Chasing the Young

...Reviewed by Samuel R. Barber In ancient tribal societies, the young sometimes devoured their deceased elders in a ritualistic attempt to acquire the mature virtues of age...

...His patience now severely tried (see the self-righteous pique of his "The Unholy Alliance"), but still determined to be an understanding parent, Keniston again shifts gears—trying now to justify the angered frenzy of the young by turning our attention to the nation's social pathologies...

...They are inelegantly readable, repetitious, superficial, and derivative...

...The political radicalism that can be found in the lyrics of many rock songs exemplifies the intimacy that has often (if not always) obtained between the hip counterculture and the political Left (exclusive of the button-down ideologues of the Progressive Labor Party, to be sure...

...Nowhere in this book does Keniston attempt to come to terms with the aspirations, styles of protest, and psychological roots of black rebellion among the young...

...Typologies of students come and go: in later writings I abandoned this one," he confides, preparing us for "Faces in the Classroom...

...The collection falls somewhat arbitrarily into three sections: "The Roots of Youthful Dissent" (topical essays of the early 1960s), "Faces of Dissent" (pieces on youth-types like idealists, drug-users, and drop-outs, including synoptic articles covering the same ground as his two earlier books), and "The Two Revolutions" (more topical essays from the late 1960s, along with some book reviews...

...Indeed, the young can be divided into two polar groups—the privatistic drop-outs of the non-political, uncommitted counterculture, and the involved, politically conscious radicals of the Movement...

...Even Keniston seems uneasy in the presence of his earlier work, for he has prefixed each essay with a short introduction explicating lost historical contexts, apologizing for obsolete analytical constructs, retracting unfulfilled prophecies...

...When reduced to the alienated privatists and the alienated radicals, Keniston's "Youth" turn out to be an exclusive bunch...

...Indeed, his new "book," Youth and Dissent, a 400-page potpourri of previously published essays, articles, and reviews, appears to be a response to the demands of the book market rather than to the demands of critical analysis...

...In retrospect this essay seems fragmentary and incomplete," he advises, in introducing "The Speed-up of Change...

...Remember student apathy and panty-raids...

...Kenneth Keniston, author of two major books on the young (The Uncommitted and Young Radicals) and an empathic clinician who' has practiced widely among student populations, is no exception...

...Mr...

...His portrait of youthful motives, values, career plans, and conflicts will make sense only to women who have brothers...

...All of Keniston's neo-Freudian psychologizing (overly-protective mothers, father-envy) is applicable only to young males...

...But hostile or friendly, the youth-watchers have all inevitably, if inadvertently, contributed to the exploitation of the young...

...This polarity pervades all of Keniston's work...

...Remember "hoods" and "beats" and "sit-ins...

...When Keniston open-mindedly shifts gears and begins to consider this new political awareness and generational conflict in terms of youthful idealism, some militant young turn nasty and attempt to realize their ideals overnight with vengeful rhetoric and violent action...

...The flaccid exhortation with which Keniston concludes his epilogue is all too typical: "What happens in the next decades will depend not upon blind institutions and cultural forces, but upon the intelligence, good will, and hard work of countless individual men and womeh...

...You Have to Grow Up in Scarsdale" is the title of one of his essays...

...but why then should we read it...

...Unfortunately, the package comes rapidly apart under the strain of reading...

...They are all here in the early essays, wafting from the past like bittersweet, half-remembered tunes from a "Great Songs of the Fifties" album...

...Barber, a political scientist at Rutgers, is the author of "Superman and Common Men: Freedom, Anarchy, and the Revolution," published last year by Praeger...

...An even more serious weakness of the dichotomy is that it forces a remarkable variety of youth styles and attitudes into two narrow categories and gives an almost elitist tone to Keniston's ensuing analyses...

...as he muses on their relative "lack of rebelliousness against their parents or their parents' generation," they stage a major Oedipal revolution that has not yet subsided...

...Remember when Albert Camus and William Golding were campus heroes...

...But while the use of this polarity precludes the sort of psychoanalytic reduc-tionism associated with detractors of the young like Bettelheim and Feuer, and in this sense is most welcome, it also tends to polarize features of youth behavior often found together...

...These are, after all, occasional essays, intended originally for immediate consumption rather than for our historical archives...

...This journalistic bundle is loosely tied together by a prologue justifying "Youth" as a new stage of development between adolescence and adulthood produced by such factors as prolonged education, inadequate employment opportunities, later marriage, a more abundant economy, and the general requisites of a technocratic society whose pace of social change is undergoing continual acceleration...

...Nowadays, in our youth-lusting market society, the old devour the still-living young with appetites aroused by envy and titillated by fear...

...to be interested in Keniston's analysis, indeed you do...

...A small but indispensable part in this industry has been played by the youth-watchers, who not only report back to the educational, political, and economic merchandisers on the state of the market, but through their psycho-sociological analyses help to define and reshape the market itself...

...The jacket blurb tells us that Keniston "follows" the young through the 1960s in Youth and Dissent...

...Meanwhile, however, the young move back into a new species of privatism born of futility and despair, leaving Keniston to wonder whether he ought to have kept those concepts he discarded in the 1960s in the closet with his old neckties (the ones that, if you only keep them long enough, become fashionable again...

...The re-emergence of privatism does not, for example, really take Keniston unawares, for in it he sees one of the enduring features of the otherwise changing topography of youth alienation: political involvement has always been the exception, not the rule, among American youth...

...What is worse, even if we grant Keniston his elitist focus, we find that alienated radicals and alienated dropouts include neither women nor non-whites...

...It ought to stand as a warning, however, to those who—in order to feed a gluttonous market—think it prudent to turn their journalistic speculations and scholarly residues into enduring treatises...

...It is possible today to begin to imagine a society far better than any society men have known...

...there are themes in Youth and Dissent that do constitute a point of view...

...Despite the ephemeral topicality of much of his work, however, it would be unfair to regard Keniston merely as a journalist...

...But this is probably to take it all a bit too seriously...

...Thus, in the early 1960s, just as Keniston is lamenting the pri-vatism of the young, they are turning political...

...And this may be far more significant for the future than the fact of an alienated, elitist minority...

...Privatism and involvement are the subjects of his two earlier books, the historical constructs by which he distinguishes different stages in the development of youth culture, the analytic categories by which he examines concrete youth behavior, and the criteria by which he explores future scenarios and expresses his own preferences for involvement...

...However disproportionate their influence, white, middle-class, suburban students at elite Eastern colleges surely do not constitute the whole of American youth...

...New appetites mean new markets, and new markets mean new industries: hence, our burgeoning youth-industry, devoted equally to the selling of goods to the young and the selling of the young to the old...

...He seems rather to be chasing them, like a well-intentioned parent whose unrelentingly sympathetic understanding never quite overtakes the restless children he pursues, arriving at each stage of growth just as the children have left for the next...

...but why then has he published it...

...Youth and Dissent may not damage but will do little to enhance its author's well-established reputation...

...Not only are a majority of our young (for better or worse) neither radical nor uncommitted, a great proportion are not especially alienated—at least no more so than the average adult American...

...Some youth-watchers are overtly hostile to the young (Bruno Bettelheim or Lewis Feuer), some are dispassionate but sympathetic (Robert Liebert or Kenneth Keniston), and some are uncritically adulatory (Theodore Roszak or Charles Reich...

...Why is it that the enthusiasms and fashions of ten years ago always seem more alien and remote than the enduring features of epochs centuries away...