The Unmaking of an American

...from Russia to Ecuador, hoard at present be shared by a vast number of people, from the widest range of cultures imaginable, with ideas and values which will remain in constant conflict7 How can people retain their individuality, cultures their integrity7 Those are the kinds of questions that a sane, democratic America would have faced during this decade of bullshit, and wanton, crazy violence They are also the kinds of questions that should have been faced in The Making of an Un-American Regrettably, Cowan simply assumes they will disappear in the revolution —never defined, except to specify that it must be "violent" What is his case7 Well, capitalism is not working well in Ecuador and other underdeveloped countries, and the oligarchs do not pay their taxes But Cowan offers little evidence that an upheaval would improve the situation Interestingly, economist Robert L Heilbroner does make a case for revolution (I do not accept it, but it is a rational argument) Heilbroner, however, urges totalitarian revolution precisely because it would allow destruction of the social customs and relationships so venerated by Cowan, who denounces capitalism for corroding them Despite his radical posturing, he is actually reactionary in his belief that existing national cultures have permanent validity Heilbroner does not make that mistake He agrees that—in the words of one of the Peace Corps directors Cowan denounces as "racist"?these people are often the main obstacles to progress", to the extent that their cultures are products of poverty, they may have to be jettisoned The fundamental assumption of most revolutionary proposals?never carefully explored by Cowan —is that poverty is essentially caused by a maldistribution of wealth In global terms this assumption is preposterous On the simplest level, a complete and summary redistnbution of world wealth with a goal of equality would merely plunge everyone everywhere mto poverty and destroy the engines of production on which hope for an eventual end to scarcity ultimately depends What is true on a world scale, given a redistribution of the wealth accumulated in industrialized countries, is overwhehmngly true in most less-developed countries, where a key impediment to progress is the absence of sufficient local funds for productive investment?the inadequate concentration of wealth to generate self-sustammg growth, even assuming expropriation of all that is owned by the wealthier residents In a few fortunate countries, like Cuba and Israel, this is overcome by direct foreign aid But in general if the less-developed countries can arrest their cultural sclerosis and zenophobic nationalism, if they can create the common markets and legal structures needed to discipline both indigenous and external investors, then the best source of development capital will be the merging industrial economy of the Northern hemisphere The worst approach is to evict foreigners, exterminate local business initiative and create large government bureaucracies to force economic growth by substituting for imports in accordance with a politically motivated plan The oft-heard argument that no nation can endure dependence on economic forces outside its own borders is a reactionary canard Like Japan and Great Britain today, and to a lesser extent even the United States, in the future all countries will be dependent on business decisions made beyond their borders Economic imperialism is objectively an obsolescent issue now and would become completely chimerical if the less-developed countries would accept the paramount trade imperative of the modern age the need for continental, if not intercontinental, organization of production and commerce A few outside investors could not dominate systems that were economically valid To the degree that the New Left focuses on U S colonialism and ignores Third World parochialism, it dooms itself to reactionary inconsequence Cowan is also wrong to deride the American potential for other reasons Beyond its promise in conquering the worldwide problem of material scarcity, the United States remains the only truly multuacial democracy in the world If, through the inadvertent collaboration of American racists and revolutionaries, the country ultimately fails both in eradicating poverty and in reconcding the races, I too will become an un-American But I doubt if at that terrible moment m world history, there will be a publisher foi a book on my unmaking The key to Cowan's overall approach may be found in the origins ot his Peace Corps stint His editor at the Village Voice felt Cowan's style lacked the confessional resonance, the personal inflection, that marks the writing of Jack Newfield —or, to identify the originator of this fashion of empirical expressionist journalism, Norman Mailer So Cowan went abroad, in part to develop a more emotionally distinctive style through a deeper engagement in "experience " This is the epoch of the intimate voice With Mailer in the lead, writers everywhere are confiding details of their lives and sentiments that they would have restricted to novels and letters a decade ago In Life, Joan Didion engages you with revelations about her marriage, in the A tlantic, Renata Adler opens an essay with less engaging confidences about her laryngitis and her taste m daytime tv In Harper's, Edward Grossman runs on about his girlfriends and David Halberstam writes articles on Ted Sorensen and McGeorge Bundy that ape Mailer's style to the point of unintended parody Even in the New Yoiker's non-fiction columns, where authors previously maintained a coolly observant first-person singular, Ellen Willis has broken in with periodic intimacies about her reactions to Rock which, like most such "criticism," tell us much about the writer and virtually nothing about the music The Village Voice, of course, specializes in this kind of prose, epitomized by Newfield's notion that the way to show the full turpitude of a Southern delegate at a Republican convention is to portray him sweating or picking his nose Cowan found a similar style in Ecuador Though it is hardly distinguishable from the others in the New Left chorus ot moralistic intimacies, it does succeed m holding our attention It is good for conveying moods and reactions But in the end it cloys—as Mailer sometimes cloys—and the emotions fail to conceal the insufficiencies of the argument To make a serious political point —to sustain a political ideology—it is not enough to evoke personalities to describe incidents, it is not enough to piesent one's personal reactions as a basis for even a relatively trivial political program—or vote And it is gargantuan arrogance to offer such impressions as grounds for catastrophism and violent revolution In the end, Cowan's "dialogue with experience" succumbs to a mystique of experience, the conceit that one's own impressions are more valuable than analytical knowledge, that ultimately it is best—most authentically responsible—to base one's political views on one's emotional correspondence with immediate events In this stance, the extremity of one's positions depends on the profundity of one's outrage and desperation, rather than on an objective appraisal of the problem and its solution New Left authors seem not to realize that they, like all mortals, are after all mere specks in time and space Despite the many limitations of quantitative economic and historical analysis, it remains the only instrument we have to transcend the straited bounds of our senses, the tyranny of the immediate encounter and the uncerebrated emotion I happen to agree with many of Cowan's views I am open to the possibility that revolution is desirable in some countries m Latin America, I strongly oppose American intervention to save any regime that cannot defend itself But Cowan's accounting of experience does little to help my appreciation of his position I can only conclude that one becomes an un-American m the same way many former Communists after then own dialogues with experience, became militant cold warnoi s—for essentially personal reasons that are hardly informed by historical perspective or comparative analysis Cowan's experience of the last decade, like that of many Communists in the '40s, has been a series of personal disillusionments and betrayals—not public tragedies, but private traumas The civil rights movement, the Kennedy assassinations, the Peace Corps failure, the draft, and the Vietnam war have cumulatively overwhelmed him, discomfited his most cherished hopes and denied him the opportunity of authentic and effective political action His first inclination is to blame himself for this moral impasse, then he decides the time is out of joint?the system is rotten and has "made it virtually impossible for us to survive as decent human beings " Politics has posed dreadful dilemmas for young Americans in recent years They have either had to recognize the agonizing complexity of moral choice and thus concede their own moral impurity, or else transcend it teleologically The empirical history that betrays us can be replaced by an ideological history that exempts us, and we can be restored to integrity and righteousness—the easy moral certitudes of our childhoods We can escape the draft—and rebel—and make it in New York publishing, all at the same time Thus the ideology of the New Left plays a role similar to Middle American church-going It is an ideology of moral certification and exemption If one has faith m the 1 evolution, one need not bother with the continuing predicaments of integration, one need not face the excruciating moral and practical problems of political action in a representative democracy If a specific "1 evolutionary" act makes things better, that is well and good, if it makes things worse that is also well and good, for things must get worse before they get better Right on But an American who is fully open to experience will realize that political action in history is always morally flawed, that the kind of absolute political integrity Cowan seeks can be achieved only by the complete rejection of power, and consequently the loss of ability to achieve constructive change...

...The Unmaking of an American The Making of an Un-American: A Dialogue with Experience By Paul Con an Viking 370 pp $6 95 Reviewed by George F. Gilder Co-authoi, "The Patty Tlwt Lost Its Head" You don't have to be a New Leftist to be outraged by the current state of affairs in the United States, or to enjoy the notion of booing Spiro Agnew, storming into government buildings and bombmg draft boards You don't have to be a New Leftist to perceive grave moral dilemmas in the possession of luxuries in a starving world Nor do you have to be a New Leftist to prefer the easy hyperboles of indignation to the exacting demands of traditional study and analysis Such cathartic gestures, however, are shunned as counterproductive by conventional seekers of political influence In American politics, it is principally a radical claim that direct, even idiosyncratic self-expression is the most effective mode of discourse Self-indulgence thus becomes the measure both of righteousness and political influence And there is at present quite a rush to adopt this marvelous stance, as Paul Cowan does in his apologetic for young radicals, The Making of an Un-American He asserts the providential creed quite openly "The lesson I had learned is that you cannot reach other people by constrictmg your own personality You might flatter the process with terms like 'self-restraint,' 'belief in rationality' Yet whatever value judgment you made, one thing was clear it didn't work In the America of the 1960s people were moved by passions, not persuaded by calm words " Cowan was pleased, therefore, to find that as he matured his "words and actions were becoming more passionate less conventionally rational," that he no longer felt constrained to "write thoroughly researched, carefully reasoned articles [to] convince influential intellectuals that the New Left makes more sense than the Social Democrats " Today he writes groovy prose about his own experiences, feelings and reactions The Making of an Un-Amencan, we are informed by Jack Newfield m a cover blurb, rivals "Catch-22, the songs of the Rolling Stones and the prose of Eldndge Cleaver" as an explanation of the New Left We quickly discover that in Cowan's case the making of an un-American was expensive, only a rich and tolerant democracy like the United States could have afforded it There is tuition at Dalton, Cho-ate and Harvard, an edifying sojourn in Israel, a two-year writer's sabbatical in Ecuador, subverting the Peace Corps at its own expense, and finally, a year at Washington's Institute for Pohcy Studies, that valuable haven for the antischolarship of radicals Presumably the society will accommodate still more books designed to affirm the notion of the aggrieved rich that the U S will offer no roles worthy of their radiant moral visions unless it is first bathed m blood Till then we are to he around stoned—Let It Bleed at 331/" revolutions per minute, no traction Cowan writes "The Stones' hard, angry beat expressed my increasmg disillusionment with America just as clearly as Pete Seeger's open, optimistic voice had expressed the faith I felt in the country when the decade began Since John Kennedy's assassination the image of a gunman had never left my bram I grieved for the land I had wanted to help build then But now I know that I could never live in the sterile paradise which most white Americans saw as their home " It is difficult to resist the temptation to dende and dismiss such self-important mamfestoes, which leap without a hint of irony from private grievance to historic judgment The subtitle of Cowan's book is "A Dialogue with Experience And it is his experience that permits him to transcend the "profound behef in reason" and the disavowal of violence benighting so many young Americans Cowan's life in the sterile paradise has indeed been tough—more than 300 pages' worth of anguished engagement with anti-Semitism, racism, colonialism, boorishness, stupidity, pollution, hypocrisy, assassination, war This all leads—in the final chapters where his triumph over the scruples of reason, civility and nationality is celebrated—to a kind of literary and intellectual decomposition analogous, I suppose, to the current state of the New Left Cowan is satisfied with his new politics But even a sympathetic reader may be dissatisfied with his failure to structure his book toward a culmination rather than just pile it up As it is, we learn that the Peace Corps is, in general, a farce—a recognition that is no surprise to anyone who has measured its pollyanna assumptions against the dreadfully stubborn problems of the underdeveloped countries We can believe that it attracts a number of missionary jingoes and careerists, we appreciate that large bureaucracies, often dehumanizing in the best of circumstances, can become monstrous when their purposes are futile, we know that a great many Americans are boobs, and that Middle Americans have yet to master the exquisite proprieties of race relations in this time of agonizing transition But we also see that Cowan's later indignation tends to grow in proportion to his earlier credulity, that he is inclined to be arrogant and intolerant and that his idiom of moral outrage is ludicrously squandered (Laughter at a training movie showmg an African carpenter with nails m his hair suffices for Cowan to prove a mentality both "racist" and "colonialist") He employs emotional momentum, anecdote and tangential experience rather than logical argument to advance his awesomely portentous themes Violent revolution (Cowan's italics) is indispensable to underdeveloped countries like Ecuador, the Umted States is most characteristically a racist and rmpenah-1st country and the chief enemy of world progress Unfortunately, the book is too long for what it has to offer—even if it is too short on documentation for its positions Yet ignoring The Making of an Un-American would be a mistake, for though Cowan is driven to distraction by his experience, he does manage to describe it well The chromcle begms with the by now familiar account of "An Image to Last a Lifetime" the traumatic encounter with racism This time it happens not in Harlem, Selma or Germany, but at Choate School for Boys, where Cowan was brutally hazed, in part by anti-Semites Having been similarly hazed at Exeter, I deeply sympathize with his prep-school plight But I reject his implication that hazing is essentially racist, and others who attended Choate at approximately the same time find preposterous his description of rampant racism there Ironically, I detect heavy prejudice in Cowan's caricatures of what he calls the wasp establishment Despite my almost pathological sensitivity to racial undercurrents—to the point of cringing at Cowan's use of the word "denigrate"—I have found racism hardly more prevalent among establishment wasps under 50 than among the disestablishment Leftists who, for example, usually enjoy black music only as sung by whites (or Jirm Hendnx, singing derivative psychedelic rock and pandering to the racial fantasy of the black man as a brutal Pnapus) Recent public opimon polls, moreover, suggest that both establishment whites and their offspring, New Left and otherwise, are anti-racist The polls make the further point that racism is rapidly diminishing among young Americans—creating, in fact, the most dramatic generation gap in public opinion statistics—and almost disappearing among the children of wealthy wasps and Jews, who are apt to end up at places like Choate Their probable accession to power seriously impugns Cowan's evident conviction that the sole solution to America's racial crisis is guerrilla warfare in the streets, accompanied by violent revolution against "American imperialism" around the world Nevertheless, Cowan establishes to his own satisfaction the smug racism of the wasp establishment Then he moves on to Harvard and discovers the sterility of the intelligentsia Assuming that the current American predicament epitomizes a thoroughly corrupt history, Cowan denounces every relatively optimistic analysis of Amencan expenence from Louis Hartz to Oscar Handlin Like most New Leftists he shows an absolute lack of historical imagination, casually denying the obvious achievements of this country and casually applying the standards of the mid-20th century to situations where they were virtually meaningless The New Left cannot conceive of the possibility that in asserting the primacy of programs to end the Depression and then to win World War II, the American political leadership acted commendably, that principal emphasis on the problems of American racism or colonialism would have seemed lunatic in 1932 or 1942 It letuses to accept that the achievement of the previous generation in fighting and winning the war against Nazism excels in historic importance any attainment before us today The Depression and World War II generations earned their present confidence Having surmounted two crises at least as severe as our current extremity, they can affirm their optimism—their faith m the tradition of liberal pragmatism —more cogently than the New Left can validate its desperate absolutism But Cowan's brief dialogue with experience teaches him that Harvard and the liberal academic program decreasmgly taught there are irrelevant His view of Harvard is followed by a tedious account of his summer with the civil rights movement m Mississippi, which it is his remarkable notion was as dangerous as a tour of duty in Vietnam He shows that when rich neurotic whites and poor uneducated blacks are put together in various ill-conceived projects, the results are compound misunderstandings, jealousies, and sexual conflicts So, like most of the New Left, he more or less gives up on racial cooperation until Alter the Revolution Unwillingness to persist in the admittedly difficult but nonetheless imperative course of integration is not evidence of racism, one gathers from Cowan, if it can be rationalized with some bloody vision of Utopia In this realm, I rather prefer the Mormons, who expect racial brotherhood to be achieved through divine revelation At least they do not demand that blacks qualify themselves by fulfilling the violent fantasies of white ideologues The young radicals' discouragement with integration is understandable, of course, since they associate only with extremist, traumatized blacks who dismiss integratiomsts as Uncle Toms The egalitarian majesty of the New Left in urging both wealthy, resourceful whites and impoverished blacks to reject the vulgar materialism of U S society (the paradise is "sterile," you understand) reminds one of George Bernard Shaw's epigram about the law It equally prohibits the rich and poor from sleeping under bridges Cowan's treatment of racial issues is otherwise pervaded with a sentimental populism best evinced by his contention that Fannie Lou Hamer of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party, not Joseph Rauh of Americans for Democratic Action, should serve as arbiter of strategic questions at a Democratic convention He cannot comprehend that Mrs Hamer's cause could be utterly just—as it was—and yet necessarily subordmate in 1964 to the imperative of nominating liberals and defeating Barry Goldwater Politics continually pose such quandaries, wherein good people must be rebuffed for tactical reasons, often even for the long-term interests of their own cause For Cowan, however, "the people" are always right, if they are the right people Cowan took this ingenuous faith with him to Ecuador for his stmt in the Peace Corps His case agamst his Peace Corps colleagues, whose company was soon to prove a burden greater than his sensibility could bear, early focuses on their libraries How could they possibly understand Ecuador when in 1966 few of them had so much as heard of such counterculture heroes as Paul Goodman, Frantz Fanon or Eldndge Cleaver9 It Cowan had met a group of Peace Corpsmen who had concentrated on those three writers, with occasional ventures into Hermann Hesse Robert Heinlein and Che Guevara, and close attention to the Rolling Stones—if, that is to say, he were to have met at the training camp a fashionably lettered member of the New Left, he would no doubt have been intellectually comfortable But his fashionably lettered New Leftist—unless his reading was far broader than usual—would have been an ignoramus of a most dangerous sort, an arrogant ignoramous with a penchant for violence American imperialism ravages Vietnam Well, let Revolution ravage the world—and let us start by offing some pigs Revolution is always an improvement, right, and capitalism has brought only racism and indigence to the world Right on The case for this posture is not persuasive if one studies the issues very deeply, which young radicals neglect to do A New Leftist would hear of John Pincus and Harry Johnson only if they were subjects of an expose in Rampaits He will know something about Gunnar Myrdal only as a honky sociologist who wrote about blacks Yet these writers, I submit, with their emphasis on such prosaic matters as trade and investment, have enormously more to offer on the problems of the less-developed countries than the collected works of Cleaver, Fanon, Goodman, Guevara, and Marcuse But of course the academic economists do not offer a polymorpmcally violent "dialogue with experience " Nor are they so passionately hortatory Cowan ends by askmg "Can the wealth which America and its allies...