Richard Sennett
The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life
(1970)
[109]CHAPTER FIVE
═══🙡═══Outgrowing a
Purified Identity
HOW DO MEN LEARN TO ACCEPT PAINFUL SURPRISES AND disorder? In that acceptance lies the secret of how puri- fication myths come to seem unreal. Since the myths take on full force in the crisis of adolescence, the process of learning to face pain tells something as well about how adolescence is transcended and adulthood gained.
An easy cliché has it that suffering makes men's lives "meaningful. » We know that men who take the exit into permanent psychosis suffer terribly; whole communities of men also suffer, from hunger, from slavery. It seems a paltry thing to say these lives are therefore meaningful, the suffering productive. Indeed, the surest way to ac- quire a sympathy for the revolutionaries of the nineteenth century is to read various ministers' tracts for the poor, in which fourteen hours a day of heavy labor are described as a "blessing given to discipline lust and the passions of
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the flesh." The modern equivalent of this stupidity is that which says the black people will grow stronger through their need to struggle, as though the elementary decencies of life, effortlessly accorded the majority, were so precious that the minority should go through a hellish test to be worthy to possess them.
It is grotesque to look on misery as a blessing; yet I would argue as well that the visions of society without pain can never be; in fact, such visions now often lead revolutionary leaders to create what their ideologies abhor, even more pain and oppression in the world. This is but another facet of the same slavery under the guise of "decency, 99 of self-restrictive solidarity. Thus, great in- justice seems to arise when a certain pain and disorder in social life is consciously avoided.
The experience of certain young revolutionary leaders suggests a way exceptionally strong men have worked be- yond this paradox. It sometimes occurs that when out- breaks by the young fail in the first attempt, a deep change occurs in the lives of certain leaders; these men grow stronger in their commitment to the cause, yet the nature of the commitment is transformed by the experience of failure. The Russians Borodin and Garine, who were active in the Chinese Revolution, exemplify this change: they ex- perienced in themselves a certain loss of systematic ap- proach and an absorption in details that do not follow directly from revolutionary doctrine, although their faith in that doctrine remained strong. The same shift occurred for a few of the students involved in the college disorders of 1968-9. The crushing of their efforts did not blunt the
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desire for change, but they became more curious about their enemies and themselves apart from the struggle for power; the failure made them live more in terms of under. standing those who are different.
What happened to these exceptional young people was that they abandoned the self-enclosing purity of someone like Hong, Malraux's youthful character in The Con- querors. These young people came to have a curiosity about the immediate world around them, a concern about their enemies as well as about themselves. This occurred, I am convinced, because something innate to the child which languished during adolescence, was revived by their failure to conquer the outside world. Because they failed their childhood curiosity was renewed about things and people in the immediate world, a world too large to con- trol coherently. In certain circles now, for instance, one finds a compassion for the police, a desire to know how their lives have come to make them detest the students and the blacks.
What is so subtle about the changes in such young people is that their commitment has remained strong. Only now, as the result of a failure the first time in acting out revolutionary ideas, the revolutionary commitment coexists with a new desire to see, to touch, to understand apart from the preordained truths of a coherent ideology. This compassion for the enemies- the police, the white factory workers who hate them, even for the middle-class parents- produced among these exceptional people a hu- mility and willingness to be self-critical. That is the hidden story of much of what occurred in the last year (hidden
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because the press, in search of easy pictures of "them" and "'us, " probed only the degrees of radical commitment, and not the experience of the commitment itself in this gen- eration).
This conversion process, which admittedly touched the lives of only an exceptional minority of student "rebels, shows how a certain kind of failure weakened the myths of a purified "'us" and "them." The response to failure among these young people was peculiar, however, and sets them off as strong people. A characteristic other than the supposedly extreme nature of their ideology made them exceptional.
Every young man, on the eve of his adulthood, has dreams for himself, dreams about what he wants to do, to find out, to accomplish. These dreams for the future are the heart of how he conceives of his identity; as has been shown, these dreams tend to cohere in one solidified picture because the young man finds it hard to live with ambiguities or dissonance. But everyone dreams beyond his power. In the course of adulthood not all these youthful desires will be realized, and a man will be forced to salvage what pleasure he can in the midst of frustration. What happens to most adults, which did not happen to some of the young radicals during recent events, is that the failure makes them feel the dreams were no good; subsequently, most adults await whatever routine is dealt them. The difficulty now is that unexceptional adults believe the loss of youthful dreaming is itself "growing up, " as though adulthood were the passive conclusion to a doomed activity and hope during adolescence.
But this movement from dreaming, on the one hand, to
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passively going through the available routines, on the other, is not a breaking apart of the purification patterns. It is just this passive resignation which is so easy, which allows a man to sink into comfortable patterns of no chal- lenge, and so prolong the worst strength of his adolescence, the strength to avoid having to act in unknown, not easily controllable situations. The fear of the unknown that caused the youth to dream a life for himself in which everything fit together is transmuted in adulthood into a fear of acting outside mechanical paths because the first dreams could not come true. "Giving up" is a very common way affluent adults describe the tenor of their adulthood; social studies show this true for a much wider range of people than those with severe depression dis- orders. But "giving up" is a comfortable act, and men who have done so can unite to put down the challengers of their routine and their peace. What is to be learned from exceptional people like the young radicals I have described is not an ideology but the reason why they accepted the fact that their first dreams failed and yet held onto the fact of belief. What needs to be found in affluent community life are the means by which such a strength can be encouraged in everyday life.
Breaking Apart the Need for
a Purified IdentityThere is a four-stage process, as I conceive it, in the move-
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ment from the adolescent strength, in which young people piece together an identity where everything fits, to the strength in adulthood of accepting as real dissonant and painfully conflicting experiences.
Stage One: Adolescence brings to a head the imbalance between the capacity for experience and the fund of ex- perience available that could guide new powers and strengths. The human being is able to replace his parents at the very heart of what before constituted their author- ity, for he is able to synthesize moral and value rules that define his identity in a social context wider than the family.
Stage Two: The tension in this growth imbalance can be resolved through the mechanisms of purified experience in creating an identity, so that the individual projects the meaning of experiences he is afraid to have, and thus seals himself off from actually confronting the unknown in the social world around him. The coherent identity that emerges leads to a voluntary limitation and withdrawal in social life, a servitude to projections of social reality that are unified and pain-transcending.
These two stages of development, I believe, mark the character of change in a large number of lives now. As the first chapters of this book have tried to show, the social institutions of the modern city encourage growth to be frozen in this way, so that hiding from the unknown is carried into adult social life as a means of establishing a feeling of "community" in unthreatening sameness.
It is this normal adulthood pattern which must be broken. The experience of some exceptionally strong youthful revolutionaries hints at what could evolve.
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Stage Three: In trying to enforce a vision of coherent order, the young person meets an immovable obstacle or social situation that is out of his control. The disorderly world defeats the dreams of coherence and solidarity.
How the defeat occurs is crucial. When the dreams of the more idealistic young--which is to say, a large number of young people- -are simply ignored, or rejected through coercive force, nothing is changed. What those who now deploy the police or the school administrations against idealistic young people fail to see is that the policemen's clubs do not destroy; they vindicate the truth of the adolescent challenge thrown down. What collapsed, in a good way, during the rebellions of 1968 was rather the assumption that "We, the students, are good, "they, the establishment, are bad. These purified images collapsed and a compassion was born. That hidden productive failure had nothing to do with police. If purified identity images can be broken because the individual feels them unreal for the present moment and its demands, if some- how he can be brought to understanding that failure, what could be the possible result?
Stage Four: Childhood curiosity about the immediate world is reborn. The desire to see, apart from the desire to see things in their proper place, is regenerated. In other words, the courage to look in unknown places and experience feelings and situations one has not met before re-emerges. And out of this process can come a kind of human concern centered on and appreciative of the "otherness" " in the world.
These stages of development summarize complex growth patterns in perhaps too sweeping a fashion. To
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reveal the complexity it is easiest to look at the end point of these four stages, the opposition to adolescent purifica- tion desires. I have spoken of this state as a possible adult- hood, but something more than just its logical outlines can be seen. For the case histories of successful treatment of certain mental disorders-_-notably schizophrenic disturb- ances where a large degree of hysteria is present--reveal the characteristics of adult identity freed from this need for purified experience. Just as psychologists have inter. preted purification desires in an extreme form as in- dividual "pathology, the treatment of such pathological individuals may show how the pathology in its social form may be treated as well.
Contrasts of Adulthood to Adolescent Identity:
The Loss of OmnipotenceWhen a man's vision of order, of a pure and painless life, has been defeated by a social world too complex to be dis- ciplined, the man isn't defeated, only his belief in his own omnipotence is. For the purification urge is precisely the desire to be all-powerful, to control the meanings of ex- perience before encounter so as not to be overwhelmed. As Heinz Hartmann has observed, however, losing the feeling of being omnipotent is the birth of feeling per sonally strong in another way.
This new sense of personal power has been termed, in
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the literature of one branch of psychoanalysis, a fully developed "ego strength." What is meant by the jargon is that although an adult feels no longer wholly the manipulator of the world around him he also feels that that world cannot in turn wholly manipulate him. A cer- tain kind of self-sufficient aloneness and singleness is born, paradoxically, at the moment when a man sees he is not going to be able to be the master of all that occurs in his life. This has been expressed by religious writers like Martin Buber as the feeling that once a man sees himself as "one among many rather than as the master and there- fore the mirror of the social world, the sense of his "being greater than his attributes" is born. The idea of ego strength tries to describe this feeling on a less mystical plane: a certain strength is affirmed through shedding the belief in the masterful power of the self.
What is meant psychologically by this strength can be shown in two ways. In clinical work with hysterical in- dividuals, therapists have observed the hysteria to be a controlling device: if social situations are charged up to the level of hysterical emotion, the person feeling hysteri- cal can be in total control. He or she, after all, is the one making them hysterical in character. Hysteria is therefore often interpreted as a fear of what will happen were a per- son not absolutely in control of the surrounding world. In therapy with such people, the goal becomes one of con- vincing them that they have a strength and an inner being apart from their ability to control the environment. When the therapy works, there seems to be kindled a great sense of strength in the patient, not only in the freedom from
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the hysteria, but also in a feeling that the patient will not be destroyed by new wandering or exploring.
A second way of understanding this ego strength that comes from feeling limited is in terms of the concept of identity itself. In the strict sense of the term used by Erikson and Hartmann, identity is a conscious way of forming the rules by which one places oneself in social space-_it is precisely an identifying of oneself in society. Coherent identity patterns that emerge in adolescence are a way of identifying oneself as a controller; when co- herence patterns are broken, one identifies oneself as a being in the midst of other beings: one can influence them but not make them over in one's own image. Con- versely there is something in oneself they cannot make over.
That something is a different kind of identity-making process, for adult identity comes to be defined as a set of acts that a person can perform rather than a set of attributes or possessed characteristics. The difference is critical. The self-images developed in adolescence are what Peter Blos calls objects of self-hood, static symbols or beliefs that identify who the adolescent is within the circles he moves in. In the possible adulthood that lies beyond adolescence, the need to label one's identity by what one possesses or what one thinks bows to a sense of self-hood created by virtue of a certain kind of action. In order to perform this action a man must learn the futility of trying to fix immutably his relation to his social world through symbols or attributes of identity. This act I call caring.
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Caring: The Consequence of Being LimitedSomething happens to the quality of a person's concern when he loses the adolescent desire to be omnipotent. The change is embodied by two alternative uses of the word "caring."
In everyday language, we speak of "caring about" some- one, and also of "caring for" " someone. When we say we care for someone, we mean something stronger than the first expression; we almost mean at times that we want to take care of them. This in turn psychologically works so that we will take them over, that they might drown in us. This is one way of looking at strength in a relation- ship between two people in love.
Therapists have found, in looking at marriage patterns of schizophrenics, that this sort of caring creates some- thing evil between husband and wife. This form of caring becomes a drive for power and a demonstration of prowess. In a social realm, the same kind of caring is per- haps what underlies Weber's notion of charisma, for it is at the heart of the desire to lead, and also the urge to be led. The latter-_-to be led under the guise of being cared for--is the more frightening, in either intimate or group relations. One submits to a leader, as Tocqueville put it, out of a simple desire for comfort, as a way of avoiding the pain of being independently mobile and aware. Such a withdrawal is in fact the essence of the evasion of social contact in purified communities. The feeling of being cared for under these human conditions
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is the joy at being taken over. Thus the structure of purification seems bound up with a feeling of human concern that is in fact a power play.
What kind of caring would exist independent of the desire for power, apart from a master and his willing slaves? This kind of caring I would call "caring about." It is closely related to a simple, creature-like curiosity, but a curiosity about graspable images, that is, individualized images. The more individual, the more particular the thing or person cared about becomes, the more men are able and willing to care about it. This kind of caring supposes that the strength of affection grows stronger the more each individual develops his or her uniqueness- there is more to care about, more to explore. The recogni- tion that personal differences are something to love is a turning point in therapy with the marriages of schizo- phrenics. This is why the achievement of adult identity is a condition of human strength; the individual develops the power to care about individual, immediate things that may hurt him.
Socially, this kind of caring would be hostile to any abstract notion of humanity or brotherhood--hostile to any ideology, for a universalized notion of humanness is impossible for limited creatures like ourselves to grasp, and therefore to care about. This is why discussions of psychological ethics that depend on knowledge of what "the' human person is turn out to be so abstract; in the realities they care about, people do not act on the basis of a composite, fixed figure. Again, if the ideologies of the doctrinaire capitalists or of the doctrinaire Marxists seem dry and bloodless, it is perhaps because they rob men of
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the chance to care about something small enough to grasp, something whose dimensions are capable of being dealt with in a direct way .
This concept of care is thus a product of learning human limits, learning the limits of a person's concern and power in the world. In this way, the free curiosity of the child, the concern about immediate objects of experi- ence in themselves, can resurface through therapy with a disturbed adult. Concern and specific care need no longer be dictated by preconceived structures of values as occurs in adolescence: things can be taken in "that don't fit" a person's sense of his identity in the world. The therapy creates a conviction of one's ability to survive, not to be annihilated by the world one doesn't yet know. This belief in the indestructibility of oneself, leading to such a capacity to care, is in its turn born of a failure to destroy the "otherness." the unknown in social ex- perience.
Thus the complex vision of such people as a few of the young 1968 radicals comes about. Dreams of the just and perfect can remain as strong as they were in adolescence, yet there is also generated the capacity to explore and care about specific new things or situations not part of that ideal vision. This is the freedom of adulthood: the capacity to absorb new and perhaps painful meanings, the willingness to get involved in situations a man can't securely control. The freedom is overlaid, however, on that capacity, developed first in adolescence, to learn how to formulate lines and sequences of meaning into order to identify oneself in the social space one lives in. This juxtaposition occurs in a striking way.
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Continuities Between Adulthood and
Adolescent Coherence: ChanceThis double capacity, to become involved freely and yet to exercise rules for identity-making, is a complex phe- nomenon of psychological growth. Its significance may become clear by looking at a break made by two founders of modern psychology, William James and Sigmund Freud, from the assumptions of the Victorian era about the stages of growth to adulthood.
In child-rearing books of the middle-nineteenth cen- tury, the human being before puberty was depicted as a creature different in essence from the one that took form with the onset of sexual drives. The human being who had experienced sexual union in early adulthood was in turn conceived to be different, in emotional essence, from the adolescent. These child-books portray what can be called a transformational idea of human emotional de- velopment; the analogy would be that of the physical metamorphoses occurring in the growth of an insect. Both James and Freud rejected this transformational concept of development and substituted for it what could be called an additive idea of man's emotional development.
The nature of the human material they saw added in the course of growth was not the same, but there are some striking similarities in how they understood the process of addition to be occurring. For the new elements did not change the essence of the emotional material that came
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before, but rather added new, counterbalancing desires; for both James and Freud, the process of growth was thus like the continual enlargement of a mosaic. The func- tioning whole human being was a different man, to be sure, as he grew, but only because a new set of re- lationships and balances had been struck between the enlarging mosaic of emotional elements. Freud's and James's great gift to the present was to show how living creatures never shed off what they have been earlier, to show how the psychic reality of a life is not its momentary appearance but also its history.
The essence of the possible adulthood I have described is that the individual would consciously accept, and feel comfortable with, the character of growth James and Freud depict. The guilt-based need of an ill person to wipe out the past and create a totally new self, at the same time that he is a slave to the past, is absent in this state of adulthood, for concomitant with an adult's ability to let new things in for themselves, to be free, is the capacity to accept earlier states of non-freedom as part of the sum total of who he is. This acceptance of the past's mosaic makes it something the individual need not con- tinually relive in order to change it. To bring individuals to such an acceptance is a great psychotherapeutic achievement. For, in this way, a man feels free to live in the present as a distinct, new area of experience all his own.
Both the unstable character of adulthood and the will- ingness of an adult to accept regressive modes of be- havior in himself amount to the acceptance of chance in
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life. But to accept the chance character of emotional strength does not mean to become passive; it rather is an extension of the force of caring "about.
Such caring is not, in an adult's life, a permanent condi- tion, nor a permanent desire, but an unstable quality that changes as the character of the individual develops and as social processes beyond the individual's control also evolve along new lines. Therapy shows that an adult man may not only feel released from being responsible for everything in his world; he may also feel that the par- ticularities he does care about can be championed only at specific moments in time, not for always. Furthermore, he is open to losing his adulthood, through regression to modes of the past. Thus caring is a definite, natural proc- ess at a certain point--adulthood--in the life history of a man, but this full adulthood is not something permanent or ultimately triumphant: the full emotional strength of a man can be felt only as something fragile in time.
The conclusion I draw is that emotional growth is not an inevitable, one-way process, as physical growth is. This conception of adulthood as unstable helps to explain then, but not to lessen, a darker reality: the existence of so much pain in the everyday problems of ordinary life.
Because a mature creature carries all the earlier crea- tures he was within him, at the times when he ceases to be an adult, ceases to care about the effects of his acts, the cravings and needs of more primitive forms of life re-emerge. In terms of the pain they cause, these cravings seem to be expressions of that careless viciousness we see so often in children. It is part of their innocence to be in. different to the effects of what they do; conversely, we
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think of children who do care about these effects as more "mature," no matter what their physical age.
In a sense, the identity-making powers of adolescence raise this innocent production of pain to a system. One's attention is focused on finding rules with which to create a unified self-image. The materials for these rules are not social experiences; they are rather attributes and artifacts of personality. Put concretely, an adolescent boy or girl does not think of himself as possessing a defined char- acter by virtue of his past experience, for that experience is of a childhood inappropriate to the way he now feels; what he possesses is rather how he dresses, how he talks, the kinds of things he enjoys, his commitment to ideas. Adolescents, unlike adults, do not come to these attributes by way of sifting through experience, but by an act of conquest, of willful assimilation. And in that self-direct- ing process lies the possibility for systematically becom- ing indifferent to what does not pertain to the identity one is building for oneself. The literature on normal rather than pathological adolescence offers a guide. In sensitivity in erotic and love relations can occur system- atically in the search for the "ideal" lover, an ideal per- son who, as has been shown, is a reflection of the idealized person the young person is seeking to make of himself. Purifying identity is thus a means of making indifference a regular rule of conduct.
Regression to this systematic indifference or to the more primitive indifference of children, to their innocence in this sense, is inevitable. Because adult growth is addi tive rather than transformational, other elements of psychic reality are always present to intrude. For this
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reason interpersonal pain and disorder is inevitable; this regression forms the essence of the social reality never to be erased by any utopian arrangement of society.
The power of adolescence-and the power of even earlier stages of life to re-emerge in adulthood and so bring confusion and complexity into the lives of sup- posedly rational adults--affects the nature of care and concern itself.
Adulthood has been taken as a care about limited events in which the caring was not an attempt to possess or to take over. An adult caring must mean that we don't feel a possessive power over what we value; in what sense, then, can we be responsible for it?
The different chronologies of a physical and an ethical aging may clarify the problem. To possess a thing is to take it out of time, which implies that we rob it of its own destiny. To be responsible as an adult means to champion a person or thing without feeling responsible for its des- tiny. A concern for the here and now is precisely the sense in which good caring deals with specific and limited events in time, in a life history, and entails as well a sense of the limited vision one can have of the world in which one lives.
The center of this idea is that interpersonal pain and disorder are inevitable in any society. Since some societies are capable of causing more pain than others, "caring about" men and women in society must involve caring about such issues as equalizing opportunity and the shar- ing in the cultural and material products of the society. Utopian politics is adolescent, certainly, but no adulthood
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that loses such a utopian vision in the process of aging can be called a real adulthood.
Thus the comfortable reactionary adage should be re- versed, to read: "Anyone can be excused for being con- servative when he is eighteen, but no one can be excused for being a conservative when he is forty."
Remembrance
Adolescent strengths can also survive into adult lives through the way people define their past lives, that is, through the materials people admit into the arena of what they consciously remember.
The past life history, in terms of what adults remem- ber, comes to be viewed through a sort of inner prism: a specific event or act, which men let into their lives and care about in and of itself, awakens a cluster of memories that is put in some order or relationship to the present. This is how traces of the need for a coherent identity re- main through the connections between a panoramic past and a concrete thing cared about right now. For instance, a man may remember a painful argument with his par- ents; the argument may seem to embody all the arguments he ever had with them; the memory was what psychia- trists call a "crystallizing memory." Yet the power of that memory does not make him feel all arguments he has now are in the mold of that past event he recalls so well. Divorcing the panorama of his past from the new events
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of his present is the strength of his adulthood, just as the strength of his adolescence was learning to make the panorama. In this way an adult is free of "obsessions," of meanings and concern in the present rigidly shaped by the past life history. When therapists treat such obses- sions, the object is to retain the rule-making power of an identity, but to tame it so that new matter and new mean- ing can permeate an individual's sense of his history.
Ethical adulthood, as caring about concrete images and events that exist on an intimate scale, would involve a capacity for remembrance of this kind. It is evident that the desire to care in this form deals with the experiences of early life as both important and yet not adequate for the present. In existential psychologies like Rollo May's this is what permits innovation in life histories. Yet for this freedom to exist, an earlier desire to give rigid shape to psycho-social realities, to remove the burdens of pain from them, must have been acted on and the attempt failed. In other words, for a man to have a truly malleable historic" sense of the events in his own life, the acting out and the failure of adolescent strengths must have occurred. Otherwise, there is a compulsive need to inter pret the variety of present and future experiences only in terms of the issues of the past, or worse, if the young person has never had a chance to act on the strengths emergent in his adolescence, there can remain the rest of his life the haunting sense that all the painful realities he encounters could have been avoided, if only he had once been strong enough.
This notion of remembered life history has found a great, and convoluted, expression in the work of the ego
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psychologist Heinz Hartmann. The sense of one's life history, Hartmann believes, must constantly shift as new events in the present transform the meaning of the past leading up to them. In the same way, each new genera- tion of historians must reinterpret the events of a culture's past in light of the new shapes of meaning that come to fruition in the present.
What I would emphasize here is that this "historical" remembrance must emerge in adulthood from a structural failing in adolescence; the gift of this freedom comes from a social situation that permits the young to act out their painless dreams and to fail constructively.
The Social Frame
I believe the conditions of present-day society are such that this forum for acting on adolescent strengths is denied adolescents, except in the area of radical politics. If the present generation of the young seems, indeed, to be more activist, more left, than the generations before, it is perhaps a sign that they are trying to satisfy the need to act on the strengths that have emerged during their recent lives; the feeling of being threatened with a perma- nent adolescence has radicalized these students as much as the special social issues of the Vietnam war, poverty, and the draft.
Even today only a few young people can make a social forum out of politics for their own growth; radical politics
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is of necessity a limited sphere, and its guiding impulse is increasingly becoming claustrophobic and repressive. The social question for young people is still where to find an enlarged forum for experience and exploration. This, I believe, is the true task of planning modern cities. The ills of the city are not mechanical ones of better transport, better financing, and the like; they are the human ones of providing a place where men can grow into adults, and where adults can continue to engage in truly social existence.
There is a social ethic that binds the elements of this adult state together, binds the sense of limitation, the sense of caring, the hidden unities with childhood and adolescence. The desires for purification generated in adolescence are ethically a form of self-slavery, a fear of freedom. What emerges in adulthood, in chance situa- tions and shifting grounds, is a desire for liberty, but of a special kind.
A half-century ago the German writer Max Weber sought to describe two opposing "ethics" of social involve- ment. These "ethics" were what Weber called an ethic of responsibility contrasted with an ethic of ultimate moral ends. A responsible act, Weber said, is always impure, always painfully mixed because of diverse motives and desires; an absolute act, on the other hand, is a struggle toward purity of desire and act, as well as toward a "pure" end. The desire for purified identity I have described clearly resembles this absolute ethic. It is a cathartic feel- ing for men; it leads them to dream of a world order purified of painful challenges, an order fixed, trustworthy, and predictable.
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By contrast, the twisted acts Weber understood to be involved in an ethics of responsibility are close to the adult state that emerges when painless identity dreams have been tested and have failed. For an ethics of respon- sibility means performing acts that are impure, having a variety of motives that may even conflict with each other. And this is what accepting the mosaic of one's past will lead a man to feel about his own motives. The very diver- sity of these acts makes them painful: a man feels that it is impossible to set things right, to follow a simple course, to feel certain inside about what he must do. This realiza- tion replaces the self-lauding dignity of the saint or the revolutionary dreamer, the smug certitude of the respect- able community leader, with the doubts of a man. What Weber sought to evoke by an ethics of responsibility was exactly that feeling of self-limitation involved in adult lives: what the self-limitation leads to, Weber said, is not a weariness and withdrawal from social situations, but a willingness to get involved in the kind of messy, disorgan- ized social experiences that are immune to some tran- scendent end or justification.
Two questions are involved in such an ethics of re- sponsibility: why are disorderly, painful events worth encountering? and why are such encounters more "re- sponsible" than an ethics of absolute ends?
The regression from adulthood to earlier stages of life activity speaks to the first of these questions. Innate to pre-adult life, and codified in routines of adolescence, is a willful innocence of the effects of one's actions on others; that is the material from which painful dislocations and differences become innate to human society, be it socialist,
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capitalist, or feudal. It is the attempt of men to deal with that regression, to waken the regressor to the human "otherness" around him, that provides whatever modicum of decency and civility a society contains. This attempt to deal with "otherness, to become engaged beyond one's own defined boundaries of self, is the essence of the adult- hood I envision and also the essence, I believe, of what Weber understood by an ethics of responsibility. But this means that such adult exchanges, or exchanges between someone absorbed in his own routine and someone not ab- sorbed in it, are laden with potential for disorder and un- predictable turns. Such situations are essentially explora- tions, not actions out of previsualized rules. This is why disorder and painful dislocation are the central elements in civilizing social life.
It might seem, therefore, that when Weber spoke of this state of affairs as an ethics of responsibility, he meant men ought to experience such encounters for the sake of improving the quality of social relations. This might seem incumbent upon them, and thus a responsibility. But I believe Weber's idea had a more personal, less duty-bound meaning.
Such adult encounters mean that someone inevitably would become hurt or disoriented. But as a matter of com- mon sense people do not want to be hurt or overwhelmed: men do not stare painful facts or situations in the face out of boundless desire for flagellating themselves. The point of these encounters is not that men desire to be hurt by them, but that they want something else from them, some- thing more deeply satisfying, and they are willing to en- dure unforeseen consequences.
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The adulthood I have described is one in which a man knows that his being cannot be annihilated by the plans of others. From failing to coherently manipulate the social space around him, the adult learns also its limits in ma- nipulating him. John Stuart Mill expressed this as the idea that a man had no fully developed personality until he felt that his strengths, like his weaknesses, were alone and unique to him only. The act of caring about something, then, of reaching outside oneself to explore something unknown, is thus a way of reaffirming and strengthening the sense of being a full personality, by being alone at the core. The caring cannot be justified, cannot be sus- taining, simply on the grounds that it is something shared between men.
Therefore this adult reaching-out is a paradox. A man becomes engaged in truly social ways, probing the "other- ness" around him, in order to reaffirm the fact of his uniqueness, his adult being. The fact that a man can care about something outside himself is a sign that he has a distinctive self of his own. It is this impulse of ego affirma- tion, as Heinz Hartmann calls it, that creates situations of human caring.
Thus the autonomy of an adult man is not a form of isolation. Because of his knowledge that he is a real, con- crete, individual being, a man is free to care about the effect of what he does in the world. Men possessed by the desire for purification do not have the power to care, as autonomous men in a world of men; they are indifferent to the effects of their acts, especially in moments of strain, because they have not developed a sense of themselves that would give them the strength to have a sense of
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others. Thus the American super-patriots who created the myth of "us" against "the communists" are powerless to understand the brutalizing effect of the Vietnam war on the young men they conscripted into military service. The desire for purified identity is a state of absolute bondage to the status quo; there exist few resources for analyzing how society works, only intense strengths, through the medium of coherent symbols, to transform the status quo into a generalized abstract state of life. Adult caring is more responsible, to use Weber's term, because an indi- vidual who thinks in terms of specifics is led into un- known social experience, where he makes discoveries, often terribly painful ones. That a nation like America is irresponsibly adolescent is revealed in the great fear Americans have of learning about the war they have made.
From Possible Adulthood to the "Real World"
The adult condition of life is a possibility now realized by few people. Since I have described something potential not actual, my idea of freedom from adolescent patterns of purification may seem utopian. Yet the violence and the blind, empty coherence of present-day community life are so strong and so dangerous that a turn to looking at radical changes in the quality of social life has become a necessity. What affluent society in the
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last two decades has shown is that the received no- tions of community are in fact a way for people to hide from each other, and that the product of hiding is slavery and indifference. In place of the communal bonds men now experience, a different adult society needs to take form.
The bonds in the adult society I envision would be dif- ficult. Care between individuals would exist only to the extent that mutual curiosity and specific personal bonds developed. There would be no expectation of human love, no community of affection, warm and comforting, laid down for the society as a whole. Human bonds would be fragmented and limited to specific, individual encounters.
Such an unstable and shifting community would have to be based on human beings who feel themselves limited constantly changing, and unwilling to surrender their smallness to any grand vision, unwilling to make them- selves whole. This would be a society involving many dis- satisfactions and even much loneliness, but it would be real to the extent that men could live honestly, without myths of painless harmony.
Such a society, I believe, can arise only in the diverse disorganization of a dense city. Within adult lives, only a complex environment can give the possible complexities of men's lives full play. Since men's full ethical nature is unstable, fragile, and involved in disorganized events, only a society that is willingly unstable can provide, out of its own richness, a medium for growth beyond ado- lescence. But equally important, only a truly chaotic urban life can challenge the slavery patterns of ado-
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lescence so that large numbers of young people have the opportunity for growth now accorded only to a few. Thus can problems of therapeutic human development become the guides for understanding how cities of the future should be built.