The birth of a sect

STUDENTS DAVID MARTIN

Dr Martin is a Reader in the Department of Sociology at the LSE.

'And we said to them, "Come. Come, with no specification, come." And they came. From France and Germany, up and comings, down and outs . . .' New Pentecost? No, a student essay.

'The only law is: Do what thou wilt.' Re- cently discovered pamphlet of the Civil War? Not at all, just the student newspaper.

'We intend to give them sanctuary.' An offer from compassionate clerics? No, just students again, speaking, as in the. first two instances, of the occupation of LSE during the Vietnam rally.

First intimations of a sectarian onset came over a year ago when a student shouted at me 'You are in chains.' He referred to my spiritual con- dition. The incident forcibly reminded me of George Fox, when he used to exclaim against the 'professors' in the steeplehouses. Moreover it has even been proposed that students should make just such prophetic denunciations in lec- tures, so that bourgeois ideology shall not pass unwitnessed against.

It wasn't long before even my marxist col- leagues noticed another sectarian pointer: an increasing and exuberant lesion with reality which in important ways amounted to a rejec- tion of 'the world.' As old-style revolutionaries, concerned with documenting social reality, they could only lament a mounting indifference to fact: scientific fact—or facts about the School. Students hardly pretended otherwise: one of them commented in an essay (1 paraphrase) 'Facts are like God—if they don't exist you must invent them.'

It's no wonder communication is supposed to be bad in the School. The channels are there all right but information is immediately trans- muted and distorted into a frame of myth and threatening portent which leads rationalist academics to imagine they are surrounded by chronic liars. Yet they are no more liars than Jehovah's Witnesses: they believe whatever

they need to believe in genuine visionary style. Even when they Were engaged in character assassination and obscene libel it was no sooner invented than sincerely credited.

When 'vision' is all-embracing it insinuates itself into some odd places. I was participating in a seminar on the scientific methodology of Karl Popper—a tough, long haul which some of them find rather distasteful. After the usual references to bourgeois liberalism, status quo etc, etc, one of them looked up and said that in his view prostitutes and criminals knew more about society than a social scientist could. Of course, it all depends what you mean by 'know' and 'society,' but I could only reflect that al- though the prostitutes might precede the Pharisees into the Kingdom of God they were not yet enrolled as members extraordinary in the scientific community.

The basic point is that subjectivity rules their world. Consciousness is all and action is superior to the elucidation of reality. Action is justified by faith. The vital simplicities of religion become the grand simplifications of politics. The central distinction to be grasped is a metaphysical one: those who have true and those who have false consciousness, converted and unconverted. Reason, fact, sequence, cate- gory, structure, gradation : all are dissolved in a childlike unity of experience. Here the links with infantile regression, fantasy and aggression are particularly clear. This is why the carefully articulated system of disciplines and the struc- ture of committees, not to mention the grada- tions of authority, knowledge and experience, can be simplified and dissolved into a sea of surging consciousness: the 'General Assembly.' In this atmosphere the very notion of degrees is obscene: they have four classes where revo- lutionaries have only their favourite 'binary distinction'—saved/ unsaved.

Yet,the demand for consciousness does vary in its intensity. Immediately after the first Viet- nam rally I attended a meeting which not only discussed the injection of police horses, how to pull police off them, and how to break cordons, but whether the consciousness of a rally should be relied upon to 'rise' spontaneously, whether indeed some previous planning might not be necessary like coming provided with helmets.

As with planning for the future so with the past : let the dead bury the dead, apart from the sacred martyrology of revolution. One of the objections advanced against Trevor-Roper when they threatened to prevent Oration Day was that he wasted his talents on the seven- teenth century. A university is not a place to comprehend a tradition any more than it exists to elucidate the world: it is a base.

Those who 'occupy' the base must act. When the French Revolution ('68) occurred a rump of revolutionary students tried to take over the building and sent out their missionaries two by two to proclaim the good tidings to the workers of London. Apparently the post office workers said they were a nice bunch of kids; the dockers were perhaps less polite. But no rejection dis- courages the genuine Witness: the Acts of the Students have only begun. Chi lives! 'Today the portent, tomorrow the reality' as one of them put it.

Act and Destroy. The theme of 'creative vandalism' is still only a minor one but it links with a horror of the past. Stubbing a cigarette out on an SCR picture is not perhaps very important but I had an entirely serious con- versation with one revolutionary who said Cambridge should be burned down. It misled, it seduced, it threw a veil over a cankered social reality. This same revolutionary had misspent seven years of his youth in four universities, including Cambridge, and had sensibly set light to none of them.

Students set sociologists a problem. One of the tools used to understand sect-formation is the notion of relative deprivation. But the students' wounds and deprivations are usually self-inflic- ted. Even if the wells of knowledge have been filled with bourgeois bilge the library is always open. There is even a course in revolution. Few have experienced anything more shocking than social mobility, and the North London middle class not even that. Provided with nearly total freedom they have to conjure up immaterial restraints, though these occasionally 'material- ise' in what one of them splendidly called the 'arbitrary erection' of gates. Their worst incar- ceration is in a bureaucratic role which fails to offer them unrestricted possibilities; and their worst pang is a hunger of the spirit—alienation. Hence the oriental marginalia of revolution.

Yet relative deprivation may still be relevant. I recently read this on the Socialist Society poster: 'Do you want to go into middle man- agement at £1,300 a year?' I paused and under- stood. Was it really fair that educated young socialists should receive little more than a dust- man? Could it really be that these young people —precious souls whom Chi Guevara died to save—were channelled into middle manage- ment? My junior colleagues upbraided me for my simplicity: didn't I know the revolution was a revolution of rising expectations? How re- lative can your deprivation get?