What's the Trouble?
Howe, Irving
Social Crisis, Crisis of Civilization, or Both? We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and the rest of it, mere junk from fashionable...
...Miniature settings serve as laboratories, sometimes mere sickrooms, for dealing with the largest problems of modem life...
...This belief in the autonomous potential of the masses lay at the heart of early Marxism, in what we may now be inclined to regard as its most attractive period: the years in which European social democracy gradually emerged as a popular movement...
...the alternatives are neither real nor attractive...
...But a crisis of civilization, though it can be muted or its effects postponed by the relief of social problems, cannot as a rule be dissolved through acts of public policy...
...But who would deny that there are extremely troubling results from undertaking so revolutionary a task under social circumstances often inhospitable to it...
...The caution: nothing could be more disastrous for our political life in the immediate future than to have the modest, perhaps manageable and (as some intellectuals like to suppose) "boring" problems of the welfare state swept aside in behalf of a grandiose, surely unmanageable and (as some intellectuals would feel) "exciting" Kulturkampf between the up-tight and the loose, the repressive and the permissive...
...One of the few things these millions of young people may discover in the universities is, however, that learning and culture, since they are but faintly credited by many of their teachers, need hardly be credited by them...
...The fetid backwaters of the past seep back...
...The Nazi and Stalinist concentration camps have raised questions as to the nature of our nature: is there an inherent bestiality in mankind beyond the correction of collective activity...
...To insist merely upon the former might be parochial...
...Such are the reasons that might be given for a situation in which the crisis of modern civilization, recurrent for at least a century and a half, is again felt as immediate and pressing...
...Mass culture quickly provides lower-class equivalents to middle-class styles, and often succeedsin spilling across class barriers...
...Even a major social change doesn't necessarily lead to a radical disruption of the civilization in which it occurs...
...All we can say with assurance or good will is that the themes of religious desire appear and reappear in the experience of our epoch, tokens of "the missing All," whether as harmony or dissonance...
...He would surely not have suspected that weakening of religious belief, a development to which he had contributed, might bring unexpected difficulties to the lives of skeptics...
...It works itself out in ways we don't readily understand and sometimes, far from working itself out, it continues to fester...
...Our socialist observer might also have noted, in the somewhat reductive terms prevalent on the Left, that science was triumphant and religion in decay...
...But even if true, this hardly minimizes the importance of what has happened within large and significant segments of middle-class youth--especially in the United States where the middle class sprawls across the social map and strongly influences the ways in which adjacent classes live...
...To be sure, if we could solve social problems of the magnitude I have just mentioned, our sense of the remaining troubles would come to seem less ominous...
...It would be self-deceiving, if for some comforting, to suppose that we are going through just another "normal" struggle between generations which "in time" will work itself out through familiar mechanisms of social adjustment...
...For it occurs within a context of class domination and social snobbism, as well as at a historical moment forcing upon the young ghastly dilemmas...
...Even to ask such questions may strike one as both comic and impudent: comic because it seems a little late to be returning to a theme that has been pursued to the point of exhaustion, impudent because it can hardly be approached in a few pages...
...Who, looking upon the experience of our century, does not feel repeated surges of nausea, a deep persuasion that the very course of civilization has gone wrong...
...Let me turn to a vocabulary not spontaneously my own and suggest that we are beginning to witness a new religious experience—or, perhaps, an experience of religious feelings...
...The immediate social form through which such young people try to organize their re sponses is a cluster of distinctively generational groups lying somewhere between family and occupation...
...merely upon the latter, grandiose...
...there must also occur some loss of conviction in the animating ethos of the nation or culture, some coining IRVING HOWE apart of that moral binder which holds men in the discipline of custom...
...Meanwhile there was flowering in England the theory and practice of classical liberalism...
...It is marked by anxieties bordering on demoralization and often a retreat from serious purpose that becomes sheer panic...
...Youth mobility is high...
...These fragile institutions of the youth culture also reveal themselves as testing grounds for experiment with, or actingout for, the crisis of values which long antedates their appearance...
...Many, though not all, of their manifest complaints are valid and deserve to be taken at face value, and my point applies only to the structures of feeling and expression through which these are made known...
...I dis...
...the nineteenth and the social anxieties of the twentieth century are related—with the issues that obsessed the nineteenth century, issues that had to do with the desanctification of the cosmos, surviving into our own moment in surprisingly powerful ways...
...Since the above was written, there have appeared reports of widespread and serious drugusage among young workers, both white and black, in major American industries...
...The welfare state has small attraction as an end or ideal in its own right, and little gift for inspiring the loyalties of the young...
...sociate myself from such an intent...
...For to the extent that the transmission of values is blocked and a lack of faith in the power of education spreads among the educated classes, there must follow a more pervasive uncertainty as to the meanings and ends of existence...
...gartens, from technocratic experts to soulful dropouts, has not been reassuring...
...Torn between the problems of too much freedom and the problems of too little, between the fear of an endless chaos and the claustrophobia of rigid social definition, they create, in the words of Richard Flacks, "institutions which can combine some of the features of family life with those of the occupational structure...
...A social crisis raises difficulties, a crisis of civilization dilemmas...
...This, I know, is a view distasteful to what passes today for orthodox Marxism, and so I mean it to be...
...A new sense of time, as Daniel Bell has remarked, came to dominate the arts, and the result would be that thrust toward restlessness and hunger for novelty, that obsession with progress as an end in itself, which has since characterized much of modem culture...
...The whole tragic experience of our century, I would submit, demonstrates this to be one of the few unalterable commandments of socialism: the participation of the workers, the masses of human beings, as selfconscious men preparing to enter the arena of history...
...and indeed, he might even form or join his "own" party...
...IRVING HOWE One major sign is the decay or at least partial breakdown of the transmission agencies— received patterns of culture, family structure, and education—through which values, norms, and ideals are handed down from generation to generation...
...It may be pos WHAT'S THE TROUBLE...
...What we must do is to recognize the distance, perhaps the necessary distance, between political strategy and existential response...
...What I propose to assert is that we have been living not—certainly not merely— in the Age of Revolution about which Trotsky spoke but in an Age of Counterrevolution that has assailed mankind from Right and Left...
...SAUL BELLOW, Herzog THE RHETORIC OF APOCALYPSE HAUNTS the air and naturally fools rush in to use it...
...Who, thinking of our bombs and our pollution, does not wish, at least on occasion, to join in the jeremiads against all that we are and have...
...his first inclination would have been to regard it as a sign of reaction, For that matter, it is by no means clear that a socialist of the present moment can understand it, either...
...Among Marxists the significance of this liberal outlook was far from appreciated, and in the Marxist tradition there has un IRVING HOWE doubtedly been a line of opinion systematically hostile to liberal values...
...The Fabian course to which democratic socialists in the United States are, by and large, committed, seems to me the closest we can come to political realism...
...Nothing, that is, except that vulgarized quasiMarxism which has been improvised by a small though significant minority of the intellectual young...
...One result is that in the name of rejecting their elders' betrayal of liberal values they slide into contempt for those values...
...Higher education on a mass scale is becoming a reality in Western society, yet no one quite knows what its purpose, content, or outcome is or should be...
...which followed the breakup in the nineteenth century of traditional religious systems...
...It is a social arrangement sufficiently stable, thus far, to all but eliminate the prospect of revolution in the advanced countries...
...What could possibly constitute evidence for such a claim...
...all returning to plague us at the end of the twentieth...
...Perhaps so...
...The present conflict between generations or if you prefer, between segments of the generations, is "normal" only insofar as it seizes upon, intensifies and distorts those philosophical, moral and religious themes which we have inherited from the nineteenth century...
...How could it be otherwise...
...A politics of limitation, of coalition, of step-by-step change is desirable...
...Richard Lowenthal has remarked on this score: We have not yet had a civilization that was not based on a transcendent belief...
...There are many things about which we simply cannot know...
...the proletariat sinks into indolence and cynicism...
...I am convinced, in any case, that the coming era will witness a proliferation of such sects, some betraying the corrupting effects of the very technology they will repudiate, others mixing antinomian ecstacies with utopian visions, and still others seeking to discover through simplicities of custom the lost paradise of love...
...The more education is exalted in our social mythology, the less do we seem to know what it means...
...Around such questions disputes rage, and rage so harshly that connections can barely be made between the antagonists...
...well, quite so brutal...
...Nor is it to suggest that every change taking place at the deeper and more obscure levels of our experience should immediately be submitted to a harsh moral judgment...
...They were talking about a crisis of civilization...
...I am aware here of a possible criticism: that in speaking of these three stages of recent history as they had been thought of by socialists, I am referring not to objective realities but to conceptions nurtured, perhaps mistakenly, by people on the Left, and that there is nothing inherent in modern history which requires that certain problems be correlated with early capitalism or others with socialism...
...And even in its triumphant moments, itexhibits a want of consciousness in its choice of leaders...
...Many people, especially those drawn from the upper and middle classes, have thereby come to experience a certain freedom to see their lives in generalized or abstract "human" terms...
...If we look at the collapse of democratic societies in our century, we must conclude that the usually cited causes—economic depression, unemployment, etc.—are necessary but not sufficient elements...
...It WHAT'S THE TROUBLE...
...and whether the sense of disorientation that afflicts us isn't due to the difficulties of keeping alive a high civilization without a sustaining belief...
...At one and the same time, a young person of middle-class origin can feel free to experiment with his life, yet must also live under the shadow of a war perceived to be unjust and even criminal...
...An anxiety, A caution, And a caution against the caution...
...That expresses and intensifies a crisis of civilization...
...The question is: will we succeed...
...We have learned that the effort to force men into utopia leads to barbarism, but we also know that to live without the image of utopia is to risk the death of imagination...
...but precisely for that reason we ought to recognize the points at which it fails to stir the imagination or speak to the troubles and passions of many people...
...vast popular movements, some burned out in defeat and others twisted into betrayals, would also appear in Europe and Asia...
...In practice, it is hard to keep the two kinds of response completely separate...
...In the West, a mere three decades after the ravages of totalitarianism, there is again visible a strident contempt for the ethic of liberal discourse and the style of rationality...
...He is asking something more troublesome: can atriumphant working class, once in power, displaythe political "capacity" to rule over a modernsociety or will it, in effect, cede power to an alliance of bureaucrats, intellectuals, and technocrats...
...in part it signifies a thread of confusion that has kept recurring throughout the history of modem education...
...Some of it is indeed "mere junk from fashionable magazines," and even those of us who know that we have lived through a terrible century can become impatient with the newest modes in fin du mondisme...
...It has no clear sense of the connections it would maintain— or whether it even wishes to maintain them—with the civilization of which presumably it is a part...
...One immediate cause for establishing these institutions is frustration with the external society: there is less and less socially useful or meaningful labor for young people to do and the consequence is that while the process of socialization is sped up the prospect of maturation is delayed...
...We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and the rest of it, mere junk from fashionable magazines...
...Because, if carried through to the end, they release yearnings and desires that by their very nature cannot be satisfied through the limited mechanisms of democratic politics...
...andthey do not bring with them a strong sense of class allegiance or definition to which they feel obliged to cling and which might create psychic barriersbetween them and their middle-class peers...
...Without that, or some qualified version of it, socialism is nothing but a mockery, a swindle of bureaucrats and intellectuals reaching out for power...
...The chaotic but profoundly significant urges and passions that sweep through modem society —at once innocent and nihilistic, aspiring and gloom-ridden, chiliastic and despairing— must touch us as well as those with whom we have political quarrels...
...Yet both those defending and those attacking the society may well be speaking with complete sincerity in behalf of a common heritage of values...
...Nor should this, by the way, come as a surprise, for no other twentiethcentury ideology has been so powerfully able to stir or corrupt the nascent religious im pulses of sensitive and uprooted people...
...Movies, rock music, drugs—these may not figure with equal force inthe lives of both working- and middle-class youth, but increasingly they do create a generational consciousness and solidarity that, to an undeterminedextent, disintegrates class lines...
...One is tempted simply to say what Louis Armstrong is supposed to have said when he was asked to define jazz, "If you don't know, I can't tell you...
...The caution against this caution: There are limits to common sense and pragmatism, which those who favor these qualities ought to be the first to recognize...
...What, beyond such needs, should they wish to learn...
...Even if we conclude that the breakdown of religious systems, enormously liberating as in part it was, also yielded unforeseen difficulties for those who might never have stepped into a church or a synagogue, this is not to be taken, of course, as a token of support for those who wish to recreate through will the dogmas that were once supported by faith...
...And they will surely be heard again...
...does not follow that everything to be found among minorities will become a long-range social trend...
...if extensive, for deep changes in the relationships of power...
...But if we lack that discipline, we will pay heavily...
...All questions of the nineteenth century...
...Perhaps we have no choice but to Live with the uncomfortable aftereffects of the disintegration, aftereffects that range from moving efforts at private spiritual communion to flashy chemical improvisations for pseudoreligious sects...
...Anyone observing the intellectual life of the West during the past decade may be struck by the thought that some such loss of conviction, or some such coming-apart of moral binder, seems to be happening, if not among the masses, then certainly among growing segments of the educated classes...
...Is there a path for us, a crooked path for men of disciplined hope...
...What, beyond the rudiments of literacy, do people need to know...
...Though it may coincide with a social WHAT'S THE TROUBLE...
...That in a society so beset as ours with ideological noise and cultural clatter we should expect the necessary discipline—give unto the ballot box its due, and leave for your life-style what your taste requires—seems all but utopian...
...Youth groups, cultures, movements serve this function, combining relations of diffuse solidarity with universalistic values...
...But even if we lean toward skepticism, we ought to recognize the possibility that a series of intermittent generational traumas, and the current one is hardly the first, might constitute a long-range historical trend of major importance.* • A few points in rebuttal of those who, in thename of plebeian solidity, minimize the significance of the new youth styles: • It is hard to suppose that the feelings of disaffection or dismay one encounters among youngpeople are confined to those who come from asingle class, though it may well be that such feelingsare most strongly articulated by them...
...But more important by far is the fact, as I take it to be, that those who believe they are motivated merely by a revulsion against the betrayal of accepted values are in reality being moved, at least in part and at least with partial consciousness, by the more extreme visions of life-style that we associate with postindustrial society...
...The Vietnam war, in a more recent moment, has been felt by segments of the young as an international trauma, serving to break ties of loyalty with both society and 463...
...The Golden Age," wrote Dostoevsky, "is the most unlikely of all the dreams that have been, but for it men have given up their life...
...Has the vision of the self-activization of the masses, a vision democratic in its essence, proved to be false...
...It is still too soon to speak with certainty...
...They would be symptoms of a crisis of civilization through which Western society has been moving for at least a century and a half...
...Whatever this may signify, and I don't pretend to know, it ought to be sufficient evidence to dismiss the claim that somehow the less attractive features of the "counter culture" are unique to disoriented or spoiled middle-class youth...
...And when to this incoherence is added the persuasion that young people should be kept in schools for increasing lengths of time (often with the parallel notion that schools should be made to resemble the external society, which is to say, to be unlike schools), then immediate and long-range troubles are thrust into a dangerous friction...
...whether the nihilism every sensitive person feels encompassing his life like a spiritual smog isn't itself a kind of inverted religious aspiration (so Dostoevsky kept saying...
...The social-political problems of the moment and the deeper crisis of civilization have, so to say, a habit of collaboration...
...It has more to do with the experience of communities and generations than with the resolution of social conflict...
...To such questions a simple answer is neither possible nor desirable...
...Now, it has been argued by writers who are skeptical of the above description that signs of disaffection, whether trivial or profound, are mostly confined to segments of affluent youth and that the blue-collar young, still facing a struggle for economic survival, cannot indulge themselves in such existential luxuries...
...but it is also a social arrangement unstable enough to encourage the militant arousal of previously silent groups, the intensification of political discontents, and the reappearance, if in new and strange forms, of those tormenting "ultimate questions" with which modern man has beset himself for a century and a half...
...In part this arises from the mixed failings and successes of the welfare state, but in part from an upswell of unacknowledged and ill-understood religious sentiments that, unable to find a proper religious outlet, become twisted into moral and political absolutism, a hunger for total solutions and apocalyptic visions...
...There seems barely any consensus among professors as to what they are supposed to profess, barely any agreement among educators as to what they believe education to be or do...
...Clearly, it is too soon to say whether we are witnessing a transient outbreak of malaise reflecting the privileges and disadvantages of middle-class youth or a fundamental revision in the patterns of our life reflecting the emergence of postindustrial society, the loss of faith in traditional puritan and bourgeois values, and the persistence of moral and metaphysical problems thrown up by the crisis of civilization...
...This would not of course be the only direction of political change in the twentieth century...
...And there is a feeling abroad, which I partly share, that even if the Vietnam war were to end, our cities to be rebuilt, and our racial conflicts to be eased, we would still be left with a heavy burden of trouble, a trouble not merely personal or social but having to do with some deep if ill-located regions of experience...
...and postcapitalist (quandaries concerning work, leisure, morality, and style, such as are sometimes described as "existential," a term meant to indicate significant imprecision...
...The atom bomb has made us aware that the very future of the race hangs on political decision...
...I accept this criticism in advance, but would only add that all of us see, as we must see, historical developments through the lens of our assumptions, and that those who reject socialist categories may come to similar conclusions through their own terms about the mixture of problems I have been discussing...
...Let us not rehearse them at length...
...In the long run this is surely what one hopes for all humanity—that men should free themselves, to the extent that they can, from the tyranny of circumstances and confront their essential being...
...It may in deed be that the religious impulse is deeply grounded in human existence and that men need objects of veneration beyond their egos...
...Such a politics offers a possible way of improving and extending the welfare state, which is about as much as one can hope for in the immediate future, but it has little to say about problems that the welfare state is barely equipped to cope with...
...Again experience proves far more recalcitrant and complicated than any of our theories has enabled us to suppose...
...The expected benefits of Reason were scorned, as being either deceptive or unneeded...
...So let us be ready to acknowledge to others and ourselves that between the politics we see as necessary and the imaginative-expressive needs we have as men living in this time, there are likely to be notable gaps...
...The spectrum of nominated substitutes, from union bureaucracies to insurgent kinder WHAT'S THE TROUBLE...
...workingclass children go to college in increasing, if not sufficient, numbers...
...Today's middle-class style can become tomorrow's working-class style...
...It turns to communities of the faithful who repudiate technology and civilization itself, a repudiation as old as religion itself...
...For the one thing that is entirely clear is that a politics or a social outlook devoted to democratic social change and the style of rationality would lose...
...We might, for example, choose to say that during the past decade we have become aware that the religious disputes of WHAT'S THE TROUBLE...
...Yet, no matter how alien we remain to the religious outlook, we must ask ourselves whether the malaise of this time isn't partly a consequence of that despairing emptiness * This kind of remark, I know, is too easily used as a way of dismissing the radical young...
...It is a project that declares every citizen to be entitled to a higher education and soon may enable every citizen to obtain one...
...man Social Democrat might have felt about the experience of his time.* The main historical fact about the nineteenth century—and for socialists, one of the greatest facts in all history—is that the masses, dumb through the centuries, began to enter public life...
...JEAN VANNIER, "A Century's Balance Sheet," Partisan Review, March 1948 The question Vannier is raising here is not merely whether the working class can take power —that is an old and well-rehearsed question...
...With it, socialism could still be the greatest of human visions...
...But we would be dooming ourselves to a philistine narrowness if we denied that such questions do beset human beings, that they are significant questions, and that in our moment there are peculiarly urgent reasons for coming back to them...
...Or to be more modest we experience problems that in our thought we have assigned to three stages of society: precapitalist (race, illiteracy, backwardness...
...So, unless he were the kind of laborite or social democrat who had become a bit skeptical of his received orthodoxies, our observer of 1895 wasn't likely to grasp the revolutionary implications of the liberal premise, or to see it as part of a large encompassing democratic transformation that ideally would link the bourgeois and socialist revolutions...
...He would, in the jargon of our day, become a subject of history rather than its object...
...A bleak prospect...
...If, say, in the next decade figures like Spiro Agnew and Jerry Rubin, or to choose less disreputable substitutes, William Buckley and Charles Reich were allowed to dominate public debate, people would vote according to their prejudices concerning drugs, sex, morality, pornography, and "permissiveness...
...but we were naive in our sense of how it might be brought about, or what the cost of bringing it about might be...
...Why then should one suppose that such sentiments can pose a threat to democratic institutions...
...Finally, he might have become aware of certain trends in Western culture, such as the fierce hostility to bourgeois life shown by almost all writers and artists, including the reactionary ones, and the rapidity of change, indeed the absolute triumph of the principle of change, within European culture...
...Its courage and selfsacrifice are not enough to give it what, precisely, is needed in order to act out the role assigned to it by Marx: political capacity...
...they are likely to share atleast some of the responses of other students...
...The welfare state systematically creates appetites beyond its capacity to appease—that, so to say, is the principle of dynamism which keeps it both in motion and off balance...
...For if felt at all, a crisis of civilization must be felt as pervasive: as atmospheric and behavioral, encompassing and insidious...
...To speak of a crisis of civilization is not, of course, to suggest that our civilization is coming to an end: it may be but we have no way of knowing...
...others reject the received values (sustained work, restraint as a social discipline, postponement of gratifications in behalf of ultimate ends, goals of success, etc...
...The First World War—as it reveals not only the hypocrisies of the Eureopean states, including the liberal bourgeois states, but the inability of the social democrats to prevent a global bloodbath—proves to be a terrible blow to the inherited attitudes of the earlier age of progress...
...Furthermore, we must recognize that at least in a democratic society politics has built-in—and in the long run, desirable—limitations...
...The bourgeois mythos has been losing its hold on the bourgeois mind, though nothing has come along to replace it...
...The United States, and to a lesser extent other advanced countries of the West, have embarked on a project which, we socialists would like to think, might better have coincided with the growth of a democratic socialist order...
...Modern culture was recruited as an authority in the assault upon liberal styles of feeling...
...If we allowed such impulses to dominate our minds and our conduct, we could hardly call ourselves socialists either, since we would have lost that fraternal feeling and patience that require democrats to heed the wishes of the people...
...The American Revolution did not...
...Partly because of the sterility of traditional religious institutions, this experience cannot easily be embodied in religious terms and it must therefore assume the (often misshapen) masks of politics, culture, and life-style.* Our socialist of 75 or 80 years ago, smug in his rationalism and convinced that all would be well once "we" took power, could hardly understand such a development...
...In any case, the jumble of interests and needs I have been associating with various stages of modem history could also be regarded as distinctive elements—elements of conflict and tension—within the welfare state...
...The "instinctive sense of reality" attributed to it by Auguste Comte, which it soreadily reflects in many a circumstance, abandons it at such moments...
...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 is gone...
...A social crisis is expressed mainly through public struggle, a crisis of civilization mainly through incoherence of behavior...
...The welfare state cannot count upon those fierce sentiments of national loyalty which, precisely insofar as it has come to dominate the industrialized portion of the world, it replaces with an array of group and sectional interests —that much-vaunted pluralism of interests often concealing an imbalance of opportunity...
...Some declare an acceptance of received values but cry out against their betrayal by the system or the men who run it...
...The difficulty—let us say, one difficulty— of living at this moment in history is that we experience, both as simultaneity and contradiction, the problems of three stages of modern society...
...Yet evenamong plebeian segments of our population thereare visible strong feelings of rage and resentment, sometimes turned against "the students," but inorigin and character often sharing with "the students" sentiments of powerlessness and dismay...
...If local, a social crisis calls for reform...
...In this country, thelines of social and cultural demarcation between the classes are not nearly so firm as in othercapitalist societies...
...L L ET US NOW TURN abruptly away from our present concerns and move backward to a point some 75 or 80 years ago, in order to see how an English left-laborite or Ger * The central idea for this section was suggested to me by Max Shachtman, though I cannot say whether he would approve of the way in which I have developed it...
...How shall we live...
...but other terms can often veil similar perceptions...
...In the short run—and who knows, perhaps even the long run—a conflict develops between the values of high culture and the values of universal education, to both of which we are committed but between which we would hardly know how to choose, if choose we had to...
...What is required here is a measure of social and intellectual discipline, the capacity for keeping one's various interests distinct and in a hierarchy of importance: thus, legalization of marijuana may be a desirable goal but it is as nothing compared to ending the Vietnam war, and if raising the first issue will impede progress on the second, then we must restrain ourselves...
...Why we should be experiencing this confusion of realms is a question to which the answers are either too easy or too hard...
...it may be possible through legislation to improve the conditions under which men work but it is not possible through politics to cope with the growing uncertainties men have as to work and leisure...
...but if you are concerned with long-range social trends, then you must recognize that by their very nature these are likely first to appear among minorities...
...Young protesters often believe they are motivated by a fundamental denial of Western civilization when in reality they are unhappy with their private lot...
...But by and by, whatever the consequences of its action, whether victory or defeat, it is finally caught up in the sluggish, quotidian flow of things...
...Or merely delayed by historical interruptions and accidents?* I shall not try to answer this question, in part because I am not certain how to answer it except to note the cogency of a remark attributed to Coumot: "The fact that we repeatedly fail in some venture merely because of chance is perhaps the best proof that chance is not the cause of our failure...
...The self-activity of the working class, that essential fulcrum of socialist power, would now be replaced in all too many instances by an authoritarian manipulation of plebeian energies (Communism in all its forms) or by an accommodation to the limited goals of the existing society (social democracy in most of its forms...
...for while such a situation might arise out of spontaneous passions on all sides, it might just as well have been arranged as a political maneuver for the far Right, the only political group that could profit from it...
...WHAT'S THE TROUBLE...
...The whole enterprise of education is in grave trouble...
...Romantic writers like Pilnyak and Pasternak looked upon the Revolution less as a step to proletarian power than as an upheaval within the depths of their country that would force it toward a destiny sharply different from that of the West...
...When a society does not know what it wishes its young to know, it is suffering from moral and spiritual incoherence...
...People employing another set of categories will no doubt see the politics of this century in other terms...
...We are also saying that we live at a moment when problems beyond the reach of politics—problems that should be beyond the reach of politics—have come to seem especially urgent and disturbing...
...It is in the very nature of the welfare state that through its formal, ideological claims it should arouse steadily increasing expectations which as an economic system still geared mainly to a maximization of profit it does not always or sufficiently satisfy...
...There are overwhelming cultural or pseudo-cultural experiences shared by the young of all classes, certainly more About the gravity of a second major symptom that points to a crisis of civilization there is likely to be less dispute...
...If the impulse Dostoevsky invokes here cannot be expressed through religious channels, then it must turn to secular equivalents...
...Problems therefore suddenly appear in this late capitalist society that we had supposed would emerge only under socialism—problems not to be described merely or mainly in terms of social class but rather as pertaining to all human beings...
...It turns to heretical sects seeking an unsullied pantheism...
...Impatience with the sluggish masses, burning convictions of righteousness, the suffocation of technological society, the boredom of overcrowded cities, the yearning for transcendent ends beyond the petty limits of group interest, romantic-sinister illusions about the charismatic virtues of dictatorship in underdeveloped countries—all these tempt young people into apolitical politics, at best the commune and at worst the bomb, but both sharing an amorphous revulsion from civilization itself...
...Because, if carried through to the end, they summon moods of desperation and fanaticism which lead to a dismissal of democratic politics...
...At least in principle, a social crisis is open to solutions by legislation and reform, that is, public policy...
...But if we remember that ours has been the century of Hitler and Stalin, then my "brutal exaggeration" about the main political drift may not seem...
...sible through legislation to remove some of the socioeconomic causes of alienation but it is not possible through politics to cope directly with that seething cluster of emotions we call alienation...
...Curricula discussions at faculty meetings are notoriously tiresome, yet they finally do reflect disputes and mirror disorientation concerning the very idea of education and thereby, perhaps, the very nature of our civilization...
...Let us now propose a brutal exaggeration, yet one that has its analytic uses: by the time the nineteenth century came to an end, at a point usually agreed to be 1914, the basic direction of world politics starts to be reversed...
...The anxiety: whenever there occurs that meeting of social crisis and crisis of civilization I have sketched here, democratic norms and institutions are likely to be in danger...
...Ultimately, one suspects, this crisis has to do with residual sentiments of religion and vague but powerful yearnings toward transcendence...
...It turns to the fanaticism of ideology (which may explain the continued hold Marxism has on the imaginations of the young, for is not Marxism the true religion of our century...
...Who, elbowing his way past the wastes of our cities, does not feel revulsion against the very stones and glass, the brick and towers, all the debris of inhumaneness...
...IV H H OW DOES ONE KNOW that we, like our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers, are living through a crisis of civilization...
...There is little concurrence in our universities, and not much more in our high schools, as to the skills, disciplines, kinds of knowledge, and attitudes of mind we wish to develop...
...Premature...
...capitalist (class conflict, economic crisis, distribution of wealth...
...I don't suppose there has ever been a time when the question hasn't been asked, but in those centuries when religious systems were commonly accepted as revealed truth, the problems of existence necessarily took on a different shape and eventuated in a different emotional discipline from anything we know in our time...
...In time that would be one source of the Marxist disaster...
...There follows a terrible confusion in which problems open to public solution become encumbered with metaphysical and quasireligious issues while efforts are vainly made to bring into the political arena metaphysical and quasi-religious issues beyond the capacity of politics to cope with...
...We can only say that developments occur which occupy a longer time span and are more deeply lodged in the intangibles of conduct than is true for the issues of a given moment...
...In the industrialized countries capitalism has entered a phase of unprecedented affluence, not justly distributed yet still reaching almost every class in society...
...But it is crucial to note that we experience these three orders of difficulty within the context of an advanced or "late" capitalism...
...These "ultimate questions" as to man's place in the universe, the meaning of his existence, the nature of his destiny— that they now come to us in rather modish or foolish ways is cause for impatience and polemic...
...For good or bad, illumination or contamination, young workers in a mass society increasingly share the surroundinggeneral culture...
...Yet people who are anything but fools seem also to yield themselves to visions of gloom, as if through a surrender of rationality and will they might find a kind of peace...
...In the West a generation has arisen accustomed to affluence and therefore able to devote itself to problems of life, sometimes merely life-style, as against the problems of making a living...
...Trotsky attacked these writers for this heresy, but in retrospect it does not seem that they were quite as foolish as he made out...
...A Berlin worker had heard August Bebel speak...
...Millions of young people are thrust into universities and no one quite knows why or toward what end...
...Liberalism as both idea and value came under fierce attack...
...For the sake of it prophets have died and been slain, without it the peoples will not live and cannot die...
...they even maliciously assume the guise of one another...
...But they would still be there...
...Every political tendency on the Left had to face the question: if the working class turns out not to be the revolutionary force that Marxists had supposed, what then...
...In 1948, writing on the occasion of the hundredthanniversary of The Communist Manifesto, one of Trotsky's close associates remarked about the working class that It has shown itself capable of outbursts of heroism, during which it sacrifices itself without athought, and develops a power so strong as to shake society to its very foundations...
...IRVING HOWE cated man...
...What do we hope to pass on from one generation to the next in regard to moral and cultural values...
...Who can say...
...For these are disputes that come down to the question of how or whether we shall maintain a vital continuity with traditional Western culture...
...What seems likely is that all who share the view that democratic norms are essential to a tolerable life would be ready to grant some credit to the sketch that has been drawn here...
...this question has obsessed thoughtful people throughout the modem era, which is to say, since at least the French Revolution, and it has obsessed them with increasing anxiety and intensity...
...What needs, then, to be estimated, or simply guessed, is the extent to which such minorities—in our case, a rather substantial one—may shape the conduct of tomorrow...
...Who can fault this premise...
...By an irony too painful to underscore, it is only in Eastern Europe that intellectuals have come to appreciate the value of liberal institutions...
...IRVING HOWE earlier generations...
...Perhaps by a third line of speculation: that it is precisely the recurrent political-social difficulties of Western capitalism, significantly eased but not removed by the welfare state, which create a fertile ground for the emerging symptoms of a long-festering crisis of civilization...
...The decay or partial breakdown in the transmission of values occurs most dramatically among middle-class and upper-middleclass youth secure enough in the comforts of affluence to feel that in the future our primary concern will be existence rather than survival...
...If your main concern is to plot out lines of voting behavior, then it is indeed crucial to notice the class limitations of the new youth styles...
...he was struck by the thought that, for all his limitations of status, he might help shape public policy...
...If we felt no impulses of this kind we could hardly call ourselves socialists, since we would have lost the wish for a qualitative transcendence of the given reality...
...What the worker came dimly to realize was not merely that history could be made, the lesson of the French Revolution, but that he himself might make it, the message of socialism...
...Some of the more spectacular symptoms of disaffection we are now witnessing ought to be taken not as historical novelties revealing the special virtue or wickedness of a new generation, but as tokens of that continuity of restlessness and trouble which comprises the history of Western consciousness since the late eighteenth century...
...And even if I am wrong in supposing that only the far Right could profit politically from a Kulturkampf, how much comfort is that...
...but what we do not really know is the relative weights to assign to these reasons, and that means we do not know very much...
...yet we must not allow strategy to blot out vision...
...For what should interest us here is not the "rightness" of a particular intellectual vocabulary or tradition, but a cluster of insights that might be reached through different vocabularies and traditions...
...Those of us who spoke for a universalization of culture and education were not, I think, wrong...
...A counter society, half-real and halfmyth, has appeared as the Third World, imbued by its admirers with a mixture of utopianism and authoritarianism, revolution and primitive nobility: all arising from a revulsion against advanced society...
...III H H OW ARE WE NOW TO RELATE the two lines of speculation I have thus far advanced— first, that we are experiencing the repercussions of a crisis of civilization (a few signs of which will shortly be noted) and second, that we are living through the consequences of the failure of socialism...
...In any case, for us this failure is the central problem of modern political experience, and it helps explain—even while being far from the sole explanation for—the fact that every mode of politics in our century succumbs in varying degrees to authoritarianism...
...Remembering the certainties of our socialist of 75 or 80 years ago, good decent and even heroic fellow that he was, we might be a little cautious in dismissing the needs and aspirations of our fellowmen, especially those we find difficult to understand...
...If the nineteenth century promised, roughly speaking, an everincreasing movement toward democracy and liberality, than the twentieth, even while exploiting the catchwords and passions of the nineteenth, would be marked by an overwhelming drift toward various kinds of authoritarianism...
...It canrid itself in an instant of the most inveterate prejudices, while there seems to be no limit to its audacity...
...Nor would he have paid attention to the views of, say, Dostoevsky on this matter, for as a rule he felt comfortable in the self-contained world that, together with an ideology proclaiming competence in almost all branches of knowledge, socialism had created for itself...
...crisis and thereby exacerbate its effects, a crisis of civilization has to do not so much with the workings of the economy or the rightness of social arrangements as it does with the transmission of values, those tacit but deeply lodged assumptions by means of which men try to regulate their conduct...
...A social crisis signifies a breakdown in the functioning of a society: it fails to feed ^L•S^7 the poor, it cannot settle disputes among constituent groups, it drags the country into an endless war...
...By contrast, the Russian Revolution not only overturned social arrangements, it also signified a deep rent within the fabric of civilization—or so it seemed only a few decades ago, though today, with the increasing "bourgeoisification" of Russia, we can no longer be certain...
...We are saying that many things requiring remedy are open to social-political solution (provided intelligence and will are present...
...He can feel himself free to abandon the norms of bourgeois society, yet in doing so he will often unwittingly reinstate them as self-alienating masks and phantasms...
...By classical liberalism I have in mind not a particular economic doctrine, as the term has come to be understood in Europe, but rather a commitment to political openness, the values of tolerance, liberties such as were embodied in the American Bill of Rights, and that most revolutionary of innovations, the multi-party system...
...What is our image of an edu so than in any previous society...
...In the short run, however, this occurs, to the extent that it does occur, within a social context that distorts and frustrates the newly acquired sense of the human...
...We failed to see that some problems are not open to quick public solution, and we refused to see that the solution of other problems might lead to new and unforeseen ones...
...In part this seems due to immediate causes that might let up in a few years...
...The immediate result is social bitterness and clash...
...The central expectation of Marxism— that by its own efforts the working class could transform history—was called into question...
...It ought to be said that the more intelligent socialists had foreseen the possibility that by liberating men from material want socialism might impose upon them a severe crisis of civilization, though impose it under circumstances more favorable to the human imagination than had been possible in the past...
Vol. 18 • October 1971 • No. 5
