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NAT HENTOFF
retired radicals and the utopian rhetoricians. They are in a constant
dialogue with that part of the society which few Americans confront
directly. They learn as well as advise. Their theories .are tested and
often changed by existential, day-to-day experience with neighborhoods
utterly alien to, let us say, liberals, labor-union leaders, the hierarchy
of socially concerned church officials and not a few militant Negro
writers.
I have not mentioned the place of international affairs in the
perspective of the new radicals. Most of them are of course opposed
to our unilateral and quite hypocritical involvements, like our presence
in South Vietnam. But then, so is the
New York Times.
Some are
pacifists, either nuclear or total. Few, in any case, support the "over–
kill" peace-through-threat-of-Armageddon stance of present American
foreign policy. They are not-most of them anyway-naive about
Communism, Soviet or Chinese, but they consider their own energies
,best spent on changing
this
society so that it will not in its way
continue to produce smoothly rounded, interchangeable citizens. In–
sofar as they appear to have begun to think through a foreign policy
for the "new society," many would conclude that just as cybernetics
can produce the kind and scale of resources developed countries
decide
to have, so this knowledge can be shared with underdeveloped coun–
tries to help them jump into the Industrial Age. And
this
knowledge
must be shared not in a system of political vassalage or as part of a
Cold War game of dominoes, but in a spirit of expanding humanism
which recognizes that decisions now
can
be made which could eventu–
ally end an economy of scarcity everywhere. Humanism can thus be
paralleled by self-interest, by the realization that the end of world-wide
poverty in a nuclear age can greatly minimize the pressures for the kind
of conflict which spirals into war.
There would then be the danger, of course, of a global de–
humanized technological society, but by then also, perhaps, this
country and others would have discovered ways of keeping the ma–
chines under control. In any case, the immediacy of present American
problems-particularly when viewed in terms of cybernation-con–
vinces most new radicals that the only realistic way to change our
foreign policy
is
to build domestic political power first.
The new radicals are essentially engaged in giving a voice (with
power) to the voiceless-including themselves. At the University of
