New Reformation

Paul Goodman

Description

New Reformation was Paul Goodman’s last book of social criticism. The man who set the agenda for the Youth Movement of the Sixties with his best-selling Growing Up Absurd, and who wrote a book a year to keep his “crazy young allies” focused on the issues as he saw them, stepped back in 1970 to re-assess the results of what he considered a moral and spiritual upheaval comparable to the Protestant Reformation—“the breakdown of belief, and the emergence of new belief, in sciences and professions, education, and civil legitimacy.”

Michael Fisher’s introduction situates Goodman in his era and traces the development of his characteristic insights, now the common wisdom of every radical critique of American society. A poet and novelist famous in his day for books on decentralization, community planning, psychotherapy, education, linguistics, and media, nowhere is Goodman’s voice more prescient and still relevant than in New Reformation.

Sujets

• American Left
• Visionary
• Marcuse
• Intellectual
• Herbert Marcuse

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 21 juin 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604864236
• Langue: English

Extrait

Cover

Copyright

The New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative The New Reformation © 2010 by Sally Goodman Introduction © 2010 by Michael C. Fisher This edition © 2010 by PM Press All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-60486-056-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2009901372
Cover: John Yates Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA on recycled paper.
Introduction
T hough largely unheard-of today, the writer and activist Paul Goodman (1911–1972) was one of the foremost intellectual leaders of the American student and antiwar movements during the sixties. Having written nine books of social criticism, given hundreds of lectures, and appeared at countless protest demonstrations between 1961 and 1969, he stood at the center of the radical youth movement that enveloped his times. Yet since his death in 1972, when there was a large outpouring of obituaries and personal remembrances, he has rarely been mentioned outside a few footnotes in sixties anthologies. What accounts for this? How could a dissident thinker of such consequence forty years ago be subject to contemporary historical amnesia so pervasive that his influence has been all but forgotten?
Ironically, the same obscurity that plagues Goodman today is consistent with the reception he experienced during the bulk of his lifetime. Then as now, almost no one knew where to place him, and his radicalism frequently stood at odds with many of his contemporaries. An anarchist, a classicist, a bisexual, a psychologist, a self-described poet and all-purpose “man of letters” — Goodman was an iconoclastic force unto himself. But during the sixties his influence was everywhere. Especially during the first half of the decade, his affection for young people and their newfound social consciousness drew him to campus teach-ins and demonstrations all over the country. Students routinely packed auditoriums and lecture halls to hear him speak, and many later remembered his impromptu addresses as electrifying. Yet few in the audience would have guessed that this success came to Goodman late in life, since it was only after the 1960 publication of Growing up Absurd that the public began taking any interest in his work. For over twenty years, Goodman had been a controversial presence within the small literary circles that defined New York City’s Jewish intellectual life. Until Growing up Absurd , his contributions were considered minor at best. But then came the landslide of the sixties. As chance had it, his rabble-rousing bestseller dovetailed perfectly with the arrival of the New Left on the American political scene, and from then on he was a permanent fixture within the student movement.
As both leader and adviser, Goodman’s goal was to help students navigate the difficult waters of social revolution without falling prey to the tactical mis-steps that tend to befall radical ambitions. Perhaps predictably, though, the cozy initial relationship he developed with the student movement did not last long. By 1967 Goodman had grown increasingly dissatisfied with the fruits of youth radicalism, and with left-wing politics in general. On one level his problems with the young centered on deep cultural and philosophical differences. Yet Goodman’s root problem lay in what he considered their profound historic and religious crisis. In New Reformation , first published in 1970, Goodman elaborated on this theme by mixing analysis with personal reflection from throughout the sixties. The book turned out to be his last work of social criticism. As an unflinching meditation on the meaning of the decade that changed everything in America, it may also be his most important.
At the heart of New Reformation is an essential question: What significance did the crumbling New Left have in an America already fractured by surging cultural and political disarray? For Goodman, the answer was evident in most instances of youth revolt then taking place throughout the western world. By the end of the sixties, the entire framework of bourgeois society felt bankrupt to young people across the globe. Useful only as an object of scorn, they rejected its ubiquitous technology and scientific worldview, its liberal politics and insular middle-class values. Particularly in western Europe and the United States, masses of students stood ready to oppose the status quo by any means necessary. Yet beneath the slogans and radical posturing Goodman saw a deeper spiritual issue. To him, the reason so few young people wanted a role in their parents’ society was that the world they stood to inherit had become meaningless.
At the end of his long tenure as a prolific writer and social critic, Goodman realized that a major turning point in western history was on the horizon. He compared his own time to that of the Protestant Reformation, even though it was unclear what this might mean for the future. Everywhere around him, the social and cultural order looked on the brink of collapse, and he too felt the need for radical change. In the final years of his life, Goodman stood alongside many Americans, equally hopeful and fearful in the face of a necessary New Reformation.
The story of Paul Goodman’s unusual political and intellectual radicalism begins and ends with the story of a very peculiar American anarchist. 1 Unlike many of his contemporaries, Goodman’s career as a social thinker spanned four decades, consisting of numerous fields of study, professions, and intellectual interests as diverse as the over forty books he had written by the early seventies. Taking on the various roles of novelist, poet, academic, philosopher, psychologist, social critic, and, finally, advocate and teacher of the dissenting young, Goodman modeled himself after the classic man of letters. Over the course of his career, numerous critics accused him of spreading himself too thin by trying to cross and unify so many disciplines, but as he saw it, the nature of his pursuit required that he follow a less conventional approach: “A man of letters knows only a little about some major human concerns, but insists on relating what he does know to his concrete experience. So he explores reality, [and] finds that the nature of things is not easily divided into disciplines.” 2
Throughout his career, Goodman’s entire philosophic and political approach was based on a central concept. At times he referred to this as human nature, or more specifically as the human “organism” that is imbued with a certain essence by the nature of things. All organisms, all natures, Goodman wrote, functioned by means of “creative adjustment. Selecting, initiating, shaping, in order to appropriate the novelty of the environment to itself . . . Adjusting, because the organism’s every living power is actualized only in its environment.”
In adapting and responding to what is found in the physical environment, the individual human being became activated as the curious, inventive, and boundlessly creative organism it was by nature. Across all societies and epochs, Goodman contended, this process remained constant. The interplay between the organism and its environment was what defined human nature, and from it, man had the unique ability to take on culture and to become socialized as a member of a community. Yet the key to adequate adjustment between organism and environment was balance. In order for an individual to be excited and enhanced by the socialization process rather deadened by it, the “environment must be amenable to appropriation and selection; it must be plastic to be changed and meaningful to be known.” 3
Here was the essential “social-psychological hypothesis” that ran across all of Goodman’s writings, resulting in his consistent anarchist approach. As he wrote late in life, “Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite proposition: that valuable behavior occurs by the free and direct response of individuals to the conditions presented by the historical environment . . . Anarchists want to increase intrinsic functioning and diminish extrinsic power [because] behavior is more graceful, forceful, and discriminating without the intervention of the state, wardens, corporation executives, central planners, and university presidents.”
Goodman’s ultimate political ideal was based on a philosophic principle: ‘”Soul is self-moving.”’ 4 But his goal was not merely to increase individual freedom. As both a practical state of mind and a sound basis for political methodology, anarchism worked to increase intrinsic functioning by affirming the individual over a smoothly operating society: “For me, the chief principle of anarchism is not freedom but autonomy, the ability to initiate a task and do it one’s own way . . . The theory is that my organism tends to actualize itself if I stand out of the way. It is an article of faith.” 5
Despite his apparent emphasis on individualism, Goodman also recognized that individual health depends on society since communal bonds provide the building blocks of culture and the basis for meaning in life. For him, the question was “How to take on Culture without losing Nature?” 6 And the answer was synthesis. The reason Goodman favored anarchism was that it tended to bring about social, political, and individual habits that harmonized, rather than antagonized, man’s various needs. It was really a very simple solution to the problem of taking on culture without losing nature. As he wrote in his last book, Little Prayers and Finite Experience (1972), the essence of anarchism boils down to “political truth so simple that a boy can see it with a frank look, namely: Society with a big S can do very little for people except t