The Invisible Men

...when our elders have not sufficiently learned what there is to be learned from the failure of blueprints for Utopia and of positions of critical support...

...Ours is not the tradition of all anti-traditionalists, but specifically the tradition of those whose chief aim was to cut through the mystifications which most men use to avoid confronting the harsher truths...

...Thus, we feel that part of our job is to oppose the transformation of the media of mass communication into media of mass stupefaction...

...Our case rests, however, on this proposition: At one period, from roughly the time of the Moscow Trials through the American Government's honeymoon with Stalinism, the primary duty of every honest politically-minded intellectual was to debunk the Soviet system...

...Such a task requires that we accept the only material there is—man and this world—rather than retreat into the illusion of a god and a supernatural world...

...One way to indicate our kind of No is by reference to our tradition...

...Podhoretz provides two marks of the non-generation: "None of them came to maturity during the Depression'' and their "crucial public experience" was "the cold war...

...More important are the ways in which our experience sets us off from intellectuals who are now 35 and older: (1) Our experience of revolutionary radicalism, as of the Depression, was largely second-hand...

...Our crucial public experience, however, is this: We acquired political awareness before the cold war but after the Moscow Trials...

...The last requirement cannot be met if we politely restrict ourselves, as the liberal journals do, to an attack on the political activities of religious organizations, but only if we oppose religious belief itself...

...The Young Generation —10 Invisible Man Why did we believe as we did...

...If we lived in Great Britain, most of us probably would be members of the Labor party: in present-day America, where there is no viable socialist movement, we feel that our talents are most effectively employed outside a formal political-partv framework...

...we stood in no bread lines and few picket lines...

...But we still find it meaningful to ask what is living and what is dead in Marxism, and we employ several Marxist notions...

...Part of the trouble is the lack of a visual group symbol that I have noted above...

...Too, we are not gadflies willy-nilly...

...some even discovered Trotsky before Marx...

...We became involved with revolutionary radicalism when it was dying of—among other things—factionalism, and our shrill allegiances shifted rapidly from one radical group to another...

...Our invisibility is a function, too, of the fact that none of the currently available verbal tags quite comprehends us (for reasons which I cannot go into here...

...They never got over it, by which I mean that they irretrievably lost the courage to stand alone...

...3) Many of our mentors were, when we first met them, already on the way out of the revolutionary movement and assuming various postures of "critical support...

...the ablest statements of our point of view (nearly all are in the magazine Dissent) come from the few intellectuals over 35 who managed to avoid the pitfalls awaiting their generation...

...Like the older generation we got our fingers burned by Marxism, but we managed to salvage more heart and mind...

...and, more than anything else, to oppose the current cowardice of many intellectuals themselves, i.e., the religious revival...

...For them, a system is now a biological need...

...that we face up to the fact that truth is not always beauty and that some problems of men have no apparent solutions...

...He fails to notice a good-sized chunk of the latter half of his "non-generation"—probably because we cannot be comprehended by a visual symbol, be it act or object...

...And in the process we have become more genuinely radical than they ever were...

...The content of our search for selfhood may have been different from that of our less literate, more movie-struck age-mates, but the psychodynamics were the same...

...It is not enough to seek social causes...

...Thus, for example, we are utterly opposed to the Soviet system but nevertheless disagree with the have-you-done-your-Red-baiting-today orientation of some writers...

...2) Our commitment covered a much shorter time span...

...His articles and reviews have appeared in the Chicago Review and Dissent...

...We do not deny the usefulness of tradition as such...

...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 understand us, one must refrain from listing outward and visible signs of the inward and spiritual grace, and instead talk of ideas and feelings...

...It is not distaste for tradition per se that causes us to be alarmed by the older generation's instigation of "American Civilization' programs in our colleges and a general overattention to all things American, nor yet the fact that this orientation is in part a product of the cold war...

...We believe also that intellectuals today cannot afford a total preoccupation with politics and economics, narrowly conceived, in the face of general cultural trends that threaten the very intellectual standards which make a rational critique of political-economic life possible...

...We were old enough to experience the Depression sharply through the impact it made on our elders—vicarious experiences, true, but nonetheless unforgettable...

...But, given our belief in cosmopolitanism as opposed to chauvinism, we fail to see why "the need for roots" must be fed chiefly by the soil on which one happens to be born...

...that we be concerned not with constructing a new system but with a radical questioning of the concept of system itself...

...We object because our elders' need to come home again has forced them to abandon standards derived from world culture and into an acceptance of national origin as a criterion of intellectual and moral worth...

...Today, when such debunking takes place in every edition of every newspaper, when as often as not it is a smokescreen for reactionary tendencies within American society, and when the appeal of Communism in America is weaker than it has ever been, the primary duty of the intellectual lies elsewhere—especially if he would be a new leader...

...Our present radicalism retains something of Marx while throwing out the Bolshevist bathwater...

...In numerous ways, we constituted not a political movement but a Leon Trotsky Fan Club...

...for us, Marx is not all wet...

...An example: Melville, judged against the backdrop of world literature, produced one first-rate book (Moby Dick) and one second-rate book (The Confidence Man), but those members of the older generation who now assume power positions in our English departments no longer care to make such judgments...

...This is the tenth contribution to our symposium on the young generation of U.S...

...One of my clearest boyhood memories, for example, is of adults stealing pigeons from the park...

...Our tradition, therefore, is the tradition of Socrates, Nietzsche and Max Weber...

...Ours is a group that finds it especially difficult to translate attitude into social action and that has no standard insignia of any sort...

...It is not a question of group size, for even if I make an extremely pessimistic estimate of our number—say, 3,000—this constitutes a considerable fragment of the intellectuals now in their late twenties and early thirties...

...It seems to us that the older generation got too used to having a system, in this case Marxism, to do all the thinking about values for them...

...to oppose the enervation of college teaching that results from superpatriotism, the drift to vocationalism, the military demand for more engineers, and that recent perversion of democracy which declares that everyone has not only the economic right but the intellectual right to go to college...

...This is why we have, for example, Jewish ex-radicals hastening to become "good Jews" again by writing for Commentary, and why—the demon of system requires it—they must puff up Jewish "theology," culture-philosophy, etc., rather than accept Judaism for the hodgepodge of primitive ritual law that it essentially is...

...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 Bell ("The Once-Born, the Twice-Born, the After-Born"), Jascha Kessler ("Killing a Mouse"), John Hunt ("Farewell to the Fallen Angel"), Alfred Sundel ("Beyond Conformity"), Morton Cronin ("In Defense of Revisionism") and Leslie A. Fiedler ("A Fortyish View...

...and at the time I knew why they did so...

...Ned Polsky is an executive editor at Thomas Y. Crowell...

...We read Das Kapital and shortly thereafter were reading the Dewey Commission report and Trotsky...

...and there is, of course, the special handicap of our refusal to join a political party or to form one...

...All who would plan a new society must err, in our view, if they refuse the antecedent task of seeing the present world for what it really is...

...Most important of all, perhaps, is our failure to produce major spokesmen from among our own age group...

...the particular content of our polemic is determined by a pragmatic criterion of relevance—the view that one should undertake what needs doing most at any given time...

...For us, the emphases are different...

...We feel that it is high time for a reassertion of the necessity of atheism—a rejection of any and all belief in a supernatural being, no matter how personal and "non-institutional" such belief may be...

...Why, given this vigorous credo, are we at present invisible even to most of the Left...

...Our kind of dissent is difficult to portray for what it is and easy to confuse with what it is not, which is to say that there is more than one kind of dissent...

...Our general attitude, and in particular our presumption in standing aside from all political parties, should not be mistaken for an irresponsible cult of nonconformity, since it derives not from a love of dissent for its own sake but rather from a realistic estimate of our present situation...

...Almost any system will serve them in a pinch (e.g., Vedanta), but ultimately preferred is one that allows them to make peace with parents and country, and to expiate guilt feelings for having broken away in the 1930s...

...Many of us never became more than fellow-travelers despite our passion, because the shifts followed one another with such rapidity...

...The behavior that I have described was also bound up with the psychosexual phenomena of adolescence, particularly with what Erik Erikson calls "identity crisis...

...There is an infantile No and a mature No, an alienated No and a committed No, a cowardly No and a courageous No, and a sour No and a joyful No...

...In thus aligning ourselves, we are neither less committed nor less responsible than our elders...

...The fact that our experience of revolutionary Marxism was wholly adolescent, while our elders' experience was only initially so, means that we have "outgrown" it in a way that most of them have never been able to do...

...True, we are extreme revisionists: We keep little except Marx the social analyst, and, at that, Marx the social analyst as modified by Max Weber and a dozen others...

...Words like "class consciousness" and "bourgeois chauvinism" may be shopworn, but the concepts behind them are not: if we use such words in the full knowledge that they bring smiles to the faces of our ciders, this is a product of the lack of exact synonyms and a desire to save the concepts...

...And we feel it most responsible indeed to accentuate the negative, to be essentially muckrakers...

...Our political education, such as it was, clearly distinguishes us from the true non-generation: We are the last age-group of American intellectuals that, as a group, had some sort of involvement with revolutionary radicalism...

...We recapitulated the ideological shifts of our elders in a highly telescoped way...

...Partly we are influenced here, it must be admitted, by awareness of the motivation of such writers, for by our "growth" we mean not only that we can retain some elements of Marxism but that we are not driven by a permanent resentment at having once been fooled by the elements we now reject...

...The result of all this: We became disillusioned almost before we had acquired illusions, became members of the "homeless Left" without ever really having had a home...

...We believe that the central threat within American political-economic life is not the Communist party but the permanent war economy (is it only us "youngsters" who recall that the New Deal never solved the unemployment problem...