The Young and the Old

There has been much discussion about young rebels’ selection of the university as a primary target for recent upheavals. Many distinguished commentators (David Riesman, Christopher Lasch, Stephen Spender, Herbert Marcuse, Lionel Trilling, and Noam Chomsky, among others) have cautioned students about the dangers of confusing the vulnerable centers of learning they attack, and for periods of time “bring down,” with society at large. Spender put the matter eloquently when he said that “however much the university needs a revolution, and the society needs a revolution, it would be disastrous . . . not to keep the two revolutions apart.” He went on to point out, as have others, that the university is “an arsenal from which [student-rebels] can draw the arms from which they can change society”; and that “to say ‘I won’t have a university until society has a revolution’ is as though Karl Marx were to say, ‘I won’t go to the reading room of the British Museum until it has a revolution.’ ” Yet wise as these cautionary thoughts undoubtedly are, one also has to consider the ways in which the university’s special symbolic significance makes it all too logical (if unfortunate) a target for would-be revolutionaries.

What makes universities unique is the extent to which, within them, the prevailing concepts of a society are at the same time presented, imposed, examined, and criticized. The university is indeed a training ground for available occupational slots in society, as young rebels are quick to point out; it can at its worst approach a technical instrument in the hands of the military-industrial complex. But it can also be precisely the opposite, a training ground for undermining social institutions, as Spender suggests, and as the young rebels themselves attest by the extent to which they are campus products. In most cases the university is a great many things in between. It provides for students four years of crucial personal transition—from relatively unformed adolescence to a relatively formed adulthood. And the fact that many are likely to move through continuing protean explorations during the post-university years renders especially important whatever initial adult “formation” the university makes possible. For these reasons, and because both groups are there, the university is the logical place for the rebellious young to confront their ostensible mentors, and thereby both define themselves and make a statement about society at large.

The statement they make has to do not only with social inequities and outmoded institutions, but with the general historical dislocations of everyone. And in this sense the target of the young is not so much the university, or the older generation, as the continuing commitment of both to the discredited past. But the university provides unique opportunities for the young to reverse the fatherson mentorship—and, moreover, to do so in action. The reversal may be confused and temporary, with student and teacher moving back and forth between leadership and followership, but in the process the young can assert their advanced position in the shaping of what is to come. Though the “generation gap” seems at times to be increasing beyond redemption, there is also a sense in which the gap narrows as the young engage their elders as they never have before, and the university becomes a place of unprecedented intellectual and emotional contact between the generations. And what happens at one university can be repeated, with many variations, at any other university throughout the world. Universities everywhere share a central position in the susceptibility to new currents, and tend also to present students with very real grievances; the global communications network provides not only the necessary contagion but instant instruction in the art of university rebellion. Specific actions and reactions then give way to a general historical process.

We learn more about the university in tire midst of militant social disorder by turning to the greatest of recent national upheavals, the Chinese Cultural Revolution. More than is generally realized, universities were the focus of much that took place during that extraordinary movement. Not only were they a major source of Red Guard activists, but within them a series of public denunciations of senior professors and administrators by students and young faculty members preceded, and in a sense set off, the Cultural Revolution as a whole. These denunciations originated at Peking University, which was the scene of many such upheavals, both before the Communist victory in China and during the subsequent campaigns of “thought reform" that are a trademark of the Chinese Communist regime.

The Cultural Revolution, the most extreme of these campaigns, contrasted with more recent student rebellions elsewhere in one very important respect: the young were called forth by their elders (Mao and the Maoists) to fight the latter’s old revolutionary battles, and to combat the newly threatening impurities associated with revisionism. But from the beginning there was probably a considerable amount of self-assertion and spontaneity among Red Guard leaders and followers. And over the course of the Cultural Revolution, overzealous Red Guard groups became more and more difficult for anyone to control, especially as they split into contending factions, each claiming to be the most authentically revolutionary and Maoist. And during the summer of 1968 reports of jousts, fights, and pitched battles among them, also taking place at Peking University, revealed how within two years that institution had shifted in its function from provider of the spark of the Cultural Revolution to receptacle for its ashes. Significantly, members of the Red Guard were then demoted to the status of “intellectuals” who required the tutelage of workers and especially peasants (and the control of the army). But Peking and other universities continued to preoccupy the regime as places in need of fundamental reform.

Indeed, the remolding of educational institutions has been greatly stressed over the course of the Cultural Revolution. And the extraordinary step of closing all schools throughout China for more than a year was both a means of mobilizing students for militant political struggles beyond the campuses, and revamping (however chaotically) the nation’s educational process. In my book Revolutionary Immortality (1968), I described the Cultural Revolution as a quest for a symbolic form of immortality, a means of eternalizing Mao’s revolutionary works in the face of his anticipated biological death and the feared “death of the revolution.” The university was perceived throughout as both an arena of fearful dangers (revisionist ideas) and as what might be called an immortalizing agent (for the promulgation at the highest cultural levels of the complete Maoist thought).

In its own fashion, the Cultural Revolution was a response to the New History, which in China’s case includes not only Russian and Eastern European revisionism but early manifestations of proteanism. Chinese universities, however, have been forced to flee from contemporary confusions into what is most simple and pure in that country’s Old Revolutionary History; this is in contrast to the more open-ended plunge into a threatening but multifaceted future being taken by universities throughout the rest of the world. Yet those issues are far from decided. Universities everywhere, China included, are likely to experience powerful pressures from the young for “restructuring.” While this hardly guarantees equivalent restructuring of national governments, it may well be a prelude to fundamental changes in almost every aspect of human experience.

One can hardly speak of definitive conclusions about something just beginning. Nor would I claim a position of omniscient detachment from the events of the New History. But having earlier affirmed its significance, I wish now to suggest some of its pitfalls, and then some potentialities for avoiding them. From the standpoint of the young, those pitfalls are related to what is best called romantic totalism. I refer to a postCartesian absolutism, to a new quest for old feelings. Its controlling image, at whatever level of consciousness, is that of replacing history with experience.

This is, to a considerable extent, the romanticism of the “youth movement.” I have heard a number of thoughtful European-born intellectuals tell, with some anxiety, how the tone and atmosphere now emanating from young American rebels is reminiscent of that of the German youth movement of the late Weimar Republic (and the Hitler Youth, into which it was so readily converted). What they find common to both is a cult of feeling and a disdain for restraint and reason. While I would emphasize the differences between the two groups much more than the similarities, there is a current in contemporary youth movements that is more Nietzschean than Marxist-Leninist. It consists of a stress upon what I call experiential transcendence, upon the cultivation of states of feeling so intense and so absorbing that time and death cease to exist. (Drugs are of great importance here but as part of a general quest.) The pattern becomes totalistic when it begins to tamper with history to the extent of victimizing opponents in order to reinforce these feelings; and a danger signal is the absolute denial of the principle of historical continuity.

We have already noted that political revolution has its own transformationist myth of making all things new. When this combines with the experiential myth (of eliminating time and death), two extreme positions can result. One of these is the condemnation and negation of an entire historical tradition: the attempt by some of the young to sever totally their relationship to the West by means of an impossibly absolute identity replacement, whether the new identity is that of the Oriental mystic or that of the Asian or African victim of colonialism or slavery. And a second consequence of this dismissal of history can be the emergence of a single criterion of judgment: what feels revolutionary is good, what does not is counterrevolutionary.

A related, equally romantic pitfall might be called “generational totalism.” The problem is not so much the slogan “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” as the unconscious assumption that can be behind it: that “youth power” knows no limits because youth equals immortality. To Ire sure, it is part of being young to believe that one will never die, that such things happen only to other people, old people. But this conviction ordinarily lives side fry side with a realization—at first preconscious, but over the years increasingly a matter of awareness—that life is, after all, finite. And a more symbolic sense of immortality, through works and connections outlasting one’s life-span, takes hold and permits one to depend a little less upon the fantasy that one will live forever.

Under extreme historical conditions, however, certain groups—in this case, youth groups—feel the need to cling to the omnipotence provided by a more literal image of immortality, which they in turn contrast with the death-tainted lives of others. When this happens, we encounter a version of the victimizing process: the young “victimize” the old (or older) by equating age with individual or historical “exhaustion” and death; and the “victim,” under duress, may indeed feel himself to be “as if dead,” and collude in his victimization. Conversely, the older generation has its need to victimize, sometimes (but not always) in the form of counterattack, and may feel compelled to view every innovative action of the young as destructive or “deadly.” Indeed, the larger significance and greatest potential danger of what we call the “generation gap” reside in these questions of broken historical connection and impaired sense of immortality.

The recent slogan of French students “The young make love, the old make obscene gestures” is patronizing rather than totalistic, and its mocking blend of truth and absurdity permits a chuckle all around. But when the same students refer to older critics as “people who do not exist,” or when young American radicals label everyone and everything either “relevant” (“revolutionary”) or “irrelevant” (“counterrevolutionary”) on the basis of whether or not the person, idea, or event is consistent with their own point of view, we are dealing with something potentially more malignant, with the drawing of sharp lines between people and nonpeople.

Perhaps the ultimate expression of generational totalism was that of an early group of Russian revolutionaries who advocated the suppression and even annihilation of everyone over the age of twenty-five because they were felt to be too contaminated with that era’s Old History to be able to absorb the correct principles of the New. I have heard no recent political suggestions of this kind; but there have certainly been indications (aside from the Hollywood version of youth suppressing age in the film Wild in the Streets) that young radicals at times have felt a similar impulse; and that some of their antagonists in the older generations have felt a related urge to eliminate or incarcerate everyone under twenty-five.

I have stressed the promiscuous use of the word “relevant.” Beyond its dictionary meanings, its Latin origin, relevare, “to raise up,” is suggestive of its current meaning. What is considered relevant is that which “raises up” a particular version of the New History, whether that of the young rebels or of the slightly older technocrats (such as Zbigniew Brzezinski) who are also loud of the word. Correspondingly, everything else must be “put down”— not only defeated but denied existence.

Such existential negation is, of course, an old story: one need only recall Trotsky’s famous reference to the “dustbin of history.”But the young, paradoxically, call it forth in relationship to the very images and fragments we spoke of before as protean alternatives to totalism. An example is the all-encompassing image of the “Establishment": taken over from British rebels, it has come to mean everything from American (or Russian, or just about any other) political and bureaucratic leadership, to American businessmen (from influential tycoons to salaried executives to storekeepers), to university administrators (whether reactionary or liberal presidents or simple organization men), and even to many of the student and youth leaders who are themselves very much at odds with people in these and other categories. And just as Establishment becomes a devil-image, so do other terms, such as (in different ways) “confrontation” and “youth,” become god-images. It is true that these godand devil-images can illuminate many situations, as did such analogous Old Left expressions as “the proletarian standpoint,” “the exploiting classes,” and “bourgeois remnants,” the last three in association with a more structured ideology. What is at issue, however, is the degree to which a particular image is given a transcendent status and is then uncritically applied to the most complex situations in a way that makes it the start and finish of any ethical judgment or conceptual analysis.

This image-focused totalism enters into the ultimate romanticization, that of death and immortality. While the sense of immortality, of unending historical continuity, is central to ordinary psychological experience, romantic totalism tends to confuse death with immortality, and even to equate them. Here one recalls Robespierre’s famous dictum, “Death is the beginning of immortality.” which Hannah Arendt has called “the briefest and most grandiose definition . . . [of] the specifically modern emphasis on politics, evidenced in the revolutions.” Robespierre’s phrase still resonates for us, partly because it captures an elusive truth about individual death as a rite de passage for the community, a transition between a man’s biological life and the continuing life of his works. But within the phrase there also lurks the romantic temptation to court death in the service of immortality—to view dying, and in some cases even killing, as the only true avenues to immortality.

The great majority of today’s radical young embrace no such imagery; they are, in fact, intent upon exploring the fullest possibilities of life. But some can at times be prone to a glorification of life-anddeath gestures, and to all-or-none “revolutionary tactics,” even in petty disputes hardly worthy of these cosmic images. In such situations their sense of mockery, and especially self-mockery, deserts them. For these and the related sense of absurdity can, at least at their most creative, deflate claims to omniscience and provide a contemporary equivalent to the classical mode of tragedy. Like tragedy, mockery conveys man’s sense of limitation before death and before the natural universe, but it does so now in a world divested of more “straight” ways to cope with mortality. Those young rebels who reject this dimension, and insist instead upon unwavering militant rectitude, move toward romanticized death and the more destructive quests for immortality.

The theme of militant rectitude brings us back once more to the Chinese experience—and to Maoism as the quintessential expression of romantic totalism. For we may see in Mao a paradigm of the pitfalls of a noble vision, a paradigm which has great bearing on the struggles of youth throughout the world quite apart from whatever attraction they may feel toward this extraordinary leader. Mao’s unparalleled accomplishments make him perhaps the greatest of all revolutionaries. If one studies his writings, one is impressed by his tone of transcendence, his continuous insistence upon all-or-none confrontation with death in the service of revitalizing the Chinese people, so much so that I have described him as “a death-conquering hero who became the embodiment of Chinese immortality.” Young rebels throughout the world can perceive something of this aura, however limited their knowledge of the concrete details of Mao’s life. They can, moreover, make psychological use of his Chineseness to reinforce their condemnation of Western cultural tradition, while also viewing him as the leader of “the external proletariat” (a new term for the people of the Third World, seen as possessing a vanguard revolutionary role).

Further, young rebels respond to Mao’s militant opposition not only to Russia and America but to the “world establishment” dominated by these two great powers. And even more to his deep distrust of bureaucracies which culminated in his remarkable assault during the Cultural Revolution upon the organizational structure of his own party and regime. (Several student-radicals I asked about Mao gave as their first reason for admiring him: “He’s against institutions.” Though it should be added that many others find fault with him, and sometimes mock both Mao’s celebrated Thought and what they regard as equally stereotyped American attitudes toward the man and his ideas.) Add to this Mao’s achievements in guerrilla warfare, his affinity for the great Chinese outlaws, and his sentimental but often moving poetry with its stress upon immortality through revolution, and one can understand why even Chinese Communist spokesmen themselves have referred to him as a “romantic revolutionary.”

Yet Mao’s very romanticism—his glorification of the revolutionary spirit and urge to inundate all minds with that spirit—has given rise to what is perhaps the most extensive program of human manipulation known to history. And during the Cultural Revolution he has become the center of an equally unprecedented immortalization of words and personal deification that has offended even admirers of long standing. Young rebels who embrace from afar Mao’s version of “permanent revolution" may too easily overlook the consequences of the recent campaign on behalf of that principle: irreparable national dissension, convoluted and meaningless iorms of violence, and extreme contusion and disillusionment among Chinese youth (as well as their elders), perhaps especially among those who initially responded most enthusiastically to the call for national transformation. Not are young rebels in the West aware of the extent to which the Maoist vision has had to be modified and in some ways abandoned in response to the deep-seated opposition it encountered throughout China.

Intrinsic in Mao’s romantic-totalislic conduct of the Cultural Revolution is a pattern I call “psychism,”a confusion between mind and its material products, an attempt to control the external world and achieve strongly desired technological goals by means of mental exercises and assertions of revolutionary will. Now the radical young in more affluent societies have a very different relationship to technology; rather than desperately seeking it, they feel trapped and suffocated by it (though they also feel its attraction). But they too can succumb to a similar kind of confusion, which in their case takes the form of mistaking a rewarding inner sense of group solidarity with mastery of the larger human and technological world “outside.”The recent Maoist experience can find its counterpart in a sequence of experiences of young rebels in the West: deep inner satisfaction accompanying bold collective action, disillusionment at the limited effects achieved, and more reckless and ineffective action with even greater group solidarity. This is not to say that all or most behavior of voting rebels falls into this category; to the contrary, their political confrontations have achieved a number of striking successes largely because they were not merely assertions of will but could also mobilize a wide radius of opposition to outmoded and destructive academic and national policies. Yet the enormous impact of high technology in the postmodern world, and the universal tendency to surround it with vast impersonal organizations, present an ever increasing temptation to transcend the whole system (or “bag”) by means of romantic worship of the will as such, and especially the revolutionary will.

Whatever their admiration of Mao, many young rebels find themselves in tactical conflict with pure Maoists who view Mao’s sayings as transcendent truths, and insist upon apocalyptic violence as the only form of authentic revolutionary action. Such pure Maoists were depicted, one might say caricatured, by Godard in his film La Chinoise, and have had their counterparts in the American student movement. As advocates of Maoism from a distance who lack their mentor’s pragmatism and flexibility, they are somewhat reminiscent of the non-Russian Stalinists of the 1930s. But for most young rebels, Mao and Maoism are perceived less as demarcated historical person and program than as a constellation of heroic, and above all antibureaucratic, revolutionary images. The problem for these young rebels is to recover the historical Mao in all of his complexity, which means understanding his tragic transition from great revolutionary leader to despot. To come to terms with their own Maoism, they must sort out the various elements of the original—on the one hand its call for continuous militant action on behalf of the deprived, and its opposition to stagnant institutions; on the other, its apocalyptic totalism and desperate rearguard assault upon the openness of contemporary man.

Yet precisely the openness of the young may help them to avoid definitive commitments to these self-defeating patterns. They need not be bound by the excesses of either Cartesian rationalism or the contemporary cult of experience which feeds romantic totalism. Indeed, though the latter is a response to and ostensibly a replacement for the former, there is a sense in which each is a one-dimensional mirror-image of the other. Today’s young have available for their formulations of self and world the great twentieth-century insights which liberate man from the senseless exclusions of the opposition between emphasis on “experience" and on the “rational.”I refer to the principles of symbolic thought, as expressed in the work of such people as Cassirer and Langer, and of Freud and Erikson. One can never know the exact effect of great insights upon the historical process, but it is quite possible that, with the decline of the total ideologies of the old history, ideas as such will become more important than ever in the shaping of the new. Having available an unprecedented variety of ideas and images, the young are likely to attempt more than did previous generations and perhaps make more mistakes, but also to show greater capacity to extricate themselves from a particular course and revise tactics, beliefs, and styles—all in the service of contributing to embryonic social forms.

These forms are likely to be highly fluid, but need not by any means consist exclusively of shapeshifting. Rather, they can come to combine flux with elements of connectedness and consistency, and to do so in new ways and with new kinds of equilibria. Any New History worthy of that name not only pits itself against, but draws actively upon, the old. Only through such continuity can the young bring a measure of surefootedness to their continuous movement. And to draw upon the old history means to look both ways: to deepen the collective awareness of Auschwitz and Hiroshima and what they signify, and at the same time to carve out a future that remains open rather than bound by absolute assumptions about a “technetronic society” or by equally absolute polarities of “revolution” and “counterrevolution.”

It is possible that man’s two most desperately pressing problems—nuclear weapons and world population—may contribute to the overcoming of totalism and psychism. I have written elsewhere of the pattern of nuclearism, the deification of nuclear weapons and of a false dependency upon them for the attainment of political and social goals. This nuclearism tends to go hand in hand with a specific form ol psychism, the calling forth of various psychological and political constructs in order to deny the technological destructiveness of these weapons. Nuclear illusions have been rampant in both America and China. There are impressive parallels between certain Pentagon nuclear policies (grotesquely expressed in the John Foster Dulles doctrine of “massive retaliation”) on the one hand, and the joyous Chinese embrace of nuclear weapons as further confirmation of the Maoist view of world revolution on the other. Similarly, Pentagon (and early Herman Kahn) projections of the ease of recovery from nuclear attack bear some resemblance to the Maoist view of the weapons not only as “paper tigers" but even as a potential source of a more beautiful socialist order rising from the ashes.

Now, I think that young rebels, with their frequent combination of flexibility and inclusiveness, are capable of understanding these matters. They have yet to confront the issues fully, but have begun to show inclinations toward denouncing nuclearism and nuclear psychism as they occur not only in this country but among the other Great Powers. Insights about nuclear weapons are of the utmost importance to the younger generation—for preventing nuclear war, and for creating social forms which take into account man’s radically changed relationship to his world because of the potentially terminal revolution associated with these weapons.

To the problem of world population young rebels are capable of bringing a pragmatism which recognizes both the imperative of technical programs on behalf of control and the bankruptcy of an exclusively technical approach. Looking once more at China, we find that a country with one of the world’s greatest population problems has approached the matter of control ambivalently and insufficiently, mainly because of a Maoist form of psychism which insisted that there could never be too many workers in a truly socialist-revolutionary state. Yet this position has been modified, and there is much to suggest that the inevitable Chinese confrontation with the actualities of population has in itself been a factor in undermining more general (and widely disastrous) patterns of psychism. Young radicals elsewhere are capable of the same lessons—about population, about Maoist contradictions and post-Maoist possibilities, and about psychism per se.

Are these not formidable problems for youngsters somewhere between their late teens and mid-twenties? They are indeed. As the young approach the ultimate dilemmas that so baffle their elders, they seem to be poised between the ignorance of inexperience, and the wisdom of a direct relationship to the New History. Similarly, in terms of the lifecycle, they bring both the dangers of zealous youthful self-surrender to forms they do not understand, and the invigorating energy of those just discovering both self and history, energy so desperately needed for a historical foray into the unknown.

As for the “older generation”—the middle-aged left-intellectuals—the problem is a little different. For them (us) one of the great struggles is to retain (or achieve) protean openness to the possibilities latent in the New History, and to respond to that noble slogan of the French students, “Imagination in power.”But at the same time this generation does well to be its age, to call upon the experience specific to the lives of those who make it up. It must tread the tenuous path of neither feeding upon its formative sons nor rejecting their capacity for innovative historical imagination. This is much more difficult than it may seem, because it requires that those now in their forties and fifties come to terms with the extremely painful history they have known, neither to deny it nor to be blindly bound by it. Yet however they may feel shunted aside by the young, there is special need for their own more seasoned, if now historically vulnerable, imaginations.

For both the intellectual young and old, together with society at large, are threatened by a violent counterreaction to the New History, by a restorationist impulse often centered in the lower middle classes but not confined to any class or country. This impulse includes an urge to eliminate troublesome young rebels along with their liberal-radical “fathers,”and to return to a mythical past in which all was harmonious and no such disturbers of the historical peace existed. What is too often forgotten by the educated of all ages, preoccupied as they are with their own historical dislocations, is the extent to which such dislocations in others produce the very opposite kind of ideological inclination; in this case a compensatory, strongly antiprotean embrace of the simple purities of the old history—personal rectitude, law and order, rampant militarism, and narrow nationalism.

If man is successful in creating the New History he must create if he is to have any history at all, then the formative fathers and sons must pool their resources and succeed together. Should this not happen, the failure too will be shared, whether in the form of stagnation and suffering or of shared annihilation. Like most other things in our world, the issue remains open. There is nothing absolute or inevitable about the New History, except perhaps the need to bring it into being.