Bridging the Gap
Gliedman, John
Bridging the Gap The Whole World Is Watching. A Young Man Looks at Youth's Dissent, by Mark Gerzon. The Viking Press. 267 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by John Gliedman Conspicuous among the books dealing...
...Still worse, the occasional excursions into high school rhetoric make it all too tempting to ignore what he is saying and to dismiss him as merely naive...
...But he seems to have misjudged the proper attitude to take toward his audience...
...In spite of everything, they still look to society to provide positive challenges to their idealism...
...Not in the positive sense of the Enlightenment, but in the negative sense of the scientist who rationally exhausts every possibility before accepting (or rejecting) a theory...
...First of all, the book is too long...
...The generational difference must be stressed...
...Far more serious is the matter of the tone...
...It would be a far better one but for several grave flaws...
...Gerzon is radical enough to make traditional liberals uncomfortable about the possibility that he and his cohorts are their ideological heirs...
...Most of these are forthright, but badly written...
...It is likely, but by no means certain, that this fraction embodies its generation's version of liberalism...
...Though competent, he is unoriginal and often superficial...
...But he has carried off something almost as interesting—a piece of outstanding ideological biography...
...This is the stuff of an interesting, sometimes a fascinating book...
...Nonetheless, we must be grateful to Mark Gerzon for making the attempt to explain his generation to an older audience...
...This is flattering, but the flattery rings hollow in a book which fairly vibrates with criticism of nearly every aspect of traditional authority...
...Where Gerzon and those like him part company with the rest of their generation is in their proposals for political action...
...It makes us curious about what will come next...
...Behind the attempt to explain his position, a rather terrifying experiment seems to be taking place...
...Reviewed by John Gliedman Conspicuous among the books dealing with the generation gap are those written from the other side of the great divide—first hand accounts of what it's like where it's at, by SDS activists, hippies of various religious persuasions, women's liberationists, and the like...
...This is probably a good thing...
...Written when he was nineteen, The Whole World Is Watching is one of those books which succeeds as much because of its flaws as in spite of them...
...Gerzon seems to be giving one last chance to the hypothesis that American society is amenable to rational persuasion...
...For one thing, he accepts most of the criticisms of American society leveled at it by the New Left and the hippy underground...
...But there is something else too, something more exclusively contemporary...
...And like them, he is "hung up" on the new quadrivium of "love," a changed definition of masculinity and femininity, the avoidance of hypocrisy at any cost, and a categorical imperative to discover one's thing and then to do it...
...His analysis is, I believe, typical of the way an important but often overlooked part of his generation views itself and the world...
...Half or even a third as many pages would suffice...
...But above all, they believe in rationality...
...Even Henry Adams waited until the end of his life to place his youth in historical perspective...
...It is not so much that they really believe that the system can be radically reformed from within, but that they desperately want to believe that it can...
...There is more than a little of John Dewey in Gerzon's strategy of argument...
...Gerzon's book is neither sociology nor autobiography, but a mixture of both...
...They approach the reader on a take it or leave it basis...
...Attempts to bridge the generation gap—to tell why it is as well as how it is—are rare indeed...
...Instead of treating his reader as an equal, he treats him as a superior...
...To be sure, Gerzon writes well—outstandingly so for a budding social scientist...
...Gerzon has not provided a coherent analysis of his generation...
...Gerzon should know his McLu-han well enough to prevent the medium from sabotaging the message...
...It promises more...
...It is impossible to avoid the feeling that Gerzon is trying to manipulate us...
...In spite of its defects, The Whole World Is Watching is not merely a useful clue to how a certain group of young men view themselves and the world...
Vol. 34 • February 1970 • No. 2
