...those who become consolidated...limit their horizon so as not to see what might destroy their newly-won unity with time and space or expose them to the fear of death--and of killing. Such a consolidation along technological lines is, I submit, now taking place. [in it]...the technologically possible may replace the ethically permissible....and this can only cause subliminal panic, especially where the old decencies will prove inadequate, and where the mere possibility of overkill can be denied only with a mental strain which will match the sexual repression of the passing era in unconscious pathogenic power. (Toward the Year 2000; Bell, editor.)
For most of its participants the strike was a cry that, despite the faculty's insistence upon the "old decencies," students were being pressed to combine their identity development with "techniques of mastery and domination," repressing their awareness of "institutionalized inequalities" and the "fear of death--and of killing." The strikers went on to say that it is not technology itself, but capitalist technology which demands a repression whose "pathogenic power" has skewed our emotional, sexual, and intellectual lives in training us to manage the lives of others.
***
The late 'sixties exploded the "New Frontier" assumption that personal career advancement is complementary to the welfare of all the people, sending many students stumbling across class lines as cab-drivers, carpenters, farmers, factory-workers, and bums. The spiritual nub of their "downward mobility" was a thirst to encounter the world differently from the way a newly-minted upper middle class professional does--to encounter it with reverence, in dialogue, and with some of that delight, that "excellency of childhood" (Reinhold Niebuhr) without which all the wellsprings of human endeavor run dry. They felt that, if permanently cast as "professionals" and "clients," as managers and managed, they and the poor were but two sides of a counterfeit social coin, clasped together in necrophilic embrace, each with its own hurts derived from its objectification of the other.
In those years the Brazilian revolutionary educator Paolo Freire wrote in his Pedagogy of the Opressed that "rejoining the people" requires a profound rebirth into an equality which no amount of expertise, however necessary, can provide--or replace. He said that leadership grows from the depths of one's caring, with the support of those who entrust a member of the community with a task in their continuing humanization. Bright-eyed junior managerial lemmings who crowd around political figures over sherry in our common rooms may have no inkling of this, except as platitude; neither, for that matter, may self-congratulatory sectarian "radicals," precious literary "humanists," or other "individualists" coping with the pains of life in a liberal market economy. The lesson of the late 'sixties was that we must surrender these insidious self-conceptions, for without a stronger social glue, without people's sense of themselves as passionate shapers of a common destiny, whole cultures lose the will to live, and all our social scientists' horses and men cannot put Humpty Dumpty together again.
***
"Downward mobility" seldom occurs voluntarily now nationwide. A "subliminal panic" shot through the middle classes after Kent State, and again when thermostats dropped and gas lines formed in the early morning darkness; today many students are unapologetically out for themselves alone. Especially telling are the rise of guru- and pseudo-liberation fads in the wake of the earlier protest's defeat, and of "decadence" at schools like Yale, where leaves of absence are at an all-time low; they signal most vividly a spiralling-off of individuals into private worlds within a corporate universe.
The harsh realities unveiled during the 'sixties are still with us, then, but going to Harvard means minimizing them with a stiff upper lip. We know there are warm spots in the water around us, but we are sailing over them on a self-important little ship piloted by proud matrons going nowhere with a great show of dignity, dragging the water for warmth with elegant fishnets. We are the crew, and now and then we jump over the side, but only to repair the nets, seldom to swim. Our boat belongs to a fleet which still fancies it controls the ocean, but our nets are the old liberal language and theories, which do not catch what we need now to grow; they certainly don't help us to recognize a pervasive ruin which has come quietly down upon the vast suburban sprawl so many of us call home, or to face and find meaning in the fact that many of us were raised there on the spiritual analogue of a dry heave. No wonder our words to one another ride lightly upon the deepter currents, as whitecaps upon the sea.
Ironically we needn't cross class lines anymore to glimpse the meaning of our pasts and of what lies in store for us. As power becomes increasingly centralized in the service of corporate profit, more of us will find ourselves doing alienating work for large employers even as doctors, even as lawyers. Ultimately we are contronted with three choices: reaching ever higher, at increasing personal cost, for influence in the structures as they are; succumbing to a decadent privatism which depends upon the structures it disdains; or finding new ways to band together with others, and perhaps to attack the concentrations of power.
Many of us are taking the first choice, convincing ourselves that only sissies or dreamers would complain of its rigors, and hoping somehow to avoid waking up ten years hence with bloated faces in the middle of bad marriages out there in some of those sad, empty places whence we came. Not a few of us appear headed toward a genteel version of the second choice. The last choice is one we are emotionally least-equipped to make. "Rejoining the people" is difficult because the "people" themselves may be unfree and afraid, trading upon old patterns of domination and submission. In that context, "rejoining" them can only seem foolish, quixotic, a kind of unilateral disarmament where one surrenders precisely those defenses and advantages which have proven so necessary to survival in a malevolent environment. One fears a loss of "individuality" and "sensibility," little knowing that it is only in a community of equals that real love-risks may be taken, a full range of feelings shared, or wisdom truly nurtured.
Odysseys and Pilgrims' Progresses lead to that knowledge; so, if real, does every coming of age. In the struggle to deploy one's gifts humanely there is often no guidance or material reward, only that scent of tragedy which always attends the decision to find out the truth about oneself, whatever the cost. But we are not so tone-deaf to the classics, I hope, as to have forgotten that in tragedy there is real life of a kind we seldom see at Harvard.
I suppose it is at first a matter of choosing different academic courses, or, indeed, of taking a year off, or of assessing the vitality of one's relationships, and groping towards new ones. And, yes, it is a matter of seeking help if all the world seems grey. But while there is an inner, personal struggle which politics can never replace (oppression doesn't just come straight from GM or Washington, but is internalized through primary relationships, and must be uprooted there), there is also a social struggle to build communities which sustain individuals, and for which no amount of personal therapy can substitute.
Mao Tse Tung once remarked that it takes an intellectual ten years to rejoin the people, but I suppose the time estimate for students would be much shorter. Only yesterday we arrived here children fresh from suburban hothouses, living contradictions cast up by a society which was twisting us as much as those we were being trained to rule. For all God's dangers, our critique of a "Harvard education" will spring again and again from our struggle to become "ordinary" in the most profound sense of the term.
Who among us, after all, wants more than to be able to look back, when someday the touch grows cold, upon oceans of light, upon friends and lovers touched and embraced, upon comrades with whom we have shared honest work, and strangers well-met along the way? We are going to have to take risks to build social contexts for that kind of life--risks in some instances with nearly overwhelming feelings of loss, loneliness, pain, and humility along the way to a deeper joy we have scarcely remember exists, yet never completely forgotten.
After all, it is 1976; the country is changing, and we are growing old so young. I think some of ourclassmates have left us because they've found the courage to stop putting a brave face on things, and have brought themselves instead to the touchstones of whatever dreams they still harbor, to see how they live, what has become of them, and whether they may yet "rejoin the people" in themselves.
1. James Baldwain, The Fire Next Time (Dell pb) p. 128.
2. How Harvard Rules, booklet published by the African Research Group during the strike, 1969.
3. Ibid, front cover.
4. Erik Erikson, in Daniel Bell (ed) Toward the Year 2000 (Free Press, 1968) p. 188.
James A. Sleeper is writing his thesis on the socialization of suburban adolescents.