Paul Goodman—Class Cultures

Paul Goodman
Growing Up Absurd
(1960)

[161] A persistent error of the sociologists has been to regard middle-class and working-class values as co-ordinate rival systems. Rather, they are related vertically: each is a defense against some threat of the other. Primary values are human values. The middle-class "values" are reaction formations to inhibit in themselves some human values still available to simpler people. Therefore, under stress of life or disillusion, such inhibitions may give way. They may give way to an ambivalent opposite, like becoming a bum; but they may also simply relax to ordinary nature and community, spontaneity, nonconformity, etc. Conversely, the working-class "values" are nothing but ignorance, resignation, and resentment of classless values of enterprise and culture, at present available only to the middle class; and many a poor boy escapes his petty class attitudes and achieves something. In brief, it takes effort to make a middle class obsessional, and it takes effort to make a poor boy stupid.

Paul Goodman
"Compulsory Mis-Education" (1964)
in Compulsory Mis-Education and The Community of Scholars

[21] Because of the increasing failure of the schools with the poor urban mass, there has developed a line of criticism...asserting that there is a "culture of poverty" which the "middle-class" schools do not fit, but which has its own virtues of spontaneity, sociality, animality. The implication is that the "middle class," for all its virtues, is obsessional, prejudiced, prudish.

Pedagogically, this insight is indispensible. A teacher must try to reach each child in terms of what he brings, his background, his habits, the language he understands. But if taken to be more than technical, it is a disastrous conception. The philosophic aim of education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and into the one humanity. Prudence and responsibility are not middle-class virtues but human virtues; and spontaneity and sexuality are not powers of the simple but of human

[22]

health. One has the impression that our social-psychologists are looking not to a human community but to a future in which the obsessionals will take care of the impulsives!

In fact, some of the most important strengths that have historically belonged to the middle class are flouted by the schools: independence, initiative, scrupulous honesty, earnestness, utility, respect for thorough scholarship. Rather than bourgeois, our schools have become petty-bourgeois, bureaucratic, time-serving, gradgrind-practical, timid, and nouveau riche climbing. In the upper grades and colleges, they often exude a cynicism that belongs to rotten aristocrats.

Naturally, however, the youth of the poor and of the middle class respond differently to the petty bourgeois atmosphere. For many poor children, school is orderly and has food, compared to chaotic and hungry homes, and it might even be interesting compared to total deprivation of toys and books. Besides, the wish to improve a child's lot, which on the part of a middle-class parent might be frantic status-seeking and pressuring, on the part of a poor parent is a loving aspiration. There is here a gloomy irony. The school that for a poor Negro child might be a great joy and opportunity is likely to be dreadful; whereas the middle-class child might be better off not in the "good" suburban school he has.

Lasch—To Establish or Submerge?

Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)

p. 6—my note says:
contrasts the "consciousness movement" with past "millenarian outbreaks"; specifically, in living "only for the moment" and not for some future utopia

[8] Her preoccupation with the state of her psychic health, together with her dependence on others for a sense of selfhood, distinguish Susan Stern [in her memoir of the Weathermen] from the kind of religious seeker who turns to politics to find a secularized salvation. She needed to establish an identity, not to submerge her identity in a larger cause.

A linchpin of the broader narcissism thesis. Certainly it is observable in many areas of life whether or not narcissism per se is involved. The choice of a sixties activist as an illustration is, nonetheless, probably not an innocent/unmotivated choice and probably doesn't do justice to the earnest beliefs of a great many involved in those movements. Another case, I think, of visibility and representativeness being conflated. A more mundane, representative example could be made of the vast majority of eighteen year-olds who show up to college declaring a major in the performing arts, only to eventually graduate or (statistically much more likely) quit having established much but submerged little.

[10] For the narcissist, the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged individualist saw it as an empty wilderness to be shaped to his own design.

...

[15] [Jerry] Rubin claims that the "inner revolution of the seventies" grew out of an awareness that the radicalism of the sixties had failed to address itself to the quality of personal life or to cultural questions, in the mistaken belief that questions of "personal growth," in his words, could wait "until after the revolution." This accusation contains a certain amount of truth. ...

Yep. Anytime you're told something indispensible can wait, expect the wait to be interminable.

[16] Yet...in those years, there was a growing recognition [by the New Left and others]...that personal crisis on the scale it has now assumed represents a political issue in its own right, and that a thoroughgoing analysis of modern society and politics has to explain among other things why personal growth and development have become so hard to accomplish...

Yep.

Also from a note:
pp. 25-27—against understanding "contemporary narcissism" as classbound

[26] The collapse of personal life originates not in the spiritual torments of affluence but in the war of all against all...

...

[27] the very conditions that created the crisis of personal relations in the first place

now being advocated as solutions.

Nancy Isenberg—Liberty and Freedom Meant Different Things

Nancy Isenberg
White Trash: The 400-Year Old Untold History
of Class in America (2016)

p. 75 -- "Franklin certainly never endorsed social mobility as we think of it today, despite his own experience."

pp. 81-82 -- "Paine was careful to downplay the distinction between the rich and the poor. He wanted his American readers to focus on distant kings, not local grandees."

p. 85 -- "[Jefferson] called the new western domain an "empire for liberty," by which he meant something other than a free-market economy or a guarantee of social mobility."

Ostensibly, then, the broader objective throughout this part of the book is to restore to various figures, documents, and events the historical context which ensuing centuries of reductionism and ideology have gradually eroded. I must confess, though, that even (or especially) after a second pass, I really need her to say more about each of these interpretations. (Start with the fact that that's what they are.) And if it is as simple as three colonial-era ivory tower dwellers "reveling in rhetorical obfuscation" (p. 86 re: Jefferson specifically, though frankly I wonder if this isn't an apt criticism in all three cases), then this needs to be made more clear.

I would say as well that the laying bare of, variously, Franklin's hypocrisy, Paine's charlatanism, and Jefferson's rhetorical obfuscation is an exercise which, notwithstanding any visceral satisfaction it might provide for cynics (among which I proudly count myself here), is inherently more biographical than historical. Did these conceptions have legs? What countervailing position(s) emerged? And how and to what extent were these various positions, as Erich Fromm might have asked, "socially patterned?" This is a tall order of course, but without its fulfillment I'm left with a vague aftertaste of Great Man Theory. As "elites," perhaps these were, in the long run, influential thinkers; but given the topic of the book, one must wonder as well how representative they truly were.

The story of Oglethorpe and Georgia was new to me, and perhaps only because it was new did I come away from that chapter with fewer concerns about the overall narrative being spun. But by the end of Chapter 4 it certainly has become clear that this is a series of case studies more than a comprehensive account. I'm not oblivious to the many factors which tend to push an author in that direction; I've just evolved into an all-or-nothing reader, hence I would have been game for an exhaustive study.

[from a Goodreads post, 2017]