Growing Up Absurd
Growing Up Absurd is a 1960 book by Paul Goodman on the relationship between American juvenile delinquency and societal opportunities to fulfill natural needs. Contrary to the then-popular view that juvenile delinquents should be led to respect societal norms, Goodman argued that young American men were justified in their disaffection because their society lacked the preconditions for growing up, such as consideration and self-respect, meaningful work, honorable community, sexual freedom, and spiritual sustenance.
Goodman's book drew from his prior works, psychotherapy practice, and personal experiences and relations in New York City. The small New York press that originally commissioned the book asked Goodman to return his advance when the resulting book, written in late 1959, focused less on the commissioned subject of city youth gangs than on the American culture and value systems in which the youth were raised. Nineteen publishers rejected Growing Up Absurd before Norman Podhoretz used selections from the book to relaunch his magazine, Commentary. After Podhoretz encouraged Random House publisher Jason Epstein to reconsider the book, Goodman had a contract the next day. Random House published Growing Up Absurd in 1960 and a Vintage Books paperback edition followed two years later.
Growing Up Absurd quickly became a bestseller with 100,000 copies sold in its first three years and translations into five languages. It was widely read across 1960s college campuses and popular among student activists and the New Left, who assimilated the author's ideology. Growing Up Absurd transformed Goodman's outcast career into mainstream notoriety as a social critic, including invitations to lecture at hundreds of colleges, though Goodman's fame did not endure long after his death in 1972. Many specifics of Growing Up Absurd became dated with time and, in later years, retrospective reviewers criticized Goodman's exclusion of women from his analysis. New York Review Books reissued Growing Up Absurd in 2012.
Background
In the United States, the affluent postwar 1950s was a time of both general prosperity and conformity. The latter had become a theme of social criticism by the decade's end. Critiques on the relation between social norms and the individual psyche included David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, William H. Whyte's The Organization Man, and Vance Packard's The Status Seekers. As a whole, this literature portrayed American culture as white-collar subservience to mass advertising and corporate life. Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd belongs to this tradition, having consolidated, as historian Kevin Mattson put it, "a decade's worth of social criticism".Among American writers of the period, concern for proper childrearing and education loomed larger than questions of workplace conformity and middle-class standards. They largely wrote in disapproval of what youth culture portended for the country's future. The image of the juvenile delinquent became a pervasive symbol for this decline, reflected in the rise of urban youth gang warfare and the popular portrayal of the maladjusted, non-conformist outsider in films and theater such as The Wild One, Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden, and West Side Story.
Synopsis
In Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System, Paul Goodman faults American culture and values for the rise of juvenile delinquency in the late 1950s. Delinquency and "dropping out" of society, Goodman argues, are sane and justified responses to an adult society not worth growing up into, lacking in meaningful vocation, honorable community, sexual freedom, spiritual sustenance, and other qualities that youth require in their society to develop their social and moral identities, i.e. to grow up. He writes primarily about disaffected young men—urban juvenile delinquents and the beatnik subculture—and refers to the prevalent sterile, conformist American social order as the "organized system". Goodman disagrees with the then-common view that the solution for youth disaffection was to bring the youth to respect societal norms. Siding with the youth, he argues that the young already understood and rejected societal standards as unimportant. In this way, Goodman makes the youth social problem into less a problem than a symptom of a more existential need.Goodman contends that American society ruined the concept of vocation and created artificial demands through advertising. Affluent, postwar advanced capitalism boasted high employment but, Goodman writes, at the cost of reliance on "artificial... demand for useless goods" that created unfulfilling, bureaucratic work, without a sense of purpose or service. Goodman believes that vocation that focuses on use, interest, style, and love has meaning and self-justified purpose, but that work focused on role, procedure, and profit tends towards meaninglessness. Thus youth were rightfully disaffected, says Goodman, at the prospect of joining an adult society lacking fulfillment. The chapters of Growing Up Absurd apply this argument to facets of life including "Faith", "Jobs", "Patriotism", and sexuality.
Goodman describes the period's mechanical social order and its feeling of inescapability and forced conformity as an "apparently closed room" fixated on a "rat race". He posits that citizens traded the simple pleasures of daily life for the securities of living under an affluent, mechanized order enabled by corporations, a situation he calls "sociolatry". To Goodman, this trade-off—that a society would choose the preservation of its systems over the sake of its own people—is "absurd".
Goodman holds that "socializing" youth to play specialized roles in an adult society is inherently wrong for betraying their nature in the name of societal benefit. Goodman asks, "Socialization to what?" If societal aims are wrong, the urge to socialize children to societal roles becomes circular and self-serving. No amount of amelioration, he writes, including better schools or more social workers—would justify this socialization. Those seeking to correct delinquency, Goodman says, should instead improve society and culture's opportunities to meet the appetites of human nature. Goodman faulted social critics, including himself, and academic sociologists for being content with studying this system without endeavoring to change it. He posits that attempts to mold human nature to social order would backfire, and that "freedom and meaning will outweigh anomie" if given the chance.
To create a society worthy for youth to want to join, Goodman resolves, certain "unfinished" revolutions must be brought to their conclusion on topics including companionship, democracy, free speech, pacifism, progressive education, syndicalism, and technology. He implores readers to pursue these ideals seriously, and to direct their rebellion towards political ends, in the book's final chapter, "The Missing Community".
Publication
Author Paul Goodman had a marginal intellectual career before publishing Growing Up Absurd, both prolific and on the fringe. Throughout the 1950s, Goodman developed his practice of Gestalt therapy and finished his epic novel The Empire City, which ends with its protagonist "spoiling for a fight" against a target the author was unable to articulate. Goodman, who conflated the fictional protagonist with himself, came to conclude that his fictional character's desire for a fight was the author's own, and that it would be "war against the Organized System" to reclaim his sick society from the forces that alienated him. Goodman's Growing Up Absurd was the beginning of this campaign, which would run throughout the rest of the 1960s. Like Goodman's protagonist, Goodman believed that he had to work through his societal alienation by participating in society. He drew from his approach to psychotherapy, which focused on changing societal circumstances rather than his clients.In late 1958, mainstream editors began to court Goodman for works of social criticism after reading his articles in small political and cultural magazines. Through the winter, he read Washington, Jefferson, Thoreau, and Emerson and considered how he might make his own patriotic intervention in American society. A small New York press, Criterion Books, offered Goodman a $500 advance to write a book on New York's teenage gangs in the summer of mid-1959. The resulting manuscript did not focus on the youth but the American culture and value systems in which the youth were raised. Goodman wrote the manuscript over several weeks that autumn. The final work thematically derived from topics he had been addressing for years, such that some parts were simply quoted from past works. He drew from his personal interactions in New York City, his teaching experience, and his colleagues Benjamin Nelson, Harold Rosenberg, and Elliott Shapiro. The book's section on vocation was informed by Max Weber's essays on vocation.
Goodman wrote in his diary that upon finishing his last chapter, he whistled "The Star-Spangled Banner" as he walked the chapter to his publisher. He saw himself as patriotically defending his country against "the system". Goodman believed that the issues of conformity and alienation described in his manuscript were better expressed as political than as cultural issues. He wanted his political message to be read in advance of the 1960 presidential campaign. The publisher decided not to publish the manuscript and asked Goodman to return the advance for delivering work unfit for print. The manuscript was rejected by 19 publishers, including the publisher that would ultimately print it.
In his memoir, Commentary magazine editor Norman Podhoretz wrote that he had been searching for an "opening salvo" on juvenile delinquency and middle-class youth deviance, a highly publicized topic, to mark his magazine's reimagination as a home for American social criticism. Most treatments of the subject, he wrote, described the phenomenon as "unrelated incidents of individual pathology... to be dealt with either sternly by the cops or benevolently by the psychiatrists". He heard about Goodman's finished manuscript and had a long-standing admiration for the author's writing and "colloquial directness". Though Podhoretz considered the initial excerpt he read of Goodman's manuscript to be uninteresting, he was impressed by the work as "the very incarnation of the new spirit had been hoping would be at work in the world".
According to Podhoretz's memoir, he excitedly called Random House editor Jason Epstein, whom he convinced to come over and read the manuscript that night. Though Random House had previously rejected the manuscript and Epstein thought Goodman a "has-been", Goodman had a contract the next day. With the book's release planned for later in 1960, Goodman and Podhoretz revised over half the manuscript into three extended serial extracts for the editor's Commentary magazine reboot. These extracts ran in February, March, and April 1960. Extracts also ran in Dissent, Mademoiselle, and Manas around the same time.
Goodman was confident that his message was clear and agreeable. According to Goodman's later literary executor, in Growing Up Absurd Goodman tried a new style that was powerfully earnest, direct, and patient, whereas his prior writing had qualities of hectoring insistence and recklessness. Goodman normally rejected attempts to revise his work, but approved of Random House's appointed book editor. According to Goodman's brother, these were the only edits Goodman permitted in his career.
Random House published the book's first edition in 1960 and Vintage Books printed the first paperback two years later. Growing Up Absurd was translated into French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. The book's appendices include articles and book reviews by Goodman from the late 1950s. Goodman dedicated Growing Up Absurd to the Gestalt psychotherapist Lore Perls for her role in helping train and mentor him as a therapist, cooling his defiance, and enabling him such that he could write the book. New York Review Books reissued the book in 2012 with a foreword by Casey Nelson Blake.