Society without Aim

...It lies precisely where the behavioral problem that so exercises the system's spokesmen lies...

...It is all somehow engaging, like a late evening conversation with a man who, although not a specialist, suddenly decides to bring all the knowledge of his maturity to bear on a problem you never thought he cared about and does it with passionate concern, positing idealistic, perhaps Utopian answers and ultimately using the problem as a metaphor for an examination of the condition of man in our time...

...pleasure...

...The style, then, is prima facie evidence that we are in the presence of a man who is blessedly not a reporter who must clothe his thought—or rather, lack of it—in the style ap-pioved by our journalistic organization in order to lend it authority...

...By opting out of the system they have sought, and found, a new, healthier reality...

...Thus, in this book quotations from the classic philosophers and the literature of psychology rub shoulders with the argot of the street and of the literary man...

...For the socio-economic-political system which orders our lives is interested only in production and profit, and ritualistically invokes the old language only on state occasions when it is trying to reassure everyone that everything is still O.K...

...Juvenile gangs, beat and angry cabals all suggest an attempt to organize new, small communities existing outside the larger one, communities in which men can again live fully as human beings...

...Goodman is here ostensibly addressing himself to the plight of our youth...

...Further, it is evidence that the writer is going to do something more than the Vance Packards of the world attempt...

...It is rare for the writer of social commentary to eschew the middlebrow journalese which is the conventional diction of this increasingly popular quasi-art form and to speak, like an artist, in a voice that is uniquely his own...

...Why are they causeless rebels...

...The evidence of their eyes tells them it is untrue...

...These aborted revolutions, begun in a simpler day when a small ruling class could impose liberal, humane, individualistic values on a closed society which, for all its dislocations, had a genuine sense of community, have left us a language which sounds noble when we discuss the problems of living, but which is irrelevant to the reality of our existence and is worse than useless when we attempt to couch plans for action in it...

...Our problem is not to encourage the reintegration of these communities into our present society but to encourage more like them, communities cut to the scale of man, not of machines and organizations...

...All the recent doings of problematic youth . . . have had the stamp of at least partially springing from some existent situation, whatever it is, and of responding with direct action, rather than keeping up appearances and engaging in phony role playing," he says...

...The great mass of men don't, in their hearts, believe this stuff...

...But he suggests there is a glimmer of hope...

...Human cogs, members of the lonely crowd, lacking a feeling of their own worth and therefore of genuine community spirit based on mutual respect, shut off from the realization of manly goals (and even manly work) through which they could express their true selves, they find themselves isolated and rebellious against the system they know— however dimly—is the cause of their trouble...

...Goodman's book is profoundly pessimistic...

...I don't know how to describe, precisely, the quality of Goodman's writing, but it accurately reflects the man, novelist, poet, psychologist and, above all, independent urban intellectual and all-around man of letters he has been for many years...

...is always dependent on function...

...Reviewed by Richard Schickel The first thing that strikes the reader of Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd is its remarkable style...

...When we have done that, it is possible that we will discover, just for example, that "enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies ongoing activity...

...And why does the conventional wisdom fail so dismally in attempting to deal with their malaise...

...Why, he asks, are the kids so feckless, so lacking in goals and ambitions, so withdrawn from the concerns that animate adult society...

...Since man can function well only if he feels that he, the individual, is important and what he does is not absurd routine but vitally important to the community, this is an answer not just to the problems of juvenile delinquency but to the entire existential problem of our production line society...

...In a startling metaphor, Goodman suggests that our society is a closed room from which we cannot escape and in which we seem to be doomed either to participate, griping, in the rat race or condemned to watch it proceed in a state of horrified withdrawal...

...He suggests, as an historical approach, that our age is the product of failed, or half-finished, revolutions —social, sexual, political, economic, religious...