Day nursery of revolution

PERSONAL COLUMN DAVID MARTIN

Dr Martin is a Reader in the Department of Sociology at the LSE. This article is an abridged version of a chapter in a book which he is editing, 'Anarchy and Culture,' to be published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in the spring.

Ever since Imagination Seized Power in England's premier school of the social sciences the academics there have found that they barely experience any awareness of a change when they pass from home to work or from week to weekend. Previously a weekend with the children was very different from a week at the London School of Economics. At home the children were fascinating creatures, exposed to every irrational whim, quite amoral and charmingly spontaneous. One moment they would bury their heads in your bosom, the next beat you unmercifully between the eyes. Students, on the other hand, appeared as responsible adults, apparently well able to look after themselves without detailed supervision, and content with _reasonable fulfilments of academic duty. At home the children wanted to be loved; at university the students wanted to be taught. The transition from one to the other seemed clear.

Then quite suddenly all was changed. The facade of disciplined student endeavour was rolled away revealing an entirely new scenario in the making: the Houghton Street Day Nursery of Revolution. The young adults dis- appeared into the wings and in their place there entered a new set of fascinating creatures, quite amoral and alarmingly spontaneous, demand- ing at one moment to bury their heads in your bosom and the next beating you unmercifully between the eyes. The very revelation of this new scenario tore off the scales from the vision of the academics and achieved one major ob- jective of the revolution: the abolition of the difference between home and work, labour and leisure. The life of the academic became all of a piece: he just moved from one nursery to another.

Academics are by habit disinclined to believe their eyes, but a whole series of changes con- firmed this original impression. The first was a barefaced disregard for truth on the part of his charges. Whereas the adult student had always been slightly shamefaced about fabri- cation, the denizens of the Day Nursery of Revolution positively celebrated it. They claimed that 'the invention of truth' (their own phrase) was better than reality—as indeed it was. In their view the great defect of bourgeois science was that it could not make the truth up as it went along. The older type of student had only done this under pressure in examina- tions: he had hardly thought of making it the principle of scientific activity. It had not occurred to him that he was actually superior to the sordid requirements of mere objectivity and the heavy chains of bourgeois logic. But in the Nursery such things only weighed down the achievements of the Imagination. The child constructs his own world. Anyone who con- tradicts that world he treats with a knowing grin of superior ignorance.

Apart from the new-found power of fantasy, the Day Nursery revealed an incipient thug- gishness. It appeared that occupation was nine tenths of the law. Wants and demands varied violently from one moment to the next. Ego- centric autonomy coexisted with instant re- course to the maternal breast. Academics were required to be immediately available but not to interfere. To the students the Nursery was

their territory : there was no notion of neutral

space. All the toys and apparatus belonged to the children by absolute right and they might use them if and when they wanted : the adult world owed them not merely a living but a leisured existence. All adult rules were re- sented but no one doubted the adults would appear with the goodies when the proper time for them came around.

The main activity of the Nursery of Revo- lution was drama. In the darkest corner of the Nursery is to be found an Old Theatre, so called because the same childish scenes are re- enacted there year after year. There the children use their imaginations and play at revolution.

They never tire of these endless scenes and enormously prefer them to contact with the outside world.

Now that the principle and practice of the Nursery is so well established, the LSE aca-

demics naturally vary in their reaction: some, for example, are very reactionary indeed. Other academics have been so sheltered from reality by longish sojourn in the university that the Theatre of the Absurd does not strike them as in the least peculiar. This type of academic has the kind of centre which always has a soft spot for the wet left.

Yet other academics desperately wish to join again in the great dramas of youth. Some very

curious symptoms follow as a result. For ex- ample, they suffer acute confusion between paedogogy and paedophilia. To take another example, they become unable to distinguish between being lit-up and being enlightened. To join in the spontaneous life of the Nursery seems to provide the best guarantee against crabbed age and dull responsibility. They even develop a positive preference for ignorance and immaturity.

In a sense some academics discover in the Nursery a new version of in loco parentis.

Nevertheless, the role of the parent who indul-

gently eggs the children on to new forms of high-spirited and lovable mischief is not an

easy one. He is only really wanted when there is some danger the mischief will annoy the neighbours to the point where they will do something about it. Apart from this the 'old

boy' is dispensable. In any case the new ver- sion of in loco parentis is not really just what

the old academic might wish. The real desire is less for an indulgent parent than a kind of private tutor: the sort of hapless scholarly attendant who waits upon the impetuous whim of the young master. This may suggest a new interpretation of the famous remark, 'We must

educate our masters.' The Nursery is indeed gradually tnoving towards this particular revo- lutionary notion of the academic role: one student actually complained to me that after having got excited about a book he was unable to discuss it with his tutor for a whole week. The capacity of the Houghton Street Day Nursery of Revolution to create a reaction has already been referred to. Those who 'react' are known as 'reactionaries' and are the embodi- ment of Incarnate Evil. These people form the demonology of the Nursery. Ordinary nurseries are peopled by fairies, hobbits, elves, hobgoblins, trolls and so on. Students don't be- lieve in fairies, but they believe the evidence for demons is cumulative and irrefutable. Their world is peopled by monstrous creatures, such as governors, professors, politicians, bureaucrats, capitalists, journalists and so on, about whom they constantly claim to be 'frightened,' whose activities they refer to as 'sinister.' These creatures are believed to be about to hand them all over to be eaten by ogres in the Stock Exchange. All events in the outside world are explained in a few key formulae about the machinations of the demonic capitalists and bureaucrats: this childish gabble is most easily picked up by the bright as well as most quickly dropped by them.

Such explanations are basically not much superior to my son's explanation of why he gets up in the night: 'pink elephants are biting me.' Unfortunately, his formulae and theirs both take a considerable time to refute. On the other hand, they also believe the brutal bureaucratic trolls can be spirited out of existence by a single stroke of the- Imagina- tion: as one student stated. 'We have made the ruling classes tremble.' No wonder they claim imagination has seized power: not only has it seized power, it has—literally—run riot.

How do we explain the reappearance of the Nursery? Is infantile regression really a revo- lutionary threat? These questions prompt two further questions. The first concerns the way in which we treat people in the genuine nur- series at home, and also in the schools, the nurseries of future citizens. The second is whether our civilisation is so secure that wide- spread indulgence in the fantasies of childhood —maybe through a lifetime—is something it can withstand without breakdown.

In our society we have gained the kind of control over external necessities which can enable large sections of the community, especi- ally, of course, students, to maintain flights from reality over considerable periods of time. Not many of us are like the police or the army actually engaged on tasks at the frontiers of society where failure has serious consequences. To engage on collective tasks where there is risk provides a sharp check on fantasy.

This increased possibility of persistent infan- tilism is connected with the fact that a misread- ing of Freud has made us such timid parents that our children are under-socialised, inade- quately prepared for social realities. We are so afraid of making them conformists and so guilty about making them guilty that the process of socialisation has been inverted. The twentieth century has stood Freud on his head. It is the socialising agents—parents and teachers—who feel guilt.

Now there is a partial gain here: for previous generations education and upbringing was a form of over-kill. All contrary imaginations were crushed in order to prepare the young victims for a narrowing, limiting reality. Life was conceived as a relentless march, an inevit- able task. Now, however, the task-force has dis- appeared, the symbolic drill has dissolved into physical expression, and the march has become a ramble. The structure of grammar has dis- integrated into creative writing. The gain is more than the loss, but the loss is considerable, since not all of life can be a ramble, and, for those whose education suggests that it is, the reality principle can be staved off for a very long time. Moreover, life at a university requires the kind of self-discipline for which neither marches

nor rambles are adequate preparation. So much educational rambling is in any case partly an excuse for intellectual laziness and pedagogical sloppiness.

When we-define youth as automatically inno- cent and creative it obviously is difficult to make the transition from youth to adulthood

and responsibility. Who would want to exchange automatic innocence for automatic guilt, the right to blame freely for the right to be freely blamed? At the same time some minimal re- sponsibility is almost unavoidable and the first initiation into adulthood is often the arrival of children. When this happens the under-socialised parent is himself too frightened to socialise: the most he can accept is the role of elder brother, which enables him to retain the illusion that he is still not saddled with ultimate respon- sibility for what happens. The result is the ap- pearance of children who both demand to have real parents and who detest parents. And just as the initiation into responsibility of parenthood causes a trauma of withdrawal so does the initiation into concrete social respoh- sibilities. Thus the academic, faced with a posi- tion of responsibility, fears that he is at heart no longer a student, no longer the eager-eyed vanguard of the future. So he too steps aside and takes the role of the totally indulgent parent, seeing in each childish folly a new revelation of innocent creativity.

All these themes come to a focus in relation to the necessary forces of order in society and the psychology which must lie behind such forces—in any society. Nowadays the free-float- ing imagination of the student can coexist with the psychology of the task and—among the forces of order—the psychology of authority and obedience. In short the mentality of the police in any society is a vicarious sacrifice for the mentality of indulged creativity. And in our society we can actually afford more of the in- dulged creators. Nevertheless the possibility of the under-socialised student depends on the cer- tainty of the over-socialised policeman, not to mention the disciplined dedication of the teacher. It is precisely this symbiosis which can give rise to an extreme hatred between the two polar sections of society.

One final point: I have argued that student anarchism depends on the discipline of those who work, his disorder on the certainty that others will patrol the streets and maintain the law for him. He attacks paternalism in the sure and certain hope that permissive elders will con- tinue to act in loco parentis. This symbiosis tells us something about student rev, *utionary poten- tial. The antinomian heresy—'Do what thou wile—has never spawned a lasting revolution. A mixture of student aestheticism and theatric- ality is a much greater nuisance than it is a danger. The• social relationships of the nursery may be boring and infuriating but hardly a char- lenge to the adult world. The older style of re- volutionary disciplined himself and was cruelly anal in his irrevocable march towards a new society. He was_collectively his own police and army and a terrible job he made of it. But where he failed the political equivalent of a children's nature ramble is hardly likely to succeed.

The whole enterprise depends too much on what it pretends to overthrow. Or to put it another way: anarchism and vitalism are ex- cellent attitudes for social parasites but are not serious political philosophies. It is the Puritans who make revolutions, even in England. One need not worry too much about long-haired Cavaliers decked out in the trimmings of Car- naby Street.