JOHN HENRY RALEIGH
analogous to that between the Irish nation and the British government
in the nineteenth century as described in
1066 and All That,
where it
is said that as successive waves of Prime Ministers kept coming up
with an answer to "The Irish Question," the Irish kept changing the
question.
So
too the students, and I trust they are enjoying this, keep
changing the question.
There is of course no such thing as
the
student, nor do students form
as yet anything like a genuine class. Nevertheless, I think it can be
suggested that the dynamic-deterministic syndrome operates with great
force among them. My own experience has been at Berkeley where
there is, I am convinced, as intelligent and energetic and responsible,
in the full sense of the term, a group of students,
as a
whole,
as have
ever been assembled in such numbers. But I have been struck not so
much by their insurgency, although this was startling and bewildering
enough when it happened, as by the various anomalies and paradoxes in
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their behavior. Their activist side, both in the good sense and the less
edifying sense, gets into the newspapers, leaving out of account the
considerable amount of passive, and often stoical, stress and malaise they
undergo. Their outbreaks, naturally, are there for all to see; unseen is
their fatalism which often still exists, even under the
cry
of "down with
the bureaucrats" (at the same time they will often shout "down with
the bureaucrats" when they have no valid reason to do so ).
Someday no doubt this will all be clearer. What has struck me over
a long period of time are the anomalies, many of which are no doubt
familiar: they are extraordinarily idealistic (about specific injustices) and
extraordinarily skeptical (about men, institutions and ideas); extra–
ordinarily active, aggressive and brave (in moving mountains ) and
quite passive and receptive intellectually (for those who mount the bar–
ricades outside the classroom seldom do so within, and the rebellion
does not really extend to this realm). They often tend to have, at least
in comparison to their forebears, a wide culture, but it is a thin one.
In fact their whole orientation, except to social injustice, is not vertical
but horiwntal, to books, experience, places, perhaps to friends. They
are extraordinarily verbal but practically inarticulate in expressing them–
selves. They distrust nothing so much as formal psychology, and still
their whole approach to life is inveterately "psychological," i.e., the
contemporary disease of never being able to judge an action without
discerning, or impugning, a motive. Some are unbearably lonely, and
neurotic, and others have an awesome self-enclosure, yet their class
solidarity is almost absolute.
Their emotions are powerful, real and explosive, but volatile,
