Father Strikes Back

...The students became death-seekers...

...The students who went to Mississippi in 1964, says Feuer, identi BOOKS fled with the Negroes, but the identification "fused itself with an extinction of both one's selfhood and selfishness through a death-seeking for the movement's sake...

...That political and social movements draw upon energies rooted in psychological troubles is a commonplace...

...That some student militants are among those violating standards of civility is one of the more unfortunate facts of our present situation, and this ought to be of concern to liberals and radicals too...

...Is it severe enough to account for the student movement...

...with maintaining what Ortega y Gasset alluded to as that clearing in the jungle called civilization...

...A complex of urges—altruism, idealism, revolt, self-sacrifice, and self-destruction—searches the social order for strategic avenues of expression...

...But, as an enterprise of intellectual analysis it is no more successful than the earlier dispatches...

...Such predilections, whether held by sons or fathers, indicate a laxity of mind...

...Mark Rudd holds Columbia responsible for a long list of political and social ills including "our identity crisis...

...If one assumes that both descriptions are true (although the first implies a dubious a priori assumption about "universals in human nature"), then what is the effect of the second on the generational relationship of fathers and sons...

...Feuer uncovers these ideological and behavioral patterns in past and present student movements of the Western and Eastern worlds...

...few will deny that, in societies like our own, unresolved Oedipal difficulties may be Iinked to political ideologies and behavior...

...In addition to casting doubt on the rationality of one's antagonist, the question is an assurance that there is no need to pay any attention to the reality he is experiencing...

...When the students "go to the people" they are rejected, largely because they do not appreciate the real needs and aspirations of the peasants and workers...

...Questions of this order are resolutely ignored by Feuer...

...The movement becomes politicized, and typically attempts to attach itself to "carrier" political movements of a peasantry or working class...

...Not unexpectedly, he finds them also present in Berkeley—where he was one of the beleaguered fathers...

...But at this point the hard tasks begin...

...Feuer here resembles some student ideologues who prefer theories that enable them to avoid grappling with the complexities of the social world...

...To what extent may the ideologies and behavior of students be ascribed simply to fear and hatred of castrating fathers, rather than to the specific circumstances of their social position...

...Since that conflict is one of the "deepest universals of human nature," the psychological conditions for generational conflict are always present in all so cieties--students are perennial time bombs in the ivy...

...Generational conflict" is the war between students, driven by primitive emotions, and a generation of hated and feared castrating fathers...

...His analysis, then, has a conservative political import...

...There is also a lack of rigor in Feuer's use of the concept of "de-authoritization...

...Student movements show recurrent patterns of behavior throughout history...

...The better contemporary work shows an awareness of complexities to which Feuer's simplistic perspective remains blind...

...Aside from the usual difficulties of such a procedure, he ignores the further difficulty that, as the delayed entrance into adult roles affects more of the young for longer periods of time, age as a category of thought becomes more important...

...Other questions of an empirical and methodological nature are not dealt with any more adequately...

...But even conservatives would do well to be wary of Feuer...

...Because he does not raise questions that are relevant to his analysis, Feuer produces an explanation of student movements that reduces them to an eternal replaying of the primal murder...

...His mechanical Freudianism is just another variation, complete with scholarly apparatus, of the tiresome gambit of the parlor psychoanalyst, "Yes, but what is your real reason...

...Early critics of Feuer noted that his views were designed to discredit the Berkeley students...

...And thereby the very real contribution Freudian theory can make is lost...

...The mere fact that the students may define the situation as a conflict of young versus old does not in itself support any particular explanation...

...Berkeley, of course, is the raison d'être of the book...

...Matters are not helped when the students' severest critics show a disregard for the same standards...

...Are students simply to be defined as children rebelling against fathers, or are they also, for example, a grouping of young people occupying a special position and life circumstance in a particular kind of society...

...Here, narrowness of intellectual vision produces an appalling coarseness of sensibility...

...It is also true, given the influence of psychoanalysis in American middle BOOBS class culture, that students will indiscriminately mix political and psychological perspectives...

...The true conservative is concerned with preserving standards of civility...

...it elaborates a thesis Feuer propounded in his communiques from the front during the Free Speech movement...

...It is an insensitive and mechanical use of Freudian concepts that ignores developments in psychoanalytic thought since Totem and Taboo, and bludgeons history into a foreordained shape...

...To undertake the exploration of the psychological dimension of thought and action in terms of the metaphor entails a responsibility for going beyond what, since Freud, are mere truisms...

...His intentions are not pertinent since, regardless of intent, the discrediting function must follow from his initial theoretical assumptions...

...There is a violence of word as well as deed...

...Feuer's metaphor captures this undisputed psychological dimension of student behavior because, to quote Max Black, a metaphor evokes "a system of associated commonplaces" serving "to organize our views of man...

...How intense is the generational conflict between middle-class fathers and sons in contemporary America...

...Its definition never allows for a test of the proposition that whenever there is genera tional conflict, the older generation has been "de-authoritized...

...Indeed, the book has a quality reminiscent of the memoirs of a retired general making forays into history to justify old decisions and back-handed swipes at former comrades...

...THE ROOT METAPHOR controlling Lewis Feuer's vision of the student world is the primal band of brothers falling on the father with bared teeth and drawn knives...

...The tendency toward violence has an ambiguous quality, since it is linked with a "suicidalism" characteristic of students in full generational revolt...

...Unfortunately, laxity permits some gains...

...But they explode only when a generation of fathers has been "de-authoritized .. . a sense that the older generation has discredited itself and lost its moral standing...

...The first task is to relate the psychological to other perspectives on the problem...

...It might be a responsibility of intellectuals to moderate tendencies to violence in at least the one sphere where they do have some influence...

...The rejection encourages already present tendencies toward elitism, violence, and antidemocratic ideologies...

...Each case examined reaches a conclusion similar to that of the judgment on the Bosnian students: "Gavrilo Princip, who dreamed of killing policemen, finally achieved his place as a father-destroyer, a hero in history, even though it also meant the destruction of himself and the maiming of European civilization...

...Feuer liberally quotes the words of students and calls attention to their generational metaphors...

...Here Feuer is symptomatic of an important aspect of the conflict of generations—an unwillingness to take the students' experience of reality seriously until it is too late...

...Similarly, one would expect that someone who sees McCarthyism as "the projected creation in large part of the bad conscience and cowardice of the radicals— Communists, former Communists, and fellow travellers" would not himself show, in his comments on former colleagues and Paul Goodman, an absence of generosity approaching a meanness of spirit like that of the "radicals...