I will finish this book at some point this year, hopefully. There’s just so much here and I’ve been in a terrible reading slump.

I’ve gotten so much from just the introduction, written by Michael C Fisher. 

“A man of letters knows only a little about some major human concerns, but insists on relating what he does know to his concrete experience. So he explores reality, [and] finds that the nature of things is not easily divided into disciplines.” Goodman surely got that right!

And this is true Anarchism: “Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite proposition: that valuable behavior occurs by the free and direct response of individuals to the conditions presented by the historical environment . . . Anarchists want to increase intrinsic functioning and diminish extrinsic power [because] behavior is more graceful, forceful, and discriminating without the intervention of the state, wardens, corporation executives, central planners, and university presidents.”

He got that right, too. What we hear about anarchy today is not what it meant fifty years ago. Like so many great ideas, it was co-opted by radical extremists who poisoned the term by promoting wanton destruction for its own sake. 

Goodman also said, “For me, the chief principle of anarchism is not freedom but autonomy, the ability to initiate a task and do it one’s own way . . . The theory is that my organism tends to actualize itself if I stand out of the way. It is an article of faith.” That is a very different way of looking at faith. But one could also argue that sometimes we can’t even get out of our own ways. 

On his experiences as a writer who lived with his sister during the Great Depression: “If there’s no chance to get a job, the competitive sense to get ahead disappears. Decent poverty is really an ideal environment for serious people.” If only I’d had taken that approach at a much earlier age… and it’s interesting because now we have social media reinforcing the idea of competitive sense, which is why I avoid it entirely. Even YouTube, I think, is a threat to my mental health, as I keep getting the urge to become a “creator” again, and that is not a worthwhile pursuit for this “serious writer” at least, not quite yet. That competitive sense needs to be gone from people first before they truly are inclined to hear what I have to say. 

Of course I no longer experience any sort of material poverty. It’s a strange dichotomy; I feel so poorly in spirit yet have riches beyond most people’s understanding. 

Goodman wasn’t popular in the 40s due to his view that “World War II could not be a fight between democracy and fascism, good and evil, because democracy belonged to individuals, not to governments.” Well he was absolutely right in his position but of course people are more than happy to give over all their agency to the media and their carelessly elected “representatives.” Not that they’re all bad; but overall they are often as careless as those who vote for them. And their carelessness and partisanship can have very damaging consequences.

I didn’t know that Goodman had a column in the Middlebury College newspaper in Vermont. It was syndicated from there.

I have mourned many times the idea that Society (with a capital S) has failed people. And it seems that Goodman would agree. Eventually the progress being made broke down as change wasn’t happening. And a lot of what started as principled nonviolent movements broke down into violent protests fueled by blind rage and hopeless desperation. It’s happening again…

What we saw at the end of the sixties with the radicalizing of the youth movements was a response to the same problems we face in this ‘postmodern age’:  “the dehumanizing tendencies-the rationalizing, abstract universalizing, grading, and isolating of individuals”

In particular, the abstract universalizing is key. The rationalizing and grading of individuals, and their subsequent isolation, grows out of such absurd abstractions that make up the foundation of many contemporary worldviews.

…

“Social science deals with the tension between people and personnel, between human powers and human institutions. In my opinion, it is always practical and political-in a good society where the institutions actualize and enhance human powers, there would be little social science. (My anarchist bias is that, by and large, this happens best when persons and their functioning communities are just let be.)

I actually see wisdom in his bias.

The very next paragraph: “When institutions drastically fail to provide, and do severe damage, as by brutal exploitation, unsuccessful war, or incompetent tyranny, people respond with political turmoil, and aim at a revolution in government. When conditions are-or are also-“dehumanizing,” there is alienation, anomie, mental disease, delinquency, and generation gap; and we come to the cultural and religious crisis that is the subject of this book. My subject is the breakdown of belief, and the emergence of new belief, in sciences and professions, education, and civil legitimacy.”

That last term, civil legitimacy. It doesn’t sit well with me. Nor did it with Goodman, clearly.

I’m glad he points out that by a New Reformation he actually means overcoming “ the dehumanizing tendencies set in motion by the Protestant Reformation itself.” In addition to the earlier mention of abstract universalizing that was quoted earlier, Goodman also adds Phariseeism and economism. These are two terms that weren’t mentioned in the introduction that perhaps should have been, although they each come with their own complications.

“…  we do not agree on what the humanities are about; but it is better for the humanities to be about the wrong thing than about nothing.”

This is an interesting statement. 

These last three paragraphs sound sort of like my own feelings about the youth of today…

“As one of the half -dozen elder statesmen who have provided propositions and points of view that the young have picked up, I really do not know how to cope with the dilemmas that arise when I dissent from their movement and they show me their hostility in no uncertain terms. Just to condone their idiocy would, it seems to me, be condescending, and I have never done it. But the young at present are so insecure and distrustful that they hotly resent criticism, and they are so alienated that they don’t understand it anyway.

Their intolerance is breathtaking. Do Your Thing means do their thing. I have seen cases where they exploit their elders’ resources and sponsorship, but then betray our explicit purposes because they are convinced that we are fools or finks. They do not regard this as conning.

What then? Suppose we shrug and turn away. Then they have no access to the resources that we ought to share, to which they have a right claim, and to any wisdom we have to give, such as it is. And if those of us who care for them, and whom they somewhat respect, do not take them seriously. if only to hector them, who will take them seriously? Besides, they are the ball game. And sometimes they even do know better.”

Sometimes the young do know better. But it’s scary that I look at folks just a decade my junior and the world as they see it is not entirely accurate. And when I gently try to tell them what I’m seeing that they seem inherently biased against, they refuse to listen and ghost me. I feel like Goodman did at the end of 1969. Yes, the youth of today are insecure and distrustful just as they were then. And the youth then were the age of my grandparents, and funny enough their children fell right back in line. How frustrating.

Sadly the new reformation that Goodman expected did not come. Something worse happened… but it took another generation to become fully realized.

…

This is my first highlight from chapter one:

“In 1940 the federal budget for research and development was seventy-three million dollars, in 1967 seventeen billion. As the old man predicted in The Empire City, the “duration” has lasted longer than the war. Hitler’s war was a watershed of modern times. We are accustomed, as H. R. Trevor-Roper has pointed out, to write Hitler off as an aberration, who was of little political significance. But in fact the military emergency that he and his Japanese allies created confirmed the worst tendencies of the giant states, till now they are probably irreversible by ordinary political means.”

That is to say, World War Two and the ensuing Cold War was a watershed moment that created the military industrial complex which now maintains “Society” as we know it today. The illusion of “representative democracy,” as I see it, is protected by nothing more than tanks, bombs, and now drones that will seek and destroy any enemies of the state. Everything you think you know is wrong and admitting that you have the slightest notion of this inescapable fact makes you forfeit in the eyes of those who still are seeking gainful employment or any social company. Pfft.

This hasn’t changed: “And the style of our research and development is not good. It is dominated by production of hardware, logistics, and devising of salable novelties. Often there is secrecy, always nationalism. Since the grants go overwhelmingly through a very few corporations and universities, they favor a limited number of scientific attitudes and preconceptions, with incestuous staffing. There is a premium on “positive results”; surprising “failures” cannot be pursued, so that science ceases to be a wandering dialogue with the unknown.”

That last sentence is a key. That’s exactly what science must be for it to be useful to the masses and not the corporate elite that control the government. It was happening then and it’s become a metastasized cancerous monster now!

This is big: “Modern societies have been operating as if religion were a minor and moribund part of the scheme of things. But this is unlikely. Men do not do without a system of “meanings” that everybody believes and puts his hope in even if, or especially if, he doesn’t know anything about it; what Freud called a “shared psychosis,” meaningful because shared, and with the power that resides in dream and longing. And in fact, in advanced countries it is science and technology themselves that have gradually and at last triumphantly become the system of mass faith, not disputed by various political ideologies and nationalisms that have also been mass religions. Marxism called itself “scientific socialism,” as against moral and utopian socialisms; and movements of national liberation have especially promised to open the benefits of industrialization and technological progress when once they have gotten rid of the imperialists.”

Social media has only exacerbated the “shared psychosis” of the tech-based faith of today. While social media has, ironically, also helped people connect with one another across the globe more effectively than ever before (as it was intended) it’s also become the perfect delivery system for weaponized capitalism. And we never got rid of the imperialists (like Goodman was hinting at) who took the parts of Marxism that were useful to them (even co-opting the term Capitalism and ascribing it to John Smith who would’ve been himself aghast at the assertion) and here we are.

“For three hundred years, science and scientific technology had an unblemished and justified reputation as a wonderful adventure, pouring out practical benefits and liberating spirit from the errors of superstition and traditional faith.”

It was definitely a reputation, and it was a wonderful adventure, but it was certainly not unblemished.

“During the twentieth century, science and scientific technology have been the only generally credited systems of explanation and problem solving.”

Fair enough.

“Yet in our generation they have come to seem to many, and to very many of the best of the young, essentially inhuman, abstract, regimenting, hand in glove with Power, and even diabolical. Young people say that science is anti-life, it is a Calvinist obsession, it has been a weapon of white Europe to subjugate colored races; and manifestly-in view of recent scientific technology-people who think ‘scientifically’ become insane. With science, the other professions are discredited. The academic ‘disciples’ are discredited.”

Goodman does go on to say that this anti-tech stance was rooted in the horrible things the Nazis did in the name of science. But Americans weren’t that much better. They just encouraged people to volunteer for the “good of their country.”

Hey, Goodman had a solution to  Neil Postman’s Technopoly!

“Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science. It aims at prudent goods for the commonweal, to provide efficient means for these goods. At present, however, “scientific technology” occupies a bastard position, in the universities, in funding, and in the public mind. It is half tied to the theoretical sciences and half treated as mere know-how for political and commercial purposes. It has no principles of its own. To remedy this-so Karl Jaspers in Europe and Robert Hutchins in America have urged-technology must have its proper place on the faculty as a learned profession important in modern society, along with medicine. law, the humanities, and natural philosophy, learning from them and having something to teach them. As a moral philosopher, a technician should be able to criticize the programs given him to implement. As a professional in a community of learned professionals, a technologist must have a different kind of training and develop a different character from what we see at present among technicians and engineers. He should know something of the social sciences, law, the fine arts, and medicine, as well as relevant natural sciences.”

We need these technologists more than ever. I realize such people do exist; but they are far too few in number. This is what was originally meant I think by the “liberal arts,” but we see how that term got co-opted, too!

“…  the more the technology is oversold, the less immediate utility it provides, the greater the costs, and the more damaging the remote effects. As this becomes evident, it is time for technologists to confer with sociologists and economists and ask deeper questions.”

Here, Goodman was talking about the proliferation of cars and planes. And yes, there are so many problems with how we require commuting for work. Although that has been somewhat changed with all of the remote working now. However, the tech being oversold the hardest with the most dire consequences today. In fact, it’s AI. And AI isn’t even the proper word for it: it’s advanced machine-learning applications, but that isn’t an exciting or marketable term.

“…  the recent history of technology has consisted largely of desperate efforts to remedy situations caused by previous overapplications of technology.”

Stop letting technologies get oversold! Make technologists an important functional profession like law and medicine. Such a straightforward defense against all these modern ills. 

“Since we are technologically overcommitted, a good general maxim in advanced countries at present is to innovate in order to simplify, but otherwise to innovate as sparingly as possible.”

Exactly. We have the technology that could actually make everyone’s lives better. But what fun is that?

“There are ingenious devices for unimportant functions, stressful mazes for essential functions, and drastic dislocation when anything goes wrong, which happens with increasing frequency. To add to the complexity, the mass of people tend to become incompetent, and dependent on repairmen. Indeed, unrepairability except by experts has become a desideratum of industrial design.”

The “Right to Repair” movement is a good idea and is on the right track. But the real issue starts with the purposeful planned obsolescence built into modern industrial design. And the wastefulness has accelerated exponentially.

This is frighteningly relevant: “…  if teaching machines and audiovisual aids are indeed educative, well and good; but if school boards hope to use them just to save money on teachers, then they are not good at all-nor do they save money.” He’s absolutely right.

“Technological modesty, fittingness, is not negative. It is the ecological wisdom of cooperating with Nature rather than trying to master her. (The personification of “Nature” is linguistic wisdom.)”

Brilliant! Goodman even has good solutions for healthcare, which have not worked out in practice due to… corporate greed. And he mentions automation all the way back then!

“But worse, what can happen is that the real function of an enterprise is subtly altered to make it suitable for the mechanical system. (For example, “information retrieval” is taken as an adequate replacement for critical scholarship.) Incommensurable factors, individual differences, local context, the weighing of evidence, are quietly overlooked, though they may be of the essence. The system, with its subtly transformed purposes, seems to run very smoothly, it is productive, and it is more and more out of line with the nature of things and the real problems. Meantime the system is geared in with other enterprises of society, and its products are taken at face value. Thus, major public policy may depend on welfare or unemployment statistics, which, as they are tabulated, are not about anything real. In such a case, the particular system may not break down; the whole society may explode.”

Uh oh. Yeah, we are at that point. We know those statistics are biased on purpose. And while the machines get “smarter,” they are not infallible. And they are much more likely to overlook flaws obvious to any human being with a functional set of senses because the computer doesn’t have any way to know better.

“I need hardly point out that American society is peculiarly liable to the corruption of inauthenticity. Busily producing phony products, it lives by public relations, abstract ideals, front politics, show-business communications, mandarin credentials. It is pre-eminently overtechnologized. And computer technologists especially suffer the euphoria of being in a new and rapidly expanding field. It is so astonishing that a robot can do the job at all, or seem to do it, that it is easy to blink at the fact that he is doing it badly or isn’t really doing quite the job.”

American society has only become more extreme in all the ways Goodman mentioned.

“Research and development ought to be widely decentralized, the national fund for them being distributed through thousands of centers of initiative and decision. This would not be chaotic. We seem to have forgotten that for four hundred years, western science majestically progressed with no central direction whatever, yet with exquisite international coordination, little duplication, almost nothing getting lost, in constant communication despite slow facilities. The reason was simply that all scientists wanted to get on with the same enterprise of testing the boundaries of knowledge, and they relied on one another.”

This does still happen, but often with much too little fanfare, and when an independent firm discovers something “commercially viable” they get eaten up by a large corporation or holding company (who usually spins it off to a private equity firm once they extract all the useful personnel and IP). Fun times. And as Goodman said, it’s still the small guys that make the big discoveries. We still haven’t learned…

“Too precise a preconception of what is wanted discourages creativity more than it channels it; and bureaucratic memoranda from distant directors don’t help. This is especially true when, as at present, so much of the preconception of what is wanted comes from desperate political anxiety in emergencies. Solutions that emerge from such an attitude rarely strike out on new paths, but rather repeat traditional thinking with new gimmicks; they tend to compound the problem. A priceless advantage of widespread decentralization is that it engages more minds, and more mind, instead of a few panicky (or greedy) corporate minds…

“A homespun advantage of small groups, according to the Senate testimony, is that co-workers can talk to one another, without schedules, reports, clock-watching, and face-saving.”

We are starting to see this happen more often, but again, they often get bought out as soon as they show any promise of upending the status quo and their genius is co-opted for corporate hoarding.

“Like Christianity or communism, the scientific way of life has never been tried. And, as in the other two cases, we have gotten the horrors of abusing a good idea, corruptio optimi pessima.”

Precisely. 

It seems to me what we call the “Information Age” started much earlier than I was led to believe!

“I have heard the estimate that 40 percent of the national product is in the Knowledge Business. It is mostly hocus pocus. Yet the delusory belief of parents in this institution is quite absolute, and school diplomas are in fact the only entry to licensing and hiring for every kind of job. The abbots of this system are the chiefs of Science, e.g., the National Science Foundation, who talk about reform but work to expand the school budgets, step up the curriculum, and inspire the endless catechism of tests.”

The tests are what bother me. I think the other two things aren’t bad if the money and curricula are properly managed.

Unfortunately, Goodman believed in 1970 that we were “on the eve of a transformation of conscience.” I don’t think this happened. Unless I missed it and now we’re worse off than we were then!

…

For context, Goodman wrote chapter two in the wake of the moon landing. 

Here’s a rabbit hole I’m tempted to go down: “Bodhisattvas have tended to go on inner space-time voyages, with psychological technology.”

This paragraph speaks volumes as much now as it did in 1970:

“There is nothing ironical in the fact that we can land on the moon but can’t move traffic, feed the hungry, build housing, or educate a child. NASA can’t make an epigram or a metaphor either. All these take different powers of soul; and it is politically a disaster to try to play one good against another, for people will stick to what they do value. Consider the exquisite care for safety in our space program-it is astounding that there was only one accident that cost lives. If there had been the slightest hint of sacrificing a life to go to the moon, there would have been universal outrage, as there was when the little monkey died in orbit. Yet we ruthlessly destroy people on battlefields, in jails, in slums. But it is pointless to call this hypocrisy, for it’s not. In some things we have learned to be human; in other things, we are stupid and all too human.”

Now this was obviously before the Challenger and the Discovery (the latter which I believe was actually preventable as far as loss of life was concerned!) 

It is a very important distinction that such irony isn’t hypocrisy, but rather, people just being really stupid.

Clearly Goodman was NOT a big fan of JFK: “In my opinion, to have commanded the moon landing was the only action of John Kennedy that rightly fitted his adolescent mentality, and therefore it had grace. Contrast the inappropriateness of his adolescent poker-playing during the Cuban missile crisis or his adolescent  moral cowardice during the Bay of Pigs. It’s too bad that he didn’t live to bask in the moon glory.” It did work out, at least.

Unlike a lot of people of the era that were really not a fan of the space program, Goodman actually was, just not for the political purposes it was being used (which I agree with)

“Accept the moon enterprise in its own terms, however, as something unquestionably to be done and worth doing-there have been things so wrong in its context and style that it is impossible to be happy. From the beginning, the race with the Russians has been degrading-competitiveness was also part of the personality of John Kennedy. Going to the moon and the planets is too big, too scientifically important, too historic, too dependent on all mankind, 

and too fraught with future for all mankind, to have gotten entangled in the Cold War, propaganda, prestige. The secrecy and nationalism have gone counter to the tradition of western science and have added to the current degradation of science. I have been surprised that the scientists did not protest it more concertedly; but it seems appallingly obvious, for instance, from the refusal to allow a United Nations flag to be carried, that except for the Cold 

War Congress would never have voted the money. Was this really the sentiment of the Americans (or the Russians)? I wonder what a poll about international cooperation would have shown. In our government’s official rhetoric, e.g. the statements of the astronauts on various occasions, we have indeed been considerably less chauvinistic than the Russians, but the history does not bear out our universalistic tone. On the other hand, bad as the situation is, we 

must remember that when Columbus, returning from his first voyage, put in at Lisbon, the king of Portugal plotted to banish him, his crew, his ship, and his parrots from the face of the earth before the news got abroad.”

Columbus was pretty terrible, but that is true. But history remembers him, even if not so fondly today, he was no doubt important.

It is kind of funny that no one knew who James Webb was back then; he now has a very famous telescope named after him, so that worked out.

This is a very interesting paragraph: “The collectivity is inherent in the enterprise, and that is acceptable since the purpose is not stupid and the people are not coerced. Nevertheless, as 

an anarchist and a psychologist, I am quite convinced that this kind of social organization, habituation to rote, and controlled environment is not, in a big way, viable. If it becomes universal, no child will learn anything, the culture will become Byzantine, and civilization itself will become brittle and break. What seems to be a triumph could be the beginning of the end of the road. The history of civilization, both western and oriental, has consisted of visitations of spirit, in individuals and communities, which have then enlightened mankind. I do not believe that the collective will be visited by Spirit, although I know it bloweth where it listeth.”

And if you want to talk about a lack of spiritual leadership, 2026 is a fine example. We have not colonized anything but third-world countries (and even desperate Americans) for their cheap remote labor. And civilization is very much brittle and about to break.

A very correct observation by the Boston Globe back then: “As the Boston Globe put it in an editorial: much as they like the hippies, and much as they morally agreed with the student radicals, to go to the moon you’ve got to be pretty square, shape up, and do your lessons.” And Goodman does admit this was likely true, but it wasn’t for the best, and we’ve seen that he was right.

“At the same time, in order to have live people at all, we must multiply all the ‘anarchist’ things: decentralize wherever it is possible, weaken the State, do it yourself, educate to delay socialization. It will not be easy to show the ordinary man that these apparently contrary directions are compatible. Maybe they are institutionally not compatible and we are at a dead end.”

I wish I’d read Goodman back in high school. I would’ve had no reason to do so, of course, but that’s no excuse! Joking aside, I always thought of myself as an “anarchist” in this particular mold, and I was told I was nuts. Seems I’m something of a spiritual successor to Goodman.

I love this joke: “What would be surprising? Something proving Tarot cards.” I see them as a version of Bibliomancy, personally.

…

Right away in Chapter 3, Goodman makes a keen observation about Greek theoretical science:

“Being good watchers and reasoners, the Greeks did excellent analyses of  motion, elements, heavenly bodies, biological functions, and natural history.  But they had poor apparatus and they did not experiment, so though their philosophical descriptions are still useful, there is little enduring value in their  theoretical sciences as sciences. (An exception is Greek psychology, which still  has a lot of vitality for us, perhaps because in this field they got as close to the 

data as we do, and they had fewer misconceptions to start with.) Their shortcoming was not that they were not empirical; their observations were good, and Aristotle’s Topics touches many bases of experimental method like Mill’s canons, but there is little actual experimental intervention.”

The key phrase here is “they had fewer misconceptions to start with”. 

“These studies were entirely pragmatic. Immediate purpose was intrinsic to the study, the method,  nd the scientist. They were like arts and crafts, technai, and the technician was responsible for both the purpose and the execution. The scientists were the directors; and the scale of operations made this possible-Athens had perhaps a hundred thousand people. 

They did not yet have to make the more learned distinction between natural and moral philosophy. No studies were value-neutral, whether theoretical or practical. The watching sciences each had a peculiar excellence that made it worthwhile explained in the first paragraph of the treatise; and in general, disinterested study was itself good and liberating-for free adult 

males, whose chief social activity was leisure. Theory was not practical only in that there was nothing to make or do.”

“Otiose” – “serving no practical purpose or result.” 

“Politics became the theory of the (often-changing) status quo. Rhetoric became ornamental. Ethics became personal duty. And pedagogy, the chief philosophical study among the Greeks, almost vanished from  sight; one made citizens not by growing them but by imposing the laws.”

Casuistry – “the use of clever but unsound reasoning, especially in relation to moral questions; sophistry.”

“Because of misdirected research carelessly applied, the whole world is overtechnologized and wrongly technologized. The environment is polluted, the biosphere is damaged, resources are being exhausted, and the human species is in danger of extinction. The inflexible interlocking of technologies results in drastic disruptions if anything goes wrong. Underdeveloped regions are drawn into the same ruinous system of hasty and ill-considered industrialization for political reasons.”

I take some issue with the phrase ‘wrongly technologized’ and even the idea that the whole world is ‘overtechnologized.’ It all depends on what you consider to be beneficial tech or not. I’d agree that simply introducing technology where it can’t properly be understood or maintained is a major mistake, which is part of what he’s saying, or that tech is often used as a means to an end which only produces more problems than it solves. 

The real issue, as Neil Postman would point out later in his book Technopoly, is that the benefits of technology are far from equally distributed; typically tech creates an elite that ends up in charge, just like we have now in many modernized countries. In many other parts of the world, people constantly live at odds with the tech, even the tech that is beneficial to quality of life and access to resources.

I’ve been looking for a better definition of technology, and I think this is one:

“Technology is a branch of moral philosophy, with the criteria of prudence, efficiency, concern for remote effects, safety, amenity, perspicuity and repairability of machines, caution about interlocking, priorities determined by broad social needs.”

This is not the dictionary definition of technology, but perhaps it should be. I do agree with Goodman’s call for “intermediate technologies” that “should be devised to suit local resources, skills, and customs, with the aim of eliminating disease, hunger, and drudgery without disrupting the pattern of life.” This, in hindsight, of course, did not happen.

“The mandarin education system must be revised, to increase the pool of the science-minded and raise the level of competence of the general public to judge and protect itself.”

The way he uses the term ‘mandarin education system’ is unclear to me, since the meaning of that word has shifted a lot in recent decades. One definition I found is “a powerful official or senior bureaucrat, especially one perceived as reactionary and secretive.” So does he mean that the system was reactionary and secretive? Because it certainly still is.

I do agree with what he’s saying, though. And it’s done the opposite of what he proposed, generally speaking. 

“We must dispel the superstition of science. There should be more modesty in its claims and rewards. There are other paths of pursuing happiness, and perhaps they even lead to a kind of truth.”

This is quite a statement, one I’d like to explore more. 

“…the only useful thing one can do at a talk… is to make reasonable propositions.”

Perhaps, in my current position, that’s all I can do too.

…

Chapter four is about professionalism. Goodman started out himself with a traditional take on professionalism, the same one I had for many years myself: 

“My bias was the traditional one, that professionals are autonomous men, beholden to the nature of things and the judgment of their peers, and not subject to bosses or bureaucrats but bound by an explicit or implicit oath to benefit their clients and the community.”

However this is not how people were seeing it at that point. And this has carried onto today: “As we explored further, we came to the deeper truth that the students did not believe that there were authentic professions at all. Professionalism was a concept of repressive societies and of “linear thinking” (a notion of McLuhan’s).”

I do believe McLuhan (the ‘medium is the message’ guy) was right that many professions had been co-opted to subsidize the “ruling class” in some ways. Of course, professions as Goodman suggests do actually exist, but there’s a wider problem here that was already present in 1970. 

“Suddenly I realized that they did not believe there was a nature of things. Or they were not sure of that. There was no knowledge but only the sociology of knowledge. They had learned so well that physical and sociological research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they were doubtful that there was such a thing as simple truth… Not only all institutions but all learning had been corrupted by the Whore of Babylon, and there was no longer any salvation to be got from Works.”

No wonder things are so bad in 2026 when it comes to instructional rot.

Probably the best paragraph I’ve ever read on alienation:

“Alienation is a Lutheran concept: ‘God has turned His face away; things have no meaning; I am estranged in the world.’ By the time of Hegel the idea was applied to the general condition of rational man with his ‘objective’ sciences and institutions divorced from his ‘subjectivity,”\’ which was, in turn, irrational and impulsive. In his revision of Hegel, Marx explained alienation as the effect of Man’s losing his essential nature as a cooperative producer; centuries of exploitation, and, climactically, capitalism, had fragmented his community and robbed him of the means of production. Comte and Durkheim spoke of the weakening of social solidarity, the loss of common faith, the contradiction among norms, so that people lost their bearings-this was anomie, an acute form of alienation that could lead to suicide or aimless riot. By the end of the nineteenth century, alienation came to be used as the term for insanity, derangement of perceived reality; psychiatrists were called alienists.”

Oh man, Paul, you have no idea how bad things are fifty years later. It makes me sick just thinking about how much time has passed and it only got worse.

“In both schools and corporations, people cannot pursue their own interests, use their powers, exercise initiative. Administrators are hypocrites who sell out people for the smooth operation of their systems. The Cold War has grotesquely distorted reasonable social priorities. Perhaps worst, the powers who make the decisions are incompetent to cope with modern times; two-thirds of mankind are starving, and all are in danger of extinction.”

The very sad thing here is that the Cold War mentality, which supposedly evaporated in the mid to late 90s, returned with 9/11 and the religious response was immediate, fundamental, and cruel. It is quite incredible we haven’t wiped ourselves out yet, but that’s because somehow there are those in many professions just keeping us afloat somehow. The perception of reality is completely at the fault of schools and corporations running the rest of us into the ground for no reason other than their own incompetence. It isn’t greed as much as it is complete self-absorbed idiocy.

A very bleak mention of how the Cold War mentality had affected people: “Every one of these young grew up since Hiroshima. They do not talk about atom bombs, not nearly so much as we who campaigned against the shelters and fallout; but the bombs explode in their dreams, as Otto Butz found in his study of collegians at San Francisco State College; and George Dennison, in The Lives  of Children, shows that it is the same with small children in the Lower East Side in New York. Again and again, students have told me that they take it for granted they will not survive the next ten years. This is not an attitude with which to prepare for a career or bring up a family.”

And this is today’s problem too: 

“Whether or not the bombs go off, human beings are evidently useless. The old are shunted out of sight at an increasingly earlier age; the young are kept on ice till an increasingly later age. Small farmers and other technologically unemployed are dispossessed or left to rot. Increasing millions are put away as incompetent or deviant. Racial minorities that cannot shape up are treated as a nuisance. Together, these groups are a large majority of the population. Since labor is not needed, there is vague talk of a future society of “leisure,” but I have heard of no plans for a kind of community in which all human beings would be necessary and valued.”

Postman was right that we were amusing ourselves to death. I’d say our amusements are more lethal than atomic bombs at this point. Goodman’s mention of “racial minorities that cannot shape up” isn’t meant to be a racist remark either; he’s referring to what has become the very platform of MAGA, a directive that only white Christian fundamentalists should run and enjoy this country. Yuck. It’s just crazy how much of a futurist Goodman was without intending to be.

Interestingly enough, the old are being forced back into the labor force more than ever in 2026, because they can no longer afford to retire. And healthcare costs are through the roof because the stress of our society is literally killing us. While my generation was being held up in college and massive loan debts were putting us on ice and into indentured servitude to corporations who underpaid and mistreated many of us, myself included, the same kids he was talking about were wrecking the world by perpetuating the exact worldview that he said needed to be reformed!

“A special aspect of biological corruption is the spreading ugliness, filth, and tension of the environment in which the young grow up. If Wordsworth was right in saying that children must grow up in an environment of beauty and simple affections in order to become trusting, open, and magnanimous adults, then the offspring of our cities, suburbs, and complicated homes have been disadvantaged, no matter how much money there is. This lack cannot be remedied by including Art in the curriculum, nor by vest-pocket playgrounds, nor by banning billboards from bigger highways. Cleaning the river might help, but that will be the day.”

The very next paragraph is the root of our issue with objective truth…

“And another cause of metaphysical confusion is the sheer prevalence of the man-made, with nothing to compare and contrast it with; everything is stamped with social messages. It has always been the case, in the arts and rhetoric, and in technology in general, that the medium is the message-one cannot separate “form” and “content”; but mass communications are uniquely swamping, all goods are styled and packaged commodities, the medium-message is the only experience. Young people brought up among so much artifice dare not trust the evidence of their own senses and craftsmanship unless it is confirmed on the TV screen or by being on the market; but these messages, they know, they certainly can’t trust.”

And social media, and even “traditional” media, especially when invaded by AI “assistance” definitely can’t be trusted! 

“If we start from the premise that the young are in a religious crisis, that they doubt there is really a nature of things and they are sure there is no world for themselves, many details of their present behavior become clearer. Alienation is a powerful motivation, of unrest, fantasy, and reckless action. It can lead, we shall see, to religious innovation, new sacraments to give life meaning. But it is a poor basis for politics, including revolutionary politics.”

Again he doesn’t mean specifically Christianity when he refers to the religious crisis. He means having faith in anything at all. And by revolutionary politics, he means more humanist politics. Unfortunately, the route to the mountaintop has only gotten a lot steeper since then…

Goodman talks about how these militants want to “build socialism” but have no real program to replace “monopoly capitalism.” Huh, that sounds familiar. This is how we get “fuck capitalism” and here’s our sponsor…. Because I have rent to pay… Frustrated sigh followed by a string of curses…

This is why I get so demotivated trying to write about important things. I continue to find more books that say what I wanted to say, decades or even centuries ago. Now I’m sure SOME people did listen at the time. Just not the people who could actually effect substantial change.  But maybe some of the right people did heed Goodman’s words (as people certainly did Postman…)

“The ‘political’ activity makes sense, however, if it is understood not as aimed at reconstruction at all but as a way of desperately affirming that oneself is alive and wants a place in the sun. ‘The reason to be a revolutionary in our time,’ said Cohn-Bendit, leader of the French students, ‘is that it’s a better way to live.’ And young Americans pathetically and truly say that there is no other way to be taken seriously. Then it is not necessary to have a program; the right way is to act, against any vulnerable point and wherever one can rally support. The purpose is not, narrowly, politics, but to have a movement and form a community.”

There’s that word “community” that’s become almost meaningless in our often isolating and painfully stratifying culture. Let’s not solve things; let’s just be really angry and get people to agree with us, then Netflix and chill eating our Factor meals and gambling away our “disposable” income…

“When the actors have been in touch with the underlying causes of things, issues have deepened and the movement has grown. But for the alienated, unfortunately, action easily slips into activism and conflict that are largely spite and stubbornness. There is excitement and notoriety, much human suffering, with the world no better off. (New Left Notes runs a column wryly called, “We Made the News Today, O Boyl”) Then instead of deepening awareness and a sharpening political conflict, there occurs the polarization of mere exasperation. Often it seems that the aim is just to have a shambles. Impatiently the activists raise the ante of their tactics beyond what the ”’issue” warrants, and support melts away. Out on a limb, the leaders become desperate and fanatical, intolerant of criticism, dictatorial. The movement falls to pieces.”

And this is how you get extreme populists in office with extreme ideologies battling back and forth and leaving the rest of us in the middle to enjoy either being outcast or pummeled into submission by one side or the other; in my case, both. And it’s why so many organizations with good intentions find that they don’t have any truly good ideas on what to replace the current system with, so they just rely on rage baiting people to persist. 

“Yet it is noteworthy that when older people, like myself, are critical of wrongheaded activism, we nevertheless almost invariably concede that the young are morally justified. For what is the use of patience when meantime millions are being killed and starved, and when bombs and nerve gas are being stockpiled? [this is still happening in 2026 and people need to remember this fact.] Against entrenched power that does these things, it might be better to do something idiotic, and now, than something perhaps more practical in the long run. I don’t know which is less demoralizing.”

What’s scary to me is that I’m not even 40 yet and I feel like I have Goodman’s perspective on this. And like I said in my bracketed remark. The war machine is still alive and well. It’s just idling at the moment. [Unless you count the nonsense in Iran, of course.]

This sounds familiar:

“If we do not understand their alienation, the young seem dishonorably inconsistent in how they take the present world. Hippies attack technology and are scornful of rationality, but they buy up electronic equipment and motorcycles and with them the whole infrastructure. Militants say that civil liberties are bourgeois and they deny them to others, but they clamor in court for their own civil liberties. Those who say that the university is an agent of the powers that be do not mean thereby to assert the ideal role of the university, but to use the university for their own propaganda. Yet if I point out these apparent inconsistencies, it does not arouse shame or guilt. This has puzzled me. But it is simply that they do not recognize that technology, civil law, and the university are human institutions for which they too are responsible. They take them as brute-given, as just what’s there, to be manipulated as convenient. But convenient for whom? The trouble with this attitude is that these institutions, works of spirit in history, are how Man has made himself and is. If they treat them as mere things and are not vigilant for them, do not they themselves become very little?”

I love this paragraph:

“Their lack of sense of history is bewildering. It is impossible to convey to them that the deeds of the past were done by human beings, that John Hamden committed civil disobedience and refused the war tax just as we do, or that Beethoven, just like a rock and roll band, made up his music as he went along, from odds and ends, with energy, spontaneity, and passion-how else do they think he made music?”

I absolutely love that bit about Beethoven. 

This is the same thing happening with Gen Z: “Though each one is doing his thing, there is not much idiosyncrasy in so much spontaneous variety. As if mesmerized, the political radicals repeat the power plays, factionalism, random abuse, and tactical lies that aborted the movement in the thirties. And I have learned, to my disgust, that the reason why young people don’t trust people over thirty is that they don’t understand them and are afraid to try. Having grown up in a world too meaningless to them for them to learn anything, they know very little and are quick to resent it. Their resentment is understandable; what is disgusting is their lack of moral courage.”

Even as a millennial, I found that once you turn thirty, and you’re not settled in with a “good” career and family life, you’re no good. That’s what happened to me, as I subsisted on freelance digital marketing gigs for about eight years. The young people don’t take you seriously and older folks see you as no good either. I was right; our society is radicalized to a boiling point. And it’s only a short matter of time before it boils over.

“It is irrelevant to show that the system is not the monolith that they think and that most people are not very corrupt but just confused and anxious. The point is that they cannot see this, because they do not have a world operable for them. In such a case, the only advice that I would dare to give is that which Krishna gave Arjuna: to confront with non-attachment, to be brave and firm without hatred. (I don’t want to discuss here the question of violence; the disdain and hatred are more important.) Also, when they are seeking a new way of life, I find that I urge them occasionally to write a letter home.”

That parenthetical bit about how disdain and hatred are more important… This is something deserving of a deep dive.

Even then, Goodman saw himself as a conservative when everyone else saw him as a liberal. This viewpoint has not changed. Are those words, conservative and liberal, becoming that meaningless, or do we just not take the time to define them in context? I think the latter, especially as someone who loves words and is perhaps too biased towards their utility in conveying often shapeless ideas. 

This is why I feel it is an incredible act of courage to choose to be a parent, as Goodman says: “As a citizen and father, I have a right to try to prevent a shambles and to diminish the number of wrecked lives. But it is improper for older people to keep saying, as we do, that activity of the young is “counterproductive.” It’s our business to do something more productive that they can join if they want to.”

Something more productive that they can join if they want to. How do we build this? How do we turn the good aspects of religious faith and bibliomancy into something radically humanist without relying on bashing people over the head with a big book and quoting it horribly out of context and making stuff up that isn’t even in it to subdue people?

A sad truth of modern society: “A hippie who had helped construct the People’s Park in Berkeley said that it was the first time in his life that he had ever enjoyed working hard, because it was ‘their own.’ One realizes with dismay that he had probably never repaired his bike as his own, nor painted the house as his own family’s, nor studied a subject because it was interesting to himself, nor cooperated with his friends on an enterprise simply because they thought it worthwhile. Everything was sequestered as Papa’s or as part of the curriculum or part of the System. It was necessary to live through alienation and confrontation in order to feel something was ‘one’s own.’ It was necessary to do it in a gang in order to be oneself.”

We’ve somehow lost the value of doing things for their own intrinsic worth. This is a major part of good parenting, to do things for their own sake not just because “I told you to do it.” Or maybe I deluded myself into thinking “good” parents do this, as opposed to “bad” parents. Of course, “good” and “bad” are extremely subjective as things are rarely ever that binary.

The final couple sentences of chapter four are very interesting: “The young are hotly metaphysical, but alas, boringly so, because they think the world began yesterday; they have no language to express their intuitions, and they repeat every old fallacy. If the chaplains would stop looking in the conventional places where God is dead, and would explore the actualities where perhaps He is alive, they might learn something and have something to teach.”

…

From Chapter 5: “The purpose of education is to help each youngster find his calling, the work in the community that fulfills him and, as Luther said, justifies him; yet we go to extraordinary effort and expense to provide schools that estrange him, that convince him that he has no calling and no adult community, and that nobody pays attention to him.”

We have this problem as badly as ever.

“…but nobody wants to suggest that maybe so much schooling for so many is not a good idea. In my opinion, the majority of so-called students in college and high schools do not want to be there and ought not to be. An academic environment is not the appropriate means of education for most young people, including most of the Bright.”

I’ve been saying this for years! Goodman was saying it in 1970 and now class sizes are out of control in a lot of places.

“In brief, every one of these campus disorders is essentially a prison riot. If the schools were truly voluntary associations, the disorders would never occur or would be immediately quelled by the members who would protect what they love.”

This is a very interesting point. I’ve always seen schools and colleges like prisons. Yeah they pretty much are. And now you pay even more dearly for the privilege…

I like this a lot: “As John Dewey beautifully put it, the essence of all philosophy is the philosophy of education, the study of how to have a world.”

“The survival of the humanities has seemed to depend on random miracles, which are 

becoming less frequent.” As many other things in mankind.

“…with trivial exceptions, what we mean by school – namely a special place with a curriculum generalized from the activities of life, divided into departments, using texts, lessons, scheduled periods marked by bells. specialist teachers, examinations, and graded promotion to the next step up the  ladder – is a sociological invention of some Irish monks in the seventh century 

to bring a bit of Rome to wild shepherds. It is an amazing success story, probably more important than the Industrial Revolution.” 

Those damn monks! To be fair, it’s not all bad, just mostly.

“Guessers and dreamers are not  really free to balk and drop out for a semester to brood and let their theories  germinate in the dark, as proper geniuses do.” I must be the most proper genius then, lol.

Here’s something interesting from Einstein: “Einstein said that it was preferable to have a stupid pedant for a teacher so that a smart child could fight him all the way and develop his own thought.”

Here’s a bit that I’d like to break down and discuss later at some length…

“… consider the following statement of J. S. Bruner of Harvard: We organize experience to represent not only the particulars that have been experienced, but the classes of events of which the particulars are exemplars. We go not only from part to whole, but irresistibly from the particular to the genera!.” l should think, rather, that we organize experience as a major part of the experience itself, and not to represent anything; a gestalt is not a symbol. By and large we start from the confused general or global and specify it; as Aristotle said, a baby first calls every man daddy and then distinguishes Tom and Dick. And no animal normally goes from part to whole unless totally baffled by mazes, obsessional neurosis, or schoolteachers. For instance, the normal Rorschach response is to large areas or wholes, not to details. What Bruner means to say, I think, is that to program a computer according to current symbolic logic, which is extensional, we organize “experience” in this way. But this is rather a specialized function to saddle all children with, most of whose logic is, hopefully, intentional.”

I kind of get what he’s saying here, but I think there’s a simpler, more elegant way to get at the point.

“Progressive education is always a political movement, for the exclusion of a human power or style of life is the effect of a social injustice, and progressive education emerges when the social problem is breaking out. To say this more positively, an old regime, with its method of schooling, is not adequate to new conditions; new energy and new character are needed in order to cope.

What the progressive educator thinks of as the “nature” of the child, which he is trying to conserve and nourish, is what he intuits will work best in the world. The form that progressive education takes in each era is prophetic of the next social revolution.”

I’d argue that all education is at its root political. Everything is political, really, from a certain perspective. That last sentence is particularly interesting, though, and there are great developments in independent and hyper-personalized learning plans thanks to AI tutoring models. So, perhaps there IS hope for the younger generations if we take this optimistic perspective. (Goddess, I sound old.)

I’m not familiar with A.S. Neill’s Summerhill education, so this is a gap in my knowledge I’ll need to remedy.

How is it that Goodman and I still see the same things in our education system? This isn’t right!

“I don’t agree with the theory of Head Start, that disadvantaged children need special training for their intellectual faculties to prepare them for learning. There seems to be nothing wrong with their intellectual faculties; they have learned to speak and they can make practical syllogisms very nicely if they need to and are not thwarted. If black children do not have the patterns to succeed in school, the plausible move is to change the school rather than to badger the children; and this has been the program of progressive education. But the trouble might be just the opposite, as Elliott Shapiro has suggested, that these children have been pushed too early to take responsibility for themselves and their little brothers and sisters, and these life

problems have been too insoluble to reason about. They can reason but there’s no use to it; and they cannot afford to be playful and experimental. It’s psychically more economic to be stupid and withdrawn. If so, what the children need is freedom from pressure to perform, and of course better food, more quiet, more privacy, and a less impoverished environment to grow in at their own pace. From this point of view, the schooling should not be more competitive as ‘quality education,’ but more like Summerhill.”

Well, no need for me to ever write a book about my thoughts on education… Goodman said it all already! Yes, I’m being sarcastic, and there are developments that must be considered since then. But talk about being dead on about so much.

Goodman would go on to say that progressive education, even with its “successes” were actually failures. Modern schooling sucks for all the reasons he says here in 1970!

This chapter has made me wonder, did I ever even grow up? Because the noisy youth subculture Goodman spoke of then has only intensified. No one is growing up at all! At least, what ever growing up even means in a technopoly… and they are all things Goodman despised anyway! Just like me, actually. Good to know we would’ve gotten along swimmingly.

“… I do not believe in this apocalyptic future of the breakdown of civilization. Rather, my own “Reformation” thinking about education is as follows:

(1) Incidental education, taking part in the on-going activities of society, must again be made the chief means of learning and teaching. [Absolutely!]

(2) Most high schools should be eliminated, with other kinds of youth com-

munities taking over their sociable functions. [THANK YOU!]

(3) College training should generally follow, rather than precede, entry into

the professions. [I love this idea! Ongoing training, I’ve been saying this for YEARS! Get people working and do job training in between – this is somewhat common in the UK in certain fields.]

(4) The chief occupation of educators should be to see to it that the activities of society provide incidental education, rather than exploitation or neglect. If necessary, we must invent new useful activities that offer educational opportunities. [This has been done a lot since then, fortunately. But it’s still not enough.]

(5) The purpose of elementary pedagogy, through age twelve, should be to delay socialization. to protect children’s free growth, since our families and community both pressure them too much and do not attend to them enough. Modern times pollute and waste natural human resources, the growing children, just as they do the land, air, and water. What else could one expect? [And I absolutely agree with this. I was literally just thinking about this exact point before I even read it!]”

“We must drastically cut back formal schooling because the present extended tutelage is against nature and arrests growth. The effort to channel the process of growing up according to a preconceived curriculum and method discourages and wastes many of the best human powers to learn and cope. Schooling does not prepare for real performance; it is largely carried on for its own sake. Only a small fraction, the ‘academically talented’-about 15 percent according to James Conant-thrive in schools without being bored or harmed by them. Schooling isolates the young from the older generation and alienates them.”

What’s ironic about me is that I AM academically talented and I was STILL bored and harmed by school! It held me back for many years that I could’ve been building up skills and saving money to become a free and functional adult! And now, I’m whatever this is… Goodman’s points are very strong.

“Our aim should be to multiply the paths of growing up, instead of narrowing the one existing school path. There must be opportunity to start again after false starts, to cross over, take a moratorium, travel, work on one’s own. To insure freedom of option, so that the young can maintain and express their critical attitude, all adolescents should be guaranteed a living. (The present cost of high school and the first years of college is enough to pay for this.)

Yet another brilliant idea! Such programs do exist, but they are certainly not plentiful enough.

Goodman argues that the academic schools would be better off without those uninterested and unsuited for them. But even academic types would benefit from going at their own pace (which is something we’re starting to see with some US state universities now with their trimester format, like at SUNY. Of course they’re doing this to make more money, but it is also helping people out by offering them courses that are shorter and more varied.)

“University education, in the liberal arts and the principles of the professions, is for adults who already know something. Otherwise, as Plato pointed out, it is just verbalizing.”

And that’s what’s happening; we talk big games, but it all just amounts to blabbing about while the rich get richer and ruin everything else for the rest of us…

…

After having my mind blown yesterday by the fact that Paul Goodman and I literally have the same views about education, it’s time for chapter six.

“A big obstacle to children’s learning to read is the school setting in which they have to pick it up. For any learning to be skillful and lasting, it must be or become second-nature, self-motivated; and for this, schooling is too impersonal, standardized, and scheduled. If we tried to teach infants to speak by academic methods in an environment like school, my guess is that many would fail and most would stammer.”

Yet we STILL blame kids for being “too stupid” to read. It’s because school SUCKS at teaching kids to read. I was THERE! Luckily I learned how to read before I even went to kindergarten.

“As many philosophers have pointed out, learning to speak is a stupendous intellectual achievement, involving the use of signs, acquiring a vocabulary, and mastering an extraordinary kind of algebra, syntax, with almost infinite variables in a large number of sentence forms. Yet almost all succeed equally well, no matter what their class or culture, though they learn a different vocabulary and syntax depending on their class or culture. Every child picks up a dialect, ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect,’ adequate to express the thoughts and needs of his milieu.”

In other words, reading should be easy compared to that! And notice he mentioned algebra… this is how we have large language models!

This book is insanely good. It should be required reading for education… oh wait, you can’t have that because then the system would cease to exist; you know, the one that exists for its own sake, not the children’s!

The way he turns learning to speak into an academic subject is both hysterical and frightening, because it’s true. 

Here’s the main issue: “Reading is treated as abstract, instrumental, irrelevant to actual

needs, extrinsically motivated, impersonal, standardized, nor expressive of

truth or art. The teaching often produces awkwardness, faking, and balking.”

Exactly. [What I find extremely interesting, and I’m observing this as I’m publishing these notes, I think the reason that my private Christian education was so much more effective at teaching reading than most public schools is, funny enough, the absolute importance of reading the Bible. So, there’s that. It’s also the case that my interest in Greek arose from our pastor – I sat with the adults even as a kid because I was constantly picked on in “children’s church” – talking about how Greek words in the New Testament didn’t always translate to English quite right. There are, in fact, intellectual Christians who are trying to educate people, believe it or not.]

“Most people who have learned to read and write fluently have done so on their own, with their own material, whether library books, newspapers, comic books, or street signs.”

This is why comic books are bad. We can’t have kids learning to read on their own without the “proper” schooling! (Obviously I’m being sarcastic)

This is the real reason for the reading crisis that keeps being discussed in circles: “This self-learning is important, for it is not at the mechanical level of ABC’s that reading retardation drastically occurs, but in the subsequent years when the good readers are going it alone, and the others are either signing off and forgetting, or settling for a vestigial skill that makes it impossible for them ever to read an authentic book.”

The phrase “authentic book” is an interesting one. Vestigial means “forming a very small remnant of something that was once much larger or more noticeable.” Meaning that the reading comprehension of most people is a fraction of “serious” readers. This is why reductionism is so popular in the media. And why I hate it so much to see the inherent biases and preconceptions necessary to buy into it!

His ideas of decentralized elementary education are actually very fascinating and deserve a deeper look.

“As a writer, I like Sylvia Ashton-Wamer’s method of teaching little Maoris to read. Each day she tried to catch the most passionate concern of each child as he came in, and to give him a card with that key word-usually the words were those of fear, anger, hunger, loneliness, and sexual desire. Soon each child had a large, ineradicable, and very peculiar reading list, not at all like Dick and Jane. He would then easily progress to reading and writing anything. From the beginning, in this method, reading and writing are gut-meaningful; they express truth and feeling.”

One of the few GOOD things liberal education programs have done is something like this; encouraging outside reading on subjects the kids enjoy. But the thing is, as Goodman suggests here, the idea of having that ‘most passionate concern’ be at the root of what motivates kids to read and write… remember that reading is going to spur kids on to write! This was possible in 1970 with old school card catalogs. Absolutely no excuse for this not to work now!

Goodman talks about school primarily being out and about in the city. This is a great concept. I would argue that special education kids going on field trips all the time is better for their development as human beings than “normal” kids being cooped up in classrooms all day! Yes, some instruction is going to inevitably be necessary for certain things, but as we’ve seen, kids can watch two hour lectures from their favorite YouTubers, so it’s not like kids don’t have attention spans… it’s just that it needs to be interesting to them!

This is absolutely brilliant: “For the first five school years there is no merit in the standard curriculum. To repeat Dewey’s maxim, for a small child everything in the environment is

educative if he attends to it with guidance. In any case, normal children can learn the standard eight years’ curriculum in about four months, at age twelve.”

We don’t need regimented school at all! Just give the kids Brain Quest workbooks for each grade, then spend the rest of the time reading and writing and doing cool fun stuff. Seriously. He was really onto something amazing here! (Those workbooks didn’t exist yet of course, and now we have LLM powered IEPs! No excuse!)

I’d never seen ‘perk’ spelled out this way: perquisites: “a thing regarded as a special right or privilege enjoyed as a result of one’s position.” Teachers wouldn’t lose their jobs at all or “perks” in Goodman’s systems, at least not the good ones!

…

Chapter 7 starts with a bang: “Making an educational proposal is like designing an intentional community. One provides for the physical, economic, social, and psychological needs of the members hopefully better than in ordinary society. Yet the overwhelming evidence of all such places is that they do not survive unless there is some nonrational motive, religious or nationalist or pacifist, that makes them have to survive. A community finally has to have its own poetry.”

I’ve been thinking this for a long time: “To carry on a going society, I have been arguing, most transmission can be accomplished by incidental education. The physical environment and social culture force themselves on us, and the young are bound to grow up to them well or badly. Whatever is going on always fundamentally determines the curriculum in formal schooling; and if there is no schooling at all, it is the focus of children’s attention and interest anyway, it is what is there. Dewey’s maxim is a good one: there is no need to bother about curriculum, for whatever a child turns to is potentially educative and, with good management, one thing leads to another. Even skills that are considered essential prerequisites, like reading, will be learned spontaneously in normal urban and suburban conditions.”

This is a beautiful passage: “Memory is the mother of the Muses. The literary process-and it is the same with the other fine arts-is a blend of tradition and immediate excitement, syllogism and observation, learning and metaphor. When there is no sense of history, the nuances and complexities of literature seem to have no content; they are irrelevant and boring. The young, finally, simply cannot follow a history-rich and organic motion of thought, a book, and they take it to be a mechanical train of sentences. They are sensitive enough to the nuances in a movie or the particularities of the ludicrous in a TV commercial, but these depend on experiences that they and their friends have had in their own lifetimes.”

Postman said something similar in Amusing Ourselves to Death (which was written much later) but this is much more beautifully stated.

This next passage explains a lot:

“Since the mass pitch of TV, records, and movies cuts down the possibility of using unexpected sentences even more, finally the only way to communicate anything particular is to rely on the various inflections of grunts and exclamations, like a dozen levels of saying “Wow,” or on nonverbal means altogether. So Marshall McLuhan’s prediction of the end of literature comes true, though not for the reason he imagines. Like McLuhan, the young do not understand that writing is better speech, not stupider speech. Going to college doesn’t seem to help this. Mass higher education certainly makes it worse.”

Basically, we need to increase “the possibility of using unexpected sentences.” With LLMs, that possibility is much lower than purely human-authored texts. I myself write very many unexpected sentences. So this is why literature is important; we need these unexpected sentences!

[I want to say something at some point about how song lyrics and poetry, especially, require these unexpected sentences to be invoked even more so than in prose.]

Also, a very interesting footnote about the intellectual types reading relatively few books: “I have read statistics (this effect in the New York Times in interviews with intellectual leaders of the hippies. Against them, my publisher mentions the large number of books sold, induding mine. My experience, however, has been that the larger the (paperback) collection in a pad, the more virgin are the books. To buy the books is part of making the scene.” 

I definitely agree with that last statement. The books are meant as props in a library, not for the receptacles of their content. Actually, Cinzia (Lady of the Library on YouTube) was talking about this, how virgin the books are that people review… yes, she did point out they may have just read the ebook version, but still… a lot of these “reviewers” are fake, paid advertisers. People have been “faking it” with books for centuries, though, of course.

“The young have strong feelings for frankness, loyalty, fairness, affection, freedom, and other virtues of generous natures. They quickly resent the hypocrisy of politicians, administrators, and parents who mouth big abstractions and act badly or pettily. But in fact, they themselves-like most politicians and administrators and many parents-seem to have forgotten the concrete reality of ideals like magnanimity, compassion, honor, consistency, civil liberty, integrity, justice though the heavens fall, and unpalatable truth, all of which are not gut feelings and are often not even pragmatic but are maintained to create and re-create mankind and the possibility of the Second Coming. Naturally, without these ideals and their always possible and often actual conflict, there is no tragedy. Most young persons I have met seem to disbelieve that tragedy exists; they interpret impasse as timidity and casuistry as finking out. And they are quite ready to call something bullshit just because they don’t dig it (I think they learned this in sensitivity workshops).”

What’s kind of nuts about what Goodman says here is that it sounds EXACTLY like 2026. Especially the second coming part (of course Goodman is being sarcastic but he is making a strong point). And sensitivity workshops.

There is hope, though:

“Their ignorance has advantages. The bother with transmitting human culture is that it must be re-created in spirit or it is a dead weight upon present spirit, and then it does produce timidity, pedantry, and hypocrisy. And then it is better forgotten. Certainly the attempt to teach it by courses in school. Or by sermons like this, is a disaster. Presumably it was kept going by the living example of a large number of people who took it seriously and leavened society; but the western tradition has not recommended itself in my or my parents’ generations.”

Yeah, that’s pretty much it. And the next part sounds strangely like Postman:

“The logical way to teach the humanities would be for some of us to picket the TV studios in despair to bear witness to our cause. But we are tired. And anyway, when we have done similar things, students have put their own rather different interpretation on our action. For instance, when we try to purge the university of military projects, students attack scientific research itself because that could be abused-and is even bound to be abused-as if science were not necessarily a risky adventure. They don’t see that this is a tragic dilemma. They seem quite willing-though battening on it in the United States-to write off western civil law.

“Yet, apart from the spirit congealed in them, we do not really have our sciences and arts, professions and civic institutions. It is inauthentic merely to use the products and survivals, and I don’t think we can in fact work western civilization without its vivifying tradition. Later in this book I will return to the thought that the simplest reason the cities are ungovernable is that there aren’t enough citizens; this happened during the Roman Empire too.”

There aren’t enough citizens. That is one of the most brilliant phrases I’ve ever read. Now by citizen, he doesn’t mean simply: “a person who belongs to a particular country, state, or commonwealth by birth or naturalization and has legally recognized rights and duties as a member of that entity.” He means someone who takes those rights and duties extremely seriously. Hence, why we have our civil rights now consistently trampled upon and people, for the most part, are trying to take up their duties to defend their rights, but the people they voted into office to represent them are being highly ineffective.

“Willfully ignorant of the inspiration and grandeur of our civilization, though somewhat aware of its brutality and terror, the young are patsies for the “inevitabilities” of modern times. They no longer know what to claim as their own and what to attack as the enemy. Omitting Prometheus, Faraday, Edison, the longing of mankind for light and energy, they are left with Consolidated Edison owning the field, and themselves saying, “Shut it down.” If they cannot take on our only world appreciatively and very critically, they can only confront her or be servile to her, and then she is too powerful for any of us.”

And now the young are forced into this bizarre sort of hypocrisy even more because the systems they are trying to subvert to make things better for everyone are the actual problem. Note I said systems, not the technology. We even still have ConEd.

Goodman and I truly are on the same page here: “I sometimes have an eerie feeling that there are, around the world, a few dozen of Plato’s guardians, ecologists, and psychosomatic physicians, who with worried brows are trying to save mankind from destroying itself. This is a sorry situation for Jeffersonian anarchists like myself who think we ought to fend for ourselves and are competent to do so. The young are quick to point out the mess we have made, but I don’t see that they really care about that, as if it were not their mankind also. Rather, I see them with the Christmas astronauts, flying toward the moon and looking back at the earth shining below: it is as if they are about to abandon an old house and therefore it makes no difference if they litter it with beer cans. These are bad thoughts.”

I will say that the Neo-Platonists mean well, at least, but otherwise I’m with Goodman on this. And Postman was one of them apparently.

“If the humanities-the achievement of value by the occurrence of spirit in communities and individuals through the long centuries-if they are indeed how man has appointed himself and has become. then they will surely emerge and operate in extreme situations. What is necessary is to be for real in one’s present plight, which is bound to be historical, willy-nilly, and the ancient humanities will corne to the rescue to make sense of it. No doubt this is solid comfort; but it is a hectic kind of schooling that I would not urge on anybody.”

It is exactly this sort of hectic schooling that got me here.

And this is a beautiful quote that Goodman quoted from himself in The Community of Scholars: “Civilization has been a continual gift of the Creator Spirit; it consists of inventions, discoveries, insights, art works, highly theorized methods of workmanship. All of this has vastly accumulated over the ages and become very unwieldy, yet, in the spirit, it is always appropriable. As Socrates would have said, its meaning can be recalled. The advantage of recalling it is that we are then not enslaved to it, we are citizens.”

In conclusion, Goodman adds: “And the converse must be true. If the institutions are such that there is entry into them and freedom is possible in them, the young will pick up their principles. The humanities are not obvious in the environment, but they are the causes that make it a good environment. It is not that good institutions make possible a good educational system; they are the good educational system.”

What an amazing book this is.

…

Chapter 8 means I’m almost two-thirds of the way through. What other bombshells is Goodman going to drop here?

I see this a lot today: “Those in power “co-opt” the critics, manage them so they are rendered ineffectual. (There is little direct censorship.) We are invited to be on panels or even task forces, to represent our way-out views so the proceedings are well rounded; but, speaking for myself, do not find that my critical insights are taken into account in any actions that ensue. The numerous and dynamic young do take the social critics seriously; indeed, the bulk of their libraries and many of their slogans come from them, and they are eager to act out what they have read. But they cannot read very well; they have been so alienated from history, the professions, and even the nature of things that they do not understand what a humanist is saying. And there is a prevailing sentiment that literature itself is unimportant. It is mere entertainment, or confused sociology or psychiatry, or the posture of a now shabby gentility. New media have made letters moribund and they will pass away. What is useful in them is only a noisy code that must be refined, by other than writers, for purposes of science, technology, and social engineering.”

Fortunately, letters have not fully passed away, thanks in part to Substack – for all of its issues. But they are definitely on life support.

I love this definition of Literature: “Literature is not a “linear” unrolling of printed sentences and it is not a crude code; it is artful speech. And speech is not merely a means of communication and expression, as the anthropologists say, but is a chief action in our human way of being in the world.”

An important parenthetical remark: “In my opinion, literature, although it is a method sui generis [meaning of its own kind or unique], is not a specialized department of learning but a good way of being in any department. It is a part of philosophy, which as a whole has no department.” A very ancient Greek way of looking at things that I agree with here.

More powerful commentary on Literature: “Literature brings to conscious awareness the folk wisdom that exists in vocabulary and grammar. It combines the subjectivity of personal experience and the objectivity of shared experience. Syntax-tenses, voices, moods, direct and indirect discourse, simple and complex sentences-is character, the pattern of one’s involvement in experience and with the others; it is a better diagnostic than Rorschach cards. Points of view, what the ancients called “manner,” are experiments in phenomenology. Rhythm-regular meter

and the rhythm that modifies meter-is feeling; it is one’s way of breathing, and being calm, forceful, or languid. Plot structures and chains of syllogism extend our attention span and domesticate experience by reconstructing it with a philosophical beginning, middle, and end. Metaphor is surprise.”

That final sentence, Metaphor is surprise… that’s truly sublime. 
I should point out that I discovered that this chapter was republished as an essay called “The Present Plight of a Man of Letters” in 1972.

On how literature serves “the nature of man as the animal who makes himself”: “The ability of literature to combine memory and learning with present observation and spontaneous impulse remarkably serves the nature of manas the animal who makes himself; for it revives the spirit of past makings, so they are not a dead weight, and yet is a making that is occurring now. Put psychotherapeutically, this process alleviates “inner conflict” and helps heal past

trauma by bringing it into the public world of sharable speech.”

This is why writing is so useful as therapy.

I am blown away by this, especially in 2026: “The materials of literature are cheap and common. This is so with all the fine arts; they are made of mud, rock, gestures, tinkling, and babbling. Those who hanker after multimedia and overwhelming environmental effects should

consider what is lost by using an expensive technology. Maybe only a simple and poor medium is flexible and subtle enough to lure the inward outward.”

I keep considering multimedia productions, and now that I read this, it seems I’m right to keep it simple text in many cases.

I love this concept of the Republic of Letters: “…despite its open access, literature is not democratic but aristocratic. Like any method, it lives by its own tradition as well as social causes or individual ability. But compared with other elites, the Republic of Letters has been a career open to talents, and often classless. I venture to say that a disproportionate number of its stars have been persons socially despised – outcasts, convicts. There is truth in what Wordsworth said, that the speech of the poor and unschooled, if they have been brought up among beautiful scenes and simple affections-or if, I would add, they have been daring and passionate-is more literary than the speech of courts and capitalists.”

Interesting bit here: “The aim of literature is “to move and instruct”; in the later formulations of Dryden, this means that literature instructs by moving, by disturbing rigid or stereotyped responses.”

This is an interesting point about the ‘renewal of speech’: “It is increasingly hard to fulfill one of the elementary functions of writers, to renew the speech of the tribe as it inevitably degenerates. (Confucius said that speech reform was the first step of social change; these days I would sooner get rid of the atom bombs and the pollution, but maybe it’s all the same.) The trouble is that the rate of revolutionary change in important aspects of our culture, e.g. urbanization, travel, schooling, communications, militarization, and space exploration, is so rapid that it is impossible for any renewal of speech to mature and be assimilated. Good tendencies appear, but they are swamped by the flood of publications. The overall public style is wildly eclectic.”

It’s eclectic all right…

This sounds like something Postman would say, naturally Goodman said it first: “…the mode of operation of American TV and other mass media makes them almost necessarily corrupting. Since they aim for big audiences that have few serious interests in common, the subjects treated are trivial or trivialized; communication is quick and superficial; feeling is sensational or bland-or somehow both. Brought up on this fare, young people become adept at judging the nuances and absurdities of TV commercials, but are quite unable to grasp other style or content. They, and most other Americans, cannot hear a line of reasoning if the premises are at all unexpected. Instead of assuming that the writer is saying something different, and trying to figure it out, they decide that he is a bad writer. If the conclusion is not either or the two sides that an issue is supposed to have, they take the argument to be fuzzy. An editor of Esquire objected to a line of argument in an article of mine because ‘the reader would have to think about that ’- too much to expect of anybody.”

This is where we’re at in a world dominated by TikTok and Youtube and Instagram shorts. Really, it’s just all an extension and evolution (or devolution?) of television. It’s all the same concept, except now the “programming” is much more eclectic with much less oversight (basically none) curated by an algorithm that only knows the metrics it’s told to care about, not what’s actually “good” content. The fact that many people brought up on mass media can’t deal with unexpected premises is clearly a much older problem than I thought!

Another interesting bit: “If I try to analyze a text in its own terms, to find a human spirit coping with its particulars and therefore relevant to us, it is taken as an irrelevant exercise in order to avoid present gut issues. Naturally, inability to read a book is cumulative. Since there is no belief in the tradition nor habituation in its ways, it becomes a chore just to read the sentences, and why bother?”

I love this: “Librarians have complained to me that children no longer have the time to browse and choose what interests them; I venture to say that very few who can read and write ever

learned it by assigned lessons. Literature is both too complicated and too free-wheeling to be followed without spontaneous attention springing from desire.”

Wow. “…starting from scratch, without literary tradition altogether, writing and reading are imbecile and trivial; ancient errors are tiresomely repeated; platitudes are taken for ideas; hard-won distinctions are lost; useful genres have to be reinvented, like reinventing shoes or how to boil water. This is boring. When, unencumbered by history, the young are discussing their immediate real problems, e.g. the draft, their rapping is fresh, direct, accurate, and inventive, excellently literary. When they are discussing politics, institutions, or professions, they become abstract and brassy. When the task is critical judgment or poetic affirmation of their own experience, they are embarrassed and inarticulate, or they say nothing but cliches.”

And that’s where we’re at… literary tradition has been lost on so many, and many people are only now rediscovering the classics and trying to build a new literary tradition… but it hasn’t gone anywhere yet. Mostly what’s out there now is “platitudes [being] taken for ideas” and saying nothing but cliches. Thanks ChatGPT.

“Technology is a branch of moral philosophy, but the language that is used is not the language of moral philosophy, which is literature.”

“It is the sign of an ignorant man, said Aristotle, to be more precise than the subject allows.” 

I really love this quote, because I can’t tell you how many times people try to turn abstracts into these absolute #facts.

…

Chapter 8 was “Education of the Young” which was such an absolutely incredible chapter and I was reading these amazing ideas at a time where things were going all wrong at once. And I was angry no one listened to him, apparently, because his proposed solutions would’ve saved a lot of suffering for the youth of multiple generations, but I digress.

I’m onto part three of the book called Legitimacy and chapter 9 through 12 have no title other than legitimacy in this early printing. What does he mean by legitimacy?

The chapter begins, “During the thirties, dissident young people received a thorough incidental education in political economy.” This was thanks to the Great Depression and the New Deal. “Marxian, Keynesian, managerial, technocratic, and fascist theories provided adequate terms for discussion.”

And here’s something that’s still very much relevant today as it seems most people have no clue what economics ever truly are outside of the cost of stuff, interest rates, and the stock market going up or down:

“American students today are provokingly uninterested in Economics, even – or especially – when they talk socialism… This is probably because in affluent countries the classic economic problems of scarcity of goods and exploitation of labor have diminished in importance.”

The problem is now that we have an abundance of “goods” and whatever scarcity there is typically is intentional bottlenecks to force higher prices. And exploitation of labor is rampant, not just in third world countries by first world ones, but even domestically. Most people I see today are indentured servants forever tied to college debt and all the other debts that then pile on top of it because of that college debt. Goodman had no context for this yet, of course, in 1969. 

“The business cycle and the falling rate of profit seem to have been tamed.” This is an important sentence but I need to come back to it.

What he says next is, somehow, still the underlying issue.

“Many are poor and many are outcast, but the causes are seen as political and moral.” In fact many of the causes are, but… “The ‘System’ that the young oppose has to do with Power, status, credentials, alienation, and social engineering: the fussy economic details, such as inflation, hidden costs, artificial demand, monopoly, balance of payments, are surprisingly little mentioned; and no alternative economic model is proposed. The problems that arise from the stage of our technology, e.g. collectivity and automation, also seem to be uninteresting.”

This is September 1969 he’s writing this. Now fortunately some people do talk about a lot of those fussy details. But most people are still focused on the other stuff. The ‘System’ is still very much the same, and in fact, it’s much more Power-full. And the issues that arise from tech are now multiplicated by several factors over the past half century. And is there a good solution offered? Ban guns. Give people free housing and stuff. No actual economically feasible or stable solutions. Just political grandstanding. 

“In the underdeveloped countries, for the majority of mankind, there is increasing scarcity and drudgery, and American radical students are indignant about imperialism and colonialism.”

The good news is that the latter statement is still true. Students are still very much aware of this, perhaps now more than ever. Of course, nothing is being done about it. Just a lot of talk. On the former statement, technology has brought a lot of the world up to speed on the surface, but it’s all relatively speaking… imperialism and colonialism are alive and well, just using more recent technology as the driver. The wealth inequality gap has only widened further. The US dollar is the world currency to a point where pretty much anyone who works online earns it before converting it through online services. So yeah this hasn’t changed either. 

“… it is politically outrageous for a very few corporations to involve our whole society in dirty wars, and there is enthusiasm for movements of national liberation… unfortunately, in their outrage, the young radicals are not much concerned about the fussy details of how to give foreign aid that will do more good than harm, or how to organize One World.”

And as he points out, the late 60s had plenty of opportunities to gain a political education: “sitting in and being jailed, demonstrating in vain, resisting the draft, frustrated in the campaign of ‘68, defying authority in schools, and being beaten by the police.”

Unfortunately youth today are basically just demonstrating in vain and being beaten by the police. (Or detained by ice.) And to say frustrated by the campaign of ‘24 would be the vastest understatement of all time. 

The last three paragraphs of this section require quite the deep dive. 

Perhaps the part that most needs noting is the questions facing the Left at the time, because these questions I think are still relevant now:

Are students a class?
Are outcast races a class?
How to build a movement?
Can one get power without centralized discipline?
Do we want “power” or to be let alone?
Is civil disobedience political or merely moral?
Is a hippie political?

All these are questions I don’t presently have an answer for and will require much deeper thought and research..

“The crisis of legitimacy is deeper than a political revolution; it is what I have here been calling religious: the young have ceased to ‘believe’ in something, and the disbelief occurs at progressively earlier years. Finally what is at stake is not the legitimacy of American authority but of any authority.”

Why does this seem to still be the case in 2026? This crisis shouldn’t be still going on, or maybe it’s a generational cycle sort of thing?

…

The next section of Chapter 9 begins like this: “Authorities talk about Law and Order and Due Process as if these things had an absolute sanction… The tone is curiously theocratic, as if the Law existed by divine right.”

This seems to be more true than ever in 2026, the moralizing and the leaning on Biblical “law” is getting ridiculous.

It seems that Goodman and I are on the same page about the “justice” system.

“Law and Order sounds like a fantasy of the authoritarian personality, in whom the ‘Sovereign’ has been internalized from childhood and has a nonrational charisma; but although this psychology does exist, by and large the Americans are not conformist in this way. Indeed, they have become increasingly skeptical, or cynical, about both their moral code and the justice of the Law, at the same time that they resort more readily to arbitrary or violent suppression of deviation or infringement.”

Again, what has changed in 2026 VS 1969? I want to say we’ve made progress; there is no draft anymore, for example. People have access to a lot more pertinent information if one is willing to educate themselves; but information existing doesn’t mean that the right people are going to be able to take action on it in a meaningful way.

“Even when it is not substantively unjust, Law and Order is a cultural style of those who know the ropes, have access to lawyers, and are not habitually on the verge of animal despair.” 

Unfortunately, more people than ever, including those who would’ve been considered members of a fairly healthy middle class in 1969 are on the verge of such animal despair  in 2026.

“A related and ambiguous factor is that a certain number of bright and active poor youth who used to engage in various rackets and hustles, as the only way to advance themselves, now must have gone into political activism as a career.”

Actually, this is something I DO see happening; disadvantaged kids have increasingly been becoming more politically active as they grow up. I think generally this is a good thing. This is something that has trended positively since 1969, although, there is another major outlet now called TikTok that youth are attempting to use for advancement…

I agree with the Jeffersonian wisdom that Goodman cites here: “Since laws are bound to be defied, he said, it is better to have as few as possible rather than to try for stricter enforcement. This wisdom certainly applies to the foolish drug laws and other moral legislation, which can only produce violation and contempt.”

Take note of these words, 21st century conservatives. You know both Goodman and Jefferson are right here.

I wonder if this law is still on the books… “A kind of climax of divine-right theory in American history has been the law making draft-card burning a felony, punishable by five years in prison or $10,000 fine or both. Since burning his draft card does not help a youth to avoid the draft, what is this felony? It is lese-majeste, injury to the sacred sovereign of Law embodied in a piece of paper. Yet Congress enacted this law almost unanimously.”

It’s a colonialist, imperialist attitude that America still hasn’t shaken off to this day. In fact, I’d argue this law gave the youth a way out, technically, as serving five years in prison versus going to war would likely be preferable. That fine, though, was insanely hefty at the time. That’s around $90,000 in 2026 terms. Such a fine would be pretty much the end of that person’s life. Still would be today. 

…

Returning to the third section of Chapter 9, there’s this bit: “In large areas of personal and animal life, as in the case of vices harmless to others, high-spirited persons have a definite understanding that law is irrelevant and should be simply disregarded.”

I think it’s safe to say plenty of people disregard the law, perhaps now more than ever.

“For better or worse, we do not have courts of conscience, but it is a human disaster for their functions to be taken over by policemen and night magistrates.”

Hmm, night magistrates… this means specialized court proceedings that happen outside of normal working hours. I’m curious to see where he’s going with this.

You know what we need? “… technologists asserting their professional right against authorities.” Oh, Goodman, you have no idea how much we need THAT right now!

“Speech, religion, and political acts like petition and assembly are beyond the reach of the law. These Bill of Rights guarantees can be interpreted not as a social agreement balanceable against other social agreements but as an assertion that there are areas of anarchy beyond the reach of social compact. (I have argued, in Like a Conquered Province, Appendix, that this was the sense of the founders.”

Yeah, the founders got something right, in between keeping slaves and having children with slave women… Sarcasm aside, it’s true what he’s saying here, and things like Facebook Groups and Discord should be invaluable in these areas, although they often aren’t. Keep in mind, Discord too is a corporation. Don’t ever trust ANYTHING corporate. (Goodman would agree with me on this.)

Now this is bizarrely relevant in a way that Goodman never intended: “An individual cannot make a contract to abridge his conscience or speech, or a community not to assemble and complain, any more than a man can contract himself into slavery.”

I forgive Goodman for overlooking something here because it wasn’t really a thing yet, that being crippling college debt. By agreeing to go to college, unless you have crazy scholarships, a free ride, or athletic pass, you’re signing away most of your adult life in terms of debt. That amount is now at least $100K, if not closer to $250K. To me, that’s indentured servitude. Working a corporate job, especially one that’s salaried, is also like signing your life away. So, actually, yes, you can contract yourself into a sort of slavery, an indentured servitude that’s totally voluntary because it’s “what you need to do to make it.” Of course it’s all bullshit and entirely NOT necessary. And honestly, by joining many online communities you’re abridging your own conscience and speech willingly in order to not get banned (like I do so often just by offering up the truth.)

“… it is the social contract itself that is irrelevant or self-contradictory.” He’s talking about people being punished for not wishing to participate in Vietnam. We know in hindsight that the objectors were entirely correct, of course. And to be honest, I’d say the social contract is more flawed than ever. See the indentured servitude mentioned above. I think Goodman would have a heart attack if he saw what 2026 looked like…

There’s a lot of talk here about the Ninth Amendment, something that honestly needs to be discussed more openly in 2026. It’s super foundational and it’s not being observed nearly enough. And the Supreme Court handing a lot of potentially protected ninth amendment enumerated rights over to the states to legislate is a clear violation of that 9th amendment. 

Good on the states protecting certain rights, but boo to the ones who still think “moral” legislation is a good idea; something that Goodman points out in this very chapter is a bad idea because most of the time such legislation is “increasingly likely to be nullified by massive nonpublicized, but not secretive, disobedience.”

Notably: “Just at present, the Ninth Amendment is being revived in Conservation cases, e.g. against pollution: the People have a right to their environment, which the State’s regulatory agencies have failed to protect.” Famously, President Nixon created the EPA in December 1970, perhaps as a response to these mentioned cases. The results of the Environmental Protection Agency have widely varied, of course, because of bureaucracy leading to inevitable loopholes forming that big corporations can manipulate. (Goodman likely would’ve said exactly this, and perhaps he did say this at some point.)

This is something about Revolution people need to keep in mind: “No one would deny that there is a ‘right of revolution’ but the interesting question in political science is whether it is possible to exert this right without violent breakdown of the whole structure. It was certainly the intention of Jefferson, and the sense of American pragmatist philosophy up through James and Dewey, to try to devise institutions that would make permanent nonviolent revolution possible. And in the complex relationships of modern technology, ecology, and urbanism – always verging on the brink of catastrophe and untold human misery – this is a crucial question of contemporary political science.”

Well, human misery is definitely pretty bad right now. But, yes, nonviolent revolution IS the best way to go; even if violent revolution seems to be inevitable, I don’t think it has to be.

“As Morris Cohen used to teach us, inertia is the most important energy of politics.” Morris got that right! “If the code is violated, people would prefer somebody else, the authorities, to maintain order — this is a chief use of government in the social division of labor. Law and Order in this sense does not need moral authority; it is equivalent to saying, ‘Don’t step out of line, don’t bother us, we’re busy.”

I think it’s ironic that “anarchy, defined as disorder, is a tyranny of inconvenience that no busy society will put up with…” and yet modern society IS highly and increasingly inconvenient. Our tech makes things appear more convenient than they really are; what it really is amounts to voluntary compliance because most people can’t be bothered. Keep in mind Goodman was an anarchist. His words are more powerful now than ever. And like Goodman says briefly before this: “the emphasis is not on law and Justice, but on law and Order, meaning business as usual.”

The problem is that now in 2026 things are NOT business as usual because people are being turned from an active labor force into passive consumers tricked into tricking they’re being productive by signing their lives away to consumer debt farms, acquiring increasingly worthless credentials, and letting the corporate-owned (although heavily influenced by private equity) Big Tech companies harvest our very souls. And we’re either too busy to notice how fucked up this all is or we just let it happen and give into it because we can’t be bothered otherwise. Fun times.

Goodman EVEN IN 1969 concedes, “Americans have always been very busy. But their present sentiment for Law and Order goes far beyond inertia and need for routine. It is strongly colored by anxiety. For under modern conditions both of business and rule-making, people feel not so much that they don’t want to be bothered as that they are powerless: ‘Nothing can be done, even if we want to.’ With such an attitude, any threat to order makes everybody tight, for nobody feels that he can cope. The cat might get out of the bag. The act of citizenship becomes not vigilance for justice and liberty but rallying to restore regularity and prevent further irregularity. And objectively, to be sure, the delicate interlocking of technologies and urban social arrangements does make disorder dangerous.”

THIS IS 1969! However, I’d argue people aren’t nearly as powerless as they were at that juncture. We have far more powerful means available to the general public in the form of the internet and mobile decentralized networks. The problem is, as a video I watched recently pointed out, the internet used to be a wild west we could explore, and now our experiences with it are mostly dictated by Facebook and Google. The internet, believe it or not, still exists beyond that, but whatever the algorithm doesn’t serve to us may as well not exist if we don’t know how to look for it. We now live in an age of inframotional tyranny; too much info for us to realistically process and utilize, and yet, not always the RIGHT info we need.

This paragraph is extremely relevant: “That is, the sanction of Law and Order has become the avoidance of anxiety, both neurotic and real. This explains the tone of absolutism, in the absence of tradition, religion, and moral and ritual imperatives, the things that produced ancient theocracies. Gripped by anxiety, people can commit enormities of injustice and stupidity, just to keep things under control. The archetypal example is the involuntary commitment of the insane who might be quite harmless to themselves and other people, but who have no right to make us feel uneasy by their behavior. We enact draconian penalties for the use of certain drugs, though our reasoned opinion is increasingly permissive and everybody is gobbling up other drugs.”

He goes on a bit here and you understand why the 1960’s ended the way they did. The great irony here is that religion has had a MAJOR resurgence in the United States, in particular. If we’re not careful, America could become a theocracy on the surface, using conservatism and “moral and ritual imperatives” as sustenance for bigotry, while puppeteered by private equity, the ultimate rich-getting-richer neofeudalist engine. Super fun times. And we’re still arguing over marijuana when it’s a more useful drug than most of the pharmaceutical ones (particularly narcotics) that ARE legal and MORE addictive.

This is still true: “Lively young people, distinguished scholars, talented leaders of the poor spend their time thinking up ways to make trouble.” 

This is not, just yet… “More serious: if the rhetoric is that the System, the business as usual of the majority, is an implacable enemy, it quill surely occur to some minds at some times that it is plausible to poison the municipal water supply, cause a regional power failure, set fire to a crowded department store, sabotage a train full of nerve gas. Such an event would produce a smashing reaction.”

Then we’re back to what still actually happens: “Good, say the crazies, that will polarize the situation — ‘if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem’ (a slogan of both Students for a Democratic Society and the government’s VISTA volunteers!) Those who hanker for the reaction might themselves connive at the event to produce it. But it comes to the same thing.”

And right now, many of the people who say such things as that are, in fact, part of the problem. VISTA still exists by the way, as AmeriCorps… Again, fun times.

…

Goodman writes: “I am a Jeffersonian because it seems to me that only a libertarian, populist, and pluralist political structure can make citizens at all in the modern world, but especially in countries like ours that have breathed the air of a democratic tradition.”

I should have a lot to say on this, but I’m going to leave it there for now.

Section vi of Legitimacy begins as such:

“In advanced countries, each in its own way, most of the major social functions – the economy, technology, education, communications, welfare, warfare, and government – form a centrally organized system directed by an oligarchy. This structure is not essential for most industrialization or most high technology; it is not even especially efficient, certainly not for many functions. But it has come about because of the ubiquitous drives to power, reinvestment, armament, and national aggrandizement.”

I’ve said many times that in a world where ‘efficiency’ is so often cited as a reason to make certain changes, we live in an awfully inefficient system. And I think of those four things, reinvestment is probably perfectly fine but the other three… power should be decentralized, armament should be unnecessary except for extreme cases, and national aggrandizement… Well, we see where patriotism leads us.

More to come.