The Worldwide Revolt of the Young
Howe, Irving & Coser, Lewis & Lowenthal, Richard
Richard Lowenthal is a veteran of the German socialist movement. As an exile from Hitler's Germany he worked for many years as a political journalist in London. Now a professor of political...
...We don't know how to transform troubles into issues...
...HOWE: It lost vitality and it had recurrences, but still in the actual experiences of the people living at that time, Christianity had recurrent waves of influence and power...
...LOWENTHAL: Similarly, they are not grateful that they do not have mass unemployment...
...There are related cultural problems: education in connection with leisure, education in connection with democratic control...
...are creating intellectual structures that give a common approach to these fields...
...To begin with, this is the second generation of the Cold War...
...If the kids are really Marxist, well, they have a lot of the conditions for doing a good job of political criticism in this society...
...As the welfare state, bourgeois democratic society achieves a certain stability, there is a tendency for the major parties to move closer together in their programs...
...They have a will to fail, or think it morally better to fail...
...By that I mean that these young people have not lived through the formative crises that created the present division of the world into antago nistic blocs...
...Sex means rejection of society with its repressive rules...
...I don't think that in the reality of the lives of these people sex plays such an enormous role as it does in their THE WORLDWIDE REVOLT OF THE YOUNG talk...
...They have not seen Stalin bestriding Europe...
...And then, the movement changes gradually as the ideology becomes less important, fewer people read, and the violence becomes more important...
...At present he is working on a book about modern totalitarianism...
...It seems possible that in some ways he is being vindicated as a great prophet...
...And suppose he said: The trouble is that you people are still caught up with the values and assumptions of the industrial age, while we are already part of the postindustrial age...
...HOWE: If You were hostile about it, you could say we are parasitical on the traditional religions...
...About this terrestrial mission, the best comment can be found in a passage Goethe wrote in The Italian Voyage: "A good society is one which will look like a huge hospital where we all minister to the needs of each other...
...HOWE: Will you spell that...
...But partly they were wrong...
...In its extreme form, in Germany, many of the students are literally fatherless—either their fathers were killed in the war or the marriage of their parents broke up immediately after the war...
...But there is something else which puzzles me: the enormous role of sex in this present revolt—there's something phony about it...
...I more and more feel that the greatest prophet of the modem era, apart from Marx and maybe Freud, was Dostoyevsky...
...Perhaps what we now have is the inversion of the classical Puritan idea that you must repress sex in order to work hard...
...COSER: The notion of conspiracy is quite interesting because you find it both at the extreme Right and extreme Left of the political spectrum, in both cases probably among people who feel they are not geared into the political process...
...Now this is closely connected with the original romantic revolt against specialization...
...HOWE: Approximately a million people in America belonged to one or another of the radical parties in the 30s...
...Apologists for the system often say that a lot of the decisions involve not real choices deriving from opposing value-systems but are inherent in the conditions of modern existence, and that the power of bureaucracy expresses this compulsion...
...So we have a quasi-revolutionary attitude of the young in a situation that is not thought of as revolutionary by society as a whole...
...partly what they felt was based on experience...
...LOWENTHAL: I sometimes surprise my radical students who complain about the "betrayal" of the Social Democrats by telling them that the German industrial working class refused for years to accept the Social Democratic critical slogans against a society still largely based on capitalist ownership, so that the Social Democrats more and more came to terms with it...
...Marcuse, after all, started with Heidegger, not with Marx...
...Now the old way of retaining the link, the humanistic, all-around man, is no longer attainable...
...Consequently, the anti-Stalinist tradition in which we have been brought up seems to them at best outmoded and at worst a form of acquiescence to the status quo...
...In studying the origins of Italian fascism I found that, at the root of the frustration of the young before 1914 in Italy, there was precisely that same sense of political frustration induced by the compromises of Giolitti and other parliamentary leaders...
...LOWENTHAL: If I may say so, that is a much more harmless phenomenon than most of the things we've been talking about, because in time the children will take up where their radical fathers left off...
...LOWENTHAL: This is true for some intellectuals...
...COSER: All this hangs together with the general rejection of the idea of representative democracy and an attempt to go back to a model of direct democracy somewhat like that proposed by Rousseau, in which the citizens have to get together and make decisions on a small scale...
...But the gammlers are not really the equivalent of hippies...
...But, on the whole, this is not the problem in the American university...
...Just as Dostoyevsky saw that sometimes the yearning for Christ is manifested through images of Antichrist, so very often what's happening among the kids today, though they haven't much awareness of this, is that they are trying to express through political channels desires and impulses which are essentially not political at all but are religious or quasi-religious...
...But both the parents who did suppress their past and those parents who were proud of it told their children romantic stories about their radical past: in both cases, it seems to me, what you have is a reappearance, a recurrence, of the power of Marxism...
...In California there is lots of talk about touching people, quite apart from sex as such...
...Sure," they say, "I understand that you like Your work—you write articles, you make speeches—or a doctor likes his work...
...At the same time, you have to give people a sense of the wider value of their specialty...
...In Rudd's case, Momma brought him sandwiches while he was sitting in at Columbia...
...I don't mean that it's a fascist movement...
...they have to do with the development of our civilization...
...For example, if containment in Western Europe had A DISCUSSION not succeeded they would not even be in a position to fight against the unfavorable consequences of the Cold War...
...Problems of education are central for the coming generation, partly because it's an increasingly technological and scientific society in which the gulf between people who have the scientific training and those who haven't is getting to be a very serious one...
...there's less sub-culture, less ideology to them...
...It has nothing to do with political revolution, it's not even a cultural revolution: its a cultural counterrevolution, a dissolution...
...HOWE: I was fascinated by the fact that Professor Habermas, who had been the grey eminence of the radical students in Germany, wrote a very sharp attack on them in which he even used the word "Left-fascist...
...HOWE: Do politics and "gratitude" ever have much to do with each other...
...But their critique of existing society has many basically antiliberal elements, which in Germany take on an anti-Western undertone—it all goes back to a German romanticism they have in common with the critics from the Right...
...HOWE: It gives the sense—or illusion?—of unity...
...That is what people are looking for—if you like, a substitute religion...
...The difference in this present student secession is that it takes place in apparently functioning societies, societies with full employment and steady economic growth, without stagnation or obvious political repression, not suffering from alien rule, etc...
...But those who come after them have the idea that it's a wonderful revolutionary feat to insult professors, if not to beat them up...
...And some sense of the overall connection of things has to be given: this is also required by the inwardness of modern science itself...
...Now a professor of political science at the Free University of Berlin, Lowenthal is also the author of numerous studies on European Communism...
...This is exactly the question Irving just raised: what is the good of getting the technical training in order to be a cog in the machine...
...Most of us are going to be in the corporations, in the government bureaucracies, things of that sort, and we will be doing essentially not only boring work, but what we feel is valueless work...
...A free, a pluralistic society can maintain its cohesion only if it keeps adjusting its institutions and values to changing conditions...
...HOWE: Apart from the Adamite tendency, there is a tendency to break down the couple, the whole dating system in America, which was extremely rigid among adolescents...
...Access to the chances for acquiring knowledge is becoming the central class issue...
...A second point is—and here we have something that is not Marxist at all —the idea of "waking up" a sleeping and inert society by minority violence, shock tactics...
...After a time, however, they do attract somebody: they attract the lumpenproletariat...
...The Vietnam War is the one sector of the contemporary EastWest conflict to which young people can attach emotional and moral importance...
...Suddenly there seemed to be a chance to make a direct impact on the "system," and a lot of young people forgot about their ideologies and tried to do something about the Vietnam War...
...Dostoyevsky, when he argued against socialism said, "All right, everyone will get his bellyful and the machine, the society, will run rationally, but people will go crazy...
...here they feel strongly that the U.S., and therefore the West in general, is wrong...
...have come closer to solution in our society...
...If, along with the values of love, freedom, and truth, the family cannot also inculcate the values of work and effort, it is partly failing in its job...
...In the United States, the "weakened" role of the father has a somewhat similar effect...
...That is, to the degree that they have become more and more absorbed into the system and fail to put forward radical alternatives—by which I don't mean "revolution" but significant radical alternatives— to that degree they fail to attract the rebellious young...
...And this is also very different in Europe from here...
...Hence, the withdrawal from bigness generally—a big political entity cannot be handled...
...We have to consider the possibility that there is something to this in terms of social change...
...At the same time, to tell them they also live with some of its more advantageous consequences cuts very little ice...
...Our parents' values are fine...
...If you look into the literature of the early Social Democrats, I think you'll see there's a lot of warrant for saying this...
...I think it is very important to give people who really study at the university and who do not just want to get technical training this sense of universality into which their specialty fits...
...their heads are chockful of propaganda...
...So that what appears as a revolt against authority is really a revolt against the lack of genuine authority, of credible and acceptable moral guides...
...LOWENTHAL: It just shows that we may have learned a little from these terrible years...
...It's not as if Lenin thought it all out by himself—in some of Marx's writings there is also the idea that democracy is merely a function or an accompaniment of one stage in the development of the bourgeoisie, etc...
...A few years ago, in Germany, the constructive elements among the rebel students were much stronger than they are now—they started with interesting, well-thought-out proposals for university reform, which are now being accepted...
...In their kind of Marxist criticism there are these antiliberal and anti-Western elements from the German tradition of romantic cultural pessimism, which you also find in Marcuse...
...on the whole they don't get anywhere...
...The enormous progress that free Western societies have made without the general abolition of capitalist property in the last few decades is something they don't feel because they haven't known the world as it was before...
...We used to believe when we had a kind of totalistic vision—I don't mean totalitarian—that socialism was the society in which problems, by definition, were solved...
...If you invest particular institutions with a religious expectation, then you are in for hell on earth...
...The elitist segment finally concludes that it will be heard only when it resorts to violence, and the historical precedent is the Bakuninist current in the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia...
...He thought it would happen because faith would be lost...
...HOWE: That's right: all they can see is what did happen...
...Often the leaders of the student revolt are from liberal families, and they have accepted the liberal values but charge society with not living up to them...
...It is an anti-authoritarian revolt behind which one senses a longing for authority...
...There is so much new in respect to which the parents can't really guide the young...
...HOWE: In other words, then, if you have a minority of the young acting as if it were in a prerevolutionary situation in a society that is not in a revolutionary situation, it may be that one can see this (optimistically put) as part of a long-range process of social adjustment...
...so that the immanent element can be retained a little more easily once the transcendent belief has gone...
...now their children are in college...
...At any rate, our political system seems to have become too remote for people to believe they can influence it...
...At considerable emotional and intellectual cost to ourselves, we abandoned that notion for a more complex and satisfactory theory of democracy—one that is affected by but THE WORLDWIDE REVOLT OF THE YOUNG not limited to particular social and class relationships...
...It starts really with the rise of secularism in the eighteenth century...
...Now, while we want a socialist society, we certainly don't believe that you can define it as one in which problems have been ipso facto solved...
...The Rousseauian ideal, contrasted with the reality of our time, leads not to the early Rousseauian belief in a plebiscitary democracy, but to a reversion to various forms of anarchist utopia...
...It is that only among other things...
...They're taking over the secular religious need for Utopia, but very much less the critical intellectual discipline of Marxism...
...To put it in another way, I talked about the transmission of values...
...Sometimes there isn't even a substitute father...
...they would be sincere in rejecting the fascist label...
...It's not simply the question of making something whole again that has been fragmented into parts...
...They don't believe democracy in our society is real because it has become too remote—because they feel they have no chance of participating in political decisions...
...But the real fault of the Social Democrats is that they have not sufficiently identified some of the new problems troubling people today...
...Many of the parents sup ^^'t'] pressed their own radical past in their consciousness, they tried not to tell their children about it...
...The old problems they were used to A DISCUSSION dealing with (distribution, employment, etc...
...But the European Social Democratic parties have not even been sufficiently troubled...
...LOWENTHAL: We face here a worldwide problem, an apparent breakdown of communication between the generations...
...Perhaps this will even itself out as a hopeful, democratic transition...
...LOWENTHAL: And so we are...
...Now this is a terribly difficult problem because a pluralistic society has no single, avowed purpose...
...They won't have what he called the image of the Golden Age, the idea of the Second Com ing, the sanctions and values and comforts and hopes that follow from religious belief...
...And this seems to me to occur above all in the failure to transmit the values of work and effort, the need for certain disciplines, even for certain frustrations that are an elementary part of every socialization...
...In some way they enjoy the fact that the young have the rebelliousness that they themselves have lost...
...Then suddenly the parents shift their orientation, dropping all their permissiveness and asking us to be highly competitive...
...By and large—look, for example, at the story of Mark Rudd at Columbia—many of these kids have relatively good relations with their parents...
...Values solve certain basic problems in the life of a society...
...I'm simplifying, but not terribly much...
...If not, its proclaimed values will seem no longer relevant and even hypocritical, and then the transmission of the values to the new generation will fail...
...We are dealing not just with failures but with people who, if they had a chance to succeed, would refuse to...
...The family is the elementary basis of what the sociologists call socialization and what I call the transmission of the values of a civilization...
...And as Carl Becker and others have shown, even the eighteenth-century belief in the perfectibility of man still had essentially religious aspects...
...specialization involves a degree of self-mutilation that is inevitable in a modern industrial or, if you want, postindustrial society...
...that was the age of permissiveness...
...HOWE: Yes, but it turns out there are more of "our" families than you might suspect...
...Toynbee would say that the Jews survived the decay of our civilization because they are of another one...
...Thirty or forty years from now people looking back upon our subject may not even discuss it primarily in political terms...
...they feel it is a rather boring contest between a boring bureaucratic one-party system in the East and a boring bureaucratic two-party system in the West...
...HOWE: Without, of course, knowing that that's what happened...
...It's from then on you have again and again fundamentally secular types who, nevertheless, think in terms of some synthetic religion...
...The other aspect is control...
...How does this happen...
...LOWENTHAL: Couple-forming is premature growing-up, and that's just what is not wanted...
...In Europe, the two main complaints against the universities are, first, that society is not spending enough money, thought, and energy on making them modern, big, accessible...
...HOWE: Now here we are—three people who grew up in the Marxist movement and who have retained at least some elements of it—speculating on the question of whether civilization can survive in the way we want it to survive without the recurrence of some religious impulse...
...Raise the wages, cut the hours...
...But the fact is that the question of the survival of our civilization without the original religious belief is on the agenda of our century as a central problem, and of course, a lot of people are conscious of this...
...True, this is not a completely new phenomenon...
...Hippiedom and dropouts are a reaction to this—a way of refusing the obstacle, the transition from ultra-permissiveness to severe pressure...
...If you remember, a few years ago a great stir was made by A DISCUSSION a little pamphlet by C. P. Snow on "The Two Cultures"—about the gulf between the humanistic approach and the natural-science approach...
...we're less puritanical than you are...
...Finally, there is a very specific American form of the problem: the effect of ultra-permissive childhood education in many families and schools, which is then followed by a steep jump into the pressure of learning and competition in college and university...
...Better opportunities are needed in public discussion, in the press, and in the political parties for new problems and new demands to be heard—without their advocates feeling they first have to throw bombs...
...They're often close to a slightly criminal element, juvenile delinquents or semi-delinquents, what is called the "Rockers" in Germany...
...COSER: It lost vitality...
...They feel they can't control either the political parties or the modem bureaucracy...
...No society can live if some people are not prepared sometimes to die for it...
...It's not so much a revolt against parents as against the whole oppressiveness of competition...
...HoWE: You are right in saying they live with the disastrous consequences of the Cold War...
...LOWENTHAL: They felt as much even before the coalition in West Germany...
...LOWENTHAL: Rationality is also a form of discipline—intellectual discipline...
...At great personal effort, he broke from the party in 1956 after the Khrushchev events...
...COSER: The Negro kids' relations with parents are quite different from the whites', especially in the lower class...
...But is that a good society...
...But he didn't really mean that we would get social decay or a flight into absolute power simply because economic problems would be solved...
...And the question is: Is there an alternative way of getting a sense of the relation between your specialty and society as a whole, a sense of purpose in society as a whole...
...We have had revolutionary student movements in various countries, in Russia in the nineteenth century, the fascist student movements in our time, and the revolutionary nationalist movements of the Third World —all preceding a political and social upheaval...
...LOWENTHAL: If we assume they have in mind the boring, repetitive menial work of society, then anything done to reduce that sort of work is to the good—provided that THE WORLDWIDE REVOLT OF THE YOUNG people learn at the same time to do something sensible with their leisure...
...LOWENTHAL: This is a family problem in a slightly different sense from the one I have raised...
...In America that aspect is relatively minor...
...In particular, they don't get the masses on their side...
...about new problems, however, they have not had much to say...
...COSER: There is a difference between the talk about sex fifteen, twenty Years ago and the talk about it now...
...There is much more feeling in the American case, at least with the white kids—I'll say a few things about the Negroes in a moment—that our parents are all right...
...If You read Marcuse, you find there the ideology of this demand for immediate gratification, the belief in a society without compulsion...
...talk about coming close to people, feeling warm—as if you have to learn to touch...
...In Italy this is particularly striking, rigid, and absurd...
...LOWENTHAL: The kind of paranoia you describe used to come from the outcasts of society, the failures, etc...
...That's historically new...
...LOWENTHAL: Of course not...
...The student revolt is by no means primarily a revolt against the university system...
...One rather important aspect of student culture in America is what I would call "the artsy-craftsy aspect": enormous concern with handicraft, with leatherwork, pottery, etc...
...LOWENTHAL: Where does this feeling of universal brainwashing come from...
...This is the reality, and everything else is a pipedream...
...Among the more rebellious kids, the hardening of a relationship between a Young boy and girl seems to be replaced with running in packs of eight or ten at a time—it's not nice to leave someone out...
...This is, of course, a case where a man did not suppress his past...
...You can graduate from college in pottery and leatherwork, and then open up a little shop in Greenwich Village or in Provincetown and as an adult "live happily ever after" an "unalienated" life...
...This is indeed somewhat related both to the experience of Bakuninism and to early forms of fascism...
...they resent being the victims of burdens that seem to them senseless...
...We have a friend who was one of the top leaders in the American Communist party...
...While Marcuse hasn't been as publicly critical as Habermas, on his last visit to Berlin he too was shocked...
...These are things they read about in books—books they doubt...
...The very concept of democracy appears to them a sham...
...LOWENTHAL: Still, it's a bit esoteric...
...The question is: will we succeed...
...The common denominator of the education crisis is this feeling: "Education for what...
...they do not see that a considerable element of stupidity in entertainment is the result of capitalist competition geared to the lowest common denominator— they think of this mainly as a political plot...
...COSER: One additional thing on the relation between the radical sons and the formerly radical fathers: I think you could slo A DISCUSSION ganize it by saying, "It's the return of repressed radicalism...
...I feel it embodies a legitimate criticism but also has a certain authoritarian potential in the way plebiscitary democracy can always slide into totalitarianism...
...In that respect all these new anarchist inclinations have not replaced Marxism...
...I really mean less this kind of problem than the problem of a deep failure to transmit part of the values...
...And therefore we have to create some kind of small-scale communities in which our voices count...
...LOWENTHAL: People are not "grateful" for something that—thanks to the efforts of their fathers—did not happen...
...And here is where the attraction of Marxism comes in...
...HOWE: Suppose, however, there was a young person here who said: Well, obviously, we recognize that there has to be some work, and even Marcuse says that he's not against all repression, only against what he calls "surplus repression...
...A kind of negative test of this feeling was the Eugene McCarthy phenomenon in the U.S...
...HOWE: You repress work in order to have good sex...
...And then they reach some school kids who don't know anything yet, and to some extent what in Germany is called gammler, unemployables or people unwilling to work...
...he saw "fascist" elements in the German SDS...
...And what we are trying to do is to maintain our values and move upon the momentum of these values originally created by religion—but after the transcendent belief has gone...
...COSER: But we have to take it together with a theme we discussed earlier...
...LOWENTHAL: What you're saying is, in other words, that we're having a basic crisis of our civilization, and Dostoyevsky prophesied this because he was a religious man...
...Violence is seen as the one way to "wake up" society—and how inadequate this course is in our time we all know...
...For the sake of values people are prepared to accept sacrifices, and sacrifices remain necessary whatever problems have been solved...
...Thanks to the student revolt, they are beginning to be...
...You have enough money for it, you do a lot for it, and the style is very relaxed and nonauthoritarian...
...And the sense we had that Europe averted an absolute catastrophe during the immediate postwar years—this means almost nothing to them...
...as a consequence— and here I come back to the fact that fathers and sons in America are not as far apart as in Europe—the sons are finding, if you wish, subconscious approval on the part of the fathers...
...Now it is not so much an expression of the sexual urge as it is a going back to some kind of Adamite innocence...
...So that's one aspect: the need to accept frustration, sacrifices for the sake of something...
...But now it is much broader...
...COSER: This is the main difference between the situation in Germany and in America...
...Most of them are not really taking over the substance of the Marxism of their fathers...
...The mass media are viewed as governed by a conscious or unconscious conspiracy to keep people stupid...
...The real decisions, in their view, are made behind the scenes, in compromises between interlocking bureaucracies...
...This is one reason for their frustration...
...But if people suffer from malaise, are alienated, or are falling out of the bottom of society, it may very well be that the Social Democratic parties have seen the problems but don't know how to express them in political terms...
...But let me ask whether the traditional social democratic parties in Europe are partly responsible for, or are victims of, this situation...
...Consequently, they cannot make significant choices politically...
...But there is his own son who is right back, intellectually speaking, where he was in 1936...
...And if you look at the "death of Christianity" in the nineteenth century, you know that in some sense it really didn't die...
...One aspect of the German student revolt is against the father or family: generally the father is identified with the Nazi system or with conservative and reactionary values...
...If you asked the people of the German SDS, especially the more serious-minded ideological people, they would be terribly insulted by what Habermas said...
...That sense of a brainwashed, manipulated, inert society comes from this feeling that nobody is listening...
...second, that the universities are too authoritarian, that the old sticks-in-the-mud prevent new people with ideas from doing anything...
...But it doesn't fulfill this function...
...LOWENTHAL: I am quite convinced that a secular religion is the worst solution...
...His most recent contribution to DISSENT was his article in the Winter 1965 issue on "The Prospects for Pluralistic Communism...
...LOWENTHAL: That depends on our response...
...I mean, who would have thought of that twenty-five years ago...
...Now, there is a general crisis of the basic family in our time...
...I think, in a way, the same thing is true of Marxism today, because Marxism after all has been the only major new system in the twentieth century...
...And the interesting thing is, as far as I can judge, very often the fathers are extraordinarily proud of the excesses of their sons, even though they themselves have become relatively square...
...Yet, if they don't see any sense in the conflict, they have to live with its consequences...
...This is the sense of utter political frustration that was effectively expressed in C. Wright Mills' Power Elite and has now been taken over by all New Left ideologies...
...Some of the students who are instrumental in starting this kind of movement are quite friendly, quite civilized in their personal relations with liberal professors...
...In Sweden, for instance, an enormous percentage of the population lives in towns, whereas their parents grew up in the countryside...
...But it is very hard to organize a movement to abolish alienation...
...For the issues we face go beyond the political plane...
...That is, the rejection of pluralism as a sham, the rejection of democracy as a sham, the contempt for the material values of a consumer society, the rejection of a parliament and of interest groups...
...Their THE WORLDWIDE REVOLT OF THE YOUNG conscious motivations are, of course, quite different from those of the fascists...
...Now isn't that an extraordinary thing...
...And that is a big problem, that is where education comes in...
...Then there are certain problems of human life which by their nature are not soluble: death, sickness, old age, etc...
...HOWE: In addition to identifying the feeling students have about the recalcitrance and sluggishness of society, which various ideologues both express and exploit, let's ask whether this is a legitimate criticism or a mere form of false consciousness, or both...
...He predicted, in effect, that the system would either turn into an authoritarian dictatorship or would come apart simply because there would no longer be the binding values that can keep people living and working together...
...If you feel workers are being outrageously exploited, slogans are easy...
...they have not seen the Berlin blockade...
...And then there is still another variant...
...It's a contemptuous word used by squares...
...A significant part of the younger generation seems not to accept the beliefs, values, and institutions that have been handed down to them...
...The people who start this kind of minority violence, say, Dutschke, are sincere, quasi-Marxist ideologues who believe that in their Marxist scheme of things minority violence has an indispensable tactical function...
...The other problem—more prominent in the U.S.—is: education for what...
...HOWE: We are dealing with an elite that sees itself as outcasts or struggles to become outcasts...
...The weakness of the parental role is due to the acceleration of social and technical change...
...The fact is that the development of the sciences tends to bridge that gulf—cybernetics, information theory, etc...
...What we are getting in our society is in fact a growing distinction between people who do boring work in order to live, and therefore do as little as possible, and people who do interesting work and like it...
...Incidentally, one reason why a certain type of Jewish intellectual seems to manage a little better than many of his contemporaries in maintaining a sense of direction and duty is that in the Jewish religion the strictly transcendent ele ment was less important...
...If the dominant mode of thought keeps emphasizing this idea of the inherent limitations of choice within the system, the only option for the young, as they see it, then becomes revolution...
...You can organize a movement in behalf of better working conditions, or to give the vote to the Negroes, or for any concrete objective...
...So you still need, in order to adapt to that, some puritan ethics...
...After all, sex wasn't all that repressed before...
...LOWENTHAL: But this is not quite Rousseauism any more...
...A great intellectual system takes a long time to die, assuming that Marxism, even in the narrow traditional sense, is going to die—although many elements of Marxist thought will surely survive...
...Bakunin and Richard Wagner were friends on the barricades of the uprising in 1849...
...They'll go crazy with boredom, they'll go crazy with resentment...
...Most of us of a certain generation from the socialist world tended to have a theory of bourgeois democracy, very simple-minded and Leninistic...
...Now the latter are picking up the lives of their parents, so to speak, at the point where they gave up—including not only the idealism and militancy but also the half-baked thought and sectarian rigidities from which the parents struggled to escape...
...LOWENTHAL: I think he was shocked by the growth of the cult of violence for its own sake...
...You can't pass a law...
...He now has roughly a social democratic position, and it isn't easy to make this kind of change...
...It all becomes less intellectual, less ideological, rather more "violence for its own sake," more a purely destructive thing...
...Consequently, there was no need to worry...
...It went through troubles...
...Now this has certain unforeseen consequences...
...They will really be much closer to our basic values than many other youths...
...Some young people today, however, seem to begin their political careers by absorbing the crudest Leninist notions without being Leninists or without having read Lenin...
...It was almost as bad in France, a bit better in Germany, in England much better...
...LOWENTHAL: It gives a sense of an overall picture of where society is going and what you are doing in it...
...But it has developed certain features similar to those of fascism in their antirational destructiveness...
...They are really going back to Bakunin...
...They have to live with the arms burden, the nuclear risk, the partition of Europe, the partition of Germany...
...they have been atomized...
...HOWE: What one hears most among New Left students in America is a version of Marcuse's idea that the people are not responsible political actors because they have been brainwashed, manipulated...
...They do not believe that this is a conflict between a blood-stained tyranny and freedom...
...And unless we find a way of developing our education so that this sense is given a realistic expression, I doubt that we'll overcome the crisis...
...As an exile from Hitler's Germany he worked for many years as a political journalist in London...
...LOWENTHAL: The real complaint about the structural rigidity of our parties is this feeling that new minorities don't get a hearing, that the two-party system tends to make the parties converge toward the center, and that the entrenched bureaucracy becomes comfortable and inert...
...HOWE: I want to try something out, though I haven't the faintest idea whether it's true or not...
...There's a faint parallel between these black kids and the fatherless generation in Germany...
...This degree of secession of the young is, of course, a familiar phenomenon in pre-revolutionary situations...
...Today you must take sex as a substitute for work...
...COSER: The problem is even older...
...They often have no role model, being trapped in an essentially matrifocal family...
...and they don't see why anyone should take a serious interest in it...
...You can't say, unless you have a very dogmatic Communist or Catholic university, that we educate for a certain Weltanschauung...
...LOWENTHAL: I wasn't suggesting that it was a revolt within the family, but that the family was not fulfilling its function...
...HOWE: But parties not merely have to identify problems, they must work out slogans, programs, solutions...
...You find it with Robespierre in the cult of reason, you find it with the "religion of humanity," etc...
...And so it seems to me that there is a built-in frustration and disappointment in their activity— and this may be one of the reasons for their THE WORLDWIDE REVOLT OF THE YOUNG rage, namely, that what they really want is a transcendence, or even a mystical experience, which is not available through either reform or revolutionary politics...
...Nevertheless, it got through to the kids...
...It is in this context that Vietnam has acquired such enormous importance outside the United States...
...But let me turn to mY second plane of causation...
...Now this is, to put it very bluntly, the end of civilization, if people try to live up to it...
...The students then feel there are no significant choices...
...And this is what worries me...
...Mills used to call it the difference between a trouble and an issue...
...HOWE: If the main choices are less and less distinguishable, you have to try and achieve a marginal differentiation on the outskirts of society...
...LOWENTHAL: It happens out of their sense of inability to influence the democratic process...
...Can you tell us anything about that...
...Only, (a) they don't live up to these values, they don't defend them, and (b) they expel us from paradise when we're in high school...
...HOWE: I've talked to students about this, and they say, "We go to college, and the college just trains us to be part of a machine, you know, to take our jobs as executives in some pointless institution, etc., etc...
...It was the working class that became satisfied with the status quo, more than the Social Democrats...
...It is a problem of "our" families...
...You people—you're trapped in the ethic of work, in fact, you can't live without working...
...We look back to our early childhood as a rather happy age...
...These seem precisely the kinds of activities where the individual involved does have the sense that he's not a cog in a machine, that he creates something whole...
...This is, surely, a historical argument that is not going to persuade them very much...
...that is, you have what somebody, talking about Europe, called the one-and-a-half–party system, with Social Democrats and Christian Democrats in Germany becoming less and less distin guishable...
...I would look for the explanation on four different planes, two of which are political and two not...
...But, meanwhile, several student generations have passed through the university in growing frustration, and their subjec A DISCUSSION tive experience is that society is not listening or taking up their proposals—except when they smash windows...
...It can't be avoided, but it can be accepted only if you retain some sense of the link between your specialty and society as a whole...
...But let me turn to another cause of the present generational crisis...
...LOWENTHAL: That brings us to what in my scheme is fourth—the crisis of education...
...On the contrary, we begin to see now that a socialist society would be one which in some ways would have more problems and more difficult ones, because they wouldn't be open to easy material or political solution...
...COSER: And even if they were to take over some of the values of their fathers, they take them over thirty or forty years later—when the conditions of society no longer correspond...
...Now we have never yet had a civilization that was not based on a transcendent belief...
...but most of us are not going to do that kind of intellectual or professional work...
...LOWENTHAL: G-a-m-m-l-e-r...
...HOWE: It also takes the form of opposition to rationality...
...whereas we are more liberated than you, or at least we have a different style of life, and we find it much more possible to live while doing much less work...
...And these are the problems for which all great civilizations find answers in terms of religions...
...HOWE: Those who after all are taking over some element of the Marxist tradition may be expected to go through—that is, with some inevitable modifications—at leats some of the history of that tradition...
...The young have the feeling that even if there were this integrated whole, who are we and how can we control it...
...There is an element of truth in this, but it is also snobbism, elitism...
Vol. 16 • May 1969 • No. 3
