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IRVING HOWE
personal decision, not merely as to what one shall do but also as to
what one shall be. It requires authenticity, a challenge to the self.
Certain of the vulgarities, as also part of the ideological arrogance,
of the Marxist groups can thereby be avoided.
2. With this genuine strength there goes a corresponding weak–
ness: the lack of clear ideas and sometimes a feeling that it's wrong–
or "middle class"-to think systematically. It
is
very hard these
days
for young people to become radicals at all: there is no recognized
channel or agency to which they can turn, too many of their elders
nourish memories of blazing youth but fail to sympathize with acts
of rebellion in the present, and as a result, the dissident young have
to start as if from afresh. Sometimes this means creative ingenuity,
chann, aliveness; sometimes waste, error, hostility.
The society in which these young people grow up is so deficient
in attractive or even firm values, so ready to substitute success for
significance, so absorptive and shapeless in character, that often their
rebellion must take the fonn of seeking modes of personal differentia–
tion rather than strategies for political action. They search for extreme
postures that will enable them to act out their distance from and
contempt for a society that seems intent upon a maliciously benevolent
assimilation. They search for a distinctiveness of style by which to
thumb their noses at the middle class, which often means their own
parents-and thereby, of course, reveal that they remain dependent
on the middle class, which shares with them the tacit conviction that
fundamental values are embodied in externals of dress, appearance,
furnishings and speech.
Furthermore, the. "new radicals" come upon the scene shortly
after the intellectual and academic worlds have experienced a justifi–
able revulsion against the heritage of the Cold War; at a time when
there is a general weariness with chauvinism, hysteria and mindless
anti-Communism. The theme of "alienation" is made to do heavy
duty, first as a genuine perception of how hard it is to achieve
meaningful work and authentic self in our society, second as an
inclination to revel in estrangement, as if it were some irrevocable
doom against which human will and effort cannot now prevail. This
mood
is
further intensified by the understandable responses of young
Negro militants who, in the desperation of their struggle, feel them–
selves isolated, look upon their small band as a vanguard of the
