Discussion of Joseph C. Solomon's Article, The Incredible Sixties: Psychodynamics of Youth

We must be careful not to treat healthy youthful protest against sham and hypocrisy as if it were pathological, remembering that involvement in the more unhealthy manifestations of the counterculture is for many young people only temporary. We must not forget our own youthful—often antisocial and nearly self-destructive—indiscretions. With these caveats, I must say that in general I applaud Dr. Solomon's refusal to be fashionable and to go along with those who regard the young as the sole repositories of virtue and wisdom (much as orthodox Marxists regarded the proletariat), encouraging them to drown in an ocean of self-pity, and filling the air with mea culpa.

However, I must confess that I cringe before the task of explaining what happened in the late sixties, and I tremble for those who try. Clearly, it is dangerous to generalize not only about all of youth but about all college students, or even all students who have joined the counterculture. Dr. Solomon reckons with this, although perhaps not enough. Also, it is easy to be misled. I do not agree, for example, with those professors referred to by Dr. Solomon who found “that their students had become increasingly uninterested, as though the lectures and subject matter were irrelevant….” And to the extent that this is so, the explanation could be quite simple: the fact that many have been attending college or remain there only in order to avoid the draft, or the fact that it is harder to concentrate in the midst of a campus crisis. Neither do I agree that students these days are under unusual academic pressures; some of us are apprehensive about a tendency in some quarters to relax standards.

Although I welcome the appearance among college students of an active social conscience and endorse their rejection of some of the specious values they find in our society, I worry with Dr. Solomon over mindless militancy, a tendency

to confuse difference (and even freakishness) with identity, counter-culture escapism, and