In defense of my generation
I find it odd to hear that Millennials say the screwed-up state of the world is attributable to Boomers.
Capitalism, racism, imperialism, inequality, resource over-exploitation, ecological disruption . . . are the result of longstanding macro-level civilizational trajectories dating back hundreds and thousands of years.
It was a “woke” segment of the Boomer generation that initiated significant counter-trajectories. Think of:
. the civil rights movement
. Earth Day
. anti-militarism
. second-wave feminism
. gay liberation
. the project of transitioning the left “from Red to Green”
. the eco-socialist, eco-communitarian, and ecovillage movements
An ode to the creativity and fresh thinking of the generation can be found in Richard Drinnon’s 1997 introduction to David Watson’s book “Against the Megamachine” . . .
Thirty years ago this fall the flower-power contingent of the antiwar movement requested permission to levitate the Pentagon and the government’s General Services Administration (GSA) graciously allowed they might raise the building to a maximum of ten feet. Very recently a humorless reviewer pointed to this incident as a graphic illustration of the raging silliness that has kept so many from getting a “fix” on the Sixties. But could it be that to earn that fix you need at least a GSA level of irony and just a flicker of vision?
David Watson attended his first national protest against the war that October [1967] at the Pentagon at the age of fifteen. The previous fall he had attended his first antiwar teach-in and, as he reports in the introduction to his article “Looking Back on the Vietnam War,” thereupon determined “not to be an oppressor or to tolerate oppressors.” Over the years he did what he could to stop the war, demonstrating, leafleting, burning his draft card, agitating on street corners, and, yes, waving a “VC” flag at the gates of a tank factory. Today he can see that his admiration for the Vietnamese people blinded him to the authoritarianism of their leaders, but he offers no apology for waving the NLF flag in the face of the U.S. empire, and only regrets not having done more to undermine it. That first teach-in continues in these essays and shows how consistently he has tried to do more, from 1967 to the present, a thirty-year hitch in the resistance with no end in sight.
Watson’s youthful flag-waving certainties, later sloughed off like so much baby fat, came out of a style that had long since run down. By the Sixties the traditional left had become a patchwork of brittle slogans, with anti-Stalinists locked in seemingly endless battle with Stalinists, shadow boxers united only by their mutual fear of radical change. In the name of Progress, Science, and Reason, both sides celebrated industrialism and embraced technology that was destroying the last possibilities of individuality and community. When at last a New Left rebelled against this programmatic accommodation, one vivid strand of that rebellion was neo-luddite. And it was in this counter-tradition that Watson put down roots and grew into the sensitivity and caring patience evident in these essays and in his just published treatise on social ecology, Beyond Bookchin: Preface for a Future Social Ecology (1996).
In “Homage to Fredy Perlman,” Watson records that “our community in Detroit, being far greater than the sum of the individuals who make it up, was much diminished by his untimely passing [in 1985].” A onetime student of C. Wright Mills and a gifted thinker in his own right, Fredy Perlman had earned that esteem by stripping off his Marxist presuppositions and taking the lead in the search for alternatives. Perlman participated in the Paris May Days of 1968 and on his return to the United States explored the implications of this explosion of possibilities for the rest of his life, mainly through the Black & Red publishing project and the Detroit Print Co-op, the journal Fifth Estate, and through “stories, essays, plays, music,” as Watson notes, “and by his participation in many anti-authoritarian and communitarian projects.” Perlman’s study of native peoples and their cultures had led to his discovery that “the state of nature is a community of freedoms.” As for the modern mess he called Leviathan, it is not a prospective horror: “It is our world,” Perlman wrote in Against His-story, Against Leviathan! (1983), a book Watson has drawn on for his own title and much more.
The essayist is also a close student of the work of Lewis Mumford and indebted to that of Jacques Ellul, Marshall Sahlins, Stanley Diamond, Vandana Shiva, Ivan Illich, Carolyn Merchant, Gary Snyder, and many others — he seems to have read everybody. Though shaped by diverse influences, these essays have an underlying unity laid down by the coherence of Watson’s outlook and by the unwavering intensity of his search for some way out of the labyrinth — I think of them as so many steel files smuggled into our iron cage.
Anarchism may offer a way out but not, Watson believes, through its classical nineteenth-century formulations. He easily demonstrates that Bakunin shared in distressingly full measure Marx’s glorification of progress and so did Kropotkin in his less reflective moments. But there were “contradictory currents,” as Watson also recognizes, some of which presciently anticipated his own critique of domination. Said by Emma Goldman to be “the greatest woman Anarchist of America,” Voltairine de Cleyre, for instance, rejected the centralization she saw turning people into robots and in 1900 wanted to make things new and preindustrial again so one might “watch things grow and blossom, and feel again the joy of life and the sweet kinship with all living things — learn the forgotten lore of the savage who knew all the colors of the leaves, and the shapes of them, and the way they turn to the sun….” There in embryo was Watson’s goal of an anarchism shorn of progressivism and reunited with the forgotten lore that was “anarchist” eons before the term was coined.
Here and now, I venture, Watson’s breathtakingly ambitious project is no less than to have us look at the world with our eyes wide open. In William Blake’s famous words:
If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.
* * * *
So in the light of all this, what is our final fix on Pentagon levitation in the Sixties? The late Allen Ginsberg — he has just died as I conclude this introduction — persuasively argued some years ago that the demonstration has to be understood as “a poetic metaphor” that had in fact been “a triumph of the human imagination over heavy metal materialism”: the authority of the Pentagon had been demystified and “in that sense we did levitate it.”
In the self-same sense David Watson’s Against the Megamachine raises the Pentagon for us, and that is a timely exploit in these grim days.
