Chapter 8 : An Apparently Closed Room

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 fundamental freedoms, or a slum block is rebuilt, or a man works in a factory, or social scientists think about human nature. Lever House, a Ford factory, and the Air Force Academy are built in the same “functional” style, for there is apparently only one function, Public Relations. (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 apparently closed room in which there is a large rat race as the dominant center of attention. And let us consider the human relations possible in such a place. This will give us a fair survey of what disturbed youth is indeed doing: some running that race, some disqualified from running it and hanging around because there is nowhere else, some balking in the race, some attacking the machine, etc.

1.

Start with those running the race. Of these, most interesting are the middle-status Organization Men of various kinds, for they are aware that it is a rat race, their literature 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 besides, they are afraid of the disqualified, to mix with them, and this keeps them running. This important point is generally overlooked, so let us explore it.

Sociologists of class structure seem to think that the values of the middle class are not only hard to achieve and maintain, which they are, but also that they are esteemed as good by the middle class themselves. This is evidently no longer true in a status structure within a closed system; the literature is self-contemptuous. Many a junior executive would now sincerely, not romantically, praise and envy the disqualified poor: their uncompetitiveness, animality, shouting and fighting, not striving for empty rewards; but he is afraid of such things for himself because they are too disruptive of his own tightly scheduled structure. Further, the upper class and the middle class have ceased to produce any interesting culture, and the culture of the organization is phony. The underprivileged have produced at least Negro jazz; and the strongest advance-guard artists move less and less in upper- or middle-status circles, and if they do they are corrupted.

A persistent error of the sociologists has been to regard middle-class and working-class values as co-ordinate rival systems. Rather, they are related vertically: each is a defense 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. Conversely, the working-class “values” are nothing but ignorance, resignation, and resentment of classless human values of enterprise and culture, at present available only to the middle class; and many a poor boy escapes his petty class attitudes and achieves something. In brief, it takes effort to make a middle class obsessional, and it takes effort to make a poor boy stupid.

It is inevitable that in a closed status structure middle-class values will become disesteemed, for such values are rewarded by upward “betterment.” And more philosophically, all value requires an open system allowing for surprise, novelty, and growth. A closed system cannot make itself valuable, it must become routine, and devoted merely to self-perpetuation. (When a mandarin bureaucracy is valuable it is because of the vastness of the underlying population and the absence of communication: each mandarin individually embodies the emperor.)

So the rat race is run desperately by bright fellows who do not believe in it because they are afraid to stop.

(2) Not running in the race are the Disqualified. First let us consider the average nondelinquent Corner Boys (the term is William F. Whyte’s, not to be confused with 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 underprivileged: the ignorant and resentful boys who form the delinquent gangs. In our model, we can conceive of them as running a rat race of their own, but not on the official treads. Now what is the style of their race?

A. K. Cohen, 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 delinquent culture has become more striking than their difference. 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 heroes for the juveniles. (A member of the Connecticut Parole Board urges this as a dandy thing.) Yet these post-Hemingway heroes have in turn been drawn from tough adolescents with cajónes 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 drugstores, 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 designers 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 delinquents, 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 delinquents, 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, remember, is the integral whole of politics-and-rackets staffed from the families of both groups. (Much evidence of this is given in the issue of the Nation 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 naïvely try to make something of themselves.

But in the alliance, the juvenile delinquents get the short end of the stick, for they esteem the rat race though they do not get its rewards. Naturally, their esteem has the effect of making them still more contemptuous of their own backgrounds, and all the less able to get real satisfactions that are attainable. To put this another way: the 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 hard-working fathers, and they do steal cars. I have not heard that those who ask for a Congressional investigation of comic books have asked for a Congressional investigation of Life and Esquire.

(Unless we keep in mind this context, what is the sense of the concern about the narcotics? Poor people who have neither future prospects nor lively present satisfactions will always gravitate to this kind of euphoria: 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 status of Bums. (I know a young man who works on Madison Avenue who dreams of looking for his father in the municipal dormitory.) Take as typical the Winos who lead a quiet existence in their small fraternities. It is easy, on the more blighted streets of New York, to 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 resignation plus an informed and radical critique of society (e.g., Wobbly; it is startling to hear a twenty-five-year-old spout statistics of 1910). But soon succeeds irrational and impotent resentment, and one realizes that these men are living in a closed room.

(5) The Beat Generation, however, are more genuinely resigned. They have more or less rationally balked in the race, or have not had the heart to start it. They therefore have some perspective and available energy to get personal satisfactions and even worth-while cultural goods. As we saw, they slip easily into the Disqualified and make something of poverty—more than the underprivileged do.

Yet the apparently closed room and the central fascination of the rat race are pervasive in Beat thinking too. They are not merely going their own way, they also feel “out,” and therefore they do not use for their own purposes many parts of standard academic culture that are available to them; so their own products are doomed to be childish and parochial. And they betray their best selves by seeking for notoriety and by cynical job-attitudes. Politically, their onslaughts on the Air-Conditioned Nightmare, as Henry Miller—their John the Baptist—called it, sound very like the griping of soldiers who do not intend to mutiny. Talcott Parsons has a theory that the middle-class boy, dominated by his mother and with a weak identification with his father, is driven to prove himself by delinquent hell raising. (This is the so-called “middle-class delinquency” that, of course, rarely gets to courts or social agencies and is therefore not counted in the statistics.) But I rather think that it is these Beats who best illustrate Parsons’ thesis: they have resigned the effort to cope with father at all, and they are pacific, artistic, and rather easy-going sexually.

(6) Some in the closed room direct more vigorous attacks against the machine itself and try to stop it. They are more reminiscent of old-fashioned radical youth who, however, were not fascinated by the model of the rat race but had other definite social ideals. If the energy and values that are available are restricted to those in the closed room, the machine is very tough. This seems to me to be the behavior and plight of the English Angry Young Men. Angry are not resigned, but disappointed. For instance, they complain that their elders have failed to provide them with good leadership. They are disappointed that England has degenerated into a phony Welfare State that provides no welfare and has ceased to provide 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 concerned, the whole dam group of islands could sink under 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 water, and shouted out above the engines, “Welcome to London! Greetings from England! Meet your first teenager!”

Young Americans are old hands at modern life and too sophisticated to be disappointed in their fathers or their country. But the English, of course, are seeing from the perspective of the Battle of Britain, which must have held out enormous promise. Certainly their tone is not “angry”—attacking an obstacle to destroy it or make it see sense—but waspish and bitter; and a favorite method of attack is not to demand some good but to behave like a cad. Yet perhaps these young English can be effective, they have strong advantages. The system they are attacking is, unlike ours, very unsettled—the Empire lost, the class system relatively weakening. They are better educated than our young men, and therefore not so ready nor able to resign their culture and history. They seem to remember what it is to act like human beings, and therefore they are surprised and indignant when people fall short. (This is the point of the exemplary caddishness.) Not least, in their oddly undemonstrative way, they seem to have more sexual security.

(7) French “existentialist” youth, on the other hand, have inherited a long recent tradition of public treachery. The spirit of the Resistance is no longer much apparent, and one is astonished at the cynical motives that seem to be taken for granted in quite standard theater like Anouilh. The tactics of youthful protest are to fraternize with the North Africans; but these are not an outcast group like our racial minorities, but haughty and conceited enemies engaged in war. Yet the tone of protest is not “social justice,” as among the young in England, but disdain and self-disdain. 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 already 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 delinquency, is probably the best writer in Europe—and nothing comes from nothing.

(8) Finally, everywhere in the closed room is the spirit of the hipster, jumping, playing every role. The closed room is a very busy yet very limited world; there is no surprising 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 the coolness of the hipster is a necessity in order not to “flip.” (We shall see that it is the aim of the Beats precisely 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 disappointment is inevitable if one controls the orgasm, but of course the hipster cannot afford to let go since he has no faith or support, for nothing exists, he thinks, but the rat race. Love, too, is a rat race. So alternately cool and jumping, and raising the ante, he swings with the rat race. Naturally this fantasy of “proving” pervades every other group in the closed room, the organization men, the juvenile delinquents, the existentialists, but also the Beats, for whom it is a crippling error. On the other hand, by all providing a hipster subculture for one another, they do increase the boundaries of their closed world.

Our historical situation is ironical to the point of sarcasm. There is every reason why young people growing up should be baffled and confused; and the subjective response to it is that every teenager 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 essentially different from the model of the Class Struggle. Like the rat race, the class struggle had a dominant and an underprivileged group, but the class struggle was conceived as taking place in an open field of history, in which new values were continually emerging and the locus of “human value” changing: gradually “human value” would 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 remarkable in our society how rarely one hears, even delivered unctuously, the mention of some lofty purpose; one has to go to the Ethical Culture Society or the Reformed rabbis. Correspondingly, the most important practical objectives astoundingly go by default, for instance disarmament. “Everybody” is for disarmament, but nobody believes anybody.

Suppose our State Department sent to Europe a thousand earnest missionaries to ask in every hamlet and on every street corner if the Americans will have unanimous and enthusiastic support if we unilaterally disarm at once, as soon as the survey is over. If the popular demand is irresistible, we then do disarm—on the assumption that no enemy can withstand the united sentiment of the world. If such a proposal is made, the immediate response is: “Don’t be naïve. The Russians will at once attack and the Americans will give in.”

The existence of the closed room of one pervasive system of cynical values is expressed by the prevalent proposition: “There is no use of a fundamental change, for the next regime will be like this one.” Then it is hard to grow up.