The Lost Massey Lectures (18 page)

The identification with power of the powerless middle class is also characteristic. They do not identify with brutality, big men, or wealth, but with the efficient system itself, which is what renders
them
powerless. And here again we can see the sharp polarity between those who are not politically resigned and those who are. Take the different effects of what is called education. On the one hand, the universities, excellent students and distinguished professors, are the nucleus of opposition to our war policy. On the other hand, in general polls there is always a dismaying correlation between years of schooling and the “hard line” of bombing China during the Korean War or bombing
Hanoi now. But this is not because the educated middle class is rabidly anti-communist, and certainly it is not ferocious; rather, it is precisely because it is rational, it approves the technically efficient solution that does not notice flesh and blood suffering. In this style the middle class feels it has status, though no more power than anybody else. No doubt these middle-class people are influenced by the magazines they read, which explain what
is
efficient; but they are influenced because they are “thinking” types, for whom reality is what they read.

The bathos of the irresponsible middle class is the nightly
TV
newscast on our national networks. This combines commercials for the High Standard of Living, scenes of war and riot, and judicious pro-and-con commentary on what it all means. The scenes arouse feeling, the commentary provokes thought, the commercials lead to action. It is a total experience.

Let me illustrate the anomic psychology with another example, for it has come to be accepted as the normal state of feeling rather than as pathological. (I apologize to the Canadian audience for choosing my example again from the Vietnam War. But my country is bombing and burning those people, and my friends and I are unable to prevent it.)

During the hearings on Vietnam before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Dodd of Connecticut was asked what he thought of the sharp criticism of the government. “It is the price we pay,” he said, “for living in a free country.” This answer was routine and nobody questioned it. Yet what an astonishing evaluation of the democratic process it is, that free discussion is a weakness we must put up with in order to avoid the evils of another system! To Milton, Spinoza, or Jefferson free discussion
was the strength of a society. Their theory was that truth had power, often weak at first but steady and cumulative, and in free debate the right course would emerge and prevail. Nor was there any other method to arrive at truth, since there was no other authority to pronounce it than all the people. Thus, to arrive at wise policy, it was essential for everybody to say his say, and the more disparate the views and searching the criticism the better.

Instead, Senator Dodd seems to have the following epistemology of democracy: We elect an administration and it, through the intelligence service, secret diplomacy, briefings by the Department of Defense and other agencies, comes into inside information that enables it alone to understand the situation. In principle we can repudiate its decisions at the next election, but usually they have led to commitments and actions that are hard to repudiate. Implicit is that there is a permanent group of selfless and wise public servants, experts and impartial reporters, who understand the technology, strategy, and diplomacy that we cannot understand, and therefore we must perforce do what they advise. To be sure, they continually make bad predictions and, on the evidence, they are not selfish but partial or at least narrow in their commercial interests and political outlook. Yet this does not alter the picture, for if the President goes along with them, outside criticism is irrelevant anyway and no doubt misses the point, which, it happens, cannot be disclosed for reasons of national security. And surely irrelevant discussion is harmful because it is divisive. But it is the price we pay for living in a free country.

What can be the attraction of such a diluted faith in democracy? It is what is appropriate in a chronic low-grade emergency. In an emergency it is rational, and indeed natural, to concentrate temporary power in a small center, as the ancient Romans appointed dictators, to decide and act, and for the rest of us to support the
faits accomplis
for better or worse. But since we face a
low-grade emergency—nobody is about to invade San Francisco—we like to go on as usual, including sounding off and criticizing, so long as it does not effect policy.

Unfortunately, this psychology keeps the low-grade emergency chronic. There is no way to get back to normal, no check on
faits accomplis
, no accountability of the decision-makers till so much damage has been done that there is a public revulsion (as after a few years of Korea), or, as seems inevitable, one day a catastrophe. Worst of all there is no way for a philosophic view to emerge that might become effectual. Who would present such a view? In the classical theory of democracy, the electorate is educated by the clashing debate and the best men come forward and gain a following. But in Senator Dodd's free country, acute men are likely to fall silent, for what is the use of talk that is irrelevant and divisive?

The discussion in the Foreign Relations Committee, excellent as it was, was itself typical of a timid democracy. Not a single Senator was able to insist on basic realities that could put the Vietnam War in a philosophic light and perhaps work out of its dilemmas. (Since then, Senator Fulbright has become more outspoken.) In this context, here are some of the basic realities: In a period of world-wide communications and spread of technology, and therefore of “rising aspirations,” nevertheless a majority of mankind is fast becoming poorer. For our own country, is it really in our national interest to come on as a Great Power, touchy about saving face and telling other peoples how to act or else? In the era of One World and the atom bomb, is there not something baroque in the sovereignty of nation-states and legalisms about who aggressed on whom?

It will be objected that such anti-national issues can hardly be raised by Senators, even in a free debate. But the same limitation exists outside of government. In the scores of pretentious
TV
debates and panel discussions on Vietnam during the past two
years, I doubt that there have been half a dozen—and these not on national networks—in which a speaker was invited who might conceivably go outside the official parameters and raise the real questions. Almost always the extreme opposition is himself a proponent of power politics, like Hans Morgenthau. (It usually
is
Hans Morgenthau.) Why not A. J. Muste, for instance? Naturally the big networks would say that there is no use in presenting quixotic opinions that are irrelevant. (The word “quixotic” was used by General Sarnoff of the National Broadcasting Company in his successful bid to Congress to deny to third party candidates equal free time.) By this response, the broadcasters guarantee that the opinions will remain irrelevant, until history, “out of control,” makes them relevant because they were true.

This brings me back to my subject, how people are in the world when history is “out of control.” So far I have noticed those who unhistorically will to be in control and those who accept their powerlessness and withdraw. But there is another possibility, apocalypse, not only to accept being powerless but to expect, or perhaps wish and hasten, the inevitable historical explosion. Again there are two variants, for it is usually a different psychology, entailing different behavior, to expect a catastrophe and beat around for what to do for oneself, or to wish for the catastrophe and identify with it.

To expect disaster and desert the sinking ship is not a political act, but it is often a profoundly creative one, both personally and socially. To do it, one must have vitality of one's own that is not entirely structured and warped by the suicidal system. Going it alone may allow for new development. For instance, when the youth of the Beat movement cut loose from the organized system,
opted for voluntary poverty, and invented a morals and culture out of their own guts and some confused literary memories, they exerted a big, and on the whole good, influence. Also, the disposition of the powers-that-be to treat gross realities as irrelevant has driven many intellectual and spirited persons into deviant paths just to make sense of their own experience; thus, at present, perhaps most of the best artists and writers in America are unusually far out of line, even for creative people. They hardly seem to share the common culture, yet they are what culture we have. (According to himself, Dr. Timothy Leary, the psychedelics man, espouses the extreme of this philosophy, “Turn on, tune in, and drop out”; but I doubt that relying on chemicals is really a way of dropping out of our drug-ridden and technological Society.)

We must remember that with the atom bombs there is a literal meaning to deserting the ship. This factor is always present in the background of the young. For instance, during the Cuban missile crisis I kept getting phone calls from college students asking if they should at once fly to New Zealand. I tried to calm their anxiety by opining that the crisis was only diplomatic maneuvering, but I now think that I was wrong, for eyewitnesses of behavior in Washington at the time tell me that there
was
a danger of nuclear war.

More generally, the psychology of apocalypse and the decision to go it alone are characteristic of waves of populism such as we are now surprisingly witnessing in the United States. The rhetoric of the agrarian populism of the Eighties and Nineties was vividly apocalyptic, and that movement brought forth remarkable feats of co-operation and social invention. The current urban and student populism, as I have pointed out in these lectures, has begun to produce its own para-institutional enterprises, some of which are viable.

The practice of civil disobedience also must often be interpreted
in terms of the psychology of apocalypse, but even sympathetic legal analysts of civil disobedience fail to take this into account. It is one thing to disobey a law because the authorities are in moral error on some point, in order to force a test case and to rally opposition and change the law. It is another thing to disobey authorities who are the Whore of Babylon and the Devil's thrones and dominions. In such a case the conscientious attitude may be not respect but disregard and disgust, and it may be more moral for God's creatures to go underground rather than to confront, especially if their theology does not include an article on paradise for martyrs. As a citizen of the uncorrupted polity in exile, it might be one's civil duty to be apparently lawless. There is a fairly clearcut distinction between civil disobedience in a legitimate order and revolution that may or may not prove its own legitimacy; but the politics and morality of apocalypse fall in between and are ambiguous.

Quite different, finally, is the psychology of those who unconsciously or consciously wish for catastrophe and work to bring it about. (Of course, for the best youth to desert the sinking ship also brings about disaster, by default.) The wish for a blow-up occurs in people who are so enmeshed in a frustrating system that they have no vitality apart from it; and their vitality in it is explosive rage.

Very poor people, who have “the culture of poverty,” as Oscar Lewis calls it, are rarely so psychologically committed to a dominant social system that they need its total destruction. They have dreams of heaven but not of hellfire. A few exemplary burnings and beheadings mollify their vengeance. Their intellectual leaders, however, who are verbal and willy-nilly psychologically enmeshed
in the hated system, might be more apocalyptic. For instance, Malcolm X once told me—it was before his last period which was more rational and political—that he would welcome the atom bombing of New York to vindicate Allah, even though it destroyed his own community. James Baldwin is full of hellfire, but I have never heard much of it in popular religion.

On the whole, at present in the United States the psychology of explosive apocalypse is not to be found among rioting Negroes crying “Burn, baby, burn,” nor among utopian beatniks on hallucinogens; it is to be found among people who believe in the system but cannot tolerate the anxiety of its not working out for them. Unfortunately, it is a pretty empty system and anxiety is widespread.

Most obviously there is a large group of people who have been demoted or are threatened with demotion, business-men and small property owners who feel they have been pushed around; victims of inflation; displaced farmers; dissatisfied ex-soldiers; proletarians who have become petty bourgeois but are now threatened by automation or by Negroes invading their neighborhoods. Consciously these people do not want a blow-up but power to restore the good old days; but when they keep losing out, they manifest an astounding violence and vigilantism and could become the usual mass base for fascism. In foreign policy, where immigration has freer rein, they are for pre-emptive first strikes, bombing China, and so forth. I do not think this group is dangerous in itself—I do not think there is an important Radical Right in the United States—but it is a sounding board to propagate catastrophic ideas to more important groups.

My guess is that, under our bad urban conditions, a more dangerous group is the uncountable number of the mentally ill and psychopathic hoodlums from all kinds of backgrounds. Given the rate of mental disease and the arming and training in violence
of hundreds of thousands of young men, there is sure to be an increase of berserk acts that might sometimes amount to a reign of terror, and could create a climate for political enormities. Not to speak of organized Storm Trooping.

The most dangerous group of all, however, is the established but anomic middle class that I described previously. Exclusive, conformist, squeamish, and methodical, it is terribly vulnerable to anxiety. When none of its rational solutions work out, at home or abroad, its patience will wear thin, and then it could coldly support a policy of doom, just to have the problems over with, the way a man counts to three and blows his brains out. But this cold conscious acceptance of a “rational solution” would not be possible if unconsciously there were not a lust for destruction of the constraining system, as sober citizens excitedly watch a house burn down.