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PARTISAN REVIEW
dismissed as undisciplined and self-indulgent by the frightened defenders
of the true modem tradition?
One Issue Politics.
One of the symptoms of intellectual breakdown
is the inability to see things as part of a total scene. Individuals and
movements become fixed on a single target, usually to the exclusion
of everything else. Thus the obsessive and exclusive concern with - for
or against - Vietnam, pollution, Black rights, women's lib, youth, drugs,
etc. Some peopIe can see nonsense only on the right, others only on
the left.
As
though this were not absurd enough, we are all familiar
with the reduction of the absurd
ad absurdum
which focuses not merely
on one issue but on only one aspect of it: one trend, one organization,
one publication. Do we need to be reminded that a distinguishing trait
of crackpots is the inability to generalize?
Women's Lib.
The hottest, and touchiest, issue today is women's lib.
Nobody can quarrel with its aims. But what do you do with its nutty
fringes, with the ce:ebration of masturbation and lesbianism, with its
man-baiting, its cultism, and all the ideological meanings that have been
squeezed out of the shape of the vagina and the exact site of the
orgasm? I suspect that the
I
exotic questions have taken over quickly,
because questions like equal rights and opportunities are not so modish
and require low-keyed, dull, plodding, humdrum work. All that smacks
of namby-pamby liberalism while the orgasm has all the explosive re–
sonances of revolution.
On the other hand, those who are always ready to pounce on any
sign of weakness or foolishness on the left are using the sexist extra–
vaganzas to dismiss women's lib as a whole. I guess one can recognize
women's lib's enemies, open or concealed, for what they are. But some
of its friends make it difficult to remember that you are really for it.
Educational Recipes.
Education experts are probably more polarized
than any others. On the one hand, there are the standpatters who act
as if education has been destroyed by the students, and as though in–
flated costs, fund-cuts, Agnewesque attacks on intellectuals, the smug–
ness and inertia of middle academia, and mass education have had
nothing to do with it. On the other side, speaking in the name of free–
dom, enlightenment and revolution are the nouveau-Rousseauists, whose
position when you dig through the rhetoric of human fulfillment is not
so new. It's the same old progressive notion of the student as gifted
savage.
The new educational crusaders all agree on one thing: that the
wrong subjects and wrong values are taught by the wrong teachers,
particularly in the colleges which, they claim, are cluttered with the
ghosts of the past, and that historical knowledge has been frozen into
the bureaucratic mind of the academy. There is some truth to the
