Add Comment
INTRODUCTION: AGENDA FOR A GENERATION
- We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed
now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.
- When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country
in the world: the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern
war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western
influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual,
government of, by, and for the people -- these American values we found good,
principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.
- As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling
to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation,
symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most
of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War,
symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves,
and our friends, and millions of abstract "others" we knew more directly because
of our common peril, might die at any time. We might deliberately ignore,
or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for
these were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in
the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and
resolution.
- While these and other problems either directly oppressed us or rankled
our consciences and became our own subjective concerns, we began to see complicated
and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America. The declaration "all
men are created equal . . . rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in
the South and the big cities of the North. The proclaimed peaceful intentions
of the United States contradicted its economic and military investments in
the Cold War status quo.
- We witnessed, and continue to witness, other paradoxes. With nuclear energy
whole cities can easily be powered, yet the dominant nationstates seem more
likely to unleash destruction greater than that incurred in all wars of human
history. Although our own technology is destroying old and creating new forms
of social organization, men still tolerate meaningless work and idleness.
While two-thirds of mankind suffers undernourishment, our own upper classes
revel amidst superfluous abundance. Although world population is expected
to double in forty years, the nations still tolerate anarchy as a major principle
of international conduct and uncontrolled exploitation governs the sapping
of the earth's physical resources. Although mankind desperately needs revolutionary
leadership, America rests in national stalemate, its goals ambiguous and tradition-bound
instead of informed and clear, its democratic system apathetic and manipulated
rather than "of, by, and for the people."
- Not only did tarnish appear on our image of American virtue, not only did
disillusion occur when the hypocrisy of American ideals was discovered, but
we began to sense that what we had originally seen as the American Golden
Age was actually the decline of an era. The worldwide outbreak of revolution
against colonialism and imperialism, the entrenchment of totalitarian states,
the menace of war, overpopulation, international disorder, supertechnology
-- these trends were testing the tenacity of our own commitment to democracy
and freedom and our abilities to visualize their application to a world in
upheaval.
- Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the
experiment with living. But we are a minority -- the vast majority of our
people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally-functional
parts. In this is perhaps the outstanding paradox: we ourselves are imbued
with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative
to the present. Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians, beneath the
common opinion that America will "muddle through", beneath the stagnation
of those who have closed their minds to the future, is the pervading feeling
that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion
not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well. Feeling the press
of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are fearful of the thought
that at any moment things might thrust out of control. They fear change itself,
since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos
for them now. For most Americans, all crusades are suspect, threatening. The
fact that each individual sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common
reluctance to organize for change. The dominant institutions are complex enough
to blunt the minds of their potential critics, and entrenched enough to swiftly
dissipate or entirely repel the energies of protest and reform, thus limiting
human expectancies. Then, too, we are a materially improved society, and by
our own improvements we seem to have weakened the case for further change.
- Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity
-- but might it not better be called a glaze above deeplyfelt anxieties about
their role in the new world? And if these anxieties produce a developed indifference
to human affairs, do they not as well produce a yearning to believe there
is an alternative to the present, that something can be done to change circumstances
in the school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government? It is to
this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we direct
our present appeal. The search for truly democratic alternatives to the present,
and a commitment to social experimentation with them, is a worthy and fulfilling
human enterprise, one which moves us and, we hope, others today. On such a
basis do we offer this document of our convictions and analysis: as an effort
in understanding and changing the conditions of humanity in the late twentieth
century, an effort rooted in the ancient, still unfulfilled conception of
man attaining determining influence over his circumstances of life.