Paul Goodman - High Res

7/30/2019 Paul Goodman - High Res

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A companion to the film Paul Goodman Changed My Life

published by the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas/DissentMagazine

Casey Nelson Blake, Dick Flacks,Deborah Meier, and Michael J. Brown on

Paul Goodman for Today

Paul Goodman:Dissent, rev.qxd 10/17/2011 1:43 PM Page 1


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Dissent(ISSN 0012-3846) is published quarterlywinter, spring, summer, and fallby the University of Pennsylvania Press for

the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc ., 310 Riverside Drive, #2008, New York, N.Y. 10025. Phone:

212-316-3120. website: http://www.dissentmagazine.org.

2011 by the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc. (FSISI).

Permission to reprint must be obtained from the publisher.

Reprinted from the Fall 2010 issue ofDissent

The publication of this pamphlet was made possible by a grant from the JSL Foundation.

Cover photo used in Paul Goodman Changed My Life, a JSL Films production. Courtesy of Sally Goodman.



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C A S E Y N E L S O N B L A K E

The young are honorable and see theproblems, Paul Goodman wrote in 1968, but

they dont know anything because we have not

taught them anything. Michael Browns wiseand eloquent essay proves him wrong. The young

know quite a lot, but their elders (including the

very students Goodman described) have deprived

them of a sturdy tradition of social criticism that

should be their birthright. The tradition of

Thoreau, James, Veblen, Addams, Dewey,

Bourne, and Mumford that Goodman kept alive

in the postwar years has apparently become an

embarrassment to those aspiring to global citi-

zenship and a post-national consciousness: its

masterworks barely figure in humanities courses.

As a result, young Americans find themselves

exiled from their countrys moral narrative.

Tradition has been broken, Goodman wrote

fifty years ago, and yet there is no standard to

affirm. Culture becomes eclectic, sensational, or

phony. With luck, Jonathan Lees forthcoming

film Paul Goodman Changed My Life will leadviewers back to Goodmans work and that of the

critics who inspired him. The new editions of

several of his books brought out by PM Press are

a good place to start.

Irving Howe observed that Goodman

continues to write as if it were still possible to

move people: perhaps not sufficiently or in

sufficient numbers, yet with some sense that

speech remains a power. Goodman had an

uncanny ability to make the most radical

suggestions sound eminently reasonable, as if

Disappointed but Not Resigned

P A U L G O O D M A N F O R T O D A Y

Introduction

In 1960, Paul Goodmansocial thinker,activist, poet, and novelistpublished his

groundbreaking book Growing Up Absurd. An

examination of youth disaffection in our

affluent but spiritually empty society,

Goodmans work inspired and galvanized a

burgeoning generation of sixties students and

intellectuals. Forty years later, though hisinfluence is felt throughout our culture, his

books are mostly out of print, and his name is

all but forgotten by those under the age of

forty-five. Goodman wrote some of his most

provocative and far-sighted essays for Dissent,

including one co-authored with his brother,

Percival, in which he called for the banning of

all cars in Manhattan. It was reprinted in a

collection called Utopian Essays and Practical

Proposals. This spring, Dissentand JSL Films,

creator of the upcoming documentary Paul

Goodman Changed My Life, sponsored an essay

contest in which people under thirty were

asked to name the most pressing social and

political issue of our times and write a utopian

essay that included practical proposals. More

than eight hundred young people respondedwith essays. Judges for the contest were Casey

Nelson Blake, Dick Flacks, and Deborah Meier.

We are pleased to print here the essay of the

winner, Michael J. Brown, along with essays by

the judges, all of whom were influenced by

Goodman. Essays by the two runners-up, John

Connelly and Cameron Quinn, are available at

www.dissentmagazine.org.

D ISS EN T 3



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they were projects that free people could agree

on and pursue that very day. His criticism was

an appeal to Americans horse sense, the

imperiled habit of making independent judg-ments and in democratically rubbing shoulders

with all kinds and conditions. The title of one

of his collections, Utopian Essays and Practical

Proposals, captured what was unique about the

man. Who else moved so easily from calls to

abolish nuclear weapons and ban cars from

Manhattan to a plan to replace hospital nurses

starchy whites with easy-to-wash seersuckers?

All were steps citizens could take to live more

human lives.

Because he was an anarchist from the outset,

and never a communist, Goodman didnt wastethe cold war years apologizing for having been

nave about the Soviet Union. Nor did he beat a

familiar path from Left to Center or Right.

Instead, he dispensed with traditional political

formulas as he sorted through the cultural

wreckage left by the missed and compromised

revolutions of modern times. His penetrating

indictment of our abundant society in Growing

Up Absurdstill stands.

It is lacking in enough mans work. It is

lacking in honest public speech, and people

are not taken seriously. It is lacking in the

opportunity to be useful. It thwarts aptitude

and creates stupidity. It corrupts ingenuous

patriotism. It corrupts the fine arts. It shackles

science. It dampens animal ardor. It

discourages the religious convictions of

Justification and Vocation and it dims the

sense that there is a Creation. It has no

Honor. It has no Community.

Goodman was obtuse in thinking the

maladies he diagnosed in that book were irrel-

evant to the experiences of girls and women.

But he was not obtuse in insisting that all those

capitalized words mattered, and that their

waning was a source of profound sadness for

many Americans. The difficulty Goodman had indefining his own position over the yearsa

community anarchist, a Neolithic conser-

vative, or (my favorite) an anarchist patriot

speaks more to the uselessness of political labels

than any uncertainty in his thinking.

Goodman saw more clearly than most of his

crazy young allies in the 1960s that the

United States suffered from a crisis of meaning

that could not be resolved by politics alone,

least of all the politics of revolution. The

elevation of consumption over satisfying work

had fostered a base cynicism among Americansof all backgrounds. Seemingly at odds, the

corporate executive, the juvenile delinquent,

and the Beat were united in thinking that role-

playing comprised the sum total of human rela-

tions. An organized system of reputations had

displaced older standards of excellence that

challenged the young to master and surpass

what they had inherited from previous genera-

tions. They had lost the very idea of an

objective changeable world, the conviction

that there is a Creation of the Six Days, a real

world rather than a system of social rules thatindeed are often arbitrary. As young people

they were early resigned and stayed that way.

Goodman admitted his tone was that of an

Angry Middle-Aged Man, disappointed but not

resigned. Todays disappointed but not

resignedwomen and men of all agesshould

hunt down his fugitive writings and read them.

Casey Nelson Blake teaches history and American Studies

at Columbia University. He is writing a longer essay on Paul

Goodman for Raritan.


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Photo by Paul Hawken, included in Paul Goodman Changed

My Life, a JSL Films production. Courtesy of Sally Goodman.



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Paul Goodman and the Old New Left

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D I C K F L A C K S

Im still puzzledfifty years later by what it wasabout the climate and the culture in 1960 that

encouraged many young people to think they

could make the world over. That was the year

when little groups of black students brought down

entrenched segregation by putting their bodiesover lines they werent supposed to cross. In that

same year, students rose up en masse in Turkey,

South Korea, and Japan; a host of African coun-

tries declared their independence from colonial

rule; John Kennedy became the first person born

in the twentieth century to take over the U.S.

presidency; Bobby Zimmerman started to perform

as Bob Dylan. A strong sense of youth rebellion

and generational cleavage was emerging, and it

was in that year that Paul Goodman succeeded in

publishing Growing Up Absurd.

Goodman was by then a mature intellectual,who prolifically produced serious and often

profound social criticism, illuminating fiction,

and poetry. But no one outside of a small circle

of New York intellectuals had heard of him,

until that book appeared. Its very title resonated

with the growing cultural mood among intel-

lectual youth; its argument about the ways in

which bureaucratic, consumerist, overde-

veloped society was destroying the sense of

useful work and right living struck home.

Goodman soon was a sought after campus

speaker, and as the sixties rebellions becameorganized and focused, his way of thinking was,

I think, deeply influential.

Goodman fused two philosophical streams

that were central to the early sixties outlook of

young new leftists like myself and other

founders of groups like Students for a

Democratic Society. He, like another intellectual

hero, C. Wright Mills, was a pragmatist. Our

generation saw the established Left as defined

by ideology rather than lived experienceand

this was just about as true for the whole gamut

of those who identified as socialist. Deriving

ones political strategies and analyses from ideo-

logical foundations resulted in what Mills called

futilitarian politics and in a vocabulary unin-

telligible to the masses. The main point of

claiming the need for a New Left was to

envision a way of acting and speaking politically

that connected with experience, that was exper-

imental, that had effects on the world thatcould be seen as good for peoples lives.

SDS, the Student Nonviolent CoordinatingCommittee, and other expressions of the New

Left were anarchist without at first even knowing

anything about the anarchist tradition. Paul

Goodmans use of anarchism was very instructive.

To make change you join up with friends and

neighbors and try to create alternatives that meet

needs blocked by the big institutions. Or you

demand new rules that can make life more

livable directlythese modes of action are more

practical and effective than appealing to author-

ities and institutions to bring the change.Rather than spend primary energy to get the

university to become a community of scholars,

create your ownand by so doing you may af-

fect the institution as well as making a practical

difference. To oppose war, refuse to fight it.

Goodmans fusion of the utopian and the practi-

cal, in a series of essays during the sixties, pro-

vided substance for the impulses of resistance

and the visions of a decentralization and com-

munity that defined the youth counterculture

and the early New Left.

If we could figure out why Paul Goodman

is now forgotten, we might get a better

understanding of whats happened to us

all in these last decades.



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Restoring the Spirit

D E B O R A H M E I E R

Our public officials are not much concernedabout the waste of human resources. But

the big causes of stupidity, of lack of initiative

and lack of honorable incentive, are glaring,

noted Paul Goodmana half-century agoin

Growing Up Absurd. Our society cannot have it

both ways: to maintain a conformist and

ignoble system and to have skillful and spirited

men to man that system with.

That word, spirited, is where I rest the heart

of our case. Spirited students require spiritedteachers, of course. And we are killing off the

spirit in the most deliberate wayfifty-five years

after Goodman published these words.

We have a chance now to recapture the

language of change and invest it with

Goodmans spiritbefore the new reformers

destroy the remnants of Goodmans dream. Its

hard to distort Goodmans ideas, which was part

of the strength of his languageand its value

for us again today lies in the power of his

description of the emptiness of growing up.

Of course, on occasion we will winceasGoodmans words were quite clearly largely

addressed to boys and men. Did he mean it that

way? Quite possibly.

All we need to do is add women and we

can take almost any page of that great treatise

on raising the young in the fifties and translate

it easily into raising the young in the twenty-

first century. As we enter a new age of low

wages and unemployment, Goodmans rele-

vance is striking. Whats missing? he asks.

And he answers for our time as well as his: a

community worth growing up into. The actual

resultbut not intent, says Goodmanofprogressive education was to weaken the

academic curriculum and foster adjustment to

society as it is. Surely he is right. So too the

twenty-first-century reforms The more radical

goals of the progressive education movement

were compromised until they served the

opposite purpose that John Dewey had in

mindstrengthening its intellectual content

and producing students who found it hard to

adjust. So too the radical reforms of our day

have compromised the egalitarian goals they

claim drives them. Goodman ends on acautiously optimistic notein 1957in support

of the crazies. But the organized system is

very powerful and our aspirations, like theirs,

may serve to widen the intellectual gaps not

close them in the name of equity!

Our common wealth, he says, must be

devoted to cultivating freedom and civi-

lizationthey arent inevitable if we dont

consciously nurture them when our children

are young. Goodman would be horrified to

watch this relentless march into orderly

conformity, schools organized as boot campsand test-prep academies, searching for methods

to instill right answers into our young in the

name of equity. We need to revive Goodmans

spirited defense of a spirited citizenry.

Deborah Meier, starting in 1965 as a kindergarten teacher,

went on to create innovative public schools that served all

children in New York City and Boston until her retirement in

1998. She is a longtime editor ofDissentand the author of

many books, including The Power of Their Ideas.

6 D ISS EN T


I wish he were here to challenge the Left we

now inhabit. We have largely fallen back defen-

sively to support of the welfare state and elec-

toral strategies. Goodman would say that we are

blocked by the decline in utopian thought andcreative direct action. If we could figure out

why Paul Goodman is now forgotten, we might

get a better understanding of whats happened

to us all in these last decades.

Dick Flacks s books include: Making History: The American

Left and the American Mindand the forthcoming: Playing

for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social

Movements (with Rob Rosenthal). He was active in the

founding of Students for a Democratic Society.



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M I C H A E L J . B R O W N

When I tell people that I live in my hometownof Rochester, N.Y., their most common response

is, Why? Rochester is the fifty-first largest

metro region in the United States, a tad smaller

than Buffalo and a tad bigger than Tucson. Thelocal delicacy is called the garbage plate and is

best served after 2 a.m., with a side of Lipitor.

Rochester is a snowy place. It is a place where

corporate giantsKodak, Xerox, Bausch and

Lombonce stalked the land but now skulk

amid layoffs and falling profits. Rochester is a

city with grinding urban poverty, but its suburbs

are rather prosperous places from which crops

of upwardly mobile students are harvested each

graduation season. These students often leave

the region, either for college or for work, and

many never return. The city elders wring theirhands over this brain drain. The downtown

core of the city is deserted after dark and,

increasingly, during the work day. Large

suburban business parks with rolling green

lawns and constructed drainage ponds are

luring businesses from the central skyscrapers.

Some have characterized Rochester, along with

cities like Buffalo, Detroit, and Baltimore, as

dying. If I lived in New York, Washington,

Boston, Seattle, or San Francisco, no one would

ask me why. And yet when people ask how it is

that I live here, I am eager to tell them.Perhaps I should first say why many people,

and I include myself, have left the places they

come from or at least seriously contemplated

doing so. Moving from small places to larger

ones is a major theme in American life. People

from farms and towns, from other regions and

other nations, have come to large American

cities for work. They have also come to expe-

rience the buzz of such places, to be a part of

it as Frank Sinatra sings of New York. As a kid

reading books on ancient history, I wondered

about the people alive at the height of the

Roman Empire who didnt live at the center,

who werent among the bread and circuses, the

politics of the forum, the enormous power of

the city of Rome. Such people were, I later

learned, described by the term provincial. Not

only were they people living in the provinces,

they were also people whose world was thought

to be narrowermaterially, intellectually, andculturallythan those living at the center. I

wondered whether some future kid reading

history would ask how a person living in my

own time could have made a life somewhere

other than in the great metropolises of our age.

Would such a person even be a part of history?

If the glamour of the center pulls us in, the

reputation for dullness that surrounds

remaining at home pushes us away. At the

holidays, Ive sat in airplanes listening to my

fellow twenty-somethings commiserating with

each other: I liked going home, but if I had tostay there one more day Id shoot myself.

In a culture where helicopter parents can

extend adolescence well into the third decade of

an offsprings life, there is undoubtedly merit in

striking out on ones own. But whats at issue

here, I have come to believe, is not simply inde-

pendence. Whats at issue is the tension

between belonging to a rootless professional

culture and a rooted local one. The price of

holding on to the latter may be exclusion from

the status, power, and income the former offers.

Its not the case, however, that those leavingtheir childhood homes in places like Rochester

are lighting out for wide open spaces where

opportunity abounds and careers are simply

open to talent. My peers are not leaving to

pursue Jeffersonian independence; theyre

leaving to enter large professional organizations

in which they often become quite dependent

on the caprice of bosses, the vicissitudes of

markets, the shifting terrain of mergers and

acquisitions.

And this brings me back to how eager I am


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In the Flower City, Take Root



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to tell people why I live in Rochester. It is not

because Rochester affords me economic inde-

pendence (though the low cost of living helps).

There are surely capricious bosses and volatile

markets here, too. But there is something else.There are the faces and the names of the people

around me, each of which has a story behind it,

each of which is a buoy anchored in the social

sea, helping to orient me. There are the old

buildingsthe grand facades of high culture,

the battered storefronts of the inner city, the

sentinel-like pump house on the reservoir hill

to remind me of history and time. What is

different in Rochester is that I own a piece of

this place, and this place owns a piece of me. Id

like to suggest that this relation is the grounds

for a special kind of independence.

As a boy I learnedof ancient Rome; as acollege student I learned of ancient Greece. In

Athens, the citizens of thepolis are thought to

have experienced what the eighteenth-century

French thinker Benjamin Constant called the

liberty of the ancients, and what more recent

political theorists label positive liberty.

Athenian citizens were selected for public office

by lottery, and their assembly comprised the

entire body of citizens (though women andthose not born of Athenian parents were

excluded from citizenship, and much of the

hard labor was performed by slaves). The

essence of this Athenian liberty was the citizens

freedom to determine the policies of their city,

to shape the course of the common life. Such

positive liberty differs from the negative

liberty that Constant called the liberty of the

moderns. This liberty is negative because it is

the absence of intrusion upon private life.

Positive liberty, on the other hand, is the

presence of self-governance. It is notfreedomfrom external constraints; it isfreedom tobe a

self-determining person or community, to

partake in public life. In Athens, the freedom to

participate in the life of the city was regarded as

a defining characteristic of human beings. To

live outside the city was to live outside the

political and cultural community that allows

humans to exercise their capacities for reason,

rhetoric, imagination, and artistry. He who lives

outside the city, Aristotle said, must be either a

beast or a god. For Aristotle, man is by nature

a political animal. And he who by nature and

not by mere accident is without a state, is either

a bad man or above humanity; he is like the

Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one, whom

Homer denounces. To denounce someone forliving without an attachment to a city seems

harsh to contemporary readers, but the very

forcefulness of this language tells us that the

Greeks took their civic communities seriously.

Athens was not simply a place where people

lived; for the citizen, Athens was life itself.

Though the liberty of the ancients may

sound alien to us today, it is nonetheless

appealing. In fact, its appeal lies in our sense of

its absence, our lack of civic self-determination.

We too seldom experience commitment to

something outside the self (but that serves self-development), something larger than the indi-

vidual (but that tangibly involves individuals we

know and value). Yet we yearn for it. Witness

the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. It

brought young Americans off campuses and

into the streets. They went on the road to

campaign in places like Dayton, Ohio, Wilkes-

Barre, Pennsylvania, and Sarasota, Florida. I

was one of them. The day of the New

Hampshire primary, I knocked on doors in the

towns of Antrim and Hillsborough. Obamas

primary defeat was heartbreaking, but thecampaigning was not. The way it called upon

my strength of mind to make the case at every

door, my strength of body to trudge through

snowy back roads, and my strength of will to

approach isolated houses whose owners, I antic-

ipated, had had enough of political canvassers

all this made for a sense of a days labors done

well and for a worthy purpose. But presidential

campaigns are fleeting things. If they leave us

inspired, they leave us wanting more.

The positive liberty of the ancients was not a

function of the political season; it was a way oflife. The small scale of the polisestimates put

the population of Periclean Athens at 250,000,

of which far fewer than half were eligible

citizensfacilitated civic participation. Surely

the endemic warfare among Greek city-states

and the hard work performed by slaves also

played their part in laying the foundations for

the positive liberty of the citizen, for these

offered him ample questions of great moment

to deliberate onnothing less than war (alas)

and peaceand the freedom from labor


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necessary to do so. But political participation

can also perpetuate itself. A virtuous circle

forms that quickens the bond between citizen

and city: the dearer the city becomes to the

citizen, the greater the citizens zeal for lendinga hand in its affairs.

Today, its as though this virtuous circle has

become a vicious one. People stand in relation

to their political community as spectators stand

in relation to spectacle. They are observers

rather than participants, and they are often

disgusted observers. When they do participate,

it is often simply to display this disgust. Witness

the Sarah Palin rallies, which amount to the

venting of spleen. To the extent that the Tea

Party calls forth a response from the Left, it is

likely to come in the form of shouts. The twosides are more apt to cover each other with

spittle than convince each other with smarts.

Whats missing is a field for meaningful action,

a forum for the public use of reason, a pathway

to civic life.

I think I have foundsuch a pathway here inRochester. I feel a sense of ownership over this

place; I feel committed to it. I am rooted in it

not simply because of the accident of birth. The

people I know and love are scattered all overthe world, but the highest concentration of

them in any one place is in Rochester. It is here

that abstractions become tangible realities.

Community is not an ideal of political theory; it

is the brush of elbows and the rush of friends

faces amid the Saturday crowds at the

Rochester Public Market. The environment is

not some photo of a distant stream with a bear

pawing for salmon; its the Genesee River

flowing north into Lake Ontario and passing by

Kodak factories and the Genesee Brewery.

Politics is not shouting faces on television; itsthe forum on violent crime with the mayor and

the police chief at the single-screen movie

theater two blocks away.

In Rochester, life moves along tracks other

than the career track. People have their jobs,

and they work hard at them. But they also have

projects outside their jobs. They start discussion

clubs, urban farmers markets, political action

groups, and new schools. There is a conscious

sense here of building the community: one

vacant lot converted into a neighborhood

garden, one old factory turned into an art

gallery, one letter to the editor at a time. This is

the difference between a rootless professional

culture and a rooted local one. For those in the

former, the city they live in is the site of theirjob. For those in the latter, it is the site of their

civic life. The tradeoffs involved here are very

real. The price of living in a place like Rochester

might be the curtailment of ones career. There

simply arent the opportunities here that there

are in the larger cities. It is this reality that has

led some to characterize Rochester and other

mid-size cities in the older, non-Sunbelt

portions of the country as dying places.

Ironically, civic life springs from this

perception of urban death. In the spring of

2008, I attended a conference in New Orleans.Our group heard from local leaders on the effort

to rebuild the community following Hurricane

Katrina. Expecting them to be marked by the

tragic blow their city had suffered, I was startled

by their sense of hope and their enormous

energy. They were thankful for the opportunity

to renew their city. Katrina was terrible, but it

was also an opportunity for new thinking, new

projects, and new collaborations. Most strik-

ingly, I could see that these civic leaders were

ignited by the very real way in which their city

needed them. It was time for all hands to be ondeck, for all who loved New Orleans to rally to

it, for the citizens to find in the rebuilding of

their city something like what William James

called the moral equivalent of war. We dont

need hurricanes to arouse this sentiment in the

people of our cities, nor do we need the wars

that plagued the Greeks and ultimately struck

down their ancient liberties. What we need is a

sense that our efforts are meaningful, and this

sense is to be found in our left-behind home-

towns and dying cities, in places like Rochester.

These places are fields for our civic action, andthey are places where our efforts can be vital,

direct, and discernible in their results.

William James wondered what might

happen if there were, instead of military

conscription a conscription of the whole

youthful population to form for a certain

number of years part of the army enlisted

against Nature. I think James was on to some-

thing. But what Jamess proposal mayand its

latter-day descendants the Peace Corps and

AmeriCorps domiss is the opportunity to

P A U L G O O D M A N F O R T O D A Y S

D ISS EN T 9



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mobilize (or foster) the affective bonds that

young people have to the places theyre from.

Instead, these programs often uproot people

from the communities theyre in and place

them in new locations. My proposal is for anational youth service program that gives

participants the chance to shape the future of

their own communities. Dispensing with the

martial metaphors, Id call this program

(C)itizens (I)n(V)olved (I)n (C)ommunity, to be

known by its catchier acronym CIVIC. As Paul

Goodman observed fifty years ago in Growing

Up Absurd, We have to learn again what city

man always used to know, that belonging to the

city, to its squares, its market, its neighbor-

hoods, and its high culture, is a public good; it is

not a field for investment to yield a long-termmodest profit. CIVIC aims to make good this

lesson.

This program would address the constellationof social problems Ive laid out. It would stem

the brain drain from places like Rochester by

retaining young people, at least for a time.

During that time, however, CIVIC participants

would either strengthen or form the civic spirit

that promotes the virtuous circle I have

described. Participants would experience thenatural environment by clearing trails, cleaning

shorelines, and maintaining parks. They would

learn the infrastructure of their community by

installing solar panels and creating urban

gardens. They would staff farm markets and

beautify bus shelters. They would immerse

themselves in the community by collecting oral

histories from elders in nursing homes,

providing transportation for those who cannot

transport themselves, and tutoring elementary-

school children in literacy and math. In the

second year of CIVIC, they would be handedsome of the keys to the city in addition to their

ongoing community work. Here is where the

proposal differs from the youth work camps

that Paul Goodman and others have discussed.

CIVIC participants would have regular jury

duty. They would be elections inspectors. They

would have column space in local newspapers.And they would enjoy voting membership in

municipal legislative bodies. In Rochester, for

example, the second-year CIVIC class would

have one voting seat on the city council. They

would attend all meetings of the council and

deliberate about the matters before it, choosing

a different delegate to cast their collective vote

at each meeting. The same arrangement would

apply to the county legislature, school boards,

and the various town councils. At the

conclusion of their time, CIVIC alumni would

be able to say that the community had owned apart of them and that they, in return, had

owned a piece of it. CIVIC members would

perform useful work and would be affected by

it. They would be students of and participants in

the life of the community, with their classroom

the city itself.

CIVIC will counterbalance the call of the

highly mobile and therefore rootless profes-

sional life, which has the full weight of cultural

power, social prestige, and material wealth on

its side. CIVIC will offer youth a taste of the

liberty of the ancients by placing their handson the rudder of the civic ship. The career aspi-

rations that drain the young from Rochester

impoverish the city, but they also impoverish

the young. They too often deny them the

opportunity to realize an aspect of our human

potential distinct from our professional and

private selves: our civic self.

Michael J. Brown is a graduate student in the department of

history at the University of Rochester, where he studies the

place of intellectuals in American political culture. He is the

founder of Flower City Philosophy and the coordinator of

Rochester Educators for Obama.


1 0 D ISS EN T



11/12

PAUL GOODMANCHANGED MY LIFE

a film by JONATHAN LEE

A film about the most influential man youve never heard of.

For a screening near you or to find out about educational use visit www.paulgoodmanfilm.com

A Zeitgeist Films Release

His impact isall around us.Noam Chomsky



12/12

Dissentis a quarterly magazine of

politics and culture. In the words

of the New York Times, Dissent

ranks among the handful of

political journals read most

regularly by U.S. intellectuals.

Each issue features reflective

articles about politics in the U.S.,

incisive social and cultural

commentary, plus the most

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Documents

Paul Goodman - High Res