PARTISAN REVIEW
401
up." "A cry of the heart that
is
gentle and innocent" tends to
get
buried, in the underground publications, "amid the sheer smut and
windy anger." The violent militancy of the New Left-whose "beauty
. . . has always lain in its eagerness to give political dignity to the
tenderer emotions"-is "depressing in the extreme...• At
this
point,
things do not simply become ugly; they become stupid." (The fa–
miliar
delicate order of priorities!) So much of what the young say
is "mock-Dionysian frenzy," and certainly "a fretful
cry
for 'rational–
ity'" on the part of the rest of us is to be expected. "How
is
one
to make certain that the exploration of the non-intellective powers
will not degenerate into a maniacal
nihilism?"
"The matter needs sorting out ... ," Roszak goes on to say, and
certainly Roszak
himself
does a
good
job of sorting by keeping the
young almost entirely out of his book and translating more intel–
ligible older "thinkers" to the worried parent audience the book
is
obviously addressed to. And, within his own argument, Roszak's
most subtle sorting out consists in what many of
his
readers will sure–
ly receive as a comforting separation of revolution from politics. We
must "view much that goes by the name of social justice with a
critical eye," recognizing that "even the most principled politics–
the struggle against racial oppression, the struggle against world-wide
poverty and backwardness" - can easily be exploited by the tech–
nocracy for its own aims. Perverting Marcuse's analysis of the estab–
lished culture's fantastic capacity for digesting almost anything into
its own system, Roszak would gently coax us into his intellectually
finicky quietism. "It
is
as Chuang-tzu tells us," and the latter's mes–
sage
is
summarized as "a political end sought by no political means."
Listen to Chuang-tzu himself:
The wise man, when he must govern, knows how to do nothing.
Letting things alone, he rests in his original nature.
If
he loves his
own person enough to let it rest in its original truth, he will govern
others without hurting them. Let him keep the deep drives in his
own
guts from going into action. Let him keep still, not looking,
not hearing. Let him sit like a corpse, with the dragon power alive
all around him. In complete silence, his voice will be like thunder.
His movements will be invisible, like those of a spirit, but the
powers of heaven will go with them. Unconcerned, doing nothing,
he will see all things grow
ripe
around him. Where
will
he find
time to govern?
