19601960
People :
Author : Paul Goodman
Text :
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 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 themselves. (Appendix F contrasts these two periods.)
We must distinguish between two kinds of special attention 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 “psychology.” 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 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.
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 disillusionment, 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 matching numbers are the percussive atonalists like Varèse, or the musique concrète made of the tapes. There is an Action 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 content, it does not carry enough humanity. I think this is true. But it is just its eschewing of a stereotyped or corrupt 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 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 community 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 relations. They present racial brotherhood and miscegenation as a fait accompli.
More generally, all the recent doings of problematic youth, whether in the middle class or among the underprivileged juvenile delinquents, have had a stamp of at least partly springing from some existent situation, whatever it is, and of responding with direct action, rather than keeping up appearances and engaging in role playing. 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 university 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.
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 contrasting banner.
Now the organized system is very powerful and in its full tide of success, apparently sweeping everything before 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.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
Chronology :
November 30, 1959 : Conclusion -- Publication.
January 06, 2021 : Conclusion -- Added.
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