Notebook: Self-Hatred and the Politics of Kicks

...Which may or may not help explain why so many of us are so profoundly ambivalent about their "idealism," regarding it as morally praiseworthy, pure, innocent, and all that, yet deeply distrustful of these virtues when they intrude themselves into arenas of domestic and international conflict where we have learned to believe that other virtues, the ones we call "sophisticated," properly belong...

...A "decline in the attitude toward authority" means that there are no more authors or that the emperor has no clothes or, to put it more formally, that assent in the legitimacy of a power source is being withdrawn, which of course, is a conventional step in "revolutions" (many of which are not revolutions at all but an attempt to restore something perceived as lost or usurped...

...But using politics for redemptive or expressive purposes is very dangerous in a world armed to the nuclear teeth...

...I'm not the sort of ressentiment-filled intellectual who says things like that, and besides, what it means is not even clear...

...Under the circumstances, political rage may seem far from the worst alternative...

...and this will be true so long as "organization men" and "status seekers" are not flattered when they are called by these names...

...And I said to myself (with, I noted, an immediate touch of defensive irony) there's an arresting (arrestable...

...Action" in this sense is found in extreme circumstances where something very valuable is risked (like physical safety or self-conceptions...

...The enrages, as "idealists," are tilters at windmills, who, if they had the choice and were conscious of its consequences, would prefer a grand moral gesture to a politically calculated act...

...even if one loses (does one hope to lose...

...Honor and reward are probably not the right words, since money and prestige are in pretty good supply (in any case our cultural rhetoric is rich in ways to derogate money, and as for prestige, it is enough to observe that the word's Latin source means delusion...

...The student left which today shouts so righteously against "this immoral war" in Vietnam is composed of much the same sort of people who less than ten years ago were deploring John Foster Dulles's conduct of foreign policy for, among other things, the inappropriateness of its moral evangelism in delicate political situations...

...I call this the politics of kicks, but I don't intend the term as a put-down because there is a part of me that thinks one has a right to expect one's political acts to be morally satisfying regardless of what they may or may not achieve...

...The hostile arrogance in the young man's voice, which showed through his patronizing attempt at affecting a teasing good humor, suggested that if the veteran radical was old and tired (he was neither), that is, did not have "heady expectations," then it was about time he ceased posing as a radical since only the politically erotic—wild-eyed and possessed—had a right to the label...

...But the feeling persisted, and I kept asking myself what I could have meant (a stubbornness I like to think is salutary since, for an intellectual who is not an artist, one of the few functions left to feeling is to evoke analytic thought about itself and about the extent to which it —the feeling—represents an authentic response to something perhaps only dimly perceived but really there, or whether it's simply another dreary projection of private need which would be much better suppressed...

...I do believe (and in this respect I may be beat—though I doubt it) that conferences of the kind in which you (and I) are engaged are significant less for providing a solution to the problems that occasion them than for what they reveal about the way in which problems are "handled...

...Trying to imagine this VDC leader conducting negotiations with a foreign government, as the peace of the world hangs in the balance, is almost enough to turn one into a conservative...

...Now "idealism" and "sophistication" are terms which describe polar attitudes toward the possible...

...The nobility of defeat is certainly easier to handle than the responsibilities of victory...

...Eliot's bleak sermon...

...One can choose to modify practice, to bring it into better accord with what is preached—as we are trying to do with regard to race relations...

...you don't have to win for it to have been worthwhile...

...Win, lose, or draw, to fight for the moral right is ennobling, and this is what rebellious students want to do...

...Or, finally, one can try to alter beliefs and values in order to bring them more into line with "the realities of the situation" (or, as Marxists would say, to get rid of "false consciousness," and thus, as Marxists would not say, reduce cognitive dissonance...

...A society which hasn't yet learned how to make heroic images out of the types of people it really needs and is committed to, creates an uneasy population vulnerable to ideological appeals catering to its need for heroic models...

...Probably the very best thing they do is come up with what J. K. Galbraith called positions of "permissible originality...

...Where one has hold of a political issue that is at the same time a burning moral issue (as with peace and civil rights), then involvement can easily become its own reward...

...Self-Hatred and the Politics of Kicks This article is a revised version of a letter to Daniel Bell responding to a request for some ideas to be discussed at a conference of the "Committee on the year 2000...

...thought, started to type it out to see how it looked on paper, when my inner censor said no no, that won't do...

...I remember Lipset muttering over and over with a bitter and sarcastic anger rare for him, "the moral men have won" —suggesting that Kerr had been squeezed between the moral indignants of the right and left until he had no more room to maneuver...

...Politics as kicks is expressive, is redemptive...

...To all but the most intransigent authoritarian, after all, defiance is a vice or a virtue depending on what one thinks about its object...

...And to be typical and a bore is a fact very painful to face...

...the experience enlarges one...

...I remember Marty Lipset last winter presiding at a hastily-called meeting of interested University of California faculty to consider what to do about Clark Kerr's suddenly announced resignation in the midst of the so-called "filthy speech controversy...

...I mean that our culturalemotional rhetoric is poor in symbols which glorify or glamorize or even simply praise the roles and the types of character the society has actually devoted itself to fabricating...

...My recent memories include not only Lipset searching for an accommodation, but also, a young leader of the VDC insolently baiting an editor of DISSENT, a veteran of the radical movement, not on any substantive issue of politics, but—believe it or not—about whether his "expectations" were still "heady...

...He is typical, but he's also a bore...

...In this context, irony of ironies, most of the beats are not moral avant-gardists at all, but old-fashioned moralists who prefer finding some relatively insulated niches in the social structure, relatively safe from the sort of sanctions the major institutions can invoke against their own personnel...

...Presumably Patrick Henry and Nathan Hale (those Bonzes from our grammar school texts) experienced a decline in their attitude toward authority...

...to be exquisitely immobilized, and hung up with Coleridge's "feelings all too delicate for use," is no better...

...But behind the impatience and the occasional anger that political moderates like Lipset feel toward the politically enraged, I often suspect there lies a good deal of latent resentment that the enrages seem always to capture the moral ground, leaving the moderates Ors with little but their more or less sophisticated preoccupation with tactics aimed apparently at nothing more grand, ennobling, or exciting than the sustenance of the present precarious institutional balance—which is precisely what the enraged idealists scorn, preferring their own vulnerable and corruptible utopias...

...I think the enrages are enraged at Them—at a system of social order perceived as robbing them of kicks and denying them satisfaction ("I Can't Get No Satisfaction"), as the price of an admission ticket to the prosperous, orderly Great Society, where men are reasonable, willing to compromise, ready to give a little in order to get a little...

...I think that part of our ambivalence toward these enrages is founded in the ritual function they perform for us: we live a bit of our vicarious lives through them...

...One day not very long ago, while sitting in front of a typewriter trying to write something on the reluctance of youth to grow up, I thought: This is a society which hates itself...

...There are several ways of dealing with conflicts between practice and preachment, or social structure and values...

...But the practice of their old-fashioned moralities leads them, as Erving Goffman has suggested, to where the action is, to live with the sorts of danger and exploit which our moral vocabulary is well equipped to celebrate but which our social structure is ill equipped to accommodate...

...Still, most of the available models of political men seem hardly more attractive...

...Willy Loman's wife, exhorting us to "pay attention to this man" is Arthur Miller insisting that his salesman is a tragic hero because he's typical...

...And a society which seems unable convincingly to glorify those men who manifest its most representative virtues may be said to be a society which doesn't like itself very much...

...Or one can take the "sophisticated" position, and observe that all societies institutionalize duplicity, and, having observed it, begin getting used to the fact by searching for the func tions of the duplicity...

...So to say that the politics of the beats is for kicks is not a damaging criticism, just as it is not damaging to impugn the motives of the Vietnam Day Committee at Berkeley or of civil rights activists, by saying that they do what they do "just for publicity" (since publicity influences people, and public opin ion presumably influences the Administration...

...You ask for my topofthe-head thoughts on "the enrages or the beat or simply the deviant," and one of the first things that occurs to me is that it is precisely that sort of question—and the purpose for which it is asked—that enrages the enrages and induces the confirmation of the beat...

...A society which hates itself is one that is unwilling or unable to honor or reward the social roles and the kinds of human character its major institutions commit it to produce...

...When Iittle boys are asked what they want to be when they grow up, they should be able to say (with swelling chest and trembling voice), "I want to be a registrar in a college" or "I want to be a dental technician" or "I want to be a console operator...

...If, as you say, the novel (indeed, as you suggest, all of culture) is "antiinstitutional" it is because the institutions are perceived as encouraging the behavior which our values (culture) do not celebrate, and sometimes actually disdain...

...The sophisticated are people concerned only with the presently possible, and whose energies are devoted to finding and using the most efficient means to achieve it...

...The enrages or the beat or simply the deviant" are people whose naivete is in a way charming, almost quaint, because their orientations are still primarily moral and expressive, by which I mean that they still get terribly upset by discrepancies between what is practiced and what is preached, and extract deep satisfaction from passionately expressing that upsetness...

...A place where men "maintain themselves by the common routine/Learn to avoid excessive expectation/ Become tolerant of themselves and others/Giving and taking in the usual actions/ What there is to give and take...

...and so on to the end of Mr...