A constant theme in tho discussion about the relationship between society and its youth has been the sort of theory raised to pop seller status in Charles Reich's The Greening of America. It's out-line goes like this: there's a new revolution a-coming; it can't be resisted by violence or politics for it's a cultural rather than a political revolution: it possesses the "higher, transcendent reason" we need to control technology and seize the Utopia it promises. It is the Consciousness III revolution and its agents are modern youth whose culture, music, clothes, drugs, way of thinking and liberated lifestyles, whose 'campus demonstrations and beads and Woodstock festivals' make up a consistent philosphy which will inevitably include all America and which is the best thing we've known in all history. It is this theory which I will call Reichism, its implications and oversimplifications, that I want to concentrate upon here.

Reich starts from powerlessness, and says that only 'understanding' can lead to mature autonomy, an idea not exactly new. Such an understanding he calls 'consciousness'; it is a world-view that enables the individual to act in value-directed ways. People's world-views are amazingly self-consistent and are invariably affected by their age, social background (the sociologist's euphemism for class), and the life-role (job). Consciousness is more than the sum of the parts, "it is the whole man, his head, his way of life." As a mass phenomenon it is both formed by socio-economies and creates socio-economics, but there can be consciousness 'lag', when socio-economics progress faster than consciousness. There are three types of consciousness, dubbed I, II, and III according to the order in which they historically evolved. I is the good old American pioneering view and tends to be conservative in todays political spectrum. Sir James Wattie, born of the grocery shelves, is a local example; II evolved later, it is dedicated to progress and advancement, and Martyn Finlay is a reasonably close example. III is the consciousness of Modern Youth — it doesn't need any examples, it includes whoever Reichists agree with at the moment.

A Jumble of Philosophies

Freud and Marx wrote chapters and books defining their meaning of consciousness, Reich writes a page or two and assures us he is consistent with both into the bargin. This I fail to see, just as I fail to see how anyone can possibly be consistent with both of these and with Blake and Leary as well. The kernel of Marxism is there in the socio-economics but it is most unMarxist to assert, as Reich does later, that there is any individual who doesn't exhibit his consciousness, that there can be consciousness 'lag' or that age has more to do with consciousness than class. Reich's view presumes that an individual is conscious of his consciousness and that this Super Dooper Ego is the most reliable and fundamental insight into a person — a point I think Freud would want clarified. It attempts to relate values, behaviour and autonomy but I am certain Blake would rise in wrath at the description of all this as 'head' and with the idea that there are consciousness-types. And how can anyone possibly be consistent with the practically minded Marx and Blake and at the same time with the mystically minded Leary is beyond me. In attempting to appeal to as many persuasions as possible Reich can only have excluded them all, or perhaps persuaded them to something more 'transcendent'.

There is an element of self-consistency in world-views that makes it easier for us to predict what certain groups of people will say about certain things, but just from my experience with pupils and parents of diverse social backgrounds I would dispute that either 'self-consistent world-views' or socio-economies are such reliable indicators as to what a person thinks of the Springbok tour or Women's Lib. We are in the realms of stereotypes and prejudices, and Reich is anxious to push us there — these are not merely factors they are determinants, insists Reich's theory of consciousness. They are not, I insist, these are people.

Adolescentism — a White, Middle-class Fad

Much of what Reich says is Consciousness III is really adolescentism, behaviour that functions both to define the group involved as separate from the rest of society and to provide a means of negotiating the obstacle-course to adulthood for the individual. It is not at all 'transcendent' — it is by definition and function exclusive. It is not necessarily embracing or warm either — there is deliberate alienation of everyone else implicit in such behaviour and its energy can be a nervous and undirected energy arising from the stresses that go with being an adolescent — stresses which idealised theories like Reichism tend to ignore. What's more, adolescentism is most marked as a phenomenon in white, affluent, advanced countries, the ones who can afford it. Not only does adolescentism exclude children and adults it also excludes those who don't happen to live in the blessed countries. Reichism is not merely false in its claims about Consciousness III in America, nor merely false in its picture of adolescent life, but more importantly, dangerously unrealistic on the global scale.

I wonder too just what Reich's concept of consciousness 'lag' does to his stated view that there are three types of consciousness. I suggest this it leads imm-ediately to the existence of six types of consciousness — the up-to-date and the laggers from each of the three. And if age, class, role (and sex) and geography, and schooling (and religion?) each operate to form different types of consciousness the implication is that we'd better forget all this easy waffle about there being just three types. If this is true there must be scores of different types of consciousnesses, and most pertinently, a working-class youth just can't have the same type as a middle-class youth. And if it isn't true, Reich's theory of consciousness is in limbo.

The Top Twenty of Empty Rhetoric

What is of concern in Reichism as well as this is that the rhetoric acts as a bait for unwary innocents. Reich swings along to the Top Twenty tunes of empty rhetoric. Rhetoric is not necessarily a bad thing — the full rhetoric of a Shakespeare or a Blake, or at odd times of a Mill or a Marx, are profoundly entertaining experiences. But empty rhetoric has as much value as a balloonful of hot air and deserves to be sat upon.

I choose one example from the host of them because it raises significant questions about Reichism that I don't think Reich has answered, Reich is trying to show how Consciousness III people exemplify the 'transcendent reason' we need. In a typical section he tells us that a high-fashioned woman in a matador suit is page 13 avoiding her true self but a young person dressed up is expressing himself. Military dress, peasants' shawls, gangster suits, phantom cloaks boots of all kinds — these don't mask the real person, "they show a state of mind and add to the gaiety and humour of the world."

Tedious Existentialism

"Costumes raise existential questions." Reich goes on, "they confront a person with questions never posed in our society—questions of identity and self." I don't know where Reich has been the last century or so, but I would have thought that such existential questions were posed so often and so widely in our society that yet another verges on the tedious. It may be that the questions aren't answered or that implications of the answers aren't realised, but such question-marks stalk us from bookstacks of pop or text psychology, track us down in the columns of Sunday newspapers and hound us from the TV set Existential questions, like consciousness, are a fad.

Let's grant Reich's premise that costumes raise existential questions for the person wearing them without delving too deeply into the individual's predisposition to answering such questions, How is it that the matador-salted Consciousness II person invariably avoids these questions and the gangster-suited Consciousness III person invariably confronts them? The implication is that it must be the Consciousness itself — in which case we must accept that what we are concerned with is not the costume but the way it's worn. But where in Reich's book it this distinction made clear? Whereas his theory leads to the not very original conclusion that some goodies may wear matador suits and those in gangster suits need not be goodies — all depending on the Consciousness of the person — his rhetoric leads to the implication that matador suits equals baddy and gangster suit equals goody. Even if this is true for the reasons Reich give, just what 'transcendent reason' is 'revealed' by wearing 'gangster suits, military dress, phantom cloaks, and boots of all kinds'?

Capitalist Conformity

The sad part is that Reich continues such reasoning in his examination of anything youth have ever got faddish about Beads, drugs, music, hitch-hking, long hair — all demonstrate Consciousness III but not much else. The poster fad hadn't caught on when Reich was writing but no doubt he would have included that too—nothing quite like posters for posing existential question (over and over again).

Isn't Reich avoiding something very basic here? Costumes, for example, are at the mercy of one of the most dictatorial of all capitalist industries, fashion. The fortunes that have been made out of clothes, or for that matter pop music, posters, drugs and gurudom, have been made in stunning Consciousness III enterprise. The consumerism that all these depend upon, the advertising idiocy that sustains them (listen to the ZM's and try to unravel the 'transcendent reason' Reich promises), and the slavish conformity to the with-it myth they demand, hardly herald universal liberation. Reich's analysis of Consciousness III not only falls straight into the trap he should have set out to avoid — confusing the bark of with-itness for the root, sap and leaf of a Consciousness — it also sets a trap for those naive enough to believe it — acquiescing in the pleasant slavery of affluent consumerism as the means to the revolution. The revolutionary potential of the jet set is an intriguing but scarcely convincing notion.

The Pied Piper of Amerika

The Reichist is courting all the despair and nihilism implicit in Blake's idea of innocence confronted by experience The vision Reich's most famous and most rhetorical sections create is that of an innocence not merely touchingly childlike lull tragically childish. His peroration present us with motor ways transformed into highways to the millenium by a decorative arrangement of hitch-hikers, street people growing like flowers on the pavements, official buildings having their steps warmed up by rock groups, every barrier falling. The Corporate State will apparently cower away and quietly disintegrate in a dark corner. But perhaps it will invent traffic officers and policemen to move the decorations and flowers along; perhaps the hearts of the officials inside the buildings won't be warmed, perhaps stronger barriers will be erected. Just perhaps the truth is that no revolution ever comes about without more pain and self-conscious effort than that involved in letting your hair grow long. The ending of the book has the same high sinister note of the Pied Piper instinct that leads happy-children to the Dreamland over the mountains and far, far away.

Reichism claims to represent the true revolution that will liberate the individual and society finally and eternally from the dictates of slaveries of various kinds, and lead to a wholly human way of life. But because it does not exclude those who are actually fashion-slaves and because its practice can be, and most often is, blindly irresponsible to the wider concerns of humanity, these claims are at the least suspect. To shoot the latest dope, turn on to the latest rock group with the latest stereo equipment, tour the latest Jerusalems, groove on the latest commune and spout the latest jargon of the latest guru I take to be fashion-slavery, especially if these are imposed by the dictates of the latest revolutionary consciousness. To do your own thing in your own lime (as informed by the mass media all the time) without regard to the needs and plights of others, to suck the material benefits of an affluent economy without regard to the workings of that economy and its consequences for the rest of the population of your own country and that small fraction of mankind not in your own country, I take to be blindly irresponsible. And these are truer pictures of Reichism than its visionary perorations.

Worse, what is it but repression when the bald are induced to be guilty about their baldness, the Schubert-fanciers are mocked for their fancies, and old age has become a disease suitable only for an asylum? What is it but Fascism when 'proper taste' is that prescribed by a certain group in society and those with other tastes are socially crucified? Reichism does not embrace or liberate mankind at all, it reveals an aristocratic arrogance over those who don't measure up to the standards set by whizz-kids, and an undeserved contempt proceeding from an abject ignorance of the balance of mankind.

Dehumanising Idolatry

All these implications and oversimplifications arise in Reichism, I think, because of a basic fault in its definitions — it is another instance of the dehumanising heresy of idolatry. Juvenolatry, the idolising of the trappings of what la assumed to be a different consciousness in Modern Youth as the one, true Way; that's what Reichism is about. Psychedelic glasses can be great fun, but they're not very useful in getting a clear picture of what goes on in the world; enslaving the rest of mankind to the whims of a blinded age-elite is not even fun. Both are idolatrous.

I do however find a great deal of Reich's analysis of the situation attractive. I too feel forces in modern life that disfranchise, demand and delude. I too despair in general but find some hope in evolving — not yet evolved — 'consciousness' if you want to call it that. The welling community movement is a healthy sore spot in the individualistic insanity: the tentatively bold emphases on human values are a slap in the face of the false myths of science and economics, the Refoundland of the Imagination an effective judo throw to swaggering Empiricism and the growing honesty in interracial and international affairs a boot in the arse of ostrich-delicacy. But let's not delude ourselves that these are the prerogatives of today's youth and the preserve of the professional bohemian, nor that they form The Way, The Truth and The Life.

Instead I urge that the grounds of juvenolatry be mined with some reason in the name of common sense, that you quietly tell the next Yippie you can't communicate with to 'piss off. daughter-fucker'; that you give the fingers to advertising campaigns that demand you be 'with-it by going without-it; that you turn up to communes in suits and to jet-set parties in leather jackets with Mongrel' scawled on the back, and finally, that instead of taking off to Katmandu by jet to imbibe a little Eastern wisdom, you hitch a tramp steamer to Calcutta to give the money you've just saved to the beggars dying in the streets.

"Harlem Renaissance":

by Nathan Irvin Huggins. Reviewed by A.P. Carson. Published by Oxford University Press. (N.Y.) 1971. $2.95.

The "Harlem Renaissance" according to Muggins occurred in "the opening decades of the twentieth century, down into the first years of the Great Depression", and is called such because the black intellectuals in Harlem were convinced, that they were evoking their people's renaissance in art, and American life in general. Huggin's interest in this period in Black American history is as a means to illuminate the essence of American life, by a detailed study of this particular instance, as it affects racial identity crises. To achieve this stated aim he examines the various Negro artists and artistic forms that either existed or were founded during this period.

Consequently the success of this enterprise is determined by the proficiency with which the author, a professor of History at Columbia University, handles such diverse art forms as poetry, fiction, sculpture and drama. To me he leaves much to be desired as an art critic as his criticisms are usually little more than expositions of the work under scrutiny and what attempted criticism there is, is usually shallow and naive. In keeping with the aim he has set himself, everything is pointed towards the crisis in identity that provoked these works.

His continuous theme throughout the book is that each individual negro artist was conscious of himself and also of the burden of his race. Although this dilemma is undoubtedly true, in Huggin's hands it becomes the universally applicable excuse for the failure of these artists to achieve lasting greatness within their particular discipline. This is despite the acknowledged achievement of Langs ton Hughes and W.E.B. Dubois. As a sop to current feeling about negroes he says for example, "Some black writers and artists have since that time become less provincial, more masterful of craft..."

This is the overriding feeling I got as I read the book — one of condecension and while paternalism. Although in the 1910s and 20s the negro intellectual and artist was largely dependent on white patronage for the promotion and success of his art, I don't think that it is necessary that any historian should be so overwhelmed by the fact as to allow it to dominate his thinking. It is almost an. "if it weren't for us whites you niggers would be nothing", attitude. It particularly colours his introduction to each facet of negro art he is dealing with.

After his introduction Huggins deals sketchily with the question of why Harlem and not Chicago or some other place was the capital of this phenomenon. His conclusion is the times and circumstances of its creation made it seem as the place of the coming age of the Negro. This leads him to discuss the leading negro intellectuals who were based there — W.E.B. Dubois, James Weldon Johnson — and the politics of the situation, particularly the success of Marcus A. Gravey. Included in this is a good account of the politics of the NAACP.

This all paves the way for his perusal of the Negro artists of the period. Firstly he deals with the major poets Langston Hughes and Counlie Cullen, because it is in them he sees the most obvious attempts to define black identity. In his discussion of a few 'representative' poems of his theme, he introduces the dichotomy that occured for all Negro artists of pure art versus the promotion of the race. It is his contention that this dilemma was not resolved by any of the artists and this caused them not to succeed in their attempts at enduring art.

Huggins then passes on to early novels of the Renaissance. Apart from discussing Claude MacKay he devotes the majority of his argument to the white "negro" Carl Van Vechten. It is intended to show the difference between belonging to a discernible tradition.(Van Vechten) and having to create under the aegis of while promotion and patronage, (MacKay and Hurston.)

Possibly because his subject was beginning to get out of hand, Muggin's next section is a general discussion of Negro art in the period. Me recapitulates his discussion of Negro poetry (both ethnic and otherwise), and the novel, and directs them more clearly towards the identity theme. From this he is led onto the influence of the Africa as the basis of a tradition on which blacks could build art. Its obvious manifestation in the sculpture of Aaron Douglas and Richmond Barlhe allow him to discuss the search for identity in sculpture and painting Me concludes that the "primilivism" inherent in African art was too far from the reality of the Negro situation to be a viable basis for a search for identity.

Finally there is a lengthy discussion at attempts at Black Drama. Over hall of this discussion is taken up with the influence of minsirelcy on American art and Amercans, and its inhibiting effect on the development of the Negro theatre, Most of the remainder of this section is an analysis of Eugene O'Neill's plays featuring negroes. The failure of attempts at negro theatre is attributed to the mould into which the blacks were forced by the tradition of "nigger minstrels", and the significance such shows had for national consciousness as well as a separate black identity.

The book is then rounded off with a very quick resume of the causes of the failure of Negro art in general, and also the significance the "Renaissance" has had on subsequent Negro art. Huggins does not however get back to the significance American life has for racial identity crises, but tends to leave the reader to draw a conclusion from the arguments he has presented.

Despite all my criticism over the failure of Muggins to keep to his stated purpose, and his persistent paternalism, this book is a very useful introduction into the extent and character of Negro art of the period around World War One. Me gives a good explanation of the general perspective necessary for any investigation into Negro history and the pitfall in-herent in any attempt at criticism of of Negro art. Also of great importance is highlighting of the significant factors of White American-Negro relations, and in particular the importance of each of these races for the other in establishing identity.

This book is an excellent introduction into this productive periot in Negro arts provided the shallowness of the criticism and the continual apology for the arts described is kept in mind.