Shirley Robin Letwin on the hero of the Beat Generation
Paul Goodman" was a prophet fully licensed and acclaimed in America. And now, shortly after his death, his works are being launched here. At home, he succeeded over several decades in pleasing both the pharisees and the people, at least most of the time. He lectured at all the leading universities, published in the best journals, became acquainted with officers of the law. He was endorsed by numbers of luminaries, of all persuasions, political and literary, as a " community planner, therapist, utopian, committed man," as a " flexible, subtle, witty and poetically strung mind"; and as "our most exemplary intellectual . . . the most deeply representative and most worthy one." His excellence as a specimen of the free and creative intellectual is what makes Goodman worthy of attention in Britain, still so repressed by absurd inhibitions.
To see Goodman as a ' utopian ' — the most frequent description — is misleading. True, he planned an ideal community, in a book with the elegant and evocative title of Communitas. But to be more precise, he laid out three " paradigms" of communities, including within each several paradigmatic alternatives. To be still more precise, be and his brother and co-author, an architect, " being artists," preferred the kind of community that eliminates " the difference between production and, consumption," a clever piece of social engineering which Goodman described poetically: "Such a commune is utopian, it is in the heart-child of man " . . . If then a utopian at all he was a rare utopian who had preferences yet esteemed indefinitely various models of a good life. He could therefore quite rightly describe himself as Neolithic Conservative, Cultural Revolutionary, Liberal Radical and Anarchist. Many-sidedness, that sub40 ..ideal proposed by Goethe and aspitid to by John Stuart Mill, was achieved to the utmost by Paul Goodman.
The conservative streak showed up in his admiration for old buildings and in his opposition to motorcars and roads. He was all in favour of "personal independent Speaking and Language (E3); Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals (90p); Cornmunitas (90p); New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative (90p); Five Years (90p); People or Personnel and Like a Conquered Province (90p); Adam and His Works (Cl), Paul Goodman (Wildwood). enterprise on a human scale," " manly vocation " and "genuine culture." He even endorsed advertising, because it informs a "wider public of the need for a product which is not perhaps absolutely necessary" and so makes "expanding productivity economically feasible." He outconservatised traditional conservatives, whom he accused of looking back only ten or fifteen years, by insisting on the values of " neolithic times or the Middle Ages " — values such as " space, sun, trees," not to mention " green grass and clean rivers, children with bright eyes and good colour whatever the colour." Nothing certainly could be more conservative than air, fire, earth and water.
In the same vein, Goodman warned, just as Edmund Burke had, against the "incalculably destructive " effects of revolutionary change. To avoid this, he said, we must destroy the agents of such change: "The complex of cars, roads, suburbanisation, mass air travel, the complex of plantation, chain grocers and forced urbanisation." Elsewhere he argued for less heroic measures, urging that the " inevitable " should be coped with " piecemeal," a thoughtful step toward reasserting the tenets of true conservatism.
Then, on the other hand, Goodman revealed himself as a radical. He had the typical radical courage to " drive ideas to their logical conclusion." At the I same time, he pressed for experimentation I in " economic, cultural and moral thought." Naturally he opposed the I atrocity of fighting Ho Chi Minh. He I wished to liberate blacks, women, homosexuals, children and prisoners. He hated ! conformism. He wanted society to be t governed by "skilful and spiritual men," "manly men" as ready to be homosexuall as heterosexual.
His conservatism, his radicalism, his many other facets, along with his anarchism come together in his theory of culture and education, most fully developed in Growing Up Absurd and Utopian Essays. Goodman's view is that men are animals; therefore part of nature; therefore to be protected against the unnatural.
"Animal or interpersonal activity," he pointed out, is " part of the definition of speaking and therefore of language." Therefore, "animal abilities" are "essen tially relevant." Gestures are not to be dismissed as " paralinguistic — they are language." Linguists and the like are rogues; instead of recognising that language is "various and modifying," they are always trying to pin it down. In Speaking and Language, Goodman is concerned to show that language is a "transaction," ' and that if linguists and their henchmen were not always straitening us into their " abstract recorded generalised code," we would recognise that. the "forms of language have no importance." ' Meaning ' alone matters. And meaning is independent of language.
In keeping with this emancipating view of language, Goodman opposed any form of education that stifles the natural animal in man. Reverance for education, is, however, essential. "Human education is necessary to keep things going at all." The right amount of education is essential: "too much of it makes people too simple." The right subject matter is essential: we "owe a duty to geometry as such, to Euclid, Archimedes, Newton," and must therefore teach geometry "no matter what the consequence." Besides, " character analysis and eurhythmics" should be practised in schools to "unlock and animate " what is in the child. The right aims of education are essential: these are, among others, " political freedom, clarification, appreciation, and community." And above all else, the right organisation of education is essential, and the right organisation is progressive. All progressive schools are designed to operate so that "integral community life is of the essence." The best progressive schools " specialise in serving the surrounding regions as social-physicians and leaders of regional improvements." What constitutes a good education is sharply put in Goodman's dictum that its "mores are in principle permissive and experimental." The sure evidence of a good education is products that form " almost invariably a spectrum of radical thought and life, from moralistic religious pacifists, through socialists and La Follette or TVA liberals, to free-thinking anarchists."
All of this deservedly made Goodman a culture-hero among the young of the 'fifties, ene Beat Generation. He made it clear that he appreciated and approved of their chief maxim of good conduct tesistance against the Rat Race, imposed i by The System. Since they recognised that I The System destroys ." the margin of formlessness, real risk, novelty, spontaneity, that makes growth possible," they proceeded to hide in "a hole in the I Wall" or just to run. Goodman sometimes thought that the Beats exaggerated the 'picture — "in important ways the 1 American system is not inhuman but human-all-too-human." But they were right in believing that "middle class ' values ' are reaction formations to inhibit in themselves some human values still available to simpler people." In place of the "empty ' belonging or conformity of the organisation," the Beat young found in the "warmth of assembled animal bodies" a daily "interpersonal excitement." They ' discovered that people need not be "subject to authority," that they "can go it on their own, without resentment, hostility, delinquency, or stupidity." They learned that action is superior to reflection. They accordingly insisted on ' live ' comment, ' real ' response, "art and letters as living action." Though they might have been foolish about some things, they were wise to take their bearings by the central teaching of Tao — the Blessedness of Confusion.
Goodman's own devotion to the Blessedness of Confusion is evident in all his Works and the mark it makes constitutes one of the two stigmata that conclusively establish him as an Intellectual. "Confusion," he explained, "is the state of Promise, the fertile void where surprise is possible again. Confusion is in fact the state that we are in, and we should be wise to cultivate it." So he preached and so he practised. Thus he was enabled to combine rigorous criticism of his society with an ebullient faith in "community life as continuous group psychotherapy in our sick society, in which just the anxieties and tensions of living together become the positive occasions to change people and to release new energy altogether." Thus he achieved his happy readiness to follow any phrase wherever lit might lead without letting meaning dictate his words. and his brave refusal to be shackled by consistency and coherence.
The second of the intellectual's stigmata Obvious in Goodman is his Easy Erudition. Needless to say, he mastered his Galbraith and Myrdal, his Freud, Fromm and Reich, his Russell, Dewey, Spock and all the other spiritual guides of his time. But he reached far beyond that.
Plato is invoked as authority for the Propositions that the best judge of a chariot is its user, that training men is like tending livestock, and that cities should be planned. Aristotle stands behind the statement that "the appetite of man is infinite." From Kant, Goodman learned that "our intellectual structures come into Play spontaneously, by the 'synthetic unity of apperception,' if we are attentive to real situations," and that to " exercise the cognitive faculties abstractly, ante rem, in themselves, is precisely superstition, presumptuous theology." Bosanquet IS called in to warrant that "the characteristic of philosopy is to be i concrete and central." Goodman levies contributions also onCharlie Chaplin and Lewis Mumford (" the heart of the city is the department store "); on Bruno Levi (" the reality of a house is the space within "), on Ibsen, Zola, Dreiser and Hobbes — from the last Goodman discovers that every prisoner 'has a "duty to try to escape." Norbert Wiener, the mathematician who invented cybernetics, is drawn on as interpreter of Dryden, whose greatest achievement was his insight that the poet conveys more information than the scientist because he "deranges the code," and Einstein provides corroboration for the truth that upsetting 'the code' is the source of all knowledge. Frank Lloyd Wright is called =on to defend functionalism by lauding its "opposition to cultural dishonesty, snobbery and shame of physical function." And to conclude this very modest sample of Goodman's repertoire of great sources for grand ideas, Marx vouches for the proposition that the "Elizabethan yeomanry had the highest humanity." Of course, Goodman not only knew foreign authors, but also had at his command foreign words and phrases — ancient and modern — with which he kindly supplemented the paucity of the English mines exhausted by him.
Precisely what the Blessedness of Confusion fortified by Easy Erudition can achieve is best seen by following one of Goodman's trains of thought from beginning to end. Fortunately we have his autobiographical notebooks, Five Years, aptly described by a leading American critic as "the voice of sweet reason." Among its many concise profundities, one of the most striking is the following: If we see Abraham as moment by moment continuing his job of being-a-father, there is no dilemma in his navigating the trial of faith, moment by moment. But Kierkegaard does not understand natural relations like fatherhood, so he comes to hard crises and Wild West solutions. The problem is to find the extreme in the ordinary. The man of faith does not know he has faith until you press him, or tempt his despair. He is a happy-go-lucky atheist.
An intellectual tapestry of such unparalleled richness is clearly the product of an intellect that has scrambled at will in the fecund pastures of culture, tirelessly dredged the depths of civilisation and agglomerated with unharnessed creativity, Not for Goodman, despite his PhD, the pedantry that presumes to enter into the thoughts of others and binds the interpretation of dead authors to thei: intentions rather than our uses. Not for him the contrived modesty of scholars who disguise their lethargy and ignorance as exactness and order; or the finicky priggishness that makes men of letters cling parochially to plain English and timidly converse without daring to pronounce; or the neurotic diffidence of gentlemen fussing about taste and discrimination, obsessed by fear of pretentiousness. In Goodman we see instead the generous self-made and allmaking new spirit, liberator, innovator, illuminator, stimulator — Intellectual triumphant.
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