From the Primate Patrimony To the Fellowship of Flowers

20TH CENTURY REFLECTIONSThe 1969 Alumni College Lectures — II

Some Anthropological Views on Changing Values in the Passage of Generations

PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY

I

THE PRIMATE PATRIMONY

The voyage upon which we axe all now vicariously embarked - that upon the interplanetary seas - derives much of its deep fascination, it seems to me, from the possibility that we may discover life - self-perpetuating arrangements of matter - elsewhere in the universe. We are, I suspect, a bit anxious about the discovery even as we are irresistibly drawn to it. For while we quarantine and culture our astronauts and their lunar samples to prevent a pandemic from sweeping the earth, our anxiety may be more than etiological. A different kind of contamination, spiritual if you wish, is possible! Suppose we were to discover, not on the moon but elsewhere, ways of life vastly superior to our own. Most of us can conceive of that possibility and science fiction has explored it exhaustively. Suppose our own level of orderly achievements - our civilization in which we take just pride - were to appear in comparison to the awareness and frame of reference of that extra-planetary life as the order of army ant colonies or a baboon troop appears to simple villagers of any tropical forest. The life of the ants is intriguing and in the inexorable fulfillment of their migratory laws even awesome, but so confined in its evolutionary possibilities as to be vastly inferior to the rudest savanna nomad, the most impoverished deep forest hunter and gatherer. It is even possible that this extra-terrestrial life would find little in us of any interest except for the occasional anthropologist or ethologist among them . . . quirky academics who try to squeeze meaning out of the preposterous. In short, we sense our limitations, our flawed nature, despite our technological triumphs. I suspect to some degree at least we wait for space travel, as we used to wait for religion, to confirm them.

When we conjecture about ourselves in comparison with some extra-planetary form of life we presume that we understand our own nature. Or perhaps we expect that the discovery of such life will give us that final perspective - that archimedean point from which we can grasp it. As if in all the diverse forms of life we have on this planet we could not find sufficient points of reference for understanding our own nature! In point of fact, it does seem difficult for men to think about their own natures, so much do we take them for granted. And it is just here that anthropology, I suggest, can be of some service - for the essence of its subject is the nature of human nature assayed from as wide an experience with that nature as possible. And while we anthropologists stand ready, should some articulate form of life be discovered on another planet, to be the first to step off among them or it - we have, after all, always cherished our opportunities to be the first among exotic cultures - at the same time we feel, and I think rightly, that we have been gathering in the last hundred years a great lot of data which casts light on human nature. Sometimes that data sounds as exotic as science fiction. But anthropology is science-fiction only in the sense that anthropologists proceed empirically, inductively, and objectively in the manner of the sciences while at the same time seeking to capture that awareness of our subjects which is the forte of the humanities. In any case, I'm going to adduce some of that material in this series of lectures to see if it can't help us to some better grasp of our contemporary dilemmas. I shudder to think, but admit the possibility, that it could add to those dilemmas.

I would like to begin then with our primate patrimony. The assault on men's egos made by the Darwinian claim in the 19th century that we were descended from the apes seems today, I expect, a curious overreaction to a fact that was long suspected. Not a few peoples in the history of the world, including most peoples I have studied in Africa, included the great apes as kinds of humans. Gorillas and chimpanzees were often mistaken for men in the annals of European exploration. When we read the National Geographies of their day (the 17th and 18th centuries) we find this to be the case. And, of course, Shakespeare didn't hesitate to use the ape as a metaphor for man - who was otherwise known to the bard as that paragon of animals, as well as, alas, nature's sole mistake. But the Victorians, unlike the Elizabethans, took themselves and their ancestors very seriously and were really set up to be devastated by all this evolution business. I have always felt, incidentally, that if the gorilla had been discovered in time and better known (he was really only carefully observed about 1860 to 1870, the first specimens arriving in Europe in the 1840's) the Victorians might not have been quite so scandalized. For the gorilla as opposed to the chimpanzee or the baboon (I speak from personal experience here, as I once had to barehandedly recapture a year-old gorilla) is a much more serious-minded contemplative fellow, really philosophical in a way. His deepset brown eyes under a portentous brow — he never cracks a smile - have an academic seriousness. His sexual mores, which though not precisely those of William Gladstone, yet show a decent respect for the opinions of mankind and in particular Victorians. The gorilla is, in my view, also something of a stuffed shirt, even though he beats mightily upon it.

But what really can we learn from our congenors the apes? The first thing we learn is that we are really not descended from them in the full sense of that word. That is, we are not descended from any of the contemporary apes. We have evolved separately for many millions of years from a generalized Hominoid ancestor (the great apes and ourselves are members of the superfamily Hominoidea). The separation took place sometime in the Miocene - twenty to thirty million years ago. As for the emergence of man himself, or rather, genus Homo, for a great many years we believed it took place some time in the last million years during the Pleistocene. But the data we are now getting on the Hominidae from East Africa is pushing that emergence back into the Pliocene, two million, three million, perhaps as much as five million years ago. So, it seems that if we are a bit ashamed of our origins, we can still take heart in D.A.R. fashion from how long we have been here!

The fact that we are primates and for some considerable part of our evolution lived in trees has important implications when we compare ourselves with other mammals. Adaptation to that arboreal environment resulted in capacities that later have served us very well. Tree life is probably responsible, for example, for the grasping and manipulative capacity that we have in our hands. We began to monkey around with our environment in an exceptionally sensitive way. We all know what technological accomplishments have ensued. In the trees stereoscopic and fairly long-ranging vision becomes extremely important. Distances, as you must look before you leap, have to be exactly measured. Stereoscopic sight there becomes the queen of the senses and replaces the sense of smell which is so important in other mammals. As one mounts into the trees, smell loses value - it is a more valuable sense in the heavy, damp air at ground level. We say that sight is the queen of the senses because sight is sensitive to stimuli light years away while smell, upon which other mammals are chiefly dependent, relies upon nearby stimuli which move relatively slowly and with much fuzzing. There has been a tendency in evolution, it seems, to move from proximity-testing senses to distance senses, from senses keyed into slow-moving mediums to those exploiting fast-moving mediums. It is hard to see, therefore, how we will ever improve on sight. And I think we can give a good bit of credit to the trees for improving that capability.

Our tree life has its problems. Lion cubs can tumble around on the ground without much anxiety. But in the trees one mis-spring is the end of the offspring. Effective child-rearing thus meant, it appears, a reduction in number of offspring and a much closer attentive relationship between mother and child. From these developments arose the classic anthropological observation that "only illiterates have litters." Since feeding was taking place perched upright, the mammary glands were reduced to two, for which regretful fact, however, Playboy magazine has been fully compensating us. This upright feeding characteristic of life in the trees, in which the infant is nurtured in the arms while feeding at the breast also acted, we may suppose, to strengthen the mother-child bond. In their inescapable contemplation of each other their attachment was bound to deepen. We can begin to appreciate the power of the primate mother in influencing her child. All these changes which occurred to us or were initiated as tree-dwelling mammals are important to who we are - mammals with an in-depth awareness of our environment, an astounding capacity to master it by monkeying around, and with a capacity and the patience for long-term nurturance of our infants.

Of course, if we had stayed up in the trees we wouldn't be here. At some crucial period we came down out of the trees and adapted those capabilities given to us by life in the trees to life in the forest margins and in the savanna, very possibly the savanna of East Africa. In doing this we made a clear separation from the rest of the primates, all of whom to one degree or another are still attached to trees. Man is the only Hominoid to fully descend from the leafy bower. In any case, sometime in the Pliocene we have the appearance of the Hominidae, the Man-Apes. We seem to assume, at this point, an upright posture, our pelvis cups out, our legs become very powerful indeed. Ethologists have observed that if a fight could be arranged between a gorilla and a man in which only the legs could be brought into play, we would kick the dickens out of goliath - but woe to us if he ever brought his arms into the contest.

We have discussed the close attachment of mother and infant which developed in the trees. In this life on the savanna we feel fairly confident that a very strong bonding between males arose, not only to protect the females, but to gain adaptive efficiency in respect to scavenging and the pursuit of game. Let us not forget that our arboreal descendant was relatively weak and vulnerable in the environment he was now exploiting. He had neither the speed of the ungulates nor the strength of the great cats. Furthermore, probably in response to the neural challenges of manipulation of the environment he was now giving birth to an increasingly large-brained but helpless neonate who had to be nurtured over many months and years. There was a corresponding disability of the female who bore the burden of these changes, both in pregnancy, at birth, and after. We had, furthermore, lost, or we did not develop, the very long and threatening canines which are still magnificently present in the baboon. Our success in this savanna period is more to be credited, I think, to the social organization our brains were achieving than to any other physical capacity. Among the fauna of the period we were in most respects panty-waists, and even in maturity we were and still are relatively infantile of feature - the condition is called neoteny and it has its advantages. When we reflect upon our condition in those savanna days of old, our survival staggers the imagination. It is only because we added to our capacity to monkey around in the stereoscopic view of a large brain the capacity for socially cooperative bonding between males that we succeeded in perpetuating ourselves at all.

When I lecture on the male bond to a Dartmouth audience, most of whom follow with high interest the vicissitudes of the Big Green teams, I need not expatiate on its character. But perhaps to the women in the audience who tolerate their menfolk's passion for sports as one of the ineffable and unreasonable facts of life I might read a recent statement by Bill Russell, the Boston Celtic basketball star, upon his retirement. It's from Sports Illustrated:

I was dedicated to being the best. I was part of a team and I dedicated myself to making that team the best. To me one of the most beautiful things to see is a group of men coordinating their efforts toward a common goal - alternatively subordinating and asserting themselves to achieve real teamwork in action. I tried to do that — we all tried to do that on the Celtics. Often in my mind's eye I stood off and watched that effort. I found it beautiful to watch. It is just as beautiful to watch in things other than sports.

The prevailing appreciation among men for this coordination of effort has led some to argue - excessively I believe - that maleness is a releaser for fellowship behavior that femaleness cannot be. Male dominance in politics - and political behavior generally — is subject, by this argument, to programmed biological guidance, i.e., is inherited. Surely there is more to it and less to it than that. We do, however, remember the way in which George Plimpton ended his best-seller, Paper Lion. He is leaving the Detroit Lions training camp after many weeks of participating in the body-bruising buildup of that highly coordinated band - a professional football team. He is walking to the parking lot past the tennis courts of the Cranbrook School. In the distance back on the field he hears the gruff and hearty sounds of the football fellowship in practice - the occasional shock of shoulder against shoulder, a shout to alert, the called signals. On the tennis courts in contrast he spies two pretty girls desultorily playing at tennis. One is telling the other about a new boy friend, and it is that narrative rather than the game or their coordination in it that has their attention. He sees from the way they are gotten up in their fetching tennis whites that their appearance is of greatest importance to them. It is not whether they won or lost, it's how they dressed for the game. So much for the male band, and the greatest threat to its survival!

Much more could be said of life in the trees and life in the savanna; of these collateral or ancestral hominids, of the Australopithecine so widely found in East Africa and perhaps in East Asia, of the emergence and progressive forms of Homo Erectus, and finally Homo Sapiens. But what about this primate patrimony - what lingers on from this ancestry of ours that may help us to understand our natures and our thematic concern in these lectures - the passage from generation to generation, from culture to culture?

What lingers indeed? Desmond Morris, in his widely read book, would have us believe we are all but naked apes, albeit, as he takes pains and some pleasure to detail, the most highly sexed of the primates. But Morris is a zoologist with little concern for culture, for language, for man's capacity to symbolize and to imagine, which must surely be the outstanding difference between ourselves and the apes. The comparison in short is too easy for him. And yet there is something there that we can faintly recognize, and uncertainly attach ourselves to. The clamoring I'm having to put up with this summer - and most of us have experienced - to build a treehouse for our children, is accepted the more philosophically by reflecting on what may be intimations of arboreality or recollections of inviolability arising from our beginnings. Insofar as ontogeny recapitulates phytogeny we know our infants can climb before they can walk. And any anthropologist who has had anything to do with primates when faced with the human female's fascination with and desire to fondle the infants of others, will not likely give the credit for such behavior to Benjamin Spock alone. So Morris's likening of the cocktail party - the mutual inspection, the relatively meaningless banter, the frequent exchange of partners to mutual grooming among the apes has a certain plausibility. Many highly committed cocktail party participants have been known to smack their lips with delight at some gossipy tidbit they succeeded in plucking off of another participant during a brief and "friendly" encounter. Morris's advice to arrested motorists on the proper primate response to the officer's claim on your territory may even have a certain utility and enable us to avoid a summons-

Get out of your car, go to the officer's territory, lower the head slightly, sag, look away frequently, add a few self-grooming activities for good measure to deny any aggressive intent on your part! For primates never groom and threaten at the same time!

But is it really so? Are all those unsuspected primordial primate responses just waiting there to be triggered? Behind the facade of modern city life is it the same old naked ape?

There is some, but not much, evidence that it is. Take the smile reflex in infants, usually reflected if not reflexive in mothers. As far as we anthropologists know, the smiling and hugging between mother and infant is a universal in human culture, though highly variable, as the infant in many cultures is much more somber than in ours. The reflex is shared, but only in a vague way, with some of the great apes, it being hard to distinguish a chimpanzee's grin from a grimace. So while we might point to hugging and, at least, quasi-smiling as characterizing the primate and perhaps traceable to the arboreal period where such guarantees of mutual benevolence had real survival value, yet such an identification obscures the much greater importance these patterns have to men, as they probably had to the man apes. Our infants, in contrast to the other primates, are so helpless for so long that special compensations and attractions are demanded. We all know the frustrations involved in child raising, the occasional or even frequent exasperation. And we all know what compensation for our endeavors lies in just an occasional smile spreading rather awkwardly across the baby's face. He wins us back to him if we were feeling at all tied by the burden he represents. He furthers, thereby, his chances to the kind of nurturance necessary for a healthy survival and what our author Erikson calls "basic trust." And he also makes in this reflex first entry into that intense, highly articulated social interaction of his species characterized by a multitude of signs, most a good deal more subtle than a baby's smile, but not many, we will admit, as honest and inspiring.

Our problems when we consider our primate antecedence is that in capitalizing on some of the similarities we may obscure the essence of our nature as Homo Sapiens. On the other hand, in ignoring our animal origins and exalting our homo sapience, we may never really grasp our basic natures. It is an enduring problem in the human sciences. People tend to interpret the data according to predispositions and commitments. Ethologists like Morris are predisposed to view us all as naked apes, while philosophers, let us say, with their commitment to mind, focus on our sapience. Clearly the answer is both. In man culture, which is the product of mind, works in and shapes a physical vehicle which is that of a primate. Our organizational abilities are such that as the old saw goes—men are apes living like ants. On any given issue we must try to carefully distinguish that which is the ape in us from that which is culture.

For example, an issue which has come to the attention of psychiatrists and social scientists in recent years is the very high incidence of psychological impairment - neuroses of various kinds among the members of western civilization, primarily urban dwellers: insomnia, ulcers, palpitations, shortness of breath, psychosomatic conditions, etc. The causes of this psychic assault on the effective functioning of as much as 60-70% of the population must be sought in many directions: the overstimulation to which our media culture submits us; the highly competitive nature of our existence; the double bind, so called, we find ourselves caught in, between the Judeo-Christian ethic on the one hand in which poverty is exalted, the other cheek is proffered, and the last shall be first, and the competitive ethic of social Darwinism in which affluence is esteemed, one's hand is kept close to one's chest, nice guys finish last, and nothing succeeds like success. We do have some contradictions to be anxious about. But we have also to keep in mind that the physiology we bear is still a primate physiology, nurtured over the many millions of years, accustomed to bursts of activity and then long periods of leisure characterized by casual investigative activity. The steady 8-hour, day-in-day-out application demanded of us in our bureaucracies one must suspect is incompatible with that physiology and is hence pathogenic in this psychosomatic sense. As technology makes more and more leisure practical we might hark back to our primate physiology. Anthropology stands shoulder to shoulder with the working man, white collar and blue collar alike, fighting for a physiologically realistic vacation schedule.

But now let us wind up by returning directly to our primate patrimony in the light of our major interest. What I have really suggested is that we have a "matrimony" to begin with - the disposition or species commitment, if you will, to a very close and comparatively enduring bond between mother and child. Then later in our savanna days we have the overlay of a patrimony, an additional emphasis on the banding and organization of mature males. Here are, in my view, two essential bonds integral to our natures as very social and relatively wise primates.

Morris and others, of course, have emphasized the remarkable intensity of the male-female bond among us naked apes and it is surely remarkable in some respects - although quite fragile in others. Naturally, the male-female bond more easily excites our interest, whether through romanticism or priapean curiosity. But I would like to emphasize in our discussion that it is the establishment of an appropriate relationship between those other two bonds, making fundamentally different claims upon our natures, which is a more basic challenge facing all cultures at all times. It is a challenge, as we shall see, that is inescapably involved in the relationship, often the conflict, between generations.

The ontogeny of social life as homo sapiens knows it, then, recapitulates, I argue, the phylogenetic development of mother-infant relationships in the trees and a subsequent emphasis upon male solidarity and the male group in the savanna. As we grow up we all pass from the primary claims of mother-infant relations with their characteristic values to the claims of such male solidarity groups as the Boy Scouts, sports teams, the Army, fraternities, brotherly protective orders of various kinds, and even colleges of various colors - green, blue, crimson, red - all devoted to the exaltation and solidarity of a male patrilineage (until recently at least).

I conclude by pointing out that we have reduced the much greater complexity of primate evolution to a few principles; arboreal matrimony followed by the savanna patrimony. In the social sciences as in the sciences we always look thus for relatively simple principles by which to parsimoniously grasp the much more complex phenomena. We don't deny the complexity, we simply feel that understanding is aided by reducing that complexity. Our colleagues in the humanities, dealing with the same subject, human nature, usually prefer to grasp the nettle of complexity. Discussion should always ensue in which these reductions are confronted with the complexities to see whether they hold up and whether in fact they are simplifications on this side of the complexity or upon the far side. For example, there has been a simplification in anthropology and culture history called the mother-right or "mutterrecht" theory. It is associated with a German called Bachofen and it argues that human societies were originally under the control of females and feminine values and that this order was replaced by male rule and male values. This argument keeps reappearing and may even be a part of our own debate on coeducation. If our argument here seems to be reminiscent of that theory, in our discussion of arboreal matrimony overlaid by a savanna patrimony I should like to emphasize that I am not making a value statement about evolutionary inevitability! What I am saying is that in our primate and man ape past two kinds of incompatible bonding have developed which all cultures must deal with. However you want to mix these bonds, they constitute basic considerations in any discussion of either the varieties of culture or the possibilities in the relationship between generations.

II

RITES OF PASSAGE

In our last lecture we found ourselves often drawn irresistibly towards the assumption of what is in large part only analogy ... the analogy between apes and man. We can and often do ape each other, but we are, after all, only distant collateral relatives. The other primates are very poor relatives indeed. As we watch in a movie groups of primates involved in their leisurely pursuits we note the family resemblance, but we should find it still impossible to predict what we have become from what they are. We have, to take the two influences we have chosen to dwell upon, done a great deal more with the consequences of arboreality and savanna nomadism than any other primate.

How, then, did we become human? Alas, we do not really know. Here we speak of the missing link. It is not so much that we are missing a fossil skull, which will finally provide us with a complete series from notharctus to Joe Namath, but that we are missing the kind of information that would tell us how we stepped over the threshold to sapience. Did the process occur relatively quickly or was it a long drawn-out evolutionary ramble? Did an entire species step over the line from erectus to sapiens or, more in the manner of the biblical account, was it a relatively small group of individuals, say some 30 to 50, who in some evolutionary Eden made the transition?

In arboreal intimacies and in the bonding of savanna nomads we have mentioned two factors that are essential to our nature and our progress. But more has to be said if we are to fully distinguish ourselves from the primates. The discovery of the use of symbolic forms - language - is of course absolutely crucial, although that does not interest us here. I will merely remark in passing that the discovery of the power of symbols - that power which has enabled us to talk about things that are not present and even to talk about things that never were, surpasses all other discoveries and events in man's long history.

But let's take this momentous event of language for granted and look at two other changes which seem to have been afoot. Among the primates generally, and probably among the man-apes as well, the size of the animal, as we have seen, was very important. By and large it was the big bruiser, the agile muscular fellow, who bossed the band. Surely this had advantages in matters of defense or the pursuit of game. But since brainyness is not always or not even usually correlated with brawniness, a group that always puts its affairs in the hands, or in the biceps, of its biggest is denying itself a good deal of talent. In fact, early on, along with developments in language and culture - which acted as a great equalizer among men of markedly different size - mankind looked for talents of leadership where he could find them, and not necessarily in the vicinity of muscle. In fact, it might be argued that except for a few recent hulks like John Kenneth Galbraith and President Johnson, and of course Abe Lincoln, most leadership in the U. S. and perhaps among mankind generally has been on the shorter rather than the taller side. The big man is likely to develop, by invulnerability, a philosophical complacence. The small man is likely to be quick and clever and, what matters a great deal to us Americans, very productive ... in short, an over-achiever.

Beside assuring the dominance of brain over muscle, sapiens acted in another way to maximize his potential. He got some order into his sex life. Most primates, with the exception of gorillas perhaps, are too susceptible to the sexual drive. I say susceptible because the females are always coming in and out of oestrus and the adult males always seem to be keeping an eye on them, as well as on each other. Homo sapiens very early on developed notions about incest and propriety which released him in good part from this sexual bondage and preoccupation with the availability of females. This development in mankind caught Freud's eye and his approval, and since in primate fashion he continued to think of sex as nearly everything, he labeled this other activity to which man was released - sublimation.

Thanks to its powers we are said to have developed civilization. I may say that this development in mankind was a good deal more self-evident twenty or thirty years ago. But now in these days of Portnoy's complaint and Hugh Hefner's philosophy and John Updike's Couples we may identify more easily with Homo Erectus than with Homo Sapiens.

Now we have as complete a picture of ancient man as we have time to present - a very strong mother-child bond, a very significant male solidarity, a readiness to recognize talent and virtue irrespective of power and size, a freedom, at least if we choose to exercise it, from the constant tyranny of sex. And I believe this picture will be enough of a base from which to develop our discussion of the passage of generations.

What I would like to turn to now is a set of generalizations about some of the features of the life cycle of early homo sapiens as we suppose it to have been for many thousands of years and as we know it from anthropological studies of the simpler societies, which have been quite conservative in this respect. The set of readings assigned for these lectures, let me hasten to point out, should caution us about just such generalizations for they give us plenty of evidence about the substantial differences between the various American Indian cultures. We have only to compare the casual childhood of the Nambi-Kware with the more formal requirements in growing up to be a Bororo. Still and all, let us assign a set of life-cycle stages and then develop some variations on the scheme.

In general in the simpler societies the infant is treated to considerable gratification by his mother in the first three to four years of his life. He is almost never alone. He will usually be breast fed on demand for up to three years. Not long after he is weaned he will be turned over to his elder siblings, preferably sisters. They will discipline him, but not with determination. And they will assume much of his care for, if possible, his mother will be having another child. At about age seven his competence is judged to be such that he can, within limits, help the adults to get a living. And his contribution is credited to him. Obedience and a very self-deprecating decorum are demanded of him in the presence of adults. Around the age of puberty—from age twelve on - it is customary for the boy to go through rites of passage - rituals of initiation which are crucial to the formation of an adult identity and which act to incorporate him within the adult male solidarity group. After the rites of passage we often have a period of bravado and energetic exploration of the adult world. It is a period of courtship, of long hunting or military expeditions. But by and large until a young man is married and with children he has no place or influence in adult affairs. Men without families are simply without full access to the nature of social reality, which is above all a reality made up of the needs and obligations of kinship.

There are many variations on this scheme and the anthropological literature shows us societies in which, for religious reasons, children of ten and twelve can compel their parents to conform to their slightest whim. It occurs in some Pacific societies where children may be more highly endowed with supernatural power than their parents. The ethnographers of these people tell us that on occasion one finds a willful child occupying his parents' dwelling in pouty isolation while his parents have set up makeshift quarters out under the trees. While the activities of our own children often threaten to drive us out of our houses, our departure is not likely to take place on their command. We find other societies in which children are regularly lent for long periods to be of service to other families and thus grow up in relation to adults to whom they have no blood-tie and for whom in effect they work off their childhood and adolescence. That sounds like a good idea.

A widespread variation on the custom by which the growing boy is confronted with the dominance of his father and the adult male group into which he must eventually be incorporated is found in matrilineal societies. In such societies the father often is not a disciplinarian or especially dominant. It is the mother's brother, the uncle, living elsewhere who exercises authority. He frees the father to be more of a companion to his son, conforming to an ideal for father-son relationships often put forth in American life. In patrilineal societies, however, this relatively permissive companionship has usually been assigned to the uncle, more particularly the mother's brother. With the high mobility of American life real uncles play a very vague role in our children's lives and we find, by anthropological standards, fathers playing or crying uncle to their children.

I would like to mention one further variation on our scheme, and this among the Nyakyusa of East Africa. Periodically during late adolescence and early adulthood all the young men of roughly the same age leave their natal villages to establish themselves entirely independent of the senior generation. It is as if each year Dartmouth's senior class, capitalizing on the peer group sentiments that blind them, were to go off somewhere in the College Grant and establish a new Hanover. The Nyakyusa, beyond many societies, have recognized that people of a certain age - and particularly young people - have common bonds and have decided on this device for letting them do their own thing while assuring that they do it by themselves. Another good idea. Since, however, the young men are shortly obliged to get married and establish families in their new villages, their radical enthusiasm, if they have any, is rapidly sobered up. Marriage, of course, is what saves us all from youthful willfulness.

Many societies in East Africa in this way institutionalize the bonds of common age in what we call age-grading. They thus give greater emphasis to the horizontal bonds of common generation rather than to the vertical bonds of descent. In age-grading the relationship between generations can become more intricate than anything we conceive of since there can be among living men as many as ten grades - in a sense ten generation gaps. But while certain of the younger grades tend to search for their identity by violence and upheaval and are rather expected to do so - by and large the relationship between grades as well as the passage between grades is sufficiently ritualized as to prevent unsettling challenges to the system.

Colleges, which also practice age grading by age classes, have also tended to ritualize that relationship with hazing, and bonfire building, and wetdowns. Lately these rituals have mostly been abandoned, here at Dartmouth surely, and our four age grades have been flailing around for other rituals. Whether the periodic eviction of the headmen from the palace of Parkhurst will prove to be an enduring ritual remains to be seen. Like most elders everywhere our own headmen have taken strong exception to rituals of initiation practiced at their own expense rather than at the expense of those being ritually incorporated into the tribe! One main trouble with young people today is that they don't have a proper sense of themselves as neophytes, or proper respect for their initiation.

Let us return to the scheme we put forth of the normal progression of men through the life cycle in early and simple societies - and throw that scheme up against what occurs in our own society. Most noticeable is the fact that we have abandoned most rituals of passage - or at least most rituals of any intense dramatic value. Since a chief function of rites of passage is to make unmistakably clear to young people that they are to put away childish ways once and for all and become adults - the rituals are sufficiently intense and provocative of a wide variety of emotions to achieve this - where they are lacking there will often be ambiguity in the growing person about his identity. We will often find in him as he searches for identity a curious combination of childishness and maturity — at once a claim on the rights of action of adults combined with an expectation that his actions will have the immunity and enjoy the impunity that society affords children.

Another widespread characteristic of our society is the degree to which the father's role vis-a-vis his male children as representative of that old male solidarity group has been much diminished. First of all, in a highly competitive and mobile society it is hard for him to locate a solidarity group with whom he can identify. If the father happens to be a professional athlete or an American Legionnaire or perhaps a Dartmouth man this may be easier for him - it is surely easier for him than if he is a salesman whose only other affiliation is the PTA. Such fathers will often plaintively recollect army experiences or camping experiences or athletic experiences for their children to try to demonstrate that for them too the male solidarity group exists. The father's role has been diminished for a second reason. The demands upon him of organizational life - commuting, unceasing career responsibilities and challenges, the merciless executive ladder, office sociability - often make of him an absent or preoccupied father increasingly unable to exercise an effective participant leadership in the life of his children. The consequence is that the mother's role is much extended and we get that matricentrism at home and school we have long called momism. In the anthropological terms we have been putting forth here the motherchild bond is not effectively replaced by that of the father taken up in the name of the male solidarity group. Various consequences may be expected to ensue - excessive exhibitionism, dependence, dominance, the values in other words which the mother characteristically fosters in the child and which throughout man's long history have usually been balanced at some moment by the values which men have felt the need to foster.

Let's look at exhibitionism more closely. At some point in most rites of passage the neophytes are required to perform for the adult males who are initiating them - they must brave physical punishment, endure or ingest obnoxious substances, sing, dance, recount tribal history. All this seems to be intended as preparation for the fact that as adults they must exhibit behavior worthy of emulation to younger males and they must expressly counter their previous spectatorship and submissiveness. To some degree participation in athletics, Scouts, and finally the army still carries some of these old feelings of initiation - it is felt to be beneficial for boys and young men to undergo the testing and hazards of athletics or the army to prove their worth and their readiness to join the adult males. And it is notable in recent student unrest that it is the athletes, the so-called jocks, who have remained most loyal to the adult male-dominated society. It is sometimes said to be a matter of muscle-headedness, but I think rather that athletes, by and large, are not only sensitive to the values of the male bond, but are also undergoing quasi-initiatory experiences which are preparing them - as since time immemorial - to identify with adult males. Their respect for that bond restricts their radical sentiments.

What I want to emphasize, however, is the manner in which the exhibitionism, formerly confined to initiation, has been allowed, or even encouraged by hapless fathers in their plight, to grow beyond all bounds. Whether cheering his son on in Little League or Westinghouse science competition or Boy Scouts, it is the father who has become the constant spectator of his son rather than the reverse situation which has been so long the condition of much of mankind. This is coupled with, or perhaps it has been a cause of, the inordinate worship of youth which has been characteristic of our society. We are almost Polynesian in the degree to which we focus upon the young. Is it so surprising after all those years of parental spectatorship and undisguised adulation of youthfulness that the young should acquire the view that those over thirty, if not sold out, are at least washed out?

Of course there are reasons for this focus upon youth. For one thing, in our bureaucratic culture men's jobs are so highly specialized that men have little confidence in trying to teach their sons their trades. For another thing, our culture which has institutionalized innovation is so dynamic that a man whose education is ten years old and who has not kept up is likely to find himself out of date. Not only his teenagers but his grade-schoolers are learning things he doesn't understand - new math, computers, cross-cultural studies.

We all realize that one of the elder generation's crucial jobs, for which the young are bound to respect them, is to teach, to pass on the information necessary to maintain the culture and to survive in the world. Take the situation of the Fang villagers with whom I lived for two years in Equatorial Africa in the late '50s and early '6os. Here is a culture which is relatively simple - interesting in many ways, but relatively simple — in which one man, of 30 years, is able to contain all that it is necessary to know in that culture. He could decide, at some point: "I'm not going to live in this village any more - I'm going to go off and live somewhere else. I am going to light out for the territories." And when he got to the territories he could effectively recreate that whole culture for his children. He had it in his hands and in his head - the religion, the mythology, and the technological know-how and skills to recreate his entire culture. Men like this are bound to be respected by the younger generation. The survival value and the enormity of all they know are impressive. So we ask - What does each of us adults have to pass on? How much information have we got to give that will enable our youth to survive? How much of our culture can we reproduce? The complexities are so great. With the moral dilemmas we experience, how can we contribute to their proud bearing of our culture - let alone its maintenance? Can we give them in our specialization and our obsolescence any information that is not outmoded? Most of the information they crucially need to know has been acquired by young people not much older than themselves, and it is to these, slightly older, that they most often look.

In our civilization the rapid progress of science and technology makes only the young contemporary. The rest of us are already on the verge of being outmoded, those who have lost or are rapidly losing the flexibility which rapid change demands. It is they who are intelligent. And while it is we who with the accumulation of years ought to be wise, in a highly complex society such as ours in which so much information must be processed, it is intelligence, the ability to deal with complex variables, that tends to be valued over wisdom. All this produces the curious phenomenon in Western and particularly American society of adolescents being embarrassed by their parents. Of course, here again American parents ask for it - they frequently state the wish that their children should be better than they were. When the present college generation therefore lays claim to a moral superiority and to a right to run its own affairs, we should remember that such views have not been without encouragement from those who feel themselves victimized by them.

In almost all the simpler societies, in contrast, we find an echo of Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra - "Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made." Grow old to what? our young people ask - to an increasing affluence, perhaps, but also to a programmed obsolescence! Now, one of the important purposes of rites of passage to which the young were submitted in archaic societies was to visit upon them a sense of mystery about life and the hereafter. In the processes of these rites the ordinary categories of life are broken down and recombined in a mysterious way. There are three stages to rituals of passage: separation, transition, and reintegration. And it is in the transition phase that we find this recombination of the ordinary categories of life in a mysterious way. Another purpose is to offer to youth a promise that each ritual through which they passed would bring them closer and closer to a final illumination of these mysteries. The young, the middle-aged, the old might look forward thus, perhaps with some apprehension, to increments in their understanding of the mysteries of life and to increments in the power understanding brought them.

In such societies the old were almost always invested with the power of those who understand mysteries - the power of wisdom. In an age in which wisdom is confused with intelligence or in which it is simply overridden by it and in which mystery is simply a challenge to the scientific method, rites of passage would have to be powerful mystifiers indeed to save the older generation from the slings and arrows of outrageous obsolescence. The old among us have a terrible time in communicating to the young the excitement and the challenge of growing old, partially because they are only half convinced of it themselves. In the simpler societies the rites of passage made clear in the people's minds the wise increments involved in their cultural change of status, from the customs of childhood, to the customs of young manhood, to the customs of adulthood, to the customs of old age, and finally to the customs of that most laudable status of all - that of being an ancestor or a shade.

I hope this discussion of programmed obolescence in the American life cycle doesn't sound like disguised propaganda for Alumni College. If it does it is quite unintentional, although surely this innovation in American education is a response to the conditions I have been trying to describe., There have been other kinds of responses to these conditions of our society. Some of these suggest that rituals of passage are not as expendable as our positivist temperament might lead us to suppose. For example, there is a recent book by a psychiatrist in which after long struggle in trying to understand the problems of his adult patients he finally concludes that the disintegration they are experiencing in their personalities is the consequence of growing up without the periodic integrating experiences of rites of passage. They are experiencing divided selves, he argues, because the self of each stage of their life is not properly passed on to a more mature stage. Hence as a part of therapy patients are required to psychodramatize their own rituals of passage.

In another domain we are seeing an outpouring in recent years of attempts, mostly on the part of youth, to recapture the sense of the bizarre and the mysterious, that sense so readily cultivated both by ritual and the psychedelic experience of the concatenation of categories. The psychedelic movement in many aspects seems most steadily a search for the bizarre and the mysterious - a search for realities other than the everyday one. And most often these movements, in addition to using psychedelic drugs, invent elaborate rituals the more easily to enter into their electro-chemico-neurological universe. Though the activities of these people offend many if not most Americans - the so-called "squares" of the American middle class with our commitment to the old virtues of law, order, discipline, practicality - nevertheless they are, in their way, attempting to return to the old resources of the ritually enlivened universe.

For a curious thing has happened amidst all the agitation, turmoil, and dynamism of modern life. There has been an erosion of the sense of adventure, of the sense of anticipation - of the sense of the possibilities of achievement. The day after the moonshot many claim to be as bored as the day before. How this erosion has come about, if it is the case, is difficult to disentangle. The frontiers in the world are now practically all closed down. And this is surely one of the major themes of our book by Levi-Strauss. Even the tropics are being sadly overtaken by that industrial mass culture of Coca Cola signs and Standard Oil stations. For a people like our own whose character is supposed to have been defined by the frontier it is now hard to find a frontier to define our character by. No wonder some search for the "beyond within." There are the new frontiers of the conquest of pollution and the conquest of poverty, and the conquest of population and of hunger, but somehow, for many, these do not have the compelling attraction of the challenge of the old frontiers - that challenge of fulfilling some territorial imperative whether by defending territory or by conquering that belonging to others. The excitement of exploring the frontier of space, one might think, would help to reinstill in us the old elan vital of expectancy. But space is such a solitary echoing realm, so hostile to life, and one in which so few can participate that we are as daunted as much as we are challenged. And we usually end up being thrown back upon the fact of our encapsulation upon this celestial raft, "the good earth" from which we sought respite in the first place.

Psychologists might point out that this enervation, this mal de siecle feeling, is a consequence of the affluent over-stimulation to which we are all subject. If nothing succeeds like success, nothing enervates like affluence! In this age of media that stimulate rather than messages that communicate we have a surfeit. It is not that it is hard to become excited, it is rather that we have had to learn to protect ourselves against excitement. For every night on television there is more fictional stimulation by a hundredfold than is available in the moonwalk, despite its incomprehensible reality. And our young people brought up on television frequently turn out to be the most jaded of us all. They yawn and go to bed not long after Neil Armstrong, that admirable but completely undramatic middlewesterner, takes his first step out upon the lunar surface. The orderly work of Mission Control doesn't begin to come up to the entertainment value of Mission Impossible. If certain changes in the pace of modern life have made outmoded spectators of the elder generation, the age of media has tended to make jaded spectators of us all. Clearly there is a widespread need for meaningful participation and it is to this need and its various expressions that I intend to address myself in subsequent lectures.

III

TOWARDS INTERIOR TERRITORY

It would be useful to summarize the point at which we have arrived. We have surely come a long way ... all the way from the Miocene - from our effective exploitation of stone technology in the savanna to our contemporary victimization by the built-in obsolescence of our present technology. We have the irony that we build for planned obsolescence and we suddenly find it built into ourselves. Whether we have come as far in our understanding of the issues before us is another question. Our overall object here is to try to get some idea of a "coherent design for living" within which both the generations and the various cultures now existent within this small if good earth might be satisfactorily integrated. We remember Erikson's specific phrasing - "all cultures, even the most 'savage,' must strive for what we (psychoanalysts) vaguely call a 'strong ego,' that is, an individual core (in at least a majority of their members) firm and flexible enough to reconcile the necessary contradictions in any human organization, to integrate individual (and generational differences), and above all to emerge from a long and unavoidably fearful infancy with a sense of identity and an idea of integrity."

Since in this lecture I will be referring periodically to our reading in Erikson, I ought to say something about the psycho-analytic, neo-Freudian point of view. The neo-Freudian point of view may be distinguished from the Freudian point of view, as Erikson views it, in that it is principally concerned with problems of identity formation rather than in problems of sexuality. Also, rather than being principally concerned with the life history and family romance of the individual patient — as something suigeneris, and usually the Freudian patient was sui generis to a fault - greater attempt is made, as we see in Erikson, to relate the patient's problems to society's problems and to see the way in which society both alleviates and exacerbates infantile anxieties. The emphasis is still upon the crucial nature of the experiences of the very young.

Now we must recognize that for many Freudianism by another name is still not fit meat! Most of us have something we might call the Nietzsche cum Ayn Rand cum Jacqueline Susann philosophy in us, admiring, perhaps grudgingly, the predatory male imperiously subjecting nature and women to his will. Freud is too vegetarian for the primate carnivores - too contemplative - too concerned with the other point of view. Behavioristic psychology relishes the attack upon the mythology of psychoanalysis - the maudlin morality play of id, ego, and superego. In fact, psychoanalysis as science often expresses its insights in recondite or indirect phrases. It often seems to have its interpretations both ways. It's casual about verification. But then, no very good argument can be made for behaviorism as social science - that is, as a technique for bringing us passably close to the real dimensions of human experience.

What I think we have in the psychoanalytic view is an attempt based on painfully close study of people in struggle and flight - not rats or pigeons - to contribute to understanding of the tangled life of the mind, swamped as it is, perhaps even that of the predatory male, with many contradictory emotions. Psychoanalysis, it is well argued, continues in its way the ancient and honorable demand made upon all men of the West - "know thyself." It demands, as Erikson phrases it, "introspective honesty in the service of self-enlightenment." In that sense, though afflicted perhaps with chimeras and a too self-indulgent vocabulary, psychoanalysis is a noble calling. Freud, Freudianism, and neo-Freudianism are important parts of a revolution in human consciousness in which self-conscious man is the "measure of all things." And perhaps it is this revolution alone that can save us from the terrifying prospect of unregenerate primate imperatives monkeying around in the nuclear age. Out of self-enlightenment if out of nothing else can come an enlightened age. This revolution, for one thing, can save us from the frequent attempts of demagogues, using the media now available to them, to play upon our primordial anxieties, whether they be those of helpless infancy or of that puny and weak condition of ancient savanna days.

In reading Erikson, we were speaking to this yesterday, we get an idea of what subtle things may be occurring in rituals, whether the sun dance of the Sioux or the salmon increase ceremonies of the Yurok; and we see how out of the rituals themselves there emerges a coherence and integrity in world view which is deeply satisfying beyond the sheer interest of the events themselves. To this point we have regarded rites of passage as means by which men are passed along from one stage in life to another and we have suggested that without such dramatic markers most men are helpless to do this satisfactorily for themselves.

We have also tried, more in accord with Erikson's emphasis, to demonstrate that rites of passage and particularly those stressing the passage from youth to adulthood almost always attempt to deal with that basic primate contradiction - the conflict between the maternal bond, the mother-son bond, and the paternal bond, which is in the end the male bond. Erikson, out of his recognition of childhood as an "arsenal of irrational fears" and polarities with which all societies must deal, well recognizes that function of ritual. We have identified one polarity: that of male and female values. But it is not the only polarity. For Trust, Autonomy, Initiative, Industry, Identity, Intimacy, Generativity, and Integrity are not, after all, perfectly compatible modes in the maturation process. They exert contradictory claims upon us. But more of that later.

I want here to get some closer look at certain of these generalizations. I have rather sweepingly asserted that the purposes of initiatory rites of passage were to establish the claim of the male bond over that of the mother-child bond. By no means, however, can this view be put forth without contest in anthropology. I would like to more clearly distinguish the two competing points of view put forth on this matter by anthropologists with a psychological orientation. The one argument is pretty much as I have given it here, and suggests that the function of male initiation ceremonies is to dramatize the desirable characteristics of the male role and at the same time, and thereby, incorporate the young into the adult male solidarity group. The other argument concentrates on the nature of the mother-child bond and argues that inevitably in societies in which there is long nurturance of the infant an intimacy and a primary sense of identification will be created between mother and son which would be inappropriate in adult life unless redirected by one ritual or another.

Another factor must be considered. The fact that the growing child sees that his father and his father's male peers exact rights and privileges in the world that his mother and females do not enjoy creates a secondary identification which competes with the primary one. Initiatory rites of passage then are directed primarily to the resolution of these hostilities and these dilemmas, and not to the creation of a male solidarity group. I am afraid that to those with no experience of the simpler societies all this may come down to the difference between tweedle mum and tweedle dad, but I want to assure you that rites of passage loom so central in these societies and their variety is so great among the world cultures that we cannot be sure of our interpretation - hence the debate.

There is another generalization that has been emerging in our discussion, to which I want briefly to give closer scrutiny. That is the view that mothers as females have one characteristic set of values and fathers as males have another set of values ... in short, masculinity and femininity the world over have their characteristic values. Since our talk here is drawn up from the male point of view - an inescapable perspective in anything done on the Hanover Plain - we may be rightly suspected of a chauvinism in this matter. Margaret Mead has argued in a famous book, Maleand Female, that sex roles are not tied down to physiology, to nature in any important way, but are highly plastic and subject to substantial nurturing by culture. She shows effectively, what every anthropologist is bound to admit, that there is a good deal of malleability in this regard. At the same time, she does not convince us - as promethean in her own right as she is, stepping without impediment through the realms of both male and female culture - that the flexibility is total. Something emanating from differing natures remains, making for two different perspectives in every child's upbringing and two different value perspectives in every culture ... perspectives with which that culture has to contend in the interest of its overall integration.

There is another difficulty involved in talking about values - and that arises out of the distinction between ideal and operational values: the values men declare they adhere to and the values they actually adhere to when they are called upon to act. It is perhaps the difference between platitudes and attitudes. There is some data to suggest that though men and women declare quite contrasting values, in matters of social action, however, each moves as if it held the values of the other. Let me quote some appropriate passages from a community study in suburban Toronto called Crestwood Heights which has been discussed widely in this respect.

... For the women ... the supreme value is the happiness and well-being of the individual, which taken in its immediacy determines day-to-day policy. Does a general rule press heavily on a given child? Then the child ought to have special support, or an exception to the rule should be made or the rule should be amended or abolished. The particular, the unique, the special, the case, the individual is both the focus of concern and the touchstone of policy. The institutional regularities are seen rather as obstacles than as aids to the achievement of the good life.

...The men have a firm hold on the other horn of what is cast by both sides as a dilemma. For them generally, the organization, the business, the institution, the activity, the group, the club, the rules, the law are the focus of loyalty... the 'army' comes clearly before 'the soldier' and indeed without it there will be no soldier. If the individual will learn to fit into the going institution, he will find therein whatever field of expression and achievement it is proper and permissible for him to have.

These primary orientations which lie at the level of thought and feeling and expression, are, curiously, contradicted by each sex in its role as 'operator.' The men, who allege the supremacy of the organization, the collective, are the practitioners of skills which rest, consciously or not, upon contrary beliefs. They bring to rare perfection and are secretly (within or between themselves) proud of those arts of interpersonal manipulation that are intended to make the organization work to the benefit of a particular individual. ...

The women, on the contrary, who allege the supremacy of the individual notably act in groups to persuade or coerce individuals into making changes in the conditions of group life, for example, a change in a norm system or activity. It is they who, instead of taking direct individual-to-individual action, organize, work in concert, know and use the techniques of group pressure, and so secure alteration in the circumstances of the group. ... For the women, the preoccupation with the good of the individual in allits immediacy is indeed paramount; it organizes thought and feeling and perception. No less genuine is the male attachment tothe welfare of the organization. It is only that each sex, in action,moves as it would logically be expected to move if it held theideology of the other.

The paradigm which these authors give us is this: whereas men by ideology are collectivist, voluntarist, immutabilist and rationalist, in action they are individualist, determinist, perfectionist and emotionalist. Women reverse these propensities.

The fact of the matter is, when discussing values, that what men preach may be in any society in substantial contrast with what they practice. It is almost as if men compensate in preaching for what they do in practice, or compensate in action for the values they adhere to ideally. But even more, in a pluralistic world such as our own in which there are many available contrary values, perhaps men incline to balancing their allegiance to them so as to retain, at once their flexibility and their sense of broad- mindedness. Some they choose to profess and others to practice - yet others they hold in abeyance for proper future use. Men are more complicated in this respect than the ten commandments make them out to be. While the difference between what Lyndon Johnson said about Vietnam to us here in New Hampshire in 1964 and what he did about it in 1966 might incline us to call him a liar or a hypocrite, I would adhere to the former explanation; that is, he adheres professedly to one set of values and acts on another. Perhaps one should say of Texans as of Teddy Roosevelt that they speak softly, i.e. they profess one set of values, but carry and use a big stick, i.e. they act on another set of values. Or perhaps one might say that in 1964 LBJ was talking to the female electorate of both sexes while in 1966 he was acting in the interest as perceived by him of the male solidarity group.

Whatever may be said of Lyndon Johnson, the widespread occurrence of values for professing and values for acting in American life has seemed to young people a hypocrisy, and something which they hold against the older generation. Some of them seem to realize that in a complex society with many different values available it is difficult to escape such multivalence. They have sought a return to the communal life of the simpler societies where one set of values might prevail in word and deed. For simpler cultures such as that of Ishi or the Yurok have, as Erikson says, "a simple integrity and cultural homogeneity we might well envy." Whether we can all effectively return to these societies is quite another question, as is the question of establishing, even there, utter consistency among our values.

What I hope that all this discussion of male-female values is suggesting is that what we mean by growing up is entering into a dialogue between the rather different values of one's male and female parents. These would be not only the values they profess, but the values they act on and, what may be a third thing altogether, the values they provoke in us. If this dialogue is not satisfactorily carried forth, then we have an identity problem and an exasperated generational conflict. Let us be clear that the consequences of dialogue do not have to be absolutism in one's perspective ... its most satisfactory consequences would seem to be a sharing of perspectives. Perhaps overidentification with one or the other parent is one of the great pitfalls!

While we have been concerned to document the values of maleness and femaleness we have still not, I think, gotten an adequate idea of the differences in value orientation which may prevail between cultures, although in our readings on the Yurok and the Sioux, the Bororo, the Caduveo, the Nambikware, the Brazilian, the Portuguese, the French, the Americans, and Ishi's Yahi, we see these differences in values. We see Erikson detail the centrifugality in the Sioux world view and the way in which mothers encourage in their sons an aggressive exploitativeness as regards the space outside the camp. With the Yurok, on the contrary, we see centripetality in values, the way in which the salmon dances in that universe on the Klamath combine with child raising to teach conservation and a universe-respecting life within that homeland. We recognize, when we think about the Yurok and the Sioux, that Americans' values have long been more like the Sioux, centrifugal, and we reflect perhaps that more Yurokian centripetality is called for!

Anthropologists have drawn up a simple pedagogic scheme of value orientations based on the kinds of answers various cultures give to life's basic questions. Let's list the scheme here and add to it these notions of centrifugality and centripetality:

What is man's relations to space? Centrifugal — nomadic - centripetal.

What is man's relation to nature? Over nature - in nature - under nature.

What is man's fundamental nature? Good - good and bad - bad.

What is man's place in time? Past - present - future.

What is man's relation to his fellow man? Individualistic reclusive - lineal exclusive - collateral inclusive.

What is the valued mode of personality? Being — beinginbecoming — doing.

One may deny that the diversity of values in human cultures can all be summarized as responses to six basic questions — or that all men ask these questions of existence. One may also be skeptical that the three neat responses to each question conform to the reality. But the chart gives us a better grasp of what risks being an elusive discussion.

In considering some of the basic questions that all cultures must ask of existence we have perhaps overlooked the most basic of all: the question that subsumes the rest. Who are you? Who am I? It is the question almost stridently put forth by this new radical generation towards those over thirty. Who are you that we should be so mindful of you, they ask with more than a touch of hubris? In psychoanalysis it is the concern with identity which has replaced the study of various impeding practices! For while Freud had the problem of dealing with people who knew who they were or wanted to be but suffered some kind of fetishistic or hysteric impediment to becoming it, the neo-Freudian fraternity now faces people who are not particularly hung up by one peculiar practice or another but who really don't know what they want to be ... except to be someone with "ego-integrity"!

But what, then, is identity? To define it in its most perfect form as ego-integrity can hardly satisfy us unless we have carefully followed Erikson through the developmental cycle of the eight stages of man, and have seen how the accumulation of basic trust, autonomy, initiative, industry, identity, intimacy, and generativity finally result in that wisdom of the body, of the self, and of society which is "ego-integrity."

Of identity I want to say only that, as I see it, it is composed of recognition and of positive engagement. By recognition we mean that one has a sense of being visible to the eyes of meaningful others whom we value and who value us for what we are and what we do. By positive engagement we mean that what one is doing in life is to some degree a successful and productive and hence satisfying response to the challenges of one's social and cultural environment. It is positive engagement because what one is doing in some way fulfills what one thinks is valuable. Nothing shakes one's sense of identity more than to find oneself engaged in works which are in the final analysis paltry and of little worth.

But the problem of identity may well go beyond recognition and engagement. Erikson argues that the final sense of identity, which is ego-integrity, can only be obtained if one's early training is well synchronized with what one values and does in the adult world. Is it this kind of ego-integrity that our young are searching for? It is a strange thing that out of the training our young people have experienced these decades they have so often come to a sense of self, of values, which is so incompatible, so unsynchronized, with what our adult world wants to recognize in them. Is it that we have taught them one set of values to which in our ultimate selves we adhere - not recognizing that we were operating on another set of values? Is part of the shock in the contemporary generation gap the discovery that our young refuse any positive engagement on the basis of the divided self of final values and operational values? Is this the shock of discovering that they want to operationalize final values... that they want us to face completely what we have only admitted as a part of ourselves?

We have got to be coming again to our conclusion and to do so I am going to take a crack at the identity problem, not of Erikson's American Everyman, nor even of Every Undergraduate, but of some of the most grating but also some of the most articulate young people who have been confronting us in academia in recent years. I want to make clear I am not speaking of every undergraduate, for the majority of our students still are passing through here on their way to adult life without abrasively affronting us or challenging us with those hypocrisies elder generations, they claim, have laid upon them. It is true, as our ROTC referendum last spring indicated, that a great many of these who pass through quietly can be aroused to sympathy with our rebels. The number, in any case, is not so small that we cannot identify a type of young person who has provoked us all and whose provocation we are beginning to understand. Since, it seems to me, that the generation gap is primarily a product of what has happened to young people in their upbringing - that is, what has happened to them all along in relationship to the elder generation - I am going to follow Erikson's stages and put their gripe in his language, which is not too different from theirs. I say gripe, although we know that it has often gotten a good deal stronger than that, because partially these young people are taking advantage of an American tradition of protest, and because partially we do not generally see an ideological or political framework to what they say. But the critique is a profound gripe... of the kind we cannot ignore as we ignore youthful high jinks! Despite all the anarchistic enthusiasms that accompany it, it has a deep virtue... an ultimate insight that one part of-our value system cannot fail to respond to.

Their testimony might run, I think, something like this:

"We basically mistrust the society that you would have us join for it is driven by a mad momentum of consumption and accumulation and seems committed to spirals of ever more suffocating and life-denying armaments. Its hopes in the preservation of its privileges have little grandeur and its shallow faith is invested in petty readjustments and temporizing whose interest is increasing frustration for all. We are in doubt that the autonomy allowed the individual leads to anything more than alienation and isolation, for the will power of men in the use of their own internal resources is subverted by the blandishments of media which pander to their most unreflective selves. The initiative you ask us to show in the service of such a society fills us with guilt, for we believe the direction of this society is towards greater dehumanization and its purposes are self-serving. You ask us to show industry and competence, but industry whose consequences can only be material accumulation and a competence in the manipulation of abstractions - numbers, statistics, charts, schemes, models and other intellectual humbugs which are irrelevant and skeletonize the realities of human experience. You hope that we will have a solid identity and a sense of devotion and fidelity to others and we will manage to achieve that, despite the fact that the corporate mobility of American life has moved us about so often in our youth that we had little opportunity to build devotions and fidelities in any community or even in our own nuclear families, isolated as these have always been from all others who are our relatives. The intimacies we practice and which tend to shock you will prevail against the anxious and restraining puritanism of you elders who have always postponed everything but material pleasures for dubious future profits, but at the same time have not hesitated to impose upon the sanctity of the home for career purposes. And our intimacies will prevail against those guilts within you that so often have nothing but painful personal consequences... and so rarely lead to an expiation which illuminates your fellows. It will prevail against the inability to demonstrate affection except by the gift of goods! And in any case our devotion and affiliation will not be confined to any national boundaries and tribal loyalties and enthusiasms. We will love mankind. We will bring up children who will renounce accumulation for accumulation's sake and who will produce, taking only what they need and otherwise for the good of mankind. Their wisdom will lie in contemplations and not in the strategic thinking of the frenzied rush of organizational life."

Such a testimony of the search for integrity which I have presented here is clearly a clarion call to light out for the territories - for interior territories where our values lie. It is not a lighting out, except in a curious symbolic sense which we will examine, for the Indian territories of old, those territories- which have provoked in us an imperative for such a long portion of our history. In the next lecture I want to discuss that lighting out under the title Revitalization. For such a testimony, if I have got it at all right, clearly cries out for drastic reinvigoration ... revitalization of the way of life that the young are at the point of having passed on to them from their elders. Much of what we classify as revolution in the young might better be understood, in the absence of strict politics and ideology, I suggest, as revitalization. And we will want to see in what way that process of revitalization reconciles, if it does reconcile, the contradictions youth feels so painfully present in us! Can they, in all their passionate intensity, find a center that will hold - restore to us our ceremonies of innocence? Or, will they release more anarchy upon the world?

IV

REVITALIZATION

A Lecture to Indian Youth & Any Others

We have suffered in these first three lectures from a whole quiver of slings and arrows: our primate antecedents, our outrageous obsolescence, motherpie and applehood, the cruel sense of interior contradictions, and finally as a summary of all this, the impertinent testimony of a conjectured contemporary undergraduate expressing all the failure of expectation - the enervation which youth feels in our way of life. Abandon hope therefore all ye who enter Alumni College. Prepare to meet thy offspring.

Can we draw enough perspective from the well of anthropology to turn the corner a bit - if not towards optimism at least towards a sense of culture history and philosophy that will enable us to grapple with these issues with less crippling self-blame? When all our hopes collapse around us - and what greater hope in man than in the next generation - we must remember what Cassius said to the elder Brutus on the impending news of the collapse of his army before the youthful Marc Antony: "Of your anthropology you make no use if you give thus place to accidental evils." The printed text reads philosophy rather than anthropology but I believe that may. be an error in transcription of Shakespeare's real thought on what the proper discipline is for men who are, as are we, "sick of many griefs."

Actually we have the fortune or misfortune to be living through the latest of a periodic occurrence in human affairs which we anthropologists call Revitalization. Periodically in the affairs of mankind, or more accurately in the affairs of particular cultures, a deep and pervasive feeling takes root in which the best of men do lose their conviction and in which the most intense are required by nature to cry out "how weary flat stale and unprofitable are to us all the uses of this world." A sense of decadence is widely experienced. The established order is felt to be corrupt beyond correction and beyond redemption by any available political means of reform. Unless some regeneration, some revitalization, is accomplished impending doom is forecast. Under such conditions of felt decadence and impending doom, and in the presence of charismatic individuals who can communicate to their fellow men the desperation of their lot, we get a "great awakening" - men are revitalized and obtain a new sense of their own visibility and a new sense of positive engagement with the world.

When I use the phrase Great Awakening we should be put in mind of that violent outpouring of emotion and the mass conversions to a new order in man's relationship to God and his fellow man that took place in the 1730's down this selfsame Connecticut valley. It took place in Northampton under the ministry of Jonathan Edwards, America's greatest puritan theologian. Edwards terrorized his congregations by preaching decadence and impending doom. A colleague of mine at Smith College working in the local documents of the period has pointed out to me how this Great Awakening was energized and how Edwards himself was pushed beyond his own sense of measure by the youthful elements in his congregation. These same youthful elements produced excesses and civil disorders beyond the religious conversions and changed the lives of the congregation. It seems arguable that in these youthful elements lay the sources, as in our youthful elemnts, of the feelings of decadence and doom so well articulated by Edwards himself, then in his thirties. Almost always in these revitalization movements we find adults appearing out of a variety of motives to give voice to the disgruntlement of youth, perhaps out of nostalgia for a lost innocence or deep perturbation over the inevitable compromises of adult life. Or perhaps they are prompted by the simple feeling that the young are right - conditions are damnable and must be reformed.

Here historians would help us to get a feeling for the periodicity of this kind of phenomena. Since the revitalization with which we are presently contending is a youth movement and largely, at least as far as the point of the wedge is concerned, a student movement, a compendium to be recommended is Lewis Feuer's The Conflict of Generations, The Character and Significance of Student Movements. Feuer's exhaustive treatment shows us the antecedents to Columbia, Berkeley, and our own Parkhurst. He discusses the Burschenschaften in Germany and the Bakuninite back-to-the-people movements in Russia in the 19th century. The same phenomena appear in China and Japan in the 20th century. We are presented with totalitarian student movements in Germany and France in the late twenties and thirties which perfected the non-negotiable demand and the suppression of unwelcome opinions. Feuer dwells overly much on the irrationality and self-destructive and self-indulgent aspects of these movements; and though he sees some benefit arising from their idealistic self-abnegation - for almost never are these movements out for personal gain, and this is of course why we experience such a moral dilemma in handling them — he feels on balance that they add to the injustice in the world rather than diminish it.

I want to return to what anthropology can tell us about all this. We suspect that in human affairs as in the affairs of the individual organism there is almost inevitably a periodic running down, a feeling of not being satisfactorily engaged or properly responsive to the challenges of the situation - a feeling of being committed to things which are leading to undesirable consequences. On the organismic level no matter how well articulated each of us may be, in general, with our situation we all periodically feel the need to be revitalized - to be restored to a meaningful engagement with our fellows and with our life. While physiologically we can give some chemical account of what is happening to a tired organism which has lost its sense of effective engagement (though of course a depressed sense about the "uses of this life" may have no identifiable physiological source), it is a much more difficult thing to account for the elements that build up in society and seem to call out for revitalization. The organic analogy can carry us only so far. New ideas and new visions grow stale, of course, and the enthusiasms of embarkation rapidly give way to the ennui of the middle passage. All societies, or practically all, possess goals for themselves and have ideas of their proper state that exceed their capacities to realize. Moreover all societies are afflicted to varying degrees with contradictions in values, as I have tried to suggest. They find themselves in circumstances such as Vietnam which cause them to betray their most serious convictions. For nothing is more true in human nature than that the circumstances in which men place themselves cause them to betray their most serious convictions.

While young people of one generation manage to accept, or are more "realistic" about, the failures to achieve visions, the inevitable contradictions and the betrayal of the most serious convictions, other generations are not. They are either unable to make these compromises or have the contradictions and the failures pointed up for them by an event, like Vietnam or the economic misery in Germany after the first World War, which "de-authorizes" the adult generations. Abrasiveness develops in the young and eventually an outrage which, feeding on both the persistent generational antagonism and a disinterested idealism, can result in the most tenacious kind of passive resistance or spontaneous and self-defeating violence.

The youthful thrust towards revitalization then arises on the frontier between the generations and in the misunderstandings and deceptions characteristic of that frontier. But it also occurs, and this is the classic case in anthropology, on the frontiers between cultures — in the clash of cultures as we have long called it. We find such revitalization movements occurring with great frequency in the last several hundred years as the various small and backward cultures of the world have been confronted with the juggernaut of industrial civilization. For the members of many of these conquered cultures have been unwilling or unable to live, as Ishi was forced to do, in two worlds. Faced with contradictions in values between traditional ways and the new ways of bureaucracy and technology, they have sought to revitalize. Faced with the fact that their old valued ways of behaving no longer seem to be leading to satisfaction, and feeling that the actions which go with the new values are uncomfortable, they strike out and try to create a new world within which they can become recognized and positively engaged.

We have many examples in the anthropological literature - the "terre sans mal" movements in South America, the Cargo cults in New Guinea, the Holy Water movements or the Cattle Killing movements in Africa. It would be a mistake, however, to think that revitalization gains its meanings only from these exotic episodes in western expansion. Christianity itself fits quite well the model we have in mind - a revitalization movement led by a great prophet who proposed new values and a new sense of man's place in the world - a prophet who was operating on the frontier between Roman Hellenism and the Hebraic tradition and who sought amidst those conflicts in value a new synthesis.

Revitalization movements then - though usually not a characteristic of the isolated simpler societies where rebirth is handled and institutionalized by ritual means - have been a noticeable characteristic both of cultures in contact and conflict with the west and of pluralistic societies where youth searching for identity are able to hold contradictions in values against their elders. And it is in this sense that I have wanted to suggest the similarities in that relationship between western cultures and the simpler cultures upon which they are imposing and the relationship between adult western culture and its own youth culture upon which it is inevitably imposing. Accordingly it is not surprising that many of the revitalization movements among our youth pay homage to or adopt something of the dress of the American Indian.

To better illustrate the nature of revitalization I want to discuss some examples of it among the American Indians. The first of these movements, the religion of Handsome Lake among the Burnt Lodge Iroquois of western New York State represents the most realistic attempt to cope with the civilized life being imposed upon the Eastern Woodlands Indians at the end of the 18th century. At the same time it attempted to preserve the virtues of old stock Iroquois culture. This difficult syncretism of two alien cultures was accomplished in the visions and subsequent ministry of the Seneca called Handsome Lake.

In the forenoon of a perfectly clear day, June 15, 1799, Handsome Lake awoke from a two-hour trance and a long illness, the product of a dissolute life. His people had taken the losing sides in two wars. They had lost most of their lands. They found their hunting restricted and themselves confined to an effeminate agriculture. The young were in constant turmoil. Burnt Lodge was a drunken and dissolute Indian village, though Quakers had been at work there more than a decade trying to inculcate piety, sobriety, and industry. There can be no doubt that Handsome Lake's visions that afternoon corresponded as much to Quaker influence as to his own progressive dissolution. The spirits of his visions enjoined an end to drink and a commitment to agriculture, the rejection of native witchcraft, but the preservation of traditional seasonal ceremonies. Subsequently Handsome Lake gained the support of the Quakers in his evangelization, undertaken primarily among the young, and the applause of the American government for his stabilizing effect on the frontier. He died in 1815. But the "Good Message" religion of Handsome Lake is still active among the Iroquois - in origin syncretist it has continued to prove adaptive - and in this it has outlived its visionary phase.

It may have been that in the 18th century it still appeared possible to the American Indian to make some kind of accommodation and compromise with white man's civilization. They could then still hope to forestall the English by siding with the French — or forestall the Americans by siding with the English. We do not find an enduring illusion of this kind in the 19th century. At least we do not find it reflected in the revitalization movements of this century. They are apocalyptic in character and will only settle for the disappearance of the whites and their culture. By the 19th century the Indians had a common plight regardless of tribe, and revitalization movements of the period are pan-tribal spreading thousands of miles from their place of origin.

This is true of the Ghost Dance which first appeared in 1870 and in revised form again in 1890, both times among the Paviotso and the Paiute of Mason Valley on the California-Nevada border south of Reno. It spread by means of apostles and delegations all the way across to Indian reservations in western New York State. The Ghost Dance with its emphasis upon the elimination of the whites and a return to the paradise lost — the buffaloed plains, the forests full of game — was, in respect to the expanding claims of the white man, a passive movement dependent upon magical means. Its efficacy was felt to lie in the contagious rites of the dances themselves. But it had had its more aggressive predecessors who sought millenarian ends by inter-tribal confederation and warfare - movements which were led by charismatic figures, messiahs, whose resistance to the white and whose qualities of mind and character are still admired: Pontiac among the Algonquin; Tecumseh among the Shawnees, the Wyandotes and the Delawares; Kanakuk among the Kickapoos; Petalasheroo among the Pawnee; Sitting Bull among the Sioux.

The organizational abilities and political capacities of these early 19th century Indian leaders were blocked by the inevitable defeats and endless frustrations. As a result the Indian leaders of revitalization movements in the last half of the century poised their prophesies on magical and mystical claims. History had taught them that no amount of organizational skill or political astuteness could withstand the white man. They turned away as Handsome Lake or Tecumseh never did from the practical obligations to implement their visions. They became dreamers.

Out of the energy released in the Ghost Dance was to be created a new and benevolent cosmos. The degeneracy into which Indian culture had fallen was to be cured - the presence of the white man was to be danced away. And the Indians in the three years after 1890 danced with vertiginous enthusiasm. It was not clear to the settlers that this was not a war dance preparing revolt - though its eventual object, of course, was to do them in just the same. The settlers clamored for the army, and military reconnaissance of the Sioux reservation in South Dakota led to a misunderstanding, an outbreak and the massacre of the Indians at Wounded Knee in the winter of 1891.

After 1890 spring followed succeeding spring - the ghosts of the ancestors did not appear in a blinding haze, the buffalo did not return, the whites did not vanish, and disillusion with the Ghost Dance spread. Further delegations were sent to Wavoko in Nevada who, reversing himself, compromised his original augeries. Finally an Arapaho from Anadarko reservation in Oklahoma visited him in his sweat lodge and concluded from the garbled conversation therein that he was a fraud.

Other more modest forms of revitalization have persisted however; for example, the Earth Lodge cult and especially the pan-tribal Peyote cult of which there has been so much discussion in recent years. The Peyote cult - the alkaloid stimulant Peyote, was frequently eaten in the Ghost Dance too - has today organized as the "Association of Mescal Bean Eaters" calling itself the NativeAmerican Church. It continues to make a millenarian promise, "when all Indians have eaten peyote God will make the world over."

As I suggested, revitalization movements are by no means limited to situations of colonization and culture contact. They also appear among the various strata, regions, and ethnic and racial sub-cultures of complex societies. It is of interest that Mooney in his study of the Ghost Dance notes the degree to which the Mormons in Utah cooperated with this curious messianic quest in its 1890 version. In fact it appears that many Mormons joined the Ghost Dance cult claiming that its millenarian promise held much in common with the visions of Joseph Smith. By implication - and with the help of the lost tribes theory — Wovoka could be identified with the messiah whose coming was predicted by Smith for his 85th year of age - 1890.

What this strange spark of recognition jumping across the gap between Indian and Mormon reminds us of, as does that same spark between the American Indian and American youth, is the similarity between revitalization movements regardless of the cultural, historical, and social roots from which they spring. There is, in all these movements, a posture of non-acceptance, a common quest for deliverance from intolerable contradictions and injustices in the society in which men and usually youthful men find themselves.

Perhaps our youth blame us rightly for the plight of the American Indian. Have we sufficiently reexamined the "manifest destiny" that lies behind that plight as it may well lie behind our plight in Vietnam. In any case, we now see clearly the inhumanity in the way our forebears treated Ishi's people until they were entirely eradicated. And perhaps Dartmouth people particularly are sensitive to the historic irony that one consequence of setting up an institution to minister to the Abenaki Indians in the late 18th century is the fact that 200 years later the objects of this devotion have entirely disappeared, except for some few in Canada.

We have here the irony that so strikes Levi-Strauss. We only enter into meaningful dialogue with other cultures when they are far gone or virtually defunct. When they are at the height of their powers we have little appreciation for them as we are at that point involved in a struggle with them for territorial domination and seek to understand them not for what they are but the better to defeat them. And it is thus only now - when that entropic process which Levi-Strauss describes, that process which is slowly reducing the complexities of world cultures to a common, very common, denominator - that we begin to appreciate the vast range of cultures that represent the Indian experience in the Americas.

The effects of revitalization upon our own society are quite another question. For in this process, largely energized by youth, viable cultures - even complex cultures like our own - can either be restored to their former commitments or they can be brought to consider new values that might be more appropriate than the outmoded values they follow. The passionate intensities of revitalization movements can thus have the most positive consequences for any such culture. At the same time the seeds of excess can be found in revitalization movements along with these possibilities of more appropriate values. It is one thing to have visions of a better life, it is another thing to bring these visions into being without the help of the devil himself.

V

A FELLOWSHIP OF FLOWERS?

(Excerpts)

Lectures ago, in the early Pleistocene, we began with the primate patrimony. That influence keeps reasserting itself. But it is really the surpassingly human concern with values that we have tried to focus on here as we aim towards proposing what our author, Levi-Strauss, calls the unshakable basis of human society. Let us recollect that anthropological list of the basic questions that all cultures must ask of experience and see if we can phrase the changes of value many of us have felt needful.

Are not these necessary shifts of value quite obvious? In respect to man's relationship to space must we not shift from the centrifugality characteristic of us now to a more contained centripetality? In place of feeling that man in his relation to nature has been set over her to conquer her must we not come to a fuller appreciation of the fact that we live in nature. By a rather too easy interpretation, perhaps, of the religious traditions in which many of us were raised, we often accept fundamental evil in man. Perhaps this is a correct estimate of our incapacity to live up to our ideals, but if we are too burdened with our badness we tend to project it upon others. On the other hand, there is a shallow optimism in that part of American life that has no spiritual roots ... an optimism about man's goodness which is repeatedly defeated by the crudest kind of self-serving in the various marketplaces of our life. Must we not move to the view that man, that conflicted organism, is in a struggle between those portions of him which would act in very high enlightenment and those other portions of him which gravitate to dark and narrow-minded action?

Life is a phototopic process and men, combinations of good and bad, must struggle up towards enlightenment on feet which are made of a very dull clay. As to man's place in time, have we not too long dwelt in the past or in the present, must we not, if we are to avoid in any way the catastrophes that have been laid out for us in this Alumni College, think constantly of the future implications of all our actions: keep our eye upon and nourish those of our species who are or will be adapted to the environment of tomorrow rather than those who are so well adapted to the environment of the present or the primate past? It is just this unwillingness to contemplate the future implications of our presently increasing satisfactions that assures the future disasters we fear! This value also implies a much greater concern for the welfare of our children and our children's children than for ourselves.

As for the last two value orientations: it is not clear that we must move to a more collateral and inclusive sense of man's relationship to his fellow men, away from the individualistic or lineal relations of old? And as far as the valued mode of personality is concerned, is it not manifest that this doing emphasis of ours which has made of us the busybodies of the earth must be replaced by greater respect for what a person is apart from what he does - must not our emphasis here shift to being in becoming? And if we are to emphasize our being, it is rather more reflective creatures that we must become - more sensitive to those interior territories where values lie.

As we argue for this shift in values a curious sense of history rises again to our view - an insight into history as a dialectic or dialogue of values. Do we see this if we place our values in polar sets? (And we ask again if these have anything to do with the two bonds we - have discussed?)

love authority equality hierarchy emotion reason respect for humanity respect for law and spontaneity and order ties to the soil and mobility and domination participation in nature of nature contentment achievement

Is not history a surging back and forth between overcommitment to one or another set of values? Do not men inevitably overstate their allegiance to the values they have chosen to live by so that leaders and movements arise to bring us back to balance? Among us determined achievers there have appeared those whose bag is love, man, love and equality and spontaneity and participation and the contentment of the self being the self. Another portion of the old dialogue is reasserting itself!

No, Virginia, there are no absolute values for all times and places but simply values which are more appropriate for their times. No doubt that is troubling for we are a people used to receiving our values in packaged form on graven tablets! But surely, if we cannot take values on faith there must be some categorical imperatives we can hold to by reason. The imperatives we have from Kant would seem to hold up under the assault of most reasonable men - Act only as if your action were to be a universal law and would apply to you equally. Treat humanity always as an end and never as a means. We can accept these absolutes with the highest confidence, that to the degree to which they are observed the lot of us all will be improved. But I want to suggest another imperative - the "value-dialogue" imperative. It runs: converse with others with as great an interest in understanding the wisdom in their values as you have in making them understand the wisdom in your own.

Whether this is an imperative that will hold much sway in human affairs is another question. Naturally professors who are word-bearing animals, and who concede that all intellectual life is but a footnote to the Platonic Dialogues, can be expected to put forth value-dialogue as a panacea for world problems - a blueprint for generational peace in our time. But does not it have too much of the smell of sweetness and light - the odor of academia? Is it a tough enough technique for the harrowing age in which we live? It is certain that extended dialogue, observing the imperatives we have described, is one of the most difficult things imaginable in human affairs. Most of us, it seems, persist in practicing what Jean Piaget in studying the behavior of very young children called collective monologues.

In respect to the dialogue between generations it used to be possible to ignore its necessity - for by various kinds of tricks and needful mysteries usually contained in rites of passage the older generations could exact silence and spectatorship from the young. But we have given up these forms and we face the young, who always need reasons of some kind, without them. If not the reason in ritual - what? How can we afford not to engage them in dialogue, continuing to insist in an ancient way that they are incapable of understanding, when in fact the educa- tional process is ever more precocious! When in fact a greater and greater portion of the general population are the young! When in fact the rapid turnover in technology means that it is increasingly they who have the resilience and the competence to be relevant! When in fact our obsolescence is in need of their vitality and our wisdom of their intelligence! When in fact we have lost our optimism and are in deep search ourselves!

When in this connection we read the histories of some of the great families, I don't mean the great aristocratic families or the great wealthy families whose noblesseoblige or largesse oblige hold their generations together, but rather the families of modest means and social rank such as the James family, the Mills, the Bernoullis, and the Mendelssohns who maintain the most significant kind of scientific and mathematical and artistic output over three generations. In every case, though we see generational tension, it is an enlarging tension and we are acquainted in their lives with the most productive kind of intergenerational dialogue.

Thus you have before you one admittedly meager contribution and suggestion in face of the turmott we have experienced in our relations with other cultures and in our relations with our own youths. We can hardly have succeeded at Alumni College if the sum of its message is that "everything is to be endured and nothing to be done" - if we return home stilled to contemplation of the subtleties involved or stunned in perturbation over the disasters before us. Therefore this hopeful hortatory offering.

The value dialogue we propose may appear to be intrusive on the one hand and a simple palliative on the other. I say intrusive because so much of social life can be carried on the surface of things, by signs and signals and a minimal kind of deep communication. So often we live on by agreeing to disagree and accepting not to know. Some of the most fascinating data to come to us from those anthropologists doing work on non-verbal behavior concerns their work with couples in courtship and marriage. It is surprising how in married life most couples learn to live with a very minimum of meaningful verbal dialogue - an hour and a half a week I think is the figure. Courtship is a period of great dialogue, of course, as couples get to know each other. But if we see a sudden and very sharp increase of dialogue in a matured marriage these anthropologists tell us we can be sure that something is wrong and we are likely to be on the verge of a divorce.

I think we also ought to be aware that our emphasis on dialogue might from a contemporary radical perspective look like a palliative designed to maintain the present establishment and its intolerable management of our affairs. I have in mind a more meaningful dialogue in which both parties are subject to the critique of the other and to change by virtue of that critique. But a portion of our contemporary radicalism is so impelled by the ethical and idealistic spirit and works so entirely from what they regard as the purest compassion that dialogue seems a travesty in the face of the intensity of their vision. Much earlier, before such uncompromising conviction develops and as a part of the generational dialogue, we might try to point out how pure compassion pursued with utter devotion can yet result in increments of human suffering, despair, and chaos. If we would make this point effectively we must be ready, equally, to admit that the satiety of advanced age tends to obscure a live realization of the suffering of others. It tends to obscure the differences between platitudes and attitudes. It tends itself to deny the dialogue of values!

There remains now another radical perspective which doesn't see the world as composed of cultures with complementary structurings of the value elements of experience and which doesn't regard the generation conflict as a failure of dialogue. In this view the world is perfidiously divided into the exploited and the exploiters. This is a conflict model of reality rather than an accommodation model, as we call them in the social sciences. For much of its appeal we have only our materialism and acquisitiveness to blame. My own view is that the accommodation model which we have long practiced in this country holds the better promise and can have the greater appeal, particularly if it is enriched by the dialogue we recommend. But I raise here, at the end, the conflict model just to let you know that I am not so taken in by the fellowship of value-dialogue as to ignore the depressing fact of widespread muscle headedness! Such brute facts deserve five additional lectures if not a return to our beginnings! Thank your lucky stars that you are going to be spared that.

Professor James W. Fernandez

Alumni College students at a morning lecture.

Readings for Professor Fernandez's course were Childhood andSociety, E. Erikson; Triste Tropiques, Claude Levi-Strauss; and Ishi in Two Worlds, Theodora Kroeber.