The Age of Preparation
YATES, WILLIAM ROBERT
By William Robert Yates the age One doubts there was ever a generation of young intellectuals so intent as our own on proving that they are neither young nor intellectual. Now we are faced with...
...In fact, what they say is usually necessarily false—the old are notoriously bad at playing This is the eleventh contribution to our symposium on the young generation of U.S...
...A man who hasn't enjoyed his adolescent years hasn't earned his maturity...
...It is they who turned, either in fear or in disgust, from the social experience and began to search for themselves within themselves...
...We should see what the younger generation is actually doing, not what a few interpreters from the ranks are saying about it...
...As family men, as "company men," as technicians, educators, publicists, the young seem always to think of themselves as part of a whole, as citizens of a society...
...The fact that so many are so fervently devoted to their careers has caused some critics to recoil in horror: "Perhaps more than any of its predecessors, this generation wants a good, secure job," commented Time a few years ago...
...Yet, however much the critics of the young generation would like to see their subjects stop being "spectators of life," however much they would like to see them struggle more fiercely with the world, the young are going to do just as they have been doing—acting like adults...
...We are preparing for war, we are preparing to send rockets into outer space, we are even preparing to accept, if necessary, the role of leader of nations in a world which today is a monstrous creature consisting, it would seem, of a single body of citizens with two heads...
...It is precisely those who roared through the Twenties, dashed to the barricades in the Thirties or spent their formative years in the foxholes of the Forties who have lost faith in experience...
...For the rest, these movements toward the great "I" seem to have no more meaning than a backwater swing toward an "I am an American" club...
...More likely, the young had thought about this nation's ideals more carefully than the promoters and had come up with some complex answers as well as a few new questions...
...If any among us today might be characterized as fearing experience, it is the older generations...
...one either measured up to the standards of these veterans or one failed miserably...
...They have lost their ideals...
...How they became so is the question to be considered here...
...Prosperity has killed political consciousness in students.' " One must stomach a good deal of wry humor before Shapiro's effervescent remarks can be digested safely, but there is no doubt his comments will be regurgitated by many of our young intellectuals...
...No one who went to school during this period could help but feel it...
...Now we are faced with the stark proposition that there is no younger generation among us at all, but only a "non-generation" consisting of "an assortment of discrete individuals with no collective identity...
...It was these world-weary, security-minded veterans who brought the meaning of skepticism into focus, who made "complexity," "rationality," "maturity" the key words in every intellectual discourse in which the young participated...
...Through the increased use of mass communications, one could see what the rest of the world was doing every moment, and be seen...
...came roaring from the throats of every professional town crier...
...It was not the nation but the world that pressured their consciousness during their formative years, and it is not the nation but the world that threatens them today...
...Analyzing the same facts today, we might come up with a different synthesis...
...We should not look to the young novelists, playwrights or critics to "see what's going on in the minds of the five million Americans who have graduated college since Hiroshima...
...They have nothing left to give society...
...The young generation has not lost faith in experience or in man's ability to handle himself and his society rationally...
...What is startling about this proposition is the underlying idea that, in Norman Podhoretz's terms, a generation which has found no articulate spokesmen of its own to voice its protests or to proclaim its aspirations simply does not exist...
...If there is a restlessness among today's young intellectuals, it is an eagerness not to splash around in fountains but to get on with the big adventure for which they have been preparing...
...He has looked about him and into himself and has seen the young set as "poised, sober, judicious, prudent...
...In a sense, they were all Atlases, each responsible for the support or fall of civilization...
...Their reflections on the draft, taxes, babies, even race relations seem much more civilized than the comments we hear from today's adult population...
...The following item from a recent newspaper illustrates what is falsely being said today of the young by the old: "Washington, D.C.—The Chicago poet and Pulitzer Prize-winner Karl Shapiro looked at the younger generation yesterday and accused it of 'intellectual cowardice' and 'apathy.' Sitting on a couch in the poetry room [of the Library of Congress], he viewed the young adults as 'so quiet there isn't even enough excitement in them to write...
...It taught them that thev had to prepare not only for conflict hut to defend the underlying ideals upon which their nation stood, ideals which most only understood conceptually...
...The young are going to continue being "conservative" and are going to continue conforming to their self-made patterns of "maturity" not because they are afraid of experiencing life but because they desire most urgently to control rather than be controlled by it...
...As the ideological warfare of the Forties and early-Fifties increased in intensity, the cry "Prepare...
...Jefferson, Emerson, Whitman, Parrington, Veblen, Freud—they spoke first and the young intellectuals responded...
...To accuse the young generation of "intellectual cowardice" and of "fearing experience" seems a bit foolish, then, when one considers how determinedly the young have taken up their adult obligations...
...A glance through the past suggests that most previous generations were as faceless as our own, that the articulate spokesmen of the past were nearly all "mature" intellectuals who spoke for the young set when they spoke for their peers...
...these voices tell us what we are—we don't tell them...
...We had better read the newspapers, the business house organs, the scientific, medical and legal bulletins...
...it is an Age of Preparation, and members of the young generation are its hardest-working leaders...
...Whatever might be said of the young generation, its members are not standing still...
...The young old men of today may be wiser than the flamboyant idealists of yesterday, but God they are dull...
...Men conform when they are civilized, and it is time to recognize that ours is the most civilized young generation in recent American history...
...After all, his is a mature voice...
...But, even today, how the young think of our society and how they act in it are not correlative...
...These veterans had given six or seven years of their youth to save the world—now they were out to save themselves...
...Furthermore, their reaction to world pressure allowed (indeed, forced) the young to become "conservative" as well...
...Though the word is somewhat disparagingly used today, perhaps rightly so...
...The world would not allow them to act in a vacuum...
...They need to go back and drink the wine of youth...
...But it is only politics in the national sense that is obsolete...
...They had no such faith to begin with...
...The fact that most of the young reacted like citizens and accepted the war and the draft as necessary evils saved the country from considerable embarrassment...
...They may not be overly expressive in politics, but they are ferociously involved in all other fields of activity...
...Their illusions have been discredited and destroyed,' he stated...
...Podhoretz ought not to have been shocked, really, for there never was a generation in the history of our country which had such articulate spokesmen—Fitzgerald and Hemingway notwithstanding...
...It is not the young who are "outsiders" but the old...
...They ought to cut loose, live it up, he implies...
...made unconscious internationalists of us all...
...They competed among themselves and they competed with us...
...Word began to leak from the Pentagon during the Korean conflict of the very large numbers of soldiers who were going AWOL, who were not accepting the responsibilities of their citizenship or were at least not being sold the advertising-agency promotions on what America and Americanism stand for...
...Having used the word "conforming," let it for once be used with pride...
...Conformity, however, is not analogous to apathy...
...It was the older generations of intellectuals who first turned from society to the soul when the impossibility of man's molding a perfect society by his own hands became apparent...
...Certainly there are members of the young generation who have followed the roads of introspection paved by Freud, Kierkegaard and Picasso, but one suspects they are journeying in that direction only in order to gain an experience, not to live the experience...
...The Young Generation —11 of preparation young—yet more often than not their words are accepted as being wise as well as useful...
...William R. Yates, 27, is a Southern Californian who has studied at Illinois and Columbia Universities...
...He has worked in Hollywood and is now a script consultant to CBS television's Studio One...
...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"), Leslie A. Fiedler ("A Fortyish View") and Ned Polsky ("The Invisible Man...
...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...
...The "cold war" only justified the young intellectuals' desire for early maturity by adding its own exquisite torture, the realization that the young had to be responsible for their acts...
...But he is not happy with what he sees, and therefore he conjures up a sense of "restlessness" which he says lies beneath the dark composure and quiet sobriety of our young...
...They were out for happiness, security, domesticity, success...
...This is not an Age of Security, of Apathy or of Confusion...
...The crucial experience to which members of our generation were subjected, the experience which precipitated their drive for early maturity, was not so much the sudden realization that the world was "balanced precariously on the edge of an apocalypse" as something much simpler: It was our direct association with the World War II veterans who swarmed over the nation's universities in 1946...
...This reaction to world pressure by the young still mystifies civic leaders and politicians, who can only think of the young as "apolitical...
...Their influence, whether for good or evil, was at least effective...
...But as Uncle Sam went out across the seas with his glad hand, his smile and his Madison Avenue front, something began to disturb the young...
...What they are about is preparing a social faith of their own, and to this extent they are in step with our Age of Preparation...
...They act mature, responsible, even submissive, but they do so, one suggests, because they have taken the "long view" of their role in a world society, not the "short view" of their role in a state or national society...
...A generation, however, is not created analytically but is a creation of its own life...
...After all, one handles the problems of other nations cautiously if one is to have any success at all...
...The Big Ten universities of the Middle West, where this writer began his schooling, boasted to parents and press alike of the fine, sobering influence the veterans were having on the young...
...This revelation seems to have so shocked its author that he hurries to paint an identifiable face upon the selected group of individuals born between 1925 and 1935...
...The lost generations have given their minds to psychoanalysis, their spirits to existentialism, and their hearts to the abstract arts...
...It is not the "I" but the "we" that one hears most often on the lips of the young intellectuals...
...What they tell us about ourselves is not, mind you, necessarily true...
...Their new faith is called "I...
...The ideological war was transformed into the psychological war of today...
...It was time to "shape up," to put on one's best clothing and look prosperous...
...During this period, too, the young saw that the world had not only grown smaller but flatter...
...So it is today with Riesman, Adler, Jung, Kinsey, Krutch, Niebuhr...
...Of these men, of the generation before the one now being considered, one might write: "Their very presence and bearing announced that they were serious men and women with no time for fooling around, burdened with a sense of mortality, reconciled to the sad fact of human limitation...
...ten years ago it did teach the young a lesson they never forgot...
...They are going to remain "poised, sober and prudent," for that is their character...
...world politics is a very hot issue among them...
...To a certain extent, Podhoretz has been guilty of just this...
...The cry "Prepare...
...Their influence gave birth to what has been called "the oldest young generation in the world...
Vol. 40 • May 1957 • No. 21
