ASPIRATIONS OF MODERN YOUTH
PROF.
K. VISWANATHAM
Andhra
University, Waltair
I
was amused by a cartoon which, not unjustly, sums up the attitude of youth
today: A father asks his son what he intends doing after completing his college
education. The son says unhesitatingly that he intends demanding his share of
the family property. There is defiance, disrespect, assertiveness. In the age
of the Hippics and the Beats and the Flower People and the Angry Young Men to
expect youth to be otherwise is to be blind to its urges and aspirations.
Aspirations of modern youth may be interpreted at a lower level as the desires
of youth for a well-furnished house, a good monthly income, spiritual and
aesthetic satisfaction in a picture house or a park or on the beach–a philistine
world of smug comfort confined to ‘my wife, my kids and self’ without any
control, not even parental. Or the word may connote a hunger for a
well-adjusted and deeply-satisfying world. It is in the latter sense that the
topic merits treatment, the divine discontent with things as they are, the
Shelleyan aspiration for
an
Isle under Ionian skies
Beautiful
as a wreck of Paradise.
The
aspirations of modern youth and their unrest are synonyms here. Unrest erupts
from a spiritual vacuum in the lives of well-fed people, from a material vacuum
in those of ill-fed people.
The
way of life of the older generation is laughed to scorn by modern youth. It is
said to be packed with hypocrisy, injustice, smugness, unawareness hardening
into callousness. The world was torn apart into two by the first World War and
the second as if by a violent earthquake. The old values are dead. Youth is
filled with anger, dissatisfaction, violence. The films it delights in, the
music it listens to, the books it reads or does not, the advertisements it
gapes at, the tight pants it bandages itself in, the marriages it contracts,
the way it walks in a street or boards a bus or behaves in a meeting or the
language it uses at home or in the college–are highly provocative, exciting,
unconventional. You find a contemptuous indifference to the rights of others,
to a tolerance of those rights. The very bases of civilized life are flouted
and Voltaire’s great cry is heard no more.
Eminent
educationists have analysed the unrest of youth and drawn up a list of hundred
and one factors like overcrowding in classrooms, lack of amenities, admission
to students whose fitness for higher studies is nil, lack of contact between
the teacher and the taught, uncreative education, the examination system, fewer
employment opportunities, education not being job-oriented, campus life being
bedevilled by conflicting political loyalties, etc., except the one thing we
are afraid of mentioning: lack of discipline, lack of respect for old values, a
spirit of irreverence. The Asokan edicts are a stony silence, MiJton’s
poem a dead letter and the word Guru has degenerated into the vocative case. If
there is discipline the hundred and one factors vanish into thin air. If lack
of recreational facilities is a factor, why is it the campus life in America
which has an abundance of amenities has erupted like a volcano?
These
eminent educationists are ready with hundred and one remedies
except the real one: firmness. We are afraid of confessing we have been cowards.
Parents, teachers and the Government are cowardly, weak-kneed, dilatory.
Strikes, demonstrations, processions, boycotts, gheraos–are the order of the
day and youth demands active participation in administration.
This is all absurd. You have to say with Prospero: My foot, my tutor.
School children become arbiters of the shape of things. Age has no value,
experience is meaningless, child is the Man and to adapt our saying, the egg
can laugh at the chick. Young men, writes Bacon, in the conduct and management
of business embrace more than they can hold, stir more than they can quiet, fly
to the end without considerations of means and degrees, pursue some few
principles which they have chanced upon absurdly; care not to innovate which
draws unknown inconveniences; use extreme remedies at first and that which
doubleth all errors, will not acknowledge or retract them; like an unread,
horse that will neither stop nor turn.
Anger
is a better word than aspiration; anger is the aspiration of modern youth. According
to Blake, anger is the sign of a healthy mind. Youth perhaps has been angry
throughout the ages. The old Elizabethan madrigal states this confrontation of
age and youth:
Crabbed
Age and Youth
Cannot
live together;
Youth
is hot and bold
Age
is weak and cold,
Youth
is wild, Age is tame
Age,
I do abhor thee,
Youth,
I do adore thee.
It makes one sad to read of the burning of the buses, the smashing of window panes, the destruction of public amenities, the use of violent language–by modern youth. Youth realizes little that when it burns public property, it burns common-sense, destroys reason, makes a bonfire of courtesy and tolerance. King Magnus tells Orinthia in Shaw’s play: “Without good manners human society is impossible and intolerable.” That was said in 1929. Since then society has chosen to get along, writes A. C. Ward, on a basis of bad manners in every walk of life from international politics to football. Bad manners in youth have the excuse of inexperience but what excuse have bad manners in adults? In august Councils and Parliaments the world over the so-called elected leaders of the people replace the mind by fisticuffs and use chairs as arguments; table-thumping is a syllogism and shouting reaches such a crescendo that Speakers adjourn the sessions. And when these bodies talk of affront to their dignity and prestige at some unpleasant comment, one is amused. Where are dignity and prestige? They set a vicious example to youth. And why blame youth? One of the disgusting flatteries of youth by depraved politicians is: You are the future citizens of the country, when it breaks bogies and burns laboratories.
A
recent news item states that in a single state in U. S. A. losses due to
window-breaking run into some crores. Even universities of prestige and name
like Oxford and Harvard are not secure. From China to Peru the university
campuses are on the rampage; riot police battle with militant students. That is
the only consolation to us (if it is any consolation) that the rest of the world
is as rotten as we are. One of the most comical (and tragical too) pictures in
recent times was that of the Faculty members climbing out of the first floor
window of Columbia University Philosophy Hall after its seizure by student
radicals.
I
request my readers to read Priestly’s essay on student mobs in The Moments:
If degrees were given in window smashing, car-overturning,
furniture firing, they would all have them with honours. They may be still weak
in sciences and the arts, medicine and the law but they have already Firsts in
Hooliganism. Our destructiveness and violence today do not seem to
come, writes the essayist, from any surplus of energy but from a neurotic or
even psychotic heartlessness, a cold disregard of other
persons, a hatred of life. And some thing very much like it, only of course
further developed and more subtle, has crept like a huge old serpent into too
much of our fiction and drama. There are people among us who don’t seem to
belong to the human race. Students should be reading books, not burning them.
Leading
French and British sociologists who met at Harvard are convinced that the old
liberal universities are dead. When Newman wrote his The Idea of a
University there was an idea. That idea is no longer there after the great
uprising in May ’68 in Sorbonne. There is no mono-causal theory, according to
Prof. Halsey of the Nuffield College to explain what has been happening. The
unrest of modern youth is a big factor. Whether this dark cloud rains
life-giving waters or fire and brimstone destroying the civilized way of life
(as the elders envisage it) is a big? Youth is on the war path; it is
rebellious; it hates the humbug and hypocrisy, the dishonesty and guile masked
by moral platitudes. It may destroy the sorry scheme of things entire and
rebuild the world nearer its heart’s desire or it may just destroy and purr in
satisfaction. But are violence and bad manners and intolerance the bricks to
raise a new edifice? I share the misgivings of Priestly: What sort of doctors
and lawyers and chemists and teachers of language they will make, we cannot
tell; but there should be no shortage of recruits with degrees for demolition
squads and wrecking crews. Wrong means do not produce good ends. A civilized
way of life implies a sensitiveness to the other man’s point of view, to the
other man’s property. Modern youth by destroying this sensitiveness is lighting
its own pyre. One of the minor duties of good citizenship in Britain, writes
Alistaire Cooke, is not to disturb the private life of other citizens.
Flame-throwers and litter bugs are the opponents of good manners. Let youth
realize that mass hysteria is vulgar, that the individual with guts is opposed
to the gregarious animals. Grandeur, nobility, immaculateness, there are
qualities, says if Richard Church, that wake the Caliban in some folk. What are
we to make of this scooter-riding, stone-throwing, chain-smoking,
exams-boycotting, ticketless travelling, films-adoring, rock ‘n’ roll swaying,
defiance-breathing, law-gheraoing modern youth? If this is how expensively
educated youth conducts itself, what about the youth in factories and
shipyards, mills and hotels, offices and workshops, shops and business houses,
public and private sectors. What about modern girls and their mini-shirt which
exposes, to quote Mercurio,
her
fine foot, strait leg and quivering thigh?
They
compete with boys in all walks, seek a career to be self-supporting or
husband-supporting or pursue research but the greatest objective of their
research is to catch hold of a man and make him dwindle into a husband. Ann
Whitefield cannot rest content till a Tanner is caught in the toils of
evolutionary appetite.
Everywhere
there is indiscipline. Defiance of law and authority is in the air and some
political ideology makes a virtue or indiscipline. How can youth be better when
crime fiction is its Ramayana, sexy film magazines its Mahabharata and horror
comics its Bible.
You
are either with Arnold and say that you know values or with Mill and question
everything. To Arnold Mill’s doing as one likes is anarchy; to Mill Arnold”s
culture is nothing short of death. The aspirations of youth may usher in a new
world, cleaner and juster or its adventure may be a scorched earth policy–the
shapers or spoilers of the future. Life may become a snake pit of horror and
crime or an arbour of loveliness and good manners. Youth may even land on the
moon. But what is the good? We have fouled the earth with evil passions. Why
foul the moon too? Instead of the earth being infected by germs from the moon,
we may ruin the moon with dark desires.
What
precisely are the aspirations? It is difficult to spell them. James Reston
dealing with the cliches of the radical students: meaningful dialogue,
participatory democracy, interpersonal relationship makes this point. These are
emotive slogans. The Oxford Left denounces Hart’s report as it questions the
right of the students to run the university and Prof. Kelle of Harvard defends
participation. The aspirations of modern youth can be summarised in a single
word: Rejection; unrest is a tame word. We do not know what creation lies
behind destruction. Destruction is certain–broken window panes and burning
buses and derailed bogies and bleeding heads.