The Sixties, by Jenny Diski, has remarkably little to say about the Sixties as such. Most of the book is a personal meditation on the nature of youth--and one of the best such I’ve read, for instance this passage of realistic psychology:
I was sure, the first time I sucked on an LSD-soaked sugar cube, that it would be the end of me. I knew my depressive tendencies. I had had bad trips even on cannabis. The ether and the Methedrine had turned nasty. I was certain that my chances of becoming irredeemably psychotic on acid were very high. I said a serious goodbye to myself as I put the sugar cube on my tongue.
Nonetheless, I took it. Was it because taking a risk was worth the marvellous insights I believed I would get if the trip went the other way? Or, more likely, because risk was by definition good, or at any rate, necessary? There was no choice but to take whatever risk was on offer.
In the last two chapters, the author uses three of my favorite sixties and seventies theorists--
Ivan Illich,
R.D. Laing and
Thomas Szasz--to explore guiltily how “liberation got confused with libertarianism” and the Sixties became the Thatcher era.
The author describes radical teaching practices in the sixties, echoing some of the criticisms her political opponents make today:
We tended devotedly to the lower end of the ability spectrum but paid little attention to the more able. They were us, after all, and we were quite ashamed of our privileges. It got to the point where in some sense we punished the brighter kids for not being underprivileged...The radicals couldn’t always cope with education actually having an effect. If the oppressed stopped behaving like the oppressed, we ddin’t really like it.
Diski’s work as a teacher was influenced by Illich’s ideas, which she now says were both more radical and more right-wing than she had realized. Here’s a sampling of Illich, the author of
“Deschooling Society” and the man “too radical for the radical generation”:
The existence of schools produces the demand for schooling. Once we have learned to need school, all our activities tend to take the shape of client relationships to other specialized institutions. Once the self-taught man or woman has been discredited, all nonprofessional activity is rendered suspect...In fact, learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.
Even the seemingly radical critics of the school system are not willing to abandon the idea that they have an obligation to the young, especially to the poor, an obligation to process them, whether by love or by fear...
Illich seemed like a leftist at the time, but in fact, when his sort of libertarianism is opposed to paternalistic statism, Diski and her generation are usually on the side of the state.
The majority of the activists in my generation were never as interested in individual liberty as we were in finding ways to implement our own ideas of how the world should be. I’m not sure, on Illich’s still startlingly strict definition, if we were interested in liberty at all...
Illich could well have joined Thatcher and Reagan’s theoretical advisers. I’d resist the claim that the Sixties generation were responsible for the Thatcher years, as I would resist the notion that the Jewish community in Germany were responsible for the advent of the Nazis, but sometimes I can’t help but see how unwittingly we might have been sweeping the path in readiness for the radical Right...
I will refrain from comment on the supposed Thatcherite/Nazi connection. Perhaps if the author were American, she would realize the Right gets a lot more radical than Margaret Thatcher.
Anyway, a less pejorative way of describing Sixties leftists is to say that they were concerned with caring for people rather than simply leaving them free to take care of themselves as best they can. Here’s where Szasz comes in--Diski, a former mental patient, rightly criticizes the author of
“The Myth of Mental Illness” for being more concerned with the
rights and freedoms of the so-called mentally ill than with their
happiness and safety. (Although Szasz would probably point out that the nature of happiness and the value of safety are highly subjective.)
[Szasz believed that] the State had no business interfering with matters of the mind, or even supposing that Mind existed...He refuted the concept of madness in order to refute any claim for civic responsibility towards others...Everyone made their own individual choices: the rich, the poor, the mad, the sane. That was their problem.
Szasz also suggested that when the so-called mentally ill cause real social problems (by stealing, committing violent crimes, or just being a public nuisance) they should be prosecuted like other criminals. Diski takes this suggestion as a sign of Szasz’s lack of compassion for suffering. In fact, Szasz thought that the mentally ill would be
protected by being treated like criminals, since those accused or convicted of a crime have many rights and privileges those accused or convicted of mental illness don’t have.
(Tangent: an accused criminal has the right to counsel and the right to a fair trial (usually by jury). Most of those convicted of a crime are given a specific, limited sentence, one that cannot be extended indefinitely for the same offense and one that does not depend solely on the discretion of their jailors. From within a prison, prisoners can teach themselves the law, appeal their cases, sue, complain about their treatment. A person accused of mental illness or incarcerated in a mental asylum has none of these advantages.)Despite this misreading, Diski, in characterizing Szasz and Illich as ‘radical’ ‘far right’ thinkers is pointing to a real and unresolved tension between the idea that people should be free and the idea that society should care for its members (whether they like it or not).
The school versus the market, if you will. In the Sixties, the author thought that communitarianism and liberty were naturally joined in leftist political theory--after Thatcher, she knows better, and seems quite willing to abandon liberty along with libertarianism.
Tune in next time for a discussion of Marxist theories of human nature, why Asian people don't understand sidewalks, and, of course, Proust!
