The Lost Massey Lectures (24 page)

To-day, young men of America are fighting, dying, and killing in Asian jungles in a war whose purposes are so ambiguous the whole nation seethes with dissent. They are told they are sacrificing for democracy, but the Saigon regime, their ally, is a mockery of democracy, and the black American soldier has himself never experienced democracy.

While the war devours the young abroad, at home urban outbreaks pit black youth against young soldiers and guardsmen, as racial and economic injustice exhaust human endurance. Prosperity gluts the middle and upper class, while poverty imprisons more
than 30-million Americans and, literally, starvation stalks rural areas of the south.

Crime rises in every segment of society. As diseases are conquered and health improved, mass drug consumption and alcoholism assume epidemic proportions.

The alienation of young people from society rises to unprecedented levels, and masses of voluntary exiles emerge as modern gypsies, aimless and empty.

This generation is engaged in a cold war, not only with the earlier generation, but with the values of its society. It is not the familiar and normal hostility of the young groping for independence. It has a new quality of bitter antagonism and confused anger, which suggests basic issues are being contested.

These are unprecedented attitudes because this generation was born and matured in unprecedented conditions.

The generation of the past 25 years cannot be understood without remembering that it has lived during that period through the effects of four wars: World War II, the “cold war,” the Korean War, and Vietnam. No other generation of young Americans was ever exposed to a remotely similar traumatic experience. Yet as spiritually and physically abrasive as this may be, it is not the worst aspect of contemporary experience. This is the first generation to grow up in the era of the nuclear bomb, knowing that it may be the last generation of mankind.

This is the generation not only of war, but of war in its ultimate revelation. This is the generation that truly has no place to hide, and no place to find security.

These are evils enough to send reason reeling. And of course they are not the only ones. All of them form part of the matrix in which this generation's character and experience were formed. The tempest of evils provides the answer for those adults who ask why this young generation is so unfathomable, so alienated, and
frequently so freakish. For the young people of to-day, peace and social tranquility are as unreal and remote as knight errantry.

Under the impact of social forces unique to their times, young people have splintered into three principal groups, though of course there is some overlap among the three.

The largest group of young people is struggling to adapt itself to the prevailing values of our society. Without much enthusiasm, they accept the system of government, the economic relationships of the property system, and the social stratifications both engender. But even so, they are a profoundly troubled group, and are harsh critics of the
status quo
.

In this largest group, social attitudes are not congealed or determined; they are fluid and searching. Though all recent studies point to the fact that the war in Vietnam is a focus of concern, most of them are not ready to resist the Draft or to take clearcut stands on issues of violence and non-violence. But their consciences have been touched by the feeling that is growing, all over the world, of the horror and insanity of war, of the imperative need to respect life, of the urgency of moving past war as a way to solve international problems. So while they will not glorify war, and while they feel ambiguous about America's military posture, this majority group reflects the confusion of the larger society, which is itself caught up in a kind of transitional state of conscience as it moves slowly toward the realization that war can not be justified in the human future.

There is a second group of young people, the radicals. They range from moderate to extreme in the degree to which they want to alter the social system. All of them agree that only by
structural
change can current evils be eliminated, because the roots are in the system rather than in men or in faulty operation. These are a new breed of radicals. Very few adhere to any established ideology; some borrow from old doctrines of revolution; but practically
all of them suspend judgment on what the form of a new society must be. They are in serious revolt against old values and have not yet concretely formulated the new ones. They are not repeating previous revolutionary doctrines; most of them have not even read the revolutionary classics. Ironically, their rebelliousness comes from having been frustrated in seeking change within the framework of the existing society. They tried to build racial equality, and met tenacious and vicious opposition. They worked to end the Vietnam War, and experienced futility. So they seek a fresh start with new rules in a new order. It is fair to say, though, that at present they know what they don't want rather than what they do want. Their radicalism is growing because the power structure of to-day is unrelenting in defending not only its social system, but the evils it contains; so, naturally, it is intensifying the opposition.

What is the attitude of this second radical group to the problem of violence? In a word, mixed; there are young radicals to-day who are pacifists, and there are others who are armchair revolutionaries who insist on the political and psychological need for violence. These young theorists of violence elaborately scorn the process of dialogue in favor of the “tactics of confrontation”; they glorify the guerrilla movement and especially its new martyr, Che Guevara; and they equate revolutionary consciousness with the readiness to shed blood. But across the spectrum of attitudes towards violence that can be found among the radicals is there a unifying thread? I think there is. Whether they read Gandhi or Franz Fannon, all the radicals understand the need for action—direct self-transforming and structure-transforming action. This may be their most creative, collective insight.

The young people in the third group are currently called “hippies.” They may be traced in a fairly direct line from yesterday's beatniks. The hippies are not only colorful, but complex; and in many respects their extreme conduct illuminates the negative
effect of society's evils on sensitive young people. While there are variations, those who identify with this group have a common philosophy.

They are struggling to disengage from society as their expression of their rejection of it. They disavow responsibility to organized society. Unlike the radicals, they are not seeking change, but flight. When occasionally they merge with a peace demonstration, it is not to better the political world, but to give expression to their own world. The hard-core hippy is a remarkable contradiction. He uses drugs to turn inward, away from reality, to find peace and security. Yet he advocates love as the highest human value—love, which can exist only in communication between people, and not in the total isolation of the individual.

The importance of the hippies is not in their unconventional behavior, but in the fact that some hundreds of thousands of young people, in turning to a flight from reality, are expressing a profoundly discrediting judgment on the society they emerge from.

It seems to me that the hippies will not last long as a mass group. They cannot survive because there is no solution in escape. Some of them may persist by solidifying into a secular religious sect: their movement already has many such characteristics. We might see some of them establish utopian colonies, like the 17th and 18th century communities established by sects that profoundly opposed the existing order and its values. Those communities did not survive. But they were important to their contemporaries because their dream of social justice and human value continues as a dream of mankind.

In this context, one dream of the hippy group is very significant: and that is its dream of peace. Most of the hippies are pacifists, and a few have thought their way through to a persuasive and psychologically sophisticated “peace strategy.” And society at
large may be more ready now to learn from that dream than it was a century or two ago; to listen to the argument for peace, not as a dream, but as a practical possibility: something to choose and use.

From this quick tour of the three main groupings of our young people, it should be evident that this generation is in substantial ferment. Even the large group that is not disaffected from society is putting forward basic questions, and its restlessness helps us understand the radicals with their angry protest, and the hippies with their systematic withdrawal.

When the less sensitive supporters of the
status quo
try to argue against some of these condemnations and challenges, they usually cite the technological marvels our society has achieved. However, that only reveals their poverty of spirit. Mammoth productive facilities with computer minds, cities that engulf the landscape and pierce the clouds, planes that almost outrace time: these are awesome, but they cannot be spiritually inspiring. Nothing in our glittering technology can raise man to new heights, because material growth has been made an end in itself, and, in the absence of moral purpose, man himself becomes smaller as the works of man become bigger.

Another distortion in the technological revolution is that instead of strengthening democracy at home, it has helped to eviscerate it. Gargantuan industry and government, woven into an intricate computerized mechanism, leaves the person outside. The sense of participation is lost, the feeling that ordinary individuals influence important decisions vanishes, and man becomes separated and diminished.

When an individual is no longer a true participant, when he no longer feels a sense of responsibility to his society, the content of democracy is emptied. When culture is degraded and vulgarity enthroned, when the social system does not build security but induces peril, inexorably the individual is impelled to pull away
from a soulless society. This process produces alienation—perhaps the most pervasive and insidious development in contemporary society.

Alienation is not confined to our young people, but it is rampant among them. Yet alienation should be foreign to the young. Growth requires connection and trust. Alienation is a form of living death. It is the acid of despair that dissolves society.

Up to now, I have been looking at the tragic factors in the quarter-century of history that to-day's youth has lived through. But is there another side? Are there forces in that quarter-century that could reverse the process of alienation? We must now go back over those 25 years to search for positive ingredients which have been there, but in relative obscurity.

Against the exaltation of technology, there has always been a force struggling to respect higher values. None of the current evils rose without resistance, nor have they persisted without opposition.

During the early 1950s the hangman operating with the cold-war troops was McCarthyism. For years it decimated social organizations, throttled free expression, and intimidated into bleak silence not only liberals and radicals but men in high and protected places. A very small band of courageous people fought back, braving ostracism, slander, and loss of livelihood. Gradually and painfully, however, the democratic instinct of Americans was awakened, and the ideological brute force was routed. By the way, Canada played a valuable role.
CBC
radio produced a satire of extraordinary brilliance on McCarthyism entitled
The Investigator
, which was recorded and widely circulated in the United States with devastating effect.

However, McCarthyism left a legacy of social paralysis. Fear persisted through succeeding years, and social reform remained inhibited and defensive. A blanket of conformity and intimidation
conditioned young and old to exalt mediocrity and convention. Criticism of the social order was still imbued with implications of treason. The war in Korea was unpopular, but it was never subject to the searching criticisms and mass demonstrations that currently characterize opposition to the war in Vietnam.

The blanket of fear was lifted by Negro youth. When they took their struggle to the streets, a new spirit of resistance was born. Inspired by the boldness and ingenuity of Negroes, white youth stirred into action and formed an alliance that aroused the conscience of the nation.

It is difficult to exaggerate the creative contribution of young Negroes. They took non-violent resistance, first employed in Montgomery, Alabama, in mass dimensions, and developed original forms of application—sit-ins, freedom rides, and wade-ins. To accomplish these, they first transformed themselves. Young Negroes had traditionally imitated whites in dress, conduct, and thought in a rigid, middle-class pattern. Gunnar Myrdal described them as exaggerated Americans. Now they ceased imitating and began initiating. Leadership passed into the hands of Negroes, and their white allies began learning from them. This was a revolutionary and wholesome development for both. It is ironic that to-day so many educators and sociologists are seeking methods to instill middle-class values in Negro youth as the ideal in social development. It was precisely when young Negroes threw off their middle-class values that they made an historic social contribution. They abandoned those values when they put careers and wealth in a secondary role. When they cheerfully became jailbirds and trouble makers, when they took off their Brooks Brothers attire, and put on overalls to work in the isolated rural south, they challenged and inspired white youth to emulate them. Many left school, not to abandon learning, but to seek it in more direct ways. They were constructive school dropouts; a variety that
strengthened the society and themselves. These Negro and white youth preceded the conception of the Peace Corps, and it is safe to say that their work was the inspiration for its organization on an international scale.

The collective effort that was born out of the civil-rights alliance was awesomely fruitful for this country in the first years of the 1960s. The repressive forces that had not been seriously challenged for almost a decade now faced an aroused adversary. A torrent of humanist thought and action swept across the land, scoring first small and then larger victories. The awakening grew in breadth, and the contested issues encompassed other social questions. A phalanx of reliable young activists took protest from hiding and revived a sense of responsible rebellion. A peace movement was born.