MUTANTS
516
her improbable adjective does describe a crime against her world; for
non-chaleur ("cool" , the futurists themselves would prefer to call it)
is the essence of their life-style as well as of the literary styles to which
they respond: the offensive style of those who are not so much
for
any–
thing in particular, as "with it" in general.
But such an attitude is as remote from traditional "alienation,"
with its profound longing to end disconnection, as it
is
from ordinary
forms of allegiance, with their desperate resolve not to admit disconnec–
tion. The new young celebrate disconnection-accept it as one of the
necessary consequences of the industrial system which
has
delivered
them from work and duty, of that welfare
stat~
which makes disengage–
ment the last possible virtue, whether it call itself Capitalist, Socialist
or Communist. "Detachment" is the traditional name for the stance
the futurists assume; but "detachment" carries with it irrelevant reli–
gious, even specifically Christian overtones. The post-modernists are
surely in some sense "mystics," religious at least in a way they do not
ordinarily know how to confess, but they are not Christians.
Indeed, they regard Christianity, quite as the Black Muslim (with
whom they have certain affinities) do, as a white ideology: merely
one more method- along with Humanism, technology, Marxism--of
imposing "White" or Western values on the colored rest of the world.
To the new barbarian, however, that would-be post-Humanist (who
is in most cases the white offspring of Christian forebears)
his
white–
ness
is
likely to seem if not a stigma and symbol of shame, at least the
outward sign of his exclusion from all that his Christian Humanist
ancestors rejected in themselves and projected mythologically upon
the colored man. For such reasons, his religion, when it becomes
explicit, claims to be derived from Tibet or Japan or the ceremonies
of the Plains Indians, or is composed out of the non-Christian sub–
mythology that has grown up among Negro jazz musicians and in the
civil rights movement. When the new barbarian speaks of "soul," for
instance, he means not "soul" as in Heaven, but as in "soul music"
or even "soul food."
It is all part of the attempt of the generation under twenty-five,
not exclusively
in its
most sensitive members but especially in them,
to become Negro, even as they attempt to become poor or pre-rational.
About this particular form of psychic assimilation I have written suf–
ficiently
in
the past (summing up what I had been long saying in
