Amid Missed Revolutions, Growing Up Absurd

Youth is growing up absurd, Paul Goodman suggests, largely because "the Organized System semimonopolies, government, advertisers, " fails to provide enough "man's work"--work which young men can believe in and give themselves to. The victims of this system are the juvenile criminals, whom official culture refuses to take seriously as human beings, but also the young organization men who, though lost in self- contempt, are afraid to leave what they call rat race.

It is man's work, primarily, "to produce necessary food and shelter." But not everyone can enjoy the virtues of plowing or laying bricks, so Goodman considers the case of a young auto mechanic:

That's a good job, familiar to him, he often them as a kid. It's careful and dirty at the same time.... You please people in trouble fixing their cars, and a man is proud to see out on its own the car that limped in the tow truck. The pay is as good as the fellow's, who is respected."

But alas, the pride soon changes to anger as young hero learns that cars have a built-in obsolescence, that manufacturers don't want to them repaired. And the anger, thoroughly , leads to the logic of the fast buck--you can't beat the racket, join it. So the mechanic bills for repairs he doesn't make, and for those he does.

Similarly, the factory workers--performing a operation on a big machine he doesn't understand, unaware of the manufacturing as a whole--is indifferent about his job. work, says Goodman, is unchallenging, , and seemingly unimportant. So worker is simply putting in time for the . The job holds no inherent interest.

Of course, most college-educated young men, Goodman, "make up the tribes of salesmanship, entertainment, business management, , and advertising." In this world, attention is paid to the object, the , the program, the task, the need; but immense attention to the role, procedure, prestige, profit." It is a world of role-players, whose performance calms their gnawing feelings frustration and worthlessness.

It is true, says Goodman, that in looking for , men ask for good pay, prestige and conditions, not for work that is useful or honorable within the limits of business ethics). But the remains: can youth possibly resign themselves to spending eight hours a day "doing that is no good," and not grow up absurd? a young man defines society as a " frivolous racket," what choices does he ? And, the more common question, what society do with such a chap?

According to Goodman, society refuses to take seriously, and to recognize that he has real in a real world. This chap and others like are a "youth problem," says Goodman, and emphasis is on their "background conditions," which one can manipulate. Thus, "the aim is not to give human beings real goals that warrant belief, and tasks to share in, but to reestablish "belonging'."

So these teen-agers hang around and do nothing at all, neither work nor play. Doing nothing, they begin to wonder if they are nothing. So their system of values centers on responses to "threatened masculinity." And these responses often bring trouble.

Last summer, Governor Rockefeller responded to a week of seven juvenile murders with this statement:

"We have to constantly devise new ways to bring about a challenge to these young folk, and to provide an outlet for their energies, and give them a sense of belonging."

Goodman rips this statement apart: can the Governor devise better challenges that the gang-leader? are these mysterious energies undifferentiated? where can a young man now find a greater 'togetherness' than in the strict conformity of the gang? The official practice, Goodman charges, is to write these boys off as useless and try to cajole or baffle them into harmlessness.

But many young men will not be cajoled. So they rebel--or rather, some of them do--and so Goodman's next problem is to explore a life of voluntary poverty, a life in which a man works for subsistence at a job that speaks for itself ('farm labor, hauling boxes, janitoring or dish washing, messenger").

Even more serious than the difficulties of voluntary poverty, however, is a "neurosis of chronic boredom." Goodman finds that, as cities, machines and the organization of production have grown "out of human scale," the sense of causality is lost. In the crowded city, there is a loss of neighborhood, because of poor planning and increased mobility of families. "A child might not even know what work his daddy does. Shop talk will be, almost invariably, griping about interpersonal relations."

Worst of all for children, says Goodman, progressive education has been perverted into 'life adjustment.' What must be revived is: experiment to learn theory, permissiveness in all animal behavior, emphasis on individual differences, taking youth seriously as an age in itself, community of youth and adult minimizing "authority," and emphasis in the curriculum of real problems of wider society.

But lacking a truly progressive education, the child is trained simply to accept the system, taught subtly that his role is to "belong" and "adjust," surely not to change or reform the society. But where has this led? Patriotism is feeble. The best people, says Goodman, are not turning back--like Plato's philosopher who has emerged from the case--to serve their country. So boys listen to speeches written on Madison Avenue, and they have not yet learned to cry, "Shame! make your own speech at least!"

The weakness of community is shown too in the constant plea that the family must bear the burden of teaching the culture. In a real community, there is an economy, with its crafts and its ideas. The shape of the community makes the culture evident. But, lacking this strong community, kids invent their own, reviving the feudal code of Alfred the Great, marking out safe territories, and making provision for special classes of revenge.

And then in the puzzle of finding an aim in life (a kid can't hang around the gang forever), the young man places all his hopes in having a normal healthy marriage and raising non-neurotic children. Thus, "togetherness" becomes a partial substitute for meaningful work. But of course, the responsibilities of a family only entrap a man more securely in the system.

When the children grow up, they find it hard to break away from the father who's been so good to them, and yet they cannot affirm his values, and yet (again) they have no better values to substitute. So, says Goodman, they go beat.

In other words, "if society becomes too tightly integrated, and preempts all the available space, materials, and methods, then it is failing to provide for just the margin of formlessness, real risk, novelty, spontaneity, that makes growth possible."

In addition to room for risk, says Goodman, a young man needs faith. He must be able to work hard, to lose himself in his work because the community supports him. But this sort of faith (in vocation) is today rare, and most teenagers become either "early-resigned" (those who, though qualified for the rat race, balk at submitting to it) or "early-fatalistic" (those who, underprivileged, never get a chance to get into the rat race).

In one of his more fantastic chapters, Goodman views society, through the eyes of a youth, as "an apparently closed room in which there is a large rat race as the dominant center of attention." Running madly are the middle-status Organization men, who, Goodman thinks, "praise and envy the disqualified poor: their uncompetitiveness, animality, shouting and fighting, not striving for empty rewards." Others in the room are the "underprivileged Corner Boys," who, we are told, are "mesmerized by the symbols and culture of the rat race," and will ultimately take factory jobs and not care.

Important are the delinquents, who, like the junior executives, take short cuts to glamour, and help staff "the integral whole of politics-and-rackets," thus forming an alliance against "the good boys who naively try to make something of themselves." Also in the room are the flunk-outs (the "ambivalently wished-for station of Bums"), the Beat Generation whose "onslaughts on the Air-Conditioned nightmare...sound very much like the griping of soldiers who do not intend to mutiny"), the Angry Young Men (who attack the machine itself), French "existential youth" (saying "no exit"), and finally, the hipster (who "contents himself with a magical omnipotence never disproved because never tested").

From this zoo, Goodman selects the Beats as a pilot study in the uses of leisure. "Their rejection of the popular culture, Broadway theatre, status commodities, bespeaks robust mental health." On the other hand, Beat art, says Goodman, is parochial, hopelessly parochial. Discussing Beat words--"make it," "like," "man," "cool" --Goodman finds a paucity of vocabulary and syntax expressive of the Best withdrawal from standard civilization and its learning. "In a Best group it is bad form to assert or deny a preposition as trus or false, probable or improbable, or to want to explore its meaning. The aim of conversation is for each one to be able, by speech, to know that he is existing and belonging."

Similarly, Beat novels lack structure and thus interpretation, character and thus causality. The point, it appears, is simply to insist that something happened, always on the road, on the move.

Beside the early-resigned there are the early-fatalistic, who put together gangs more readily than novels. Here Goodman offers perhaps his best insight: a view of a delinquent as powerlessly struggling for life within, not resigned from, an unacceptable world. We are reminded of Dostoevski. As Goodman puts it, "On the streets, they feel worthless and abandoned; in the reformatory, they are accepted back home." This is "delinquency-in-order-to-get-caught," or less clumsily, crime for the sake of punishment that implies 'belonging.'

The gangs are formed, and what Freud called the "narcissism of small differences" begins to operate. "Turfs" or gang territories are established. "Points of honor" become the meaning in life. And so, into insults--the formal insult, say, of invading rival "turf"--is poured all the accumulated frustration endemic in our society. As Goodman puts it, "It is inevitable that there should be a public dream of universal disaster, with vast explosions, fires, and electric shocks..."

A successful revolution establishes a new community, but a missed revolution makes irrelevant the community that persists. Goodman then lists some revolutions we have missed, or started, but compromised: technocracy, garden city, new deal syndicalism, class struggle, democracy, freedom of speech, liberalism, agrarianism, fraternity, brotherhood of races, pacifism, enlightenment, popular culture, sexual revolution (which Goodman refers to again and again), and of course, progressive education. Even this partial list hints at the scope of Goodman's approach.

And so, for that matter, does his "clear but exaggerated picture of our American society: slums of engineering, boondoggling production, chaotic congestion, tribes of middlemen . . . no patriotism, an empty nationalism bound for a cataclysmically disastrous fnish, wise opinion swamped . . . youth idle and truant, youth sexually suffering and sexually obsessed, youth without goals. . . ."

In all, Goodman judges our society as not outrageously bad, but far from adequate. Near the end of the book, he suggests one program that would make growing up less absurd--and that is decentralization, so that men could get back a sense of personal involvement in meaningful decisions, political and economic. Unfortunately, this issue is raised only vaguely and without much consideration of the politics involved.

It is man's work, primarily, "to produce necessary food and shelter." But not everyone can enjoy the virtues of plowing or laying bricks, so Goodman considers the case of a young auto mechanic:

That's a good job, familiar to him, he often them as a kid. It's careful and dirty at the same time.... You please people in trouble fixing their cars, and a man is proud to see out on its own the car that limped in the tow truck. The pay is as good as the fellow's, who is respected."

But alas, the pride soon changes to anger as young hero learns that cars have a built-in obsolescence, that manufacturers don't want to them repaired. And the anger, thoroughly , leads to the logic of the fast buck--you can't beat the racket, join it. So the mechanic bills for repairs he doesn't make, and for those he does.

Similarly, the factory workers--performing a operation on a big machine he doesn't understand, unaware of the manufacturing as a whole--is indifferent about his job. work, says Goodman, is unchallenging, , and seemingly unimportant. So worker is simply putting in time for the . The job holds no inherent interest.

Of course, most college-educated young men, Goodman, "make up the tribes of salesmanship, entertainment, business management, , and advertising." In this world, attention is paid to the object, the , the program, the task, the need; but immense attention to the role, procedure, prestige, profit." It is a world of role-players, whose performance calms their gnawing feelings frustration and worthlessness.

It is true, says Goodman, that in looking for , men ask for good pay, prestige and conditions, not for work that is useful or honorable within the limits of business ethics). But the remains: can youth possibly resign themselves to spending eight hours a day "doing that is no good," and not grow up absurd? a young man defines society as a " frivolous racket," what choices does he ? And, the more common question, what society do with such a chap?

According to Goodman, society refuses to take seriously, and to recognize that he has real in a real world. This chap and others like are a "youth problem," says Goodman, and emphasis is on their "background conditions," which one can manipulate. Thus, "the aim is not to give human beings real goals that warrant belief, and tasks to share in, but to reestablish "belonging'."

So these teen-agers hang around and do nothing at all, neither work nor play. Doing nothing, they begin to wonder if they are nothing. So their system of values centers on responses to "threatened masculinity." And these responses often bring trouble.

Last summer, Governor Rockefeller responded to a week of seven juvenile murders with this statement:

"We have to constantly devise new ways to bring about a challenge to these young folk, and to provide an outlet for their energies, and give them a sense of belonging."

Goodman rips this statement apart: can the Governor devise better challenges that the gang-leader? are these mysterious energies undifferentiated? where can a young man now find a greater 'togetherness' than in the strict conformity of the gang? The official practice, Goodman charges, is to write these boys off as useless and try to cajole or baffle them into harmlessness.

But many young men will not be cajoled. So they rebel--or rather, some of them do--and so Goodman's next problem is to explore a life of voluntary poverty, a life in which a man works for subsistence at a job that speaks for itself ('farm labor, hauling boxes, janitoring or dish washing, messenger").

Even more serious than the difficulties of voluntary poverty, however, is a "neurosis of chronic boredom." Goodman finds that, as cities, machines and the organization of production have grown "out of human scale," the sense of causality is lost. In the crowded city, there is a loss of neighborhood, because of poor planning and increased mobility of families. "A child might not even know what work his daddy does. Shop talk will be, almost invariably, griping about interpersonal relations."

Worst of all for children, says Goodman, progressive education has been perverted into 'life adjustment.' What must be revived is: experiment to learn theory, permissiveness in all animal behavior, emphasis on individual differences, taking youth seriously as an age in itself, community of youth and adult minimizing "authority," and emphasis in the curriculum of real problems of wider society.

But lacking a truly progressive education, the child is trained simply to accept the system, taught subtly that his role is to "belong" and "adjust," surely not to change or reform the society. But where has this led? Patriotism is feeble. The best people, says Goodman, are not turning back--like Plato's philosopher who has emerged from the case--to serve their country. So boys listen to speeches written on Madison Avenue, and they have not yet learned to cry, "Shame! make your own speech at least!"

The weakness of community is shown too in the constant plea that the family must bear the burden of teaching the culture. In a real community, there is an economy, with its crafts and its ideas. The shape of the community makes the culture evident. But, lacking this strong community, kids invent their own, reviving the feudal code of Alfred the Great, marking out safe territories, and making provision for special classes of revenge.

And then in the puzzle of finding an aim in life (a kid can't hang around the gang forever), the young man places all his hopes in having a normal healthy marriage and raising non-neurotic children. Thus, "togetherness" becomes a partial substitute for meaningful work. But of course, the responsibilities of a family only entrap a man more securely in the system.

When the children grow up, they find it hard to break away from the father who's been so good to them, and yet they cannot affirm his values, and yet (again) they have no better values to substitute. So, says Goodman, they go beat.

In other words, "if society becomes too tightly integrated, and preempts all the available space, materials, and methods, then it is failing to provide for just the margin of formlessness, real risk, novelty, spontaneity, that makes growth possible."

In addition to room for risk, says Goodman, a young man needs faith. He must be able to work hard, to lose himself in his work because the community supports him. But this sort of faith (in vocation) is today rare, and most teenagers become either "early-resigned" (those who, though qualified for the rat race, balk at submitting to it) or "early-fatalistic" (those who, underprivileged, never get a chance to get into the rat race).

In one of his more fantastic chapters, Goodman views society, through the eyes of a youth, as "an apparently closed room in which there is a large rat race as the dominant center of attention." Running madly are the middle-status Organization men, who, Goodman thinks, "praise and envy the disqualified poor: their uncompetitiveness, animality, shouting and fighting, not striving for empty rewards." Others in the room are the "underprivileged Corner Boys," who, we are told, are "mesmerized by the symbols and culture of the rat race," and will ultimately take factory jobs and not care.

Important are the delinquents, who, like the junior executives, take short cuts to glamour, and help staff "the integral whole of politics-and-rackets," thus forming an alliance against "the good boys who naively try to make something of themselves." Also in the room are the flunk-outs (the "ambivalently wished-for station of Bums"), the Beat Generation whose "onslaughts on the Air-Conditioned nightmare...sound very much like the griping of soldiers who do not intend to mutiny"), the Angry Young Men (who attack the machine itself), French "existential youth" (saying "no exit"), and finally, the hipster (who "contents himself with a magical omnipotence never disproved because never tested").

From this zoo, Goodman selects the Beats as a pilot study in the uses of leisure. "Their rejection of the popular culture, Broadway theatre, status commodities, bespeaks robust mental health." On the other hand, Beat art, says Goodman, is parochial, hopelessly parochial. Discussing Beat words--"make it," "like," "man," "cool" --Goodman finds a paucity of vocabulary and syntax expressive of the Best withdrawal from standard civilization and its learning. "In a Best group it is bad form to assert or deny a preposition as trus or false, probable or improbable, or to want to explore its meaning. The aim of conversation is for each one to be able, by speech, to know that he is existing and belonging."

Similarly, Beat novels lack structure and thus interpretation, character and thus causality. The point, it appears, is simply to insist that something happened, always on the road, on the move.

Beside the early-resigned there are the early-fatalistic, who put together gangs more readily than novels. Here Goodman offers perhaps his best insight: a view of a delinquent as powerlessly struggling for life within, not resigned from, an unacceptable world. We are reminded of Dostoevski. As Goodman puts it, "On the streets, they feel worthless and abandoned; in the reformatory, they are accepted back home." This is "delinquency-in-order-to-get-caught," or less clumsily, crime for the sake of punishment that implies 'belonging.'

The gangs are formed, and what Freud called the "narcissism of small differences" begins to operate. "Turfs" or gang territories are established. "Points of honor" become the meaning in life. And so, into insults--the formal insult, say, of invading rival "turf"--is poured all the accumulated frustration endemic in our society. As Goodman puts it, "It is inevitable that there should be a public dream of universal disaster, with vast explosions, fires, and electric shocks..."

A successful revolution establishes a new community, but a missed revolution makes irrelevant the community that persists. Goodman then lists some revolutions we have missed, or started, but compromised: technocracy, garden city, new deal syndicalism, class struggle, democracy, freedom of speech, liberalism, agrarianism, fraternity, brotherhood of races, pacifism, enlightenment, popular culture, sexual revolution (which Goodman refers to again and again), and of course, progressive education. Even this partial list hints at the scope of Goodman's approach.

And so, for that matter, does his "clear but exaggerated picture of our American society: slums of engineering, boondoggling production, chaotic congestion, tribes of middlemen . . . no patriotism, an empty nationalism bound for a cataclysmically disastrous fnish, wise opinion swamped . . . youth idle and truant, youth sexually suffering and sexually obsessed, youth without goals. . . ."

In all, Goodman judges our society as not outrageously bad, but far from adequate. Near the end of the book, he suggests one program that would make growing up less absurd--and that is decentralization, so that men could get back a sense of personal involvement in meaningful decisions, political and economic. Unfortunately, this issue is raised only vaguely and without much consideration of the politics involved.

But alas, the pride soon changes to anger as young hero learns that cars have a built-in obsolescence, that manufacturers don't want to them repaired. And the anger, thoroughly , leads to the logic of the fast buck--you can't beat the racket, join it. So the mechanic bills for repairs he doesn't make, and for those he does.

Similarly, the factory workers--performing a operation on a big machine he doesn't understand, unaware of the manufacturing as a whole--is indifferent about his job. work, says Goodman, is unchallenging, , and seemingly unimportant. So worker is simply putting in time for the . The job holds no inherent interest.

Of course, most college-educated young men, Goodman, "make up the tribes of salesmanship, entertainment, business management, , and advertising." In this world, attention is paid to the object, the , the program, the task, the need; but immense attention to the role, procedure, prestige, profit." It is a world of role-players, whose performance calms their gnawing feelings frustration and worthlessness.

It is true, says Goodman, that in looking for , men ask for good pay, prestige and conditions, not for work that is useful or honorable within the limits of business ethics). But the remains: can youth possibly resign themselves to spending eight hours a day "doing that is no good," and not grow up absurd? a young man defines society as a " frivolous racket," what choices does he ? And, the more common question, what society do with such a chap?

According to Goodman, society refuses to take seriously, and to recognize that he has real in a real world. This chap and others like are a "youth problem," says Goodman, and emphasis is on their "background conditions," which one can manipulate. Thus, "the aim is not to give human beings real goals that warrant belief, and tasks to share in, but to reestablish "belonging'."

So these teen-agers hang around and do nothing at all, neither work nor play. Doing nothing, they begin to wonder if they are nothing. So their system of values centers on responses to "threatened masculinity." And these responses often bring trouble.

Last summer, Governor Rockefeller responded to a week of seven juvenile murders with this statement:

"We have to constantly devise new ways to bring about a challenge to these young folk, and to provide an outlet for their energies, and give them a sense of belonging."

Goodman rips this statement apart: can the Governor devise better challenges that the gang-leader? are these mysterious energies undifferentiated? where can a young man now find a greater 'togetherness' than in the strict conformity of the gang? The official practice, Goodman charges, is to write these boys off as useless and try to cajole or baffle them into harmlessness.

But many young men will not be cajoled. So they rebel--or rather, some of them do--and so Goodman's next problem is to explore a life of voluntary poverty, a life in which a man works for subsistence at a job that speaks for itself ('farm labor, hauling boxes, janitoring or dish washing, messenger").

Even more serious than the difficulties of voluntary poverty, however, is a "neurosis of chronic boredom." Goodman finds that, as cities, machines and the organization of production have grown "out of human scale," the sense of causality is lost. In the crowded city, there is a loss of neighborhood, because of poor planning and increased mobility of families. "A child might not even know what work his daddy does. Shop talk will be, almost invariably, griping about interpersonal relations."

Worst of all for children, says Goodman, progressive education has been perverted into 'life adjustment.' What must be revived is: experiment to learn theory, permissiveness in all animal behavior, emphasis on individual differences, taking youth seriously as an age in itself, community of youth and adult minimizing "authority," and emphasis in the curriculum of real problems of wider society.

But lacking a truly progressive education, the child is trained simply to accept the system, taught subtly that his role is to "belong" and "adjust," surely not to change or reform the society. But where has this led? Patriotism is feeble. The best people, says Goodman, are not turning back--like Plato's philosopher who has emerged from the case--to serve their country. So boys listen to speeches written on Madison Avenue, and they have not yet learned to cry, "Shame! make your own speech at least!"

The weakness of community is shown too in the constant plea that the family must bear the burden of teaching the culture. In a real community, there is an economy, with its crafts and its ideas. The shape of the community makes the culture evident. But, lacking this strong community, kids invent their own, reviving the feudal code of Alfred the Great, marking out safe territories, and making provision for special classes of revenge.

And then in the puzzle of finding an aim in life (a kid can't hang around the gang forever), the young man places all his hopes in having a normal healthy marriage and raising non-neurotic children. Thus, "togetherness" becomes a partial substitute for meaningful work. But of course, the responsibilities of a family only entrap a man more securely in the system.

When the children grow up, they find it hard to break away from the father who's been so good to them, and yet they cannot affirm his values, and yet (again) they have no better values to substitute. So, says Goodman, they go beat.

In other words, "if society becomes too tightly integrated, and preempts all the available space, materials, and methods, then it is failing to provide for just the margin of formlessness, real risk, novelty, spontaneity, that makes growth possible."

In addition to room for risk, says Goodman, a young man needs faith. He must be able to work hard, to lose himself in his work because the community supports him. But this sort of faith (in vocation) is today rare, and most teenagers become either "early-resigned" (those who, though qualified for the rat race, balk at submitting to it) or "early-fatalistic" (those who, underprivileged, never get a chance to get into the rat race).

In one of his more fantastic chapters, Goodman views society, through the eyes of a youth, as "an apparently closed room in which there is a large rat race as the dominant center of attention." Running madly are the middle-status Organization men, who, Goodman thinks, "praise and envy the disqualified poor: their uncompetitiveness, animality, shouting and fighting, not striving for empty rewards." Others in the room are the "underprivileged Corner Boys," who, we are told, are "mesmerized by the symbols and culture of the rat race," and will ultimately take factory jobs and not care.

Important are the delinquents, who, like the junior executives, take short cuts to glamour, and help staff "the integral whole of politics-and-rackets," thus forming an alliance against "the good boys who naively try to make something of themselves." Also in the room are the flunk-outs (the "ambivalently wished-for station of Bums"), the Beat Generation whose "onslaughts on the Air-Conditioned nightmare...sound very much like the griping of soldiers who do not intend to mutiny"), the Angry Young Men (who attack the machine itself), French "existential youth" (saying "no exit"), and finally, the hipster (who "contents himself with a magical omnipotence never disproved because never tested").

From this zoo, Goodman selects the Beats as a pilot study in the uses of leisure. "Their rejection of the popular culture, Broadway theatre, status commodities, bespeaks robust mental health." On the other hand, Beat art, says Goodman, is parochial, hopelessly parochial. Discussing Beat words--"make it," "like," "man," "cool" --Goodman finds a paucity of vocabulary and syntax expressive of the Best withdrawal from standard civilization and its learning. "In a Best group it is bad form to assert or deny a preposition as trus or false, probable or improbable, or to want to explore its meaning. The aim of conversation is for each one to be able, by speech, to know that he is existing and belonging."

Similarly, Beat novels lack structure and thus interpretation, character and thus causality. The point, it appears, is simply to insist that something happened, always on the road, on the move.

Beside the early-resigned there are the early-fatalistic, who put together gangs more readily than novels. Here Goodman offers perhaps his best insight: a view of a delinquent as powerlessly struggling for life within, not resigned from, an unacceptable world. We are reminded of Dostoevski. As Goodman puts it, "On the streets, they feel worthless and abandoned; in the reformatory, they are accepted back home." This is "delinquency-in-order-to-get-caught," or less clumsily, crime for the sake of punishment that implies 'belonging.'

The gangs are formed, and what Freud called the "narcissism of small differences" begins to operate. "Turfs" or gang territories are established. "Points of honor" become the meaning in life. And so, into insults--the formal insult, say, of invading rival "turf"--is poured all the accumulated frustration endemic in our society. As Goodman puts it, "It is inevitable that there should be a public dream of universal disaster, with vast explosions, fires, and electric shocks..."

A successful revolution establishes a new community, but a missed revolution makes irrelevant the community that persists. Goodman then lists some revolutions we have missed, or started, but compromised: technocracy, garden city, new deal syndicalism, class struggle, democracy, freedom of speech, liberalism, agrarianism, fraternity, brotherhood of races, pacifism, enlightenment, popular culture, sexual revolution (which Goodman refers to again and again), and of course, progressive education. Even this partial list hints at the scope of Goodman's approach.

And so, for that matter, does his "clear but exaggerated picture of our American society: slums of engineering, boondoggling production, chaotic congestion, tribes of middlemen . . . no patriotism, an empty nationalism bound for a cataclysmically disastrous fnish, wise opinion swamped . . . youth idle and truant, youth sexually suffering and sexually obsessed, youth without goals. . . ."

In all, Goodman judges our society as not outrageously bad, but far from adequate. Near the end of the book, he suggests one program that would make growing up less absurd--and that is decentralization, so that men could get back a sense of personal involvement in meaningful decisions, political and economic. Unfortunately, this issue is raised only vaguely and without much consideration of the politics involved.

Similarly, the factory workers--performing a operation on a big machine he doesn't understand, unaware of the manufacturing as a whole--is indifferent about his job. work, says Goodman, is unchallenging, , and seemingly unimportant. So worker is simply putting in time for the . The job holds no inherent interest.

Of course, most college-educated young men, Goodman, "make up the tribes of salesmanship, entertainment, business management, , and advertising." In this world, attention is paid to the object, the , the program, the task, the need; but immense attention to the role, procedure, prestige, profit." It is a world of role-players, whose performance calms their gnawing feelings frustration and worthlessness.

It is true, says Goodman, that in looking for , men ask for good pay, prestige and conditions, not for work that is useful or honorable within the limits of business ethics). But the remains: can youth possibly resign themselves to spending eight hours a day "doing that is no good," and not grow up absurd? a young man defines society as a " frivolous racket," what choices does he ? And, the more common question, what society do with such a chap?

According to Goodman, society refuses to take seriously, and to recognize that he has real in a real world. This chap and others like are a "youth problem," says Goodman, and emphasis is on their "background conditions," which one can manipulate. Thus, "the aim is not to give human beings real goals that warrant belief, and tasks to share in, but to reestablish "belonging'."

So these teen-agers hang around and do nothing at all, neither work nor play. Doing nothing, they begin to wonder if they are nothing. So their system of values centers on responses to "threatened masculinity." And these responses often bring trouble.

Last summer, Governor Rockefeller responded to a week of seven juvenile murders with this statement:

"We have to constantly devise new ways to bring about a challenge to these young folk, and to provide an outlet for their energies, and give them a sense of belonging."

Goodman rips this statement apart: can the Governor devise better challenges that the gang-leader? are these mysterious energies undifferentiated? where can a young man now find a greater 'togetherness' than in the strict conformity of the gang? The official practice, Goodman charges, is to write these boys off as useless and try to cajole or baffle them into harmlessness.

But many young men will not be cajoled. So they rebel--or rather, some of them do--and so Goodman's next problem is to explore a life of voluntary poverty, a life in which a man works for subsistence at a job that speaks for itself ('farm labor, hauling boxes, janitoring or dish washing, messenger").

Even more serious than the difficulties of voluntary poverty, however, is a "neurosis of chronic boredom." Goodman finds that, as cities, machines and the organization of production have grown "out of human scale," the sense of causality is lost. In the crowded city, there is a loss of neighborhood, because of poor planning and increased mobility of families. "A child might not even know what work his daddy does. Shop talk will be, almost invariably, griping about interpersonal relations."

Worst of all for children, says Goodman, progressive education has been perverted into 'life adjustment.' What must be revived is: experiment to learn theory, permissiveness in all animal behavior, emphasis on individual differences, taking youth seriously as an age in itself, community of youth and adult minimizing "authority," and emphasis in the curriculum of real problems of wider society.

But lacking a truly progressive education, the child is trained simply to accept the system, taught subtly that his role is to "belong" and "adjust," surely not to change or reform the society. But where has this led? Patriotism is feeble. The best people, says Goodman, are not turning back--like Plato's philosopher who has emerged from the case--to serve their country. So boys listen to speeches written on Madison Avenue, and they have not yet learned to cry, "Shame! make your own speech at least!"

The weakness of community is shown too in the constant plea that the family must bear the burden of teaching the culture. In a real community, there is an economy, with its crafts and its ideas. The shape of the community makes the culture evident. But, lacking this strong community, kids invent their own, reviving the feudal code of Alfred the Great, marking out safe territories, and making provision for special classes of revenge.

And then in the puzzle of finding an aim in life (a kid can't hang around the gang forever), the young man places all his hopes in having a normal healthy marriage and raising non-neurotic children. Thus, "togetherness" becomes a partial substitute for meaningful work. But of course, the responsibilities of a family only entrap a man more securely in the system.

When the children grow up, they find it hard to break away from the father who's been so good to them, and yet they cannot affirm his values, and yet (again) they have no better values to substitute. So, says Goodman, they go beat.

In other words, "if society becomes too tightly integrated, and preempts all the available space, materials, and methods, then it is failing to provide for just the margin of formlessness, real risk, novelty, spontaneity, that makes growth possible."

In addition to room for risk, says Goodman, a young man needs faith. He must be able to work hard, to lose himself in his work because the community supports him. But this sort of faith (in vocation) is today rare, and most teenagers become either "early-resigned" (those who, though qualified for the rat race, balk at submitting to it) or "early-fatalistic" (those who, underprivileged, never get a chance to get into the rat race).

In one of his more fantastic chapters, Goodman views society, through the eyes of a youth, as "an apparently closed room in which there is a large rat race as the dominant center of attention." Running madly are the middle-status Organization men, who, Goodman thinks, "praise and envy the disqualified poor: their uncompetitiveness, animality, shouting and fighting, not striving for empty rewards." Others in the room are the "underprivileged Corner Boys," who, we are told, are "mesmerized by the symbols and culture of the rat race," and will ultimately take factory jobs and not care.

Important are the delinquents, who, like the junior executives, take short cuts to glamour, and help staff "the integral whole of politics-and-rackets," thus forming an alliance against "the good boys who naively try to make something of themselves." Also in the room are the flunk-outs (the "ambivalently wished-for station of Bums"), the Beat Generation whose "onslaughts on the Air-Conditioned nightmare...sound very much like the griping of soldiers who do not intend to mutiny"), the Angry Young Men (who attack the machine itself), French "existential youth" (saying "no exit"), and finally, the hipster (who "contents himself with a magical omnipotence never disproved because never tested").

From this zoo, Goodman selects the Beats as a pilot study in the uses of leisure. "Their rejection of the popular culture, Broadway theatre, status commodities, bespeaks robust mental health." On the other hand, Beat art, says Goodman, is parochial, hopelessly parochial. Discussing Beat words--"make it," "like," "man," "cool" --Goodman finds a paucity of vocabulary and syntax expressive of the Best withdrawal from standard civilization and its learning. "In a Best group it is bad form to assert or deny a preposition as trus or false, probable or improbable, or to want to explore its meaning. The aim of conversation is for each one to be able, by speech, to know that he is existing and belonging."

Similarly, Beat novels lack structure and thus interpretation, character and thus causality. The point, it appears, is simply to insist that something happened, always on the road, on the move.

Beside the early-resigned there are the early-fatalistic, who put together gangs more readily than novels. Here Goodman offers perhaps his best insight: a view of a delinquent as powerlessly struggling for life within, not resigned from, an unacceptable world. We are reminded of Dostoevski. As Goodman puts it, "On the streets, they feel worthless and abandoned; in the reformatory, they are accepted back home." This is "delinquency-in-order-to-get-caught," or less clumsily, crime for the sake of punishment that implies 'belonging.'

The gangs are formed, and what Freud called the "narcissism of small differences" begins to operate. "Turfs" or gang territories are established. "Points of honor" become the meaning in life. And so, into insults--the formal insult, say, of invading rival "turf"--is poured all the accumulated frustration endemic in our society. As Goodman puts it, "It is inevitable that there should be a public dream of universal disaster, with vast explosions, fires, and electric shocks..."

A successful revolution establishes a new community, but a missed revolution makes irrelevant the community that persists. Goodman then lists some revolutions we have missed, or started, but compromised: technocracy, garden city, new deal syndicalism, class struggle, democracy, freedom of speech, liberalism, agrarianism, fraternity, brotherhood of races, pacifism, enlightenment, popular culture, sexual revolution (which Goodman refers to again and again), and of course, progressive education. Even this partial list hints at the scope of Goodman's approach.

And so, for that matter, does his "clear but exaggerated picture of our American society: slums of engineering, boondoggling production, chaotic congestion, tribes of middlemen . . . no patriotism, an empty nationalism bound for a cataclysmically disastrous fnish, wise opinion swamped . . . youth idle and truant, youth sexually suffering and sexually obsessed, youth without goals. . . ."

In all, Goodman judges our society as not outrageously bad, but far from adequate. Near the end of the book, he suggests one program that would make growing up less absurd--and that is decentralization, so that men could get back a sense of personal involvement in meaningful decisions, political and economic. Unfortunately, this issue is raised only vaguely and without much consideration of the politics involved.

Of course, most college-educated young men, Goodman, "make up the tribes of salesmanship, entertainment, business management, , and advertising." In this world, attention is paid to the object, the , the program, the task, the need; but immense attention to the role, procedure, prestige, profit." It is a world of role-players, whose performance calms their gnawing feelings frustration and worthlessness.

It is true, says Goodman, that in looking for , men ask for good pay, prestige and conditions, not for work that is useful or honorable within the limits of business ethics). But the remains: can youth possibly resign themselves to spending eight hours a day "doing that is no good," and not grow up absurd? a young man defines society as a " frivolous racket," what choices does he ? And, the more common question, what society do with such a chap?

According to Goodman, society refuses to take seriously, and to recognize that he has real in a real world. This chap and others like are a "youth problem," says Goodman, and emphasis is on their "background conditions," which one can manipulate. Thus, "the aim is not to give human beings real goals that warrant belief, and tasks to share in, but to reestablish "belonging'."

So these teen-agers hang around and do nothing at all, neither work nor play. Doing nothing, they begin to wonder if they are nothing. So their system of values centers on responses to "threatened masculinity." And these responses often bring trouble.

Last summer, Governor Rockefeller responded to a week of seven juvenile murders with this statement:

"We have to constantly devise new ways to bring about a challenge to these young folk, and to provide an outlet for their energies, and give them a sense of belonging."

Goodman rips this statement apart: can the Governor devise better challenges that the gang-leader? are these mysterious energies undifferentiated? where can a young man now find a greater 'togetherness' than in the strict conformity of the gang? The official practice, Goodman charges, is to write these boys off as useless and try to cajole or baffle them into harmlessness.

But many young men will not be cajoled. So they rebel--or rather, some of them do--and so Goodman's next problem is to explore a life of voluntary poverty, a life in which a man works for subsistence at a job that speaks for itself ('farm labor, hauling boxes, janitoring or dish washing, messenger").

Even more serious than the difficulties of voluntary poverty, however, is a "neurosis of chronic boredom." Goodman finds that, as cities, machines and the organization of production have grown "out of human scale," the sense of causality is lost. In the crowded city, there is a loss of neighborhood, because of poor planning and increased mobility of families. "A child might not even know what work his daddy does. Shop talk will be, almost invariably, griping about interpersonal relations."

Worst of all for children, says Goodman, progressive education has been perverted into 'life adjustment.' What must be revived is: experiment to learn theory, permissiveness in all animal behavior, emphasis on individual differences, taking youth seriously as an age in itself, community of youth and adult minimizing "authority," and emphasis in the curriculum of real problems of wider society.

But lacking a truly progressive education, the child is trained simply to accept the system, taught subtly that his role is to "belong" and "adjust," surely not to change or reform the society. But where has this led? Patriotism is feeble. The best people, says Goodman, are not turning back--like Plato's philosopher who has emerged from the case--to serve their country. So boys listen to speeches written on Madison Avenue, and they have not yet learned to cry, "Shame! make your own speech at least!"

The weakness of community is shown too in the constant plea that the family must bear the burden of teaching the culture. In a real community, there is an economy, with its crafts and its ideas. The shape of the community makes the culture evident. But, lacking this strong community, kids invent their own, reviving the feudal code of Alfred the Great, marking out safe territories, and making provision for special classes of revenge.

And then in the puzzle of finding an aim in life (a kid can't hang around the gang forever), the young man places all his hopes in having a normal healthy marriage and raising non-neurotic children. Thus, "togetherness" becomes a partial substitute for meaningful work. But of course, the responsibilities of a family only entrap a man more securely in the system.

When the children grow up, they find it hard to break away from the father who's been so good to them, and yet they cannot affirm his values, and yet (again) they have no better values to substitute. So, says Goodman, they go beat.

In other words, "if society becomes too tightly integrated, and preempts all the available space, materials, and methods, then it is failing to provide for just the margin of formlessness, real risk, novelty, spontaneity, that makes growth possible."

In addition to room for risk, says Goodman, a young man needs faith. He must be able to work hard, to lose himself in his work because the community supports him. But this sort of faith (in vocation) is today rare, and most teenagers become either "early-resigned" (those who, though qualified for the rat race, balk at submitting to it) or "early-fatalistic" (those who, underprivileged, never get a chance to get into the rat race).

In one of his more fantastic chapters, Goodman views society, through the eyes of a youth, as "an apparently closed room in which there is a large rat race as the dominant center of attention." Running madly are the middle-status Organization men, who, Goodman thinks, "praise and envy the disqualified poor: their uncompetitiveness, animality, shouting and fighting, not striving for empty rewards." Others in the room are the "underprivileged Corner Boys," who, we are told, are "mesmerized by the symbols and culture of the rat race," and will ultimately take factory jobs and not care.

Important are the delinquents, who, like the junior executives, take short cuts to glamour, and help staff "the integral whole of politics-and-rackets," thus forming an alliance against "the good boys who naively try to make something of themselves." Also in the room are the flunk-outs (the "ambivalently wished-for station of Bums"), the Beat Generation whose "onslaughts on the Air-Conditioned nightmare...sound very much like the griping of soldiers who do not intend to mutiny"), the Angry Young Men (who attack the machine itself), French "existential youth" (saying "no exit"), and finally, the hipster (who "contents himself with a magical omnipotence never disproved because never tested").

From this zoo, Goodman selects the Beats as a pilot study in the uses of leisure. "Their rejection of the popular culture, Broadway theatre, status commodities, bespeaks robust mental health." On the other hand, Beat art, says Goodman, is parochial, hopelessly parochial. Discussing Beat words--"make it," "like," "man," "cool" --Goodman finds a paucity of vocabulary and syntax expressive of the Best withdrawal from standard civilization and its learning. "In a Best group it is bad form to assert or deny a preposition as trus or false, probable or improbable, or to want to explore its meaning. The aim of conversation is for each one to be able, by speech, to know that he is existing and belonging."

Similarly, Beat novels lack structure and thus interpretation, character and thus causality. The point, it appears, is simply to insist that something happened, always on the road, on the move.

Beside the early-resigned there are the early-fatalistic, who put together gangs more readily than novels. Here Goodman offers perhaps his best insight: a view of a delinquent as powerlessly struggling for life within, not resigned from, an unacceptable world. We are reminded of Dostoevski. As Goodman puts it, "On the streets, they feel worthless and abandoned; in the reformatory, they are accepted back home." This is "delinquency-in-order-to-get-caught," or less clumsily, crime for the sake of punishment that implies 'belonging.'

The gangs are formed, and what Freud called the "narcissism of small differences" begins to operate. "Turfs" or gang territories are established. "Points of honor" become the meaning in life. And so, into insults--the formal insult, say, of invading rival "turf"--is poured all the accumulated frustration endemic in our society. As Goodman puts it, "It is inevitable that there should be a public dream of universal disaster, with vast explosions, fires, and electric shocks..."

A successful revolution establishes a new community, but a missed revolution makes irrelevant the community that persists. Goodman then lists some revolutions we have missed, or started, but compromised: technocracy, garden city, new deal syndicalism, class struggle, democracy, freedom of speech, liberalism, agrarianism, fraternity, brotherhood of races, pacifism, enlightenment, popular culture, sexual revolution (which Goodman refers to again and again), and of course, progressive education. Even this partial list hints at the scope of Goodman's approach.

And so, for that matter, does his "clear but exaggerated picture of our American society: slums of engineering, boondoggling production, chaotic congestion, tribes of middlemen . . . no patriotism, an empty nationalism bound for a cataclysmically disastrous fnish, wise opinion swamped . . . youth idle and truant, youth sexually suffering and sexually obsessed, youth without goals. . . ."

In all, Goodman judges our society as not outrageously bad, but far from adequate. Near the end of the book, he suggests one program that would make growing up less absurd--and that is decentralization, so that men could get back a sense of personal involvement in meaningful decisions, political and economic. Unfortunately, this issue is raised only vaguely and without much consideration of the politics involved.

It is true, says Goodman, that in looking for , men ask for good pay, prestige and conditions, not for work that is useful or honorable within the limits of business ethics). But the remains: can youth possibly resign themselves to spending eight hours a day "doing that is no good," and not grow up absurd? a young man defines society as a " frivolous racket," what choices does he ? And, the more common question, what society do with such a chap?

According to Goodman, society refuses to take seriously, and to recognize that he has real in a real world. This chap and others like are a "youth problem," says Goodman, and emphasis is on their "background conditions," which one can manipulate. Thus, "the aim is not to give human beings real goals that warrant belief, and tasks to share in, but to reestablish "belonging'."

So these teen-agers hang around and do nothing at all, neither work nor play. Doing nothing, they begin to wonder if they are nothing. So their system of values centers on responses to "threatened masculinity." And these responses often bring trouble.

Last summer, Governor Rockefeller responded to a week of seven juvenile murders with this statement:

"We have to constantly devise new ways to bring about a challenge to these young folk, and to provide an outlet for their energies, and give them a sense of belonging."

Goodman rips this statement apart: can the Governor devise better challenges that the gang-leader? are these mysterious energies undifferentiated? where can a young man now find a greater 'togetherness' than in the strict conformity of the gang? The official practice, Goodman charges, is to write these boys off as useless and try to cajole or baffle them into harmlessness.

But many young men will not be cajoled. So they rebel--or rather, some of them do--and so Goodman's next problem is to explore a life of voluntary poverty, a life in which a man works for subsistence at a job that speaks for itself ('farm labor, hauling boxes, janitoring or dish washing, messenger").

Even more serious than the difficulties of voluntary poverty, however, is a "neurosis of chronic boredom." Goodman finds that, as cities, machines and the organization of production have grown "out of human scale," the sense of causality is lost. In the crowded city, there is a loss of neighborhood, because of poor planning and increased mobility of families. "A child might not even know what work his daddy does. Shop talk will be, almost invariably, griping about interpersonal relations."

Worst of all for children, says Goodman, progressive education has been perverted into 'life adjustment.' What must be revived is: experiment to learn theory, permissiveness in all animal behavior, emphasis on individual differences, taking youth seriously as an age in itself, community of youth and adult minimizing "authority," and emphasis in the curriculum of real problems of wider society.

But lacking a truly progressive education, the child is trained simply to accept the system, taught subtly that his role is to "belong" and "adjust," surely not to change or reform the society. But where has this led? Patriotism is feeble. The best people, says Goodman, are not turning back--like Plato's philosopher who has emerged from the case--to serve their country. So boys listen to speeches written on Madison Avenue, and they have not yet learned to cry, "Shame! make your own speech at least!"

The weakness of community is shown too in the constant plea that the family must bear the burden of teaching the culture. In a real community, there is an economy, with its crafts and its ideas. The shape of the community makes the culture evident. But, lacking this strong community, kids invent their own, reviving the feudal code of Alfred the Great, marking out safe territories, and making provision for special classes of revenge.

And then in the puzzle of finding an aim in life (a kid can't hang around the gang forever), the young man places all his hopes in having a normal healthy marriage and raising non-neurotic children. Thus, "togetherness" becomes a partial substitute for meaningful work. But of course, the responsibilities of a family only entrap a man more securely in the system.

When the children grow up, they find it hard to break away from the father who's been so good to them, and yet they cannot affirm his values, and yet (again) they have no better values to substitute. So, says Goodman, they go beat.

In other words, "if society becomes too tightly integrated, and preempts all the available space, materials, and methods, then it is failing to provide for just the margin of formlessness, real risk, novelty, spontaneity, that makes growth possible."

In addition to room for risk, says Goodman, a young man needs faith. He must be able to work hard, to lose himself in his work because the community supports him. But this sort of faith (in vocation) is today rare, and most teenagers become either "early-resigned" (those who, though qualified for the rat race, balk at submitting to it) or "early-fatalistic" (those who, underprivileged, never get a chance to get into the rat race).

In one of his more fantastic chapters, Goodman views society, through the eyes of a youth, as "an apparently closed room in which there is a large rat race as the dominant center of attention." Running madly are the middle-status Organization men, who, Goodman thinks, "praise and envy the disqualified poor: their uncompetitiveness, animality, shouting and fighting, not striving for empty rewards." Others in the room are the "underprivileged Corner Boys," who, we are told, are "mesmerized by the symbols and culture of the rat race," and will ultimately take factory jobs and not care.

Important are the delinquents, who, like the junior executives, take short cuts to glamour, and help staff "the integral whole of politics-and-rackets," thus forming an alliance against "the good boys who naively try to make something of themselves." Also in the room are the flunk-outs (the "ambivalently wished-for station of Bums"), the Beat Generation whose "onslaughts on the Air-Conditioned nightmare...sound very much like the griping of soldiers who do not intend to mutiny"), the Angry Young Men (who attack the machine itself), French "existential youth" (saying "no exit"), and finally, the hipster (who "contents himself with a magical omnipotence never disproved because never tested").

From this zoo, Goodman selects the Beats as a pilot study in the uses of leisure. "Their rejection of the popular culture, Broadway theatre, status commodities, bespeaks robust mental health." On the other hand, Beat art, says Goodman, is parochial, hopelessly parochial. Discussing Beat words--"make it," "like," "man," "cool" --Goodman finds a paucity of vocabulary and syntax expressive of the Best withdrawal from standard civilization and its learning. "In a Best group it is bad form to assert or deny a preposition as trus or false, probable or improbable, or to want to explore its meaning. The aim of conversation is for each one to be able, by speech, to know that he is existing and belonging."

Similarly, Beat novels lack structure and thus interpretation, character and thus causality. The point, it appears, is simply to insist that something happened, always on the road, on the move.

Beside the early-resigned there are the early-fatalistic, who put together gangs more readily than novels. Here Goodman offers perhaps his best insight: a view of a delinquent as powerlessly struggling for life within, not resigned from, an unacceptable world. We are reminded of Dostoevski. As Goodman puts it, "On the streets, they feel worthless and abandoned; in the reformatory, they are accepted back home." This is "delinquency-in-order-to-get-caught," or less clumsily, crime for the sake of punishment that implies 'belonging.'

The gangs are formed, and what Freud called the "narcissism of small differences" begins to operate. "Turfs" or gang territories are established. "Points of honor" become the meaning in life. And so, into insults--the formal insult, say, of invading rival "turf"--is poured all the accumulated frustration endemic in our society. As Goodman puts it, "It is inevitable that there should be a public dream of universal disaster, with vast explosions, fires, and electric shocks..."

A successful revolution establishes a new community, but a missed revolution makes irrelevant the community that persists. Goodman then lists some revolutions we have missed, or started, but compromised: technocracy, garden city, new deal syndicalism, class struggle, democracy, freedom of speech, liberalism, agrarianism, fraternity, brotherhood of races, pacifism, enlightenment, popular culture, sexual revolution (which Goodman refers to again and again), and of course, progressive education. Even this partial list hints at the scope of Goodman's approach.

And so, for that matter, does his "clear but exaggerated picture of our American society: slums of engineering, boondoggling production, chaotic congestion, tribes of middlemen . . . no patriotism, an empty nationalism bound for a cataclysmically disastrous fnish, wise opinion swamped . . . youth idle and truant, youth sexually suffering and sexually obsessed, youth without goals. . . ."

In all, Goodman judges our society as not outrageously bad, but far from adequate. Near the end of the book, he suggests one program that would make growing up less absurd--and that is decentralization, so that men could get back a sense of personal involvement in meaningful decisions, political and economic. Unfortunately, this issue is raised only vaguely and without much consideration of the politics involved.

According to Goodman, society refuses to take seriously, and to recognize that he has real in a real world. This chap and others like are a "youth problem," says Goodman, and emphasis is on their "background conditions," which one can manipulate. Thus, "the aim is not to give human beings real goals that warrant belief, and tasks to share in, but to reestablish "belonging'."

So these teen-agers hang around and do nothing at all, neither work nor play. Doing nothing, they begin to wonder if they are nothing. So their system of values centers on responses to "threatened masculinity." And these responses often bring trouble.

Last summer, Governor Rockefeller responded to a week of seven juvenile murders with this statement:

"We have to constantly devise new ways to bring about a challenge to these young folk, and to provide an outlet for their energies, and give them a sense of belonging."

Goodman rips this statement apart: can the Governor devise better challenges that the gang-leader? are these mysterious energies undifferentiated? where can a young man now find a greater 'togetherness' than in the strict conformity of the gang? The official practice, Goodman charges, is to write these boys off as useless and try to cajole or baffle them into harmlessness.

But many young men will not be cajoled. So they rebel--or rather, some of them do--and so Goodman's next problem is to explore a life of voluntary poverty, a life in which a man works for subsistence at a job that speaks for itself ('farm labor, hauling boxes, janitoring or dish washing, messenger").

Even more serious than the difficulties of voluntary poverty, however, is a "neurosis of chronic boredom." Goodman finds that, as cities, machines and the organization of production have grown "out of human scale," the sense of causality is lost. In the crowded city, there is a loss of neighborhood, because of poor planning and increased mobility of families. "A child might not even know what work his daddy does. Shop talk will be, almost invariably, griping about interpersonal relations."

Worst of all for children, says Goodman, progressive education has been perverted into 'life adjustment.' What must be revived is: experiment to learn theory, permissiveness in all animal behavior, emphasis on individual differences, taking youth seriously as an age in itself, community of youth and adult minimizing "authority," and emphasis in the curriculum of real problems of wider society.

But lacking a truly progressive education, the child is trained simply to accept the system, taught subtly that his role is to "belong" and "adjust," surely not to change or reform the society. But where has this led? Patriotism is feeble. The best people, says Goodman, are not turning back--like Plato's philosopher who has emerged from the case--to serve their country. So boys listen to speeches written on Madison Avenue, and they have not yet learned to cry, "Shame! make your own speech at least!"

The weakness of community is shown too in the constant plea that the family must bear the burden of teaching the culture. In a real community, there is an economy, with its crafts and its ideas. The shape of the community makes the culture evident. But, lacking this strong community, kids invent their own, reviving the feudal code of Alfred the Great, marking out safe territories, and making provision for special classes of revenge.

And then in the puzzle of finding an aim in life (a kid can't hang around the gang forever), the young man places all his hopes in having a normal healthy marriage and raising non-neurotic children. Thus, "togetherness" becomes a partial substitute for meaningful work. But of course, the responsibilities of a family only entrap a man more securely in the system.

When the children grow up, they find it hard to break away from the father who's been so good to them, and yet they cannot affirm his values, and yet (again) they have no better values to substitute. So, says Goodman, they go beat.

In other words, "if society becomes too tightly integrated, and preempts all the available space, materials, and methods, then it is failing to provide for just the margin of formlessness, real risk, novelty, spontaneity, that makes growth possible."

In addition to room for risk, says Goodman, a young man needs faith. He must be able to work hard, to lose himself in his work because the community supports him. But this sort of faith (in vocation) is today rare, and most teenagers become either "early-resigned" (those who, though qualified for the rat race, balk at submitting to it) or "early-fatalistic" (those who, underprivileged, never get a chance to get into the rat race).

In one of his more fantastic chapters, Goodman views society, through the eyes of a youth, as "an apparently closed room in which there is a large rat race as the dominant center of attention." Running madly are the middle-status Organization men, who, Goodman thinks, "praise and envy the disqualified poor: their uncompetitiveness, animality, shouting and fighting, not striving for empty rewards." Others in the room are the "underprivileged Corner Boys," who, we are told, are "mesmerized by the symbols and culture of the rat race," and will ultimately take factory jobs and not care.

Important are the delinquents, who, like the junior executives, take short cuts to glamour, and help staff "the integral whole of politics-and-rackets," thus forming an alliance against "the good boys who naively try to make something of themselves." Also in the room are the flunk-outs (the "ambivalently wished-for station of Bums"), the Beat Generation whose "onslaughts on the Air-Conditioned nightmare...sound very much like the griping of soldiers who do not intend to mutiny"), the Angry Young Men (who attack the machine itself), French "existential youth" (saying "no exit"), and finally, the hipster (who "contents himself with a magical omnipotence never disproved because never tested").

From this zoo, Goodman selects the Beats as a pilot study in the uses of leisure. "Their rejection of the popular culture, Broadway theatre, status commodities, bespeaks robust mental health." On the other hand, Beat art, says Goodman, is parochial, hopelessly parochial. Discussing Beat words--"make it," "like," "man," "cool" --Goodman finds a paucity of vocabulary and syntax expressive of the Best withdrawal from standard civilization and its learning. "In a Best group it is bad form to assert or deny a preposition as trus or false, probable or improbable, or to want to explore its meaning. The aim of conversation is for each one to be able, by speech, to know that he is existing and belonging."

Similarly, Beat novels lack structure and thus interpretation, character and thus causality. The point, it appears, is simply to insist that something happened, always on the road, on the move.

Beside the early-resigned there are the early-fatalistic, who put together gangs more readily than novels. Here Goodman offers perhaps his best insight: a view of a delinquent as powerlessly struggling for life within, not resigned from, an unacceptable world. We are reminded of Dostoevski. As Goodman puts it, "On the streets, they feel worthless and abandoned; in the reformatory, they are accepted back home." This is "delinquency-in-order-to-get-caught," or less clumsily, crime for the sake of punishment that implies 'belonging.'

The gangs are formed, and what Freud called the "narcissism of small differences" begins to operate. "Turfs" or gang territories are established. "Points of honor" become the meaning in life. And so, into insults--the formal insult, say, of invading rival "turf"--is poured all the accumulated frustration endemic in our society. As Goodman puts it, "It is inevitable that there should be a public dream of universal disaster, with vast explosions, fires, and electric shocks..."

A successful revolution establishes a new community, but a missed revolution makes irrelevant the community that persists. Goodman then lists some revolutions we have missed, or started, but compromised: technocracy, garden city, new deal syndicalism, class struggle, democracy, freedom of speech, liberalism, agrarianism, fraternity, brotherhood of races, pacifism, enlightenment, popular culture, sexual revolution (which Goodman refers to again and again), and of course, progressive education. Even this partial list hints at the scope of Goodman's approach.

And so, for that matter, does his "clear but exaggerated picture of our American society: slums of engineering, boondoggling production, chaotic congestion, tribes of middlemen . . . no patriotism, an empty nationalism bound for a cataclysmically disastrous fnish, wise opinion swamped . . . youth idle and truant, youth sexually suffering and sexually obsessed, youth without goals. . . ."

In all, Goodman judges our society as not outrageously bad, but far from adequate. Near the end of the book, he suggests one program that would make growing up less absurd--and that is decentralization, so that men could get back a sense of personal involvement in meaningful decisions, political and economic. Unfortunately, this issue is raised only vaguely and without much consideration of the politics involved.

So these teen-agers hang around and do nothing at all, neither work nor play. Doing nothing, they begin to wonder if they are nothing. So their system of values centers on responses to "threatened masculinity." And these responses often bring trouble.

Last summer, Governor Rockefeller responded to a week of seven juvenile murders with this statement:

"We have to constantly devise new ways to bring about a challenge to these young folk, and to provide an outlet for their energies, and give them a sense of belonging."

Goodman rips this statement apart: can the Governor devise better challenges that the gang-leader? are these mysterious energies undifferentiated? where can a young man now find a greater 'togetherness' than in the strict conformity of the gang? The official practice, Goodman charges, is to write these boys off as useless and try to cajole or baffle them into harmlessness.

But many young men will not be cajoled. So they rebel--or rather, some of them do--and so Goodman's next problem is to explore a life of voluntary poverty, a life in which a man works for subsistence at a job that speaks for itself ('farm labor, hauling boxes, janitoring or dish washing, messenger").

Even more serious than the difficulties of voluntary poverty, however, is a "neurosis of chronic boredom." Goodman finds that, as cities, machines and the organization of production have grown "out of human scale," the sense of causality is lost. In the crowded city, there is a loss of neighborhood, because of poor planning and increased mobility of families. "A child might not even know what work his daddy does. Shop talk will be, almost invariably, griping about interpersonal relations."

Worst of all for children, says Goodman, progressive education has been perverted into 'life adjustment.' What must be revived is: experiment to learn theory, permissiveness in all animal behavior, emphasis on individual differences, taking youth seriously as an age in itself, community of youth and adult minimizing "authority," and emphasis in the curriculum of real problems of wider society.

But lacking a truly progressive education, the child is trained simply to accept the system, taught subtly that his role is to "belong" and "adjust," surely not to change or reform the society. But where has this led? Patriotism is feeble. The best people, says Goodman, are not turning back--like Plato's philosopher who has emerged from the case--to serve their country. So boys listen to speeches written on Madison Avenue, and they have not yet learned to cry, "Shame! make your own speech at least!"

The weakness of community is shown too in the constant plea that the family must bear the burden of teaching the culture. In a real community, there is an economy, with its crafts and its ideas. The shape of the community makes the culture evident. But, lacking this strong community, kids invent their own, reviving the feudal code of Alfred the Great, marking out safe territories, and making provision for special classes of revenge.

And then in the puzzle of finding an aim in life (a kid can't hang around the gang forever), the young man places all his hopes in having a normal healthy marriage and raising non-neurotic children. Thus, "togetherness" becomes a partial substitute for meaningful work. But of course, the responsibilities of a family only entrap a man more securely in the system.

When the children grow up, they find it hard to break away from the father who's been so good to them, and yet they cannot affirm his values, and yet (again) they have no better values to substitute. So, says Goodman, they go beat.

In other words, "if society becomes too tightly integrated, and preempts all the available space, materials, and methods, then it is failing to provide for just the margin of formlessness, real risk, novelty, spontaneity, that makes growth possible."

In addition to room for risk, says Goodman, a young man needs faith. He must be able to work hard, to lose himself in his work because the community supports him. But this sort of faith (in vocation) is today rare, and most teenagers become either "early-resigned" (those who, though qualified for the rat race, balk at submitting to it) or "early-fatalistic" (those who, underprivileged, never get a chance to get into the rat race).

In one of his more fantastic chapters, Goodman views society, through the eyes of a youth, as "an apparently closed room in which there is a large rat race as the dominant center of attention." Running madly are the middle-status Organization men, who, Goodman thinks, "praise and envy the disqualified poor: their uncompetitiveness, animality, shouting and fighting, not striving for empty rewards." Others in the room are the "underprivileged Corner Boys," who, we are told, are "mesmerized by the symbols and culture of the rat race," and will ultimately take factory jobs and not care.

Important are the delinquents, who, like the junior executives, take short cuts to glamour, and help staff "the integral whole of politics-and-rackets," thus forming an alliance against "the good boys who naively try to make something of themselves." Also in the room are the flunk-outs (the "ambivalently wished-for station of Bums"), the Beat Generation whose "onslaughts on the Air-Conditioned nightmare...sound very much like the griping of soldiers who do not intend to mutiny"), the Angry Young Men (who attack the machine itself), French "existential youth" (saying "no exit"), and finally, the hipster (who "contents himself with a magical omnipotence never disproved because never tested").

From this zoo, Goodman selects the Beats as a pilot study in the uses of leisure. "Their rejection of the popular culture, Broadway theatre, status commodities, bespeaks robust mental health." On the other hand, Beat art, says Goodman, is parochial, hopelessly parochial. Discussing Beat words--"make it," "like," "man," "cool" --Goodman finds a paucity of vocabulary and syntax expressive of the Best withdrawal from standard civilization and its learning. "In a Best group it is bad form to assert or deny a preposition as trus or false, probable or improbable, or to want to explore its meaning. The aim of conversation is for each one to be able, by speech, to know that he is existing and belonging."

Similarly, Beat novels lack structure and thus interpretation, character and thus causality. The point, it appears, is simply to insist that something happened, always on the road, on the move.

Beside the early-resigned there are the early-fatalistic, who put together gangs more readily than novels. Here Goodman offers perhaps his best insight: a view of a delinquent as powerlessly struggling for life within, not resigned from, an unacceptable world. We are reminded of Dostoevski. As Goodman puts it, "On the streets, they feel worthless and abandoned; in the reformatory, they are accepted back home." This is "delinquency-in-order-to-get-caught," or less clumsily, crime for the sake of punishment that implies 'belonging.'

The gangs are formed, and what Freud called the "narcissism of small differences" begins to operate. "Turfs" or gang territories are established. "Points of honor" become the meaning in life. And so, into insults--the formal insult, say, of invading rival "turf"--is poured all the accumulated frustration endemic in our society. As Goodman puts it, "It is inevitable that there should be a public dream of universal disaster, with vast explosions, fires, and electric shocks..."

A successful revolution establishes a new community, but a missed revolution makes irrelevant the community that persists. Goodman then lists some revolutions we have missed, or started, but compromised: technocracy, garden city, new deal syndicalism, class struggle, democracy, freedom of speech, liberalism, agrarianism, fraternity, brotherhood of races, pacifism, enlightenment, popular culture, sexual revolution (which Goodman refers to again and again), and of course, progressive education. Even this partial list hints at the scope of Goodman's approach.

And so, for that matter, does his "clear but exaggerated picture of our American society: slums of engineering, boondoggling production, chaotic congestion, tribes of middlemen . . . no patriotism, an empty nationalism bound for a cataclysmically disastrous fnish, wise opinion swamped . . . youth idle and truant, youth sexually suffering and sexually obsessed, youth without goals. . . ."

In all, Goodman judges our society as not outrageously bad, but far from adequate. Near the end of the book, he suggests one program that would make growing up less absurd--and that is decentralization, so that men could get back a sense of personal involvement in meaningful decisions, political and economic. Unfortunately, this issue is raised only vaguely and without much consideration of the politics involved.