Word: absurdity
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Youth is growing up absurd, Paul Goodman suggests, largely because "the Organized System semimonopolies, government, advertisers, " fails to provide enough "man's work"--work which young men can believe in and give themselves to. The victims of this system are the juvenile criminals, whom official culture refuses to take seriously as human beings, but also the young organization men who, though lost in self- contempt, are afraid to leave what they call rat race...
...that in looking for , men ask for good pay, prestige and conditions, not for work that is useful or honorable within the limits of business ethics). But the remains: can youth possibly resign themselves to spending eight hours a day "doing that is no good," and not grow up absurd? a young man defines society as a " frivolous racket," what choices does he ? And, the more common question, what society do with such a chap...
...Goodman judges our society as not outrageously bad, but far from adequate. Near the end of the book, he suggests one program that would make growing up less absurd--and that is decentralization, so that men could get back a sense of personal involvement in meaningful decisions, political and economic. Unfortunately, this issue is raised only vaguely and without much consideration of the politics involved...
...script wildly and unjustly caricatures the fundamentalists as vicious and narrow-minded hypocrites, just as wildly and unwisely idealizes their opponents, as personified in Darrow. Actually, the fundamentalist position, even when carried to the extreme that Bryan struck when he denied that man is a mammal, is scarcely more absurd and profitless than the shallow scientism that the picture offers as a substitute for religious faith and experience...
...says Menen, until the Arabians sparked "the rebirth of learning" by rediscovering mathematics and the great Greek texts. Italy's Renaissance princes kept scholars as show-off status symbols ("The scholars cost more than a dog, but not always more than a horse"). It was intellectually absurd, feels Menen, to call on Italy for a burst of Renaissance creativity after World War II. However, "the Italians, who are an obliging people, did their best and produced an original line in beach pants for women...