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The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society
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August 6, 2021"...we must recall that most of our definitions of "mental health" (like most of the tests by which we measure it) are based on traditional American notions that the "mentally healthy" are those optimistic, practical, unapprehensive "reasonable," forward-looking men and women who people our cultural hall of fame."
"Since these efforts to re-create intact community in religion, family, corporation, or voluntary association usually fail, most Americans are forced to live without community, and must seek in inner integration a substitute for traditional social definition of themselves."
"Ours is a how-to-do-it society, not a what-to-do society."
"The human problems in our society stem not from the fact of technology, but from the supreme place we assign it in our lives."
I bought this book for two dollars at a used book store in Los Angeles, one of many books I'd bought on my trip starting in Dallas. I was intrigued by the premise: an examination of the "alienated youth in American society." During the quarantine, I'd begun to feel exceptionally alienated. I felt that the goals I'd long cherished were in fact not my own, I felt out-of-place, trapped in a society that I felt both irremediably vile and ultimately unchangeable. Perhaps Kennith Keniston, a Yale psychologist writing about Yale students in the 70's, could teach me something about my own condition. I'd always felt an affinity for 70's social sciences: any work that includes the words Marx, Freud, and Technological has me standing at attention. This book is no different. While some elements of his analysis are dated (his portrayal of the housewife, for example, has little relevance now, or his constant references to the beatniks), I believe there is still much here that is applicable to the America of the 21st century. Our society is just as technological and anti-utopian as it was then.
Keniston neatly divides his book into two parts. The first part focuses specifically on the "alienated students" who took part in his study at Yale. These students not only filled out questionnaires, but wrote out personal philosophies, life histories, and works of fiction inspired by open-ended images. Keniston includes some of these stories and they are both telling and fascinating. The alienated reject "what they see as the dominant values, roles, and instiutions of their society." They do this for reasons both personal and societal. Many of these students are brilliant, yet they drop out. They come from privileged backgrounds, yet see their bread-winning fathers as failures for succumbing to the temptation for money rather than fulfilling their ideals. They see their fathers as emblematic of the travails of adulthood, rather than as a model for manhood. As a result, they largely reject adulthood, and adult sexuality. Furthermore, they see their mothers as overbearing and perhaps forced into performing the role of housewife despite a desire for work in the wider world. They fantasize of fusion, of an end to responsibility and a return to the womb. They are existentialists and pessimists. They value present sensation over puritan savings, they prefer the role of dispassionate observer to active influencer. They abound in negative values but struggle to determine what exactly that stand for at all. They desire total immersion in a cause and yet, paradoxically, fear commitments and losing themselves within them. Much of their thinking abides by the "principle of implicit conservatism" even as they stand behind anarchism or iconoclasm. What is, is bad, but change could only make things worse.
Within the second section of the book, Keniston broadens his lens as he goes beyond typical Freudian explanations that deal with early-childhood to seek to understand what role society has to play in the alienation of these youth. I found this section much more interesting as it aligned with what I'd read of Lasch and Ellul. What Keniston ultimately writes is a fairly scathing critique of American society, of its dearth of conscious positive values, of its over-emphasis on ego control, of its lack of genuine utopian values.
Keniston writes that while technological innovation is a primary motor of social change, America's "almost unqualified acceptance of technological and social innovation is historically unusual, if not unique." Change, or progress, is seen as implicitly good. No one asked if Facebook should be allowed to exist, it was created, and now our only efforts are to haltingly mitigate its influence. Of the three abstact types of societal change, ours is certainly unguided, rather than planned as in the USSR, or imitative as in those countries who seek to Westernize. We lack models, and have no idea where we're going or what the next year might bring. Not only do we lack a consensus on the future, we feel distant and disconnected from our past. What worked for older generations will not work for us, and we're bringing our children into a world that will be radically different from our own by the time that they come of age. Keniston writes that we "increasingly feel similar sense of unfamiliarity about the not-so-distant past: the Flaming Twenties, the Depression, even the Second World War now seem slightly unreal and certainly old-fashioned-as when we comment on how "out of date" the films of those recent years now seem. The experience the 1980's, you had to live it. To experience the 980's, I imagine the 880's or the 990's would suffice. We are born and live in such a whirlwind, it seems almost natural that society should be in such a constant state of rapid change. This does not mean that this kind of change does not weigh on our psyches, albeit unconsciously or expressed in our cult of the present or cult of youth. We live in a jet plane: we fly passively towards a distant destination, with knowledge only of our immediate surroundings as the landscape flies by so quickly as to become incomprehensible. We must've taken off, but where are we going to land?
Who do we take as our models in this jet-plane world? A popular refrain emphasizes my point: "Okay, Boomer." The implicit meaning here is that other generations simply have no idea how to adapt to the challenges faced by the younger generations. Their world was different. As Keniston writes, identifications must be "cautious, selective, partial, and incomplete" or in a word, synthetic rather than total. We pull from a variety of models in construcing ourselves, with the result "likely to be a diffusion of identity, a simultaneous admiration of incompatibilities, and a resulting period of confusion, lack of sense of self, and wandering in search of some way of combining irreconcilable psychic responsibilities." Hence our burgeoning market for books by people like Jordan Peterson who promise to tell us exactly who we are and how to become whatever it is that society will respect.
What are the central tendencies of our society and what are its values? These tendencies are familiar to anyone who has read any kind of critical theory so I won't dwell on them. These tendencies are fragmentation of tasks, shattering of community, and the ascendancy of technological values. Ford built a car by himself, today's cars involve the labor of hundreds of people working piece-meal tasks. Our community, too, is fragmented. Within primary communities, "what men do and what they think is a part of what they do and what they worship: cognition, action, feeling, morality and reverence are fused." Each action and each community embodies a kind of oneness. Our society is more specialized: made up of private and public spheres, a differentiation between work and home, and beset by a myriad of overlapping organizations that fail to replicate the oneness of traditional life. Modern life has no "package deals." We live largely in the service of technological values, which are themselves merely instrumental values. We value expertise, a good work ethic, cognition over feeling, empiricism over idealism. We are very good at doing, but to be good at doing is not necessarily a "good." Nazi Germany employed technological values to disastrous ends.
Our instrumental values, while having brought us great material success, handicap us in trying to envision a utopia. We excel at employing rationalism in disproving positive myths and ideologies, and thus "our positive myths have been shorn of their strengths and justifications, separated more and more from the non-rational, deprived of emotional underpinnings which could give them coherence, fascination, and excitement." Again, we excel at the how, but fail at the what. How to be happy, how to think positively, how to cope with anxiety, how to meditate away the pain and confusion wrought by modern living. We seek out private solutions for public problems, we take the medications necessary to adapt to our society rather than focusing our energies on making society adapt to us. We are the humans, yet we live our lives in service to technological values. These values cause us to consume fantasy disassociated from life, instead of seeking to transform fantasy into reality. Our imagination is dulled by our consumption, "a man or woman conditioned from childhood to "having" fantasies only via the television screen will find it hard...to reintegrate imagination into his daily life." By disassociating fantasy, we also dissociate "the most powerful forces of passion, idealism, aspiration, and yearning.
Who is the successful American? He has a lot, of what it is hardly important. He is highly skilled, but this skill is irrelevant. He is a winner, and his victory "must" imply the defeat of someone else. That these fail as valid universal principles is certain, but we have little else by which to judge success. Ours is a society of the ego, rather than the id or the superego. What we value is self-control and self-management. Cool appraisal, sober attitudes, expertise, and Puritan ethic. We "accept as natural such exceptional requirements as the demand for prolonged education, for a long adolescence, for high levels of expertise and emotional restraint in work." Our system cannot be exported as easily as its factories or even management techniques. Our society is built on ego dictatorship, and is historically the hardest society to run or integrate into the world has ever seen. This can be demonstrated by our inhospitability for those lacking ego control, for the mentally ill or just the mentally different. That we send people to asylums is historically novel, that people drop out of school is understandable. Those who attend college find that the "The freedom of the youth culture is purchased at the price of the continuing acquisiton of the ability to meet our society's ego demands."
What does the future hold? Bigger cities, taller buildings, more stuff and having it all be available more cheaply? Doesn't this represent a failure of the collective imagination? We are the most prosperous nation in the history of humanity and yet we find ourselves in a dearth of big ideas. We have the power to radically reimagine our society, to create something more equitable, more pluralistic, more free, to create something that would embody the noblest aspirations of mankind! We're a nation of tinkerers, and yet what we need is a dreamer. Must we continue to wait for one?
"Since these efforts to re-create intact community in religion, family, corporation, or voluntary association usually fail, most Americans are forced to live without community, and must seek in inner integration a substitute for traditional social definition of themselves."
"Ours is a how-to-do-it society, not a what-to-do society."
"The human problems in our society stem not from the fact of technology, but from the supreme place we assign it in our lives."
I bought this book for two dollars at a used book store in Los Angeles, one of many books I'd bought on my trip starting in Dallas. I was intrigued by the premise: an examination of the "alienated youth in American society." During the quarantine, I'd begun to feel exceptionally alienated. I felt that the goals I'd long cherished were in fact not my own, I felt out-of-place, trapped in a society that I felt both irremediably vile and ultimately unchangeable. Perhaps Kennith Keniston, a Yale psychologist writing about Yale students in the 70's, could teach me something about my own condition. I'd always felt an affinity for 70's social sciences: any work that includes the words Marx, Freud, and Technological has me standing at attention. This book is no different. While some elements of his analysis are dated (his portrayal of the housewife, for example, has little relevance now, or his constant references to the beatniks), I believe there is still much here that is applicable to the America of the 21st century. Our society is just as technological and anti-utopian as it was then.
Keniston neatly divides his book into two parts. The first part focuses specifically on the "alienated students" who took part in his study at Yale. These students not only filled out questionnaires, but wrote out personal philosophies, life histories, and works of fiction inspired by open-ended images. Keniston includes some of these stories and they are both telling and fascinating. The alienated reject "what they see as the dominant values, roles, and instiutions of their society." They do this for reasons both personal and societal. Many of these students are brilliant, yet they drop out. They come from privileged backgrounds, yet see their bread-winning fathers as failures for succumbing to the temptation for money rather than fulfilling their ideals. They see their fathers as emblematic of the travails of adulthood, rather than as a model for manhood. As a result, they largely reject adulthood, and adult sexuality. Furthermore, they see their mothers as overbearing and perhaps forced into performing the role of housewife despite a desire for work in the wider world. They fantasize of fusion, of an end to responsibility and a return to the womb. They are existentialists and pessimists. They value present sensation over puritan savings, they prefer the role of dispassionate observer to active influencer. They abound in negative values but struggle to determine what exactly that stand for at all. They desire total immersion in a cause and yet, paradoxically, fear commitments and losing themselves within them. Much of their thinking abides by the "principle of implicit conservatism" even as they stand behind anarchism or iconoclasm. What is, is bad, but change could only make things worse.
Within the second section of the book, Keniston broadens his lens as he goes beyond typical Freudian explanations that deal with early-childhood to seek to understand what role society has to play in the alienation of these youth. I found this section much more interesting as it aligned with what I'd read of Lasch and Ellul. What Keniston ultimately writes is a fairly scathing critique of American society, of its dearth of conscious positive values, of its over-emphasis on ego control, of its lack of genuine utopian values.
Keniston writes that while technological innovation is a primary motor of social change, America's "almost unqualified acceptance of technological and social innovation is historically unusual, if not unique." Change, or progress, is seen as implicitly good. No one asked if Facebook should be allowed to exist, it was created, and now our only efforts are to haltingly mitigate its influence. Of the three abstact types of societal change, ours is certainly unguided, rather than planned as in the USSR, or imitative as in those countries who seek to Westernize. We lack models, and have no idea where we're going or what the next year might bring. Not only do we lack a consensus on the future, we feel distant and disconnected from our past. What worked for older generations will not work for us, and we're bringing our children into a world that will be radically different from our own by the time that they come of age. Keniston writes that we "increasingly feel similar sense of unfamiliarity about the not-so-distant past: the Flaming Twenties, the Depression, even the Second World War now seem slightly unreal and certainly old-fashioned-as when we comment on how "out of date" the films of those recent years now seem. The experience the 1980's, you had to live it. To experience the 980's, I imagine the 880's or the 990's would suffice. We are born and live in such a whirlwind, it seems almost natural that society should be in such a constant state of rapid change. This does not mean that this kind of change does not weigh on our psyches, albeit unconsciously or expressed in our cult of the present or cult of youth. We live in a jet plane: we fly passively towards a distant destination, with knowledge only of our immediate surroundings as the landscape flies by so quickly as to become incomprehensible. We must've taken off, but where are we going to land?
Who do we take as our models in this jet-plane world? A popular refrain emphasizes my point: "Okay, Boomer." The implicit meaning here is that other generations simply have no idea how to adapt to the challenges faced by the younger generations. Their world was different. As Keniston writes, identifications must be "cautious, selective, partial, and incomplete" or in a word, synthetic rather than total. We pull from a variety of models in construcing ourselves, with the result "likely to be a diffusion of identity, a simultaneous admiration of incompatibilities, and a resulting period of confusion, lack of sense of self, and wandering in search of some way of combining irreconcilable psychic responsibilities." Hence our burgeoning market for books by people like Jordan Peterson who promise to tell us exactly who we are and how to become whatever it is that society will respect.
What are the central tendencies of our society and what are its values? These tendencies are familiar to anyone who has read any kind of critical theory so I won't dwell on them. These tendencies are fragmentation of tasks, shattering of community, and the ascendancy of technological values. Ford built a car by himself, today's cars involve the labor of hundreds of people working piece-meal tasks. Our community, too, is fragmented. Within primary communities, "what men do and what they think is a part of what they do and what they worship: cognition, action, feeling, morality and reverence are fused." Each action and each community embodies a kind of oneness. Our society is more specialized: made up of private and public spheres, a differentiation between work and home, and beset by a myriad of overlapping organizations that fail to replicate the oneness of traditional life. Modern life has no "package deals." We live largely in the service of technological values, which are themselves merely instrumental values. We value expertise, a good work ethic, cognition over feeling, empiricism over idealism. We are very good at doing, but to be good at doing is not necessarily a "good." Nazi Germany employed technological values to disastrous ends.
Our instrumental values, while having brought us great material success, handicap us in trying to envision a utopia. We excel at employing rationalism in disproving positive myths and ideologies, and thus "our positive myths have been shorn of their strengths and justifications, separated more and more from the non-rational, deprived of emotional underpinnings which could give them coherence, fascination, and excitement." Again, we excel at the how, but fail at the what. How to be happy, how to think positively, how to cope with anxiety, how to meditate away the pain and confusion wrought by modern living. We seek out private solutions for public problems, we take the medications necessary to adapt to our society rather than focusing our energies on making society adapt to us. We are the humans, yet we live our lives in service to technological values. These values cause us to consume fantasy disassociated from life, instead of seeking to transform fantasy into reality. Our imagination is dulled by our consumption, "a man or woman conditioned from childhood to "having" fantasies only via the television screen will find it hard...to reintegrate imagination into his daily life." By disassociating fantasy, we also dissociate "the most powerful forces of passion, idealism, aspiration, and yearning.
Who is the successful American? He has a lot, of what it is hardly important. He is highly skilled, but this skill is irrelevant. He is a winner, and his victory "must" imply the defeat of someone else. That these fail as valid universal principles is certain, but we have little else by which to judge success. Ours is a society of the ego, rather than the id or the superego. What we value is self-control and self-management. Cool appraisal, sober attitudes, expertise, and Puritan ethic. We "accept as natural such exceptional requirements as the demand for prolonged education, for a long adolescence, for high levels of expertise and emotional restraint in work." Our system cannot be exported as easily as its factories or even management techniques. Our society is built on ego dictatorship, and is historically the hardest society to run or integrate into the world has ever seen. This can be demonstrated by our inhospitability for those lacking ego control, for the mentally ill or just the mentally different. That we send people to asylums is historically novel, that people drop out of school is understandable. Those who attend college find that the "The freedom of the youth culture is purchased at the price of the continuing acquisiton of the ability to meet our society's ego demands."
What does the future hold? Bigger cities, taller buildings, more stuff and having it all be available more cheaply? Doesn't this represent a failure of the collective imagination? We are the most prosperous nation in the history of humanity and yet we find ourselves in a dearth of big ideas. We have the power to radically reimagine our society, to create something more equitable, more pluralistic, more free, to create something that would embody the noblest aspirations of mankind! We're a nation of tinkerers, and yet what we need is a dreamer. Must we continue to wait for one?
February 26, 2019
I read this with keen expectations late in my university life. It was already out of date though not necessarily on my conservative university campus. The data was from an earlier time. I took Keniston seriously, however. He wrote a beautiful piece late in one decade or early in another (I forget which) "You Have to Grow Up in Scarsdale to Know How Bad Things Are".
A reader has to read this work along with "Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth", which actually studied students who supported Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy or earlier those who worked on Freedom Summer, I believe. At the time, Professor Keniston seemed helpful.
A reader has to read this work along with "Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth", which actually studied students who supported Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy or earlier those who worked on Freedom Summer, I believe. At the time, Professor Keniston seemed helpful.
July 27, 2008
All I remember is that in 1970 I identified very strongly with the some of the young people described in this b0ok.
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July 8, 2020I was always curious about how some people manage to stay and grow their resilience in the tumultuous time while others choose to slip into apathy and alienation. It's a view on the issue by a social psychologist who looks at the circle of socialization and writes about youth in the 60s in the U.S. To me, many things are relevant nowadays as well. The book gives some hints on where to look for root causes but barely touches on the way out of it.
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