LETTERS
I enjoyed reading Taylor Stoehr's appreciation of my father's book Growing Up Absurd (Dissent, Fall 1990). Although I have not read the book in the thirty years since my father, Paul Goodman,...
...My father took much of the responsibility for rearing me at a time when this was far from the social norm...
...for him, the "personal was the political," censorship and war imminent, and social action a persistent necessity...
...They are victims of several related developments but, most of all, of two closely linked phenomena...
...Humanity may very well turn to a cooperative form, or many different cooperative forms, as a last resort...
...He also spoke respectfully of many women academics, artists, doctors, educators...
...So if you want to write about something that you like, or dislike, in or about Dissent, please do it quickly...
...Now we could do with a little more nonrealism...
...But they showed none of the "utopian" rejectionism that the Dissent authors, save Howe, castigate...
...I recall my father saying he was puzzled that people read it that way...
...q The World After Communism Editors: There's something strange about the dialogue in Dissent (Fall 1990) on the postcommunist world and liberalism...
...But even his eloquent pleas seem to me essentially a morals charge rather than a reminder of the disasters that class society, in all its destructive shapes and forms, is bringing down upon us...
...In a few respects, however, Stoehr's comments run counter to vivid personal memories...
...I have written to Stoehr privately about this, but I think that for the record it should be known that I, at least, do not consider my father antifeminist or frequently apolitical...
...Let's call our alternative anything at all, as long as it means an alternative to barbarism...
...Jews may indeed "cling to an intense feeling of being victims" and nurture a memory of and identification with victims such as those of the Holocaust...
...My father also was constantly engaged in politics...
...Finally, although I was never a patient of my father's, it seems highly improbable, from how he acted in daily life and what he said, that he was not concerned with both a patient's character structure and the interaction between a person's character and the society...
...SUSAN E. GOODMAN New York, N.Y...
...They were realists...
...One large one is already suggested by several of the Dissent authors, that the eclipse of communism indicates a deeper problem with the socialist project...
...Even as I write these words, the war fever rages over SPRING • 1991 • 319 Letters Middle East minerals and land, with unforeseeable but likely calamitous consequences...
...Since my father passionately believed competent child rearing essential for a good society, it troubles me that a passage saying that raising children is "absolutely self-justifying" be read as denigrating to women...
...Were he alive today, it would be difficult for me to imagine him not having a glorious time comparing the fall of the communist empires to the collapse of earlier tyrannies, religious faiths, etc...
...He both expected me to "make something of myself" and provided the necessary support for me to become a psychologist, occasional academic, and writer...
...Real socialism, as he says, has never been given a chance to succeed...
...Not a big part of nature...
...Not even the most revisionist minded will quite claim that capitalism has earned its right to life eternal...
...I am nearly as pessimistic as Heilbroner or Wrong, I suppose, about the use of the word "socialism," now evidently of ill repute...
...Also, Stoehr's assertion seems simplistic when he says: "As a psychotherapist Goodman put the blame of maladjustment on society rather than on the patient, and treatment was aimed at helping people change circumstances rather than character structures...
...Kilson wrote: "If any American ethnic group warrants the 'enemy-memory' prize I should have thought it goes to American Jews...
...We have entered the first phases of world crisis unprecedented in many ways, and only the utmost stress upon the rest of the world's resources and peoples allows our reasonably polite Euro-American civil society to continue—for the present...
...q Anti-Kilson Editors: Martin Kilson, in his attack on Shelby Steele (Dissent, Fall 1990), used the words "right-wing" and "neoconservative" eleven times (each), unless I missed some...
...And share my feeling that this question is not some annoying, unfortunate detail but a meaningful barometer of society's real status...
...q CORRECTION In the Winter 1991 issue, no translator was identified for Stefan Svallfors's article, "Sweden: Social Democrats in Trouble...
...Even more fatal, the steady eradication of rain forests in America's Central American client states, for the expansion of agribusiness (or to siphon off demand for redistribution of existing farmland), has all but destroyed their winter quarters...
...Quite a few Dissent readers, I hope, will share my belief that humans have no more right to eradicate the songbirds than they have to eradicate us...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...The Stalinists who staged Eastern Europe's environmental massacres and the Social Democrats of France, England, Spain, and Latin America (to name only a few) who defer supinely to the rigged logic of the marketplace, are successors to the European deputies who voted War Credits in 1914...
...But I'm thinking about a different species (or, rather, subspecies) just now, New England's songbirds...
...The second matter deserving comment is his comparison of the American black "enemy-memory," or sense of victimization, to its Jewish counterpart...
...My guess is, with an economic slide ahead, the politeness level will go down noticeably...
...Real hope is a scarce commodity these days, and we should not pretend otherwise...
...Suburban housing in New England has stolen their habitat or left the remaining slivers of it so divided that the birds are subject to toxification and new predators...
...Capitalism fooled all the optimists, of course, through its unanticipated ability to turn the entire globe into a raw materials supply-house and waste-trough so as to accelerate commodity production...
...But because we have a long "lead time" for each issue, you have to send us your letter within three weeks after getting an issue of Dissent in order to get it into the next issue...
...Or a convincing demonstration that we can, as a species, survive much more of capitalism's famous success...
...Not a pretty sight, to put it mildly...
...On the other hand, he cannot claim originality in using these words as a form of political incantation (or bludgeon) designed to discredit those to whom it is applied by conjuring up self-evident evil for politically right-thinking audiences...
...The crucial difference, quite significant in the context of the dispute between Steele and Kilson, is that American Jews did not demand or receive compensation for past victimization nor have they insisted that the sufferings of the past (which stretch back even further in time than black slavery) created a sense or fund of entitlement, an open-ended commitment of society to compensate them for such hardships...
...To Letter Writers • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...
...But other than a random phrase from James Rule, one could not guess, amid all the fearful evidence ready at hand, that the ecosphere just may possibly be in trouble...
...Marxists were wrong to think that their movement's "scientific" grasp upon economics had outdated the dreamers...
...The specialists tell us that their numbers are down 70 to 90 percent from thirty years ago, and that without drastic changes they are almost certainly doomed to extinction...
...PAUL BUHLE Providence, R.I...
...PAUL HOLLANDER Amherst, Mass...
...Surely this must set a new record for a short article...
...Most of us (or should I say some of us...
...still believe, as Howe says, that a society whose power is monopolized by capital must be replaced by a society whose power is monopolized by mass, democratic participation...
...But it fooled no one so thoroughly as those who expected a swift and smooth succession to socialism...
...half a dozen varieties of warblers, also ovenbirds and grossbeaks, among others...
...Although I have not read the book in the thirty years since my father, Paul Goodman, wrote it, Stoehr's account seemed accurate and well put...
...They could see the catastrophe ahead...
...In any event it does not follow that if the Jewish sense of victimization did not damage Jewish mobility aspirations and opportunities the same applies to all other ethnic groups and especially blacks...
...Letters must be kept to about 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...The translator was Kjersti Board...
...Irving Howe dissents from his own Dissenters to point out that a great many things are getting worse in a hellish hurry...
...What political conclusions might we draw from this...
...The Jewish sense of victimization might have been as strong as that of blacks, but their belief in the malign forces of society capable of thwarting their aspirations and opportunities has not become a form of entrenched conventional wisdom Professor Kilson seems so anxious to bolster...
...we can all hope that it does so before the damage has become overwhelming...
...But I don't think that capitalism has secured its position, not by a long shot...
...Just an extraordinarily beautiful, irreplaceable part...
...q 320 • DISSENT...
...And, finally, to agree that even if these harmless creatures were not the proverbial canaries in the coal mine for us all, they would be worth defending, for their own sake, regardless of capitalism's hypocritical rationalizations of "progress" or "economic growth...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...
Vol. 38 • April 1991 • No. 2
