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Casey Nelson Blake, Dick Flacks, Deborah Meier, and Michael J. Brown on

Paul Goodman for Today

A companion to the lm Paul Goodman Changed My Life published by the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas/Dissent Magazine

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Dissent (ISSN 0012-3846) is published quarterlywinter, spring, summer, and fallby the University of Pennsylvania Press for the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc., 310 Riverside Drive, #2008, New York, N.Y. 10025. Phone: 212-316-3120. website: http://www.dissentmagazine.org. 2011 by the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc. (FSISI). Permission to reprint must be obtained from the publisher. Reprinted from the Fall 2010 issue of Dissent The publication of this pamphlet was made possible by a grant from the JSL Foundation. Cover photo used in Paul Goodman Changed My Life, a JSL Films production. Courtesy of Sally Goodman.

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PAUL GOODMAN FOR TODAY

Introduction
In 1960, Paul Goodmansocial thinker,
activist, poet, and novelistpublished his groundbreaking book Growing Up Absurd. An examination of youth disaffection in our affluent but spiritually empty society, Goodmans work inspired and galvanized a burgeoning generation of sixties students and intellectuals. Forty years later, though his influence is felt throughout our culture, his books are mostly out of print, and his name is all but forgotten by those under the age of forty-five. Goodman wrote some of his most provocative and far-sighted essays for Dissent, including one co-authored with his brother, Percival, in which he called for the banning of all cars in Manhattan. It was reprinted in a collection called Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals. This spring, Dissent and JSL Films, creator of the upcoming documentary Paul Goodman Changed My Life, sponsored an essay contest in which people under thirty were asked to name the most pressing social and political issue of our times and write a utopian essay that included practical proposals. More than eight hundred young people responded with essays. Judges for the contest were Casey Nelson Blake, Dick Flacks, and Deborah Meier. We are pleased to print here the essay of the winner, Michael J. Brown, along with essays by the judges, all of whom were influenced by Goodman. Essays by the two runners-up, John Connelly and Cameron Quinn, are available at www.dissentmagazine.org.

Disappointed but Not Resigned

CASEY NELSON BLAKE
As a result, young Americans find themselves exiled from their countrys moral narrative. Tradition has been broken, Goodman wrote fifty years ago, and yet there is no standard to affirm. Culture becomes eclectic, sensational, or phony. With luck, Jonathan Lees forthcoming film Paul Goodman Changed My Life will lead viewers back to Goodmans work and that of the critics who inspired him. The new editions of several of his books brought out by PM Press are a good place to start. Irving Howe observed that Goodman continues to write as if it were still possible to move people: perhaps not sufficiently or in sufficient numbers, yet with some sense that speech remains a power. Goodman had an uncanny ability to make the most radical suggestions sound eminently reasonable, as if

The young are honorable and see the problems, Paul Goodman wrote in 1968, but they dont know anything because we have not taught them anything. Michael Browns wise and eloquent essay proves him wrong. The young know quite a lot, but their elders (including the very students Goodman described) have deprived them of a sturdy tradition of social criticism that should be their birthright. The tradition of Thoreau, James, Veblen, Addams, Dewey, Bourne, and Mumford that Goodman kept alive in the postwar years has apparently become an embarrassment to those aspiring to global citizenship and a post-national consciousness: its masterworks barely figure in humanities courses.

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are not taken seriously. It is lacking in the opportunity to be useful. It thwarts aptitude and creates stupidity. It corrupts ingenuous patriotism. It corrupts the fine arts. It shackles science. It dampens animal ardor. It discourages the religious convictions of Justification and Vocation and it dims the sense that there is a Creation. It has no Honor. It has no Community.

Photo by Paul Hawken, included in Paul Goodman Changed My Life, a JSL Films production. Courtesy of Sally Goodman.

they were projects that free people could agree on and pursue that very day. His criticism was an appeal to Americans horse sense, the imperiled habit of making independent judgments and in democratically rubbing shoulders with all kinds and conditions. The title of one of his collections, Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals, captured what was unique about the man. Who else moved so easily from calls to abolish nuclear weapons and ban cars from Manhattan to a plan to replace hospital nurses starchy whites with easy-to-wash seersuckers? All were steps citizens could take to live more human lives. Because he was an anarchist from the outset, and never a communist, Goodman didnt waste the cold war years apologizing for having been nave about the Soviet Union. Nor did he beat a familiar path from Left to Center or Right. Instead, he dispensed with traditional political formulas as he sorted through the cultural wreckage left by the missed and compromised revolutions of modern times. His penetrating indictment of our abundant society in Growing Up Absurd still stands.
It is lacking in enough mans work. It is lacking in honest public speech, and people
4 D I SS E N T

Goodman was obtuse in thinking the maladies he diagnosed in that book were irrelevant to the experiences of girls and women. But he was not obtuse in insisting that all those capitalized words mattered, and that their waning was a source of profound sadness for many Americans. The difficulty Goodman had in defining his own position over the yearsa community anarchist, a Neolithic conservative, or (my favorite) an anarchist patriot speaks more to the uselessness of political labels than any uncertainty in his thinking. Goodman saw more clearly than most of his crazy young allies in the 1960s that the United States suffered from a crisis of meaning that could not be resolved by politics alone, least of all the politics of revolution. The elevation of consumption over satisfying work had fostered a base cynicism among Americans of all backgrounds. Seemingly at odds, the corporate executive, the juvenile delinquent, and the Beat were united in thinking that roleplaying comprised the sum total of human relations. An organized system of reputations had displaced older standards of excellence that challenged the young to master and surpass what they had inherited from previous generations. They had lost the very idea of an objective changeable world, the conviction that there is a Creation of the Six Days, a real world rather than a system of social rules that indeed are often arbitrary. As young people they were early resigned and stayed that way. Goodman admitted his tone was that of an Angry Middle-Aged Man, disappointed but not resigned. Todays disappointed but not resignedwomen and men of all agesshould hunt down his fugitive writings and read them.
Casey Nelson Blake teaches history and American Studies at Columbia University. He is writing a longer essay on Paul Goodman for Raritan.

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Paul Goodman and the Old New Left

DICK FLACKS
of those who identified as socialist. Deriving ones political strategies and analyses from ideological foundations resulted in what Mills called futilitarian politics and in a vocabulary unintelligible to the masses. The main point of claiming the need for a New Left was to envision a way of acting and speaking politically that connected with experience, that was experimental, that had effects on the world that could be seen as good for peoples lives.

Im still puzzled fifty years later by what it was

about the climate and the culture in 1960 that encouraged many young people to think they could make the world over. That was the year when little groups of black students brought down entrenched segregation by putting their bodies over lines they werent supposed to cross. In that same year, students rose up en masse in Turkey, South Korea, and Japan; a host of African countries declared their independence from colonial rule; John Kennedy became the first person born in the twentieth century to take over the U.S. presidency; Bobby Zimmerman started to perform as Bob Dylan. A strong sense of youth rebellion and generational cleavage was emerging, and it was in that year that Paul Goodman succeeded in publishing Growing Up Absurd. Goodman was by then a mature intellectual, who prolifically produced serious and often profound social criticism, illuminating fiction, and poetry. But no one outside of a small circle of New York intellectuals had heard of him, until that book appeared. Its very title resonated with the growing cultural mood among intellectual youth; its argument about the ways in which bureaucratic, consumerist, overdeveloped society was destroying the sense of useful work and right living struck home. Goodman soon was a sought after campus speaker, and as the sixties rebellions became organized and focused, his way of thinking was, I think, deeply influential. Goodman fused two philosophical streams that were central to the early sixties outlook of young new leftists like myself and other founders of groups like Students for a Democratic Society. He, like another intellectual hero, C. Wright Mills, was a pragmatist. Our generation saw the established Left as defined by ideology rather than lived experienceand this was just about as true for the whole gamut

SDS, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating

Committee, and other expressions of the New Left were anarchist without at first even knowing anything about the anarchist tradition. Paul Goodmans use of anarchism was very instructive. To make change you join up with friends and neighbors and try to create alternatives that meet

If we could gure out why Paul Goodman is now forgotten, we might get a better understanding of whats happened to us all in these last decades.
needs blocked by the big institutions. Or you demand new rules that can make life more livable directlythese modes of action are more practical and effective than appealing to authorities and institutions to bring the change. Rather than spend primary energy to get the university to become a community of scholars, create your ownand by so doing you may affect the institution as well as making a practical difference. To oppose war, refuse to fight it. Goodmans fusion of the utopian and the practical, in a series of essays during the sixties, provided substance for the impulses of resistance and the visions of a decentralization and community that defined the youth counterculture and the early New Left.

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I wish he were here to challenge the Left we now inhabit. We have largely fallen back defensively to support of the welfare state and electoral strategies. Goodman would say that we are blocked by the decline in utopian thought and creative direct action. If we could figure out why Paul Goodman is now forgotten, we might

get a better understanding of whats happened to us all in these last decades.

Dick Flacks s books include: Making History: The American Left and the American Mind and the forthcoming: Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements (with Rob Rosenthal). He was active in the founding of Students for a Democratic Society.

Restoring the Spirit

DEBORAH MEIER
community worth growing up into. The actual resultbut not intent, says Goodmanof progressive education was to weaken the academic curriculum and foster adjustment to society as it is. Surely he is right. So too the twenty-first-century reforms The more radical goals of the progressive education movement were compromised until they served the opposite purpose that John Dewey had in mindstrengthening its intellectual content and producing students who found it hard to adjust. So too the radical reforms of our day have compromised the egalitarian goals they claim drives them. Goodman ends on a cautiously optimistic notein 1957in support of the crazies. But the organized system is very powerful and our aspirations, like theirs, may serve to widen the intellectual gaps not close them in the name of equity! Our common wealth, he says, must be devoted to cultivating freedom and civilizationthey arent inevitable if we dont consciously nurture them when our children are young. Goodman would be horrified to watch this relentless march into orderly conformity, schools organized as boot camps and test-prep academies, searching for methods to instill right answers into our young in the name of equity. We need to revive Goodmans spirited defense of a spirited citizenry.
Deborah Meier, starting in 1965 as a kindergarten teacher, went on to create innovative public schools that served all children in New York City and Boston until her retirement in 1998. She is a longtime editor of Dissent and the author of many books, including The Power of Their Ideas.

Our public officials are not much concerned

about the waste of human resources. But the big causes of stupidity, of lack of initiative and lack of honorable incentive, are glaring, noted Paul Goodmana half-century agoin Growing Up Absurd. Our society cannot have it both ways: to maintain a conformist and ignoble system and to have skillful and spirited men to man that system with. That word, spirited, is where I rest the heart of our case. Spirited students require spirited teachers, of course. And we are killing off the spirit in the most deliberate wayfifty-five years after Goodman published these words. We have a chance now to recapture the language of change and invest it with Goodmans spiritbefore the new reformers destroy the remnants of Goodmans dream. Its hard to distort Goodmans ideas, which was part of the strength of his languageand its value for us again today lies in the power of his description of the emptiness of growing up. Of course, on occasion we will winceas Goodmans words were quite clearly largely addressed to boys and men. Did he mean it that way? Quite possibly. All we need to do is add women and we can take almost any page of that great treatise on raising the young in the fifties and translate it easily into raising the young in the twentyfirst century. As we enter a new age of low wages and unemployment, Goodmans relevance is striking. Whats missing? he asks. And he answers for our time as well as his: a

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In the Flower City, Take Root

MICHAEL J. BROWN
about the people alive at the height of the Roman Empire who didnt live at the center, who werent among the bread and circuses, the politics of the forum, the enormous power of the city of Rome. Such people were, I later learned, described by the term provincial. Not only were they people living in the provinces, they were also people whose world was thought to be narrowermaterially, intellectually, and culturallythan those living at the center. I wondered whether some future kid reading history would ask how a person living in my own time could have made a life somewhere other than in the great metropolises of our age. Would such a person even be a part of history? If the glamour of the center pulls us in, the reputation for dullness that surrounds remaining at home pushes us away. At the holidays, Ive sat in airplanes listening to my fellow twenty-somethings commiserating with each other: I liked going home, but if I had to stay there one more day Id shoot myself. In a culture where helicopter parents can extend adolescence well into the third decade of an offsprings life, there is undoubtedly merit in striking out on ones own. But whats at issue here, I have come to believe, is not simply independence. Whats at issue is the tension between belonging to a rootless professional culture and a rooted local one. The price of holding on to the latter may be exclusion from the status, power, and income the former offers. Its not the case, however, that those leaving their childhood homes in places like Rochester are lighting out for wide open spaces where opportunity abounds and careers are simply open to talent. My peers are not leaving to pursue Jeffersonian independence; theyre leaving to enter large professional organizations in which they often become quite dependent on the caprice of bosses, the vicissitudes of markets, the shifting terrain of mergers and acquisitions. And this brings me back to how eager I am

When I tell people that I live in my hometown

of Rochester, N.Y., their most common response is, Why? Rochester is the fifty-first largest metro region in the United States, a tad smaller than Buffalo and a tad bigger than Tucson. The local delicacy is called the garbage plate and is best served after 2 a.m., with a side of Lipitor. Rochester is a snowy place. It is a place where corporate giantsKodak, Xerox, Bausch and Lombonce stalked the land but now skulk amid layoffs and falling profits. Rochester is a city with grinding urban poverty, but its suburbs are rather prosperous places from which crops of upwardly mobile students are harvested each graduation season. These students often leave the region, either for college or for work, and many never return. The city elders wring their hands over this brain drain. The downtown core of the city is deserted after dark and, increasingly, during the work day. Large suburban business parks with rolling green lawns and constructed drainage ponds are luring businesses from the central skyscrapers. Some have characterized Rochester, along with cities like Buffalo, Detroit, and Baltimore, as dying. If I lived in New York, Washington, Boston, Seattle, or San Francisco, no one would ask me why. And yet when people ask how it is that I live here, I am eager to tell them. Perhaps I should first say why many people, and I include myself, have left the places they come from or at least seriously contemplated doing so. Moving from small places to larger ones is a major theme in American life. People from farms and towns, from other regions and other nations, have come to large American cities for work. They have also come to experience the buzz of such places, to be a part of it as Frank Sinatra sings of New York. As a kid reading books on ancient history, I wondered

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to tell people why I live in Rochester. It is not because Rochester affords me economic independence (though the low cost of living helps). There are surely capricious bosses and volatile markets here, too. But there is something else. There are the faces and the names of the people around me, each of which has a story behind it, each of which is a buoy anchored in the social sea, helping to orient me. There are the old buildingsthe grand facades of high culture, the battered storefronts of the inner city, the sentinel-like pump house on the reservoir hill to remind me of history and time. What is different in Rochester is that I own a piece of this place, and this place owns a piece of me. Id like to suggest that this relation is the grounds for a special kind of independence.

As a boy I learned of ancient Rome; as a

college student I learned of ancient Greece. In Athens, the citizens of the polis are thought to have experienced what the eighteenth-century French thinker Benjamin Constant called the liberty of the ancients, and what more recent political theorists label positive liberty. Athenian citizens were selected for public office by lottery, and their assembly comprised the entire body of citizens (though women and those not born of Athenian parents were excluded from citizenship, and much of the hard labor was performed by slaves). The essence of this Athenian liberty was the citizens freedom to determine the policies of their city, to shape the course of the common life. Such positive liberty differs from the negative liberty that Constant called the liberty of the moderns. This liberty is negative because it is the absence of intrusion upon private life. Positive liberty, on the other hand, is the presence of self-governance. It is not freedom from external constraints; it is freedom to be a self-determining person or community, to partake in public life. In Athens, the freedom to participate in the life of the city was regarded as a defining characteristic of human beings. To live outside the city was to live outside the political and cultural community that allows humans to exercise their capacities for reason, rhetoric, imagination, and artistry. He who lives outside the city, Aristotle said, must be either a beast or a god. For Aristotle, man is by nature

a political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity; he is like the Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one, whom Homer denounces. To denounce someone for living without an attachment to a city seems harsh to contemporary readers, but the very forcefulness of this language tells us that the Greeks took their civic communities seriously. Athens was not simply a place where people lived; for the citizen, Athens was life itself. Though the liberty of the ancients may sound alien to us today, it is nonetheless appealing. In fact, its appeal lies in our sense of its absence, our lack of civic self-determination. We too seldom experience commitment to something outside the self (but that serves selfdevelopment), something larger than the individual (but that tangibly involves individuals we know and value). Yet we yearn for it. Witness the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. It brought young Americans off campuses and into the streets. They went on the road to campaign in places like Dayton, Ohio, WilkesBarre, Pennsylvania, and Sarasota, Florida. I was one of them. The day of the New Hampshire primary, I knocked on doors in the towns of Antrim and Hillsborough. Obamas primary defeat was heartbreaking, but the campaigning was not. The way it called upon my strength of mind to make the case at every door, my strength of body to trudge through snowy back roads, and my strength of will to approach isolated houses whose owners, I anticipated, had had enough of political canvassers all this made for a sense of a days labors done well and for a worthy purpose. But presidential campaigns are fleeting things. If they leave us inspired, they leave us wanting more. The positive liberty of the ancients was not a function of the political season; it was a way of life. The small scale of the polisestimates put the population of Periclean Athens at 250,000, of which far fewer than half were eligible citizensfacilitated civic participation. Surely the endemic warfare among Greek city-states and the hard work performed by slaves also played their part in laying the foundations for the positive liberty of the citizen, for these offered him ample questions of great moment to deliberate onnothing less than war (alas) and peaceand the freedom from labor

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necessary to do so. But political participation can also perpetuate itself. A virtuous circle forms that quickens the bond between citizen and city: the dearer the city becomes to the citizen, the greater the citizens zeal for lending a hand in its affairs. Today, its as though this virtuous circle has become a vicious one. People stand in relation to their political community as spectators stand in relation to spectacle. They are observers rather than participants, and they are often disgusted observers. When they do participate, it is often simply to display this disgust. Witness the Sarah Palin rallies, which amount to the venting of spleen. To the extent that the Tea Party calls forth a response from the Left, it is likely to come in the form of shouts. The two sides are more apt to cover each other with spittle than convince each other with smarts. Whats missing is a field for meaningful action, a forum for the public use of reason, a pathway to civic life.

I think I have found such a pathway here in

Rochester. I feel a sense of ownership over this place; I feel committed to it. I am rooted in it not simply because of the accident of birth. The people I know and love are scattered all over the world, but the highest concentration of them in any one place is in Rochester. It is here that abstractions become tangible realities. Community is not an ideal of political theory; it is the brush of elbows and the rush of friends faces amid the Saturday crowds at the Rochester Public Market. The environment is not some photo of a distant stream with a bear pawing for salmon; its the Genesee River flowing north into Lake Ontario and passing by Kodak factories and the Genesee Brewery. Politics is not shouting faces on television; its the forum on violent crime with the mayor and the police chief at the single-screen movie theater two blocks away. In Rochester, life moves along tracks other than the career track. People have their jobs, and they work hard at them. But they also have projects outside their jobs. They start discussion clubs, urban farmers markets, political action groups, and new schools. There is a conscious sense here of building the community: one vacant lot converted into a neighborhood

garden, one old factory turned into an art gallery, one letter to the editor at a time. This is the difference between a rootless professional culture and a rooted local one. For those in the former, the city they live in is the site of their job. For those in the latter, it is the site of their civic life. The tradeoffs involved here are very real. The price of living in a place like Rochester might be the curtailment of ones career. There simply arent the opportunities here that there are in the larger cities. It is this reality that has led some to characterize Rochester and other mid-size cities in the older, non-Sunbelt portions of the country as dying places. Ironically, civic life springs from this perception of urban death. In the spring of 2008, I attended a conference in New Orleans. Our group heard from local leaders on the effort to rebuild the community following Hurricane Katrina. Expecting them to be marked by the tragic blow their city had suffered, I was startled by their sense of hope and their enormous energy. They were thankful for the opportunity to renew their city. Katrina was terrible, but it was also an opportunity for new thinking, new projects, and new collaborations. Most strikingly, I could see that these civic leaders were ignited by the very real way in which their city needed them. It was time for all hands to be on deck, for all who loved New Orleans to rally to it, for the citizens to find in the rebuilding of their city something like what William James called the moral equivalent of war. We dont need hurricanes to arouse this sentiment in the people of our cities, nor do we need the wars that plagued the Greeks and ultimately struck down their ancient liberties. What we need is a sense that our efforts are meaningful, and this sense is to be found in our left-behind hometowns and dying cities, in places like Rochester. These places are fields for our civic action, and they are places where our efforts can be vital, direct, and discernible in their results. William James wondered what might happen if there were, instead of military conscription a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years part of the army enlisted against Nature. I think James was on to something. But what Jamess proposal mayand its latter-day descendants the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps domiss is the opportunity to

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mobilize (or foster) the affective bonds that young people have to the places theyre from. Instead, these programs often uproot people from the communities theyre in and place them in new locations. My proposal is for a national youth service program that gives participants the chance to shape the future of their own communities. Dispensing with the martial metaphors, Id call this program (C)itizens (I)n(V)olved (I)n (C)ommunity, to be known by its catchier acronym CIVIC. As Paul Goodman observed fifty years ago in Growing Up Absurd, We have to learn again what city man always used to know, that belonging to the city, to its squares, its market, its neighborhoods, and its high culture, is a public good; it is not a field for investment to yield a long-term modest profit. CIVIC aims to make good this lesson.

This program would address the constellation

of social problems Ive laid out. It would stem the brain drain from places like Rochester by retaining young people, at least for a time. During that time, however, CIVIC participants would either strengthen or form the civic spirit that promotes the virtuous circle I have described. Participants would experience the natural environment by clearing trails, cleaning shorelines, and maintaining parks. They would learn the infrastructure of their community by installing solar panels and creating urban gardens. They would staff farm markets and beautify bus shelters. They would immerse themselves in the community by collecting oral histories from elders in nursing homes, providing transportation for those who cannot transport themselves, and tutoring elementaryschool children in literacy and math. In the second year of CIVIC, they would be handed some of the keys to the city in addition to their ongoing community work. Here is where the

proposal differs from the youth work camps that Paul Goodman and others have discussed. CIVIC participants would have regular jury duty. They would be elections inspectors. They would have column space in local newspapers. And they would enjoy voting membership in municipal legislative bodies. In Rochester, for example, the second-year CIVIC class would have one voting seat on the city council. They would attend all meetings of the council and deliberate about the matters before it, choosing a different delegate to cast their collective vote at each meeting. The same arrangement would apply to the county legislature, school boards, and the various town councils. At the conclusion of their time, CIVIC alumni would be able to say that the community had owned a part of them and that they, in return, had owned a piece of it. CIVIC members would perform useful work and would be affected by it. They would be students of and participants in the life of the community, with their classroom the city itself. CIVIC will counterbalance the call of the highly mobile and therefore rootless professional life, which has the full weight of cultural power, social prestige, and material wealth on its side. CIVIC will offer youth a taste of the liberty of the ancients by placing their hands on the rudder of the civic ship. The career aspirations that drain the young from Rochester impoverish the city, but they also impoverish the young. They too often deny them the opportunity to realize an aspect of our human potential distinct from our professional and private selves: our civic self.
Michael J. Brown is a graduate student in the department of history at the University of Rochester, where he studies the place of intellectuals in American political culture. He is the founder of Flower City Philosophy and the coordinator of Rochester Educators for Obama.

10

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A film about the most influential man youve never heard of.

His impact is all around us.

Noam Chomsky

PAUL GOODMAN CHANGED MY LIFE

a film by JONATHAN LEE
For a screening near you or to find out about educational use visit www.paulgoodmanfilm.com A Zeitgeist Films Release

Paul Goodman:Dissent, rev.qxd 10/17/2011 1:43 PM Page 12

Edited by Michael Walzer and Michael Kazin

Dissent is a quarterly magazine of politics and culture. In the words of the New York Times, Dissent ranks among the handful of political journals read most regularly by U.S. intellectuals. Each issue features reective articles about politics in the U.S., incisive social and cultural commentary, plus the most sophisticated coverage of European politics to be found anywhere outside of Europe.

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