When Mathew Ready Goodman died at 20, his father wrote:
Matty was essentially an unpolitical person; his absorbing intellectual interest was in sciences — in which he had gifts, and he wanted to live and let live in a community of friends — at which he remarkably succeeded. Nevertheless, he was continually engaged in political actions, against war and irrational authority.
Matty’s father, Paul Goodman, was part of the counterculture of the 1960s. Paul Goodman had a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He was also openly bisexual and an anarchist. He had problems holding academic positions. After spending most of his life on the margins, Paul Goodman wrote an influential book, Growing up Absurd. When someone asked him about why so many young people were becoming “delinquents” in the 1950s, Goodman suggested that it was the society that was off, not the young people. The system the kids were expected to conform to was the problem — not the kids.
Matty died in 1967 while climbing a mountain in New England. Paul Goodman said his son refused to register for the draft at 18. Matty lived his adult life illegally because he thought he had an obligation to resist “irrational authority.” Matty knew that, when the authorities came knocking, he was headed to prison or to Canada.
I find that phrase “irrational authority” haunting, given the failures of the current administration.
Authority that is not rational cannot be legitimate. That, in a nutshell, was the point that the authors of the Declaration of Independence were trying to get the authorities to see.
When a rogue government intrudes on the lives of its own people, it often does the most damage to the young.
• Source: Paul Goodman’s essay “A Young Pacifist” is in War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar & Peace Writing; New York: Library of America, 2016, pp. 432-43. The quotation is on p. 433. It’s here:
No comments:
Post a Comment