 | Growing Up Absurd — NotesBy Paul Goodman (1960) |
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| Growing Up Absurd — NotesBy Paul Goodman (1960) |
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American Writer, Critic, Psychotherapist, and Anarchist Philosopher
: As the movement became the Movement and shifted to a struggle between the Old Left and the New Left, Goodman remained unapologetically free. Many of his former followers abandoned him as he refused to offer a blueprint for building structures for the future, preferring the formulation of here, now, next. (From: Fitzgerald Bio.)
• "Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite proposition: that valuable behavior occurs only by the free and direct response of individuals or voluntary groups to the conditions presented by the historical environment. It claims that in most human affairs, whether political, economic, military, religious, moral, pedagogic, or cultural, more harm than good results from coercion, top-down direction, central authority, bureaucracy, jails, conscription, states, pre-ordained standardization, excessive planning, etc." (From: "The black flag of anarchism," by Paul Goodman.)
• "There cannot be a history of anarchism in the sense of establishing a permanent state of things called 'anarchist.' It is always a continual coping with the next situation, and a vigilance to make sure that past freedoms are not lost and do not turn into the opposite, as free enterprise turned into wage-slavery and monopoly capitalism, or the independent judiciary turned into a monopoly of courts, cops, and lawyers, or free education turned into School Systems." (From: "The black flag of anarchism," by Paul Goodman.)
• "As our families are, the children in both their present satisfaction and the free growth of their powers, are certainly crushed, thwarted, pushed, hurt, and misled by their hostile and doting grown-ups. Frankly, I doubt that you can find one child in a dozen who is not being seriously injured, in quite definite and tangible ways, by his family." (From: "The Children and Psychology," by Paul Goodman.)
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Notes
[1] From Dissent, Autumn, 1959.
[1] From Dissent, Autumn, 1959.
[2] From Liberation, January, 1959.
[3] From i.e., The Cambridge Review, Number 5.
[4] Throughout, AF refers to Academic Freedom in Our Times, by Robert M. MacIver. N. Y., 1955. Columbia University Press. 304 pp.
[5] One major, and surprising, defect in these books is their omission of any discussion of the small radical colleges like Antioch, Black Mountain, Goddard, etc., founded on more liberal principles than the authors’, and therefore with both a more intransigent standard of freedom and more embarrassment in being consistent. I should have thought their careers would be valuably relevant for comparison and contrast.
[6] But consider the dilemma: Such massive research and experiment must be financed, if not administered, by Foundations; and those chosen by or for Foundations tend to be at least “sound” if not “safe.”
[7] So Black Mountain College was founded by a migration in the early 1930’s, and the migrant faculty was thenceforth the owner of the college, without a governing board of trustees.
[8] This “neutrality” certainly has also a simpler and more traditional spring: the detachment of the wise and experienced, and the tradition of the academy as the home of the wise and experienced, with the motto nil admirari. Such an attitude is, of course, not neutral at all, but the provision of a background of security pre-different to controversial opinions, and relying on which, youth can risk having definite opinions.
[9] Teaching at the primary level is different, for there the emphasis is on teaching the pupil, not the subject matter; and there is then a profession of pedagogy analogous to medicine, and of which the remedial branch is psychotherapy.
[10] From Midstream, Winter, 1958.
[11] From Midstream, Summer, 1957.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org
American Writer, Critic, Psychotherapist, and Anarchist Philosopher
: As the movement became the Movement and shifted to a struggle between the Old Left and the New Left, Goodman remained unapologetically free. Many of his former followers abandoned him as he refused to offer a blueprint for building structures for the future, preferring the formulation of here, now, next. (From: Fitzgerald Bio.)
• "Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite proposition: that valuable behavior occurs only by the free and direct response of individuals or voluntary groups to the conditions presented by the historical environment. It claims that in most human affairs, whether political, economic, military, religious, moral, pedagogic, or cultural, more harm than good results from coercion, top-down direction, central authority, bureaucracy, jails, conscription, states, pre-ordained standardization, excessive planning, etc." (From: "The black flag of anarchism," by Paul Goodman.)
• "As our families are, the children in both their present satisfaction and the free growth of their powers, are certainly crushed, thwarted, pushed, hurt, and misled by their hostile and doting grown-ups. Frankly, I doubt that you can find one child in a dozen who is not being seriously injured, in quite definite and tangible ways, by his family." (From: "The Children and Psychology," by Paul Goodman.)
• "There cannot be a history of anarchism in the sense of establishing a permanent state of things called 'anarchist.' It is always a continual coping with the next situation, and a vigilance to make sure that past freedoms are not lost and do not turn into the opposite, as free enterprise turned into wage-slavery and monopoly capitalism, or the independent judiciary turned into a monopoly of courts, cops, and lawyers, or free education turned into School Systems." (From: "The black flag of anarchism," by Paul Goodman.)
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