PARTISAN REVIEW
421
of wisdom. And it
is
far from absurd for them to want to do some–
thing to change their lives! What
we
have to make clear to them
is
that it's not so much the car, as the system that built it, that needs
changing - and that we can't trade a social system in, we must
build a new one.
The perfectibility and avidity that have driven our
par~nts
in
contradictory directions have been driving us too. We've demanded
"Power to the people!", and we've identified with any and every
people in the world - except
our people.
This
drive has been gen–
uinely liberating for many of us: it has enabled us, by getting into
other people, to expand and deepen ourselves; and
this is
what the
word "psychedelic" legitimately means, and what so much of the
nineteen sixties was
all
about. But getting into other people, identify–
ing ourselves with them,
is
not enough for radicalism. Radicalism
means going to the roots, and (as Marx said) the root for man
is
man, and
if
we mean to be
men-Menschen,
human beings-if
we want our souls to expand authentically, we must make room for
ourselves at the center. In the course of the sixties, we have learned
to affirm, avidly, militantly, everyone but ourselves. Now we must
affirm ourselves as well. We must move, must grow, from apocalypse
to
dialectic.
It
is
worth pointing out that the New Left began with dialectic,
with a document
Ro~u
would have understood: the Port Huron
Statement of 1962. "Some would have us believe," the statement
says,
"that Americans feel contentment amidst their prosperity." But
the fact
is,
it goes on to say, most people are tormented by "deeply
felt anxieties about their role in the world ... [which] produce a
yearning to believe that there
is
some alternative to the present, that
something can be done to change the school, the bureaucracies, the
work-places, the government.... It
is
to this yearning, at once the
spark and the engine of change, that we address our present appeal."
The signers of the statement were determined to discover or to create
new forms of political life and action that would express people's
"unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-under–
standing and creativity"; forms that would fulfill their "unrealized
capacities for reason, freedom and love." These goals can be achieved
only by transforming America into a "democracy of individual par–
ticipation." The New Left, at its birth, embarked on a "search for
