Culture, Life Style, and Politics

...And with them would disappear the material base for the lifestyle of love and tolerance...

...THE GENTLE AND TOLERANT IDEALS of the youth culture are very similar to the traditional ideals of aristocracies around the world...

...At the same time, without these fetters imposed by civilization, raising living standards beyond subsistence would be impossible...

...To many youths, technology represents a "death trip...

...There are exceptions, naturally, but idealism is generally a luxury item...

...The question is, what enables young people to base their personal and political behavior on values that transcend simple self-interest...

...But then, on the same Board we find listed—Noam Chomsky and Marc Raskin...

...Freud presented the dilemma of industrial society in Civilization and its Discontents with a good deal more sophistication than the modem counter culture theorists...

...Aristocrats sometimes gave away large sums to the poor, patronized culture, and were kind and civil in their interpersonal relations...

...The counter culture's adulators have gone so far as to suggest that the appearance of this new "consciousness" renders a major social transformation a mere matter of time, independent of political organization or struggle...

...Just as you don't end pollution by chanting Hare Krishna at a dirty stream, so you don't create nicer people merely by circulating the love poems of John Lennon and Yoko Ono...

...I find much of the youth culture's life-style to be positive, but feel that carrying into practice its social critique would undermine what is positive in this life-style...

...Ignored are the necessities imposed by mass education, or, put another way, the expansion of higher education which computers help make possible...

...By life-style I don't mean so much the surface manifestations of clothes, music, or even marijuana—I refer to traits of gentleness and tolerance in interpersonal behavior, and a political activism significantly based on idealism, which mark the moral code and influence the conduct of members of the youth culture...

...It boasts among its Board of Advisors such familiar conservative worthies as Ludwig von Mises, Henry Jazlitt, and Felix Morley...

...And here is the contradiction within the counter culture...

...Life centers on the family and people rarely think of asking for help from others or of offering any...

...Technology has often been misused, sometimes avoidably...

...If the youth culture dismantled the industrial world, it would at the same time succeed in putting an end to its own existence...

...I remember discussions at Harvard where it was claimed that urban traffic lights and clothing represented intolerable examples of psychological repression...

...So, what's this...

...Fair enough...

...It is no accident that the new life-style spread widely among young people during the first generation of mass affluence...

...But for most people such widespread poverty would imply a quick return to dog-eat-dog...

...If "depersonalizing" technology were dismantled, as the ideologists of the counter culture would have it, standards of living would drop catastrophically...

...A few philosophersaints might continue to live nobly in the detechnologized poverty...

...The use of computers in universities is seen only as a method of reducing the student to a number...

...Now I don't want to overestimate how much gentleness, tolerance, and idealism do in fact characterize the behavior of youth...

...What appears as paradox in Freud emerges as polemic in the ideology of the youth culture...

...The high standards of living NOTEBOOK brought about by industrialism have made possible a "love generation" where otherwise there might have been only a few scattered love individuals...

...While keeping in mind Freud's paradox, it is important to realize that, after weighing positive against negative results of industrial society, no society in human history, when given the choice, has failed to opt for modernization...

...The answer, I would say, is almost axiomatic: in most cases, people will be more gentle and idealistic when they can afford to be so...

...Some on the Left romanticize the poor as less selfish and more willing to cooperate than those "corrupted" by affluence...

...To be sure, some people can find anything repressive...

...Others, from members of the Progressive Labor party to certain people on the democratic Left, claim to find nothing of value in the youth culture and often show a puritan hatred of the new youth life-styles which matches that of the average American...

...However, as a social critique, and not just a life-style, the counter culture has centered on an attack on technology and industrial society as dehumanizing, repressive, impersonal, and destructive...

...The truth, I think, is somewhere in between...

...Civilization and its technology are seen only for the ways in which they stifle individual self-expression and impose rules, not for the ways in which they liberate from drudgery and make possible the elimination of poverty...

...but here I would like to focus on what appears an internal contradiction within the youth culture, between its life-style and its social critique...

...The flower child was the daughter of the computer age...

...We received in the mail an advertisement for the National Taxpayer's Union, a conservative organization dedicated to "individual liberty and financial security for the American taxpayer...

...And it is almost hypocritical to say at the same time that one sympathizes with the starving peoples of the Third World and that one opposes the technology which offers the only practical way out of that starvation...

...Socialists can welcome certain aspects of the youth culture, while continuing to make our task the redistribution of the benefits of technology—so that more people can be influenced by the type of idealism and gentleness which marks a part of this generation...

...Technology, notwithstanding the dehumanization for which it may in part be responsible, is the key to the humanization of the lives of the masses of people...

...At the same time as some affluent American youths imagine that they would be freer and happier if they left large cities for the pastoral community of the countryside, tens of millions of peasants in the Third World are flocking away from the countryside and into the "impersonalized," "dehumanized" cities...

...And a New York Times reporter sent to Pakistan after the flood catastrophe last year reported that, The burdens of life that have made the peasants of the delta fatalistic have also made them so cially introverted—even selfish, by the standards of more affluent cultures...

...The point remains, however, that members of the youth culture show at least marginally more gentleness and tolerance in their everyday behavior than much of the rest of the population, and that middle-class idealism is an important, if not sufficient, part of any movement for social progress...

...Youth often shows little tolerance for the "silent majority...

...Aristocratic gentility presupposed high ma NOTEBOOK terial standards which made possible the luxury of a kindness resting on a material base of the exploitation of peasants and serfs...

...THERE HAS BEEN much discussion of the youth "counter culture" insofar as it affects prospects of social change in America...

...Sharing is an alien concept, except within the family—and even there, brothers do not necessarily share their food...

...Edward Banfield's study of a Sicilian village, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, concludes that pathological inability to trust and cooperate prevented the villagers from jointly improving their lot...

...What is new about modern industrial society is that it has allowed the emergence of a large-scale affluence which is not, to nearly the same extent, based on exploitation, and thus the spread of aristocratic life-styles in non-aristocratic segments of the population...

...What's This...

...In fact, exactly the opposite seems true...

...Nevertheless, it would be wrong to deny that modem industrial society, among other things, routinizes and stifles certain types of individual self-expression...

...Idealism in political behavior does not exclude tactical and moral errors within the student movement...

...For Freud, the paradox of civilization was that it required instinct repressions and postponements of immediate gratification which made many unhappy...