You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
While I shall deal with the discussants' comments individually, my remarks will, of necessity, overlap, as they are addressed to interrelated questions and to the discussion in its entirety.
I have failed to make myself clear to Dr. Donnelly. Precision and the isolation of specific variables are not possible, nor am I sure of their desirability. The element of overdetermination and ambiguity in human affairs makes the model of scientic precision, taken over bodily from the physical sciences, inapplicable.
There is a sense in which permissiveness and affluence can be overwhelming and domineering, and threatening to the sense of autonomy of the recipient. The opening scene, ostensibly, has in it the elements of a benevolent father conducting an open-ended “love-in,” in which his daughters are free to try for something beyond his basic bounty. Yet, beneath the surface of this open-handed largesse lies the adamantine core of dominance. It is self-evident to me that affluence can be imprisoning. It is not only, or primarily, in the act of consumption of the cornucopia that the act of being dominated is experienced. Being recruited into the technologic society that produces the affluence is experienced as submissive and imprisoning. The alienation of people from each other and from the meaningful aspects of living concomitants of our social processes is what the youthful dissent is about. The oedipal analog seems obvious to me, and, however distorted and unfair this may seem to us, youth persist in identifying their parents with the affluent society and its malaise. Daniel Cohn-Bendit (1969) says, “Few students have had real experience of grinding poverty; their struggle is about the hierarchical structure of society, about oppression in comfort” (p. 107).