The Lost Massey Lectures (12 page)

Shrewder psychologists among the young advocate getting involved only in what you “enjoy” and gravitate to, but this is a weak motive compared with indignation or justice.

The bother is that, except with a few political or religious personalities, the students' commitments do not spring from their own vocations and life ambitions; and they are not related in a coherent program for the reconstruction of society. This is not the fault of the students. Most of the present young have unusually little sense of vocation—perhaps sixteen continuous years of doing lessons by compulsion is not a good way to find identity; and there
is
no acceptable program of reconstruction—nobody has spelled it out—only vague criteria. Pathetically, much “definite commitment” is a self-deceptive way of filling the void of sense of vocation and utopian politics. Negroes, who are perforce really committed to their emancipation, notice this and say that their white allies are spiritually exploiting them.

It is a terrible period for the young to find vocation and identity. For most of the abiding human vocations and professions, arts and sciences, seem to them, and are, corrupt; law, business, the physical sciences, social work—these constitute the hated System. And higher education, both curriculum and professors, which ought to be helping them find themselves, also seems corrupt and part of the System. Students know that something is wrong in their schooling and they agitate for university reform, but since
they do not know what new world they want to make, they do not know what to demand to be taught.

It is not the task of 20-year-olds to devise a coherent program of social reconstruction, to rethink the uses of technology and resources, methods of management, city planning, and international relations; and they rightly accuse us of not providing them a program to work for. A small minority, I think increasing, return to Marxism, but the Marxist theorists have also not thought of anything new and relevant to over-mature societies. Most radical students, in my observation, listen to Marxist ideological speeches with polite lack of interest, and are appalled by Marxist political bullying. On the other hand, they are disgusted with official anticommunism. By an inevitable backlash, since they think all American official speech is double-talk, they disbelieve that communist states are any worse than our own.

What the American young do know, being themselves pushed around, itemized, and processed, is that they have a right to a say in what affects them; that is, they believe in democracy, which they have to call “participatory democracy,” to distinguish it from double-talk democracy. Poignantly, in their ignorance of American history, they do not recognize that they are Congregationalists, town-meeting democrats, Jeffersonians, populists. But they know they want the opportunity to be responsible, to initiate and decide, instead of being mere personnel. Returning from their term overseas, the first thousand of the Peace Corps unanimously agreed that exercising responsibility and initiative had been the most worthwhile part of their experience, and they complained that back home they would not have the opportunity. (Last year at Harvard more seniors opted for the Peace Corps than for business!)

The primary area for seeking democracy would be, one would imagine, the universities, for that is where the students are and are coerced. And the radical students, who we have seen are among the best academically, have worked for
Lernfreiheit
—freedom from grading, excessive examination, compulsory attendance at lectures, and prescribed subjects—and also for the ancient privilege of a say in designing the curriculum and evaluating the teaching. But unfortunately, as we have also seen, the majority of students do not care about higher education as such; they are in college for a variety of extrinsic reasons, from earning the degree necessary for getting a salary, to evading the draft. There is no mass base for university reform in the universities.

Mainly, instead of working in their own bailiwick, the radical students have sought participatory democracy for poor people, organizing rent strikes, marching for Negro suffrage, opposing the welfare bureaucrats, and so forth. But again there is an inherent dilemma. Negroes claim, perhaps correctly, that middle-class whites cannot understand their problems, and if Negroes are going to run their own show they have to dispense with white helpers. The present policy of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee is that Negroes must solve their own peculiar problems which are the only ones they care about and know anything about, and let their young white friends attend to changing the majority society. There is something in this. Certainly one would have expected northern radical students to get their heads broken in the cafeteria at the University of Mississippi, where they could talk with their peers face to face, as well as on the streets of country towns. And white southern liberals have desperately needed more support than they have gotten.

But pushed too far, separation consigns poor people to a second-class humanity. Some pressing problems are universal; the poor
must
care about them, e.g. the atom bombs. Many problems
are grossly misconceived if looked at from a poor man's point of view; only a broad human point of view can save Negroes from agitating for exactly the wrong things, for example the Educational Parks, when what is needed in schooling is small human scale. Also, there is something spurious in the separation, for a poor minority in a highly technological and middle-class society will not engineer the housing and manufacture the cars, etc., that they intend to use. Finally, in fact the Negroes are, perhaps unfortunately, much more American than Negro. Especially in the North, they aspire to the same American package, though it makes even less sense for them than for anybody else. The Negro subculture that is talked up has about the same value as the adolescent sub-culture, with which it shares many traits in common; it has vitality and it does not add up to humanity.

As in other periods of moral change, only the young aristocrats and the intellectuals can
afford
to be disillusioned and profoundly radical.

In their own action organizations, the young are almost fanatically opposed to top-down direction. In several remarkable cases, gifted and charismatic student leaders have stepped down because their influence had become too strong. By disposition, without benefit of history, they have reinvented anarchist federation and a kind of Luxemburgian belief in spontaneous insurrection from below. They tend to the kind of non-violent resistance in which each one makes his own moral decision about getting his head broken, rather than submitting to rigid discipline. If there is violence, they will surely be guerillas rather than an organized army.

All this, in my opinion, probably makes them immune to take-over by centralists like the Marxists. When Trotskyists, for instance, infiltrate an organization and try to control it, the rest go home and activity ceases. When left to their own improvisation,
however, the students seem surprisingly able to mount quite massive efforts, using elaborate techniques of communication and expert sociology. By such means they will never get power. But indeed, they do not want power, they want meaning.

The operative idea in participatory democracy is decentralizing, to multiply the number who are responsible, initiate and decide. Is this idea viable? (I have discussed the question at length in
People or Personnel
, arguing for a mixed system of central and decentral management by state, corporations, co-operatives, and independents.)

In principle, there are two opposite ways of decentralizing: either by dividing over-centralized organizations where it can be shown that decentral organization is more efficient in economic, social, and human costs—or at least not too inefficient; or by creating new small enterprises to fulfill needs that big organizations neglect or only pretend to fulfill. Obviously the first of these, to cut the present structures down to human size, is not in the power of students; but it happens that it does require a vast amount of empirical research and academic analysis, to find if, where, and how it is feasible. In the current American style, there is no such research and analysis, and on 150 campuses I have urged students to work on such problems, in business and engineering, education and communications, science and municipal administration. The students seem fascinated, but I do not know if they are coming across. (To say it wryly, there is an excellent organization called Students for a Democratic Society, but it is not enough evident that they are
students
for a democratic society.)

The opposite way of decentralizing, by creating new enterprises, better suits the student zeal for direct action, and they have applied it with a lot of energy and some inventiveness. It has been called “parallel development.” Typically, students have set up a dozen little “free universities” in or next to established
institutions, to teach in a more personal way and to deal with contemporary subjects that are not yet standard (e.g. “Castro's Cuba,” “The Psychedelic Experience,” “Sensitivity Training,” “Theater of Participation”). Some of these courses are “action sociology,” like organizing labor or community development. Students have established a couple of neighborhood radio stations, to broadcast local news and propaganda, and to give poor people a chance to talk into a microphone. They have set up parallel community projects to combat the welfare bureaucracy and channelize real needs and grievances. In the South they have helped form “freedom” political machines since the established machines are lily-white. They have offered to organize international service projects as an alternative to serving in the army. (As yet I have not heard of any feasible attempts at productive co-operatives or urban “intentional communities,” and students do not seem to be interested in rural reconstruction.)

Looked at coldly, such parallel projects are pitifully insignificant and doomed to pass away like little magazines. Yet they are a thrilling revival of the seemingly dead spirit of American populism: get out from under the thumb of the barons and do it yourself. In my opinion the important step is the first one, to prove that such things are possible at all; then there is no telling how far they will go. There is a good hope for bringing to life many of our institutions by surrounding them with human enterprises, like a cambium or growing layer. The most telling criticism of an overgrown institution is a simpler one that works better.

This was the educational vision of John Dewey sixty years ago, of an industrial society continually democratically renewed by its young, freely educated and learning by doing. Progressive education, free-spirited but practical, was a typical populist conception. And the student movement can be regarded as progressive education at the college and graduate school level, where it begins to be
indistinguishable from vocation and politics. It is the antithesis of a mandarin establishment and the social engineering that we now call education. Maybe this time around it will work.

So, describing American radical youth, and to a degree many other American youth, we have noticed their solidarity based on community rather than ideology, their style of direct and frank confrontation and personal contact, their democratic inclusiveness and aristocratic confidence careless of status, caste, or getting ahead, their selectivity and somewhat defiance of the affluent standard of living, their striving to be authentic and committed to their causes rather than merely belonging, their determination to have a say and their refusal to be pushed around or processed as standard items, their extreme distrust of top-down direction, their disposition to anarchist organization and direct action, their disillusion with the system of institutions and their belief that they can carry on major social functions in improvised parallel enterprises. Some of these traits, in my opinion, are natural to all unspoiled young people, but all of them are certainly in contradiction to the dominant organization of American society.

By and large this is as yet the disposition of a minority of the young, but it is the only articulate disposition that has emerged, and it has continuously emerged for the past ten years. It is a response not merely to “issues,” like Civil Rights or Vietnam, but to deeply rooted defects in our present system and it will have an influence in the future. Those who think it is the usual “generational revolt,” that will be absorbed as the students get “older and wiser,” are whistling in the dark. If it is not taken seriously and compounded with, the result will be ever deepening alienation and, ultimately, worse disruption.

The empty style of our society pervades most functions and institutions. In recent books I have described it in education and in our manner of social organization. In the next two lectures let me single out how we think about scientific technology and urbanization.

It is becoming common among social philosophers to treat the progress of science and technology as if it now goes on by itself and determines, like the Marxist “relations of production” everything else, but it is even less dependent on human choice. Whatever men wish, the independent development of scientific technology will shape the future. In more drastic versions of the theory, technology has already changed man into a product of itself, or man has become one special function in the technical system.

To Jacques Ellul, for instance, the American “empty society” can be more simply defined as an inevitable result of our high technology where, in his words, “work implies an absence of man, whereas previously it implied a presence.” He means that a few motions of human labor and brains are selected and used mechanically and the rest must be deleted as an interference. (I have laid stress, rather, on the fact that large groups of people are excluded altogether, rather than exploited.) The controlling social organization, to which I have attributed independent influence, is to Ellul nothing but a function of technology itself, which in its essence standardizes, swallows up every case, and controls. And the populist and libertarian counter-forces that I described in my last lecture are to him whistling in the dark; he would say they are like his own complaints, “the work of some miserable intellectual who balks at technical progress. What good is it to pose questions of motive? Technique exists because it is technique.”