CULTURE
435
sporadic and changeable. They will fight to the death for a cause, but
they bear no grudges. In short, they are simultaneously expressive, active,
captains of their fate; and receptive, indirect, vessels of destiny. They
are exceptionally concentrated in some ways; quite dispersed in others.
Consciously rebelling against the "official culture," they unconsciously
participate in it at fairly deep levels.
Perhaps this is only the condition of youth in any age, and they
are of course essentially no different from young people at any time
or place, although they are one of the best examples of the species. But
their social situation certainly accentuates some of the anomalies sketched
above.
For the society they inhabit is at one and the same time dynamic–
open-fluid, and rigid-closed-deterministic. It promises, on the one hand,
endless play, variety, change, novelty, the successive dissolution of the
old and the fixed; and, on the other, it portends a universal prison–
house, a "clean, well-lighted place," where everything from cradle to
grave is mapped out, processed, planned, established, precommitted and
restudied. A pure condition of the first is no more desirable than a pure
condition of the second, but there are impulses today leading in both
directions. I have put these matters in quite a different fashion from the
way in which they are stated in
Beyond
Culture,
but that is only because
I was forcibly struck when reading the book on how eloquently it called
up the twin images of an emergent and protean self in an ambiguous
relationship with a powerful and changing culture.
