Writing the Riots

H. Morpurgo: Writing the Riots

In 1959, at a time of violent unrest among American youth, a publisher commissioned a study of juvenile delinquency from Paul Goodman. The resulting volume, Growing up Absurd, was an immediate if unlikely success. Goodman had already written more than twenty books, none of which had made any great impression. And fifty years on he is once again unknown. But to reread his book in the aftermath of this summer’s riots in Britain is to be visited by uneasy feelings.

Prime Minister David Cameron’s initial response to the British riots, it will be recalled, was to blame them on something called “sheer criminality.” What that phrase meant became clear when sentences of four years were handed down for using Facebook to “incite disorder.” A month later Cameron acclaimed the “Spirit of London Awards”—according to their site, “a way of celebrating all that is good about the young, positive role models in London”—as a “powerful antidote.” One of its “London heroes,” a young table tennis player, visited 10 Downing Street to be paraded before the cameras as the acceptable face of youth. Cameron’s government has now appointed Louise Casey, “respect tsar” under former prime minister Tony Blair, to head the response to the riots. Labour leader Ed Miliband for his part has cried in the wilderness for “a new ethics.” Blair blamed bad parenting. Journalist Kenan Malik denounced the atomization and “moral poverty” of the society that had created the rioters.

Fifty years ago, Paul Goodman compared British public culture favorably with the easy denunciations and shallow explanations that followed the unrest in America. The voices of politicians and journalists were balanced in Britain, he argued, by “more learned and honorable voices” that could “thoughtfully broach fundamental issues of community plan, penal code, morality, cultural tone, with some certainty of reaching a public forum.” Goodman, who had some knowledge of the British cultural scene, was thinking of people like Bertrand Russell and Herbert Read. It was these men he went on to emulate in his analysis of what had gone wrong in the United States.

The Rowntree and Open Society Foundation, in association with the London School of Economics and the Guardian, are putting together a “data-driven” report, Reading the Riots. This will, presumably, hear from “more learned and honorable voices” in the course of its inquiries, as well as from those who were actually involved in the rioting. It is to be hoped the resulting document will read as well as Growing up Absurd.

But the “explanations” offered in the 1950s by American politicians and commentators bear a striking resemblance to those of their current British counterparts, as outlined above. “Sheer criminality” in the context of the riots is a meaningless term, almost non-verbal in its effect. It is not so much an explanation as a form of ostentatious finger-wagging, to supply a demand for such gestures. This demand was, I take it, “discovered” by the pollsters, having been generated by reporters, and was then picked up on and magnified by political speechwriters.

Goodman had his own answer to the analysis of speechwriters and journalists of his own day: “Thwarted or starved in the important objects proper to young capacities, the boys and young men naturally find or invent deviant objects for themselves. Their choices and inventions are rarely charming, usually stupid, and often disastrous; we cannot expect average kids to deviate with genius.” Goodman’s emphasis is immediately apparent: these young people are at once “thwarted” and “average.” Theirs is not some “innate” condition nor are they remarkable cases. Their behavior follows from a reality in which we all participate. “As they have been kept from constructive activity making them feel worthwhile, a part of their energy might be envious and malicious destruction of property.”

Goodman’s approach is not an apologetic, still less a romantic one. It would be compatible, for example, with some of what is aimed at by the British government’s apprenticeship programs. Such programs are, however, clearly not attracting some young people. To which the only sensible reaction must surely be to ask why not.

In seeking to explain Goodman did not set out to excuse anyone, but rather to show how American society was implicated as a whole. Much of the “blaming,” he suggests, is best understood as a defense mechanism by which we conceal that implication from ourselves. So too the “new ethics” of Miliband. There were calls for “a new ethics” in 1959 as well, and calls for much besides, like “an aesthetic suitable for the upreaching of taste” and “a more meaningful existence.” Goodman’s response was that “Existence is not given meaning by importing into it a meaning from outside.” Such language, with its “buoyant abstractions,” was “spoken as if miracles were to be had for the asking.” In reality, by contrast, “the meaning is there, in more closely contacting the actual situation, the only situation that there is.”

He offered as a positive example a program of the Youth Board in New York in which young offenders were drawn out by people involved with and interested in them. To him this program’s partial success demonstrated that it is only when adolescents have come to “accept themselves” through being accepted by a sympathetic adult that “the spiral of proving will be arrested.”

It is not, pace Kenan Malik’s relatively thoughtful column, their isolation as individuals that is in itself to blame. That term “isolated” needs qualifying. Whether or not these young people acted as members of organized gangs, it seems most unlikely that they are or were without any social context at all. Even if the context is all made up of TV shows or the internet or “stuff,” there is still somebody somewhere financing and making and broadcasting those shows, running those websites, advertising that stuff.

Rather than “isolation,” it is that whatever context they have—whether “mutually blackmailing accomplices” or mass entertainment—is humanly inadequate, trapping the young in a pre-adult state of development. Gangs or the TV are able to do this because society offers these youngsters no natural inducement to advance to the next stage. And that “advance to the next stage” cannot be made under compulsion. Goodman contrasted the partially successful Youth Board program with measures proposed to “deal with” juvenile delinquency in New York, eight out of eleven of which were punitive.

Speechifiers about “bad parenting” were also on hand in 1959. For Goodman, “parenting” was really about the degree to which a society promotes partnerships between adults in which children stand some chance of growing as they should. A “commercially debauched public culture” like our own had ceased to affirm the institution of marriage, and long before the 1960s. “Married couples no longer enjoy the support of society,” the essayist Cyril Connolly could write in the 1940s, “although marriage, difficult enough at any time, requires such social sanction.” Goodman refused to cordon his findings off from fundamental questions about the surrounding culture.

The analogy between the lawlessness of British streets in August and that of British bankers over the past thirty years is by now well worn, but those who shouted loudest and most publicly about it might ponder another connection Goodman makes. The young people he wrote about had found they could make the news by joining in delinquent behavior, which then got reported in the press. How is this essentially different, Goodman asks, from the young man in advertising who “may work hard for a year to get two five-second shots on TV?” The delinquents “take short cuts to glamour. Do they teach the junior executives to take short cuts or is it the other way?”

He suggests, in other words, that publicists of all kinds are in an entirely comparable line of business to those whose opportunities for attention-seeking are much narrower. I am strongly reminded of the army of pundits rattling off their 800-word prescriptions last summer. Certainly there were honorable exceptions: for example, John Berger’s reflections for openDemocracy and Gary Younge’s piece in the Guardian, comparing and contrasting the situation in Detroit in 1967 with that of British cities now.

The resources Goodman drew on in Growing Up Absurd, though, were those of an all-purpose literary man as well as those of a reporter. Like Cyril Connolly, Goodman saw himself as a “man of letters.” He realized what an anomaly this made him under the cultural conditions of his day, but it seems he just didn’t really care. He invoked Shakespeare’s Iago and Edmund and Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin in his discussion of delinquency, but his intentions were anything but “elitist.” What such references communicated, rather, was a profound optimism: that we can face and resolve these questions through the best of what we already have. Why gesture vainly toward “a new ethics” when most of us know so little about what our own best thinkers have already formulated?

Taylor Stoehr taught literature for most of his life at the University of Massachusetts. He has also been involved since 1994 with the “Changing Lives Through Literature” program, which is now shown to significantly reduce re-offending rates among participating convicts in Massachusetts. Stoehr was a close friend of Goodman’s and after his death edited several of his books. The “Changing Lives” program is so simple it sounds incredible: it offers probationers six months off their sentences in return for taking a literature course.

But in that course they read as nobody ever showed them how to at school. There are no grades and everyone is listened to. Classes are arranged so as to encourage exchanges between men of different generations. The books are chosen for the power of the writing and their power as stories—for their relevance, too, to the sort of lives that are actually lived by young blacks in American cities. Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, about a young man’s journey to self-respect in mid-nineteenth-century America, is the core text, and has repeatedly proven its value as such. A sister project in Exeter, England used Oliver Twist.

It doesn’t always work, but when it does it achieves something very like that “acceptance of self” that Goodman understood fifty years ago as the heart of this matter. A book about the “Changing Lives” program is forthcoming next year, and Stoehr has also edited a new Paul Goodman Reader for PM Press. In another sign of Goodman’s continuing vitality, the first ever documentary about Goodman was screened in New York in October, and between November 20 and 24 its director, Jonathan Lee, will attend screenings at Marsh Barn near Bridport, the Cube Cinema in Bristol, Oxford’s Magdalen College, Goldsmith’s College in London, and the University of Sussex in Brighton.

Goodman was almost fifty when Growing up Absurd was published, and the book gives the impression of a man throwing everything he has into one last push. And this time it worked. He was perhaps a little too old to take his sudden celebrity quite seriously, though the attentions of attractive young people, of both sexes, were very much to his taste. Goodman would become a crucial figure in the student, civil rights, and antiwar movements. For a generation that said never to trust anyone over the age of thirty, it is indeed astonishing that a fifty-something was made such a fuss of.

But by the time he died of a heart attack in 1972, his public role had already begun to pall. And Goodman was from the outset critical of much of what we associate with the sixties. (He thought little of the rock music and the Beat literature and the drugs.) It may be objected that the very optimism of that decade makes it a poor guide to a decade like our own, getting off to such a relentlessly pessimistic start. But if their optimism came too easy, might not the same be said at times of our pessimism?

Most of the protesters now occupying the space outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, like those in Zuccotti Park, are young. Coming from all manner of directions, most of them are asking some version of, how can I, or we, advance to the next stage—and what might a less venal economics look like? This time they are asking politely. The speechwriters and most of the journalists will do with that question what they are paid to do with serious questions: they will find ways to ignore or belittle it. It’s still the right question.

Horatio Morpurgo’s most recent book is Lady Chatterley’s Defendant & Other Awkward Customers (Just Press), which contains an introduction to Paul Goodman’s thought more generally, “Unblocking the Future.” He writes on the environment, literary themes, and British and European affairs.

Image: Fire at a store during riots in London in August (Andy Armstrong, Wiki. Com.)