Disappointed but Not Resigned
Blake, Casey Nelson
Photo used in Paul Goodman Changed My Life, a JSL Films production. Courtesy of Sally Goodman. PAUL GOODMAN FOR OUR TIMES Introduction In I960, Paul Goodman—social thinker, activist, poet, and...
...PAUL GOODMAN FOR OUR TIMES Introduction In I960, Paul Goodman—social thinker, activist, poet, and novelist—published his groundbreaking book Growing Up Absurd...
...The young know quite a lot, but their elders (including the very students Goodman described) have deprived them of a sturdy tradition of social criticism that should be their birthright...
...Who else moved so easily from calls to abolish nuclear weapons and ban cars from Manhattan to a plan to replace hospital nurses' starchy whites with easy-to-wash seersuckers...
...Michael Brown's wise and eloquent essay proves him wrong...
...His criticism was an appeal to Americans' "horse sense," the imperiled "habit of making independent judgments and in democratically rubbing shoulders with all kinds and conditions...
...It is lacking in the opportunity to be useful...
...Disappointed but Not Resigned CASEY NELSON BLAKE "The young are honorable and see the problems," Paul Goodman wrote in 1968, "but they don't know anything because we have not taught them anything...
...It corrupts the fine arts...
...It is lacking in honest public speech, and people are not taken seriously...
...Goodman saw more clearly than most of his "crazy young allies" in the 1960s that the United States suffered from a crisis of meaning that could not be resolved by politics alone, least of all the politics of "revolution...
...The title of one of his collections, Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals, captured what was unique about the man...
...More than eight hundred young people responded with essays...
...Goodman admitted his tone was that of an "Angry Middle-Aged Man, disappointed but not resigned...
...This spring, Dissent and JSL Films, creator of the upcoming documentary Paul Goodman Changed My Life, sponsored an essay contest in which people under thirty were asked to name the most pressing social and political issue of our times and write a utopian essay that included practical proposals...
...With luck, Jonathan Lee's forthcoming film Paul Goodman Changed My Life will lead viewers back to Goodman's work and that of the critics who inspired him...
...Tradition has been broken," Goodman wrote fifty years ago, "and yet there is no standard to affirm...
...But he was not obtuse in insisting that all those capitalized words mattered, and that their waning was a source of profound sadness for many Americans...
...It has no Community...
...Goodman wrote some of his most provocative and far-sighted essays for Dissent, including one co-authored with his brother, Percival, in which he called for the banning of all cars in Manhattan...
...As young people they were "early resigned" and stayed that way...
...Essays by the two runners-up, John Connelly and Cameron Quinn, are available at www...
...The tradition of Thoreau, James, Veblen, Addams, Dewey, Bourne, and Mumford that Goodman kept alive in the postwar years has apparently become an embarrassment to those aspiring to "global citizenship" and a "post-national" consciousness: its masterworks barely figure in humanities courses...
...As a result, young Americans find themselves exiled from their country's moral narrative...
...Because he was an anarchist from the outset, and never a communist, Goodman didn't waste the cold war years apologizing for having been na?ve about the Soviet Union...
...It corrupts ingenuous patriotism...
...It was reprinted in a collection called Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals...
...His penetrating indictment of "our abundant society" in Growing Up Absurd still stands...
...Culture becomes eclectic, sensational, or phony...
...Casey Nelson Blake teaches history and American Studies at Columbia University...
...Today's disappointed but not resigned—women and men of all ages—should hunt down his fugitive writings and read them...
...He is writing a longer essay on Paul Goodman for Raritan...
...The elevation of consumption over satisfying work had fostered a base cynicism among Americans of all backgrounds...
...Goodman had an uncanny ability to make the most radical suggestions sound eminently reasonable, as if Photo by Paul Hawken, included in Paul Goodman Changed My Life, a JSL Films production...
...It dampens animal ardor...
...It discourages the religious convictions of Justification and Vocation and it dims the sense that there is a Creation...
...It shackles science...
...dissentmagazine.org...
...An "organized system of reputations" had displaced older standards of excellence that challenged the young to master and surpass what they had inherited from previous generations...
...Forty years later, though his influence is felt throughout our culture, his books are mostly out of print, and his name is all but forgotten by those under the age of forty-five...
...Irving Howe observed that "Goodman continues to write as if it were still possible to move people: perhaps not sufficiently or in sufficient numbers, yet with some sense that speech remains a power...
...Seemingly at odds, the corporate executive, the juvenile delinquent, and the Beat were united in thinking that role-playing comprised the sum total of human relations...
...An examination of youth disaffection in our affluent but spiritually empty society, Goodman's work inspired and galvanized a burgeoning generation of sixties students and intellectuals...
...It has no Honor...
...They had lost the very idea of an "objective changeable world," the "conviction that there is a Creation of the Six Days, a real world rather than a system of social rules that indeed are often arbitrary...
...Instead, he dispensed with traditional political formulas as he sorted through the cultural wreckage left by "the missed and compromised revolutions of modern times...
...It is lacking in enough man's work...
...We are pleased to print here the essay of the winner, Michael J. Brown, along with essays by the judges, all of whom were influenced by Goodman...
...The new editions of several of his books brought out by PM Press are a good place to start...
...The difficulty Goodman had in defining his own position over the years—a "community anarchist," a "Neolithic conservative," or (my favorite) an "anarchist patriot"— speaks more to the uselessness of political labels than any uncertainty in his thinking...
...Judges for the contest were Casey Nelson Blake, Dick Flacks, and Deborah Meier...
...It thwarts aptitude and creates stupidity...
...All were steps citizens could take to live more human lives...
...Goodman was obtuse in thinking the maladies he diagnosed in that book were irrelevant to the experiences of girls and women...
...they were projects that free people could agree on and pursue that very day...
...Nor did he beat a familiar path from Left to Center or Right...
Vol. 57 • October 2010 • No. 4
