Lasch—An Autonomous Youth Culture

Christopher Lasch
The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963:
The Intellectual as a Social Type (1965)

[69] The rebellion against the middle class presents an ever-changing face. From one point of view, it was a rebellion of women against the "family claim." From another point of view, it was a rebellion of intellectuals against middle-class culture. But it was also a revolt of youth, and as such it set a pattern which had been followed with variations only of detail by each subsequent generation of youthful rebels... The mass society, lacking the cohesive influences that make a society into a community, tends to break up into smaller communities, autonomous, self-contained, and having no viable connection with the whole. The existence of a "youth problem," a phenomenon mistakenly regarded as a problem of inadequate law enforcement or of a decline of public morality or of society's failure to provide adequate incentives for young people, in reality signifies the emergence of an autonomous youth culture.

...

[80] Europe quickened [Randolph] Bourne's political sympathies. A progressive, he became something of a socialist as well. After Europe, his writing acquired a certain sharpness and bite which it had lacked before; in his later work he was less the genteel
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essayist and more the critic of politics—and his critique, as time went on, became increasingly astringent and increasingly effective. Yet in the conventional sense Bourne had no politics at all. His politics remained largely an extrapolation from his own emancipation from the cultural stagnation of Bloomfield. Though he spoke glowingly of social and political advance, he conceived of it as cultural progress. On the continent, he had noted, "life was enriched by a certain natural sensitiveness to art," the absence of which in England and America had a "brutalizing" effect. He advised a friend in New York, an architect, that if he could do anything "towards spreading that sensitiveness at home," he would have accomplished a work "as important as that of the best social reformer." "Until people begin to really hate ugliness and poverty and disease, instead of merely pitying the poor and the sick, we shall not have, I fear, any great social advance."

Wouldn't I of all people like to think so. But I do fear that cause and effect are miscast here. My bandleader at work, for example, told me I have a "disease" when I said I was going to the library after work. Like my old roommate in The Valley, he confuses openness to dating particular "fat" women with being "into" "fat" women generally. And of course, he can play. He's got the hatred of ugliness part mastered as well or better than his mastery of chords and scales, along with more than the usual sensitiveness to art. But no great social advance is on the horizon around here. More like the reverse.

Politics, in short, was important to Bourne as "a means to life." Even his opposition to the war, on which his reputation as a public figure came to rest, was a politically negative act (however appropriate or correct) signifying his continuing preoccupation with the personal as opposed to the public. He opposed the war precisely because he saw that it represented a monstrous intrusion of the public on the private. It showed him the danger, if he had not know it before, of making politics a cult; and it was the reaction to this "cult of politics," he told Van Wyck Brooks, that had finally "driven so many of the younger generation back from the liberal camp." ...

[84] These observations, drawn presumably from private rather than from public life, nevertheless had a way of slipping over into politics. Youth and Life was a political manifesto and a call to revolution. But in Bourne's politics, the source of injustice was seen not as the monopoly of the means of production or as the unequal access to privilege and power, but as the simple fact of age. The older generation ruled the world; "hence grievous friction, maladjustment, social war." More precisely:

Youth rules the world, but only when it is no longer young. It is a tarnished, travestied youth that is in the saddle in the person of middle age. Old age lives in the delusion that it has improved and rationalized its youthful ideas by experience and stored-up wisdom, when all it has done is to damage them more or less—usually more. And the tragedy of life is that the world is run by these damaged ideals.

Bourne was like other rebels before him in wishing to throw off the dead hand of the past; to that extent he belonged to a long line of radical thinkers. What was new in all this was his conceiving of the struggle quite literally as a struggle of youth against age, in spite of his awareness that youth is often more conservative than age itself. That only confirmed his opinion of the evil effects of the social domination of the middle-aged. If young people were conservative, when their natural tendency was to be radical, that was surely because they found the world in which they were expected to make their way "rather narrow and shallow."

What was also new in Bourne's radicalism was the way in which the political problem, once it was formulated in this way, dictated nonpolitical solutions. To say that "friction, maladjustment, social war" had their origin in the ascend-
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ancy of age over youth was to rule out politics altogether as a means of social advance. Specifically, it was to rule out the conventional radical solution of social revolution. Bourne could not urge the young to seize power as Marx had urged the proletariat to expropriate the expropriators. In the first place, the struggle for power was itself a form of "friction and social war." In the second place, Bourne saw clearly enough that revolutions are seldom led by men in their teens or even their twenties. ... A revolution of youth is a contradiction in terms. But in the third place, it did not require a revolution, after all, to bring the young to power. The young would come to power as a matter of course, but in their middle age—there was the rub; and what would be the gain if by that time the rebels of today had become the reactionaries of tomorrow? The young must somehow discover how to take their youth with them into middle age.

This is why it behooves youth to be not less radical, but even more radical, than it would naturally be. It must be not simply contemporaneous, but a generation ahead of the times, so that when it comes to control of the world, it will be precisely right and coincident with the conditions of the world as it finds them. If the youth of to-day could really achieve this miracle, they would have found the secret of "perpetual youth."

Not Marx but the spirit of Ponce de León presided over Bourne's vision of the better world.

Uh...Fallacy of Induction, anyone? :^|

His statement of the problem took the problem out of politics and put it squarely into the realm of psychology. The key to politics was the process of aging. The root of social disorder was seen not as oppression but repression: the destruction of freedom and spontaneity which was necessary to make children into adults. It was at this point that Bourne's analysis
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coincided with John Dewey's, Jane Addams's, and the progressive educators in general. It also ran parallel, for a while, to Sigmund Freud's, although how closely Bourne knew Freud's work, if he knew it at all first hand, is not clear. The very fact that the point should be in doubt suggests what is indeed amply confirmed by other evidence, that the concept of the child as a different order of being from the adult—and in some respects a superior order of being—did not owe its existence to Freud. It was rather the general intellectual property of the age. ...
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The nineteenth century, someone said, was the century of the child. The coincidence, toward the end of the century, of so many independent discoveries of the mystery and sanctity of childhood leads one to think that childhood must have owed its discovery not so much to a set of intellectual influences—romanticism, naturalism—as to the social conditions of the period; to some common experience through which an entire generation had passed. To look critically at the patriarchal family was to see it, first and foremost, through the eyes of a child. Psychoanalysis—which has been credited with opening up the study of the child—appears to have acted more as confirmation than as revelation. It gave the weight of science to the intuition which had already impressed itself on so many sons and daughters of the middle class: that culture was founded on repression.

But if psychoanalysis shared with American progressivism this common ground, nothing could be more illuminating than the way in which they diverged. Freud was led by his evidence to a stupefying irony: an ever-mounting burden of guilt was the price men paid for civilization. Freud was a European, and such a conclusion was implicit, perhaps, in every detail of the European scene. Jane Addams caught a glimpse of it in Madrid. But the American, faced with Europe, found it easy to repudiate its implications. Having no past, Americans could
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look forward to an untroubled future. The American progressives drew back from the implications of psychoanalysis even as they embraced it. If culture and nature were in conflict, culture would have to go.

But in fact no such conflict was thought to exist. John Dewey's resolution of it was characteristic. In traditional societies, he explained—he was thinking of the primitive societies which anthropologists were just beginning to study—the young had to be brought up in the ways of their elders. These societies, being content merely to perpetuate themselves, were obliged to instill in new generations reverence for the customs and rituals of the old. Under such circumstances, socialization might indeed require repression; for "the natural or native impulses of the young do not agree with the life-customs of the group into which they are born." But in progressive societies the "life-customs" themselves are constantly changing. Progressive societies accordingly "endeavor to shape the experiences of the young so that instead of reproducing current habits, better habits shall be formed, and thus the future adult society be an improvement on their own." If the better society of the future was defined as a "cooperative commonwealth" (as all of the new radicals, progressives, single-taxers, and socialists alike, defined it), and if it was true, moreover, that children were more adept in the art of cooperation than adults, then children themselves became the teachers in the school of social progress. Teachers became pupils. Far from repressing the natural impulses of the young, progressive societies—progressive schools in particular—tried to encourage their emulation by adults. "For certain moral and intellectual purposes," Dewey concluded, "adults must become as little children."
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This discovery of Dewey's ran parallel to Jane Addams's discovery that it was the "neighbors" who educated the social worker by demonstrating socialized democracy in action, rather than the other way around; and the sentence in which Dewey summed up his philosophy of education reads almost exactly like a sentence of Randolph Bourne's—the one in which he spoke of adults becoming "as little children."