Growing Up Absurd
Goodman, Paul
1 Growing up as a human being, a "human nature" assimilates a culture, just as other animals grow up in strength and habits in their appropriated environments, that complete their natures....
...This brings us to another striking difference...
...Much of it is hand-made, not canned...
...Migratory farm labor, mostly Negro, usually is not covered by social insurance...
...He must still face the problem of vocation and money...
...Those 'who have to cope with people in small groups rather than statistically, and attending to them rather than to some systematic goal—parents and teachers, physicians and psychotherapists, policemen and wardens of jails, shop foremen and grievance-committees—all tend stubbornly to hold that there is a "human nature...
...The society to which one is socialized would have to be a remarkably finished product...
...but the most remarkable implication was that drawn by the social-scientists themselves, when they finally got around to making use of modern psychology: theyhave found in it techniques for harmoniously belonging to the organized system of society...
...Any one who does not understand this, and the soul-searching and hair-splitting involved, will not understand ingenuous youth...
...This works...
...They have become hip...
...1) The African and Spanish influence and a part of the migrant and delinquent influence on Beat culture is inevitable but accidental...
...Hard knocks had taught them to live and let live...
...there is high employment or insurance...
...for them every aspect of their scene is equally relevant and precious...
...The jazz-and-poetry is feeble compared even to the TV commercial jingles that they have turned away from...
...He cannot afford presentable shoes for the kids to go to school...
...Human nature unmistakably demanded liberty, equality, and fraternity, and every man a philosopher and poet...
...the humanity became dubious...
...now it is diminishing suffering, accepting the system...
...Farm labor, janitoring, messenger, serving and dish-washing—these jobs resist remarkably well the imputation of uselessness made against the productive society as a whole...
...It is lacking in the opportunity to be useful...
...Prices are, of course, geared to the high standard...
...3) Meantime, those who have the new money are more careless with it, they leave their cars unlocked, they buy sex...
...Unlike most of their predecessors for a century and a half, most of our contemporary social-scientists are not interested in fundamental social change...
...His poverty tends to degenerate into stupidity...
...And Freud, with magnificent originality, tried to show that by their very conflict they made it possible to assimilate culture...
...A good teacher feels his way, looking for response...
...At last I hit it: they were talking not political economy but philanthropy...
...In an organized system, all poor tend to be the same poor...
...It discourages the religious convictions of Justification and Vocation and it dims the sense that there is a Creation...
...The poor Negroes or Puerto Ricans may be exotic to the standard customs and prejudices, but they are all the more narrow about their own...
...those there are are without benefit of union and subject to grueling exploitation...
...and of 3 statuses within the dominant class, the Organization...
...the new come into an expanding economy that does not need people...
...The bongo drums and jazz, as they practice them, are childish in the light of their knowledge and abilities...
...The paradox is softened by pointing out that in prosperity there is more employment of women, there is more divorce, and there is more money to buy liquor and drugs...
...But above all, as everybody knows who was unemployed during the Great Depression, it is easier to be decently poor when prices are low and the pressure to maintain appearances is diminished...
...The young men are Angry and Beat...
...There is a man for every job and not many are left over, and the shelves are almost always cleared...
...Social-scientists are not attracted to the conflictful core of Freud's theory of human nature...
...Now this human nature was powerfully enlisted in revolutionary struggles against courts and classes, poverty and humiliation, and it began to invent progressive education...
...What is the sense of mentioning "human nature" if we can never observe it...
...This is the dilemma of voluntary poverty in our society: either to compromise one's integrity (but then why bother...
...a Negro family in the rich county of Westchester might have an income of $4,000 yet have to pay so much rent for substandard housing that it can't make both ends meet...
...or conversely: Doesn't the poor class have, economically, a personality defect...
...Thus, nostalgic solidarity with poverty turns into philanthropy—and even exclusion, on issues where the poor are unassimilable into the abundant system...
...To have such a job is to be used and made a fool of by the system...
...Most of the social-scientists began to lay all their stress on institutionally organized reform...
...and they describe the system as the Rat Race.** But there is another large class: those who do not properly belong to the system and are not yet submerged into the poor "outside" of society: this is the vast herd of the old fashioned, the eccentric, the criminal, the gifted, the serious, the men and women, the rentiers, the free-lances, the infants, and so forth...
...This whole picture would be quite different if the underprivileged and somewhat unemployable families had a pretty good secure income over a long period...
...Pacifists commonly have accepted jobs like attendant in a hospital (that is understaffed anyway...
...Teachers and psychologists who deal practically with growing up and the blocks to growing up may never mention the word "human nature" (indeed, they are better off without too many a priori ideas), but they cling stubbornly to the presumption that at every stage there is a developing potentiality not yet cultured, and yet not blank, and that makes possible the taking on of culture...
...But he found an important new essential: man is a maker, he must use his productive nature or be miserable...
...For the big causes of stupidity, of lack of initiative and lack of honorable incentive, are glaring...
...Conant to survey the high schools...
...Our present poor are more like the ancient Roman proletariat, producers of offspring kept on a dole for political reasons...
...In boom-time, that is, there is effectually more exclusion than ordinarily...
...That is, on this view we do not need to be able to say what "human nature" is in order to be able to say that some training is "against human nature" and you persist in it at peril...
...For in such hopeless conditions any grounds of family hostility, unusual childhood frustration, or a gang on the street, will tip the balance...
...What follows, rather, is that, since cultureis so overwhelmingly evident in observing mankind, social properties must be of the essence of original "human nature," and indeed that the "isolated individual" is a product of culture...
...As our Manchester forefathers used to say, you do a disservice to the undeserving poor by giving them money, because they will get into trouble...
...this is the beautiful shaping power of our human nature...
...shops, trying to teach or give other professional services, robbing banks, landscape gardening, and so forth—but they find it hard to get along, for they do not know the approved techniques of promoting, getting foundation grants, protecting themselves by official unions, legally embezzling, and not blurting out the truth or weeping or laughing out of turn...
...This is roughly the class structure of America in the middle of the Twentieth Century...
...But now the rate of interest does not fall...
...If we trace it even roughly, we learn something about the present disagreement...
...only such a social animal could become cultured...
...It has no Honor...
...The Beats have a mystique of voluntary poverty...
...It is on this view that growing up is now interpreted as a process of socializing some rather indefinite kind of animal, and "socializing" is used as a synonym for teaching him the culture...
...At the bottom are these poor, "outside" of society...
...Work is no different from shop-lifting...
...the skilled and semi-skilled semi-monopoly factory jobs, strongly unionized...
...If the work week is shortened to 30 hours, there is evidence that they get other part-time jobs to buy new refrigerators...
...Therun of orthodox psychoanalytic practice has been quietist, as the social-scientistsclaimed...
...In the case of the delinquents, of course, this conformity is so extravagant as to be dangerous: they cannot inwardly tolerate anything that hints that their own image of perfection is questionable...
...Is "being socialized," no matter what the society, the same as growing up and assimilating human culture...
...Rather, if something does not run smoothly, they say it has been improperly socialized...
...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...
...The integral aim of useful man's-work is not mentioned by Lipton...
...2) And the economic relation of the poor to the system has importantly changed: simply, the earlier minorities, Irish, Jewish, Italian, Slavic, poured into an expanding economy that needed people...
...During depression, contrariwise, there is more community because many others are in the same boat...
...but, it is argued, he would not thereby be in the Rat Race because he just wants "bread" and will quit...
...111 The concept of "human nature" has had a varied political history in modern times...
...This is immediately evident when something goes wrong, for instance, when a child can't learn to read because he has not yet developed the muscular accommodation of his eyes...
...but how to get along at all if one has dropped "outside" and has no incentive to work and "make good...
...And the classical anthropological question, What is Man?—"how like an angel, this quintessence of dust...
...My purpose is a simple one: to show how it is desperately hard these days for an average child to grow up to be a man, for our present organized system of society does not want men...
...For example, many readers are no doubt surprised that there are so many poor and, reading about it, feel that it is a mere lag, a matter of mopping-up, in our general productive advance...
...Instead, they commence with a chapter on Physical Anthropology and then forget the whole topic and go on to Culture...
...You can't teach people some things or change them in some ways, and if you persist, you're in for trouble...
...These are the people with semi-professional and service jobs, the occupational category that has grown the most, and who get status-salaries...
...or between hard-working young fathers and idle Beats with beards...
...Sympathy appeared as solidarity...
...It is this group of junior-executives, for instance, that we have compared to the juvenile delinquents for their safe conformity and competitive individuality...
...It was clear, too, why the word "do-gooder" has fallen into mild disrepute...
...After a few years, many such young men will perceive that they are in a Rat Race...
...are engaged primarily in keeping the system itself running and slowly expanding...
...2) On the other hand, the structural characteristics of the presentday poor—those that did not especially belong to the poor of older bohemias—are essential in the culture of those who gravitate to these poor...
...Our society cannot have it both ways: to maintain a conformist and ignoble system and to have skillful and spirited men to man that system with...
...there has been a failure in communication...
...Everything looks pretty streamlined...
...All of the money is in the system...
...and families in newly industrialized areas in the South and Middle West...
...There is nothing in it that is surprising, in either the small letters or the capitals...
...Some say 20 per cent are poverty-stricken, some as many as 40 per cent.* Nevertheless, all students would agree on two propositions: (1) The composition of the poor has immensely changed...
...Besides they often speak a minority language, English...
...The principle is that anything will do...
...But on the other hand, the young men who conform to the dominant society are for the most part apathetic, disappointed, cynical, and wasted...
...They would then be members of society at least as consumers, and would eventually become as employable as the average...
...Man," as C. Wright Mills suggests, is what suits a particular type of society in a particular historical stage.** • This article forms the opening chapter, entitled "'Human Nature' and the Organized System," of a book, Growing Up Absurd...
...and perhaps the effective method would be, rather, to give them more money to spend, a kind of prize...
...Unless he is capable of a different, inventive or community culture altogether, a poor person can afford little recreation...
...Our public officials are now much concerned about the "waste of human resources," and they have appointed Dr...
...This leads to friction, of course, but also to other friendships and other activities...
...Background conditions have interrupted socialization, they must be improved...
...1 Growing up as a human being, a "human nature" assimilates a culture, just as other animals grow up in strength and habits in their appropriated environments, that complete their natures...
...Let me say at this point, however, that many of the humble jobs of the poor are precisely not useless, morally...
...But conversely, the poorly paying unskilled jobs have diminished...
...This fateful idea, invented from time to time by philosophers, seems finally to be empirically evident in the most recent decades...
...Money is called "bread...
...3) But finally, there are essential traits of Beat culture that go counter to the social traits of the poor whom they have chosen...
...So let us see what is particular in the cultural effect of present-day poverty on present-day bohemians...
...especially if, being there, he soon takes on habits which make it impossible for him, or unattractive to him, to belong to the system...
...But perhaps there has not been a failure of communication...
...There are fewer such jobs...
...Demonstrably they are not getting enough out of our wealth and civilization...
...But how...
...First, there is the possibility that the prosperous, well-paying jobs do not filter down evenly to the poorest groups who tend much more to be unemployable altogether...
...To re-establish in general what he calls the social balance, J. K. Galbraith proposes such a high long-time subsidy for all unemployed...
...For the salient thing is the sameness among them, the waste of humanity...
...Among the most competent writers, there is not much mention of "human nature...
...I24 the Japanese or the Samoans and Trobriand Islanders...
...As an heir of the French Revolution, Karl Marx kept much of this concept...
...If he picks beans he replaces a farmer for the war-factory...
...By the connivance of * It is hard to determine a criterion of poverty at present...
...To quote a paragraph earlier in this chapter: "Many of the humble jobs of the poor are precisely not useless (or exploiting...
...and this is in itself dishonorable...
...Others, to save religion, have been ultra-traditionlist, like Jung or Laforgue...
...It is hard to be sure, but my impression is that other poor, who were at the bottom, but in society, were among the most tolerant...
...We shall speak later about the limitations of this procedure and the weakness of its products...
...it is one-upping...
...The young workers will perceive it as the work speeds up, the instalment payments fall due, etc...
...They are not safe...
...Simply to subsidize the poor might be the cheapest way of coping with juvenile delinquency...
...These factors somewhat operate today too, but less so, because in some ways it now costs more to be poor than modestly lower-middle, and in many of their tastes—e.g...
...Whether they choose it or fall into it, comes to the same thing...
...but if during the end of the first year and for some time thereafter he is not given personal care, he will later be in some ways emotionally cold and unreachable— either some function has failed to develop, or he has already blocked it out as too frustrated and painful...
...The question is whether or not this structure is organic in our present system...
...The emphasis was now on "nature...
...On these points the writers on the Beat Generation are confused...
...But at this point let us stick to the social structuring of it...
...The problem of money, again, seems simple, but it is not...
...they are ashamed and won't go...
...Economic and job-uselessness...
...That is, the economy of abundance, the bulge in the pyramid, means also that those at the bottom tend to fall out of "society" altogether...
...In his book, The Holy Barbarians, Lawrence Lipton gives a considerable list of jobs that Beat take, generally temporarily, to get subsistence...
...but of course it is also persistently true that "only the poor are saved...
...I would therefore take the opposite tack and ask, "Socialization to what...
...Partly, maybe, this tone crept in because they were talking about our poor black and brown brothers...
...In the 18th century, the Age of Reason and the early Romantic Movement, the emphasis was on "human nature," referring to man's naturally sympathetic sentiments, his communicative faculties, and inalienable dignity...
...2) The next status who are "in" are the Organization Men proper, whose hours, thoughts, families, play, and peace of mind are dedicated to maintaining their positions in their particular firms and pushing upward there or in some other firm...
...Thus, in Peguy's phrase, poverty becomes misery, and the poor belong to society less and less...
...I do not mean that this is not a reasonable compensation, like an Englishman's liquor and an Irishman's betting on the horses...
...IV Let us now proceed more carefully, for we are approaching our present plight...
...But it is not art but something else...
...Much of the delinquency rouses guilt and fear in them, instead of defiant righteousness or calm philosophy (contrast the style and depth of Jean Genet with similar material...
...early toilet-training, and indeed the whole corresponding pattern of culture, but there is a diminishing of force, grace, discrimination, intellect, feeling, in specific behaviors or even in his total behavior...
...We must draw "it" out, offer "it" opportunities, not violate "it" except for unavoidable reasons...
...Now this would seem to contradict the other, and rather prima facie, theory of poverty as the important condition...
...and they did not need to protect their repressions so much as an out-caste poor...
...One plays roles and is hip...
...In voluntary poverty the problem of money is to get enough to subsist...
...Resigning, the Beats have chosen to be outside and the present poor happen to be those who, as unorganized minorities, are outside when they arrive...
...We shall see later that this is a profoundly organizational attitude...
...less easy gradation and fewer unique "classless" positions...
...VII It is relevant to introduce our discussion of the Beat Generation in this context of present-day poverty because the present-day composition of the poor in America, Negroes, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, migrant farm labor, with large urban juvenile delinquency, has been fateful for the particular culture of these young folks...
...it is more expensive to be decently poor...
...we cannot expect average kids to deviate with genius...
...IV There is little agreement in the sociology of delinquency...
...It is here that simple automation (e.g., sweeping the floor in a factory) is allowed full development...
...But on the other hand, such jobs, being hard and useful, are the most miserably exploited...
...It is here that the theory of belonging and socializing miserably breaks down...
...V At present, however, our society is settling for the first time in its history into a marked class system—with increasing mobility of persons but rigidifying of statuses and opportunities...
...It is cheaper there...
...Farm labor, hauling boxes, janitoring, serving and dish-washing, messenger—these resist remarkably well the imputation of uselessness (or exploitation) made against the productive society as a whole...
...he may develop "psychosomatic" ailments like constipation...
...The poor might have been Chinese...
...and perhaps there might be less going on the road (but this ants-in-the-pants moving about is now pervasive anyway...
...the narcotics might have been different, or some other kick than narcotics altogether...
...Things get nearer to a human scale and life makes more sense...
...Despite having minority traditions of their own, our present poor are absolute sheep and suckers for the popular culture which they cannot afford, the movies, sharp clothes, and up to Cadillacs...
...Every step of education was the resolution of a difficult social conflict...
...One of the speakers, a portly labor leader, was asked whether the new pyramid did not resemble a middle-aged gentleman with a bulge beneath the middle...
...Certainly they are suffering...
...The popular bright idea to diminish delinquency is to penalize the parents...
...The price of repairs is geared to the new cars...
...And if this question is asked, we must at once ask the other question, "Is the harmonious organization to which they are inadequately socialized, perhaps against human nature, or not worthy of human nature, and therefore there is difficulty in growing up...
...It corrupts the fine arts...
...But if these aspects of their culture were not accidental, such bright and inventive fellows would already have made more out of them...
...Migratory farmers might earn less than $900 a year, and the neighbors glad to see them leave...
...Those who have had experience of working for a firm and making a pretty good living tend to be more cynical...
...These structural characteristics of the present-day poor are essential in Beat culture...
...Obviously the Holy Barbarian is here on shaky grounds...
...This certainly seems to be our situation today...
...Next are those groups who are in the organized system of production: (1) Those who are "in" but-couldn't-care-less about the production and distribution, for instance factory-operatives...
...It is communally shared, in small groups...
...transportation and lunches, presentable clothes and laundry, are priced for good wages...
...In ordinary, static circumstances, and especially when a dominant system in a society is riding high (as the organized system is with us), socializing to that society seems to provide all valuable culture, etc.* But as soon as we think of a fundamental social change, we see that (1) at once "human nature" is again invoked to prove the necessity of change, for "human nature" has been thwarted or insulted by the dominant system...
...Let me make a close analogy—so close that it is probably an identity— between the job in voluntary poverty and the service in wartime that a pacifist can agree to perform...
...They do not suit...
...Salary $7,500 to $20,000...
...But it does not follow thatsocialized and cultural are synonymous...
...The boys are Juvenile Delinquents...
...so he's using them, not they him...
...I have nothing subtile or novel to say here...
...In such examples, the loss of force, grace, and feeling seems to be evidence that somehow the acquired cultural habits do not draw on unimpeded outgoing energy, they are against the grain, they do not fit the child's needs or appetites...
...these tend to be more naive...
...Mostly, however, it was because their attitude toward poverty is no longer part of their own fighting economic theory...
...It used to refer, like "muckraking," to quixotic attempts to reform the system...
...This is equivalent to saying that tragic poetry or mathematics were "rooted" in the Greek way of life and are not "inherently" human...
...What social conditions formed such a careless personality...
...The same blurring of distinctions has occurred between "political" and "common" criminals...
...Indeed, it is likely that the popular culture is aimed largely at them, as the lowest common denominator...
...Wright Mills...
...the system cushions its crises...
...As, contrariwise, are the organizational characteristics of being hip and convinced that society is a Rat Race...
...On this view, growing up is sometimes treated as if it were acculturation, the process of giving up one culture for another, the way a tribe of Indians takes on the culture of the whites: so the wild Babytribe gives up its mores and ideology, e.g...
...But our officials are not serious...
...We shall see that another important trait in common is having no real activity but living by role-playing.* (3) At the top, finally, are the 900 managers—figure of Fortune magazine— whose task is to minimize risk and maximize production and sales...
...E.g., I myself am pretty easy with my "integrity" by now, and I would sign almost anything convenient...
...Contrariwise, if you don't provide them with certain things, they'll fill the gaps with eccentric substitutes...
...In psychotherapy one finds that many a stubborn symptom would vanish if there were a real change in the vocational and sexual opportunities so that the symptom is not needed...
...The essence of "human nature" is to be pretty indefinitely malleable...
...They buy on credit and have to keep on the job to make both ends meet...
...But one correlation that is generally agreed on is the following: Juv enile delinquency, unlike adult crime, is more frequent in years of economic prosperity than in years of depression...
...it is "socialized...
...In the potency-ideology of teen-age delinquents, of course, such jobs are contemptible and emasculating...
...Artists and bohemians have always gravitated to the bottom of the income pyramid...
...In New York City novice Puerto Ricans are fleeced four times as much for a quarter of the space that experienced citizens manage to find in the same neighborhood...
...Life is simpler and more factual...
...More frequently, however, the matter is left vague: we start with a tabula rasa and end up "socialized" and cultured...
...It makes no difference whether the growth is normal or distorted, only real objects will finish the experience...
...It corrupts ingenuous patriotism...
...This combination, we shall see, mesmerizes them into behaving as though they were trapped in a Closed Room' and must live on their own guts without environment...
...Consider it...
...For it can be shown 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...
...Such a device would at once diminish certain kinds of delinquency, e.g., thefts, malicious mischief, certain spiteful assaults, and maybe truancy...
...A fellow might work in the organized system, e.g...
...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...
...This might come to pretending to conform rather elaborately, for the system is total...
...Exotic or at least not-standard-American arts and folkways, and awkwardness in the standard folkways...
...My own tone sounds like an Angry Middle-Aged Man, disappointed but not resigned...
...The ideals that we Westerners associate with the classic, liberal, bourgeois period of modem culture may well be rooted in this one historical stage of this one type of society...
...Nearly any civilian job a man does advances the war...
...I would make little distinction in value between talking about middle-class youths being groomed for $10,000 "slots" in business and Madison Avenue, or underprivileged hoodlums fatalistically hurrying to a reformatory...
...Present-day sociologists and anthropologists don't talk much about this process, and not in this way...
...so our poor people show off and feel big with the standard of living...
...it is educative and increases self-esteem in a worthwhile way...
...Social-scientists observe that these are the facts, and they also devise theories and techniques to produce more facts like them, for the social-scientists too are part of the highly organized systems...
...Some of it is communally improvised...
...As the day wore on I became more and more eerily disturbed at the difference in tone from such discussions in the Thirties...
...For instance, in our highly organized system of machine production and its corresponding social relations, the practice is, by "vocational guidance," to fit people wherever they are needed in the productive system...
...E.g., the hospital-workers who struck for a union so bravely last year were getting $34 a week...
...There are here three distinct concepts, which sometimes seem the same but sometimes very different: (1) society as the relations of human social animals, (2) the human culture carried by society, and (3) a particular society formed by its pattern of culture and institutions, and to which its members are socialized...
...These factors make sense, but let me raise some further considerations...
...Everybody has got to have something...
...the music might have been something else than Negro jazz...
...Also the 50 Governors, the Federal staff, heads of Foundations, etc., etc...
...But the more important cases have the following form: the child does take on the cultural habit, e.g...
...The price of gasoline pays for the parkways...
...Far from having anIndividual Psychology, he tended to exaggerate the social nature of the baby by reading into it pre-formed traits of his own society...
...so a man loses his freedom, he never stops working...
...I When poverty used to be discussed by the socialists (these same men younger), the theory was that in the capitalist system labor as a whole must be at the bottom and must become poorer, because of the falling return on investment and its pressure on wages, because of the concentration of ownership and control and the increase of inequality, and the periodic crises and unemployment...
...Let us analyze the accidental and essential influences as an interesting example of acculturation...
...It will be seen that these 3 statuses in the organized system (which includes bigger business, organized labor, entertainment, government, bigger education, etc...
...Now what becomes of these few...
...Now, however, groups of boys and young men are disaffected from the dominant society...
...Our social-scientists have become so accustomed to the highly organized and by-and-large smoothly running society that they have begun to think that "social animal" means "harmoniously belonging...
...If this is so, their disaffection is profound and it will not be finally remediable by better techniques of socializing...
...a more optimistic theory is paid no attention at all...
...It dampens animal ardor...
...Thwarted, or starved, in the important objects proper to young capacities, the boys and young men naturally find or invent deviant objects for themselves...
...For their experience has been disillusioning...
...What "it" is, is not definite...
...A curious thing has occurred...
...For the word had been used, bitterly and nobly, in a different theory: "producers of offspring" paid by the iron law of wages just enough to reproduce labor...
...Naturally this cataclysmic transition, between being in and being "outside" society, does not occur without strong accompanying emotional moments—betrayals in love, binges, blow-ups against the boss, addiction to forbidden haunts and vices...
...During the course of the 19th century, however, "human nature" came to be associated with conservative and even reactionary politics...
...A few decades later, narrow interpretations of Darwin were being used to advance imperial and elite interests...
...And (4) the spiteful feeling is increased, that those who are better off are squares, enemies, and fair victims of the gang...
...It is lacking in enough man's work...
...selfishness or magic-thinking or omnipotence, and joins the tribe of Society...
...Its fragmented members hover about the organization in multifarious ways—running specialty...
...II Astonishingly different, however, is the opinion of experts who deal with human facts in a more raw, less highly processed, state...
...Let me give an instance even earlier in life: an infant nurtured in an impersonal institution during the first six months, does not seem to develop abnormally...
...Certainlyonly society is the carrier of culture (it is not inborn...
...They are not growing up to full capacity...
...But we shall see that they are important for the poverty-mystique of the more thoughtful of the Beat Generation...
...Getting his "loot" he is an exploiter of labor, but only a little bit...
...is not now asked by anthropologists...
...This motley collection has, of • W. H. Whyte, Jr., the Hesiod of this tribe, pleads for individuality to offset the comformity of organization life...
...So far as economic and vocational causes, poverty and jobuselessness, are factors—and they are mighty important factors when they add up to being "out" of society—this is a sufficient explanation for juvenile delinquency...
...course, no style or culture, unlike the organization that has our familiar "functional" style and popular culture...
...Man" can no longer be defined as what suits the dominant system, when the dominant system apparently does not suit men...
...The jive language embarrasses their poetry...
...He assures us that this would not be inflationary, and as the director of price controls for the OPA he should know...
...therefore they have been ill-adapted and not assimilated...
...Of these, most will race on but a few will balk and stop running...
...Some, in the interests of communityand sex-reform, have wanted fundamental social changes, like Ferenczi and Reich...
...Courageously taking up or remaining with community substitutes rather than sinking in mere resignation (but this courage is common to many kinds of poor...
...One need go no further...
...Second, in a high standard economy, there is a great difference between having a little extra money and being accustomed to the well-paid standard...
...I did not once hear the word "proletariat," and that made sense...
...yet they do not intend to notice or remedy these big causes...
...This is the essential morality, that is acculturated least...
...They are failing to assimilate much of the culture...
...These are paid the lower-middle-income wages, say $4,000 to $6,000...
...It thwarts aptitude and creates stupidity...
...There is less time-table there...
...but the fact of it, of a culture that is communal and tending toward the creative, is so capital that it must have a future, and it is worthwhile to study its grounding and economy...
...It is lacking in honest public speech and taking people seriously...
...Many categories are not unionized...
...Such cases are clear-cut (they are "physical...
...As society becomes more close-knit and total, a criminal act may well be a dumb political gesture, and political protest is certainly criminal in effect...
...Part 2—CLASS-STRUCTURE 1 In our economy of abundance it is still subject to discussion whether or not there is as much poverty as there was in the thirties when "one third of a nation was ill-housed, ill-clothed, ill-fed...
...It is what, when appealed to in the right circumstances, gives behavior that has force, grace, discrimination, intellect, feeling...
...The street is occupied by kids used to other mores, to whom the gang values are pointless...
...Giving up trying to explain to those who, often literally, do not speak the same language...
...Eminent and earnest labor leaders spoke...
...The old car, which is safe at 50 m.p.h., is effectually barred from parkways made for cars at 65 m.p.h...
...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...
...the jargon might not have had a Negro base...
...but the necessary, useful, and pleasant, and the good, true, and beautiful are not much mentioned in his book.•• But cf., "Among the many models of the good society, no one has urged the squirrel wheel," says Galbraith...
...The income pyramid has changed in shape...
...a fellow will get the job if he shaves off his beard...
...This, of course, was just the line that Freud really took...
...And nevertheless Governor Rockefeller of New York says, "We must give these young men a sense of belonging...
...As labor economists they do not have soli darity with these poor...
...yet when I am a teacher, I cannot sign a loyalty oath if I am going to face a class of the young, for they count on me not to...
...It was during this later period that the social-scientists began to be diffident about "human nature," for, politically, they wanted fundamental social changes...
...the popular culture is high priced, and he gets the dregs of it...
...these are things that everybody knows...
...or to be abused and made a fool of...
...But they have hit on the theory I mentioned at the beginning: that you can adapt people to anything, if you use the right techniques...
...The Organization Man will perceive it as competition, company pressure to conform, etc...
...union and management, Negroes and the new Spanish minorities are often rejected for apprenticeship...
...In our society, bright lively children, with the potentiality for knowledge, noble ideals, honest effort, and some kind of worthwhile achievement, are transformed into useless and cynical bipeds, or decent young men trapped or early-resigned, whether in or out of the organized system...
...Suppose then, with pretty good awareness, our scarred young man is now confirmed poor...
...Immanuel Kant immortally thought up a philosophy to make these cohere...
...The most self-aware of its members are the intellectuals of the middle status, among the advertisers, and junior-executives...
...They have no style at all, and it is understandable that neither they nor their usually rather irrelevant enterprises make much headway in the market, the universities, entertainment, politics, or labor...
...2) our notion of "human culture" at once broadens out to include ancient, exotic, and even primitive models as superior to the conventional standards (as, e.g., our disaffected groups lay store by * I think many social-scientists have been making an error in logic...
...Their choices and inventions are rarely charming, usually stupid, and often disastrous...
...Among some of the Beat, such a principle of integrity is clearly operating in the job-choice...
...Viz: Organized System 1. Workers 2. Organization Men 3. Managers Poor Independents V1 Let us return now to our alert young man of average to good attainments and imagine him growing up in and into this arena...
...They know that the unorganized are up against it, for they have learned techniques of promotion and they don't think much, or much think, of other methods and kinds of results...
...For one thing, in them no questions are asked and no beards have to be shaved...
...and they do not behave as if they were justified by it...
...Vill Let us look also at Beat economics, as an interesting sidelight on the American standard economy...
...These include: Out-casteness and being objects of prejudice...
...For it could be asked: Why wasn't the accident insured...
...It has no Community...
...The style of the drugs remains crude and experimental...
...For one thing, they have a false notion that the kind of artistic activity that proliferates among the Beats is art, and gives the justification of art as a vocation...
...Not enough effort has been made to guarantee belonging, there must be better bait or punishment...
...It is characteristic of systems geared to high pay that it is hard to work for low pay...
...To them, we have apparently reached the summit of institutional progress, and it only remains for the sociologists and applied-anthropologists to mop up the corners and iron out the kinks...
...you can adapt them to anything if you use the right techniques of "socializing" or "communicating...
...Just look at that list...
...The only offset to the organization is nature or worthwhile objects...
...This vagueness is of course quite sufficient for education, for education is an art...
...I would add another important difference: (3) The relation of the other classes to the poor has markedly changed...
...This too involved a revolutionary program, to give back to man his tools...
...Naturally Macy's didn't know this when they hired him...
...Fear of the cops...
...The wages are minimum, the price of subsistence is standard high...
...It abuses science...
...From the earliest infancy, imitation and emulation, love, striving to communicate, rivalry, exclusiveness and jealousy, punishment, introjected authority, identification, growing up on a model, finding safety in conforming—these were among the conflicting elementary functionsof the "human nature" that must grow into culture...
...Money is now called "loot...
...and (3) "socialization" has been to a very limited kind of society...
...Likewise, the old monastic concept of voluntary poverty is no longer much distinguishable from either case-poverty or class-poverty, for it happens that a person cannot continue the Rat Race —he gets sick—and he chooses out, to survive...
...Provocative exclusiveness and in-group loyalty...
...Consider the concrete situation: Even if the parents are suddenly getting better pay, the young are getting merely a little extra spending-money, and this, in a society where there is suddenly a lot of money, must work out as follows: (1) The underprivileged kids get around more and are exposed to the expensive glamor, but (2) this is precisely not attainable by them, unless they take short cuts...
...The later Romantics were historically minded and found man naturally conservative and not be uprooted...
...These groups are not small and they will grow larger...
...Muckraking, in turn, has become the protest of Angry Young Men...
...Either way, it follows that you can teach people anything...
...Again, in the highly organized political industrial systems of Germany, Russia, and now China, it has been possible in a short time to condition great masses to perform as desired...
...III For those excluded from the high standard and its organization, it is becoming harder to maintain any American standard at all...
...This is not a petty problem, for when the evil is general and close-knit, it is necessary to preserve one's own personal integrity, if only to influence the future when the emergency is past...
...Their diffidence makes scientific sense, for everything we observe, and even more important, our way of observing it, is already culture and a pattern of culture...
...Low pay generally means harder work under worse conditions...
...But if he has been to college, he will likely be in the second status of the organization, in business-management, communications, sales, or technology, with its job attitude and way of life...
...There is certainly a concentration of monopolistic control, but either inequality is less (that is debatable), or, certainly, workers on a fairly high standard don't much bother who has millions...
...and scientifically, it was evident that things were being called natural which were overwhelmingly cultural...
...dressing a window at Macy's...
...Growth, like any on-going 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...
...But to be hip and cynical are not attitudes that prompt one to make a go on one's own...
...In our own century, especially since the Twenties and Thirties, the social-scientists have found another reason for diffidence: "human nature" implies "not social," referring to something prior to society, belonging to an isolated individual...
...Perhaps the social message has been communicated clearly to the young men and is unacceptable...
...and the use of any commodity tends to be increasingly tied up with the use of many other commodities and services that cost money...
...Likewise, at such times political activity is more common...
...As might have been expected, from this hectic theory of human nature were drawn the most various political implications...
...and whenever the products of the system need to be used up, the practice is, by advertising, to get people to consume them...
...As predictable, most of the authorities and all of the public spokesmen explain it by saying there has been a failure of socialization...
...In our times the distinction between case-poverty due to illness, life-accidents, or personality-defects, and class-poverty, due to social defects, doesn't amount to much...
...Most likely he will go to work for an Organization, in a factory or service job, manual or clerical, with the corresponding job attitude and way of life...
...The organization they have quit may be the armed forces or a university they cannot compound with...
...Surely all of this will be denied by the Beat fellows...
...For instance, it is impossible to be poor and run a jalopy...
...E.g...
...Nevertheless, scientifically trained anarchists like Kropotkin insisted that "human nature"—now become mutual-aiding, knightly, and craftsmanlike—was still on the side of revolution...
...They do not like to think that fighting and dissenting are proper social functions, nor that rebelling or initiating fundamental change is a social function...
...One striking trait is non-conformism and tolerance in sexual and racial questions and behavior...
...clothes, cars, recreation, and even food—the poor are even more idiotic than the average...
...This very avoidance of the real issues on the part of our public officials is, indeed, one of the big causes...
...What is not understood in this form of reasoning is that playing roles and being hip in this way is very nearly the same as being an Organization Man, for the Organization Man doesn't mean it either...
...It is not surprising then that many of those who balk in the Rat Race will voluntarily choose the other remaining possibility, poverty "outside" society...
...Becoming cultured" and "being adjusted to the social group" are taken almost as synonymous...
...Dignity and intellect were perhaps still in the future...
...so he could be said to choose poverty...
...Just as in the Protestant Ethic the poor had a theological defect...
...These poor groups, behindhand to begin with, get less schooling...
...He may become too obedient and lacking in initiative, or impractically careful and squeamish...
...They are not likely to choose the other, motley, alternative of trying to remain in society independent of the organization...
...Yet there is a tighter organization above that is harder to belong to, so that the standard is increasingly unattainable for the underprivileged...
...The insurance costs three times as much as the car...
...The old-fashioned naive thought, that primitive races or children are more natural, is discounted...
...These, not boys but early disillusioned, hip, and resigned young men are the Beat Generation...
...He (rather cynically) fails to see that such polar "individuality" is the conformity by which a man advances...
...Another man would like to be rich and famous but he cannot work otherwise than the work demands and this might not be marketable...
...it now consists mainly of racial and cultural minorities (including migrant farm labor...
...11 Recently I attended a conference (Student League for Industrial Democracy) where poverty was the theme...
...It makes little difference, then, whether a young fellow chooses his lot or is cast among the poor...
...This brings me to another proposition about growing up, which is perhaps my main theme...
...if you persist, he withdraws or becomes tricky...
...It seems most functional to speak of 3 classes, the Poor, the Organization, and the Independents...
...They felt that too much importance was being assigned to Individual Psychology (they were reacting to Freud) and that this stood in the way of organizing people for political reform...
...the families where, in our artificially maintained nearly full employment, the man has two jobs or the woman also has a job...
...There is a higher standard of living and more to conform to, in order to be "decent...
...to what dominant society and available culture...
...So the anarchist philosopher refused to distinguish these and said, "As long as one of these is in jail, I am not free...
...Therefore the fight against poverty was solidary, it was the fight for the improvement of the whole system to give labor a better position...
...It costs money to have any job at all...
...The animal part is rarely mentioned at all...
...These are preferred Beat jobs...
...if it proves annoying, it too has been inadequately socialized...
...Such ideals as personal freedom and cultural autonomy may not be inherent features of cultural life as such...
...In this respect the Beat are more like the old-fashioned poor, and this of course makes it easier and more profitable for them to be poor...
...It is interesting to contrast the different species of imagined rodents between those who are running the race and the scholar who is contemplating it with wonder...
...But in these circumstances, it is immensely admirable that the Beat Generation has contrived a pattern of culture that, turning against the standard culture, costs very little and gives far livelier satisfaction...
Vol. 7 • April 1960 • No. 2
