Anti-American Generation

Edgar Friedenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351531511
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the social atti-tudes that distinguish today's youth from their predecessors, identifies the sources of these attitudes in the social experiences of today's youth, and analyzes the stereotype implied in the term "Anti-American Generation." These essays show clearly that the issue between the dissenting, primarily middle-class youth and their elders and most of the working class (regardless of age) is a difference of opinion not about Americanism but about moral behavior and the scope of moral judgment. What distinguishes the generations is not so much their feelings about their country, as' their feelings about what people should do about their feelings and the role feelings should have in the conduct of one's life. The at-titudes of the young are largely in conflict with an older cultural tra-dition that promotes the subordi-nation of impulse and personal conviction to rational control for the sake of common purposes and future acceptability and effective-ness.

1 Introduction

EDGAR Z. FRIEDENBERG

The title assigned this volume by the editors of trans-a.cûon seems to me misleading, though, as the middle-class middle-aged say, I can live with it. It is hard to be sure just what my age and class mates mean by the phrase "to live with"; but we use it, in any case, to refer only to persons and conditions we don't feel very strongly about. There are a lot of those. Most young people never use it at all.

Though it is indeed true that the United States, with its folkways, mores, and foreign policy constitutes a set that a great many young people do feel strongly—and negatively —about, and that this certainly helps distinguish them from my generation, I don't think the distinction is a matter of being anti-American. The middle-class, middle-aged, are not pro-American. One of the curious distinctions of our time and place is that no significant social group seems to be affirmatively pro-American. Who defends the war in Vietnam as public policy, or the satisfactions offered by the media as aspects of a truly good and bounteous life? Even the working class, though conventionally patriotic, intends its flags and diurnal auto-headlights as symbols of resentment and hatred, not of affirmation and well-being. If you want to see an ordinary American leap with joy, it would be best, perhaps, to go wait on the moon. The astronauts seem genuinely joyful in their patriotism, are certainly ordinary; and, anyway, the leaping is easier. Closer to home, it's a lot harder to make it.

What tends to distinguish the generations is not so much their feeling about America as their feeling about feeling and what people should do about their feelings. This is brought out in several of the articles included in this book. In our society, people over 30 are likely to look upon their feelings as a problem rather than a resource or reliable guide. We try to compensate for them, so as to remain unbiased; to control ourselves and our impulses so that they will not lead us into temptation or liaisons dangereuses, or even into behavior that, granted other people's expectations of persons in our role, would be embarrassing or disruptive. When this process becomes unbearably depriving we seek therapeutic help in strengthening the rational component of our psyche, which we have learned to think of as compartmentalized, to keep us from doing what we know we aren't supposed to do. If this fails, we seek further help, as needed, to keep us from feeling guilty about having done it, since we know that guilt makes us inefficient and may lead to various somatic disorders, reduced efficiency and possibly lowered life-expectancy, none of which should happen to a rational man. The more sophisticated middle-aged may also seek therapeutic help in becoming able to love, and, in the language of our generation, to relate meaningfully to others, since these are among the most important duties of a responsible member of the middle-class, and closely linked, as we say, to self-esteem.

The young, by contrast, are more likely to look upon their feelings as a guide to what is good, and certainly to what is good for them, and to view the demands of society and the expectations of others—if these are based on role rather than the way each perceives the other as a person— as the problem; and often as a problem that cannot and should not be approached by rational means, since what is defined as rationality in our society is in itself a supremely alienating form of self-abuse. It would surely be repetitious here to restate the by now over-familiar insistence of the young on spontaneity and authenticity as the wellsprings of responsible moral action. Nevertheless there are certain aspects even of this familiar dialectic that still seem— indeed, on the basis of the evidence of the papers in this volume—to require clarification.

First, this generalization, besides being very crude, specifically neglects the effects of social class on the relationship, which distort it considerably, though probably not in a very complex way. Generally speaking, working-class youth will tend to be more uptight and conservative than middle-class. In the working class, there is no anti-American generation; blue-collar youth is likely to be strongly and sometimes violently anti-hippie and, in its own view, apolitical, though working-class hostility may be the prime political fact of our time. Blue-collar youth does not merely support its local police; it is the local police. It is also a prime source of conventional challenge to the law and order it will later so grimly support; but this challenge is not ideological. Working-class youth break the law; they don't attack the system, though those aspiring to middle-class status may adopt some "mod" attitudes and manners in the familiar pattern of anticipatory socialization. Walter B. Miller's "White Gangs," which are lower-to working-class in membership are prime examples of this apolitical activism which has not disappeared, and may not even have diminished. It has simply become much less of a threat to the silent majority, which prefers familiar patterns of juvenile delinquency to black militants, to student protest demonstrators whom it calls rioters, and to middle-class youngsters who distribute underground newspapers it regards as obscene and who smoke pot, thereby defining themselves as addicts. The violence of conventional working-class juvenile delinquents may even be encouraged to control the middle-class dissidents—a rather common ploy in high schools which often depend on athletic coaches and their teams of primarily working-class "jocks" to keep the the longhairs literally whipped into line. In English cities, counterinsurgent groups of lower-status native born youth have already institutionalized themselves as "skinheads," closely shaven, whose raison d'etre is the harassment of their long-haired age mates and blacks.

It is of working-class youth, now grown to young manhood, that the American army is largely composed. "The Army," as Paul Goodman said in Growing Up Absurd, "is the poor boy's IBM." The Marine Corps, as a matter of policy, is apparently all skinhead, at least in bootcamp; while the tensions and hostilities between white marines— especially non-commissioned officers—and black marines over the Afro hair styles worn by some of the latter at Camp Lejeune suggest that the stress of leaving a young man's hair alone may exceed the Corps' limits of tolerance. Charles Moskos, Jr.'s article "Vietnam: Why Men Fight" is an excellent account of the terrifying ideology that governs the behavior of these young men who so firmly believe they have none; and whose notable lack of patriotic fervor is accompanied by a bovine refusal to consider the war and their roles in it as a part of any moral or political context, coupled with a high level of hatred and contempt for those who do.

In their refusal even to admit the relevance of moral judgment to the question of either the continuance of so ghastly a war or their own conduct within it, American soldiers resemble much more closely the attitudes of their elders than those of youth. In this sense, at least, the Army does build men. It might be thought peculiar and, after the events at My Lai positively inconvenient, that a society should have come to define moral insensitivity as a mark of maturity. Yet, this paradox can be explained; and the explanation contributes greatly to an understanding of what "the anti-American generation" is really against, and why a corresponding polarization has developed in every industrialized country of the world, including those, like Canada, that have neither a draft nor direct involvement in the Vietnam war as issues which directly threaten the younger generation.

What is at issue between the dissenting, primarily middle-class youth on the one hand; and their elders and most of the working class regardless of age, is not a difference of opinion about the content of moral behavior, but about the scope of moral judgment. The content issues are obviously phony. It is possible to object sincerely and on moral grounds to the use of drugs that affect the mind— but not for a drinking man. It is possible, as many genuine conservatives have done through the ages, to insist, sincerely, that for the sake of social stability even repressive laws must be enforced. But for those who take this position, it is clearly even more vital that law enforcement officials themselves be held accountable before the law. American law-and-order enthusiasts characteristically take the contrary position; no evidence suffices to convict a policeman for violence against hippies, Black Panthers, war resisters or participants in protest demonstrations; and it is rare for the^v victim to avoid adding a conviction for resisting arrest or "interfering with government administration" to the physical injuries he has sustained. As Michael E. Brown makes very clear in his article on "The Condemnation and Persecution of Hippies," those who condemn and persecute dissident youth most enthusiastically are in no way committed to respect the legal rights of others as the basis for a just or orderly society.

A rather striking illustration of this proposition is reported in the Buffalo Evening News December 6, 1969, in a front page story from Chicago, whose Federal Bench is not distinguished by its tenderness toward young people who took part in protests during the 1968 Democratic National Convention:

A federal jury deliberated less than 30 minutes Friday and found a Chicago policeman innocent of violating a college students' civil rights during last year's Democratic National Convention.

U.S. District Judge James B. Parsons expressed disbelief when the not-guilty verdict was returned in the case of Thomas M. Mayer, 44.

Mayer was charged with threatening and striking Kevin W. Cronin Jr., 20, of Chicago, on August 30, 1968, when he learned the youth had participated in demonstrations.

"Are you certain that's the verdict?" Judge Parsons asked. "I am surprised," he added.

"It is unfortunate under our law that the government doesn't have the right to ask for a new trial. If they did, I'd grant it," Judge Parsons said.

The characteristic of dissenting youth that arouses most hostility in its adversaries is not the specific content of their moral ideology or nature of their impulse-life, but the depth of their conviction that their conduct should be guided by their moral ideology and illuminated by their impulse-life. The dominant ideology of the older generation—and, especially, of the middle-class liberal—is based on a contrary moral view: that it is wrong to antagonize people if you can avoid it, or to be arrogant and uncompromising, or to make a divisive display of one's personal views or idiosyncrasies, or to spoil a good team play by acting out on your own. The rationale for this moral position is, of course, derived from the demands of consensus politics in the small group as well as the state. To behave in such a way as to destroy consensus or even to impede its formation is immoral because it is held to be impractical and counterproductive. It disrupts negotiations, and may lose you and your associates their turn next time and their share in the negotiated settlement. Victory, as such, is not anticipated. Only extremists would seek victory in Vietnam; but its destruction ought to be accepted without moral indignation as an unintended but now probably inevitable consequence of the interplay of American social and political interests and ambitions. The Vietnam war is really just a special case of industrial pollution which will have to be dealt with later by appropriate techniques. If we destroy the land of the Vietnamese we can always issue the survivors Diners' Club cards.

The silence of the "silent majority," then, does express a moral position; a genuine and consistent belief in the subordination of impulse and personal conviction to rational control for the sake of a common purpose and future acceptability and effectiveness. In a contest over the morality of instrumental behavior as compared to expressive behavior, it does seem that the former should win hands down and, presumably, hanging loosely at the sides in an innocent position. It is surely more rational, almost by definition, to behave sensibly rather than to allow oneself to be swayed by emotion. But by definition, though not by current usage, "rational" implies above all a sense of proportion—a ratio in which feeling has its place in the denominator; wisdom does not permit calculation to approach the infinite. And even a trace of linguistics—even the merest smattering of French—suffices to remind that the word "sensible" in English has lost precisely those connotations it retains in French that make it sensible; its root is in feeling, not thought.

What makes this conflict between rational and expressive morality—and hence between the anti-American generation and their elders or straight youth—crucial, dangerous and probably irreconcilable is the fact that our peculiar conception of rationality as a process to which feeling is alien and from which it must be excluded is derived from fundamental aspects of Western industrial society. It is not the result of any misunderstanding that could be cleared up by discussion or education: our educational system, in fact, is designed to indoctrinate students with just this conception of rational authority; which is a major reason that their hatred and distrust have come to center on the schools. And it does not seem to be related to the form of the economy, though capitalist modes still retain certain norms of individualism, largely obsolete in practice but still available as moral resources with which to fight the system, that youth in the more uptight of the communist countries must struggle along without. The most lucid and complete statement of the philosophical and political processes involved in producing this impasse is contained in an essay by the Canadian philosopher, George Grant. Though this is entitled and primarily directed toward "The University Curriculum", {Technology and Empire [Toronto, Anansi, 1969] pp. 113-133) Professor Grant's analysis applies to our entire cracked social monolith. The dynamism of technology has gradually become the dominant purpose in western civilization because the most influential men in that civilization have believed for the last centuries that the mastery of chance was the chief means of improving the race. It is difficult to estimate how much this quest for mastery is still believed to serve the hope of men's perfecting, or how much it is now an autonomous quest. Be that as it may, one finds agreement between corporation executive and union member, farmer and suburbanite, cautious and radical politician, university administrator and civil servant, in that they all effectively subscribe to society's faith in mastery.

The purpose of education is to gain knowledge which issues in the mastery of human and non-human nature. Within the last hundred years, it has become increasingly clear that the technological society requires not only the control of non-human nature, but equally the control of human nature. This is the chief cause of the development of the modern "value-free" social sciences. A society in which there are more and more people living in closer and closer proximity will need enormous numbers of regulators to oil the works through their knowledge of intelligence testing, social structures, Oedipal fixations, deviant behavior, learning theory, etc. . . .

For the social scientists to play their controlling role required that they should come to interpret their sciences as "value-free". . . Social sciences so defined, are well adapted to serve the purposes of the ruling private and public corporations. . . From the assumption that the scientific method is not concerned with judgments of value, it is but a short step to asserting that reason cannot tell us anything about good and bad, and that, therefore, judgments of value are subjective preferences based on our particular emotional makeup. But the very idea that good and bad are subjective preferences removes one possible brake from the triumphant chariot of technology.

In looking more closely, however, it will be seen that the fact-value distinction is not self-evident, as is often claimed. It assures a particular account of moral judgment, and a particular account of objectivity. To use the language of value about moral judgment is to assume that what man is doing when he is moral is choosing in his freedom to make the world according to his own values which are not derived from knowledge of the cosmos. To confine the language of objectivity to what is open to quantifiable experiment is to limit purpose to our own subjectivity. As these metaphysical roots of the fact-value distinction are not often evident to those who affirm the method, they are generally inculcated in what can be best described as a religious way; that is, as doctrine beyond question.

Class liberalism is the ideological cement for a technological society of our type. Its sermons have to be preached to the young, and the multiversities are the appropriate place. That the clever have to put up with this as a substitute for the cultivation of the intellect is a price they must pay to the interests of the majority who are in need of some public religion. . . . Western men live in a society the public realm of which is dominated by a monolithic certainty about excellence—namely that the pursuit of technological efficiency is the chief purpose for which the community exists. . . . Modern liberalism has been a superb legitimizing instrument for the technological society, because at one and the same time it has been able to criticize out of the popular mind the general idea of human excellence and yet put no barrier in the way of that particular idea of excellence which in fact determines the actions of the most powerful in our society. The mark of education is claimed to be scepticism about the highest human purposes, but in fact there is no scepticism in the public realm about what is important to do.

The fact that in our society the demands of technology are themselves the dominating morality is often obscured by the fact that the modern scientific movement has been intimately associated with the moral striving for equality. . . .The tight circle in which we live is this: our present forms of existence have sapped the ability to think about standards of excellence and yet at the same time have imposed on us a standard in terms of which the human good is monolithically asserted. ... It would be presumptuous to end by proposing some particular therapy by which we might escape from the tight circle of the modern fate. The decisions of western men over many centuries have made our world too ineluctably what it is for there to be any facile exit. Those who by some elusive chance have broken with the monolith will return to the problem of human excellence in ways too various to be procrusteanly catalogued. The sheer aridity of the public world will indeed drive many to seek excellence in strange and dangerous kingdoms (as those of drugs and myth and sexuality). In such kingdoms, moderation and courage may be known by the wise to be essential virtues. But when such virtues have been publicly lost they cannot be inculcated by incantation, but only rediscovered in the heat of life where many sparrows fall. Much suffering will be incurred by those who with noble intent follow false trails. Who is to recount how and when and where private anguish and public catastrophe may lead men to renew their vision of excellence.

In the concluding paragraph quoted, Grant is clearly referring to those, among others, who have broken with the monolith to become hippies, and has acutely identified certain of the flaws in the hippie way of life that are most threatening to its viability and its integrity. The total thrust of his argument also sharply contradicts the assumptions of those, among whom Berger may, I think, fairly be counted, who see in the emergence of the hippie subculture largely a rerun of earlier chiliastic countercultural movements. There are resemblances; the hippies do in certain respects resemble the early Christians locked in mortal combat with Rome; at the time, it must have seemed almost as obvious as it does in viewing the condemnation and persecution of hippies that it was they the combat was going to be mortal to. History gives us a somewhat different perspective; of the latter centuries of the Roman Empire one may say, elegiacally, if you gotta go, that may be the way to go; while the Christians are more of a problem than ever; and some, like Father Berrigan and Father Groppi, are still pretty early. But the major difference is between the earlier cultures that came to be rejected by their young on moral grounds and our own. Though authoritarian and often even tyrannical, none of these earlier establishments was pervaded by the peculiarly modern and willfully amoral letch for technological domination that Grant ascribes to our own—a state of mind too witless and trashy even to be called hubris. The Romans, by Athenian standards, were technology freaks, to be sure; like us they thought plumbing, turnpikes and military display very valuable. But it is to be doubted that they would have attempted to launch an expedition to the moon; and certainly if they had they would not have dared to identify it with Apollo. It seems unwise. Legend does not hold Apollo, though a moderate god, to be conscientiously opposed to violence; and the Goddess of the moon, Diana, is his sister. And a huntress in her own right.

Grant's argument thus explains, I believe, two very important and unresolved questions about the various social subgroups included in this set of papers as part o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• Part I
• Part II