St Edwards University - Tower Yearbook (Austin, TX)

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The students’ cultural revolution is liberal radical on equality and authority, but conservative on community. itead the interdependence of all things a1 species in nature. To place sensory experience ahead of iceptual knowledge. To live physically close to nature, athe open, off the land. To live in groups (tribes, communes) sher than in such “artificial” social gits as the nuclear family. To reject hypocrisy, “white lies,” and fier social artifices. To de-emphasize aspects of nature il- jninated by science; instead, to cele- rt all the unknown, the mystical, and |» mysterious elements of nature. To stress cooperation rather than (mpetition. To embrace the existentialist emphasis being rather than doing or planning. To devalue detachment, objectivity, d noninvolvement as methods for finding lth: to arrive at truth, instead, by pect experience, participation, and ‘olvement. To look and feel natural, hence rejecting makeup, bras, suits, ties, arti- ficially groomed hairstyles. To express oneself nonverbally; to a- void literary and stylized forms of ex- pression as artificial and unnatural; to rely on exclamations as well as silences, vibrations, and other nonverbal modes of communication. To reject “official” and hence artific- ial forms of authority; authority is to be won, it is not a matter of automatic en- titlemen t by virtue of position or official standing. To reject mastery over nature. To dispense with organization, ration- alization, and cost-effectiveness. To embrace self-knowledge, introspec- tion, discovery of one’s natural self. To emphasize the community rather than the individual. To reject mores and rules that inter- fere with natural expression and function (e.g., conventional sexual morality). To preserve the environment at the ex- pense of economic growth and technology. The counterculture is well named. As Kenneth Kenniston noted, it defines it- self, at least in part, in terms of what it opposes. And what it opposes consti- tutes a huge part of our culture. Yet, as the varied definitions of nature and the natural suggest, the positive side of the counterculture is the more significant one. Three themes in the new naturalism of the student movement stand out—the stress on community, the apparent anti-intellectual- ism, and the search for what is sacred in nature. It is a mistake to think of new student values in conventional political terms. The student movement is generally identified with political radicalism, and many of its views come from radical theorists. But some of its leading ideas, especially those relat- ing to community, have deep roots in con- servation tradition. If we trace liberal and conservative ideologies historically, we can distinguish them by their opposing positions on the fundamental philosophical issues of equality, authority, and community. By these criteria, the students’ cultural revolution is liberal radical on equality and authority, but conservative on community. It is such novel juxtaposi- tions that make the student movement inter- 39

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The New Naturalism By Daniel Yankelovich Sick my colleagues and | first began to study the revolution in campus values in the mid-1960s, I have been reminded of Alfred North Whitehead’s dictum that “oreat ideas often enter reality in strange guises and with disgusting alliances.” Whitehead was referring to the emergence, three millennia ago, of the idea of the essential equality of men. But our studies have led me to won- der whether the college student move- ment might conceivably harbor an idea of comparable importance. Should its claim to transform our moral sensibili- ties and national life-styles be taken seriously? Were we witnessing a new chapter in an authentic and serious movement in American cultural history or merely a nervous spasm elicited in re- sponse to the unsettling events of our time? In the course of our research with college students, | have come to regard these questions as the most crucial ones that can be raised about the student movement. Critics of student protest offended by long hair, rioting, open sexuality, and challenge to authority, see mainly the strange guises and dis- gusting alliances. Devotees of the coun- terculture, on the other hand, romanti- cize the movement, hailing each new a- ? berration as the inspired expression of 38 a great idea. But is it not possible that both sets of judgements, even though they seem to contradict each oth- er, form a single truth? Is it not like- ly, as Whitehead implies, that any im- portant new idea as it struggles to be born will assume transitional forms, some of them ugly and contaminated by passing circumstances? My own conclusion is that White- head’s formula holds true for the stu- dent movement: It does harbor a great idea, and that idea has entered current American reality in many strange and misleading guises. Conceptually, the movement’s central idea is neither whol- ly original nor yet a platitude. It has, in fact, recurred as a theme of our civilization many times over hun- dreds of years, though it has probably not been urged in so compelling and noy- el a form since the time of Rousseau. The essence of the idea is that we must initiate a new stage in man’s re- latedness to nature and the natural. In the hierarchy of values that consti- tute man’s conception of the summum bonum; the student-led cultural revo- lution elevates nature and the natur- al to the highest position. Whatever is natural is deemed to be good; whatever is artificial and opposed to nature is bad. But what is truly natural and what is opposed to nature? The answer is by no means self-evident. We have i- dentified almost twenty meanings of the concept “natural” as the student movement defines it. Some meanings are obvious, others are subtle. Some are superficial expressions of life- styles that students experiment with and then abandon like so many one- night stands; other meanings are fun- damental to man’s existence. To be natural, in the student lexicon, means: To push the Darwinian version of nature as “survival of the fittest” into the background, and to emphasize

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also thrives. The relationship between them is Consciousness III cannot thrive unless Consciousness . symbiotic, not mutually exclusive. esting; at least some of the old stereo- types are being rethought along fresh lines... The task of restoring, preserving, and creating new forms of community has haunted Western civilization since the Middle Ages. It is as if the great victories won in modern times by Protes- tantism, individualism, rationalism, sci- ence, and industrialization all were gain- ed at a terrible cost—the sacrifice of community. In the headiness of newly won freedom, democracy, and material progress, the cost was minimized. Yet, as our mod- ern history unfolds, the elan of our tech- nological materialist society wears down. A terrible loneliness and a sense of iso- lation break through at the society’s greatest points of vulnerability. In our present culture, many of the human bonds of community bonds seen as so necessary to the spirit as to be constitu- tive of all that is humanly natural, have come apart... Perhaps no aspect of the students’ cultural revolution is as poorly under- stood—and as widely misinterpreted—as student mistrust of rational, conceptual, calculative, and abstract modes of thought... The student movement reserves its most brutal shock for those logical-mind- ed managers, technologists, engineers, professors of business administration, planners, accountants, experimenters, and quantifiers for whom rational, orderly, and logical methods are the royal road to truth. To these professionals—and they are the men who keep our society running— student disdain for rational procedures is incomprehensible. In such attitudes, should they be generalized, they see the destruction of all they have built. And they are probably correct. Even within the counterculture itself, the disdain for technique takes its toll. Commune-baked bread is often hard, flat, and taste- 40 less; the belts fall apart (and, after all, how many belts do we need?); and commune-based law firms that reject disciplined thought win few cases. As our society is presently constitu- ted, service to one’s fellow man, of- fered with compassion but without knowledge, can be a menace to both giver and recipient . . . Unless the cul- tural revolution is to be confined to enclaves of elitist dropouts with well- heeled parents, it must somehow learn to coexist with the technological thrust of our society. If the new nat- uralism is to have a constructive im- pact on the society, it must presup- pose the existence of an affluent econ- omy with a technological base. Charles Reich to the contrary, Consciousness IU cannot thrive unless Consciousness II also thrives. The relationship be- tween them is symbiotic, not mutually exclusive. With these qualifications duly reg- istered, we come to our main point, namely, that the student critique of the rational, the technical, and the abstract is not mainly a negative rejection of these methods. Indeed, it is not a vote against them but a quest for other modes of understanding .. . The mathematician Marston Morse onc said, “The creative scientist lives in ‘the wilderness of logic’ where reason is the handmaiden and not the master .. . it is only as an artist that man knows reality.” Morse’s viewpoint, shared by many creative scientists, often after long introspection about how their discover- ies were actually made, is that the logical, orderly, abstract processes of explicit reasoning are merely the sur- face manifestations of rationality. They presuppose other, less well-organized forms of experience that arise out of an immediacy of involvement, a total en- gagement of the mind and senses with the subject being studied. This type of in- volvement is the opposite of detachment and sequential logic. Without it, tech- nical reason is doomed to perform its sterile operations in a vacum. Reason is trivial when cut off from its grounds in direct experience.