From the Shelf Decent and Indecent

210 pp. $5.95

POSTWAR BABIES are indebted to Dr. Spock. In an era of strict childbearing, he intervened for us, pleaded for fewer spankings and more parental affection. But now that we are getting a grown-up version of those spankings- Clubbings, gassings, jailing- Dr. Spock's political interventions in our behalf are futile. When he spoke in defense of draft resistance, he too was indicted.

Despite the vigorous self-confidence of Spock's new book, Decent and Indecent, self-doubt and despair creep in. In these moments Spock bemoans the futility of rearing well adjusted babies who will be incinerated by a sick society. Unspoken is his personal despair that Spock the activist can't wield the power of Spock the psychiatrist/pediatrician. He changed childbearing practices but can't stop the war.

The book is comprised of five tenuously linked sections, held together by Spock's assurance that they are related. They all deal with the psychoanalytic etiology of problems in America: feeling of individual worthlessness. Sex and sex roles, obscenity, the war, politics, and education. Each ailment is dealt with separately, isolated from all the other ailments. There is no cohesive diagnosis of America's ills.

Spock begins his cursory analysis of the Vietnam War with the Soc Rel bestseller On aggression by Konrad Lorenz. With Lorenz's help, he traces aggression in animals from ring doves to humans, while asking the question. "Are we better or worse than animals?" (The animals, of course are unavailable for comment.) Vietnam is reduced to displacement of aggression- we are an aggressive people who project aggression onto minority religions and races, here the Vietnamese. Such a reductionism view explores the racism of the war, but not the economics.

In the introduction to his section on sex roles, Spock says that he is afraid of losing his female supporters because of his views on sex rotes. He is right to be afraid. His argument, that men and women are temperamentally different and should adopt different social roles, nostalgically echoes Don Juan, Uncle Tom, and white supremacist paternalizing. Spock says, "I believe women are designed in their deepest instants to get more pleasure out of life when they are not aggressive. To put it another way. I think that when women are encouraged to be competitive too many of them become disagreeable." He thinks problems arise between the sexes when temperamental differences are not kept clear. Since women are more passive than men, the feminist movement will make women unhappy by making them unnaturally aggressive and competitive.

PUBLICITY about Decent and Indecent has centered on the liberal Spock's "reactionary" views on obscenity. He thinks television, movies, and books which brutalize sex, display immorality and violence are destructive to society because. "they assault the carefully constructed inhibitions and sublimations of sexuality and violence that are normal for all human beings and that are essential in the foundation of civilization."

Old Doc Spock seems to imply that it is necessary for us all to be neurotic. He considers the Supreme Court's guidelines on obscenity- works appealing to prurience and utterly lacking in social significance- too limited to curb pornography and media violence effectively.

Spock's solution is that judges and juries be given the power to ban works which they find shocking or revolting so that children, his primary concern, will learn healthier attitudes toward sex and learn to sublimate aggression. Spock's faith in the judicial system, bolstered by his acquittal of conspiracy to encourage draft resistance, probably prompted the idea to make judges and juries art critics.

With the power to ban shocking and revolting works, the courts would become enforcers of middle class art standards. Schools, fearing the new court power, would be even more timorous in exposing children to art and literature dealing with sex. ("The Wizard of Oz- there's a dirty old man.")

Obscenity puts dirty thoughts in little minds. Spock wants children to grow up with liberal, healthy attitudes toward sex, but his call for law and order, would, as Mayor Daley said, preserve disorder.