Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR CONGO VIOLENCE Robert A. LeVine's "Africa in Perspective". (NL. January 18) is just excellent. I have finally read an account that gives me an understanding of what is going on and why...
...At times the NL exasperates me, but articles such as this one keep me reading the journal...
...and after two years of a fairly strong apolitical reaction entered my third year of college working for the Democratic party, an organization I never would have thought of as being worthy of my association...
...Unfortunately, neither Marx nor Savio reacted rationally to the situation...
...Yes, Kelman is quite right about the generation of today being on the verge of committing the same political mistakes its parents made in their youth...
...by 1650, 500 million, and now we are 3.2 billion...
...the young zombies yearn and lust for tyranny...
...January 4) is perfectly free to make a fool of himself if that is what he desires...
...He is clearly an exceptionally well-read and incisive young man...
...more intellectual as well as political excitement at Great Neck South High School than at Brooklyn College, which once upon a time possessed a rather "radical" intelligentsia...
...ROBERT GLOTZER ROBBE-GRILLET Stanley Edgar Hyman ("The Austerities of the New Novel," NL...
...civil violence and civil war is a sublimation of their agressive impulses into a crusade more objectively fitted to the facts of the frustrating situation...
...KURT OPITZ DEFENSE OF POE As a member since the age of 16 of the Poe mob . which may be more numerous than Mr...
...Oakland, Calif...
...He still may be unconvinced after all th is...
...It was not until 1939 that the good guys were separated from the bad guys...
...the fourth is due in 1977 and the fifth will come in 1987...
...I had many of them myself...
...It only incites naturally rebellious adolescents to irrationally reject any objective examination of their country's purpose...
...He takes himself very seriously and seems to he in danger of falling into one of the most common intellectual traps: that of intolerance for lesser beings...
...Kelman is correct in saying that students in New York and other large metropolitan areas succumb to this disease earlier than most...
...And, if there is a country in the world which they admire which is not a tyranny I would be glad to learn of it...
...University radicalism is in some ways more sophisticated...
...February 1), I was hoping that he would spend his undergraduate years at Brooklyn College...
...That is to say, the students involved read only books and periodicals which advanced their political views, and would not consider giving even cursory examination to an opposing argument...
...The University of Chicago long had a reputation as a "Pinko" school...
...Now Savio is another symptom...
...But it is vastly more rational and promising for an eventual de-alienation of Mass Man and escape from the Anthill State...
...This alternative is not so dramatic or emotionally exhilirating as mass meetings, strikes, and clashes with police and authority figures...
...One lashes out blindly to destroy th e perceived source of frustration: one examines the situation and with melancholy stoicism repeals the famous prayer: "God give me the courage to change those things which I ca n change, the patience to accept those that I cannot change, an d the wisdom to know the difference...
...As a graduating senior at Brooklyn College, I am reluctant to report that there seems to be...
...after all, at Bronx Science and the High School of Music and Art that the student protest against in-school air-raid drills began...
...There were still many of that ilk when I came two-and-a-half years ago...
...pulls out of his portfolio instead of extracting them from Robbe-Grillet's novels, he is not doing his job...
...Only the most obtuse of readers could charge that "the whole fascinating world of the mind is made off-limits" in Robbe-Grillet's novels...
...RICHARD E. ELBERT The dynamics behind Feuer' s thought processes...
...However...
...the criterion will be not how much...
...Chicago, Ill...
...true of a small number of students at Berkeley...
...This is not to say that Robbe-Grillet, who has met with a lot of fools here and abroad, is in need of Hyman's favorable opinion...
...they are two of the factors which determine a student's ability to be "in...
...or presently we will have generations upon us who are rabid supporters of one political position, or apathetic to all...
...Russia is getting too mellow and civilized for their perverted tastes...
...MATTHEW ZION Lewis S...
...He observes that his is "a personal account, not a statistical one...
...the complexity of organization, the depersonalization and consequent alienation of the hum an personality will grow apace...
...The words of philosopher-rebel Mario Savio protesting the alienation of modern life .with its complexities springing from the division of labor...
...one novel ( The Narrative of A . Gordon Pym ) , the reviews of William Ellery Channing's poetry, Hawthorn e s Twice-Told Tales, Dickens' Barnabv Rudge...
...if what Kelman says is true...
...We can only shudder for the fate of our nation over the fact that Savio and his fellows seem bead ed in th e same direction as Marx: toward a nihilistic...
...ideologies are taboo because ideologies, they believe, use men rather than help men...
...and Macaulay's essays- plus any 10 pages of Marginalia...
...Hyman think s ( "The Lawrence Mob" NL...
...There are many fewer now...
...Social disorder, radical mass movements after the pat tern o f Nazism and Bolshevism . and increasing civil war and anarchy will develop . And DEAR EDITOR thus will increase the disorganization of human society, and the death rate-by war, famine, and pestilence-until the human ecological system restores some sort of balance- or disappears...
...Of course Robbe-Grillet never intended The Erasers, or any other of his works, to be a "perfectly serious version of the Oedipus story," as Hyman would like to have it...
...Martin Buber...
...All this is his good right as , private reader...
...Great Neck may not be .. typical town, but I can safely say that several of the phenomena Kelman has noted in his article are distressingly common among high school and college students of all political persuasions...
...not in the problem-solving pattern of Thinking Man...
...These characteristics are, perhaps the cause of his failure to examine the personal causes of extreme Leftism in high school students...
...New London, Conn...
...The Leftist student is usually extremely well-read...
...and in all fields...
...but how good...
...That means, simply, a great crusade for population control...
...The attitudes of students in my high school days (I attended Hyde Park High School in Chicago, which serves the ultra-liberal Hyde Park and Kenwood communities) toward political views other than their own were the same Kelman describes among students in Great Neck...
...Marx...
...domestic issues leave them strangely cold...
...Kelman is quite right when he says that there are many students who are forever arguing that "values are relative...
...Even though Kelman and I sit on opposite sides of the political fence (I am a National Review subscriber, though my parents have long taken THE NEW LEADER...
...So will the individual' s frustration...
...I am afraid Hyman is just that reader...
...J am quite familiar with the characteristics of a rigid radicalism...
...Yet, there are a number of students-and they do exist -who are seeking "absolutes...
...Chicago is really controlled, I'm told by a YPSL, by the real estate interests...
...Chicago...
...It is his own business if he has an ingenious puzzle-loving lady of his household construct for him a time sequence in Jealousy...
...The depersonalization of the Multiversity which Feuer so vividly describes an d the student s so bitterly resent is but a function of the population explosion of the human race since 1800...
...but at least he won't spell our cult-hero' s middle name with an "e " Nell' York City DWIGHT MACDONALD BERKELEY I want to "cast my vote" in favor of Professor Lewis S. Feuer in reg a rd to the discussion taking pl ace in re cent issues of THE NEW LEADER, centering around the multi problems of the multi-university, the University of California...
...et al, are their heroes...
...and urbanization of mankind, precisely duplicate the romantic young Karl Marx's ruminatinons of 1844...
...the organizational revolution...
...There is, however, a naivete that remains...
...blind an d petulant catharsis of hat e and destructiveness...
...It is entirely up to him to be bored by Last Year at Marienbad, to find RobbeGrillet's novels trivial and tedious and hence, uninteresting...
...Maoism was also not a developed concern, but we had more than our share of apologists for the Soviet Union, anti-patriots, and rigid pacifists...
...A person who is paid for telling truths about a work of art is, however, obliged to his public which expects that he will stick to his side of the bargain...
...In those days we were lied to (with few exceptions) by the Moscow correspondents...
...Chicago radicalism may well have moved to Berkeley, leaving behind a more neutral and balanced, but alas somewhat less concerned and involved student body...
...Youth and Politics" (NL...
...I have finally read an account that gives me an understanding of what is going on and why it is happening...
...It is immaterial whether the population growth was cause or effect of th e increasing complexity and depersonalization of human organization: the two occurred concurrently, But one thing is certain : As the population grows...
...JORDY BELL Expatiating on Steven Kelman's excellent article I might state that I have personal experience of youth and politics during the Great Depression...
...Only the most rabid refuse to read works other than politics and economics (this is, I'm told...
...This is not the case today as (with few exceptions again) the correspondents give a true picture of life under tyranny...
...Students aged 14-17 years are not adults and should not be expected to have adult minds...
...in the Christian Era there were 250 mill ion...
...It took until the year 1850 for human society to gain its first billion people, but the leap to two billion ca me in only 75 years, and th e third bill ion was reached in 1962...
...But his recommended remedies were fundamentally Irrelevant...
...Both .Savio and Marx were reacting to the frustration of modernity in the typical frustration-aggression cycle, a primitive mechanism both animal and human psychology bred into th e organism somewhere in the slim7 and dust of evolutionary struggles for survival, The rebel's react ion is that of a beast, while Kerr's is th at of Thinking Man...
...and that Great Neck, New York, is not a typical town...
...and "A Descent into the Maelstrom" ) , one essay ( "Th e Imp of th Perverse" ) . five poems ('Israfel...
...not aware of the Russian tyranny...
...Croix, V.I...
...in reading those section s of the article purporting to describe my ideology . " (italics mine) . To me the rhetoric of both Kerr and Feuer is a form of evasion rather than clarificatio n. As an arrested student I think this: The Berkeley revolt was a re volt on behalf of civil liberty, on behalf of human dignity, above all on be half of life...
...Sonnet : To Science ." "The Sleeper " and The ~,t y In the Sea...
...Hyman's trouble is that he cannot grasp that a lack of allegorical implications by no means impairs the imaginative appeal of a novel...
...however, many students whose radicalism does not abate with entrance into a university and for many, indeed, it begins only in the freshman year of college...
...Alexandria, Va...
...Castroism and Maoism happen to be fashionable...
...Brooklyn, N. Y. ROBERT WILKES Steven Kelman's analysis of the "Leftist student intelligentsia" at Great Neck South Senior High School is impressive...
...As Kelman points out...
...To argue that a novel is bad for failing to deal with character if this was not the author's intention, to demand individuality where none fits the scheme of the book, solicits sad reflections on Hyman's capabilities as a critic...
...They want a purpose in life...
...I'm sure Kelman is aware that they are particularly conformist, even though, they are conforming to iconoclasm...
...what with their categories of beatnik, Stalinist and so on, would seem to naturally prejudice Professor Feuer against a group of students who right from the start rejected such classified approaches to hum an action...
...these students are misguided and a little foolish, but they are, after all, only high school students...
...As for Clark Kerr, how innocuously he writes : " I congratulate Professor Feuer on his analysis of the student action at Berkeley...
...EUGENE H. METHVIN...
...For many radically inclined students it takes exposure to the organized radicalism of the university to crystallize their commitment...
...Jacques Maritain...
...In those days, too, the politically engaged students were fighting the monstrous tyranny in Germany...
...Montreal, Quebec ANDRE E. LEBLANC YOUTH AND POLITICS While reading Steven Kelman's article...
...Many people of the past couple of generations have fled to Europe to escape American norms and politics...
...And with the rising level of frustration , so will rise the free-floating hostility and level of violence in our world society...
...in his rebellion against the alienation of modern man in the early Industrial Revolution, was only registering the first alarm signal of looming Malthusian disaster...
...I worked for Johnson, and with many misgivings about the sincerity of his liberalism...
...They reacted in the primeval, beastly behavior pattern of the frustration-aggression cycle...
...although this was not entirely a natural development and was greatly spurred by the Goldwater candidacy...
...There is now a greater interest in participation in regular politics...
...and especially its relationship to the Communist world...
...There are...
...I tend to view myself (perhaps with a touch of snobbery) as one of those who came through an immature period successfully...
...When I was in high school (1959-62) it was even easier to be pro-Castro, as we did not at that time have as clear a notion of what Fidel planned for Cuban society and many "responsible adult intellectuals" still had high hopes...
...What does excite them though and makes them yell and scream, is the murder, slaughter, torture and rapine of the contemporary tyrannies...
...I have not come out of my radicalism to work for Goldwater...
...Lansing, Mich...
...and a mammoth human effort to build the Great Society in which, in President Johnson's words...
...Having gone to the Bronx High School of Science in New York City, I am well aware of the social pressures that contribute to political views of particularly intelligent teenagers...
...While I share Kelman's concern about these one-sided individuals, I am much more concerned about their later development...
...and, unfortunately, the situation then was not the same as it is now...
...which I also read), I fully agree with his astute observation that < oversimplified and purely emotional patriotism" is not a necessary element of civics education...
...however, they are not participating in this cause because they adhere to a particular political ideology but because they feel it is their "duty" to participate...
...This depersonalization is evident not only in the concentration of 27,000 students on the Cal campus, with attendant bureaucratization and frustration s, but throughout the world...
...Th ere ca n' t be any joy in a barbaric society run by an in timidated bureacracy more cautious than just, a society which by criminal arrests attempts to discredit citizens legitimately petitioning for a redress of their grievances...
...Now, however...
...Paul Tillich, Will Herberg...
...There seems to be an admission policy that works to their prejudice, and communities of this sort are self-perpetuating in the sense that they continue, if they are allowed to continue, to attract like-minded persons...
...Also, these same students are seeking the Gemeinschaft community (or the organic community), where men know who they are and what they are expected to do...
...January 18 ). may I entreat him to read or re -read . before any mo re talk of "h is cold mechanical hand," four stories ("The Man of th e Crowd," "William Wilson:' "The Purloined Letter...
...He is certainly right...
...Romance...
...C "Rebellion at Berkeley" was a brilliant report and analysis...
...It was...
...the extremist (Right or Left) passion for oversimplification...
...But it becomes an altogether different story if he appears as a critic...
...If he instead indulges in a legislative mood, reproaching his author for disregarding certain principles which he, Stanley E. Hyman, erstwhile New Critic...
...and those who joined the Communist party were, for the most part...
...Stone Age man numbered 10 million...
...The only alternative to their blind rebellion and ensuing chaos...
...My generation and those in this country who have been exiles from their ow n idea ls will continue to fight for social and economic freedom , will continue to oppose life-denying tyrannies wherever we must confront them...
...These students are more concerned about the relationship between God and man (or the I-Thou relationship) than the news reports in Moscow News or National Review, To be sure, they are taking an active interest in the civil rights cause...
...THOMAS L. JELTRUP Steven Kelman has displayed perspicacity far beyond his years in his article, "Youth and Politics...
...We must not manage the contents of our textbooks as some elements in our Communications media attempt to manage our news...
Vol. 48 • February 1965 • No. 4
