"What strikes one about the activist young is their lack of zest. Their obscenities are wooden, their insolence without a sparkle, and even their violence is trancelike. They dissipate without pleasure and are vain without a purpose. The revolution of the young is not against regimentation but against effort, against growth and, above all, against apprenticeship. They want to teach before they learn, want to retire before they work, want to rot before they ripen. They equate freedom with effortlessness and power with instant satisfaction.
Never have the young taken themselves so seriously, and the calamity is that they are listened to and deferred to by so many adults. A society that takes its solemn adolescents seriously is headed for serious trouble. How humorless and laughable the solemn young! One realizes that one of the chief differences between an adult and a juvenile is that the adult knows when he is an ass while the juvenile never does. There is a link between seriousness and dehumanization. Is there anything more serious than a cow grazing in the pasture? The nonhuman cosmos is immersed in an ocean of seriousness. Man alone can smile and laugh.
The hope is often expressed that student activism may eventually lead to genuine educational reform, provided an exasperated public does not lose patience and over-react. Is such a hope justified? I remember how in 1964 when Savio and his Free Speech Movement pals started their revolution on the Berkeley campus. I had the feeling that I was witnessing the Latin-Americanization of an American university. The politicization of universities has been for decades a fact of life below the Rio Grande. But I have still to hear anyone maintain that education and academic performance in Latin America have attained some sort of excellence not found in institutions of learning untouched by a student revolution.
We are also told that the young have a special talent for diagnosing the ills of our age. I doubt whether this is true. The young have a genius for discovering imagined grievances. It goes without saying that imagined grievances cannot be cured, but they enable the young to evade those aspects of reality which do not minister to their self- importance. "The imagined ills," says Laurens Van Der Post, "enable them to avoid the proper burden that life lays on all of us."
It is true that present-day young are idealistic. But theirs is the easy idealism that condemns abuses and pushes aside any thought that would reveal the difficulties and complexities inherent in righting wrongs. They are not willing to do the hard work by which alone the world can be improved. Hearing what they say and seeing what they do, one suspects that one of the main functions of the young's idealism is finding good reasons for doing bad things.
One has the impression that the young do not want to, or perhaps cannot, grow up. Our campuses have become dour, playless nurseries echoing with a doctrinaire baby talk. You see six-foot babies clamoring for power and protesting against universities not having adequate arrangements for child care.
Here in San Francisco, as I watch the young with their bedrolls hitching rides and see them sprawled on the grimy sidewalks of Market Street and Haight-Ashbury, I am reminded strongly of the Great Depression. That the great affluence of the 1960s should have produced a phenomenon so similar to that produced by the Great Depression, only substituting juveniles for grownups, is one more striking absurdity of an absurd age.
Never has youth been face to face with more breath-taking opportunities and more deadly influences, and never before has character been so decisive a factor in the survival of the young. Nowadays a ten-year-old must be possessed of a strong character in order not to get irrevocably flawed and blemished. The road from boyhood to manhood has become sievelike: those without the right size of character slip into pitfalls and traps. The society of the young is at present almost as subject to the laws of sheer survival as any animal society. In the Bay Area you can see the young preyed upon by dope pushers, pimps, perverts and thugs. The supposedly most sheltered generation is actually the most exposed.
The present-day young do not seem to go anywhere yet they are impatient. They cannot bide their time because it is not the time of their growth. It seems doubtful whether a generation that clamors for instant fulfillment and instant solutions is capable of creating anything of enduring value. Instantness is a characteristic of the animal world, where action follows perception with the swiftness of a chemical reaction. In man, because of his rudimentary instincts, there is a pause of faltering and groping, and this pause is the seedbed of images, longings, forebodings and irritations which are the warp and woof of the creative process. Peter Ulich, in The Human Career, underlines the social significance of the pause: "Rarely is anything more important for the rise of civilization than the human capacity to put an interval between stimulus and action. For within this interval grow deliberation, perspective, objectivity-all the higher achievements of the reflective mind."
The creative flow is predicated on an inner gradient, on the damming-up of impulses and cravings. It is of singular import that a measure of self-denial should be a factor not only in ethics but also in the creative process, and that, as suggested in Chapter 3, a free affluent society must become a creative society if it is to keep stable and orderly. Yet one wonders how acceptable such insights are to a generation indoctrinated with the belief that suppression of appetities is dangerous both psychologically and politically.
One also suspects that the young's exaggerated faith in spontaneity and inspiration is a characteristic of unstretched minds. Creative people believe in hard work. At the core of every genuine talent there is an awareness of the effort and difficulties inherent in any achievement, and the confidence that by persistence and patience something worthwhile will be realized. It needs great effort to make an achievement seem effortless."
--- First things, last things / Eric Hoffer (1972)
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