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the thousands who resisted or shouted on campuses did so
in
the
name of naive or disingenuous or even nostalgic politics (be careful
what you wish for in your middle age, or your children will parody
it forthwith!); and sheer ennui doubtless played a role along with a
justified rage against the hypocrisies of academic life. Univemties
have long rivaled the churches in their devotion to institutionalizing
hypocrisy; and more recently they have outstripped television itself
(which most professors affect to despise even more than they despise
organized religion) in the institutionalization of boredom.
But what the students were protesting in large part, I have come
to believe, was the very notion of man which the universities sought
to impose upon them: that bourgeois-Protestant version of Humanism,
with its view of man as justified by rationality, work, duty, vocation,
maturity, success; and its concomitant understanding of childhood and
adolescence as a temporarily privileged time of preparation for assum–
ing those burdens. The new irrationalists, however, are prepared to
advocate prolonging adolescence to the grave, and are ready to dis–
pense with school as an outlived excuse for leisure. To them work is
as obsolete as reason, a vestige (already dispensible for large numbers)
of an economically marginal, pre-automated world; and the obsoles–
cence of the two adds up to the obsolescence of everything our society
understands by maturity.
Nor is it in the name of an older more valid Humanistic view of
man that the new irrationalists would reject the WASP version; Rabe–
lais is as alien to them as Benjamin Franklin. Disinterested scholar–
ship, reflection, the life of reason, a respect for tradition stir (however
dimly and confusedly) chiefly their contempt; and the Abbey of
Theleme would seem as sterile to them as Robinson Crusoe's Island.
To the classroom, the library, the laboratory, the office conference
and the meeting of scholars, they prefer the demonstration, the sit-in,
the riot: the mindless unity of an impassioned crowd (with guitars
beating out the rhythm in the background), whose immediate cause
is felt rather than thought out, whose ultimate cause is itself. In light
of this, the Teach-in, often ill understood because of an emphasis on
its declared political ends, can be seen as implicitly a parody and
mockery of the real classroom: related to the actual business of the
university, to real teaching only as the Demonstration Trial (of Dimi-
