Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

This new outlook is basically existentialist in its emphasis on direct, momentary personal experience, especially with other people. It emphasizes people, and finds the highest good of life in interpersonal relations, handled generally with compassion and irony. The two chief concerns of life are “caring” and “helping.” “Caring,” which they usually call “love,” means a general acceptance of the fact that people matter and are subjects of concern. This love is diffuse and often quite impersonal, not aimed at a particular individual or friend but at anyone, at persons in general, and especially at persons one does not know at all, as an act of recognition, almost of expiation, that we are all helpless children together. The whole idea is very close to Christ’s message, “Love one another,” and has given rise to the younger generation’s passionate concern with remote peoples, the American Negroes, and the outcast poor. It is reflected in the tremendous enthusiasm among the young for the Peace Corps, civil rights, and racial equality, and the attack on poverty, all of which have much greater support among middle-class young people than can be measured even by the surprisingly large numbers who actively do something.

This desire to do something is what I call “helping.” It is a strange and largely symbolic kind of helping, since there is with it a fairly widespread feeling that nothing that the helper can do will make any notable dent in the colossal problem; none the less, there is an obligation to do something, not only as a symbolic act but also as an almost masochistic rejection of the middle-class past. The younger generation who support the Peace Corps, the attack on poverty, and the drive for Negro rights have an almost irresistible compulsion to do these things as a demonstration of their rejection of their parents’ value system, and as some restitution for the adults’ neglect of these urgent problems. But the real motivation behind the urge “to help” is closely related with the urge “to care”; it consists simply of a desire to show another human being that he is not alone. There is little concern for human perfectibility or social progress such as accompanied middle-class humanitarianism in the nineteenth century.

Both of these urges are existentialist. They give rise to isolated acts that have no significant context. Thus an act of loving or helping has no sequence of causes leading up to it or of consequences flowing from it. It stands alone as an isolated experience of togetherness and of brief human sharing. This failure or lack of context for each experience means a failure or lack of meaning, for meaning and significance arise from context; that is, from the relationship of the particular experience to the whole picture. But today’s youth has no concern for the whole picture; they have rejected the past and have very little faith in the future. Their rejection of intellect and their lack of faith in human reason gives them no hope that any meaning can be found for any experience, so each experience becomes an end in itself, isolated from every other experience.

This skepticism about meaning, closely allied with their rejection of organizations and of abstractions, is also closely related with a failure of responsibility. Since consequences are divorced from the act or experience itself, the youth is not bound by any relationship between the two. The result is a large-scale irresponsibility. If a young person makes an appointment, he may or may not keep it. He may come very late or not at all. In any case, he feels no shame at failure to carry out what he had said he would do. In fact, the young people of today constantly speak of what they are going to do—after lunch, tonight, tomorrow, next week—but they rarely do what they say. To them it was always very tentative, a hope rather than a statement, and binding on no one. If the young fail to do what they say, they are neither embarrassed nor apologetic, and hardly think it necessary to explain or even mention it. Their basic position is that everyone concerned had the same freedom to come or not, and if you showed up while they did not, this does not give you any right to complain because you also had the same right to stay away as they had.

The other great weakness of the younger generation is their lack of self-discipline. They are as episodic in their interests and ambitions as they are in their actions. They can almost kill themselves with overwork for something that catches their fancy, usually something associated with their group or with “caring” and “helping,” but in general they have little tenacity of application or self-discipline in action.

They lack imagination also, an almost inevitable consequence of an outlook that concentrates on experiences without context. Their experiences are necessarily limited and personal and are never fitted into a larger picture or linked with the past or the future. As a result they find it almost impossible to picture anything different from what it is, or even to see what it is from any long-range perspective. This means that their outlooks, in spite of their wide exposure to different situations through the mass media or by personal travel, are very narrow. They lack the desire to obtain experience vicariously from reading, and the vicarious experiences that they get from talk (usually with their fellows) are rarely much different from their own experiences. As a result, their lives, while erratic, are strangely dull and homogeneous. Even their sexual experiences are routine, and any efforts to escape this by experimenting with homosexuality, alcohol, drugs, extraracial partners, or other unnecessary fringe accessories generally leave it dull and routine.

Efforts by middle-class parents to prevent their children from developing along these non-middle-class lines are generally futile. An effort to use parental discipline to enforce conformity to middle-class values or behavior means that the child will quote all the many cases in the neighborhood where the children are not being disciplined. He is encouraged in his resistance to parental discipline by its large-scale failure all around him. Moreover, if his parents insist on conformity, he has an invincible weapon to use against them: academic failure. This weapon is used by boys rather than by girls, partly because it is a weapon for the weak, and involves doing nothing rather than doing something, but also because the school seems to most middle-class boys an alien place and an essential element in their general adolescent feeling of homelessness. Girls who are pressured by their parents to conform resist by sexual delinquencies more often than boys, and in extreme cases get pregnant or have sexual experiences with Negro boys. From this whole context of adolescent resistance to parental pressures to conform to middle-class behavior flows a major portion of middle-class adolescent delinquency, which is quite distinct in its origin from the delinquency of the lowest, outcast class in the slums. It involves all kinds of activities from earliest efforts to smoke or drink, through speeding, car stealing, and vandalism of property, to major crimes and perversions. It is quite different in origin and usually in character from the delinquencies of the uprooted, which are either crimes for personal benefits (such as thievery and mugging) or crimes of social resentment (such as slashing tires and convertible tops or smashing school windows). Some activities, of course, such as automobile stealing, appear among both.

These remarks, it must be emphasized, apply to the middle class, and are not intended to apply to the other classes in American society. The aristocrats, for example, have considerable success in passing along their outlook to their children, partly because it is presented as a class or family attitude, and not as a parental or personal attitude, partly because their friends and close associates are also aristocrats or semi-aristocrats, and rejection of their point of view tends to leave an aristocratic adolescent much more personally isolated than rejection of his parents’ view leaves a middle-class adolescent (indeed, the latter finds group togetherness only if he does reject his parents), partly because there is much more segregation of the sexes among aristocrats than in the middle class, but chiefly because the aristocrats use a separate school system, including disciplined boarding schools. The use of the latter, the key to the long persistence of the aristocratic tradition in England, makes it possible for outsiders to discipline adolescents without disrupting the family. Among the middle class, effort to discipline adolescents is largely in the hands of parents, but the effort to do so tends to disrupt the family by setting husband against wife and children against parents. As a result, discipline is usually held back to retain at least the semblance of family solidarity as viewed from the outside world (which is what really counts with middle-class people). But the aristocratic private boarding school, modeled on those of England in accord with the basic Anglophilism of the American aristocracy, is sexually segregated from females, tough, sports-orientated, usually High Episcopal (almost Anglican), and disciplines its charges with the importance of the group, their duty to the group, and the painfulness of the ultimate punishment, which is alienation from the group. As a consequence of this, any resentment the aristocratic adolescent may have is aimed at his masters, not at his home and parents, and home comes to represent a relatively desirable place to which he is admitted occasionally as a reward for long weeks on the firing line at school. Such a boy is removed from the smothering influence of “momism,” grows up relatively shy of girls, has more than his share of homosexual experiences (to which he may succumb completely), but, on the whole, usually grows up to be a very energetic, constructive, stable, and self-sacrificing citizen, prepared to inflict the same training process on his own sons.