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The
Society Beyond
- Look beyond the campus, to America itself. That student life is more intellectual,
and perhaps more comfortable, does not obscure the fact that the fundamental
qualities of life on the campus reflect the habits of society at large. The
fraternity president is seen at the junior manager levels; the sorority queen
has gone to Grosse Pointe: the serious poet burns for a place, any place,
or work; the once-serious and never serious poets work at the advertising
agencies. The desperation of people threatened by forces about which they
know little and of which they can say less; the cheerful emptiness of people
"giving up" all hope of changing things; the faceless ones polled by Gallup
who listed "international affairs" fourteenth on their list of "problems"
but who also expected thermonuclear war in the next few years: in these and
other forms, Americans are in withdrawal from public life, from any collective
effort at directing their own affairs.
- Some regard this national doldrums as a sign of healthy approval of the
established order -- but is it approval by consent or manipulated acquiescence?
Others declare that the people are withdrawn because compelling issues are
fast disappearing -- perhaps there are fewer breadlines in America, but is
Jim Crow gone, is there enough work and work more fulfilling, is world war
a diminishing threat, and what of the revolutionary new peoples? Still others
think the national quietude is a necessary consequence of the need for elites
to resolve complex and specialized problems of modern industrial society --
but, then, why should business elites help decide foreign policy, and who
controls the elites anyway, and are they solving mankind's problems? Others,
finally, shrug knowingly and announce that full democracy never worked anywhere
in the past -- but why lump qualitatively different civilizations together,
and how can a social order work well if its best thinkers are skeptics, and
is man really doomed forever to the domination of today?
- There are no convincing apologies for the contemporary malaise. While the
world tumbles toward the final war, while men in other nations are trying
desperately to alter events, while the very future qua future is uncertain
-- America is without community, impulse, without the inner momentum necessary
for an age when societies cannot successfully perpetuate themselves by their
military weapons, when democracy must be viable because of its quality of
life, not its quantity of rockets.
- The apathy here is, first subjective -- the felt powerlessness of ordinary
people, the resignation before the enormity of events. But subjective apathy
is encouraged by the objective American situation -- the actual structural
separation of people from power, from relevant knowledge, from pinnacles of
decision-making. Just as the university influences the student way of life,
so do major social institutions create the circumstances in which the isolated
citizen will try hopelessly to understand his world and himself.
- The very isolation of the individual -- from power and community and ability
to aspire -- means the rise of a democracy without publics. With the great
mass of people structurally remote and psychologically hesitant with respect
to democratic institutions, those institutions themselves attenuate and become,
in the fashion of the vicious circle, progressively less accessible to those
few who aspire to serious participation in social affairs. The vital democratic
connection between community and leadership, between the mass and the several
elites, has been so wrenched and perverted that disastrous policies go unchallenged
time and again.
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