Slouching Towards Gomorrah (5 page)

Sympathizers with the New Left said the radicals were a new, healthier, more expressive generation of Americans, in contrast to
the authoritarianism and repression of traditional American society. But Rothman and his colleagues, in a series of studies of student and adult radicals, found that “rather than exhibiting the liberating themes, both radical adults and students exhibit marked narcissism and enhanced needs for power.”
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They also showed a higher fear of power than traditionals or nonradicals.

There is another factor in student radicalism that deserves mention, however. At the time, I read that an Israeli visitor to the United States said of those students something to this effect: “Their fathers gave them prosperity and freedom, and so they hate their fathers.” It seemed merely a biting comment on the ingratitude of that generation. It was that, but now it seems to have conveyed a deeper insight. In his superb work on envy, sociologist Helmut Schoeck
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recounts the findings of psychiatrist Robert Seidenberg about a young man whose repressed envy of his hosts and their possessions made him so acutely uncomfortable that any dinner party was an ordeal for him.

“Probably this personality type,” Schoeck comments, “can help us to understand the world-wide rebellion of youth since 1966. As the ‘envious guest,’ Seidenberg’s clinical case, these young people lack the maturity to be the ‘guests of our affluent society.’ The overprivileged youngsters, from California to West Berlin, from Stockholm to Rome, strike out in senseless acts of vandalism as a result of their vague envy of a world of affluence they did not create but enjoyed with a sense of guilt as a matter of course. For years they were urged to compare guiltily their lot with that of the underprivileged abroad and at home. Since the poor will not vanish fast enough for their guilt to subside, they can ease their tensions only by symbolic acts of aggression against all that is thought dear and important to the envied elders.”
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These factors operating together produced the restless, rebellious Sixties, and what former radicals Peter Collier and David Horowitz aptly called a “destructive generation.”
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The Sixties were born at a particular time and place: June, 1962, the AFL-CIO camp at Port Huron, Michigan. (There were preliminary stirrings in parts of the civil rights movement and in the
Free Speech movement at Berkeley.) Though most Americans have never heard of the proceedings at Port Huron, they were crucial, for the authentic spirit of Sixties radicalism issued there. That spirit spread and evolved afterwards, but its later malignant stages, including its violence, were implicit in its birth.

Port Huron was an early convention of SDS, then a small group of alienated, left-wing college students. There were fifty-nine delegates from eleven campus chapters. One of them described their mood: “four-square against anti-Communism, eight-square against American culture, twelve-square against sellout unions, one-hundred-twenty square against an interpretation of the Cold War that saw it as a Soviet plot and identified American policy fondly.”
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In short, they rejected America. Worse, as their statement of principles made clear, they were also foursquare against the nature of human beings and features of the world that are unchangeable. That is the Utopian impulse. It has produced disasters in the past, just as it was to do with the Sixties generation.

Starting from a draft by Tom Hayden (heavily influenced by the writings of the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills), the convention wrangled out the
Port Huron Statement
,
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a lengthy, stupefyingly dull manifesto, setting forth the SDS agenda for changing human beings, the nation, and the world. Like the wider student radicalism that ensued, the document displayed the ignorance and arrogance proper to adolescents. These youths were in a state of euphoria about their own wisdom, moral purity, and power to change everything. They were short on specifics about how they would reform the world, what the end product would look like, and what was to be done if the world proved intractable.

SDS and the
Port Huron Statement
did not create the temper of the Sixties out of nothing. They coalesced the restless discontents of their generation. While most student rebels did not belong to SDS, the
Port Huron Statement
repays attention: it was the most widely circulated document of the Left in that decade, brought
SDS to national prominence, and its notions became the common currency of the New Left. The New Left is important because it is still with us in the guise of modern liberalism. What was composed at Port Huron, therefore, is a guide to today’s cultural and political debacles.

The pronouncements of the Sixties radicals were intellectually negligible, often farcical. But many of us were naive enough at the time to assess them, and their capacity for destruction, in intellectual terms. Had we known more about past Utopian movements, we would have seen that the
Port Huron Statement,
though nonsense, was also a document of ominous mood and aspiration.

“We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love,” SDS proclaimed. The phrase “unfulfilled capacities” was substituted for the statement in Hayden’s draft that man was “infinitely perfectible.” (A few religious delegates objected that men cannot achieve perfection on earth.) Hayden’s original words, which were not that different from the replacement words, expressed the view, common to totalitarian movements, that human nature is infinitely malleable so that a new, better, and perhaps perfect nature can be produced by the rearrangement of social institutions. Since actual humans resist attempts to remake their natures, coercion and, ultimately, violence will be required. The initial rhetoric of the movement, however, before disillusion set in, was one of peaceful aspiration.

“[H]uman brotherhood must be willed … as a condition of future survival and as the most appropriate form of social relations.” This is but one of many references to equality of condition throughout the document. The talk of brotherhood, of man’s unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love, and of radical equality was, and proved to be, dangerously unrealistic. Without reference to a supernatural Being, SDS was proposing, largely through politics, to bring their secular vision of the kingdom of God to fruition on earth, now. It is an ideal that the most devout and active Christians have never remotely approximated for any community larger than a monastery, and probably not in any monastery.

SDS’ search for a shortcut to heaven was in the spirit of millenarianism,
a phenomenon well-known in the history of Christianity. In the Middle Ages, historian Paul Johnson informs us, “The official Church was conventional, orderly, hierarchical, committed to defend Society as it existed, with all its disparities and grievances. But there was also, as it were, an anti-Church, rebellious, egalitarian, revolutionary, which rejected society and its values and threatened to smash it to bits.”
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The millenarian seizure of Munster in Germany is a case in point. It was a brief reign of communism (all food and valuables taken by the government, housing reallocated on the basis of need), forced polygamy (women who refused were summarily executed), and frequent executions for a long list of infractions, including complaining and disobedience. When the town was retaken, the millenarian leader, I was almost pleased to learn, “was led about like a performing animal until January 1536, when he was publicly tortured to death with red-hot tongs.”
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“It is a tragic but recurrent feature of Christianity that the eager pursuit of reform tends to produce a ruthlessness in dealing with obstacles to it which brings the whole moral superstructure crashing down in ruins.”
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SDS made the same mistakes about the possibility of creating a paradise on earth, ruthlessly attacked the moral superstructure, but did not, some may think unfortunately, suffer similar consequences.

Real human beings do not have any unfulfilled capacity for love, or at least not a large one; they simply do not regard men as infinitely precious, whatever the homilist may say on Sunday; and they lack the boundless energy and selflessness required to will themselves to brotherhood. Any program for society based on such vapors is headed for disaster. The real ideals, perceptions, and interests of humans differ and conflict, and always will. Attempts to suppress aggression entirely and to substitute love, being unnatural, will finally erupt in greater aggression. When Utopians are frustrated in the realization of their vision by the real nature of humans, who are then seen as perversely evil, they can turn nasty and violent. Others will engage in moral assault. SDS did both, and other student radicals followed them.

“The goal of man and society should be … finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic.” How was that to be done? “[P]olitics has the function of bringing people out of isolation and
into community, thus being a necessary, though not sufficient, means of finding meaning in personal life.” Nowhere is one informed what “meaning in personal life” might be. It is an amorphous concept, held by the SDSers in much the same way as the New England clergyman who said that whenever he tried to imagine God, all he conjured up was a “sort of oblong blur.” Nor is it at all clear why politics is necessary to meaning. One supposes that any number of fathers and mothers, religious people, scientists, novelists, philosophers, businessmen, et al. have found meaning in their lives without resort to politics. Note that politics seems to be the only way of escaping isolation and coming into community, a proposition that assumes the only real and significant communities are political.

The search for a “politics of meaning” is a feature of modern liberalism, and reflects the human yearning for the transcendental by persons for whom religion no longer fills that need. But politics as a transcendental value cannot be satisfied by the compromises and partial successes of democratic processes. Transcendental politics requires the absolute, and necessarily moves, as far as circumstances permit, towards authoritarian or totalitarian models. Modern liberalism displays that tendency, which, fortunately, is frustrated by the structure of American government, the party system, and most Americans’ distrust of excessive zeal.

The notion that politics is a necessary means of finding meaning in personal life also necessarily leads to the politicization of all areas of life and culture, summed up in the phrase used by feminists and others that “the personal is political and the political is personal.” Politics is always and inevitably about power. Personal relationships are, therefore, inevitably power relationships. The radical feminist branch of modern liberalism, to take one example, sees all male-female interactions, including marriage, as power relationships…a view that does not do a lot of good for marriages and families.

The longing for personal authenticity appears to be common in radical movements. “By the height of the [French] Revolution in 1793-94,” sociologist Robert Nisbet tells us, “the passion for authenticity was almost uncontrollable among the revolutionaries. The Revolution began to devour its own, keeping the guillotine working overtime in the execution of even high officials like
Robespierre for the crime of ‘hypocrisy’ or ‘inauthenticity.’”
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As Lionel Trilling wrote, after the spirit of the Sixties generation had become manifest, “‘[Authenticity’…. is a word of ominous import…. [It] is implicitly a polemical concept, fulfilling its nature by dealing aggressively with received and habitual opinion, aesthetic opinion in the first instance, social and political opinion in the next.”
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It is a word associated with extreme autonomy as well, but as Trilling also pointed out, one can be certain of one’s authenticity only by knowing that one has achieved that state in the opinion of others, which is a contradiction of the extreme autonomy sought. To judge one’s own independence through the opinions of others is to forfeit independence.

That is precisely what the Sixties radicals did. They prized individualism so greatly that it turned them into egalitarian conformists. What made them individualists was their rejection of American culture and bourgeois morals. What made them egalitarians was also their rejection of American culture and bourgeois morals. Since none of them aspired to an aristocracy or to asceticism, they had to reject bourgeois hierarchies and morals from the other direction. This translated as foul language, sexual promiscuity, marijuana and hard drugs, and disdain for the military and for conventional success. Since these were the only “authentic” ways to think and behave, the student radicals eagerly became what Harold Rosenberg once characterized as a “herd of independent minds.”

“In social change or interchange,” said SDS, “we find violence to be abhorrent because it requires generally the transformation of the target, be it a human being or a community of people, into a depersonalized object of hate.” This sentiment is particularly poignant in retrospect since some in SDS, within a very few years, became violent. A few years after Port Huron, its organization’s offshoot and legitimate heir, the Weathermen, organized the Days of Rage riots in Chicago. At a subsequent “War Council,” Tom Hayden led the Weathermen in “a workout of karate jabs and kicks” for a “strenuous fifteen minutes” in preparation for armed struggle.
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Port Huron’s professions of love and brotherhood had, predictably, turned to rage and attack, both physical and moral, when society would not accept brotherhood on SDS’s terms.

The relentless message of the
Port Huron Statement
was that
America was corrupt from top to bottom. Grave and critical faults that required sweeping change were found with American foreign policy, corporations, labor unions, old-style liberalism, universities, race relations, economic arrangements, military preparations, government, political parties, the desire for material goods, and much more. People with such a view of their society could not respect its institutions, its leaders, its moral tone, or accept a process of gradual reform.