role, our historic mission, is to be overcome someday.
When the great day comes, none of us will get to share in its fruits. Liberation for the world will mean only repression for us. According to the late Ted Gold, after American imperialism is defeated abroad, “an agency of the peoples of the world” will be set up to run the American economy and society, presumably to give our television sets, cars, and clothes back to their rightful owners. Africans, Peruvians, Vietnamese will move in and take over—making every John Bircher’s worst dreams come true. Indeed, said Gold, in his last published words before his tragic death, “if it will take fascism, we’ll have to have fascism.” Americans are so innately, irreparably, radically evil, that “it will take fascism”—the twentieth century’s realest vision of hell on earth—to give us our just deserts. And the handwriting on our palace walls is just as clear as the words over the gate of the Inferno: All of us must abandon all hope for ourselves.
When the Weatherpeople burst on the scene in the summer of 1969, their manifesto stirred a storm of bitter invective on the left. What seemed most outrageous about them—even more than the terrorist tactics they were to develop a few months later—was their overwrought self-hatred, at once personal, racial, and cultural. Critics with a sense of irony were quick to pick up echoes of that old reliable “liberal guilt.” But there were greater ironies which no one was ready to confront. This guilt trip, sick as it was, struck a deeper chord in a great many radicals’ sensibilities than they cared to admit. For the Weatherpeople were only working out, to its absurdly logical conclusion, that idea of the American people as “one-dimensional,” which most American radicals had accepted uncritically for years. By taking it seriously—dead seriously—the Weatherpeople made it plain to all of us how cruel, how antihuman an idea it was. But none of us on the Left had a clear alternative. If the mass of the American people, if “modern men” as a class, were not one–dimensionally evil, exactly what were they—or, rather, what were we? Everyone was embarrassed because no one could say. Hence, the critiques of the Weathermen, as illuminating as they are, all have a curiously hollow ring. There is an emptiness at the center, where an idea should be. What’s missing is a theory of the American people—and more, a theory of “modern” people, of the men and women whom highly developed societies create; a theory of the tensions and contradictions in the life we live, of our strengths and limitations, of our hidden capacities and potentialities.
To try to fill this vacuum, we must go back to the beginning of the modern age. For the peculiar emptiness that afflicts the New Left is close to the very center of the life and experience of “modern man” as such. Ever since the first modern societies began to take on a distinctive form, and people like us emerged in their midst, one of our deepest drives has been to get outside ourselves. So much of the paraphernalia of the sixties—from beads to psychedelic drugs to sentimental idealizations of the “Third World”—expresses an archetypical modern impulse: a desperate longing for any world, any culture, any life but our own. This impulse has made the life of modern men and women strangely paradoxical, maybe even absurd, at its core. On the one hand, it has enlarged our sympathies and sensibilities, deepened our feelings, developed our understanding, helped us grow; on the other, it has led us, in affirming other people’s lives, to turn against and deny and negate our own. It is only too typically modern that the New Left of the 1960s should gain at once a three-dimensional vision of so many other kinds of people—blacks, Indians, the Third World, women, homosexuals, schizophrenics, and on and on—and a one-dimensional view of themselves. This is only the latest punchline in a sick joke that gives some of the flavor of modern society’s sickness, and yet, ironically, manages to express some of its health as well.
To understand the modern predicament, it might be useful to look at Rousseau, for he was the first truly modern radical. Living in the midst of the first great wave of modernization, he was the first radical thinker to address himself directly to the problems springing up in its wake. He was the first to get the jokes that modern men were playing on themselves. Unfortunately, some of Rousseau’s radical impulses led him up a blind alley, one which prefigures and may illuminate the impasse in which the New Left is stuck today. But Rousseau also found in himself the insight and imagination to see beyond his impasse, and I believe that those of us on the Left may find in him a way to see through—and, hopefully, to break through—our own.
II
Among the many notes in Rousseau’s writings that strike close to home, one of the most arresting is the uninhibited rage and violence with which he attacks the modern city, its culture and its people. A typical remark: “In this age of calculators, it’s remarkable that no one should see that France would be far more powerful if Paris were annihilated.” Burn it down! Rousseau’s tone here is far more typical of the 1960s than of the 1760s. (Typical of the 1960s too, that he should be shocked and perplexed when some Parisians treat him as a menace.) But he insists that his feelings about Paris are nothing personal; he aims his malevolence at the modern city per se: “A big city, full of scheming, idle people, without religion or principle, whose imagination, depraved by sloth, inactivity, the love of pleasure, and great needs, engenders only monsters and inspires only crimes.” Thus, “Men are not made to be crowded together in ant-heaps; they should be scattered over the earth which they have to cultivate. The more they gather together, the more they corrupt themselves.” We can see here the birth of a distinctively modern apocalyptic language and one-dimensional vision—a language which we survivors of the 1960s have heard, and a vision we have seen, all too well. This language and vision borrow the rhetoric and imagery of Jewish, early Christian, and medieval apocalypse, raging against the Great Whore of Babylon (an image of which the Black Panthers and their white followers are particularly fond), hoping for its destruction. But the perspective now is secular and post-Christian: These radicals yearn not for a transcendental, purely spiritual redemption, but for a kingdom that will be immanent, material, in and of this world.
In fact, Rousseau’s one-dimensional view of the city was only a small part of a much larger one-dimensional picture. He was well aware that, at the very moment he was condemning the “great cities,” they were just emerging as the centers of energy in a vast social, political, and cultural evolutionary process—a process of development which is still going on today. In condemning them, Rousseau was condemning the esprit générale of modern society and the historical movement that was bringing this society into being.
We can find somewhere in Rousseau’s work just about every objection to modern society that anyone has thought of, left, right or center, in the last two hundred years: It is too free, it is not free enough; men are too “leveled,” they are too unequal; people cannot get close to each other, they are thrown into intense and indecent intimacy. But Rousseau’s most concrete account of his confrontation with modern society is in his romantic and political novel, The New Eloise, in which Saint-Preux, the young, sensitive, intellectual hero, who is stifled by the rigid class prejudices and emotional deadness of his native petit-bourgeois provincial society, comes to Paris, in search of a place to which he and his love, Julie, can flee, a social structure into which individualistic and romantic people can be integrated, can build and live a life. Rousseau’s treatment of the trip is perhaps the first modern instance of what has since become an archetypical modern theme, both in art and in life: The Young Man from the Provinces Comes to the City. As Lionel Trilling points out, Rousseau himself—“a shiftless boy from Geneva, a starveling and a lackey, who becomes the admiration of the French aristocracy, and is permitted by Europe to manipulate its assumptions in every department of life”—is “the father of all Young Men from the Provinces, including the one from Corsica.”3 Confrontation with the great city, exposure of the self to its promises and perils, is an ultimate test of who a person is, of all that he or she can be.
Saint-Preux is immediately thrilled by the energy and vitality of Paris, the “great spectacles,” the “enormous diversity of things,” the “many attractions which offer so many charms to the newcomer.” The most striking thing about life here is its fluidity. He feels himself “thrown into a torrent” that overruns all social barriers and generates an unprecedented social
