Ebook: Conversations with the bewildered

Foreword When I returned to Europe at the end of 1968, after an extended lecture tour in the United States, I told my publishers about the innumerable debates and discussions I had held with students and teachers at some twenty-five universities and colleges all over the country. I had been fascinated by the young American intellectuals I met, who struck me as keen, deeply involved, well-informed and totally sincere. These personal contacts radically altered those views about them which I had gleaned from nCWSpapers and other publications. For it is simply not true that these young people want to destroy everything. They want to create a better world, and they can see no better way of going about this than to eradicate those elements in their social order which they regard as negative and dangerous. I cannot accept the popular view that they ‘have it too good’, and that their behaviour is a form of arrogance bred by the security of the affluent society. My impression was that they were quite clear about one thing: what was wrong with this affluent society. They knew this because their thinking was honest and critical, and this seems to me supremely important. It is true they are extremely well off compared with most young people elsewhere, but this they take for granted as part of the social order which they are attacking. I think it is quite wrong to talk about arrogance when young people are rebelling against the scale of values of a highly materialistic society in which they live. I would prefer to stress the fact that they have not been corrupted by their affluence, and I think they deserve respect for their moral involvement and their feeling of responsibility for their fellow-citizens and for their country.