Customer Reviews

Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I read Growing Up Absurd in 1967, a few months after I got out of the army, having served my two years as an active duty draftee. I was working as a shipper-dispatcher in a large bakery: I unloaded baked goods from large trucks and distributed them among much smaller trucks for delivery to homes and stores. At the time, that kind of job paid enough to raise a family in which the other spouse worked at her discretion. Working class had not yet devolved into working poor. I drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, and ate chocolate eclairs with the truck drivers. The work got done, but there were no time-and-motion study industrial engineers gauging my efficiency. The job was not the sort that you took home. As an occupational bridge between the army and a state university, I thought it was all pretty good. The job made a simple but solid sort of sense, It seemed useful. After reading Paul Goodman's book, I began to wonder why I was aspiring to anything of higher status and income, the kind of work that demanded one or more university degrees.

In retrospect, however, it's good that I was determined to be upwardly mobile. The kind of job I had in 1967 may or may not still exist, but it certainly does not pay the bills which accumulate when raising a family. Working class and working poor have, indeed, become coterminous. This is not something that Goodman foresaw, but in the '60's neither did anyone else except an occasional Marxist who didn't think Keynesian fiscal policy would work well forever.

Even in the '60's, however, and with regard to the hardy and conventional working class, Goodman raised pertinent, and entirely new to me, questions such as "Why would anyone find satisfaction in working as a mechanic repairing trucks that delivered the New York Times?" I was still sufficiently naive that I thought the New York Times was a class act, disseminating truth and, occasionally, wisdom; keeping us free by keeping us informed. I couldn't imagine anything better than the interesting and manly work of a skilled mechanic laboring to assure that all the news fit to print was widely disseminated.

Goodman, however, introduced me to the banality of the world that the times maintained, and the crass materialism that provided rewards for continued, uncomplaining participation. Yes, Goodman respected what Veblen called the instinct of workmanship, but he also saw that it had been perverted to serve meaningless ends and to maintain the hegemony of the emptiness of expensive trinkets and fatuous titles. We lived in a comparatively affluent world, but one in which work was being degraded, generating alienation and normlessness, fostering a drab and desolate existence in which most of us learned that what we did paid the bills but otherwise was not worth doing.

Five decades later, Goodman's analysis is even more accurate and compelling. The world of work is shot through with even greater doses of meaninglessness. To add injury to injury, most "jobs of work" don't even pay the bills. Somehow we've been persuaded that the flood of women into the labor force to do the same grunt work as men, and typically at a much lower level of compensation, has been a giant step toward sexual equality.

The longshoreman, autodidact, and author Eric Hoffer, writing during the same era as Goodman, was fond of extolling the virtues of work as an end in itself. He described the cargo he helped move as "crap," but stil found fulfillment in work.

Goodman was a good deal more critical. He characterized the work that Hoffer valued as absurd. Goodman was right then, and he's even more on target now. Though some of the details, lingo, and images in Growing Up Absurd are dated, the book remains well worth reading. I'm retiring this year, and, looking back, with the possible exception of the time I spent in the bakery, the work I have done -- and there has been a lot of it -- has been absurd. It paid the bills, but at what cost? No surprise to Goodman that the arc of a working life would be replete with questions such as this.

Paul Goodman knew the 1950s, its bland neighborhoods, its schools so like prisons, its emphasis on athletics and prom queens. His book, "Growing Up Absurd," told every high school graduate and fresh-faced frosh in college exactly what they already knew.

High school was and is a waste of time and energy. How much better to just skip it entirely. High school students grew up deformed and degenerated, skipping classes, taunting teachers and each other, not doing homework and still making the honor roll.

Just having an adult say these things, recognizing just how absurd high school continues to be is so freeing, and so affirming. And about time, too.

However, nothing notable has been done to improve it since the 1950s, and no matter how that boring school day is arranged, it still feels like prison.

What a great and wonderful book! Bunches of insight about the natural disaffection of the modern citizen. Truly a book about one of society's big questions.

Oh... wait... this was written in 1959? But there's all that government-business collusion? And the outrageous pharmaceutical industry and media monopolization scandals? And the hope for the near-future?

1959?! How stinkin' depressing! Great book. Read it; maybe the world is ripe for change.

Okay, the part about Russia is dated.

As another reviewer, Dylan Miller, stated, "this ain't dated." If anything, his analysis of the woes of society is even truer today than when he wrote the book at the beginning of the `60's. This was a second reading for me, after 40 some odd years. Some of the vocabulary is quaint, e.g., The "Beats," "hipsters," et al., but many of his central criticisms ring solid. Perhaps the saddest part is wondering who are the "Paul Goodmans'" today, or are they all co-opted?

I continue to believe that Goodman is strongest in his critiques on the nature of work, both in this book, and in his excellent "Communitas," which he co-authored with his brother, Percival. Once mankind mastered the "means of production," there has been a steady, fundamental problem with how a person is to live in a meaningful fashion. Much work is busy work, to keep people occupied. Essentially, one person digs a hole, and another comes, and fills it in. Fifty years on, the endless "war on terror" is a job creator; witness only the slender slice of thousands upon thousands of airport screeners.

The primary focus of the book though is on youth, generally men, and their acceptance or rejection of their adult roles in society - to use the words from Charles Reich's "The Greening of America," another classic from this period, " the machine tooling of the young to fit the needs of various baroque bureaucracies...". He devotes two chapters, one each, to groups who reject their roles: one he calls "the early resigned," the other "the early fatalist." The former are roughly what was once called "The Beat Generation," primarily the intelligent who consciously rejected society's assigned roles, and tried to maintain a viable economic life at the fringes of society. The later group seeks identity through juvenile delinquency, often hoping to be caught for their actions. Another of his central points is that many of the problems of today's youth relate to "unfinished" revolutions from prior decades.

Overall, I feel that he meanders too much in his style, appending irrelevant points to his analysis. He redeems himself though with crisp pithy zingers which neatly describe an issue. Consider: "Where there is official censorship it is a sign that speech is serious. Where there is none, it is pretty certain that the official spokesmen have all the loud speakers."

This book was written only a couple of years before "The Feminine Mystique," and numerous years after "The Second Sex." On page 13 he displays some flaming male chauvinism, outlining why it is difficult for a boy to achieve meaningful manhood, but for a girl, since she is just going to get married anyhow, it is no big deal! "Her career does not have to be self-justifying, for she will have children, which is absolutely self-justifying...". Later, on page 186, in terms of a woman involved with a Beat poet, he says: "This is a satisfaction for her female narcissism, or penis envy."

Overall, Goodman is one of America's essential social critics; much of what he says remains relevant today, but due to his stone-headed lack of empathy for the issues involved with a woman's role in society and its economic system, he does not deserve the full 5-star rating.

This is the first title by Paul Goodman that I have read. He had an interesting critique of modern society (c. 1960). If one can get around many of his assumptions (i.e, everyone is in the rat race, man!) and his sometimes facile diagnostics (progressive education is the panacea!) the book has a lot to say to a modern reader. Many of the reasons he points out for the discontent of youth (both affluent and otherwise) are still with us. His section on "Beat Economics" is pretty interesting as well. Well worth a read.

The words are still important to ingest and ruminate, if not meditate, upon. All educators with any soul left must read this book. The cyclical nature of politics and the efforts by the right to destroy education make this a must read! If only to gain an alternate insight. Taken in small doses, or all at once, it suffices to ease the pain of a country's once great educational experiment circling the drain on its way to fourth-world eminence.