Charles Reich's Con Job: The Greening of America Turns Twenty
Mallon, Thomas
BOOK REVIEWS T t was twenty years ago today, Professor Reich taught the kids to say: Consciousness III is coming. My college sociology prof, who took it all quite seriously, called it "Con III."...
...Again, we learn that in 1968 "a majority of people certainly wanted peace, but they could not turn their individual wills into action by society...
...The only bit of hard information, of a rather wistful kind, in the passage quoted above, is that in the fall of 1970 acceptance of the word "life-style" was still tentative enough for it to require a hyphen...
...It is as if some unseen divider, a glass partition, a plastic coating, a separate curtain of conversation, has been removed, leaving people effortlessly closer...
...Nouwen, Sheldon Vanauken, Richard J. Mouw, Russell Kirk, and Robert Coles...
...Professor Reich uses his very first paragraph to let the reader know that the old order giveth way to the new: America is dealing death, not only to people in other lands, but to its own people...
...If you write, teach, give speeches, you know the great value of your research notebook, with its notes, ideas, outlines, and plans...
...His passage about American high schools offers a perfect example of the new academic's self-satisfaction with metaphor...
...One is relieved to go back and find how bad many of its reviews were ("hard to excuse in a mature adult"—Saturday Review), but, then again, the popular press is usually less faddish and gullible than the professoriate...
...When it comes to universities themselves, Reich deplores their continuing lack of imagination ("We cannot get beyond the idea that a university is `private property' or that prose is different from poetry"), though he does note some encouraging developments: "Student ideas on curriculum have begun to get a response...
...Not so easy with your old notebook...
...So let's not think of this as a lame book: let's think of it as a differently abled one...
...Naming names" was always a left-wing bugaboo...
...Actually, they did want peace, but they were disinclined toward surrender...
...Heaven forbid...
...And when they do kick in, "a single pizza or a single Coke is passed from person to person in the same room...
...corporations...
...Ignorance and vulgarity burp up from every page in self-parodic sentences that would earn a big, penciled "Good...
...By that time, Charles A. Reich, the 42-year-old Yale law professor who had started his career at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, was the favorite new thinker on campus...
...Uptight Con II professionals, he laments, "do not listen to music together, or lie on the grass and look at the sky together, or share food, or sit silently and exchange vibrations...
...The University of Chicago's Martin E. Marty, a Lutheran, says that, "if predictability is the death of journalism, think of the NEW OXFORD REVIEW as alive and lively...
...Let's saddle up and ride with him once more, out of the "one vast, terrifying anti-community" that is America...
...Their faces "seem to have lived more, even in their short years," but their road "is open to all others...
...Many became highly paid corporate lawyers, using their know-how to help their clients avoid attempts at public regulation...
...We kick around a wide variety of issues and defy easy pigeonholing...
...Reich speaks of "conversions," convincing himself, as in a nerd's erotic dream, that everything will now be different: "What the new generation has already achieved is a way of being with other people that is closer, warmer, more open, more sensitive, more capable of sharing, than prior generations have known...
...A little child shall hustle them...
...Those who write for us include such diversely penetrating intellects as Christopher Lasch, Avery Dulles, John Lukacs, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Robert N. Bellah, Walker Percy, Henri J.M...
...As for Reich's view of the middle class, it is hard to separate smirking pity from hatred...
...They adopted the life-style of wealth, power, and success...
...Faith or reason...
...And where, long time passing, have all the New Dealers gone...
...Please allow 2 to 8 weeks for delivery of first issue) SPECIAL DISCOUNT RATES ^ One-year subscription $14 (regularly $19) ^ One-year student, unemployed, or retired person's subscription $12 (regularly $16) ^ Two-year subscription $23 (regularly $35) NAME (Please print or type) STREET ADDRESS CITY STATE ZIP CODE FOR FIRST-TIME SUBSCRIBERS ^ One-year Canadian or foreign subscription...
...perhaps that's why Reich almost invariably declines to name a single member of any category he devises in a book that shows an almost Dantesque love of classification...
...Easily cross-reference your notes, ideas, topics — the one thing that is very difficult to do without Squarenote...
...One matter on which Reich differs measurably from the current Am-Civ crowd is that of drugs...
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...It was killed by the machines: "Independence was replaced by a grumbling servility...
...Surfing—as opposed to status-conscious skiing—is cool: "In the world that now exists, a life of surfing is possible, not as an escape from work, a recreation or a phase, but as a life—if one chooses...
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...It's forgiving of errors...
...The following instance of repetition is revealing: "In the executive suite, there may be a Leger or Braque on the wall, or a collection of African masks, there may be a vast glass-andmetal desk, but there is no one there...
...Beyond even these are the moviemakers, who "especially" come "quite close to the truth" about society...
...You will argue perhaps that I am quoting Professor Reich out of context...
...His generalizations are not gross...
...But Reich rolls Beethoven over very gently: "It is no criticism of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century geniuses to say that today's music has found a world they never knew...
...US$17 (regularly $22) Payment must be drawn in US Dollars O Sample copy $3.50 Send coupon or letter...
...Most new users are up and working in fifteen minutes...
...Some keep their research notebook as a bound journal, others in a loose-leaf binder, others as a set of index cards...
...Reich professes to detest power ("The very existence of power is an evil"), but his descendants are preoccupied, above all else, with "empowerment...
...Navy yukking it up while looking through the cross hairs of the five-inch gun he's firing at the North Vietnamese coast...
...They profess belief in town-gown "Community," but that community usually means the radical and disadvantaged and not the wage-earners, who are regarded as society's pitiable androids...
...Only "because the organization keeps everyone so busy...
...The good news, back in 1970, was that Con II had "worn itself out, fighting the know-nothing-ism of an earlier America," leaving room for, yes, Con III...
...Nearly all of them took jobs where they served the very interests which were the enemies against which the New Deal fought...
...Keep using your tried and true notebook...
...Nor is anyone convinced that he should work for the good of the CHARLES REICH'S CON JOB The Greening of America Turns Twenty Thomas Mallon 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990 community...
...They add, he declares, "a whole new dimension to creativity and to experience...
...they are Joan Baez or Bob Dylan, working in a bank or a filling station until their minds and bodies have forgotten the poetry that was once in them...
...Millions of Americans did, from installment to installment in the New Yorker and then through the hardback edition of October 1970...
...Reich's evidence tends to come more from literature than from life...
...Perceptive people are now re-examining the treasure of Christian humanism and exploring that ancient, but living and expansive, tradition exemplified by Moses, Jesus, St...
...They are driven by outside authority, not merely that of the state and their employer, but by the nameless authority that says 'it must be done this way,' the authority of what Heidegger called 'the they.' " Why is truth so imperceptible to the them, that is, the gas-pumping, check-cashing, would-be troubadours...
...We are told that in 1968 "the people never got a chance to vote for Gene McCarthy...
...As for fundamentalism in its Christian form, it's actually a new-fangled departure from historic Christianity...
...Of course, what Reich is talking about never really happened at all (people looked rather bizarre for several years and in all other aspects remained exactly the same), but even on a self-delusory level it didn't persist very long...
...Oh, thanks, son...
...Having failed to remake the larger world, they have settled for running a toy one, creating a mad new arts curriculum and viewing the outside world with appalled contempt...
...D eich's style is reminiscent of a .L\ 1970 term paper composed in the course of a speed-driven all-nighter...
...Besides them, he rails against nightmarish coercions: "A high school boy must cut his hair or be suspended, a civil servant must refrain from political activity, a college teacher must publish in scholarly journals...
...all sense of power and potency passed out of his hands...
...Try Before You Buy...
...Reich produces a lot of movie-trailer prose ("a scene as beautiful and awe-inspiring as anything ever put onto film"), and displays a general tendency when discussing all aspects of artistic endeavor to write the way Joel Siegel talks...
...sciousness II "that the richness, the satisfactions, the joy of life are to be found in power, success, status, acceptance, popularity, achievements, rewards, excellence, and the rational, competent mind...
...And it's a lot easier to modify notes with Squarenote, because it has a built-in editor...
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...Yes, those are a few of his least favorite things...
...Oddly enough, the Con III sprites, with their unlimited power of choice—all of it paid for by the Con II drones—seem, as Reich describes them, more robotic than anyone: "All choices arethe 'right' choice (for all lead outward) . " Con III types are so mellow and tolerant that they will find the good in everyone: "A person who thinks very poorly is still excellent in his own way...
...It was quite logical, and quite democratic...
...He must continually remake his definition as he learns more about himself and his world...
...Actually they tried for all of it and have ended up complaining that downward mobility has left them with too little money to buy all the poison white bread for which they developed a late craving...
...In describing the dreary Con II world still teetering in place, Reich asks his readers to swill it down whole hog after whole hog, providing not even the sort of evidence Ronald Reagan's detractors used to characterize as "anecdotal...
...l'C Magazine's Editor's Choice Award Write or Call 617-277-9222 Lucy Lynch, Author UnionSquareWare 27 S t.Mary's Court, Brookline, MA 02146 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990 39 to one embarrassed or afraid, is a form of violence...
...Actually, a life of surfing has always been possible if you were willing to hang ten over dad's wallet...
...The latter goes, as it were, with the flow...
...Reich's dedication offers his book "FOR THE ST'UDENTS AT YALE WHO MADE THIS BOOK POSSIBLE AND FOR THEIR GENERATION...
...This introductory offer at $99 is limited to the readers of The American Spectator Magazine.] If for any reason you don't want to keep Squarenote, just send it back, and you don't owe us a cent...
...Reading Reich in 1990 is not purely an exercise in nostalgia, because his style of thought (it has no substance, but it does follow a recognizable mode) is still quite alive, at least in one place...
...Humanism & Religion: Enemies ? God or Man...
...But mainstream, incarnational Christianity is, aside from some aberrations, none of the above...
...And they're doing it in the pages of the NEW OX FORD REV 1E W. An ecumenically-minded monthly magazine edited by serious lay Catholics, we've been characterized by Newsweek as "thoughtful and often cheeky," by Utne Reader as "surprisingly original," and by the Library Journal as "incisive . . . brilliant...
...The other noticeable change between Reich and his Am-Civ heirs involves U.S...
...he has to laugh at himself...
...By the mid-eighties, however, young people would be requiring that equally profound thinker, Oliver Stone, to tell them about the wrong turn they'd taken down Wall Street...
...This is the language of the race-, class-, and gender-obsessed courses, where feeling replaces thought, and analysis gives way to a self-congratulatory empathy...
...If you listen to the electronic fundamentalists or village atheists, these are mutually exclusive choices...
...The degree of curricular change twenty years later would have astonished him, but he can take credit for contributing to the semantic debasement in which what have been called victim-based studies are now carried out...
...This is what Reich says about "the tragedy of the white-collar and blue-collar worker": "If they had an individual excellence or greatness, in some area, it has been passed over by society...
...That does not mean, however, that a personal definition will not include careful training for competence and excellence...
...Then, after you have tried it, if you want to keep Squarenote, send us $99...
...the group is sharing its bread and wine...
...He constructs Con III in the same self-delighting manner with which a science-fiction writer concocts and codifies a planet: "The individual must define his own career and his own terms...
...An examination or test is a form of violence...
...The chief difference between Cons II and III is that the former "has beenconvinced that man's needs are best met by trying to dominate experience rather than being subject to experience...
...Francis, Aquinas, Thomas More, Tolstoy, Newman, Niebuhr, Merton, C.S...
...How many poor parents must have opened their presents on Christmas morning 1970, to find what Junior had gotten for them, for $7.95, at the college bookstore...
...Talk to a retired school teacher in Mendocino, a judge in Washington, D.C., a housewife in Belmont, Massachusetts, a dude rancher in the Washington Cascades...
...To Reich they are the omnipotent engines of oppression and psychosis: to today's Am-Civ lecturers they are pitiful giants, mocked for their weakness, scolded for letting everyone down by being insufficiently big and powerful and competitive...
...Consciousness, Reich writes, "is a term that already has several meanings, including an important one in Marx, a medical one, a psychoanalytical one, a literary or artistic one, and one given us by users of hallucinogenic drugs...
...So say the most thoughtful and passionate of our youth, from California to Connecticut...
...Trust me: he is that rare thing, an author who benefits from being quoted out of context...
...No one can take himself entirely seriously in bell bottoms...
...On the subject of unsatisfying work, this is his idea of an "example": "There is, for example, no advertising designed to create pride in craftsmanship or in a worker's self-discipline...
...Imagine a Consciousness II university professor, or even a college athlete, in bell bottoms, and all of his pretensions become funny...
...A number of university presidents have been forced out...
...from more than one instructor of my collegiate memory and current acquaintance...
...Compulsory gym, A Better Research Notebook For PC Users Who Write, Teach, Give Speeches, Or Conduct Seminars...
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...Con I, you may recall, was pre-industrial and Jeffersonian, occasionally admirable but much too dumb and not very groovy...
...And will have none of it...
...Berkeley, CA 94706 PAYMENT MUST ACCOMPANY ORDER 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990...
...The new music is the most outasight thing of all: "It has a complexity unknown to classical music, even to symphonies written for full orchestra...
...Did you hear him...
...he's kiddie-worshipping: "The young people start with entirely different premises, and all is revealed to them...
...we mean violence in the sense of any assault upon, or violation of, the personality...
...As a prof, he is not just kiddie-whipped...
...Helpful, no doubt, in finding the fridge as the munchies kick in...
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...Make check payable to NEW OXFORD REVIEW...
...they are intergalactic...
...dex cards, with Squarenote there's always more room on the page...
...It is a book one would have to be ashamed to have written, its success a more convincing example of "the shabbiness and tawdriness of American mass culture" than any cited by Reich himself...
...Why risk loosing your research notebook...
...Reorganize, resequenceyournotes and ideas — at the touch of a key — to gain fresh insight into your field of research...
...Pick something pointless and extreme and run it into the ground, and you'll dull the students into believing it meaningful: "What the school determines to accomplish it does so in a constant and total atmosphere of violence...
...I guess that lets out Wallace Stevens back at the Hartford, though it doesn't stop Reich from using a Stevens verse as one of his three epigraphs...
...Unlike paper pages and inSquarenote runs on any IBM-compatible PC with 384K of RAM, floppies or hard disk, monochrome or color monitor, and any printer...
...Reich hopefully cites the evolution of Charles Goodell—one of those Republicans who "grew"—after Nelson Rockefeller appointed the congressman to serve out Robert Kennedy's Senate term: "New York's Senator Goodell, a backward-looking man when he represented an upstate constituency, grew sideburns and became a vocal liberal as he became the representative of the entire state . . . " The month after The Greening of America was published, the voters of the state of New York, in their first chance to vote on Senator Goodell, threw him out of office and replaced him with William F. Buckley's brother...
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...He also declares that "a truly sensitive person just could not stand to ride to New York on the Penn Central railroad...
...Must we, then, opt for either modernity's "polar night of icy darkness and hardness" (Max Weber) or some pied piper...
...the disinclination being stronger than the desire, they chose continued war...
...This realization is not limited to the new generation...
...No one at all is in the executive suite...
...Now there is a better way to keep your research notebook— with Squa re notem , the electronic notebook, on your PC...
...it affirms the transcendent dignity of the human person — body, mind, and soul...
...It is Consciousness III, by the way, not II or I, that "can appreciate Vivaldi as well as the blues...
...See for yourself the ease of use, and great value of keeping your research notebook on Squarenote...
...the worker must submit to the authority of the bosses...
...Reich doesn't like to describe it too "systematically and analytically," because to do that is to "engag[e] in an intellectual process which Consciousness III rejects...
...in Reich's margins...
...At times Reich seems to take Peter Pan's method for his own ("Now all we have to do is close our eyes and imagine that everyone has become a Consciousness III: the Corporate State vanishes"), but the language of the re-education camp has a way of poking through: "The young people of Consciousness III see effortlessly what is phony or dishonest in politics, or what is ugly and meretricious in architecture and city planning, whereas an older person has to go through years of education to make himself equally aware...
...We do not mean physical violence...
...More than anything else, The Greening of America sounds like the book of a professor who hopes to score with his students...
...No one...
...Con III freaks and chicks burn incense at home "to restore the sense of smell," and marijuana effects something like "what happens when a person with fuzzy vision puts on glasses...
...His motto seems to be a variation on one of his era's mottoes: if it feels good, say it...
...If you haven't given up on God or humanity, join the stimulating conversation and subscribe today...
...That place is the university campus, which, like The Grateful Dead, just keeps rolling along, with programs in American Civilization presided over by professors who have the same cartoonish, middle-class-hating views as Reich...
...Professor Reich was forthright r about his dislikes, which included the "cruel deception" persuading ConThomas Mallon's most recent book is Stolen Words: Forays Into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism (Ticknor & Fields...
...Modify and add to your notes as often as you wish, without re-writing or running out of space...
...They "have to be worn to be understood...
...Private property is referred to in quotation marks, and election results are subject to interpretive dismissal...
...The Greening of America, on its twentieth anniversary, is recommended to the very young, with one last warning: Never trust anyone over sixty...
...That's right—not one single person, anywhere...
...He's remade the point not because it may elude the reader, but because he thinks it's so profound it should be repeated for a hush or prolonged applause...
...Freshman classics like Melvilles Bartleby and Death of a Salesman come in handy, though Vonnegut and Kesey (that "remarkable book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest") and R. Crumb's Head Comix (twenty-six lines of "Stoned" are quoted) are the really important belletristic buttressings...
...it is condemnatory of human nature, fearful of the body, suspicious of the intellect, and antagonistic to social justice...
...The fundamental spirit of The Greening of America is, of course, totalitarian...
...If only it had lasted...
...Reich wrote of middle-class families, circa 1970: "With the unerring perceptiveness of the child, their children have read these messages from the lifeless lives of their 'successful' parents, have seen marriages break up because there was nothing to hold them, have felt cynicism, alienation, and despair in the best-kept homes of America...
...Print out parts of your notebook to take to your lecture, seminar, etc...
...The requirement that a student must get a pass to walk in the hallways is violence...
...He writes that "No person with a strongly developed aesthetic sense, a love of nature, a passion for music, a desire for reflection, or a strongly marked independence, could possibly be happy or contented in a factory or white-collar job...
...He decries stuffy apartments and warns against some shocking consumer dangers: "Some products are showing a noticeable deterioration in quality, others can be frighteningly dangerous in the wrong hands (an oven cleaner that can damage the eyes...
...Not satisfied with simple party lines, the editors probe and nudge and jab in the hope of inducing fresh thought...
...Imagine a bell-bottomed sailor in the U.S...
...In fact, they did, in a number of primaries, many of which he lost...
...The next Con, the technocratic Con II, reached its sad maturity with the New Deal, which "did succeed in coping with the Depression emergency, which might have brought down the whole system, but the system's problems were preserved along with it...
...Thank heavens bankruptcy would soon put all those poetes maudits out of their commuting miseries...
...O ne's pen could run dry writing "Evidence...
...Many others served as executives of large corporations...
...In our time we've witnessed the inability of secular modernity to bring moral coherence or spiritual depth to life, and the concomitant rise of menacing fundamentalisms, from the so-called Bible Belt to Israel, the Muslim world, and beyond — not to mention the proliferation of bizarre cults...
...This world or the next...
...Lewis, Christopher Dawson, Dorothy Day, Archbishops Romero and Tutu, Lech Walesa, and Mother Teresa...
...But he knows what he likes, bell-bottomed pants for one thing...
Vol. 23 • October 1990 • No. 10
