Midge Decter and the American Way

MIDGE DECTER herself gives the best name for her attempt to explore the generation gap of the 60s. Her "essay in fictionalized sociology" lies somewhere in a hazy limbo between bad sociology and mediocre fiction.

Decter introduces her thesis in a highly personalized, highly patronizing "Letter to the Young."

We allowed you a charade of trivial freedoms in order to avoid making those impositions on you that are in the end both the training ground and proving ground for true independence. We pronounced you strong when you were still weak in order to avoid the struggles with which you would have fed your true strength. We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid long, slow slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling.

Her main sociological point is that the "hedonism" of the generation which reached college during the 60s was (and is) the result of their upbringing--that their liberal, post-Freudian parents, in trying to avoid repressing their children or endowing them with the guilt so common in their own generation, also avoided giving them any way to define themselves against an objective reality. Decter argues that by giving children everything they needed and by encouraging them to explore and to question their society's values, parents unwittingly led their children to the radical, alienated position at which they arrived.

The body of Radical Children is a series of four archetypes, "exemplary stories, stories about parents and children, which describe the transactions that went on between us." The four sketches are entitled. "The Drop-Out." "The Pothead," "The Sexual Revolutionist," and "The Communard." She refers to her characters as "the young man" or "the girl's father." Each sketch describes the main character's upbringing, his growing disaffection with society, and his parents' bewilderment.

This technique is completely unpersuasive. Sociology--as Decter seems to realize when she says in a defense against those who would scoff at her lack of documentation, "This is the inevitable peril for anyone who seeks to discuss the world through the medium of his or her own senses"--requires some kind of evidence to support theories. True, Freud may not have had statistics, but at least his contributions were not descriptions of general social phenomena, and his work was based on personal exploration of his field. If no social theorists offered evidence to support their ideas, then the only thing which could persuade anyone would be emotions--which, in the long run, means the only argument would be force, since no one can back down on feelings. Without some kind of factual support, theories cannot be tested. They only hang there, turning slowly, slowly in the wind, and in the end don't offer much insight into anything.

DECTER might have been more convincing had she relied purely on fiction. Much of the best literature has elements of sociology implicit in it. But if readers are to draw parallels between characters and themselves, there must be some way to identify with the characters. The characters in Radical Children never attain the depth necessary for such identification, for the prefatory letter clearly distinguishes between the reader and the read--and anyhow who is willing to identify with a character named "the girl" who has been labelled "The Pothead?"

All of which isn't to say that Decter's theories might not have something to them. They're just hard to evaluate. Many of her ideas have a shred of truth behind the exaggeration and the fog of her own values; for example, her sketch of "The Sexual Revolutionist" who, aided by modern contraceptive technology and by her liberal mother, falls into a series of relationships based only on sex and finally revolts against sex completely, joining a commune of women who reject their sexual exploiters, seems fairly plausible. On the other hand, Decter cannot imagine that the revolt may have had an objective cause--widespread disillusionment with marriage as an institution, and the spread of freer sexual relations resulting from that disillusionment. Because she is interested only in the relationship between parent and child. Decter often avoids other issues: that the 60s might have been a time when the government was drafting young men to fight a war many considered immoral, and that throughout that era many people, not only the children of liberals, were questioning the values that have traditionally made up the American way.

Decter obviously is a liberal herself, and has her objections to the status quo. But she emerges as a spokesperson for the American Way. She feels the liberal parents' real failure lies in the fact that their children haven't gone on to "join the company of its fully accredited adult members," i.e., "adulthood" as society defines it.

While she does her best to understand why "the young" act as they do, she never quite rids herself of the sense that dropping out is somehow reprehensible. She never reconciles herself to the notion that perhaps alternative lifestyles offer something worthwhile. Each of her characters ends in failure--the drop-out goes off to California, the pothead moves to an apartment with only dope as her objective, the sexual revolutionist will never acheive a normal heterosexual relationship, the communard leaves his commune in disgust at the problems he finds within it to apply to law school as a final rejection of interpersonal relationships. Decter seems to give up hope for the youth of the 60s. because in the last analysis she feels they will never be quite capable of fending for themselves.

And you? Some of you are still prone to go on as before declaiming your superiority to the meanness and the hypocrises of the achieving society, and your sensitive refusal to have a hand in its crushing of the human spirit (although those of you who speak this way are doing so less noisily than you once did). But what are you truly, in the privacy of genuine self-confrontation, saying to yourselves?

You are adults now--or should be--no longer in process of formation or unfolding, no longer in potentia but fully here. Thus there are things to be observed about your generation on which the count is already in, things that can no longer be denied by us and that are the real and hard ground from which you must proceed.

BECAUSE OF HER rather one-sided view of the generation gap. Decter is at her best when she describes the way liberal parents--whom she defines as "America's professional, or enlightened, middle class"--felt about their children. The pride, bewilderment and pain of these parents as their children turn from specimens of human perfection into examples of the social perversions which she attributes to the youth of the 60s is all here. These are parents who did their best to bring their children up right, and as a result their children will never be satisfactory adults. Each sketch ends with a total breakdown in communication. The child leaves, and the parents are left stunned, offering up "a silent prayer" for their child's "success."

But Decter never deals with the possibility that her description of the liberal parent (with whom she has so clearly allied herself) may be inaccurate. She claims that the youth of the 60s are unable to define themselves except in terms of their parents, and because of this assumption must conclude that their attitudes grew out of a liberal childhood. Yet she never quite realizes that every generation is a product of the generation before it, and that her liberal parents--whom she characterizes as "America's professional, or enlightened, middle class"--are still influenced by the attitudes of their parents. Her liberal parents bend over backwards to avoid the mistakes their parents made, and if Decter was not so defensive about her own generation, she might find that it never grew up either--that her definition of adulthood as a state in which one is completely self-defining may be beyond the limits of human imperfection.

Because she cannot be really critical about either traditional American society or the role played by the liberal parent, Decter's argument is self-contradictory. What is worse, however, is that she offers no alternatives. She creates a picture of what happens when liberal parents try to raise children, and the only other alternative she leaves is a conservative upbringing, with all the repression that implies. The conservative method seems to produce children who reject their parents' values by becoming liberal parents, while the liberal method seems to keep children wrapped permanently in swaddling bands. There doesn't seem to be much hope for children of the future--Decter never suggests that there are people, yes, even a few that were in college during the dreaded 60s, who adjusted fairly well to reality. Her parents, as well as her children, are all failures. But if all the children are failures, there seems to be a logical flaw in her argument, as at least a few of the youth of the 60s were not of liberal backgrounds, and she will have to look to reasons outside the home to explain the dissatisfaction of an entire generation.

THE REAL FAILURE of Liberal Parents, Radical Children lies in Decter's unwillingness to stand away from the phenomena she is describing. She may wish to describe the world through the medium of her senses, but she seems to have sensed only half the problem. Because she offers no concrete evidence, one can't argue with her; but for the same reason, her book doesn't resolve anything. She ignores too many other possible factors to give a convincing description of why the generation gap occurred, and is too biased to give a viable alternative. Liberal Parents, Radical Children may offer a mildly interesting theory, but in the end it is a theory that leads nowhere.