To Get People Moving

...They have little to do, however, with the Utopian criticism promised by the title...

...Institutions and activities are judged to be prag matic if they meet these needs rather than according to their capacity to avoid "rocking the boat" or their "realistic" acceptance of "moderation" and the "lesser evil...

...Goodman's gnomic and dogmatic style of expression often irritates and I don't believe that this is solely because, as he himself would probably contend, he succeeds in penetrating people's "character armor" and nudging buried repressions...

...Several of these are exciting and profound—I liked especially the discussion of "speech as action" and "On the Intellectual Inhibition of Grief and Anger...

...Some of the "practical proposals" in Paul Goodman's collection of essays are: Solve the traffic problem by banning private cars from Manhattan...

...This sounds liberating and enlightened yet "practical" at the same time...

...I have every sympathy with his insistence on the reality of a human nature that is both biological and generically social and with his rejection of much contemporary sociology as insufficiently psychological and excessively prone to put forward an oversocialized view of man...

...He wants to get things moving again, to break through the attitudes of self-pity and compulsive "putting down" of the system cultivated by so many self-styled "radicals" and "rebels" (he brilliantly dissects the Beats and the hipsters), to stir people to direct action on the community level that undercuts the machinery of national politics and centralized bureaucracy...

...Thus Goodman describes himself as a pragmatist in the tradition of James and Dewey...

...The result is that we often feel deprived somehow of a chance to answer back, to call stop, if only in order to clarify the argument...

...But the nature of human nature is a bit more problematical than Goodman allows...

...His approach raises, however, two related but distinguishable problems...

...Goodman certainly recognizes this, but is inclined to forget it in his enchantment with the details of his suggested reforms...

...Goodman's point is that his "Utopian essays" actually constitute "practical proposals" to solve concrete, acknowledged human problems...

...One suspects he is aware of this, a fact that arouses irritation with his occasional pose of being a simple commonsensical fellow, a child exclaiming at the nakedness of emperors, who is calling us back to obvious truths we have all forgotten...

...For example, in the essay "Pornography and the Sexual Revolution" (the best single thing I've read on the whole subject of sexual censorship) Goodman argues for the removal in contemporary America of all censorship of symbolic representations that "stir sexual desires and thoughts," up to and including what is called "hardcore pornography...

...However, these objections are secondary in light of Goodman's major purpose: To get people moving, criticizing and planning again in an immediate way, unbefogged by ideological abstractions and considerations of power...

...It is a potpourri, including in addition to the social criticism a scattering of essays on avant-garde writing, painting, theology and the psychology of intellectuals and artists...

...This tension gives his argument a richness and complexity, a kind of double vision, that enables him to combine inventive imagination with a diagnosis of our plight that cuts beneath the cliches about "organization men" and "mass society" that have by now become so familiar and boring...

...Goodman himself hasn't changed much in his long career as a writer, social critic and reformer...

...Yet one is struck by the congruence between his outlook and the mood of the newly rebellious campus and youth groups of the sixties...

...Pragmatic" has become the most popular of all approving adjectives in the vocabulary of American planners, reformers and political innovators...

...Ultimately, Goodman's practical proposals are fully meaningful only in the con text of a larger view of society, one that is "utopian," if you like, in the traditional and favorable sense...

...Tinkering with administrative arrangements, "raising the level" of TV by scheduling a few more "serious" panel discussions, getting a civil rights bill through Congress that the Southern Senators feel they "can live with"—all of these are seen as manifestations of a pragmatic outlook and are so justified...

...He eschews far-reaching visions of a total reconstruction of modern life and his acceptance of the label "utopian" is ironic, pointing to the fear, apathy and cynicism pervading our society which has dried up not merely the "spontaneous imagination of ends" but even the "capacity to invent ingenious expedients...

...create work camps for youth modelled broadly on the CCC to give young people a sense of useful work, a needed refuge from the family and to carry out Goodman's suggested projects for reshaping the physical environment...

...Big truths about human nature and broad moral judgments are asserted along with obviously sensible smaller truths as if our certainty about the latter extended to the former as well...

...Goodman has better warrant in the James-Dewey tradition for his use of "pragmatic" than those who equate it with political manipulation, although one sometimes wishes that he would give a little more sustained attention to philosophical considerations...

...The trouble is that "our simple-minded proposals make people feel foolish and timid...

...With considerable acuteness, he examines the probable consequences of such a decision and draws the teeth from the standard fearful objections, urging, however, that "since the change-over would be so drastic, the court might aim at a deliberate slowness, and the mass media would wisely want to meet and agree on a prudent rate of change...

...Several of the longer essays on Utopian thinking, applied science and the new spirit of contemporary youth convey adequately Goodman's larger assumptions and central insights as a social critic...

...rebuild a few of America's ugly small towns to show what might be done by non-bureaucratic planning on a manageable scale...

...Secondly, there is a tension between the case Goodman makes for his concrete proposals and his awareness of the probable response to them...

...I think that Irving Howe sensed a similar conflict when he expressed concern in the Winter, 1962 issue of DISSENT that Goodman's proposed youth work camps might in practice become semimilitary, authoritarian institutions...

...Goodman justifies giving free rein to local option by invoking the ideal advantages of cultural decentralization...

...Yet I think that a reader unfamiliar with Communitas and Growing Up Absurd would be baffled as well as enlightened by this book...

...One is reminded of the arguments of self-styled Jeffersonian upholders of states' rights against the encroachments of a federal welfare-state...

...legalize pornography, since the present policy of censorship under various "obscenity" statutes "not only must continue to fail, but in itself keeps on creating the evil it combats...

...He takes particular human needs—for useful work, sexual fulfillment, space and fresh air—as his point of departure, not, as in the previous examples I cited, the existing set of social arrangements and vested interests...

...But when Goodman goes on to argue that "the aim is to establish a principled general policy [and] the states and localities could continue to enforce whatever censorship they please, so long as they do not risk a national suit and are content to do without some of the national culture," one begins to doubt whether his proposal would have much effect on present realities...

...For it is precisely local groups, both private and public, that impose effective censorship today, as the distributors of Lady Chatterley's Lover and The Tropic of Cancer have learned to their pain...

...But the trouble is that these advantages are ideal rather than established realities in contemporary America...

...in principle they make an impressive case, but in practice they ensure a do-nothing policy by vesting final authority in venal, gerrymandered state legislatures that are easily swayed and corrupted by vested interests and narrow pressure groups...

...First, what are the nature and source of the human needs which serve as his criteria for evaluating social performance...

...The title is meant to suggest a paradox...

...therefore, paradoxically, the simpler and more easily effected the ideas we suggest—the less 'utopian' they are—the more they are really im practical for these people...

...Thus there is a conflict here between the "utopian" — how things ought to be in a better American society — and the "practical" — what we can do now, given the way things are —of Goodman's title...

...But this collection, following his much-discussed earlier books, is clearly aimed at an audience already familiar with and responsive to Goodman...

...The Kennedy Administration is frequently praised for approaching the nation's problems in a pragmatic spirit...

...At the same time, his very understanding of the manifold ways in which insights are domesticated and grand moral-critical traditions blunted leads us to wonder whether actual attempts to carry out some of his proposals might not result in their becoming mere pragmatic expedients in the debased sense he rejects...

...Now Goodman means something quite different, by pragmatic, almost the opposite in fact...