Two Kinds of Liberalism

...Paul Goodman has pointed out that guilt is a highly unreliable and dangerous motive for action, which is why the emphasis on white guilt in the Kerner Report and other establishment papers is less than fully useful...

...it may have to do with private guilts transferred to a social situation...

...This is evidenced in some white radicals who seem to look forward with great eagerness to a coming black rebellion, oblivious to the fact that it could lead to a mass slaughter of blacks, or who romanticize ghetto life to the point where the terrible effects of injustice become positive virtues...

...s Get This Straight, iVow DO NOT FOLLOW RECIPES ON WEATHERMAN LEAFLET IN LAST RAT...

...It is assumed that the home chemist knows NOT to pour Sulfuric acid (H2SO4) into metal containers...

...The guilt liberal searches for the satisfaction of purgation and punishment, while the militant black usually seeks changes in the structures of society...

...The limits of duty liberalism have been mercilessly revealed by blacks and radical whites over the past several years, to the point where the entire phenomenon has come to seem reprehensible...

...The guilt liberal also avoids the noblesse oblige mentality, since he regards himself as NOTEBOOK morally inferior to those he seeks to help...

...Of the many reasons that can be offered for this, the most important may simply be prosperity...

...The extraordinary popularity of The Graduate is another sign of this public flagellation...

...Goodman has also suggested that many whites are probably not racists in the deepest sense...

...when it is possible to be both revolutionary and chic at the same time something has gone wrong with politics...

...It is most deeply imbedded, perhaps, in precisely those liberals who have found new radical identities and now press for "revolution" while scorning the meliorist dreams of their youth...

...Hence the charge by black militants that whites cannot be trusted, since they will return to their suburbs in times of danger, has less force now than it did a few years ago...

...Without admitting it, the duty liberal is often self-congratulatory...

...That such things may happen in the vicinity of Los Angeles does not justify this movie as a "searing indictment of middleclass values...

...A popular record of last year—Harper Valley PTA—has had a similar vogue...

...It is, of course, a powerful impetus to political activism, since the purging of one's soul is a driving psychological force almost without equal...

...The concentration of the acid to be used is not given...

...Often they turn against those who have made them feel guilty...

...Superficially, "duty liberalism" appears quite similar to guilt liberalism...

...Insofar as the expressed feelings of the guilt liberal are genuine, he may become a genuine revolutionary...

...The classic leftist struggles were against highly visible, physically-entrenched economic interests...

...Particularly dangerous is No...

...Psychology then declines into a technique for discovering the roots of failure, preferably hidden betrayals...

...Is it not misleading to imply that this moral self-image is a dirty little secret...

...All recipes in underground papers are dangerous...

...Even the provincial capitals of America now harbor their share of bourgeois intellectual "revolutionaries," distinguished by their clothes and speech, their patronage of certain bars, the willful narrowing of their intellectual life to whatever is most extreme and avant-garde, and a general refusal to participate in any kind of meliorist activity...

...BEING CAREFUL IS NOT ENOUGH...

...By and large, the New Left can be considered the farthest extension of guilt liberalism...

...POWER TO THE PEOPLE'S RESEARCH...

...Stripped of its trimmings the story of The Graduate is preposterous—a bright Ivy Leaguer is seduced by his father's partner's wife, who makes him a prisoner of obsessive lust and then turns on him violently when he falls in love with her daughter...

...The duty liberal is also less than fully committed to the cause...

...The most serious criticism has been that duty liberals, unable to sympathize with alien groups, approach these people condescendingly...

...His personal satisfaction may come from observing the gratitude of the poor as they receive his favors, though it need not be that crude...

...The psychology of politics has validity and, up to a point, usefulness...

...Self-condemnation and ritual acknowledgment of guilt, whether sincere or feigned, have become for many liberals a substitute for real politics...

...Men obsessed by guilt are often barred from the objective assessment of the possibilities, which are of course necessary for any kind of effective politics...

...It is in the New Left that the strengths and weaknesses of guilt liberalism emerge—the willingness to question everything and to risk oneself, along with an irrational apocalypticism reaching out for selfdestruction and an obsessive concern with one's own feelings and styles...

...They also have a vested emotional interest in the exacerbation of conflict and even in prolonging injustice, since it is only by submitting to the fire of strife and endlessly reliving and then undoing their past sins that they can adequately atone...

...Some whites have shown a remarkable willingness to burn their bridges...

...He is more likely than the guilt liberal to stress the communal guilt of all men and of society itself...

...He welcomes the opportunity to make himself a mere instrument in the hands of those he has harmed...

...Rat, May 8-21, 1970...

...Guilt liberalism" is self-explanatory...

...He looks upon his liberalism precisely as a sign of his moral superiority and believes that he is less guilty than most men in that at least he recognizes his responsibilities and takes measures to discharge them...

...The great strength of guilt liberalism is precisely its obsessiveness, since the guilt liberal has a compulsive need to atone, and this can drive him even to cooperating in the destruction of his society and himself...

...NOTEBOOK THE SPLITTING OF THE LIBERAL CAMP into moderate and radical, or meliorist and revolutionary, wings, is probably the natural outcome of a deeper but largely hidden division...

...As Hollywood and the Jet Set—and many who admired both were too sophisticated to admit it—began to embrace political reform, politics became more than a struggle for measurable results and began to assume a quasi-mystical veneer...

...Largely unconscious or semiconscious, it is a division recognized only on the periphery, by transferral of deep feelings to public issues which are, by comparison, merely on the surface...

...Many who seemingly had principled commitments to racial integration and "bourgeois" civil liberties abandon these almost without a murmur as they are told that these ideas are objectively pernicious...

...Some who have spent decades in an honorable search for justice now cringe before the most irresponsible criticisms of the wildest sects of the New Left, and compulsively confess to whatever charges are hurled at them...

...Duty liberals are mainly of this kind, and the charge of "objective racism" against them at times therefore is justified...

...It is ridiculously foolish to think that reading an article in an underground paper is enough preparation to work with any dangerous chemicals...

...But a preoccupation with political psychology is almost an infallible sign that politics itself has become debilitated and bereft of hope...

...It is a division within the liberal soul, according to hidden self-images and obscurely sensed motivations...

...But poverty itself is the relatively more simple component of our social pathology...

...Recognizing his moral superiority and natural talents, the duty liberal believes that he has much to offer the oppressed...

...However, most duty liberals are probably not racists in any personal way...

...If duty liberalism proved itself to be too cold and uncommitted to provide the force for real change, the steadiness of its vision is something the Left still sorely needs...

...He is an unreliable ally, easily driven from the field by failure, rebuffs from those he is trying to help, or intimidations by those he is fighting against...

...ADULT LIBERALS are now passing through an unhealthy phase of guilt exorcism...

...Blaming society means blaming everyone, hence blaming no one...

...If you're serious, you must do a lot of research, understand the principles behind the chemical reactions you cause...

...Quite early on, every analysis of poverty begins to shade into problems of race and problems of culture, neither of which can be "solved" in any acceptable political way or even satisfactorily defined...

...To an extent this has meant a change of personnel— the eclipse of old-line liberal leaders and the sudden emergence of white New Leftists virtually unknown a few years ago...

...A curious shift, not much noticed, has occurred in leftist thinking—Marx has been quietly displaced by Freud as the patron saint, the philosopher whose system is most useful for explaining political realities...

...The directions ignore the need for certain preliminary knowledge and experience...

...Also, of the two sources of sulfuric acid suggested, the acid from a car battery is very dilute (mild), laboratory sulfuric acid can be dilute or concentrated...

...Today poverty remains a major problem, but it is impossible to locate precisely where the blame for it lies...

...It was a serious political mistake for RAT to print this leaflet without a postscript explaining that its contents were not checked out by the staff and were not intended as a recipe for Rat readers...

...Why some people feel this guilt while most apparently do not is difficult to say...

...indeed many New Leftists appear to be the guilt-liberal children of duty-liberal parents...

...Among veterans of the euphoric liberalism of the early 1960s a secret or open despair has set in...

...and the currently fashionable dogma that every white liberal harbors at his core a neurotic obsession with blackness is probably not true...

...Liberals and radicals, having become amateur psychologists of power, are highly adept at explaining the hangups behind political failures...

...Certain kinds of duty liberalism also induce a commitment more reliable and persistent than that of the New Left in that it proceeds from intellectual conviction and principle and not merely from fluctuating emotions...

...Having convinced themselves that the System cannot be changed and having apparently been shut out from power by the Republicans, the blacks, and the New Left, older liberals now probe deeper into their own psyches to atone for their own failures...

...A moratorium should be declared on the use of the term "hangup...

...Doing "chemical experiments" is dangerous enough to require you to study up on every related area so that you are competent to deal with anything that might go wrong...

...Their sin against the blacks is primarily that of indifference, of willingness to acquiesce in and profit from other people's genuine racism and exploitation...

...Yet it is not merely the young to whom this picture conveyed a mythic NOTEBOOK truth—many earnest, sober liberals saw themselves indicted in it...

...The duty liberal also professes feelings of guilt and moral responsibility for social injustices, and he involves himself in social action in order to discharge the guilt...

...Here the limits of psychology begin to be apparent...

...To an extent also it has been accomplished by the conversion of many people from duty liberalism to guilt liberalism, either through the pursuit of fashion or the genuine discovery of hidden feelings of guilt...

...Guilt-ridden persons are likely to act irrationally, without thought or plan...

...Some blacks, of course, want to punish whites as well, and then their aims may coincide with those of the guilt liberals...

...Under the guise of radicalism and daring they cater to current fashions in an obvious way...

...ONE OF THE LESS HAPPY ASPECTS of the Kennedy era was the way it blended politics and fashion, giving rise to a concern with style and mood that had been lacking in earlier American liberalism...

...He also has a vested interest in believing that progress has occurred even when it has not, since this increases his self-esteem and lightens his responsibility...

...Some duty liberals also pursue the guilt mentality by rote—repeating the requisite concepts and expressing the appropriate emotions—not out of mere fashion but from a genuine wish to learn how to experience these things...

...An underground paper can only be a sketchy and poor place to learn about any kind of technology, compared to a good chemistry book from the public library or school bookstore (rip one off...

...This is one of the few periods of our history in which intellectuals become more radical as they grow older...

...Ultimately it derives from his need to believe in himself as a morally superior man, hence one committed to action...

...They are detached from the whole nexus of race-and-culture strife...

...The unmasking of duty liberalism has made way for the era of guilt liberalism, which readily shades into a kind of radicalism...

...And the cen trality of the race question leads straight to psychology—it is difficult to show that prosperous whites have an economic need to discriminate, hence the explanation for their behavior must lie "deeper...

...Too often an originally valid concept is debased into a mere refusal to take other people's values seriously...

...They fear and distrust blacks, but not substantially more than people always fear and distrust those who are different from themselves...

...The safety rules for the laboratory that you might have learned in high school are really true, and important to remember...

...1, the self-igniting Molotov...

...On a conscious level, the guilt liberal also wants objective changes, but he has a conflicting need to follow his own psychic rhythms...

...In its pristine form, duty liberalism is simply noblesse oblige...

...and learn general laboratory procedures, including techniques of getting accurate proportions, thermometer readings and temperature controls...

...Middle-aged clergymen were quite adept at explicating the lyrics to show how the universal depravity of the respectable town, far excelling Peyton Place in its accomplished infidelities, was immediately applicable to suburban congregations...

...Is it not desirable that everyone believe himself to be a moral man...

...You should also have adequate safety equipment—goggles, rubber gloves, fire extinguisher— your kitchen stove is a poor substitute for a Bunsen burner...

...The division can perhaps be approximated by the categories "guilt liberalism" and "duty liberalism...

...it is rather abstract...

...A comfortable middle class living in a culture in which radical questioning has become fashionable grows curious about its own inner depths...

...It refers to those who feel, in an emotional way, morally responsible for the injustices of society...

...it might not be enough to ignite immediately, in addition to completely dissolving the rag and burning your hand...

...The how-to-do-it leaflet is dangerously misleading and incomplete...

...His responsibility is something arrived at through reasoning...

...Is it not catastrophic when men do not...

...The difference lies in genuineness and depth of feeling—often the duty liberal does not really feel very guilty...

...Concentrated sulfuric acid will not only completely change the recipe...

...The hopelessness of our present political mood obviously arises from our awareness that we have never before confronted problems as subtle and elusive as those which now beset us...

...Selfdefinition and self-testing, self-purgation and role-creating are now as much a part of the Left as any political program...

...These popular art works serve the function of public purgation and self-punishment for many, but they are really escapist...

...The most serious defect of the guilt liberal is that despite his sometimes obsequious humility before the black, his fundamental aims are not only different from the black's but of a different order...

...Despite the fact that I myself have been guilty of using some of the approaches I deplore, it is time for liberals to eschew psychology and to seek where in the larger world they can play a genuine political role appropriate to their capabilities and their natural human limitations, about which they need feel no undue shame...

...Self-analysis, when not obsessive or therapeutic, is also an amusing game...