Paul Goodman
<http://www.dissident.org/071999/dissmnth.htm>
The term "libertarian" in recent times has come to signify a kind
of "damn the torpedoes, full speed astern" form of
laissez-faireism that abjures some of the more malign
mini-dogmas of the Republican Right while celebrating its
abiding premise. The premise, of course, is that all good men
and true are at liberty to stuff whatever swag they can into their
seabags without concern or responsibility for their mates and
fellow passengers. As preeminent individualists in an era when
most people with good sense realize that chesty individualism vestigial
or incipient is our nation's worst affliction, libertarians hoist the
ensign of
piratical, free market capitalism to swashbuckling heights heretofore
unimagined
by both corporate and populist conservatives.
Libertarianism didn't always connote such odious purpose. For
leftists of an earlier generation libertarian meant Social
Anarchism and Mutual Aid in the tradition of Peter Kropotkin. Its
most reflective advocate was an essayist, poet, novelist, dramatist, and
activist, named Paul Goodman.
Goodman's most acclaimed book was Growing Up Absurd, and
it continues to occupy a prominent place on lists of the most
influential books of the century. Literate baby-boomers earnestly
explain that Growing Up Absurd was the story of their life. In fact,
it was not a story of anybody's life, but an unsmiling examination
of the myriad cultural, social, and economic derangements that
invalidate human community and enfeeble America's young
people. Goodman demonstrated how American institutions
collude to subvert their own purported objectives, nullify genuine
democracy and educate children to be callow and stupid. They
accomplish this by denying us authentic work. Employment is not
work.
Manly, meaningful, work was a recurrent motif in all Goodman's
writings, and how authentic community is best served. About
these, and the celebration of joyous, uninhibited sex, he wrote
inexhaustibly.
Like his university teaching days, his literary career was troubled
and paradoxical. After twenty-five years of struggling to bring to
print hundreds of poems, plays, stories and novels rejected by
major publishing houses, but much admired by an increasing
coterie of artists and intellectuals, Goodman abruptly found
himself one of the several most lionized philosophers of the
1960's. (C.Wright Mills, Norman O. Brown, and Herbert Marcuse,
though intellectual mediocrities compared to Goodman, were the
other Left superstars of the era) Anointed by the New Left student
revolution and heralded by the liberal press, his books suddenly
tapped a wide audience. The student revolutionaries, Goodman
eventually recognized, understood him no better than the
mainstream publishers who had earlier rejected him, or than they understood
their other ideological leaders, and in the end he disavowed the lot of
them as
a mob of witless narcissists. What especially offended him was the
metastasizing
"ahistoricity" of the young. "They no longer remember their own history,"
he said.
"Each incoming class is more entangled in the specious
presentI am often hectored to my face with formulations that I
myself put in their mouths, which have become part of the oral tradition two
years old, (the)author prehistoric."
Largely a product of his own experience and self-education, Paul
Goodman was abandoned by his father as an infant to be raised
with minimum supervision by his bohemian mother in the intense
Jewish intellectual atmosphere of early twentieth century New
York. As a child he roamed the streets, parks, museums and
libraries of
Manhattan, absorbing the atmosphere and noting its lessons.
Goodman came of age in the 1940's. A CCNY graduate, though
never a part of the City College Marxist cabal that now forms the
core of New Conservatism, he spent much of his time for the next
decade sneaking into classes at Columbia and Harvard,
eventually landing a job at University of Chicago where he took a
Ph.D. in Literature. Soon fired for insisting he had a right to "fall in
love" with his students, male and occasionally female, he was
thereafter fired from every college that hired him "out" from the
outset, in the literal as well as contemporary meanings of the
word.
With a wife and three children to support Goodman settled into a
life of bohemian poverty, became a familiar face in 8th street and
Fourth Avenue bookstores and saved postage money by riding
his bike to publishing houses, only to be dismissed as too avant
garde, or not avant garde enough. In fact he was both, and was
so considered by his colleagues at Black Mountain College,
where many of the great or famous in unconventional American art
and letters taught in the late forties and early fifties.
Not until midlife did Goodman, by then discouraged and
marginalized in a burgeoning literary world of lesser talents, get a
significant break. It arrived in curiously artless guise. Goodman
became acquainted with the Jewish refugee psychiatrist, Fritz
Perls, like himself, an entirely original thinker. Perls had for some
time been adapting principles of gestalt psychology to the needs
of psychotherapy. Happily, Perls was as graceless a writer as
Goodman was skillful. They collaborated on a book that remains a
classic, Gestalt Therapy.
Rapidly now, his focus shifted from poet and novelist to social
critic. Although his breakthrough book, Growing Up Absurd, was
rejected by a dozen publishers, in 1960 it became a huge
success even among conventional academics. Goodman was
soon playing an avuncular role in the youth rebellion, traveling
from campus to campus while writing a book a year. Remarks
one biographer: "As the movement became The Movement and
shifted to a struggle between the Old Left and the New Left,
Goodman remained unapologetically free. Many of his former followers
abandoned him as he refused to offer a blueprint for building ideological
structures for the future, preferring the formulation of here, now, next."
It is not unfair to say that Paul Goodman wrote about, and to, men
at a time when men were having overwhelming difficulty
re-defining themselves. If his entire philosophy were reduced to
one word, it would be "making-do," the title of a Goodman novel
from the 1960's.
For Goodman that meant doing self-sufficient, purposeful work at a
human scale.
Goodman would much rather see a student become an ace carpenter
and write
some poetry after hours than become an Ivy League English
professor or,
God forbid, a lawyer. Human language, when authentic, is always
poetry,
he argued, and when it is not, as is so often the case with
educated and
institutionalized "high achievers", it is shit.
Like Thoreau and Whitman and Dewey, he would hold in
contempt today's "hands-on kinda guy", whose hands are mostly
employed summoning numbers on a laptop computer. His
philosophy of education, spelled out in all his books, but pointedly
in Community of Scholars, like Dewey's, condensed to the
maxim that for a small child everything in the environment is
educative if he attends to it with sympathetic guidance.
He argued passionately for schooling based on field trips and apprenticeships
in the world as it is.
Goodman anticipated both urban and rural ecology by decades.
His masterwork, Communitas, which argued for removing all
cars from Manhattan before there was actually such a thing as gridlock,
remains an essential text for any serious student of architecture.
As an ecologist speaking of "sustainable development", he held
that "Both socialists and capitalists make a disastrous ethical
mistake, mortgaging the present to the future. . . Sometimes I
state my program in the form, 'How to take on Culture without
losing Nature,' but that is already too abstract."
The starting point for his social analysis, correctly observed an
Internet
biographer, was the assumption that for the most part "Society" is a
fictitious and
superstitious abstraction. People, said Goodman, 'mostly live their lives
in a loose
matrix of face to face communities, private fantasies, and shifting
subsocieties."
He found Marx's obsession with Society (and dissidents' absorption with
THE SYSTEM) "pathetic."
If he was no vociferous champion of women, neither was he a
friend to Left-wing ideologues. Showing his Renaissance man's
colors he cautioned the unheeding hippies of the sixties, that it is
better to freely take on a minor tradition which can be
appropriated as experience than be forced to take on a major
tradition which cannot. "Real people," he said, "mean what they
do. Vocation is taking on the business of the community so it is
not a dragIf I find that what I am good at and good for, that my
community can use and will support, securely doing this, I can find
myself further."
Dissidents continuing the search for themselves and other
aspects of their universe may find it profitable to explore Paul
Goodman's parallax view.
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