sacked, for this is con-
doned by his peers, it is among the "socially accepted ways";
but it is the publicity that sometimes accrues; and is this not
tantamount to saying that it is not the thing but the proposi-
tion that is being penalized? (I know, for instance, of an even
closer case, where a teacher in a small progressive college
was refused reappointment not because of his delinquent be-
havior, which was at that place not uncommon and fairly
public, but because of his "overt" claim to the right of it.) 2
Could not many such cases quite simply and relevantly be
transformed into cases of infringement of academic free-
dom? But in this problematic area, the theory in courses in
anthropology is kept far distant from the practice in the
ongoing process of life.
In my opinion there is, in our times, a still more problem-
atic area of social relationships: how to cope with war and
the complex of issues around it, conscription, nuclear re-
search, international diplomacy. Now in Professor Maclver's
book, pacificism is accorded three pages; in the history,
more interestingly, the cases of the First World War are
given a large number of pages, but "academic freedom was
relatively little affected during the Second World War,"
(Dev. 505) Why was it not? It seems to me that this area
and the sexual area have an essential element in common:
that in them a strong conviction tends to overt physical, not
merely verbal, behavior;- that is, the consequences of convic-
tion tend to be dramatic and drastic, e.g., a young man may
2 One major, and surprising, defect in these books is their omission
of any discussion of the small radical colleges like Antioch, Black
Mountain, Goddard, etc., founded on more liberal principles than
the authors', and therefore with both a more intransigent standard
of freedom and more embarrassment in being consistent. I should
have thought their careers would be valuably relevant for compari-
son and contrast.
Appendices 259
refuse the draft, a physicist may decline the job. Therefore
these areas are sensitive, and therefore they are not much the
objects of inquiry. But the suppression is not proximately ex-
tramural but intramural, and it is not forced by the president
but by the faculty.
I am reasoning somewhat as follows: What is problematic
for inquiry is always just beyond the known; in socio-psycho-
logical matters this is an area of confusion and anxiety, and
of suppression and repression; then its exploration must in-
volve interpersonal daring and personal risk, whether or not
there is "acting out," and in these matters there is a generic
tendency toward acting out. The vital social questions for in-
quiry are those you are likely to get jailed for messing with.
When you are threatened with academic sanctions, it is a
good sign that you are on the right track; when you are
fired, it is better; but when you are beyond the pale of the
academy and "will receive no support from your colleagues,"
then you are possibly touching the philosopher's stone. My
point is not that universities are worthless, nor that they
should not or cannot be free, but that one cannot seriously
regard them as primarily places of inquiry nor found the case
for academic freedom on freedom of inquiry.
Of course it is unrealistic, and it would be uncharitable, to
object to the dropping of a man who by his theory and prac-
tice makes his colleagues anxious; after all, they have to live
and breathe too and feel themselves part of a team.
The situations with which we are mainly concerned are
those in which an influential or power-holding group en-
deavors to make or succeeds in making its own predilec-
tions the official standards of fitness to teach, even though
these predilections are particular to their own coterie or
social class. . . . Where such groups exercise control, the
freedom of education is seriously infringed, and the more
independent and freedom-loving members of the institu-
tion are likely to suffer most. It is the teacher who sets the
highest value on intellectual freedom who is the most ob-
noxious to the authoritarians. The higher his standard of
260 GROWING UP ABSURD
responsibility, the lower the respect in which they hold
him. (AF 147)
Professor Maclver is here precisely not talking about the
faculties of universities, but about their extramural oppres-
sors; would he not, on reflection, extend the censure to the
academic coterie as well?
2.
In the main these books seem to me to be written with a
generous integrity and bona fides. They were occasioned, of
course, by the recent investigations of communists and "com-
munists"; and in such discussions, where every nuance of
rhetoric and the penumbra of connotations are scrutinized by
seasoned experts like Dr. Hook, it is impossible to satisfy any-
body. But to my ear Professor Maclver's sermons his book
has very many pages of long sermons all ring solid nickel.
There is, however, one major topic in treating which there is
evident embarrassment, avoidance, difficulties hinted at but
not explored, and letting sleeping dogs He with one eye open:
this topic is the relation of knowledge and action. I do not
find it credible that the meetings of so experienced a com-
mittee did not evoke more philosophic acumen on this sub-
ject than is here revealed.
On the one hand, Professor Maclver (the historians less so)
lays great stress on "the intrinsic worthwhileness of the
knowledge of things, the moral and spiritual values of the in-
tegrity of mind that steadfastly seeks the truth" (AF 14), the
excitement of the infinite unknown, the grandeur of standing
on the brink. He speaks of this with a religious fervor that
makes us believe Mm but that also, I fear, takes it out of the
context of a discussion of academic freedom at the Univer-
sity of Illinois or even the colleges of the Ivy League. For a
seeker blessed and cursed with this much of the holy spirit
will act accordingly with little help or hindrance from the
opinions of presidents or from considerations of his own
status and tenure; disciples will seek him out, and if we do
Appendices 261
not, so much the worse for us. I think, too, the professor Is
too sanguine about the possibility of inculcating such an
ideal by the ordinary processes of education in colleges; those
who pick it up there have it in them to pick up.
On the other hand, all our authors are sold on the prag-
matic theory of truth (I do not mean a utilitarian theory),
namely, that truth is successful inquiry, and inquiry is an ag-
gressive handling and coping with problems that claim at-
tention; inquiry is experimental, it intervenes. This implies a
close connection of knowledge and action. I am not here
speaking of the consequences of inquiry but of the process it-
self. In the social sciences this must mean very often, must it
not, sallying beyond the walls into areas that are trouble-
some, or even to making trouble where all seemed quiet.
Certainly if we consider the masters of the century prior to
our generations whether Comte, Marx, Proudhon, Durk-
heim, Kropotkin, Sorel, Veblen, Lenin, Freud, Dewey, etc.,
etc. we are struck by their activism, their actual or pro-
jected experimentation on a civic scale. Some of these men
are unthinkable as academics and some had uneasy academic
lives. The present-day preoccupation with careful methodology
is academically praiseworthy, but it does not lead to intensely
interesting propositions. One cannot help feeling that a good
part of the current concern with statistics and polling is a
way of being active in the "area" without being actively en-
gaged in the subject matter. There is a good deal of sharpen-
ing of tools but not much agriculture^
Professor Metzger eloquently expresses the very point I
am trying to make. He is distinguishing the cases of Richard
Ely and Edward Bemis who got into trouble on the theory
and practice of labor organization during the 90's:
A ... difference lay in the extent to which Ely and
Bemis put their theories into action. For all his talk of
3 But consider the dilemma: Such massive research and experiment
must be financed, if not administered, by Foundations; and those
chosen by or for Foundations tend to be at least "sound" if not
"safe."
262 GROWING UP ABSURD
the need for concrete reform, Ely's criticisms of the social
order tended to be general, not specific; hortatory, not
programmatic. For all his warm humanitarianisin, he made
no intimate contact with the multitude. "Only twice in my
life," he wrote, "have I ever spoken to audiences of work-
ing men, and I had always held myself aloof from agita-
tions as something not in my province something for
which I am not adapted." Replying to the charge by
Regent Wells that he had acted on his sympathies for la-
bor, he issued a categorical denial. This author of a
friendly history of the labor movement denied, at his trial,
that he had ever entertained a walking delegate in his
home, that he had ever counseled workers to strike, that
he had ever threatened an anti-union firm with a boycott,
or that he had ever favored the principle of a closed shop.
Were these charges true, Ely wrote, they would "unques-
. tionably unfit me to occupy a responsible position as an in-
structor of youth in a great University." These were the
words of a very academic reformer. (Dev. 433)
When Ely was academically vindicated, Bemis wrote to him:
"That was a glorious victory for you. ... I was only
sorry that you seemed to show a vigor of denial as to enter-
taining a walking delegate or counselling strikers as if
either were wrong, instead of under certain circumstances
a duty" This was the difference between them: Bemis was
not only a partisan . . . but an active party. . . . The
subsequent careers of Ely and Bemis bear out the impor-
tance of this point. Ely survived (and in good part re-
nounced) his spoken and written heresies. He remained in
a state of academic grace for the rest of his life, taking a
post at Northwestern in 1925 and one at Columbia in
1937. Bemis became an academic Ishmael with a reputa-
tion as a partisan and a malcontent that he was never able
to live down. Except for his brief and ill-starred tenure at
Kansas State, he received no further academic appoint-
ments. The trustees of the republic of learning could in-
Appendices 263
flict on this kind of miscreant the terrible retribution of
neglect. (Dev. 435)
All this is excellently and feelingly said. But it was an issue of
sixty years ago, and today in this area a teacher has "the
right to exercise the same political and civil liberties that are
enjoyed by other citizens." (AF 238) My bother is that our
authors do not extrapolate to present-day areas that must
have the same borderline characteristics, and then look a lit-
tle harder for academic-freedom cases which might look pre-
cisely not like academic-freedom cases as reported to the
American Association of University Professors.
On this same topic of knowledge and action, let me raise
another difficulty concerning the action of teaching itself and
the teacher's responsibility for consequences. Our authors,
especially the historians, are frequently scornful of the "as-
sumption . . . that a young man yields to the imprint of
ideas as easily and uncritically as wax." (Dev. 411) They
stress, rather, the development of freedom to learn, the op-
portunity to hear all and pick and choose. I do not think
these are, in interesting cases, the real alternatives. The
young mind is indeed not passive but intensely active, and its
activity is to crystallize around an ideal, a system of ideas, or
a nonfamilial personality, that serves as a parent substitute.
Quite apart from sex, the relation of teacher and student is
an erotic one, where for the student the attraction is in the
excitement, particularly the rebellious excitement, of the sys-
tem of propositions. The more excellent the teacher, the
stronger the charismatic effect of his voice. In itself this is all
to the good and is anyway inevitable; it cannot be prevented
by doctrinal neutrality for then the very syntax of neutrality
itself becomes adorable. But the attempt to prevent the effect
or to disown reponsibility for it, discourages the ^student and
thwarts and embitters the teacher. Is not the situation fa-
miliar, that a powerful teacher is regarded by his colleagues,
partly in envy and partly in anxiety, as a seducer of his stu-
dents and indeed in a conspiracy with them to cast ridicule
on themselves? On the other hand, if the strong teacher
264 GROWING UP ABSURD
maintains his reserve, the student, whose needs are more
frank, has indeed been rejected and will be either humiliated,
disappointed, or angry, depending on his character. My guess
is that every college term there is more infringement of the
freedom to teach by academic timidity along these lines than
in the whole history of cases here treated. Worse, is there not
a great waste of natural human resources?
Our historians write of the liberation from "doctrinal
moralism" (Dev. 353ff), the idea that if, e.g., a man is an
atheist he is no doubt a drunkard and unfit to teach: "in sci-
entific criticism the dissociation of the man from his work
has become a cardinal principle." This was indeed a great
advance, for it heightened the respect for evidence and its ac-
curate presentation and criticism. But I submit that the older
theological view had the following merit: that a proposition
was fraught with life consequences and had therefore the ut-
most seriousness; you knew a man by what he professed. I
dislike appealing to the romantic and grisly past, but we must
bear in mind that the adventure of inquiry has one quality
when you are risking disgrace, imprisonment, and even
death; and another when you are risking tenure; and quite
another when you are risking nothing. Our secular society has
great advantages, and even especially for inquiry, but its
strong point is not the achievement of vocation or manliness.
In his rhetoric of dedication to the Truth with a big T, Pro-
fessor Maclver is harking back to Spinoza; I wonder if, by
and large, he could comfortably use this rhetoric at the
Faculty Club. Maybe I am wrong.
To sum up so far: I have tried in a quick and rude way to
indicate that the professors fall short in two ways from a
standard of inquiry as a phase of an experimental instrumen-
tal empiricism: they avoid problematic areas and they do
not experiment their hypotheses. (Nothing of what I have
said, let me remark, applies to more old-fashioned notions of
academic freedom of inquiry. For instance, the notion of
freedom of dialectic, as exemplified in, say, the Parmenides,
where precisely the attachment and nonattachment to any
proposition is used as a therapy of the soul. Or the Aristote-
Appendices 265
lian freedom of curiosity, aimed at theoria as the highest
happiness. Or the medieval libertas philosophandi, with its
emphasis on disputation to let new air into an accepted
world. Or finally to the Enlightenment's concept of freedom
of criticism in the Kantian sense (quo warranto?) , where the
faculty of philosophy serves, as Kant says, as a kind of loyal
opposition from the left. All of these base their claim on the
proposition that the university is different from, perhaps bet-
ter than, perhaps a servant of, the rest of the world.)
3.
I said I had started on an "apparently unfair" tack. Un-
fair because I chose an innocent sentence in a minor context,
and I have been devoting myself to a matter of logic that
Professor Maclver's book is mostly not about. Now what it
is about is the defense of such inquiry as does exist from the
current attacks upon it, and specifically and explicitly the
communist hunting of the Cold War by many parties, from
government agencies to self-constituted vigilantes. Let us
then turn briefly to the overt book itself and see if I can
show the relevance of the tack I have been taking.
Professor Maclver's findings on the Party and the investi-
gations are the familiar ones of many liberals, and they war-
rant little fresh discussion here. Summarily: (1) The Party-
communist teacher is unqualified, as authoritarian, suppres-
sive, conspiratorial; but this disqualification is based on his
activities, not on his theories. (Frankly, this distinction is
idiotic, since what is a party that does not constrain to ac-
tion?) (2) Past affiliation does not disqualify. (3) A com-
munist, "whether he carries a Party card or not," may be
dismissed "if he injects propaganda into his teaching or rela-
tionships with students"; but conversely, if he teaches a non-
controversial subject and is otherwise circumspect, it is better
to let him be. (4) Investigation should be done by the faculty,
not by the administration or outsiders. (5) "Any general in-
vestigation to uncover possible communists is wholly un-
desirable." (6) Loyalty oaths are "derogatory, injudicious, and
266 GROWING UP ABSURD
futile." (7) Student organizations should be permitted to in-
vite C.P. speakers. (8) Communist ideas do not disqualify the
student.
It is useful to distinguish two strata in such a list: judg-
ments that could be called anti-McCarthy and those that
are anti-anti-anti-McCarthy. Objections to high-handed and
unfair pressures, to informing, to lack of due process, to al-
most all restraints on freedom of speech: this is simple anti-
McCarthyism; and at it are leveled charges of political
naivete, of being duped, of not seeing that this is a unique
conspiracy, of locking the stable after the horse is gone, and
so forth. The response to these charges, in turn, is anti-anti-
anti-McCarthyism: granting that there are grounds for the
investigations, yet their effect is so productive of fear and
withdrawal and inhibition of useful functioning that they
weaken the body politic rather than purge it; thus they play
into the hands of the enemy, etc.
I think that it is this latter attitude, the prevalence of aca-
demic anxiety rather than any righteous indignation, that has
prompted the books we are reviewing. For the fact seems to
be at least so it is agreed by all sides in this controversy ex-
cept the investigators themselves that the communist in-
filtration has been trivial, was never large, and has steadily
waned for years; that the furor of investigation has been out
of all proportion. The question, then, is why anything so
groundless and inappropriate has been met by anything but
simple manly rejection, either quiet, derisive, or indignant,
depending on one's temperament. Why such big looks? Let
me open Maclver at random and quote a few near-by pas-
sages:
There were evidences that in departments or faculties,
here or there, disguised or subtle pressures had been ap-
plied to prevent the advancement of such noncomforming
members or against the renewal of their appointments if
they lacked tenure. It was not that the scholars who pro-
tested against the oath requirements were themselves non-
conformists there were very many good conservatives
Appendices 267
among them but, whatever their economic viewpoints,
alike they apprehended a growing peril to academic free-
dom. (AF 178)
No attack seems to be more disruptive than that which
emanates from governing boards. . . . They rock the in-
stitution. . . . Governing boards are seldom prescient of
the effect such edicts produce. . . . Often the disturbance
that ensues comes to the governing boards as a complete
surprise. . . . Censorial and inquisitorial action on the
part of those who themselves are not devoted to the
scholar's search for truth is for the true scholar a vital
threat. (Ibid)
What concerns us here is that the Tenney warnings and
threats and proposals created the most serious apprehen-
sions among leading educators. (AF 179)
This new exercise of authority by a board over a faculty
contained implicit threats against the status of the educator,
against the two most vital interests of the profession. The
protesting faculty members saw in the new requirement on
the one hand a threat to academic freedom, on the other a
threat to security of tenure. The pro-oath regents denied
that any such threats were involved . . . but this lack of
understanding is one of the two frequent consequences of
the lack of rapport that exists in this country between
faculties and governing boards. (AF 177)
I quote at random from adjacent pages; the book is thickly
studded with the like. One is ashamed to copy out the pas-
sages. What is one to make of this astonishing anxiety on
the part of grownups, of professors, of supposedly dedicated
scholars! "Disguised," "implicit threats," "rock the institu-
tion," "vital threat," "most serious apprehensions," "lack of
understanding," "they are not prescient"; and all this syn-
drom where in many cases admittedly no danger existed, and
where altogether at the worst no great danger existed. Is it
so hard to clear up misunderstanding by bearding the lion?
or to force implicit threats to become explicit and have a
bang-up fight? Could these persons really be so concerned
268 GROWING UP ABSURD
about losing their jobs? And if they are really concerned
for freedom as a principle and a vital need, is this the tone of
such a concern?
I fear it is rather the tone of subordinate bureaucrats rid-
den by self-doubt and with plenty of projected hostility, un-
able to withstand the least pressure without anxiety. Then I
cannot believe in the devotion to inquiry that gives them so
little strength of self as this. And I cannot believe in the ag-
gressive intensity of inquiry that gets them into so weak a
feeling for the state of things. The job-clinging itself is not so
much base as a pathetic symptom. How easily they are de-
flated of their status! What shall we say of an elite of com-
petence that has so little pride and self-confidence? Is this
our proud academic freedom? If I felt it was only this I
would tear up my doctorate.
The fear of actual investigation, the paranoiac suspicion of
fancied investigation, the economic panic, need for status,
clinging to security: these have been familiar in the Ameri-
can middle classes during the past couple of generations;
there is no need to discuss in the context of the academic
community the causes that have been operating in the whole
community. What is specific, however, is that these are doc-
tors, with a proud tradition, sacred symbols, a culture far
broader than average, the inspiration of beautiful subject
matters and grand authors: in short, a self -transcending re-
sponsibility to history past and future that they (we) cannot
finally betray without shame and self -betrayal. They must
rally, even though the form of the rallying reveals the inner
conflict of these books.
4.
It is remarkable how, in reading the vigorous and informa-
tive history of Professors Hofstadter and Metzger, one can
see forming through the decades the lineaments of modern
academic man, and an academic notion of inquiry defining it-
self. The authors call their book a "Development" and they
rightly regard as an achievement the present concept of aca-
Appendices 269
demic freedom with its bill of rights and its highly ramified
national system of professional defenses, At the same time,
being scrupulous and fairly philosophical and not at all homi-
letic, they note down the inevitable losses and sloughings-off
that have occurred along the way. Now if instead of merely
noting these losses, we accumulate them and form them into
a picture: what a picture it is! so to speak, an ideal shadow
of Western Academic Man that, we hope, haunts the modern
American academic man, and sheds on him glory, and gives
him a bad conscience. Let me collect half a dozen of these
contrasts of development and loss.
(1) "At the time of their greatest independence," says
Professor Hof stadter,
the universities lived in the interstices of medieval society,
taking advantage of its decentralization and the balance of
its conflicting powers to further their own corporate in-
terests. [They were guilds of masters or students.] They
appealed to king or council against pope, to pope against
king or bishop, and to king and popes alike against trucu-
lent town governments. Moreover, they had weapons of
their own that put them above the level of mere appellants
and gave them independent bargaining power. Among
these weapons were the cessation or suspension of lec-
tures, the academic equivalents of the modern strike. A still
more powerful device arose, oddly enough, from their
very poverty. Unhampered ... by physical apparatus,
great libraries, worldly goods, and substantial college
foundations, they could and on occasion did migrate, tak-
ing with them their large numbers of students and profita-
ble trade. 4 (Dec. 7-8)
I suppose this could be taken as the zenith of academic lib-
erty; just as the nadir would be a faculty of science, saddled
with its cyclotron, supported 80 per cent by the War Depart-
4 So Black Mountain College was founded by a migration in the
early 193 O's, and the migrant faculty was thenceforth the owner of
the college, without a governing board of trustees.
270 GROWING UP ABSURD
ment of a centralized state that dictates the avenues of re-
search, and with a "personnel" subjected to a clearance ar-
rived at by secret investigation.
(2) More than half of this history of universities is oc-
cupied with the decline of sectarian control of academic se-
lection, thought, and action; the secularizing of learning. The
other side, the loss, is of course that thought and action tend
to come to us more lightly; few of us, though some, spend
sleepless nights of doubt about a detail of phrasing in theory
leading to an inconsistency in behavior perhaps publicly un-
noticed anyway. Professor Hofstadter charmingly recounts a
touching story of the resignation of the first president of
Harvard, Henry Dunster, who had found in his heart that no
infant could properly be baptized and had to proclaim the
same. (It seems to me, by the way, that this is an inevitable
opinion for a college man who should set great store on
learning and inquiry.) But Dunster was
not dismissed, and he could have kept his job if he had
promised to be silent about his unacceptable convictions,
for everything in the case indicates that the magistrates
and ministers never lost personal confidence in him. Dun-
ster, however, submitted a curious letter of resignation
which made no clear reference to religious issues but
dwelled at some length on the recent investigation of the
college and the expansion of the powers of the Overseers
at the expense of the Corporation. Hie General Court
gave Dunster the opportunity to take a month to recon-
sider. Evidently they still hoped that he could be persuaded
to swallow his heresy. . . . But a month later Dunster
closed his presidency with the utmost finality when he in-
terrupted a baptismal service at Cambridge with a star-
tling speech against infant baptism and the "corupcions
stealing into the Church." (Dev. 89)
What is touching is not so much, the president's earnest and
dramatic witnessing, exactly in the style of Hawthorne, but
the way in which the others respect their brother's right to
Appendices 271
wrestle with his god and their subsequent solicitude for him.
It is unnecessary to mention contemporary contrasts.
(3) Again, in discussing the influence on America of the
great German universities of the nineteenth century, the his-
torian, Professor Metzger, beautifully analyzes on the one
hand what was carried over, the methodic thoroughness, spe-
cific competence (but not the universality of interest), the
freedom from utilitarian narrowness, dedication to absolute
freedom of truth; and on the other hand what was sloughed
off or suffered a sea change.
We come to the heart of the difference when we com-
pare the American and German conceptions of inner and
outer freedom. . . . The German idea of "convincing"
one's students, of winning them over to the personal sys-
tem and philosophical views of the professor, was not con-
doned by American academic opinion. Rather, as far as
classroom actions were concerned, the proper stance for
American professors was thought to be one of neutrality on
controversial issues, and silence on substantive issues that
lay outside of their competence. Innumerable utterances
affirmed these limitations. Eliot, in the very address that so
eloquently declared that the university must be free, made
neutrality an aspect of that freedom: ". . . It is not the
function of the teacher to settle philosophical and political
controversies for the pupil, or even to recommend to
him any one set of opinions as better than another. . . .
The student should be made acquainted . . . with the
salient points of each system." (Dev. 400)
Professor Metzger goes on to argue that this norm of neu-
trality itself springs from an American bias of thought, its
empiricism, resistant to intuition, speculation, fantasy in the
end, a suspicion of deliveries not fairly quickly verifiable. 5 I
5 This "neutrality" certainly has also a simpler and more tradi-
tional spring: the detachment of the wise and experienced, and the
tradition of the academy as the home of the wise and experienced,
with the motto nil admirarl Such an attitude is, of course, not neu-
272 GROWING UP ABSURD
do not think he sufficiently estimates the disadvantages of
the limitation to "neutrality" as against the German freedom
to "convince." In the first place, with the American limita-
tion, competence almost automatically becomes specializa-
tion, for what quickly verifiable fact is to connect the various
parts of study? There is no system of facts, only systems of
thought. Again, is Eliot's ideal of neutral presentation some-
thing that can possibly exist in a classroom? Have you ever
listened to a convinced Whiteheadian trying to present the
philosophy of Kant? Then is the teacher to have no convic-
tion of his own? It is plausible for the school to be neutral
and present all sides, but how can the teacher be neutral?
But most important, Eliot and Professor Metzger do not see
realistically the situation of the student in the face of neu-
trality and competence: his moral nature must have some
culture or other, and if no ideal or moral connections are
made in the university, this culture unless he has had an un-
usually lucky upbringing will fall to the first extramural
propagandist, or intramural but extracurricular propagandist,
or even worse, it will continue in an infantile set of preju-
dices and unconscious conventionalities while his intellectual
life will be correspondingly arid and without vital strength
and prone to panic before Senatorial committees or rabble
rousers. As I have said above, the teacher is responsible
either way, whether he freely exerts his influence or with-
holds it; and I think he does better not to worry about a
standard of scientific certainty and impartiality, but, relying
on the sense of his own integrity, to act forthrightly accord-
ing to probabilities, keeping an open mind and heart. Best of
all, no doubt, that he have a wisdom and learning that cuts
under controversy and relieves its sharpness, but this is not a
"stance" but a fact. It is a fact if the professor's urbane de-
tachment, encyclopedic scope, urgent following-up, insistence
on accuracy, or ability to make the controversy fascinating in
tral at all, but the provision of a background of security pre-differ-
ent to controversial opinions, and relying on which, youth can risk
having definite opinions.
Appendices 273
itself (there are several admirable styles of teaching none of
them "neutral") , if these continually provide a new unsettling
challenge to the student's wish to have an answer; but it is
only a stance if the student feels he has come up against a
limit of "no opinion." I don't think the majority of teachers
are in fact this good. Finally, it seems likely that an impor-
tant reason for the American standard of professorial neu-
trality has been the youth and sexual immaturity of our col-
lege students as contrasted with the German university stu-
dents of that time; our students are more impressionable; but
it is hard to see the logic of, on the one hand, dropping the
older paternalism (or giving it over to administrative deans)
and, on the other hand, discouraging discipleship; the students
are told they are no longer children but young men, but they
are forbidden the love affairs, both physical and intellectual,
of young men. Yet where could such affairs be safer than at
a university? Indeed, the contradiction is sometimes worse.
There was a case at a famous Eastern college where in the
aftermath of a sexual escapade the dean gave a studenf s
name to the police; a great foreign teacher, who had once
served as Rector of a European school, exclaimed indig-
nantly, "We were not in loco parentis and we protected
them; you act in loco parentis and you do not protect them!"
There spoke eight hundred years.
(4) Another grievous loss for academic man occurred with
the abandonment of the liberal arts course of classics for an
elective system geared more to adjustment to the changing
social scene. Professor Metzger handles this as follows:
As the result of deeper social forces at work, the "con-
serving" function of the college no longer loomed so large.
The unhinging of moral certainties by urban living, the
fading out of the evangelical impulse, the depersonaliza-
tion of human relations in the process of industrial expan-
sion, were destroying that integral vision, that firm and
assertive credulity, required of institutions devoted to con-
servation. ... A good part of the pre-Civil War aca-
demic's opposition to a more secular university and a more
274 GROWING UP ABSURD
vocationalized curriculum stemmed from the desire to pro-
tect very fragile values from the crush of a rough society.
He sought the freedom not to acquiesce in the philistinism
of his age. (Dev. 317)
I think this is wrongly put; it sounds like Allen Tate, who
could say, justifiably enough, "Undo it!" At the beginning of
Academic Freedom in Our Times Professor Maclver ana-
lyzes the climate of opinion unfavorable to academic freedom
and finds a major factor in the want of a common culture
and a deep-going communication. Given Professor Metzger's
analysis here, this is more and more inevitable, the University
cannot cure it but rather tends to worsen it. What is com-
mon, integral, and humane is ipso facto out of date and
fragile and needing conservation; meanwhile the University
hastens on to new inquiry. Against this, the Great Books
movement, associated with the names of Hutchins, Adler,
McKeon, and Buchanan, has denied that the common culture
is out of date; but they have made the contrary mistake, it
seems to me, of claiming it is "eternal" and resides in the
Great Books as "classics." All this is topsy-turvy and looking
in the wrong place. The true classics are the structures,
whether propositions or methods or habits, that are in fact
operative in the present juncture, urban, industrial, deper-
sonalized, or whatever. There is always a classical curriculum
to be found, because what is classical is simply what is cen-
tral, concrete, causally operative, underlying; and indeed in
any new situation, the classics never look like "classics," nor,
in the present state of literature, are they likely to be books.
The Socratic dialogue is classic, and in our times it is to be
found in the psychoanalytic group-session, where very soon
one reaches what is integral, humane, and communicative.
The experimental method is classic and chastens and unites
us, but it must not be taught as a laboratory exercise nor in a
course in logic, but rigorously applied to some real practical
behavior. Eurhythmies and sports are classic. Mathematiz-
ing experience is classic. It is not classic to teach grammar,
but it is classic to define the grammar of your speech. The
Appendices 275
mistake has been to study monuments of classical ages the
Greeks, the Medievals, the seventeenth century rather than
to assume that we are presently creating classics. I propose
that this is what Dewey meant by reconstruction, to find-and-
make ourselves classical techniques and a common culture by
a philosophical handling of just where we are on our way.
This is not what the university has been doing, and now no-
body can teach classics and we do not know what classics we
have.
(5) Another loss occurred to Academic Man when he be-
came, and agreed to consider himself as, merely an academic
man, without some other function and status of his compe-
tence in the larger society. The historians relate with too
much satisfaction, it seems to me, the development of a spe-
cialist "profession" from a group of clergymen who per-
haps temporarily accepted calls as teachers. But teaching
on the university level, 6 though it is surely a vocation and re-
quires a special temperament and knack, is not a profession
because it does not have a proper subject matter; it is a uni-
versal art applied to a proper subject matter; one might as
well speak of a "professional orator." To the extent that the
teacher inquires into the subject matter proper, however, he
is not a teacher, and then why does he hang around the
campus so much? One's suspicion is, alas, that the ancient
maxim is true: "If you can't do it, teach it." Teaching is cer-
tainly a vocation and a responsibility of every expert; very
few things are more beautiful to see than good teaching;
perhaps nothing is more re-creative and enlarging for the ex-
pert himself, for he can teach with an integrity generally im-
possible in practice, and he gets to look at Ms habit of art
with new eyes; even so, the scene of the same aging grown-
ups hanging around while generations of youth pass by, has
something in it that stinks in the nostrils. As for colleagues,
the company of the like-minded is both stimulating and com-
6 Teaching at the primary level is different, for there the emphasis
is on teaching the pupil, not the subject matter; and there is then a
profession of pedagogy analogous to medicine, and of which the
remedial branch is psychotherapy.
276 GROWING UP ABSURD
forting, but to be immured with the like-minded is like liv-
ing at Princeton. A disadvantage of the professional situa-
tion, of course, is that the academic is economically tied;
necessarily he is fearful of losing his tenure; he cannot, un-
der stress, go off to his proper job where he is indispensable
because he produces the goods. (In our society, of course,
most of those goods do not fetch a price.) But perhaps a
greater loss is that whole areas and provinces of science and
scholarship have become merely intramural, they no longer
importantly exist as the property of adult academies and
learned societies, which in turn have tended to become
merely honorary memberships that give prizes and sponsor
social gatherings. Extramural science is bound to industry,
extramural scholarship does not exist at all; yet it is simply
by the accident that there are university libraries and labora-
tories and stipends that such activities are immured, with cor-
respondingly irrelevant restrictions and duties that must be
alleviated by claims to "academic freedom." It is hard to
know what to advise the scholar, hampered or often ham-
pered by the atmosphere of colleges, in a society that does
not much patronize the study of history, linguistics, and lit-
erature; nevertheless, to our ideal picture of the more heroic
and free Academic Man we would do well to add the linea-
ments of the Humanist and the scientist of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, who were not professional aca-
demics. (Dev. 49, 195)
(6) Lastly, we must refer to a loss that has come with the
coming of the Big University. Professor Metzger reads off the
indictment from Veblen's The Higher Learning in America:
Acutely, he discerned the trend toward bureaucratiza-
tion was transforming the university's personnel, structure,
and behavior. This change was already evidenced in the
army of academic functionaries the deans, directors, reg-
istrars, and secretaries who had come upon the scene to
manage the affairs of the university. It was evidenced in the
organization of the faculty as a graded hierarchy of ranks
within which passage was controlled by a series of official
Appendices 277
promotions. It was evidenced in the writing of rules that
defined the rights and obligations of professors and trus-
tees. It marked, though it did not cause, the end of an aca-
demic era in which the college had been a community
and the faculty a body of peers. (Dev. 453)
Dealing with this and the rest of Veblen's jeremiad, Metzger
seeks to prove, successfully enough, that Big Business as
such was not the guilty agent, that the changes were socially
pervasive and inevitable. But otherwise, I am baffled by the
equanimity of his acquiescence. I should have thought that
the faculty is the university, and if this university ceases to
exist, what is there to write about as a continuing historical
entity? We have come full circle from our first historical
quotation, about the guild of scholars choosing the interstices
of a plural society and willing to preserve itself by migrating
bag and baggage; now we have, apparently, merely one
wheel in a machine, that needs, to be sure, its own special
oil and rules for successful operation, but we can hardly ex-
pect to hear from it any unique delivery of the creator spirit.
This is not very interesting. If the brothers do not confront
one another face to face and communally decide, nothing
follows from their being brothers. Academic Man becomes
the same as any other American man; this is just what one
surmised from the passages of anxiety in Maclver's book
professors behaving like all the other sheep; it is uncharita-
ble to level at them any special charges or to subject them to
any special scrutiny; but then what is all the talk about a
peculiar dedication? But I am sanguine enough to believe
that the case is not so desperate as this.
The case is, it seems to me and it is expressed in the tone
and matter of both these stimulating books that there is a
double Academic Man.
Looming ever in the background is this ghostly presence
or absence that we have been figuring forth by the accumula-
tion of lost causes that can never be lost. I have tried to cull
traits that show him in his extramural and intramural rela-
tions, in his personal responsibility and community, in his
278 GROWING UP ABSURD
curriculum and livelihood. He is part of a band "intensely
self-conscious and self-important," as Powicke said, and that
carries colors and a coat of arms, not bashfully. He feels
himself the carrier of Western culture and the champion of
new invention. He has a deserved reputation as a stickler for
antique tradition with excessive scrupulosity, and for stirring
up entirely gratuitous innovations, just to make trouble. He
is prone to terrible knockdown conflicts with his colleagues
on the basis of mutual respect, and to erotic devotions, both
lenitive and dangerous, toward his students. He goes abroad
on his career in the world and sits on the faculty as an inde-
pendent man of the world. This ghost, I say, is continually
trying to break into reality and take over, but he is restrained
in many ways, let me hasten to add, fortunately restrained
by the circumstances of social history (very fully explained
by our authors). Restrained and nonexistent, but he exerts
an eerie fascination on the living body, rouses in him dreams,
makes him touchy and irritable and suddenly ashamed and
rebellious; and sometimes he gets hold of the speech and
utters things like Professor Maclver's somewhat mesmerized
sermons.
In the foreground and with us, is the other academic man,
frightened by a noisy politician. Caught in a bureaucracy,
ridden by authority from above and bullying others from be-
low, he is afraid of a black mark against him, because if he
loses his job here he won't have good references elsewhere;
there is only one academic world and it is for him the only
world. Weighed down by vast mortmain properties, corpo-
rately held and that make the living faculty a trivial force;
and dependent for current expenses on alien interests that
pay the piper and call the tune. Unerotic and at least pub-
licly antisexual, naturally he is subject to anxiety. He uses
lofty ethical terms to shame others, but gets remarkably little
strength and animation from the reality pretended. He en-
gages in plenty of intramural bickering and jockeying for
position, but never in a bang-up fight. He does a good deal
of obsessional counting and methodical busy work that is not
very different from telling beads. He is not distinguishable,
Appendices 279
and circumspectly avoids becoming so by overt action. He
and his fellows huddle together not as a totemic band but
because it is cold. This is the academic man that speaks in
Professor Maclver's reportage.
APPENDIX E
Review of On The Road*
In three hundred pages these fellows cross America eight
times, usually camping on friends or relatives; and they have
kicks. The narrator tends to become saddened by it all, but
gives little evidence of understanding why. The fellows seem
to be in their middle or late twenties ("not long after my wife
and I split up") surprisingly, for the kicks are the same as
we used to have less solemnly in our teens, between terms.
Mostly they are from the middle class. Many other young
men in their twenties and thirties call this book crazy and the
greatest, as if it were their history: they were there. So let's
look into it.
To an uncritical reading, On The Road seems worse writ-
ten than it is. There are hundreds of incidents but, through-
out most of the book, nothing is told, nothing Is presented,
everything is just "written about." Worse, the narrator seems
to try to pep it up by sentences like, "That night all hell
broke loose," when the incident is some drinking sailors re-
fusing to obey an order; "this was the greatest ride I ever
had," but nothing occurs beyond a fellow getting his pants
wet trying to urinate from a moving truck; "this was excit-
ing, this was the greatest" but it's not exciting. Soon, when
the narrator or some other character says "The greatest," we
expect that he means "pretty fair"; but alas, he does not
mean even this, but simply that there was some little object
of experience, of whatever value, instead of the blank of ex-
perience in which these poor kids generally live.
For when you ask yourself what is expressed by this prose,
* From Midstream, Winter, 1958.
280 GROWING UP ABSURD
by this buoyant writing about racing-across-the~continent,
you find that it is the woeful emptiness of running away from
even loneliness and vague discontent. The words "exciting,"
"crazy," "the greatest," do not refer to any object or feeling,
but are a means by which the members of the Beat Genera-
tion convince one another that they have been there at all.
"I dig it" doesn't mean "I understand it," but, "I perceive
that something exists out there." On me as a reader, the ef-
fect is dismay. I know some of these boys (I say "boys"; Jack
Kerouac is thirty-five) .
Last summer I listened to Kerouac's friend Allen Gins-
berg read a passage from his Howl; it was a list of impreca-
tions that he began pianissimo and ended with a thunderous
fortissimo. The fellows were excited, it was "the greatest."
But I sadly asked Allen just where in either the ideas, the im-
agery, or the rhythm was the probability for the crescendo;
what made it a sequence at all and a sequence to be read just
like that. The poet was crestfallen and furious; this thought
had never occurred to him. And yet, during those few min-
utes they had shared the simple-minded excitement of his
speaking in a low voice and gradually increasing to a roar; it
was not much of a poetic experience, but it was something, it
was better than feeling nothing at all that night. What
Kerouac does well, not just writes about, is his description of
the jazz musician who has hit on "it" and everybody goes wild
shouting, "Go! Man! Go!" But they cannot say what "it" is.
These boys are touchingly inarticulate, because they don't
know anything; but they talk so much and so loud, because
they feel insulted by the existence of the grownups who
know a little bit.
"You can't howl a gripe, Allen. You can howl in pain or in
rage, but what you are doing is griping." Perhaps the pain is
too sore to utter a sound at all; and certainly their justifiable
rage is far too dangerous for them to feel at all. The entire
action of On The Road is the avoidance of interpersonal con-
flict.
One is stunned at how conventional and law-fearing these
lonely middle-class fellows are. They dutifully get legal mar-
Appendices 281
riages and divorces. The hint of a "gangbang" makes them
impotent. They never masturbate or perform homosexual
acts. They do not dodge the draft. They are hygienic about
drugs and diet. They do not resent being underpaid, nor
speak up at all. To disobey a cop is "all hell." Their idea of
crime is the petty shoplifting of ten-year-olds stealing ciga-
rettes or of teen-agers joy riding in other people's cars. But
how could it be otherwise? It is necessary to have some con-
tact with institutions and people in order to rebel against
them. It is necessary to want something in order to be frus-
trated and angry. They have the theory that to be affectless,
not to care, is the ultimate rebellion, but this is a fantasy; for
right under the surface, obvious to a trained eye, is burning
shame, hurt feelings, fear of impotence, speechless and pow-
erless tantrum, cowering before papa, being rebuffed by
mama; and it is these anxieties that dictate their behavior in
every crisis. Their behavior is a conformity plus royaliste que
le roL
One kid (age twenty-one) visited my home the other* 1 night,
carrying his copy of On The Road. The salient feature was
his expressionless mask-face, with the squared jaw of uncon-
scious, suspicious watchfulness, the eyes in a fixed stare of
unfelt hostility, plus occasional grinding of his back teeth
at a vague projected threat. Even the hostility was hard to
make overt, but his lips cracked in a small childish smile
when he was paid attention to. "But nothing can be inter-
esting from coast to coast, boy, if you do not respond to it
with some interest. Instead all you can possibly get is to
activate your rigid body in various towns, what you call
kicks." He explained that one had to avoid committing one-
self to any activity, lest one make a wrong choice.
It is useful to place this inexpressive face and his unoffend-
ing kicks in our recent literary genealogy. Great-granddaddy,
I guess, is the stoical hero of Hemingway: Hemingway's
young fellow understands that the grown-up world is corrupt
and shattering, but he is not "Beat," for he can prove that
he is himself a man by being taciturn, growing hair on his
chest, and shooting elephants. He has "values" and therefore
282 GROWING UP ABSURD
can live through a few books. His heir is Celine's anti-hero, a
much shrewder fellow: he sees that to have those "values" is
already to be duped by the corrupt adults, so he adopts the
much more powerful role of universal griper and cry baby,
to make everybody feel guilty and disgusted. The bother with
his long gripe is that it is monotonous, there is a lot of oppor-
tunity for writing, but not even a single book. The next hero,
and I think the immediate predecessor of being on the road,
gives up the pretense of being grown-up altogether (a good
case is Salinger's Catcher in the Rye') : he is the boy in the
very act of being mortally wounded by the grownups' cor-
ruption. This terrible moment is one book. But you can't
cry forever, so you set your face in a mask and go on the
road. The adolescent decides that he himself is the guilty one
this is less painful than the memory of being hurt so he'd
better get going. The trouble is that there is no longer any
drama in this; the drama occurred before "my wife and I
split up" before I lost my father.
Sociologically, the following propositions seem to me to be
relevant: (1) In our economy of abundance there are also
surplus people, and the fellows on the road are among them.
There is in fact no man's work for them to do. (2) We are
inheriting our failure, as an advanced industrial country, to
have made reasonable social arrangements in the last cen-
tury; now when there is no longer a motive to work hard
and accumulate capital, we have not developed an alterna-
tive style of life. (3) The style that we do have, "Madison
Avenue," is too phony for a young person to grow up into.
(4) Alternatively, there is an attraction to the vitality (by
comparison) of the disfranchised Negroes and now the
Puerto Ricans; these provide a language and music, but this
culture is primitive and it corrupts itself to Madison Avenue
as soon as it can. (5) In family life there has been a similar
missed-revolution and confusion, so that many young people
have grown up in cold, hypocritical, or broken homes. Lack-
ing a primary environment for the expression and training
of their feelings, they are both affectless and naive in the sec-
ondary environment. (6) The spontaneous "wild" invention
Appendices 283
that we may expect from every young generation has heen
seriously blighted by the anxieties of the war and the cold
war. (7) The style of life resulting from all this is an obses-
sional conformity, busy-ness without any urge toward the
goals of activity, whether ideal goals or wealth and power.
There is not much difference between the fellows "on the
road" and the "organization men" they frequently exchange
places.
I ate another apple pie and ice cream; that's practically
all I ate all the way across the country, I knew it was nu-
tritious and it was delicious of course. (Page 15.)
On other occasions, they eat franks and beans. More rarely
hamburgers, malted milks, of course. That is, the drink-down
quick-sugar foods of spoiled children, and the pre-cut meat
for lazy chewing beloved of ages six to ten. Nothing is bitten
or bitten-off, very little is chewed; there is a lot of sugar for
animal energy, but not much solid food to grow on. I sup-
pose that this is the most significant observation one can
make about On The Road.
For nearly two-thirds of this book one is struck, I have
said, by the lack of writing; the book is nothing but a con-
versation between the buddies: "Do you remember when?"
and, "Do you remember how we?" "That was the great-
est!" Here is confirmation that they, like Kilroy, were there;
but not much distilled experience for the reader. But then
(page 173) there is a page of writing, not very good and not
original it is from the vein of rhapsody of Celine and
Henry Miller nevertheless, writing. The situation is that the
narrator finally finds himself betrayed, abandoned, penniless,
and hungry in a strange city. The theme of the rhapsody is
metempsychosis. "I realized that I had died and been reborn
numberless times but just didn't remember" and this theme
is a happy invention, for it momentarily raises the road to a
plane of metaphysical fantasy. And this is how the passage
climaxes:
284 GROWING UP ABSURD
In the window I smelled all the food of San Francisco.
... Let me smell the drawn butter and lobster claws.
There were places where they specialized in thick red
roast beef au jus or roast chicken basted in wine. There
were places where hamburgs sizzled on grills and the cof-
fee was only a nickel. And oh, that pan-fried chow
mein . , .
Here, at least in wish, is a piece of reality that is not just
kicks and "the greatest"; he wants to eat this food. Silone
was right when he said that we must learn again the words
for Bread and Wine.
APPENDIX F
"The Crime of Our Century" *
COMPULSION, BY MEYER LEVIN. Simon and Schuster.
1956. 495 pp. $5.00.
NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT, By JAMES YAFFE. BOSTON.
Little Brown Co. 336 pp. $3.95.
Here are two recent hooks about the Leopold-Loeb case
which Meyer Levin calls "the crime of our century." It oc-
curred when Levin was in college (1924). James Yaffe is
younger and takes the whole matter less seriously. Now the
case is always considered the typical crime of the twenties,
and I should like to set against these books for comparison a
book of the twenties, Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925),
which retells a typical murder of the time of Dreiser's own
youth, the case of Chester Gillette (1906). By this compari-
son I hope to say something about the twenties and the fif-
ties, two decades of expansion.
I am not here making a literary evaluation, yet I must be-
gin from a literary distinction. Of the two recent books,
Yaffe's is quite worthless; by bowdlerizing, up-to-dating, stere-
otyping, and juvenilizing the events and persons of the case,
* From Midstream, Summer, 1957.
Appendices 285
he contrives to lose both artistic probability and any other in-
terest. But Compulsion is not a bad book; by its earnest se-
lection of the journalistic, medical, and legal material, often
given verbatim, it presents an interesting and believable re-
port; and Levin makes something touching and significant
of the narrator's involvement in the action. Dreiser's book,
however, is of a different genre, it is a work of art; not (to
my taste) a wonderful work, but a work of art in that it
makes itself a world and this world is more important than
the "case," it is the real case. The questions that I would ask
are these: what would a book about the Crime of Our Cen-
tury be like if it were worked as Dreiser worked? Would such
a work get itself written and received? What, contrariwise, are
Levin and Yaffe doing? And what does this tell us about the
fifties and the twenties?
What strikes one immediately and persistently, is how
Dreiser is in his story, in a way that our writers are not. He
works as though all the motives and behaviors were im-
mediately plausible, unquestionable by either the author or
the audience, and therefore needing no explanation, only
presentation. He may or may not have a theory of causa-
tion we know that he had several but he does not need
one and he does not offer one; simply he shows us how first
undeniably Clyde Griffiths did and suffered so and so, and
then he did and suffered so and so. Instead of causation and
the imputation of responsibility or compulsion, we get a solid
and stolid probability that adds up to a real world; that's
just how it was, like life only more so. (Dreiser carries this
through admirably; the only episode that seems to me
sketchy and a little fumbled is the temptation to the murder
plan; but the author recovers.) Again, as a doctrinaire nat-
uralist, Dreiser eschews every literary attitude except this
narrowly selective "lifelike" presentation; there is no perspec-
tive, no irony, no wonder, no humor, no wisdom, compas-
sion, admiration or contempt; no symbol, no formal surprise;
certainly no sympathy. (But love, the love of undeviating
attentiveness.) In all these ways Dreiser is not involved in
the crime, but we shall see that just in these ways Levin and
286 GROWING UP ABSURD
Yaffe are, each in his own fashion, involved. They cannot
present the case as a naturalistic probability. Levin wisely
makes little effort to do so and relies on the documents to
move his story (that's how it was because that's how it was
reported in the press) ; when Yaffe tries it, his story moves
not at all.
When Dreiser succeeds in his art work of this kind, there
follow two cultural consequences of the highest importance.
In the first place he triumphantly vindicates the art act itself,
for it is art and art alone that does human justice to Clyde
Griffiths (and perhaps to his original Chester Gillette; but
that no longer makes any difference) . Here Dreiser is per-
fectly aware of what he is doing; he devotes his entire de-
nouement to the varying attempts to understand and be
fair to the young murderer: the trial, the appeal, the com-
passionate minister, the wise governor, the loving and sac-
rificing mother, and finally the confused boy himself trying
honestly to assay himself. No one truly understands what oc-
curred; but the author can say, "Nay, read here; this is what
occurred." (Indeed, my bother with this good book is that
Dreiser does not bring this poignant problem to the fore-
front soon enough; he does not show us until too far along
the confused youth, longing to be understood and told what
he is. Dreiser shows us always his vacillation and cowardice,
but not enough his confused integrity; he sticks so close to
what is like that particular life that he misses one transcend-
ent tragedy of every life.)
But even more relevant to our present theme, when
Dreiser succeeds in making a probable crime by accepting
every usual presupposition, the social effect is revolutionary.
If people do not like the outcome, they cannot simply reject
it; they must reject the whole sequence en bloc; and since
they have been patiently led along step by step, accepting
every step as sensible, plausible, and like their lives, they
must must they not? be shaken in their whole way of ex-
periencing as a viable way of life. See, says the author, here
is how you make sense, and it is not viable. Something is
Appendices 287
wrong. At this level, simply to entertain an alternative mo-
rality to the one that doomed Clyde, is to disavow the mo-
rality you grew up in. Historically, Dreiser's works were
part of the revolutionary change in the sexual mores. The
events of An American Tragedy would no longer be prob-
able if retold today; this particular plot would occur today in
a soap opera.
The authors of our books on Leopold and Loeb are not
in those events, which are alien to them. There is no shared
assumption of author and audience that this is, step by step,
inevitable behavior leading up to what is quite unacceptable
but must be accepted nevertheless or all our sense rejected en
bloc. Yaffe's book is merely manufactured on a causal theory,
that such and such parental attitudes lead to such and such
juvenile delinquency: the premises are stereotypes, and the
esthetic effect is the frigid one of having established a possi-
bility, for the sake of argument or to get a book written, that
such and such might occur; but there is never any probability
or internal motion. Levin, much more masterfully, makes the
chief thing his own need to find out the cause, a fine theme,
not unlike Proust's; but then there is too much about Leo-
pold and Loeb and not enough about Meyer Levin. The
esthetic effect of the major bulk, the crime, is the harsh one
of unpleasant newspaper reports. Both authors make the
philosophical error of trying to present a living process by
explaining it rather than by reliving it with us; their causes
are ex post facto; at every moment the protagonists might
do otherwise but don't happen to; afterward we can trace
the trajectory they did follow, as if to say, "there must have
been a compulsion"; we are certainly none the wiser about
ourselves, or any urgent present matter.
Then there arises the question: What on earth makes
two writers devote so much effort to a narrative they can-
not get on with, and one of them to call it by such a title as
the Crime of Our Century? Why do they treat with it at all?
This is a crucial question. They are obviously fascinated.
With what? It is fortunate that we have two books, for un-
288 GROWING UP ABSURD
like as they are in most respects, they prove to have a couple
of surprising attitudes in common, and these give us the clue
to the relevance of these books at this time in the fifties.
As alien as they are to the case, our authors feel even
more alien to the social milieu in which the case occurs. In
Yaffe, who up-to-dates the story, the disaffection is blatant
from the beginning. He is dealing with what would be nor-
mally a gloomy subject, yet with almost every character ex-
cept the protagonists, his manner is usually satirical and of-
ten sarcastic. One father is a frigid ass, the other is a weak
fool; one mother is sickly and timid, the other is a domineer-
ing club woman and a fool; the principal is a pompous fool;
the lawyer is a vain conniver; the psychiatrists don't care;
the judge is a sentimental fool. And as his story reaches its
climax, Yaffe hits on the pattern he is after: that nobody is
concerned with the one important thing, the case, but this
one is interested in his golf, score, that one in his new article,
another in his business prestige, etc. To drive it home, the
author runs through the routine a second time.
Levin's disaffection is more touching; it is a slow growth
to awareness of how pointless his own career as a man has.
been. Let me quote from his ending:
... As it happened, I never again reached the intense in*
volvement and achievement if achievement it may be
called of my first assignment. When something big
comes to us early in our careers we have an expectation
of exceeding and exceeding ourselves; yet for some this
never happens, just as, for some, no later love has the
quality of first love. I married, divorced, and during the
war I was a correspondent with the Third Army. It was
in the last weeks that the case came finally home to me.
Back in America he meets his first love.
. . . Looking at her, I was thinking, It could have been.
It could all have been. . . . And I tended my job and
married again, and we live in Norwalk.
Appendices 289
But the social disaffection of both authors is evident also
in their surprising attitude toward the two protagonists. They
sympathize with, and admire, the dark funny-looking Jewish
intellectual misfit (of course in Yaffe nobody is Jewish) the
one who wears the glasses and loses the glasses the brood-
ing one who has the fantasies of being a serviceable slave.
They yearn to extenuate for him according to their own
standards of decency, and Yaffe even contrives his metaphys-
ical salvation. But toward the other, the fair good-looking
youth, skilled in sports, dancing, and dramatics, sought af-
ter by the girls and boys, both authors are cold and even
hostile; he is, somehow, to blame. What does this mean? Our
authors look at themselves and at the world and its desirable
roles, and they find nothing to admire and love at most
something to envy and be vindictive about but certainly
nothing that adds up to what you could be "intensely in-
volved" in, or to "achieve" anything there. Yaffe, the
younger, takes this pretty much for granted; Levin has
learned it as he pursued his career and found that he, or it
(it makes no difference), didn't come across. But there were
those two rich and bright boys back in the twenties who
"had everything," and they were wise to it already. They
acted it out it is fascinating because one of them seduced
the other into doing something spectacularly pointless, for
the excitement; they committed the Crime of Our Century.
As is often the case, the opening page of Compulsion,
before the author has a chance to develop his habitual de-
fenses, tells more about the case and the real situation than
all the rest. A professor is giving a brilliant cram lecture for
the morrow's entrance examination to Law School. Judd,
who killed the boy the day before, takes no notes; yet he is
paying attention, because he seizes the first occasion to inter-
rupt and bother the teacher and the class with his theory of
the Superman; but he feels they don't understand his argu-
ment. . . . Levin here wants to portray the preoccupied
youth, doodling a hawk, and unable to keep away from the
area of the crime, and this is very well. But the salient psy-
chological features of the scene are not these "unconscious"
290 GROWING UP ABSURD
ones but much simpler and revealing ones: (1) What would
seem to be "objectively" important, the cram lecture and the
examination, is unimportant not only to Judd but also to the
other students and to the teacher, for they rush at once into
the time-wasting argument. (2) The aim of the young man
is chiefly to claim attention, as if starved for attention, and
to have something vital to him drawn forth and treated seri-
ously, though not necessarily approved, even perhaps more
to be refuted. (3) But since what he offers has no immediate
practical content, there is no way to get himself understood.
He wants to share his fantasy, which is his only creative act,
but it is only a fantasy. We can be sure that, uninterested in
the objective business of society the examination and un-
able to make contact with the other persons, he will pour his
energy into lush fantasies indeed. (Of course I am not here
speaking of Leopold and Loeb but of how they exist as
fantasies of Meyer Levin.)
Now let me revert to the first question above: if our au-
thor were going to artifice a real world of the case, as Drei-
ser did in An American Tragedy, it is in these scenes of so-
cial behavior and how the protagonists are in them, and how
they are not in them, that half the substance of the work
would be. This is especially true for the outgoing, the so-
cially successful youth (Artie). The author tells us, for in-
stance, that Artie is a fine tennis player. In Yaffe's book the
counterpart is manager of the baseball team. How is he in
these sports? We get not a word. But Levin in one brief pas-
sage lets us know that Artie is impotent. Then we can en-
visage him on the field, or dancing hot jazz, throwing him-
self wildly into it for the relieving excitement of the
muscular activity; excelling with the need to prove potency,
and with the flash of triumph (and contempt) in doing so;
but never, never with the total release of orgasm having al-
ways something unfinished and the need, more fiercely next
time, to repeat and with this, the inability to get any of
the quiet rewards of activity and success. He can do it and
he proves it, but then it doesn't mean anything and he turns
Appendices 291
on his heel; or more deeply he turns on his heel in full
flight from the anxiety of losing control and bursting into
tears. Levin is concerned with explaining, and he is com-
passionate; but if he envisaged the real scenes and simply
constructed them, there would be no need for explanation
any more than Dreiser explains anything and the work it-
self would repair something, make it whole again, and this
is the act of compassion.
Now the other half of such a reconstruction of the real
case would, I think, deal with the proliferating fantasies, es-
pecially of the inward-turning youth. It happens that in our
generation, by no accident, writers have learned to recon-
struct such masturbation fantasies as a literary form. Genet
is the most masterly, Henry Miller is more pedestrian. The
essence of such reconstruction is that the physical and social
reality, the "other's reality," enters the presented world with
apparent caprice or is there only on the fringes; its meaning
and value is the use it plays in beginning, maintaining, and
heightening the fantasy. Certainly this is not far from the
Leopold-Loeb "case" as told in the books we are consider-
ing; but our authors do not stay with the fantasist's world
and therefrom lead us to the crime step by step as it really
was; rather they persist in keeping the social valuation as
their structural framework and then the overt acts of
fantasy occur as alien and require a causal explanation. And
yet these same authors, as I have said, do not take that so-
cial reality seriously at all! Then what on earth are they do-
ing? They are fascinated and they are avoiding.
In order to get something more nearly resembling what
Dreiser did, we could structure this material as follows:
On the one hand the scenes of the unsatisfactoriness of our
social reality, made obvious and probable for us, the final
pointlessness of the esteemed roles and careers, of the games
and dates, the coldness of the families and fraternities, and
the gnawing need to exceed. On the other hand, the rich
reality of the fantasy world into which something looms
from outside so that there begins to occur overt behavior
292 GROWING UP ABSURD
continuous with the fantasy. It is in this matrix that the
events occur that are reported in the newspapers as crime
by those who have not gone step by step this whole road.
The youths kill a random boy for no reason, that is, for a
trivial reason that would fit a trivial deed; but of course to
them the deed is neither enormous nor trivial but of the or-
der of their other acts; and their reason is not trivial, but to
run the risk of being caught, exposed, punished. (It is hard
to know what Levin means by "compulsion" he seems to
be saying that the death wish is compelling; but I think the
usual psychological wisdom is that the thrilling excitement,
the compulsion, is in the confrontation with the others. This
is what the affecdess repeat.) Yaffe and Levin seem to be
peculiarly moved by the acts. They do not seem to under-
stand how any principle of disaffection or estrangement, con-
tinuously operating, will take a person far afield; and not
only negative principles, but such positive faculties as healthy
lust or common sense in a crazy world will eventually lead
a man to enormities of eccentricity; and the honest artistic
need to touch a smug and debauched audience eventuates in
dada. But these books keep the enormity of the act in the
foreground; the crime is isolated. We continually feel their
tug toward the crime as unfinished business for themselves
several times Levin says as much.
They cannot make the agents real and the act inevitable;
they are too involved; they must explain it away. To sum up
our comparison: in these books it is the crime we are to disa-
vow and not the world of our assumptions; yet that world is
not looked at squarely either, but avoided. But in An Amer-
ican Tragedy it was not the murder but the whole way of
social life in which that murder was an incident that was re-
created, and since our own experience of life allowed us to
regard the sequence of events as probable, we had radically
to disavow it, that is, to entertain alternatives,
Yet the book we have proposed in theory, portraying as
plausible and probable so radical a disaffection from the ac-
cepted institutions and behaviors, and developing with sym-
pathy the fantasies of perversity such a book could not get
Appendices 293
itself accepted. People do not dare to disavow so frankly
our conventionally desirable world, and therefore they would
not admit the real scenes to be plausible; nor can they ac-
cept the fantasies of desire as what someone indeed might
desire. It would all seem far-fetched and repugnant, rather
than only too real and inadmissible en bloc. Yet the books
that put the crime in the foreground these exert a fascina-
tion.
Let me now generalize and compare the twenties and fif-
ties as two periods of expansion. Both are marked by a
booming productivity, much money to spend, a rising
standard of living, and also by cultural adjustments to great
technical innovations that offer exciting prospects; radio then
and television now; flying the ocean and the geophysical
year; relativity physics and psychoanalysis then and nu-
cleonics and psychotherapy now. In both decades a vast in-
crease in international travel and cultural exchange. Such
things both support and give content to the expansion. At
the same time lie twenties and the fifties are marked by a
profound disillusionment and disgust at the way our civiliza-
tion has recently disgraced itself. No doubt the First World
War was a more severe shock to moral preconceptions we
were inured by their experience of barbarism; yet we man-
aged to turn up with crematoria and atom bombs. But these
experiences, too, foster expansion in those who survive and
in whom the shell shock thaws out, for people are purged,
especially if there has been frank vomiting; and then more
daring and radical notions can express themselves with a
good conscience, since nothing an individual can think of
would be so wicked as what everybody thought of collec-
tively.
But there is also a dark contrast between the decades. The
twenties were a time in which people thought (really be-
lieved) that there would never be another war. Great na-
tions scuttled their warships according to a formula, and
signed the Kellogg-Briand agreement. This element, of se-
curity, is of course capital to an expanding mood, for it is the
absence of an external counterpressure.
294 GROWING UP ABSURD
If we consider the artistic creations of the twenties, they
were indeed such as one would expect and hope for in a
time of expansion and disgust. There was a flowering of ad-
vance-guard work, experimental, offensive, outrageous, bring-
ing to a large public the esoteric efforts of several decades.
And the standard style, as by that time An American
Tragedy was in standard style, moved with serene self-con-
fidence, immune from the need to explain, as if all the nec-
essary radical positions had been securely conquered. In art
as in politics, we had all the three elements necessary for the
emergence of novelty: expanding energy, a rejection of the
past, and security enough to tolerate confusion and anxiety.
Artistic creation today gives, rather, an impression of be-
ing balked, potential but unable to get along. There is a
counterpressure that both opposes expansion and discour-
ages it inwardly. Not only is there no peace, but no forth-
right effort for it; the international community and even
science are not free exchanges; and the increased standard of
living no longer pays off in pride and joy, for people are
avoiding some risk. There is not enough security, therefore
not enough ability to tolerate anxiety, and therefore not
enough risk of something startlingly new. At the same time,
of course, there is too much disgust with the old, and too
much new energy to burn, to allow for great conventional
products. Instead there is a balked and teasing flirtation
with something different, without daring to affirm it. It is in
this ambience, I think, that books like Compulsion and Noth-
ing but the Night get themselves conceived in fascination, ex-
ecuted defensively, and widely accepted by an audience that
will not thereby change. They are widely accepted because
everybody is in the same boat. Everybody knows better, but
few dare to believe it and witness it.
Finally, let me return to the Case itself. The twenties had
Flaming Youth; the fifties have Juvenile Delinquents. Leo-
pold and Loeb were not Flaming Youth, they were juvenile
delinquents a generation ahead of their time, and therefore
they seem now to have committed the Crime of Our Cen-
Appendices 295
tury. Flaming Youth is rebellious youth astoundingly care-
less of the wisdom it rejects, claiming to be grown-up and
untrammeled even while admitting it might be making mis-
takes to which it claims a right; but its aims are positive
enough: sex, speed, and liquor to relax inhibition, ideal politi-
cal doctrines, and frank answers in words of one syllable for
thorny moral dilemmas. These are kids (they recur) looking
for an honest adult to refute them. Meyer Levin's protago-
nists show some of this zeal, but I suspect that it is Levin
who is looking for the honest adult. Our juvenile delinquents
are not rebellious but resigned; and they are trapped and
desperate. Since these young people do not know where to
try to exercise their energies, they do mischief. The speed
and liquor, and the PAL and the fan-clubs, are not the prel-
ude to a quieter good time but to more desperate expedients
toward excitement. Their philosophy would be Existenz and
UActe Gratuite, except that to philosophize affirms an es-
sence, truth, and it is not an acte gratuite but the property of
a rational animal.
Dreiser's Clyde Griffiths is a dumb precursor of the rebel;
he feels he is deprived, only he does not know how; and he is
lovingly portrayed in a decade when they thought they knew
what was wrong, and importantly did know, and were en-
gaged in changing it. But our present protagonists "have"
everything and it's no good; there is no point in their rebel-
ling against their fathers for they don't have it either; and no-
body demonstrates anything new for them in the best-sellers.
They are rebels without a cause.
I am reminded of the commencement exercises some years
ago at one of the superior academic high schools in New
York: Music and Art. Senator Javits, then State's attorney,
addressed the class and urged them to help combat juvenile
delinquency by interesting the tough kids of their neighbor-
hoods in their own cultural pursuits. Abstractly this was not
a foolish proposal even meaty for a commencement ad-
dress. But the teen-agers to whom I listened thought it was
ridiculous; that the delinquents were much in the right and
296 GROWING UP ABSURD
they were stronger and would influence the good boys rather
than the other way around; also with a certain purity
that music and art should not be degraded to do police work,
for they impugned the State's attorney's motives.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PAUL GOODMAN, a native New Yorker, was
born in 1 9 1 1 . After graduating from City College in New
York, he went on to receive his Ph.D in humanities
from the University of Chicago. Mr. Goodman taught
at the University of Chicago, New York University,
Black Mountain College, and is a fellow of, and teacher
at, the New York and Cleveland institutes for Gestalt
Therapy. He has written for Commentary, Politics,
Kenyon Review, Resistance, Liberation, Partisan Re-
view, etc. His fiction includes The Facts of Life, The
Break-Up of Our Camp, Parents' Day, and The Em-
pire City. Kafka's Prayer and The Structure of Litera-
ture are books of criticism. In the area of social studies
he has written Art and Social Nature and is coauthor of
Communitas and Gestalt Therapy.
Mr. Goodman is married and has two children.
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