In other words, the youth-ist attitude is just that, not an outlook but a reflex, not political correctness but generational correctness. The
ArtShow
researchers and the Twixter experts adopt youth sympathies as a mannerism, a custom of their expertise. What makes someone say to an adolescent, “Before you sally forth into the world, heed the insight of people long dead who possessed a lot more talent and wisdom than you,” is more a personal ethic than a political creed. The ethic has seeped down to the level of etiquette, so that when a dissenting voice calls for more traditional knowledge, it sounds not just wrong, but wrongheaded, mean-spirited, bad form. The intellectual force of the call is obscured by its impropriety. This is the natural course of a norm. It begins as a fresh and unusual idea, then passes through the stages of argument, clarification, revision, and acceptance. It may have been radical or controversial once, but over time, adopted by more and more people, it turns into common sense and its distinctiveness dims. When an idea becomes a habit, it stops sparking thought. When everybody accepts it, it abides without evidence. At that point, the idea acts as a tacit premise, like travel directions you print out from Mapquest when taking a trip for the first time. You follow the route and arrive at Point B. You don’t ponder alternatives. In a traditional classroom from way back when, a youth-centered approach might have appeared iconoclastic and provocative, triggering disputes over learning, maturity, and selfhood. Now it passes without a murmur.
THE PROCESS was complete decades ago, and like so many dominant cultural attitudes today, the final ennobling of youth motives and attribution of youth authenticity derive from the revolutionary heat of the 1960s. And they advanced, as the conversion of ideas into norms often does, not mainly through logic and evidence, but through intimidation. A host of analyses dating from that time to our own ranging from Morris Dickstein’s
Gates of Eden
to Christopher Lasch’s
The Culture of Narcissism
to Allan Bloom’s
The Closing of the American Mind
to Roger Kimball’s
The Long March
document the fiery forensics of that moment, and they vividly portray the youth spirit of the age. But here we focus upon something else—the notable, mainstream, middle-aged mentor’s posture toward them. The kids and their idols forged a radical youth culture on and off the campus, but what concerns us here is how the conventional stewards of tradition, the intellectuals and teachers in authority, reacted to it.
One particularly eloquent and vigorous exposition illustrates the position well. It appeared in the October 1968 issue of
The Atlantic Monthly,
at the same time that youth activism was cresting, roiling college campuses everywhere. That month, for instance, the House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed Jerry Rubin for hearings on demonstrations in Chicago during the recent Democratic Convention. Co-founder of the Youth International Party (Yippies), Rubin showed up bereted and shirtless, sporting a bandolier of live cartridges and a toy M-16 rifle. Meanwhile, at Berkeley, students and administrators negotiated over a series of ten lectures to be delivered by Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver in a course on racism. The same week, a few miles south at Stanford University, Cleaver provided an audience a sample of his rhetoric:
America is the oppressor of humanity . . . America the torturer, America the ugly, the successor of Nazi Germany.
I challenge Ronald Reagan to a duel because Reagan is a punk, a sissy and a coward. . . . He can fight me with a gun, a knife, or a baseball bat. I’ll beat him to death with a marshmallow.
In this temperature of youth fury the
Atlantic Monthly
article weighed in. The author was 42-year-old Rutgers University English professor and World War II veteran Richard Poirier, and it bore the histrionic title “The War Against the Young.” The heading in the magazine cites him as a distinguished author, editor (
Partisan Review
), and academic, but the essay drifts far from his scholarly field and into the cauldron of 1960s adolescence, which he terms “that rare human condition of exuberance, expectation, impulsiveness, and, above all, of freedom from believing that all the so-called ‘necessities’ of life and thought are in fact necessities.” Indeed, that Poirier should have taken up the generation gap at all would surprise colleagues and students from years later who knew him as a renowned scholar of American literature devoted to literary memory and canonical writers. In 1979, he co-founded the Library of America, a still-running, award-winning venture providing handsome editions of classic American writing. According to its Web site, the Library of America “seeks to restore and pass on to future generations our nation’s literary heritage,” and the founders’ aim was to ensure that those works remained in print for those generations. Before that, Poirier had produced commanding interpretations of American literature, and for graduate students in the 1970s and 1980s, knowing the thesis of his
A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature
was essential. One would expect him to defend cultural institutions even while sympathizing with the political messages of the young. Few individuals represented the virtues of tradition and knowledge better than Poirier.
All of which runs against the argument of the
Atlantic Monthly
essay. It starts with a patent fact: “The rebellion has broken out.” To the dismay of their parents, “the youth of the world almost on signal have found local causes—economic, social, political, academic ones—to fit an apparently general need to rebel.” Young Americans have rejected the society they stand to inherit, the “system”
in toto,
and they insist upon a full-scale “cultural revolution” as a “necessary prelude even to our capacity to think intelligently about political reformation.” They won’t be put off, Poirier warns, and they scorn the blandishments of middle-class success. Poirier does not supply examples of the revolt, however, nor does he demonstrate the revolutionaries’ fitness to arraign, try, and sentence the “governing system. ” Youth rebellion proceeds in fitful ways, and as sideburns lengthen, rock ’n’ roll spreads, ROTC flees the campus, and Vietnam escalates, the Youth Movement grows more militant and sweeping. In early October, the FBI warned that the “New Left” is bent on sabotage, and judged Students for a Democratic Society a “forerunner in this nihilist movement.” Poirier has his eye on something more dangerous, however, an insidious counterrevolutionary force gathering against it.
It comes from the seniors. Surprisingly, he doesn’t mean the FBI or those aged ogres launching “patronizations, put-downs, and tongue-lashings” at the young, “the likes of Reagan and Wallace.” Poirier identifies a milder, no less effective enmity: the rational, moderate-sounding Establishment intellectuals who decry the belligerent rhetoric and inflated self-image of the Movement. People such as Columbia professor and Hubert Humphrey advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, Soviet “containment” theorist George Kennan, and Amherst English professor Benjamin DeMott object to the verbal violence, the “revolutionary fervor” and “spirit of over-kill” suffusing the leading voices of youth in America. From their Olympian power centers, Poirier observes, they compose calm but withering analyses in
Time
and
The New Republic
targeting the young as foolhardy and shrill. That’s the elders’ tactic, and Poirier finds it abhorrent.
He concedes that the young are “inarticulate” and “foolish,” but he doesn’t care to test the accuracy of the intellectuals’ judgment. What matters is the style of their speech. In their overall demeanor, he says, they speak in the idiom of adulthood, the language of “responsible, grown-up good sense.” Poirier describes it as “a language that is intellectually ‘cool,’ a language aloof from militant or revolutionary vocabularies.” While youth leaders sound riotous and raving, censorious commentators such as DeMott prefer “a requisite dispassion,” their “uses of language . . . almost wholly abstracted from the stuff of daily life.” The moderate tone lays all good sense on the side of adults, and youth sympathizers stand exposed, visibly impolite, erratic, and extreme. The very rationality of the discourse denies any credibility to youth protest. This leads to the extraordinary thesis of Poirier’s essay. However civil, thoughtful, and reasonable it comes off, he declares, the discourse of counterrevolutionary intellectuals amounts to, precisely, a “war against the young.” Their sensible moderation constitutes an assault, a “more subtle method of repression,” “yet another containment policy, this one for youth.”
Note the equation. “Containment” was a geopolitical strategy, a Cold War way of combating Soviet expansion. Here it turns inward on one portion of the U.S. population, the younger set. The putatively rational and prudent judgments by levelheaded thinkers in fact repeat the foreign policies of the U.S. government, including the harshest ones. “The intellectual weapons used in the war against youth,” Poirier proclaims, “are from the same arsenal—and the young know this—from which war is being waged against other revolutionary movements, against Vietnam.” The very values that youth fail to embody—rationality, moderation—are themselves the rightful object of youth fury, Poirier says, for they undergird the killing tactics unfolding in Southeast Asia. Their rationality merely rationalizes the status quo, and their moderation moderates the indignation of young people idealistic enough to reject the Establishment. The protocols of civil society serve incongruous aims—to resolve dissent in peaceful ways
and
“to suppress some of the most vital elements now struggling into consciousness.” If that’s true, Poirier reasons, youth irresponsibility is a mode of critique, youth intemperateness the stoppage of a vile system. Their protest doesn’t target one policy or another. It dives deeper into fundamental values, the grounds of civility, respect, propriety—and properly so if civility itself acts to screen planned degradations across the globe. This is why the Youth Movement is not a reform agenda. It’s a cultural revolution.
Immaturity has its purpose, then, juvenile excess a liberatory end, and if we recoil at the sight of youths invading campus quads and burning cars, we should ponder first the grounds of our recoil.
We
have to change, Poirier insists, deep down. We must “learn to think differently.” The burden sits all on the adults.
In thinking about the so-called generation gap, then, I suggest that people my age think not so much about the strangeness of the young but about their own strangeness. . . . Only when the adult world begins to think of itself as strange, as having a shape that is not entirely necessary, much less lovely, only when it begins to see that the world, as it has now been made visible to us in forms and institutions, isn’t all
there,
maybe less than half of it—only then can we begin to meet the legitimate anguish of the young with something better than the cliché that they have no program. . . . For what the radical youth want to do is to expose the mere contingency of facts which have been considered essential. That is a marvelous thing to do.
The conventional poles reverse. Youth teach elders, not vice versa, and the real world isn’t so real after all. The established knowledge of the past, “facts which have been considered essential,” has no present clout. And as the facts of life melt under the inquisitive anguish of the young, the normal lives of middle-class adults come to seem every bit as temporal and partial as the lifestyle experiments of hippies. Or rather, even more so, for 1960s youths are willing to question social existence, while 1960s adults conform to it. “Radical youth,” caustic and restless, gets all the concessions, the “adult world,” sober and rational, all the suspicion. Only the adult world needs fixing.
POIRIER’S
ESSAY MARKS
a signal case of the generational romance, the transformation of youth from budding egos into attuned sensibilities. His argument models a different mentoring, an approach that may have respected the students but yielded a terrible outcome. Over the years, the indulgence of youth circulated among educators and settled into a sanctioned pedagogy with a predictable result: not an unleashing of independent, creative, skeptical mental energies of rising students, but what we have seen in previous chapters, routine irreverence and knowledge deficits.
The radical youth argument did its work all too well. From the 1960s to the 1980s, with movies, music, television, and fashion drifting steadily down the age ladder, the college campus stood as one of the last ties to tradition, where canonical knowledge prevailed over youth concerns. But if the uprising called for a wholesale cultural revolution, the campus stood squarely in its sights. As Poirier surmised, to meet the youth challenge, “the universities need to dismantle their entire academic structure, their systems of courses and requirements, their notion of what constitutes the proper fields and subjects of academic inquiry.” And once a distinguished scholar writing in an eminent intellectual magazine interpreted the presiding civilization as a factitious social fabric accountable to the disordered, exigent scrutiny of teenagers, lesser academics could hardly hold back. If Richard Poirier could ennoble youth motives and denigrate adult standards, if a renowned academic could renounce a hierarchy at whose top he stood, if the momentum of culture beyond the campus surged headlong on the same course, what junior colleagues would object? The continuity of tradition was always a fragile thing, and it wouldn’t take much for generation-to-generation handoffs to go wrong, but when the things that ensured it fell under reproach— classrooms and teachers themselves—adolescents could add a brand-new moral weapon to their resistance. If sensible adult judgment complemented bombing raids in Vietnam, adult critics of youth weren’t just cranky pedants. They were creepy plotters, and they might as well join hands with Pentagon strategists and corporate bosses. This was argument by stigmatization, guilt by far-flung association. American society relied on learned professors and high-brow periodicals to maintain intellectual ideals, but here they commended youth subversion. Poirier characterized “youth in its best and truest form” not as modesty, studiousness, and respect, but as “rebellion and hope.” Anyone who stood in its way fell into the camp of reactionaries.