CANDIDES LEGACY

...Edwin Schur examines these tracts in his analysis of self-awareness as an ideology...

...And he prospered...

...So, still resolutely turning away from the world as Candide had done so many years before, each of his descendants began to cultivate his own feelings, his human potential, and his consciousness in a search for joy, growth, openness, and an improved ability to relate...

...There is an absence of a readiness to care about the lives of others when no one displays any sense of urgency about the dismal employment prospects of black American youth...

...Here again the response is a familiar one: first people must change themselves, become liberated, open, spontaneous, and then the world will change...

...Schur, in an examination of the possible relevance of the ideology to social action like that of the women's movement, shows the poverty and deceptiveness of selfawareness thought as a means of dealing with the real problems of people trying to cope with injustice...

...Among the fruits of their labors are Esalen and Encounter group therapy as well as numerous tracts celebrating, among other panaceas for the psyche, the virtues of communicating, primal screaming, TA, TM, and EST...

...There is a lack of simple humanity when being on welfare becomes synonymous with cheating and serves as the ground for moral indignation...

...But there is, I think, one more aspect that ought to be noted...

...He gave himself wholly to that task, obeying the dictates of the work ethic as he had once honored the precepts of Dr...

...In some sense they are merely the latest manifestations of an American tradition, the self-help manual...

...The world, though, does not go away and has a habit of intruding into even the most intensely cultivated gardens...

...Ultimately one must face the question of what to do about the world and its attendant pains...

...These manuals, past and present, stress an optimistic theme: success is within the reach of anyone who has the right frame of mind and is willing to apply himself...

...getting ahead in the world" was the primary goal...

...Pangloss...

...The other side of that coin is a withdrawal to the garden of the psyche where one cultivates awareness of self and an indifference to the fate of others...

...According to the revisionists, Candide decided to cultivate his own garden when he and his companions reached California...

...But by the time Candide's great-grandchildren reached maturity—what with the family's ability to invest in the latest agribusiness technology and the availability of Mexican wetbacks—the family was not needed in the fields...

...They had become, in short, a leisured, middle-class group that could not easily practice the family faith...

...But in the selfawareness movement what must be done or accomplished in the world takes a distinctly secondary place: "The scope of living is reduced to one individual and his or her immersion in an interiorized process...

...Its individualistic ethos ignores the everyday horrors of poverty, political inequality, and injustice, and implicitly denies that these, rather than a lack of awareness, are the significant causes of unhappiness...

...For all the fine talk about growth and creativity there is an obvious lack of sensitivity to actual problems, and there is an equally obvious relationship between this callousness and the middle-class status of the consumers of selfawareness doctrines...

...Perhaps the best example of the routinization of conciousness is Transcendental Meditation, which also shows that you don't have to be American to appreciate the profits of rationalization...

...How to Win Friends and Influence People, The Power of Positive Thinking, and a recent best-seller, How To Be Your Own Best Friend are part of a tradition reaching back to Poor Richard's Almanack...

...There is a lack of generosity apparent when the President of the United States seizes upon Open Admissions and free tuition at New York's City University as prime examples of "fiscal irresponsibility...

...THE AWARENESS TRAP: SELF-ABSORPTION INSTEAD OF SOCIAL CHANGE, by Edwin Schur...

...Nor does the ideology recognize that those daily pains of existence (and some of the joys) that may be part of, say, a marriage, are as much the result of its structure as a social institution as a failure of persons "to relate" properly...

...It was not long, however, before it occurred to them—many, after all, had sojourned in Berkeley and some had visited Cambridge and New Haven—that the solution to their problem was to abandon a fundamentalist view of the faith and to take Candide's injunction metaphorically...

...The current infatuation with self-awareness is part of a more pervasive meanness of spirit that runs through much of today's middle-class consciousness...

...To the very end of his life he preached the importance of cultivating one's garden, and each generation of the family instilled the idea in the succeeding generation...

...The traditional manuals saw self-improvement as a means for material success...

...New York: Quadrangle Books...

...There is a touching ecumenical spirit present when both Charles Reich and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi agree that, a change in consciousness will determine the future social being of men and women...

...Meanness of spirit is recognizable as an active turning away from the world that others must live in...

...Although the contemporary manuals assure readers there is no simple way to achieve the benefits of a heightened consciousness, Schur finds that they succumb nonetheless to the conventions of self-help with listings of how-to-steps to selfawareness...

...The primary focus is not on the relation of the individual to the world about him and to the tasks that must be or ought to be accomplished there but, rather, on the "inner But this is precisely what the ideology denies...