Growing Up Absurd-Again

...One reason why he was so in tune with the young was that he himself had never quite grown up—that was one (not altogether satisfactory) alternative to growing up absurd...

...The young of the middle class grew restive in their colleges...

...A girl does not have to, she is not expected to, "make something" of herself...

...and even when he felt constrained to raise his voice, it was likely to be an angry rebuke in speech or broadside rather than patient exposition and analysis...

...It is not an interesting question whether or not our present Youth Problems are fundamentally different from those of other times, whether or not they will blow over...

...It is not a "psychological" question of poor influences and bad attitudes, but an objective question of real opportunities for worthwhile experiences...

...Beatniks and juvenile delinquents are antiquated types—though the youth gangs are killing each other again, for higher stakes, in Boston and Washington, D.C...

...In recent years Goodman's writings have probably been most read in West Germany, by the anarchist wing of the Greens...

...Goodman's next paragraph spelled out his main theme so trenchantly that it is worth another long quotation: Growth, like any ongoing function, requires adequate objects in the environment to meet the needs and capacities of the growing child, boy, youth, and young man, until he can better choose and make his own environment...

...Their cultural dismay is genuine, but they take much too lightly the absence of initiative, morale, or commitment...

...And in a similar vein, of himself and his friends: Our position is ambiguous...

...but Goodman's relations with younger civil rights workers were never very close...

...They loved him for it...

...Nonetheless, those were the ideas on everyone's lips...

...Where were his data...

...his call for a closer and more harmonious relation of the urban and the rural, rather than the specious modern mixing of the two in suburbia...

...Immediately after World War II radicals had predicted the institution of a "permanent war economy" —by the mid-fifties called, still more blandly, "the organized system" or, somewhat misleadingly, "the cold war...

...There would be a kind of metaphysical crisis...

...This kind of thinking is the final result of the recent social-scientific attitude that culture is added onto a featureless animal, rather than being the invention-anddiscovery of human powers...

...Yet the others suffer more from us than we do from them...

...Goodman had an answer to such attacks: "How could I write a perceptive book if I didn't pay attention, and why should I pay attention to something unless, for some reason, it interested me...

...Business, government, and real property have closed up all the space there is...

...Public speech quite disregards human facts...

...But the older generation, which had learned not to expect too much from the world, hardly knew what he was talking about...

...If we sum up these imagined conditions, there would arise a formidable question: Is it possible, being a human being, to exist...

...It thwarts aptitude and creates stupidity...

...Perhaps the recent events in Eastern Europe and China cannot yet be assessed in terms of their outcome, but they, too, argue that Goodman understood the limits of organized power to adapt human nature to any social order...

...the crucial economic problem remains that of synthesized demand...

...certain basic concerns of public life have also been altered by the experience of the intervening years so profoundly that Growing Up Absurd, because it did not address them directly, might now seem stale or beside the point...

...One had to ask what the job was for...

...Most careers and callings were without ideals of use or service, simply competitive and commercial...

...Working-class and ghetto youths with less future to renounce, reacted more recklessly to society's plans for them...

...Her career does not have to be self-justifying, for she will have children, which is absolutely self-justifying, like any other natural or creative act...

...the "present" is broadened to include more past...

...Perhaps Goodman would have granted this had he been writing Growing Up Absurd in 1990 instead of 1960, but it is not really clear what he would have said today...

...Yet Growing Up Absurd was no underground classic of campus cafeterias...

...and yet millions, who to all appearances are human beings, behave FALL • 1990 • 487 Growing Up Absurd as though they were the normal course of things...

...Goodman was using the word "ecology" long before he wrote Growing Up Absurd, and FALL • 1990 • 491 Growing Up Absurd he considered an unpolluted natural world part of our birthright...

...Goodman drifted farther and farther "out of the swim" and lived below the poverty line for many years, during which he and his wife nonetheless managed to raise a family chiefly on her salary as a secretary...

...There is no behavior unregulated by the firm or the police...

...On the one hand we are the savage, obscene, and uncouth anarchists, rebelling against the solid Establishment...

...his reminder that technology properly belongs under the jurisdiction of moral philosophy and not the R&D teams of the corporations or the Pentagon...

...As one writer "under thirty" put it, at last someone from the older generation had told the truth about American society—"what the sharpest young people know today, and speak of among themselves...

...A shibboleth...

...Ours remains an affluent society, with enormous amounts of leisure, a surplus of goods, and a large class of unemployables on the dole or in the army...

...At the same time he was obviously giving them permission to be young and to enjoy their prerogatives...

...The experts responded huffily: "Qualified investigators—with specialized training—have been and are at work to find correlations and hopefully causal factors in regard to adolescents with social and emotional problems...

...The illusion that no other way of doing things was possible he named "the apparently closed room...

...and finally his insistence that modern technology be taken out of the hands of the greedy corporations and made responsible to human need and the health of the planet...

...Although we cannot say that such ideas have now won the day in any practical way, they are surely part of our truth, and Goodman one of our guides to making it practical...

...The trick now is not only to make people want things they don't need but also to make them believe they're getting what they do need...

...I rely on the natural strength of the unfinished situation seeking closure...

...It is lacking in enough man's work...

...they are made anxious by our animality, humiliated by our snobbery...

...Goodman declared that the young were right to rebel against a society that did not give them meaningful work to do, sexual freedom, a community to be proud of, and food for the spirit...

...He had never had a big public success, and the plums Paul Goodman Photo by Heka Davis seemed never to fall into his lap...

...He had friends among black activists, notably Bayard Rustin, one of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s chief advisers, and he dedicated a book to Elliott Shapiro, the famous white principal of P.S...

...The motivation of most FALL • 1990 • 489 Growing Up Absurd sociology, whatever it is, tends to produce worse books...

...Many of those ideas are now part of common knowledge and experience, as they were from the start part of common sense...

...Today he would probably not be writing about world politics, though in the climate of the nineties the Czechs and Poles would have much to learn from Communitas, Compulsory 490 • DISSENT Growing Op Absurd Mis-Education, and People or Personnel, books that make the decentralist argument against the aggrandizing bureaucracy of the state...

...His authorities were his friends Harold Rosenberg, Benjamin Nelson, Elliott Shapiro...

...There was little comfort in having been right about this, since the political intelligentsia was going through its own decline...

...Such ideals as personal freedom and cultural autonomy may not be inherent, necessary features of cultural life as such...

...What, in the nineties, might we still learn from Goodman...

...As for Black Power, he was for it if it meant community control of schools, services, and police...

...He was always telling his youthful audiences that they did not know enough, that they had to work at mastering something so that they could contribute to a better society...

...488 • DISSENT Growing Up Absurd When Goodman complained that society offered too little "manly work" to its adolescent youths, he was not talking about unemployment— though well aware that the lack of jobs was a major cause of delinquency in the ghetto—but the more pervasive scarcity of work worth doing at all...

...Instead, there will have to be changes in our society and its culture, so as to meet the appetites and capacities of human nature, in order to grow up...

...If the husband is running the rat race of the organized system, there is not much father for the children...

...His plays had been produced by the Living Theatre, and his novels, stories, and poems had won him an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters...

...Conceive that the man-made environment is now out of human scale...

...It is lacking in the opportunity to be useful...

...we answer impertinent questions of investigators about our friends...

...The teenage gangs with their tribal codes of honor and their compulsive risk taking had in effect seceded from the social order and returned to Hobbes's state of nature...

...This emphasis on the here and now could be electrifying, but it depended on his actual presence, the literally hundreds of campus appearances he made...

...By then things had gotten much worse...

...It appealed to a wide audience of thoughtful people, desperate for a breath of fresh air in the Eisenhower era...

...He knew what he wanted to say because he had been saying it for years, and anyone close to him would hear the echoes on every page...

...they seem to be reconciled to people having no souls...

...To which he replied that even the best authorities seemed to rely on information derived from the juvenile delinquents who got caught—obviously a skewed sample...

...For it can be shown—I intend to show—that with all the harmonious belonging and all the tidying up of background conditions that you please, our abundant society is at present simply deficient in many of the most elementary objective opportunities and worthwhile goals that could make growing up possible...

...I am thinking, for example, of Goodman's anarchist call for decentralization and local autonomy based in community life...

...To this he had a standard answer, which took the accusation seriously though it was often merely a pretext for homophobic attacks on him: (I say the "young men and boys" rather than "young people" because the problems I want to discuss in this book belong primarily, in our society, to the boys: how to be useful and make something of oneself...

...Sometimes his disciples misread him on these issues, taking his life choices—as a bohemian artist, an open and promiscuous bisexual, a self-proclaimed anarchist and seditiously outspoken pacifist—to represent daring acts of commitment...

...Initially it did not occur to him to justify himself...

...At the end of Growing Up Absurd Goodman offered a program consisting of a couple of dozen such "missed" or "unfinished" revolutions that needed to be honestly carried through in order to establish a community for the young to grow up in...

...Or put it another way...

...As he often said, if a man simply does his job well, he is bound to get into hot water...

...Ralph Waldo Emerson, the radical thinker in the previous century most akin to Goodman, had said much the same thing to an audience of young "mechanics' apprentices" in 1841: each of "the lucrative professions and practices of man . . . requires of the practitioner a certain shutting of the eyes, a certain dapperness and compliance, an acceptance of customs, a sequestration from the sentiments of generosity and love, and compromise of private opinion and lofty integrity...

...we gossip about the new cars though they will make our cities unlivable...

...Growing Up Absurd dealt with black and Puerto Rican youth rather schematically, hardly distinguishing them from white toughs of the slums, but surely he was not wrong to say that the heart of juvenile delinquency was economic: "The underprivileged kids get around more and are exposed to the expensive glamour, but this is precisely not attainable by them unless they take short cuts...

...Chapters from it were printed not only in radical magazines like Dissent and Liberation but also in Commentary, Evergreen Review, and even Mademoiselle, and the young who did not discover him through their own grapevine were likely to find Goodman on the reading list for Freshman English...

...These conditions are absurd, they don't make sense...

...On particular problems like busing or breakfast programs he was more likely to ask what was good for the children than to support any faction...

...Goodman used to call himself Dutch Uncle to the young, and part of their thrill in reading him was the avuncular reminder that there was after all something to be proud of in the past—splendid ideas and works of art, stirring acts, glorious human beings...

...I have nothing subtle or novel to say in this book...

...As a psychotherapist Goodman put the blame of maladjustment on society rather than the patient, and treatment was 486 • DISSENT Growing Up Absurd aimed at helping people change circumstances rather than character structures...

...Goodman did not think America had quite arrived at this Orwellian world, but the disaffection of young people was signaling how close it was...

...We have no recourse to going back, there is nothing to go back to...

...As for the United States, there is plenty of evidence that socializing techniques don't work for everyone—witness the growing population of our jails...

...Perhaps this is as telling a way as any to characterize how Growing Up Absurd seems out of date...

...The FBI has a file card of all the lies and truths about everybody...

...His words rang true in a way that sent shivers down the spine...

...Modern times have been characterized by fundamental changes occurring with unusual rapidity...

...Where these questions turn into ecological ones, on issues of energy scarcity, pollution costs, and nonrenewable resources, Goodman had nothing to say in Growing Up Absurd, but it is not hard to extrapolate from his views on technology or the standard of living to see what his position would be...

...The organized system, according to Goodman, was the latest attempt to reduce nature and character to status and role—and not only in the United States, where corporate capitalism controlled the means of "socializing" and "communicating" in order to create welladjusted producers and consumers of ever more standardized commodities, but also "in the highly organized political industrial systems of Germany, Russia, and now China," where "it has been possible in a short time to condition great masses to perform as desired...

...But it was the self-righteous tone of these qualified investigators, with their correlations and causal factors, that burned him up...

...What this means is not that Goodman was wrong in thinking that American affluence was here to stay...

...During the last dozen years of his life Goodman had a lot to say about some of these, but in his book on youth and the organized system they are, at best, part of the background...

...Americans were not used to it, but apparently they still wanted to believe in a connection between work and ideals...

...it took ten years of postwar muttering before the left began to find its voice again...

...The university has become merely a training ground for technicians and applied-anthropologists...

...yet his platform presence was anything but charismatic, and his public manners were such as to keep him out of the mass media—he was liable to ask the talk-show host how he could stomach his job...

...It took readers aback to find Goodman writing so unembarrassedly about ideals...

...He was simply blinded in this area, unable to see, for example, that his argument could be reversed: men needed women with their own autonomy and pride, and unless their claims were taken into account there could hardly be any full understanding of what human nature requires to grow up...

...This, too, his critics abhorred...

...In a paragraph late in Growing Up Absurd Goodman quoted C. Wright Mills, whose sociology seemed typical of a kind of radical positivism that was wrong-headed: "The ideals that we Westerners associate with the classic, liberal bourgeois period of modem culture [said Mills] may well be rooted in this one historical stage of this one type of society...

...The appeal to traditional values was already old-fashioned thirty years ago...

...People were habituated to the isolated phenomena that made the headlines, but almost no one recognized the pattern in them...

...and his own experiences teaching at a left-wing prep school or hanging out with Black Mountain College drop-outs in Greenwich Village gave him plenty of examples of "disaffiliated youth...

...In his last book, Little Prayers and Finite Experience, he reaffirmed the minimum program of his "peasant anarchism": "I want only that the children have bright eyes, the river be clean, food and sex be available, and nobody be pushed around...

...The problem was so endemic in American society that most people regarded it as part of life...

...his urging a more livable balance of urban and rural values...

...Often this was not what anybody wanted to hear, but like Shapiro he was a good friend to racial equality without mythologizing the conflict...

...these are the things that everybody knows...

...But it is also true that for certain basic goods such as housing, medical care, education, and even food, the quality has gotten shoddier and shoddier...

...His "social animal" was not the hygienic statistic of the Kinsey Report, but a flesh and blood creature, struggling in the net of inconsistent mores, the interrupted and incomplete sexual revolution of our century...

...He pointed out how the wave of juvenile delinquency paralleled the beatnik subculture in the same urban centers, and he argued that both forms of rebellion were responses to the organized system, equally familiar territory mapped by everyone from George Orwell to Erich Fromm...

...Just look at that list...

...The civil rights movement concerned Goodman from its earliest stages, though he wrote about it infrequently —half a dozen articles, mostly in Liberation, and only in passing in books...

...It is easy to show that Growing Up Absurd is dated...

...At this point Goodman sat down to write Growing Up Absurd, originally commissioned by a small publisher simply as a book on the teenage gangs rampaging in New York during the summer of 1959...

...Do they have the right of it, that there is nothing absurd...

...A man is put in doubt about his own sanity...

...There was no sign that any of them took the young seriously as people, with ordinary human needs...

...Indignation and hope were the feelings he roused in the young with his little thumbnail sketches of the history of technology or progressive education and with his insistence that you had to know something in order to do anything worthwhile...

...As an anarchist and pacifist during World War II he had advocated draft-dodging, he flaunted his bisexuality, and his talent for saying what nobody wanted to hear got him fired from teaching jobs after a semester or two...

...In fact, I am conservative...

...Goodman put part of the blame on social critics like himself, especially the academic sociologists who were, he thought, bemused by their cult of methodology: "Paying attention to the products of the social machine and the issue of making the machine itself," he wrote in a separate essay, "social criticism has mostly ignored the underlying social psychology, obvious as it is...

...These have shattered tradition but often have not succeeded in creating a new whole community...

...The quest for the glamour job is given at least a little substance by its relation to a "better" marriage...

...In his journal he congratulated himself: Socially and psychologically, this has the effect of making my radical rejection of the status quo seem spectacularly conservative...

...whether the Beats are a fad and the Delinquents no worse than in 1850...

...Actually feminism and anarchism coincide on many issues...

...He had become a kind of pariah (his word), so much so that early in the fifties he had given up on his literary career and turned to psychotherapy for a living and a way of being justified in the world...

...Automatically one begins to use their words and think their thoughts, although one knows that they are absurd...

...In recounting these noble goals and their betrayal, he was asking readers to take the modern enterprise seriously, and not just for granted...

...Sexuality is divorced from manly independence and achievement...

...For someone who recognized how thin and bare American family life had become, Goodman clung with astonishing tenacity to the patriarchal skeleton...

...If not, what good was it...

...A related area, where time has perhaps eroded Goodman's analysis, is economic...

...But he was opposed to taking risks, and simply wanted to lead the jolly life of a twelve-year-old, with as little adult supervision as possible...

...The danger was not a matter of oppression so much as of suffocation...

...That was certainly the direction in which Goodman was leaning...

...their tone has neither indignation nor utopian aspiration...

...From the first Goodman conceived his book in much larger terms...

...Some reviewers who knew him personally, and disapproved, thought that his whole book was special pleading: "Goodman wants the colleges and universities to safeguard the freedom of sexual deviants . . . . [W]e come in such passages to the heart of Goodman's grievance against society, and the source for his quest for allies among the juvenile delinquents...

...Goodman had been decrying what he called "the sociolatry" as long as others were talking about the permanent war economy...

...His celebrity was a peculiar one: he was a brilliant talker...

...New conditions will be the conditions of, now, this kind of man, stubbornly insisting on the ideals that he has learned he has in him to meet...

...If we are to have a stable and whole community in which the young can grow to manhood, we must painfully perfect the revolutionary modern tradition we have...

...FALL • 1990 • 493 Growing Up Absurd Since its first publication Growing Up Absurd has never been out of print, but one would hardly say there has been any demand for it since Goodman's death almost twenty years ago, nor is it easy to imagine any sudden flowering of interest in him as part of the nostalgic resuscitation of the sixties now underway...

...494 • DISSENT...

...A good example is his "Causerie at the MilitaryIndustrial," sternly delivered to a conference of high-level research and development officials during the Pentagon demonstrations of 1967, with his student allies picketing at the door...

...Appearances" is itself a media term and distorts the situation...

...Contrariwise, if you don't provide them with certain things, they'll fill the gaps with eccentric substitutes...

...This is effectually to give up the modern enterprise altogether...

...But we will not give it up...

...we attend conventions, listen to public spokesmen, and smile a lot and shake hands...

...Among political thinkers of the New Left, Goodman was unusual in the range of subjects he felt confident in addressing...

...When the latest bohemian avatar—the beatnik—was suddenly inflated to mythic proportions by the media, many students "disaffiliated" (as the jargon went) to join Kerouac and company in spirit if not actually on the road...

...Growing Up Absurd was Goodman's answer to this view of human nature as indefinitely malleable: "You can't teach people some things or change them in some ways, and if you persist, you're in for trouble...

...If Goodman's name has dropped out of consciousness, I think this means that he never served very well as a commodity, and that his work resists cooptation even as heirloom politics...

...For him most racial issues boiled down to social and economic justice pure and simple...

...His thinking might have taken shape along the lines of his friend Ivan Illich, whose theories of gendered spheres of life and work have gotten him vilified as an "essentialist" by academic feminism...

...It has no Honor...

...When Goodman went to Berkeley or Michigan State or wherever it was, he usually managed to cause trouble...

...One chapter in particular, on the "Social Animal," disturbed people, for there Goodman made his case for the sexual freedom of the young...

...His Puerto Rican handball partners provided the delinquent's worldview: "I won you, didn' I? I won you last week too, didn' I?" To the big new audience Goodman now reached, Growing Up Absurd was a revelation...

...It discourages the religious convictions of Justification and Vocation and it dims the sense that there is a Creation...

...His list was a catalog of the ideas of modern Western culture: from science and technology to pacifism and the brotherhood of man, from democracy and freedom of speech to syndicalism and progressive education...

...It was up to the left to find ways of turning disaffiliation and delinquency into politics...

...It has no Community...

...The deepest needs of our society are still those spelled out in its chapters— worthwhile jobs, relevant education, a reasonable standard of living (including the choice of decent poverty), public officials who do not lie or make one ashamed of being a citizen, sexual mores and family life compatible with human nature, a stable body of virtues and values that the culture can agree upon and inculcate in succeeding generations...

...The sixties certainly proved him right...

...he did not come to autograph copies of his latest book...

...Goodman was able to call upon traditional values with an assurance that rivaled Emerson's because he, too, was a man of letters in the old-fashioned sense, at home in high culture...

...It was said that every student activist in Berkeley had a copy of Growing Up Absurd on the shelf, but few had read it cover to cover...

...And so forth...

...For often it is not a question of making innovations, but of catching up and restoring the right proportions...

...On the other hand, we are the handful of high-born, well educated, God-fearing and polite aristocracy protesting against the vulgar powers-that-be...

...his critique of the lockstep educational system and the art-killing mass media devoted to a wasteful, venal standard of living...

...They were never his creation or property—they were truths of human nature, traditional wisdom remembered at a moment of impasse, attitudes necessitated by our crisis...

...But these are mere symptoms, as they were in 1960...

...The young were right to judge that he was on their side in this struggle...

...Although he never thought of himself as political, there was surely a political message in the fact that he invariably raised the hackles of his readers...

...The young quickly saw the point, for especially among college students it was their own nagging discovery...

...Now that the dust has settled, it should be possible to raise another kind of question about his influence...

...Delinquents and drop-outs simply represented a rattle in the social mechanism, to be corrected by tightening the screws...

...Goodman resisted: This is like saying that tragic poetry or mathematics was "rooted" in the Greek way of life and is not "inherently" human...

...Much to deplore, too, of 492 • DISSENT Growing Up Absurd course, though it hardly matched modern achievements like television and the nuclear warhead...

...For the younger generation in particular, what was appalling was the contrast between the contented conveyor-belt world they were being socialized for and the increasing likelihood that the machinery, they themselves, and the planet would come to a final nuclear halt...

...Both were right— that is, the phrase no longer functions as a rallying cry, not because it has been forgotten but because it has quietly entered the language...

...No wonder...

...This stoical resolve is, paradoxically, a conservative proposition, aiming at stability and social balance...

...Correspondingly, our "youth troubles" are boys' troubles— female delinquency is sexual: "incorrigibility" and unmarried pregnancy...

...What studies had he run...

...The idea of "staking all" in some romantic moment of moral ecstasy did not appeal to him...

...One way of putting it would be to ask how Growing Up Absurd has weathered its thirty years...

...A recurrent complaint about Growing Up Absurd, even in the first letters and reviews, was that Goodman ignored the problems of girls and young women, half the youth in the organized society...

...Goodman had written on all these topics, including major theoretical works on city planning and psychotherapy...

...It was all very well for Goodman to say that bearing and raising children were "absolutely self-justifying," but what if society treated these as subordinate roles, functions of a kind of servant class incompetent for anything else...

...Whatever one thinks about this genealogy—Goodman himself was not very impressed by the French version of Existenz, which he preferred in the theological form Martin Buber gave it—the ethical dimension of Growing Up Absurd was Protestant and Pragmatist as much as anything...

...Such aims and practices went against human nature and could not be remedied by simply improving the methods of socialization—more communication, better schools, enlarged staffs of social workers...

...The main arguments he made regarding ecology were already formulated in 1960, and come into his critique of the organized system in three ways: his pervasive disgust with the American standard of living, full of waste and frivolity...

...He knew that the disaffected young of 1960 were "transient" phenomena...

...Unless the entire economic machine is operating, it is impossible to produce and buy bread...

...Growing up had become a process of becoming "socialized," that is, of learning to play one's part in the structure of roles and statuses...

...Though he claimed being "queer" made him a kind of "nigger," he did not try to theorize out of his own experience...

...It makes no difference whether the growth is normal or distorted, only real objects will finish the experience...

...To ourselves, finally, we are simple and all of a piece—there is nothing to do but stick to our principles, brazen them out, and try to diminish both our irrational guilt in society and our inhumane contempt for it...

...During the next decade he was invited to hundreds of colleges, where he might speak on education one night, give a seminar on urban and rural values the next day, followed by a speech on psychoanalysis and religion or the morality of scientific technology...

...Again and again he was described as "old-fashioned" and even "old-fashionedly moral," because he spoke of honor and faith and a sense of vocation: "[W]e all believe and know these things," wrote one reviewer who was surprised and moved, "but we fear that to say them out loud would be to evoke the superior smile...

...And yet his critics were wrong when they accused him of catering to the young, or blindly accepting their impulses as politically sound...

...Today's universitybased intellectuals have devoted a good deal of their lives in the meantime to "deconstructing" Western ideology and exposing the power relations on which its idealistic rhetoric is founded—though the theorists have hardly kept pace with yuppiedom, where prudence, thrift, fortitude, honor, and magnanimity are so many moldy figs...

...Yet as every woman knows, these problems are intensely interesting to women, for if the boys do not grow to be men, where shall the women find men...

...The cold war is a continuous presence in Growing Up Absurd, especially in the chapter on "Patriotism," but he did not focus exclusively on international politics...

...For instance, we encourage economic lunacy by watching TV...

...In 1990 the alienation and anomie take other forms, so that an analysis of beats and delinquents no longer seems very helpful, but Goodman's larger argument still applies: Every profound new proposal, of culture or institution, invents and discovers a new property of "Human Nature...

...Moreover, the movement that he was part of, although it had its intellectual side, was not a theoretical one, and the ideas that he brought to it did not require packaging as books and articles in order to spread...

...In his view it was the usurpation of ordinary life by this vast machinery that lay behind the metaphysical crisis the existentialists were now terming "absurd": Let us exaggerate the conditions that we have been describing...

...Today it is harder to stay in the "bulge" —or perhaps there are now two bulges, like a snowman...

...Then what kind of animal is oneself...

...It dampens animal ardor...

...What made the hair stand up on some graying heads had a very different effect among the young, who took Goodman's defense of their sexual freedom at face value...

...It is a shame that intellectuals have allowed this ground—the appeal to the grand in our heritage—to be taken over by slogan-mongers...

...It was such strokes that won him disciples on the campuses, at the same time that they maddened his detractors...

...A hundred years later Goodman called this state of affairs "the rat race...

...Later in the decade rebel students would be calling him a bourgeois liberal, while establishment figures who were bourgeois liberals still called him a seducer of the young...

...119 in Harlem...

...It is here that the therapy of belonging and socializing breaks down miserably...

...What I have tried to show, rather, is this: that such problems, by their form and content, test and criticize the society in which they occur...

...But the meaning of the economy of abundance is that there are now very many, perhaps even a bulge, at the lower-middle-income level," and it followed, among other things, "that those at the bottom tend to fall out of 'society' altogether...

...More and more people find it hard to raise middle-class families without two jobs, and among the poor there are still many without even one...

...while the flower of disaffiliation has simply passed on from beat to hippie to punk...

...In spite of all this Goodman was a relatively unknown figure in American letters...

...One reviewer of Growing Up Absurd cheerfully predicted that "in a few years the term `The Organized Society' will be relegated to the limbo for the offspring of sociological journalism," while another prophesied gloomily that "we shall have to live with the system[;] . . . barring the industrial accident called war, several (perhaps many) generations will grow up absurd and like it, for they will be normal and well-adjusted...

...Unless something like censorship interfered with his work, or something like the Vietnam War and the draft took him "by the throat" so that he could not breathe, Goodman steered clear of politics, quite the opposite of radicals like A. J. Muste or Noam Chomsky...

...The particular manner in which the symptoms emerge was not so important to Goodman...

...These were forms of withdrawal and despair rather than confrontation...

...It is lacking in honest public speech, and people are not taken seriously...

...It shackles science...

...Indeed, sometimes he merely quoted from earlier works...

...If we now take these losses for granted, Goodman has nothing to say to us...

...An emphasis on the moral life was part of the general development of the New Left ethos, which has been identified as existentialist and often been traced to Albert Camus...

...There is a rigid caste system in which everyone has a slot and the upper group stands for nothing culturally...

...With this background, it is less important, for instance, what job an average young woman works at till she is married...

...If everyone knew these things, why were so few doing anything about them...

...Goodman's rationale for leaving women out of Growing Up Absurd came as an afterthought, a long parenthesis added to his first chapter after it appeared in Dissent...

...There is nothing in it that is surprising, in either the small letters or the capitals...

...This applied to the larger scene as well, and during the late fifties he began to edge toward a new vocation as social critic, at the same time that society itself was shifting in ways that would create an audience for what he had to say...

...Henceforth it is going to be in these terms that a young fellow will grow up and find his identity and his task...

...But no doubt, in our runaway, one-sided way of life, the proposal to conserve human resources and develop human capacities has become a radical innovation...

...Rather, as he said in his chapter on "Class Structure," the income pyramid has changed its shape: "It used to be that the most were the poor at the bottom and then, evenly, fewer and fewer at each level up to a few at the top...