Beyond Conformity

...As Who's Who well knows, identity is established not by personality or character but by record...

...In the incredible expansion of U.S...

...In the conformity and conservatism which are the temper of our times, Hobbes's old law of surrendering individual rights to achieve social benefits is still at work...

...This week's spokesman, Alfred Sundel, is a young New York editor whose fiction has appeared in such periodicals as Retort, Western Review and Perspectives...

...industry in the late '40s and '50s (accelerated by a false war economy), the generation of the '20s and '30s to a large extent became integrated into our society...

...Some, fired by the legend of the '20s and worn-out cliches about America, were eager for their day in Europe...

...They will have to capture all the disruption of the mechanical and mass effects of our age, and of the threatening thunder...

...But in the fact that all the accounts are not in yet...

...But in the urgency of making money, in the byways of business, in the groves of academe, our unfulfilled lives are blunted, and we grow duller and duller as day succeeds day and the dance of life goes on...

...What wonder, then, that our younger generation of ^ltellectuals are quiet, conforming and cautious...

...In the possibility that all the vitality and promise our \ ounger generation must certainly have is now being watered down by the exigencies of time and causality, we may well suspect that their conformity is a symptom, not a phenomenon...

...In the U.S., universities and colleges offered them the sanctuary of medieval monks from a world of political rapine and war, but there was also the lucrative professional-commercial field...

...The great increase in world population, the breakdown of absolutism and the rise of technological power dynamics evoke an ever greater need for us to identify with powerful forces which have a destiny of their own, whether they be corporations, universities, magazines or movements...

...Henceforth, what would be the legends of Siegfried and Beowulf compared with those of IBM and du Pont de Nemours...

...And they wanted some of the pie...

...Bohemianism was passe, for theirs was a generation that had been brought up on movies where the American democratic class struggle had vividly been impressed upon them—a struggle not between classes but for class itself, ever up to something bigger, better, finer: more money, power, prestige...

...The stir of primitive urges beneath our fine clothes, however, makes us nostalgic for the forgotten rituals of an earlier age when man did not sit alone in little rooms, lost in himself...

...In order to arrive, those who will truly speak for our younger generation will not only have to swim against the current, they will have to be equal to the new world...

...to assault our senses...

...Their fault lies not in that they haven't measured up to the lost generation...

...Time, too, has its own subtle curvatures, and between the stupefying reality of 1957 and the mythic era of the '20s the world has changed many times over...

...All of which made for a certain caution, an acceptance of Stendhal's idea that after the French Revolution man would no longer earn his bread by heroic deeds but by his guile alone...

...Their eyes were backward, not forward...

...Today's world is filled with total-war victims, the shades of Buchenwald and slave-labor camps, the sufferers of yaws and malnutrition, awakening Africa and Asia...

...New York became the host to an international secular organization which, for all its faults, is today more politically influential than the Roman Catholic Church with its 1,600 years of influence on Western civilization...

...For even in the face of prosperity there are those who will in their hearts say No, who will throw opportunism, rewards and caution to the wind and return to truer goals, not for an ideal or through reason but in spite of themselves, not with flags unfurled but behind their own backs...

...Just as important, they will have to seek for a continunity with the past, not only across an arithmetic span of time, but across the curvature itself...

...In this new age of jet airliners and atomic-powered submarines, time itself has taken on the speed of light, so that a year of the technological present is not equal to a year of Amenhotep's reign or even to one of Harding's administration...

...Yet, the younger generation is more interested in cocktails than in CARE packages, in trips abroad than in critical issues, in fashions than in art, in exoticisms than in understanding other cultures, in money than in ethics...

...from what they early heard, saw and read they learned that it wasn't what you were but who you knew that got you somewhere...

...As great churches and temples had once marked the bastions of civilization, so hydroelectric plants now divided the world into modern and backward areas...

...From the hosannas of advertisers they learned to be cynical...

...and the axes it had to grind, for many reasons, became buried hatchets...

...Great air armadas are practicing for war while bombs are being tested more powerful than death, and flying saucers pose an unbelievable possibility...

...As primitive man in the fastness of his forest protectively identified himself with animals and clan, so we, in our society of material success and failure, tend to worship big names like pagan gods and to display them like totem poles whenever we feel a need for their protection...

...The endless excitation of our senses, the sensationalism and shock therapy of our mass media of communication leave us with a deadening of the nerves, a lack of feeling and enthusiasm, until in the end neither Frankenstein, murder nor torture move us and we become removed from our own genuine facial expressions while "entertainment" brings up the big guns of fts last resort, sex...

...However, time—by the very accumulation of itself—• has a way of rectifying its own curvature, and if Hobbes can say "I told you so" there's Dostoyevsky, too...

...The younger generation were not, however, "sad young men," but eggheads...

...If World War II saw technology become king, the '50s saw it become so powerful that, like Louis XIV, it could say, "L'etal, c'est moi...

...Israel and Egypt, harking back to the long ago, offer the world the equally unbelievable possibility of being the alpha and omega of Western civilization...

...From movies they learned that poverty was the abyss, money the key to happiness, preaching the bunk, and love a This is the seventh contribution to our symposium on the young generation of U.S...

...For if the wafer gives communion, so do Harvard and General Motors...

...much has yet to be said, and time alone will tell it—in its own sweet curving time...

...His most recent contribution to The New Leader was a review of Maya Art and Civilization...

...lucky something that fell to you without obligation...

...They will have to tell us how far we are from our lost ethic, our moral obligations and our own undiscovered selves...

...The majority got graduate degrees, but because of the conflict in American education and those greater conflicts of the times their degrees were more often of bewilderment than in subjects...

...The 30-year period between the '20s and the '50s paralleled an economic cycle from postwar prosperity to depression to a second and greater postwar prosperity...

...When Tolstoy's Rostov feels "self-oblivion in the foremost ranks of Kutuzov's army," he opens the door on the existential dilemma of our age...

...Failure means human sacrifice, throwing yourself out the window, personality disintegration...

...And because they will have to meet these challenges, their way will be long and hard, their work most likely misunderstood...

...Subject to the apprehensions of the draft, the hydrogen bomb (which preached its own carpe diem) and McCarthy, two wars and the threat of a third dazed them, while inflation, plus the increasing numbers of those who came from moneyed homes, pointed up the problems of economic disadvantage...

...If they took the primrose path, it was because the warpath had long been abandoned...

...Other contributors to the discussion thus far have been Wallace Markfield ("Children of the Fattening Fifties: Our Non-Generation Revisited"), Arthur Cohen ("For a New Center of Creativity"), Daniel Hell ("The Once-Born, the Twice-Born, the After-Born"), Jascha Kessler ("Killing n Mouse") and John Hunt ("Farewell to the Fallen Angel...

...But the sad fact is that the early Hemingway and Fitzgerald are as obsolete as Lindbergh...

...But over and above everything there were the elemental needs of youth, the search for identity and integration...

...their arrivals met no doubt with hostility or silence—as has happened before...

...They are softies, at the mercy of man's eternal weakness to be preoccupied with himself and his pleasures in a society that recommends indulgence at ever) turn...

...What the hobo seeks in alky, the yogi in meditation, the patient in analysis, the monastic in reverent indwelling thought and the poet in his poem—integration—our society brings untold pressure upon its members to find in making money...

...But once there, instead of comprehending the historic changes afoot (i.e., Europe being transformed by technology), many hunted for what Hemingway had reported 25 years before...

...rose from a prewar second-rate power, off in a corner from the rest of the world, to the dominant position in world affairs, while all nations were shifted in their status seemingly overnight...

...intellectuals—a generation defined by Norman Podhoretz in the first article of the series as the young men and women born between 1925 and 1935, who are now between 21 and 31 years old...

...To compensate for this, a remnant of Nietzsche's "mnemonics of blood and cruelty," as practiced by primitive man, is with us today in what our hucksters call "a million dollars worth of entertainment...

...So in the quality paperback, the university press, the improved photographic process, the long-playing record, foreign films and a living literature, the lost generation found itself...

...The U.S...

...Their fault is that they adhered too closely to the myth, too readily accepted the cliches, while time's curvature made the difference...

...With the weight of years had come accomplishment, with continued accomplishment had come recognition, with continued recognition had come authority and positions of power, and with these, in turn, had come value judgments which went to create an atmosphere...

...they identified too strongly with the irresponsible characters of the early Hemingway and Fitzgerald and wondered why they couldn't be as gay and legendary...

...and you had to get somewhere...