1985 (12 page)

Anarchism has come back to the world, but chiefly with the young. It is characteristic, and probably admirable, in young people to wish to dissociate themselves from both socialism and capitalism, since both have police forces, laws, a concern with materialism, and a respect for property. ‘Property,' said the proto-anarchist Proudhon, ‘is theft.' Young people tend to idealism, which may be a symptom of the disease called adolescence but also produced the Romantic Revival in literature. They also tend to rebel against their parents, who are dull, worried about money, and have an unhealthy appetite for possessions. Their parents are prepared to send them to fight and die for their country, which means property the young do not own and do not want anyway. The State is, and we yawn saying it, a father-figure. The great divisions in the world are not national or religious or economic; they resolve themselves into one division, which is that of youth and age. The division was mildly dramatized for me in West Berlin a few years ago. Having inspected the whole length of the Wall, I sought a rest and a drink at a table outside a
Bierstube
called
Der Moby Dick.
It was run by the young and patronized by the young. Nobody came to serve me. After half an hour I walked in to the bar and asked why. ‘Because,' said a blond young man with a
Herrenvolk
profile, ‘you are of the generation that started the war.'

It seemed a fair reason. The fight between youth and age – or, strictly, between puberty and maturity – engenders a dynamic, excites the flow of adrenalin, adds interest to life. It is a more acceptable struggle than the one between classes or nations, and it is romantically bedded in ancient myth. But there is a problem we do not find in the older divisions. When we fight for land or money we are fighting for solid objects in space. The youth-age conflict is a time-war. Youth is time's fool, youth's a stuff will not endure. It becomes maturity or age, its opposite and enemy, and nobody can properly tell at what point the frontier is crossed. Age does
not last either, but it ends in death, which is sharp and incontrovertible. Youth is part of a process, but it is important to the young that it be represented as a quasi-permanency, something static, almost spatial. Young people come and go, but youth remains. Any young person needs to achieve definition of his youth through membership of a community of the young. If he is with the young and they accept him, he knows he is young. The old need no communal assurance that they are old, and they expect to die alone.

The youth group is less concerned with doing than with being. It cannot define itself in terms of a continuity of membership, nor is there properly a continuity of culture. The important thing is to sit about and be young together. There are activities on the verge of doing nothing, such as taking mild narcotics or hallucinogens and listening to rock music – both substitutes for art and learning. A bland sense of alienation from the laws and culture of the old can satisfy, with no need of stressing alienation through aggression. Unfortunately, it is the agents of the gerontocracy, or old men's rule, that are aggressive and demand conformity. Youth, content just to be, has to shift from the essential to the existential. The group defines itself in the manner of a mature society – with politics and what is known as a counter-culture. It resembles a commune of the nineteenth century, opposing itself to the established order, though, most unbakuninian, with no hope of overturning it.

That is, of course, an over-simplification. If the youth movements of the sixties can be described in terms of primitive anarchism, this means that anarchism is capable of too many definitions. There have been some young people who have made an intelligent political rationale out of their sense of alienation, such as the ‘pragmatic anarchists' of Germany and Scandinavia, mostly young intellectuals. There was an anarchist youth movement in Yunan province in the People's Republic of China, suppressed by the central government in 1968. Bakunin has been specifically evoked by young people in America as well as Europe, carriers of blown-up photographs of the prophet at rallies for the condemnation of everything produced by the old – police forces, television, canned foods,
autoroutes
, war, indiscriminate killing, prisons. Bakunin will serve as the patron saint of any movement that invites voluntary membership and allows equally voluntary withdrawal and is dedicated to harassing the State or else studiously pretending the State does not exist. But the whole purpose of the nineteenth-century anarchic movement was to
provide a genuine alternative to the State as an instrument of rule or, mostly, oppression. Youthful communes and even mature
kibbutzim
have, whether they will or not, to acknowledge that the State exists: they themselves exist by the grace and favour of the State. There is nowhere today where the State is not.

In any discussion of the political future of the countries of the Free World, we have to consider seriously the danger that the youth movements represent to the cause of traditional liberty. Such a statement will seem nonsensical to youth itself, which believes it is the sole custodian of freedom in an age when the old seem desirous of limiting it more and more. It is true that age seeks to limit the freedom of youth, but only because this freedom is properly licence. If men are born free, it is only in the Ingsoc sense that animals too are born free: freedom to choose between two courses of action presupposes knowledge of what the choice entails. We gain knowledge through direct experience, like the burnt child fearing the fire, or else through the experience of others, which is contained in books. The voice of the neo-anarchists is that of the film-maker Mr Dennis Hopper: ‘There ain't nothing in books, man,' or that of the British pop-singer who said: ‘Youth don't need education. Youth susses things out for itself like.' Dr Samuel Johnson, having listened to an exponent of primitivism, said: ‘This is sad stuff, sir. This is brutish.' It is cow-like rather than lion-like. It takes a long time to gain, by browsing over a field, the protein available in a quick meal of meat. We old offer the meat of education; the counter-culture goes back to grass.

Education consists in taking swift and economical meals out of the larder called the past. Bakunin, with his eccentric interpretation of Hegel, rejected the past, which was bad by definition, not being new. The young very logically reject the past because it seems of no use to people living in an eternal present. And when the old start to oppress the young, it is of course in the sacred name of the past that the bludgeons are raised. The young do not necessarily reject educational establishments, however, since being taught involves being in communities of their own kind, with teaching as an irrelevance or as a purveying of things to be rejected, such focuses of protest being welcome to the idealism of youth.

It is instructive to note how far youthful anarchism has been able to prevail against central government since the year of the first appearance of
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
No student of 1949 could have dreamt that, twenty years later, university authorities would have been so willing to
abdicate traditional discipline. Students have gained remarkable liberties, or licences, by the simple procedure of demanding them. The question of the old was
why
? Of the young it has been
why not
? It is difficult, in an establishment dedicated to reason, to give good reasons why student dormitories should not be mixed, promiscuous copulation should not abound, drugs should not be freely taken. In a society given over to consumption, it becomes, for muddle-headed academics, difficult to separate learning from other saleable commodities. If students wish to study petromusicology (the aesthetics and history of rock music), Basic Swahili, or the poetry of Bob Dylan, they, as the consumers, must have their way. And it is very difficult to make out a cogent case for the study of Latin or medieval economics, or to convince that education is most valuable when we do not too nicely question its content.

Students must naturally delegate the voicing of their desires and abhorrences to elected leaders. Even anarchists require leaders, as Bakunin recognized, thinking of himself. He assumed, like his successors, that new modes of leadership would be untaintable by the vices of the heads of the old tyrannies and oligarchies; a leader of free men and women would be the articulator of their needs, not their oppressor, since the very notion of oppression belonged to a past destroyed. A phenomenon of our age, and a very bizarre one, has been the rise of the student leaders – young people like Daniel Cohn-Bendit, hero of the barricades during the 1968 Paris student revolt, and Jerry Rubin, founder of the Youth International Party. Names not now well remembered used to be briefly in the news when the Dutch Provos or the Spontaneous Maoists of the French high schools extolled the virtues of shoplifting, incest and killing as an
arte gratuit
. We should ask what all this has to do with education. The true leaders of youth should be their pedagogues, qualified to inform them what they have to learn in order to survive as members of a civilized community. The logic of youth's eligibility for choosing its own leaders has, inevitably, been pushed to the near limit with children of twelve finding coeval spokesmen for proclaiming their rights. We have not finished with this extension of rights down the age-scale: it is all a matter of finding leaders.

The student leaders reported in the press are ranting extremists of an eclectic kind, mixing Marx and Bakunin, Zen and the Hobbits in bouts of verbalization with no real programme except more and more licence for the young. The danger is always that they can all too easily be
manipulated by maturer, genuinely radical, minds that know what they want. The cause of the students becomes whatever universal cause has lately become urgent. To a great extent, the student rebels of Paris in May 1968 were directed by adult agitators. Youth groups are very useful engines: young people have energy and sincerity and ignorance. They have all the qualities that would make them valuable to the professional agitators who want to bring in Ingsoc. The young could easily be made to love Big Brother as the enemy of the past and the old. He is, after all, careful not to call himself Our Father.

The Orwellian world is one that could have a strong initial appeal to the young. It has a striking anarchic feature – a complete absence of laws. It treats the past as a void to be filled with whatever myths the present cares to contrive. It sets up, as a group to be despised, a vast body outside the pale, devoted to past traditions, reactionary and conservative, essentially
old
. Oldspeak is rejected as having no power to express that eternal present which is youth's province as well as the Party's; Newspeak has the laconic thrust of the tongue of youth. The programme, if not the eventual reality, would find its most energetic supporters initially among the young, all happily ready to destroy the past because it is the past, and to accept the Ingsoc revolution as it has already accepted the mixed mythology of Mao, Che Guevara, Castro and Bakunin himself. It is the prospect of revolution that counts, with its connotations of the liquidation of the outdated and the glory of the fresh start. What comes after the revolution is another matter.

If, on the other hand, the new strikes even the innocent and ignorant young as somehow suspect, it can only be scrutinized in the light of standards derived from the past. I mean, of course, those sifted nuggets that add up to what we vaguely call a tradition, meaning a view of humanity that extols values other than those of pure bestial subsistence. The view is, alas, theocentric and rests on an assumption that cannot be proved – namely, that God made man to cherish as the most valuable of his creatures, being the most like himself. It is not the aggregate of humanity that approaches the divine condition but the individual human being. God is one and single and separate, and so is a man or a woman. God is free, and so is man, but man's freedom only begins to operate when he understands the nature of the gift.

Human freedom is the hoariest of all topics for debate: it still animates student gatherings, though it is often discussed without definition,
theological knowledge or metaphysical insight. Augustine and Pelagius confront each other on the issue of whether man is or is not free; Calvinists and Catholics shout each other down; even in Milton's hell the diabolic princes debate free will and predestination. The pundits of predestination affirm that, since God is omniscient, he knows everything that a man can ever do, that a man's every future act has already been determined for him, and therefore he cannot be free. The opposition gets over this problem by stating that God validates the gift of free will by deliberately refusing to foresee the future. When a man performs an act that God has refused to foresee, God switches on the memory of his foreknowledge. God, in other words, is omniscient by definition, but he will not take advantage of his omniscience.

The arguments for and against free will can be transposed to the secular plane. So much of man is genetically determined, environment limits him as well as his physical and psychological structure; a seemingly free act may well be the end-product of a process determined by a multitude of unconscious and mechanical factors. Man cannot control his response to a reflex. History is a cyclical movement, and man rides the cycle: he revisits old scenes and repeats old actions. Man is a social creature, and society is a negation of individual freedom. And so on. The view of man as an unfree being is hard to combat, and it is supported by Freud, who found that adult acts were motivated by childhood events cached in the unconscious, and Marx, who saw history as a huge steam engine committed to one track and one destination.

The proponents of human freedom accept a great number of limitations on it, but insist that there are areas where it has to operate, or man ceases to be man. First, man's special nature resides in his capacity to make certain judgements on the basis of certain criteria. He can attach these criteria to experience; he learns the criteria from a combination of experience and insight. He is totally free to apply them. Thus, he can freely choose to declare a thing beautiful or ugly, good or evil, true or false. Writing in his diary, Winston Smith says that freedom consists in being able to say that two and two make four, but this is only one of three available freedoms. It is important to keep the three categories separate from each other, so that a thing is not declared ugly because it is immoral or (
pace
John Keats) true because it is beautiful. There is a whiff of religion in all this: we are reminded that truth, beauty and goodness are attributes of God. But, on a purely empirical
approach, nobody would deny that these are valid areas of human judgement.