Growing Up Absurd

Following World War II, amidst underlying fears from nuclear proliferation, American radicals recognized increasingly regimented societal expectations as "the organized system" by the mid-1950s. Themes of rising defiant, restless, disaffected youth culture seceding from social order became popular in the media, between teenage gangs, bohemian beatniks, and the more reckless working-class youth.[1] Growing Up Absurd follows 1950s sociological critiques like The Organization Man but instead of focusing on the personnel, focuses on the collateral damage.[2] Goodman disagrees with the common view that the solution for youth disaffection was to bring the youth to properly regard society and its goals. He argued that the youth already understood and rejected society's overorganized and unimportant goals.[3]

In Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System,[4] Goodman blames American culture and value systems for the rise of juvenile delinquency in the late 1950s.[5] Goodman argues that both urban juvenile delinquency and the beatnik subculture were responses of rebellion against the organized system.[1] Goodman focuses on young men who, he argues, were justified in their rebellion against a society lacking in meaningful vocation, honorable community, sexual freedom, and spiritual sustenance.[6] Youth require these qualities in their society in order to grow up and develop their social and moral identities.[7]

Work becomes meaningless because it focuses on role, procedure, profit, rather than love, style, interest, use.[7] Corporate jobs had become abundant but were unfulfilling, without a sense of purpose or service.[5][8] Worse, this mechanical state of affairs was widely accepted as inescapable or the nature of work: an "apparently closed room" fixated on a "rat race".[8] Those that did not conform, he writes, were cast aside as "drop-outs" with inchoate frustration.[5] Goodman refers to this corporate takeover as "sociolatry", that citizens traded the simple pleasures of daily life for the securities of living under an affluent, mechanized order. To Goodman, this trade-off was "absurd":[1] even with better schools and staffing, it would still be wrong to "socialize" youth into role responsibilities detrimental to human nature.[6] If societal aims are wrong, the urge to socialize children becomes circular and self-serving. Goodman asks, "Socialization to what?"[2] Those seeking to correct delinquency, he wrote, should instead improve society and culture's opportunities to meet the appetites of human nature. Goodman faulted social critics, including himself, and academic sociologists for being content with studying this system without endeavoring to change it.[6] He held that attempts to mold human nature to social order would backfire[9] and that, given the chance, "freedom and meaning will outweigh anomie".[10]

To create a society worthy for youth to want to join, Goodman resolves, certain "unfinished" revolutions must be brought to their conclusion on topics including brotherhood of man, democracy, free speech, pacifism progressive education, syndicalism, and technology. He implores readers to seriously pursue these ideals.[11]

Author Paul Goodman had a marginal intellectual career prior to publishing Growing Up Absurd, sustained by his wife's secretarial salary and his psychotherapy practice.[12] Throughout the 1950s, Goodman developed his practice of Gestalt therapy and finished his epic novel The Empire City. The novel ends with its protagonist, at the encouragement of his therapist, "spoiling for a fight" to reclaim his sick society from the forces that alienated him. Goodman, in his journals, struggled to name this fight and blamed his own cowardice as blocking his ability to see his own, personal fight to then insert in the story.[13] He later came to conclude that the fight would be "war against the Organized System" and it need not be his protagonist's war but the author's own, beginning with Growing Up Absurd and running throughout the rest of the 60s. Like Goodman's protagonist, Goodman believed that he had to work through his societal alienation by participating in society.[14] He drew from his psychotherapy practice as well, which focused on changing societal circumstances rather than his clients.[12]

Growing Up Absurd excited Epstein, an editor at Random House pictured here in 2011, even more so than Podhoretz.[15]

In 1958, after publishing in small political and cultural magazines, Goodman began to receive requests for writing and speaking on social criticism from mainstream editors.[16] He read Washington, Jefferson, Thoreau, and Emerson and considered his own patriotic intervention in American society.[17] A small New York press, Criterion Books, offered Goodman a $500 advance[5] to write a book on New York's teenage gangs in mid-1959.[1] The resulting book, however, did not focus on the youth but the American culture and value systems in which the youth were raised.[5] Goodman wrote the book over several weeks in the coming months.[18] The book thematically derived from topics he had been addressing for years, such that some parts were simply quoted from past works. He drew from his personal interactions in New York City, his teaching experience, and his colleagues Benjamin Nelson, Harold Rosenberg, and Elliott Shapiro.[1] Also significant, where his prior writing had qualities of hectoring insistence and recklessness, Goodman tried a new style that was powerfully earnest, direct, and patient. He was confident that his book's message was clear and agreeable.[19] Goodman wrote in his diary that upon finishing its last chapter, "The Missing Community", he whistled "The Star-Spangled Banner" as he walked the chapter to his publisher. He saw himself as patriotically defending his country against "the system".[20] The publisher decided not to publish the book and asked Goodman to return the advance for delivering a manuscript unfit for print.[21] The book was rejected by 19 publishers, including the publisher that would ultimately print it.[15]

In his memoir, Commentary magazine editor Norman Podhoretz wrote that he had been searching for an "opening salvo" on juvenile delinquency and middle-class youth deviance, a highly publicized topic, to mark the magazine's reimagination as a home for American social criticism. Most treatments of the subject, he wrote, described the phenomenon as "unrelated incidents of individual pathology ... to be dealt with either sternly by the cops or benevolently by the psychiatrists".[22] He heard about Goodman's finished book and the part that was published in Dissent. Despite what he described as his long-standing admiration for Goodman's writing and "colloquial directness", he considered the magazine piece uninteresting but was impressed by the book as "the very incarnation of the new spirit I had been hoping would be at work in the world".[23]

According to Podhoretz's memoir, he excitedly called Random House editor Jason Epstein, whom he convinced to come over and read the book that night. Though Random House had previously rejected the book and Epstein thought of Goodman as a "has-been", Goodman had a contract the next day.[15] Goodman and Podhoretz extracted three long articles from the manuscript—more than half of its length—for the editor's revised Commentary magazine. Epstein of Random House planned the book's release to follow the serialization.[24] While Goodman normally rejected attempts to revise his work as a violation of the human spirit's natural flow, Goodman approved of Random House's Growing Up Absurd editor. According to Goodman's brother, the editor's manuscript edits were the only edits he permitted in his career.[25]

Random House published the book's first edition in 1960[26] and Vintage Books printed the first paperback two years later. The book was translated in French (1971), German (1971), Italian (1964), Japanese (1971), and Spanish (1971).[27] New York Review Books reissued Growing Up Absurd in 2012 with a foreword by Casey Nelson Blake.[5]

Growing Up Absurd was Goodman's first work of "abnormal sociology"—just as abnormal psychology describes the conditions of unusual behavior, Goodman's book addressed the institutions and politics that inhibited functional behavior. As a follow-up to Gestalt Therapy, his last nonfiction work a decade prior, Growing Up Absurd served as Goodman's reparative therapies for abnormal social conditions.[28] Goodman dedicated Growing Up Absurd to the Gestalt psychotherapist Lore Perls for her role in helping train and mentor him as a therapist, helping cool his defiance, and enabling him such that he could write the book.[29] The book's core indictment of the societal conditions that produce delinquency, however, were not necessarily original to Goodman and was concurrent or presaged in the work of sociologists R. D. Laing and Herbert Marcuse.[5] Goodman considered his proposals conservative in how he sought to restore aspects of the past.[11]

The book was a best-seller,[4] with 100,000 copies sold in three years, with wide readership among the New Left[5] and across 1960s college campuses.[12][24] Goodman's ideas became popular with student activists and it was said that every activist at Berkeley had a copy, even if few read the full text.[30] Americans had seen isolated headlines on juvenile delinquency but had not seen the similarity of pattern between both urban and beatnik revolt against the organized system. To this public, Goodman's literary executor Taylor Stoehr recounted, Growing Up Absurd was "a revelation".[1] Chapters from the book were republished in radical and mainstream magazines,[12] and Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz credited the quick rise of his revamped magazine to the strong response to Growing Up Absurd's serialized extractions.[24]

The book was revelatory to readers who had not considered but wanted to believe that work and ideals were connected. To his new audience, Goodman read as both fresh and old-fashioned, with unabashed advocacy by a man of letters for a moral culture with traditional values of faith, honor, vocation. Goodman's discussion of the "rat race" and worthwhile work too resonated with college students, who had similar realizations, but was more distant to adults who had grown accustomed to the American nature of work.[8] The book's advocacy for youth's sexual freedom was shocking to older readers and some accused Goodman of using the book to argue for acceptance of sexual deviance.[8]

Contemporaneously, public intellectual John K. Galbraith described Goodman's book as hard to read from its title to its appendix, in contrast to the increasingly commonplace slick and superficial mass market works of criticism.[3] Literary critic Kingsley Widmer described Goodman's rhetoric as varying between righteousness, condescension, and magnanimity.[31]

Some critics focused on Goodman's ability to offer solutions. That youth want meaningful work, said The Times Literary Supplement, is a tautology. While it is easier to puritanically agree with Goodman's assessment of societal downfalls, the reviewer said it is harder to ascertain why we agree with these aims yet cannot seem to achieve them. In this way, Goodman banked too heavily on the miraculous changing of minds rather than meeting people where they were.[32] Galbraith's New York Times review considered Growing Up Absurd a "serious effort" despite not offering robust solutions.[3]

On the occasion of the book's 2012 reprint, one retrospective reviewer considered the book's core issues of corporate greed and spiritual barrenness as being more pronounced than 50 years prior.[5]

Fueled by the changing desires of the times, including a willingness to address societal issues, Growing Up Absurd transformed Goodman's outcast career and brought him public fame as a social critic.[33][5] He emerged from the book with attention he had long sought, including a college lecture circuit and a public role both literary and in school reform.[10] Some of Goodman's ideas have been assimilated into mainstream, "common sense" thought: local community autonomy and decentralization, better balance between rural and urban life, morality-led technological advances, break-up of regimented schooling, art in mass media, and a culture less focused on a wasteful standard of living.[30] His systemic societal critique was adopted by 1960s New Left radicals[34] and an emphasis on moral life subsequently became part of the New Left's aspirations.[8] Goodman bridged the 1950s era of mass conformity and repression into the 1960s era of youth counterculture in his encouragement of dissent.[5] Goodman became a popular guest speaker both for the book's resonance with 1960s youth and his criticism of the youth movement's excesses.[5] He was invited to lecture at hundreds of colleges.[10]

Goodman's outré expressions on art, politics, and sexuality were misinterpreted by his followers as acts of intentionally flouting a sick society's norms, but were more accurately described as Goodman's own refusal to fully grow up. Both interpretations built his affinity with the young. While some criticized his flattery of the young, Goodman also often reminded young audiences how little they knew and encouraged them to pursue mastery if they wanted to make a better world.[8] Part of Goodman's appeal as a "Dutch uncle" was his reminder that past had ideals, acts, people worthy of pride.[35]

Many specific details of the book soon became dated.[36] While youth gangs persisted, juvenile delinquency as a topic did not and the disaffected beatniks successively traded favor for hippies and punks. The Cold War pervades the book.[11] Goodman's discussion of poor youth focused on socioeconomic needs and not racial conflict.[37] Goodman's primary intention was to show how youth issues reflect their parent society, not to provide a comparison of such issues across eras.[9]

Goodman's patriarchal assumptions about gender and treatment of women, exemplified in his focus on "man's work" and the inherent fulfillment of motherhood, were rebuked in early reviews and the following decades.[37][38] In particular, he wrote that the book focuses exclusively on men and their careers because women, having the capacity for childbirth, did not need a career to justify their worth.[39] By his literary executor's account, Goodman was "blinded in this area", having ignored the role of women's own fulfillment and extrafamilial autonomy in his description of a fully developed human nature.[37] Retrospective reviews reproached Goodman's analytic exclusion of women[5][2] and one cited it as sufficient reason to not want for a "Goodman revival".[5] Goodman's analysis of men similarly narrows to "manly" lad culture, excluding those from upper-class or non-urban backgrounds.[40]

Looking retrospectively at Goodman's career, literary critic Kingsley Widmer panned the book as rough, rambling, and mediocre despite its insights and sociological vision.[4] Overall, Widmer considered Goodman's analysis of vocational and community issues to be unserious, and Goodman's thoughts on decentralization and schooling to be better expressed in other works. Growing Up Absurd's main contribution, Widmer contended, was in focusing public attention "on the discontents of the young and the lack of humane values in much of our technocracy".[41] Widmer felt that Goodman's subsequent "public gadfly" appearances had merit[41] and that the practical idealism he wanted for the young was partially realized in the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement. As 1960s campus rebellions suggested the possibility of greater change, Goodman and the youth shared mutual sympathies for several years in which he was often invited to colleges to speak.[10]

Growing Up Absurd was among the first works of American school social criticism in a 1960s body of literature that became known as the romantic critics of education.[42] Critics of public schools borrowed the book's ideas for years after its publication, and his ideas on education reverberated for decades.[43]

Growing Up Absurd was continually in print as of 1990 but was not high demand as a classic. For having launched his public career, within decades, Goodman was largely forgotten from public consciousness. His literary executor wrote that much of Goodman's effectiveness relied on his electric, cantankerous presence.[30] Over time, the idea of "the system" entered common language and ceased to be a rallying cry.[35] In the 1980s, Stoehr surmised that the book had the widest readership among the anarchist West German Greens.[37]

• Growing Up Absurd at the Internet Archive
• Web page for 2012 reissue