Talking 'Bout His Generation
In a logical world, the
number of books written about a political movement would have some rough
connection with its ultimate importance. The noisy crusades that became
historical footnotes would all be literary footnotes as well.
But we are living in a
different sort of world, one in which it is possible, for example, to fill up
the better part of a library with volumes written by, and about, the leftists
in Manhattan in the 1930s. Anything you want to know about the sectarian
ideological warfare of these quarrelsome people--Socialists, Stalinists,
Trotskyites, Schactmanites, Lovestonites--you can find in masochistic
detail.
That's
not because their arcane disputes held any fascination for most Americans at
the time. Nor is it because of their impact on the decades that followed. I
have never heard anyone suggest that the key to understanding American postwar
politics lay in the arguments among the competing factions at CCNY in 1937 or
their subsequent recreations on Riverside Drive. The truth is that 1930s
leftism became a literary genre because those who indulged in it enjoyed
writing books, and were also willing to buy them.
It would be a mistake to conclude that, as those leftists
depart from the scene, the tradition of political verbosity will die out.
Rather, a new generation of aging leftists--the campus radicals of 1968--is
emerging, and off to an appropriately windy start. If you happen to be
interested in the internal factionalism of SDS in 1965 or Tom Hayden's Port
Huron statement of 1962, a large collection of books is available to help you.
Or you can purchase a two-volume account of the Sorbonne uprising in Paris,
compressed into a tidy 1,311 pages.
Now
there is another book, A Tale of Two Utopias , by Paul Berman, a veteran
of the 1960s leftist wars who writes for The New Yorker , the New
Republic , and other organs of the nonmilitant journalistic mainstream.
The difference between Berman's volume and most others I have seen on the
subject is that his is an entertaining book, readable and unpretentious, a
little softhearted toward his old comrades, but more than willing to take them
to task for their absurdities.
O >f all those
absurdities, one stands out in high relief, and also links the leftists of the
1960s to those of the Depression years. It is their consistent overestimation
of their own significance. That the student activists of Berman's generation
believed a political revolution to be within their grasp may seem a little
puzzling from the vantage point of 30 years, but is perhaps understandable as a
product of youthful exuberance: Berman himself lapses into a romantic nostalgia
when he describes what it felt like to be in the vanguard of something new and
magnificent--in politics, in culture, in the way human beings treat each
other.
"A utopian exhilaration
swept across the student universe," he writes on the first page. "Almost
everyone in my own circle of friends and classmates was caught up in it. ...
Partly it was a belief, hard to remember today, that a superior new society was
already coming into existence. And it was the belief that we ourselves--the
teenage revolutionaries, freaks, hippies and students--stood at the heart of a
new society."
This
was, as Berman readily concedes, an illusion. But what can it claim for its
legacy, a generation later? A Tale of Two Utopias is a lucid,
three-pronged attempt to answer that question.
The first of Berman's quests for a larger meaning--in the
experiences of the Americans who led the Students for a Democratic Society and
the other leftist political organizations of 1968--is not a pretty one. By the
end of 1969, the idealism of the SDS had degenerated into personal bickering
and a flirtation with Maoist terrorism that could be written off as mere
goofiness had it not resulted in the loss of innocent lives on both sides of
the Atlantic.
That the radical
enthusiasms of 1968 left no permanent political imprint upon the Western
democracies is a conclusion that a simple electoral history of the ensuing
decades, the decades of Reagan, Thatcher, and Kohl, would seem sufficient to
prove. Berman sadly acknowledges it. But the politics of the 1960s were a
challenge to culture as well as politics. Berman locates his second search for
meaning in the "gay awakening" that had its symbolic start in the 1969 protest
at the Stonewall bar in Manhattan. The students who the year before had marched
and chanted and proclaimed "it is forbidden to forbid" had been arguing for
liberation of the oppressed of virtually every kind, and when it comes to the
sexually oppressed, Berman says, the last two decades can be seen as a victory.
"There is reason to think that on the matter of homosexuality," he writes,
"some small but important aspect of human personality has begun to change."
That
may be true, but the connection between the gay awakening and the student
rebellion of 1968 is an oblique one. Gay liberation, like feminism, is central
to the whole individualist ethos of the last two decades. But it doesn't
exactly count as a trophy from the barricades. The world would have conceded
the claims of both gays and women without the student occupation of a single
lecture hall anywhere in the world.
T >here is one
more search for meaning, and it takes Berman across the ocean. Adam Michnik was
arrested in a demonstration in Warsaw in February of 1968, went on to become
the leading theorist of the Solidarity protest movement of the 1980s, and
survived to take up a role as middle-aged statesman in the Polish political
world that succeeded the collapse of communism in 1989. Václav Havel was in New
York in the spring of 1968, participated in the student strike at Columbia,
joined Alexander Dubcek in the short-lived liberal uprising in Prague that
summer, and became the president of Czechoslovakia in 1990. Shortly after
taking office, he entertained Frank Zappa on a state visit.
Perhaps, Berman
speculates, Havel and Michnik represent the true legacy of the worldwide
revolutionary sprouting of 1968. Unlike the students of Columbia or the
Sorbonne, they persevered, and they won--something. But what?
The
peaceful revolutions in eastern Europe in 1989 were indeed a defeat for the
forces of illegitimate authority. That they were the incarnation of the dreams
of 1968 seems a stretch, to say the least, even if some of the important
players came out of the original cast. In the end, Berman does not make such a
claim. He ponders the hopeful predictions of Francis Fukuyama that Western
civilization is moving gradually, if fitfully, toward greater individual
freedom. But he closes with the darker speculations of Andre Glucksmann, a
leader of the Sorbonne rebels of 1968 and a later convert to conservatism, that
the utopian enthusiasm of those years simply did not take sufficient account of
the fundamental reality of evil in the human psyche.
And so, at the end of his odyssey, Berman finds a bit of
meaning, but little reassurance. How does the world feel as the 20 th
century comes to a close? "The world feels this," Berman declares: "humble,
skeptical, anxious, afraid, shaken."
Maybe so. On the other
hand, it is an oddly grandiose conclusion to an appealingly modest book. Berman
presents almost no evidence about the way the world is feeling. What he tells
us is how the student rebels of his own generation are feeling, and that they
are not feeling very well. In magnifying the global significance of their
discontents, Berman ultimately succeeds in reinstating his lifetime membership
in the class of 1968.
