Closing of the American Mind (13 page)

The resulting inevitable individualism, endemic to our regime, has been reinforced by another unintended and unexpected development, the decline of the family, which was the intermediary between individual and society, providing quasi-natural attachments beyond the individual, that gave men and women unqualified concern for at least some others and created an entirely different relation to society from that which the isolated individual has. Parents, husbands, wives and children are hostages to the community. They palliate indifference to it and provide a material stake in its future. This is not quite instinctive love of country, but it is love of country for love of one's own. It is the gentle form of patriotism, one that flows most easily out of self-interest, without the demand for much self-denial. The decay of the family means that community would require extreme self-abnegation in an era when there is no good reason for anything but self-indulgence.

Apart from the fact that many students have experienced the divorce of their parents and are informed by statistics that there is a strong possibility of divorce in their futures, they hardly have an expectation that they will have to care for their parents or any other blood relatives, or that they will even see much of them as they grow older. Social security, retirement funds and health insurance for old people free their children from even having to give them financial support, let alone taking them into their own homes to live. When a child goes away to college, it is really the beginning of the end of his vital connection with his family, though he scarcely realizes it at the time. Parents have little authority over their children when they leave home, and the children are forced to look outward and forward. They are not coldhearted; the substance of their interests merely lies elsewhere. Spiritually, the family was pretty empty, anyway, and new objects fill their field of vision as the old ones fade. American geography plays a role in this separation. This is a large country, and people are very mobile, particularly since World War II and the
expansion of air travel. Practically no student knows where he is going to live when he has completed his education. Very likely it will be far away from his parents and his birthplace. In Canada or France, by contrast, even if the same fundamental cultural winds are blowing, people have almost no place to go. For an English-speaking Canadian born in Toronto there is, practically speaking, only Vancouver as an attractive alternative, and for a Parisian there is no alternative whatsoever. The unlimited, or dissolving, horizon, which is the hallmark of our age, is in these places somewhat less visible. People are not really more rooted in them, but they are stuck. Hence they continue to see their relatives and all the people they grew up with. Their landscape is unchanging. But a young American really begins all over again, and everything is open. He can live in the North, South, East or West, in the city, the suburbs, or the country—who knows which? There are arguments for each, and he is absolutely unconstrained in his choice. The accidents of where he finds a job and of variable inclination are likely to take him far away from all he has been connected with, and he is psychically prepared for this. His investments in his past and those who peopled it are necessarily limited.

This indeterminate or open-ended future and the lack of a binding past mean that the souls of young people are in a condition like that of the first men in the state of nature—spiritually unclad, unconnected, isolated, with no inherited or unconditional connection with anything or anyone. They can be anything they want to be, but they have no particular reason to want to be anything in particular. Not only are they free to decide their place, but they are also free to decide whether they will believe in God or be atheists, or leave their options open by being agnostic; whether they will be straight or gay, or, again, keep their options open; whether they will marry and whether they will stay married; whether they will have children—and so on endlessly. There is no necessity, no morality, no social pressure, no sacrifice to be made that militates going in or turning away from any of these directions, and there are desires pointing toward each, with mutually contradictory arguments to buttress them. The young are exaggerated versions of Plato's description of the young in democracies:

 

[The democratic youth] lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another
downing water and reducing, now practicing gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied with philosophy. Often he engages in politics and, jumping up, says and does whatever chances to come to him; and if he admires any soldiers, he turns in that direction; and if it's moneymakers, in that one, and there is neither order nor necessity in his life, but calling it sweet, free and blessed, he follows it throughout. (
Republic
, 561c-d)

 

Why are we surprised that such unfurnished persons should be preoccupied principally with themselves and with finding means to avoid permanent free fall? No wonder that the one novel that remains continuously popular with students is Camus's
The Stranger
.

In addition to their self-ironical niceness, the other striking quality of these students is their egalitarianism. Whatever their politics, they believe that all men—and women—are created equal and have equal rights. It is more than a belief, it is an instinct, felt in their bones. Whenever they meet anyone, considerations of sex, color, religion, family, money, nationality, play no role in their reactions. The very understanding that such considerations once really counted for something has departed; it belongs to mythology. This may seem surprising inasmuch as there is such interest in roots, ethnicity and the sacred—the things that once separated men. But it is precisely because they are no longer real that they fascinate. A real Italian immigrant in 1920 did not worry about ethnicity. He had it, and although he was an American, his life was by necessity and choice Italian, and he lived with Italians. His grandson at Harvard today might wish to recover Italianness—the social disadvantages of which his father struggled to shake off—but his friends will be the individuals he likes, willy-nilly, not because of his Italian origin but as a result of the common features of American life. His sexual attractions, and hence his marriage, will not be influenced by his national origin or even by his traditional Catholicism. And this will not be because he is attracted by opposites or is trying to join the establishment. It is simply because such things do not really count now, even if there is a conscious effort to make
them count. There is no society out there that will banish him for marrying out of order, or even parents who will object very strenuously. He is not in any important way looked on as an Italian by his peers. Even if students have gone to parochial schools, where they were religiously and in effect ethnically segregated, the general culture usually prevails, and when they enter the university they almost immediately find themselves associating primarily with those who were formerly outsiders to them. They simply drop their cultural baggage. There is none of the solemnity of the interfaith or interethnic get-togethers I knew as a child, where people who felt themselves to be very different and who were quite often both prejudiced and victims of prejudice, pointed piously to the brotherhood of man. These kids just do not have prejudices against anyone. Whether this is because man has been reduced to a naked animal without any of the trappings of civilization that differentiate him, or because we have recognized our essential humankindness, is a matter of interpretation. But the fact is that everyone is an individual—if not very individual—in our major universities. They are all just
persons
. Being human is enough for what is important. It does not occur to students to think that any of the things that classically divided people, even in egalitarian America, should keep them away from anyone else.

Thus Harvard, Yale and Princeton are not what they used to be—the last resorts of aristocratic sentiment within the democracy. The differentiations based on old family or old wealth have vanished. The old wounds that used to be inflicted by the clubbable on the unclubbable, in our muted version of the English class system, have healed because the clubs are not anything to be cared about seriously. All this began after World War II, with the GI Bill. College was for everyone. And the top universities gradually abandoned preference for the children of their alumni and the exclusion of outsiders, especially Jews. Academic records and tests became the criterion for selection. New kinds of preference—particularly for blacks—replaced the old ones, which were class preserving, whereas these are class destroying. Now the student bodies of all the major universities are pretty much alike, drawn from the best applicants, with “good” meaning good at the academic disciplines. There is hardly a Harvard man or a Yale man any more. No longer do any universities have the vocation of producing gentlemen as well as scholars. Snobbism of the old sort is dead. Of course students are, no matter what they say,
proud to be at one of these select universities. They are distinguished by it. But they believe, and they are probably right, that they are there not because of anything other than natural talent and hard work at their earlier studies. To the extent that their parents' wealth may have contributed to their excelling in high school whereas poorer children were disadvantaged, they believe this to be a social injustice. But they are not very much bothered, at least not so far as whites are concerned, for the country is largely middle class now, and scholarship aid is easily available for those unable to pay. They see around them students who come from all kinds of families. Very few feel themselves culturally deprived, outsiders looking resentfully in at the privileged whose society is closed to them. Nor are there social climbers, for there is no vision of a high society into which to climb. Similarly, there are no longer schools of thought, as there always used to be, that despise democracy and equality. Again, World War II finished all that.
All
the students are egalitarian meritocrats, who believe each individual should be allowed to develop his special—and unequal—talents without reference to race, sex, religion, family, wealth or national origin. This is the only form of justice they know, and they cannot even imagine that there could be any substantial argument in favor of aristocracy or monarchy. These were inexplicable follies of the past.

Again, although the difference between girls and boys still has a living meaning—unlike the difference between Jew and Catholic, German and Irish, old family and new family, which are mere memories of their parents' day and do not constitute differences in present way of life—students take women's equality in education, their legitimate pursuit of exactly the same careers as men and their equal and often superior performance in them, completely in stride. There are no jokes, no self-consciousness, in short, no awareness that this state of affairs is any less normal in human history than is breathing. None of their beliefs result from principle, a project, an effort. They are pure feeling, a way of life, the actualization of the democratic dream of each man taken as man, the essential, abstracted from everything else. Except no abstraction is taking place. Contrary to fashionable opinion, universities are melting pots, no matter what may be true of the rest of society. Ethnicity is no more important a fact than tall or short, black-haired or blond. What these young people have in common infinitely outweighs what separates them. The quest for traditions and rituals both proves my point and may teach
something about the price paid for this homogenization. The lack of prejudice is a result of students' failing to see differences and of the gradual eradication of differences. When students talk about one another, one almost never hears them saying things that divide others into groups or kinds. They always speak about the individual. The sensitivity to national character, sometimes known as stereotyping, has disappeared.

The one eccentric element in this portrait, the one failure—a particularly grave one inasmuch as it was the part most fraught with hope—is the relation between blacks and whites. White and black students do not in general become real friends with one another. Here the gulf of difference has proved unbridgeable. The forgetting of race in the university, which was predicted and confidently expected when the barriers were let down, has not occurred. There is now a large black presence in major universities, frequently equivalent to their proportion in the general population. But they have, by and large, proved indigestible. Most keep to themselves. White students act as though their relations with black students were just as immediate and unself-conscious as with others (including Orientals). But although the words are right, the music is off-key. Here there is an atmosphere of right-thinking, principle and project—of effort rather than instinct. The automatic character of current student camaraderie is absent; and the really intimate attachment that knows no barriers stops here. The programmatic brotherhood of the sixties did not culminate in integration but veered off toward black separation. White students feel uncomfortable about this and do not like to talk about it. This is not the way things are supposed to be. It does not fit their prevailing view that human beings are all pretty much alike, and that friendship is another aspect of equal opportunity. They pretend not to notice the segregated tables in dining halls where no white student would comfortably sit down. This is only one of the more visible aspects of a prevailing segregation in the real life of universities—which includes separation in housing and in areas of study, particularly noticeable in the paucity of blacks in theoretical sciences and humanities. The universities are formally integrated, and blacks and whites are used to seeing each other. But the substantial human
contact, indifferent to race, soul to soul, that prevails in all other aspects of student life simply does not usually exist between the two races. There are exceptions, perfectly integrated black students, but they are rare and in a difficult position.