Sympathy for the Devil: Faust, the ’60s, and the Tragedy of Development

Sympathy for the Devil: Faust, the ’60s, and the Tragedy of Development

Our day and night at the Pentagon, like Faust’s encounter with the Earth Spirit, marked a new awareness of ominous, fearful powers that had to be dealt with before our dreams of freedom and self-fulfillment could be made real.

In January 1974 I was a year and a half out of college and in every conceivable respect unhappy about it. The country was low in the water, and so was I. One of the things that troubled me was the collapse of the dreams—political, cultural, spiritual—that the decade of the 1960s allowed young people to hope for, however impractical those dreams were. All of that had come crashing down to earth, and the members of my generation now had to live in the wreckage and find some way forward. But how?

I was mired in all this depressing perplexity when I picked up a copy of American Review, the superb mass-market paperback literary magazine edited by Ted Solotaroff, and came upon Marshall Berman’s long essay, “Sympathy for the Devil: Faust, the ’60s, and the Tragedy of Development.” I’ll leave it to you to discover its profundity, its vast intellectual reach, its flashes of self-deprecating humor, and its inextinguishable optimism in the face of political disaster. But to me, grasping for purchase as history swept us along to God knows where, reading it was one of the most clarifying and meaningful experiences of my thinking life. It didn’t so much explain the sixties, with their exhilarating peaks and shattering valleys, as frame them in the most fruitful way imaginable. It grounded me in exactly the way I needed at that moment. I’ve never forgotten it.

I of course was all over Berman’s 1982 masterpiece All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity as soon as it came out. I assumed that his American Review essay had been a trial run for that book, but puzzlingly, except for the its first chapter, “The Tragedy of Development,” few of the words in that piece ended up in the book. And yet the ideas put forth in “Sympathy for the Devil” inform every page and paragraph of All That Is Solid; a trial run it most certainly was.

The year 1982 was perhaps the peak of the Reagan reaction, the worst possible time to publish a book that represented the last gasp of the lyrical left and a deeply hopeful expression of humanistic radicalism. It was a commercial failure and in a short time was allowed to go out of print. But in 1988, while I was an editor at Penguin, I was able to reissue it just because I wanted to. My expectations in terms of sales were modest, but it turned out to be a very smart move. All That Is Solid is now recognized as the classic it is, and Penguin has reprinted its edition upward of twenty-five times and counting.

For some reason Berman never chose to reprint “Sympathy for the Devil” in any of his collections. The only time it has ever reappeared in print was when I used a long section of it as the coda for an anthology I edited, The Sixties (1982). Because American Review has never been put online, the essay has essentially been hidden from view for more than forty years. Until now. Thanks to Dissent, you can enjoy one of the greatest political essays ever written by an American. Spread the word.

—Gerald Howard

Modern bourgeois society . . . a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world that he has called up by his spells.

—Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848

Why is there always trouble when we sing this song?

—Mick Jagger, while singing “Sympathy for the Devil” at Altamont in 1969

A Trip to the Underworld

I can remember very vividly the time when the tragedy of Doctor Faust became real for me. It started the day before the great march on the Pentagon, when I ran into an old teacher of mine on upper Broadway. It was a lovely Indian summer day, and we stopped in front of the West End Bar for a dialectical chat. I was 26, just out of graduate school with a newly minted Ph.D., immersed in my first teaching job, finally out in the world and on my own, “a grown-up” at last. And yet, even as I felt newly grown, I was also enjoying a new youthfulness, for it was the annus mirabilis of 1967, and I was wonderfully drunk on the spirit of the times. As my big red flowery tie flapped in the wind, and my newly long hair blew back in my face, and all the wildlife of Broadway streamed around me, I felt happier than ever to be alive. My old teacher asked me how I liked being a professor; I said that while I loved teaching I didn’t take very well to the professorial role, but identified myself far more closely with “the kids”; he shook his head, smiled his famous ironic smile, said, “Oh, dear,” and we were off—off on one of those generational arguments about what “the kids” were up to, where they were leading our country and our culture, where it would all end. Who doesn’t remember those arguments? We can already feel nostalgia for them; they were the real sound of the ’60s.

We ran through all the usual numbers—the hair, the drugs, the clothes, the loud music with the serious pretensions, the wild disruptions and weird displays, all the new forms of personal and political militancy. To me, these forms meant a chance to open up and reach out, to get more intensely close to other people, to become more genuinely and deeply myself; to him, the new styles all looked nasty and brutish, dumb and blind, and he felt sorry for the person he thought I was becoming. Before long we reached the inevitable impasse—rather friendly it was, for a ’60s impasse—and we were just about to part, when he noticed the button I had on: “Exorcise the Pentagon,” it said. “Why, Marshall, I didn’t know you believed in magic. Didn’t you used to say that all that stuff was a failure of nerve?”

I stammered dumbly, suddenly unsure of myself. He had put me on the spot; how could I show him that I hadn’t lost my nerve? That in throwing myself into the activism of the ’60s I hadn’t thrown away the intellectual honesty that had meant so much to me in the ’50s? It was at this point that I thought of Faust. I remembered a detail from it. I’d read it years before in my old teacher’s class. Goethe’s Faust, in his first encounter with Mephistopheles brings him to terms by entrapping him in the sign of the pentagram that guards his door. The memory gave me energy, and I could smile again. I pointed out the text to my teacher; it meant, I said, that our project of confronting the evil spirits in the Pentagon was thoroughly Faustian, and as such had impeccably humanist credentials that he could not ignore. He argued with my reading and my use of Faust, but I could see that he was pleased I’d brought it up. Finally he grasped my hand (fraternally? paternally?) and wished me luck in my confrontation. “But remember,” he said, “Faust gets hold of those powers because he’s really serious about the Devil. He’s a believer. Are you?” And he was off, but his smile lingered on.

That smile hung over me on the way down to Washington the next day. It made me realize that my relation to my generation was a lot more complex and ambiguous than I had liked to think. On one hand, I was nauseated by the free-floating religiosity that seemed to suffuse the air like tear gas. When I heard the endless whine of “Hare Krishna” chants fill the streets I loved, I almost missed the silent ’50s. When I saw my sweet students take flying leaps into every sort of faith—Brahmans on Broadway, ashrams in the Catskills, Jesus freaks from Flatbush—and I felt drenched by the splashes they made, I almost longed for the arid dryness of my own school days. I agreed with Marx and Freud that all religions were essentially drugs; and although I had recently learned to enjoy drugs, I had no desire to pass off the joys of being high as higher truths. I knew I’d gone through plenty of changes in the ’60s. But had I changed into a believer? God forbid! On the other hand, even as I told myself this, I could feel I was protesting too much. If I was really so far beyond belief, what was I doing with a button that proclaimed the politics of sorcery and demonology? Nobody was forcing me to wear it; indeed, some of my best friends were urging me to take it off. They said the real issues were American imperialism and capitalist oppression; to talk of evil spirits, to participate in the “Holy Ritual of Exorcism” that was planned for the day, was nothing but obscurantism and mystification. I knew what they meant, and found it hard to argue, so I told them it was a joke, and even (or especially) revolutions needed humor. But I knew, too, that these ancient, fearful images—facing the forces of darkness, overcoming them through spiritual (as well as political) power, driving the demons out of our land—brought me closer than ever to the real and dreadful seriousness of what we were trying to do. I was no believer; but I felt that I needed to appropriate the language and sensibility of belief, to embrace and exploit it, to penetrate and plunder its powers, in order to confront a reality that was otherwise too vast, too deep for me, for us, to grasp. I felt that Faust—at least the way Goethe brought him to life—was a kindred spirit now. It was a mistake to think of Faust as a believer; no, he was at least as enlightened and disenchanted as I was, and probably more so, probably as ironic about life (including his own) as my old teacher himself; but he was driven by the enormity of his hopes and the desperate urgency of his needs to grasp all the help he could get.

For a few hours my visions of darkness seemed to dissolve in the sunlight and warmth of the day. This was 1967, remember, when every sit-in was a love-in. For the first few hours, our demonstration was a celebration, a carnival, a harvest festival—it was even the right season—a great blooming and gathering of life. We floated through the crowd—through those immense Washington spaces that were made for festival crowds, but never seemed to attract them anymore, except for demonstrations—we admired the exotic and beautiful costumes, the weirdly imaginative and artful displays; we played with babies and little children, smoked dope (those of us who didn’t think it too frivolous), strummed and sang, embraced neighbors we hadn’t expected to see and old friends we hadn’t seen in years, waved and smiled at strangers who felt like friends at once. There were so many of us, from every class and race and region and culture in the country—I sang “Solidarity Forever” with a Polish laundress from Chicago who had fought both her union leaders and her husband and finally convinced her local to take a stand against the war—and we were so colorful and radiant and enthusiastic that it was easy to forget why we were there. Someone proposed a cheer for Lyndon Johnson, as the man who, by uniting millions of young and old Americans against him, had bridged the generation gap—and although there were plenty of boos, most of us were genuinely happy to be there and we cheered. It was everything that the Fourth of July was once supposed to be.

It wasn’t until the end of the day, when the sun was starting to sink, that the darkness we had repressed returned to us, and I thought of Faust and his demons again. We had been marching for what seemed like hours, on flat, empty roads, when suddenly someone up ahead cried, “Land, ho!” someone else sang out, “I think I’ve found America” (echoing a Bob Dylan song that conflates the figures of Christopher Columbus and Captain Ahab), we turned a corner and there it was, the Pentagon. It wasn’t all that high, but it was incredibly wide, it just kept on going, it seemed to stretch out across an endless plain and fill the whole horizon. My friends and I fell silent. How could we even approach this thing? Our ranks swelled and swelled—some said there were a million people there that day—but the empty spaces between us and it seemed so vast, that we felt as if all the people in the world could hardly begin to close the gulf. (We would seek a sign: the signs said this was only the North Parking Lot—“And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper.”) We were paralyzed in an agoraphobic haze, literally spaced out. I remembered then that Oswald Spengler, in The Decline of the West, had said that the essence of the Faustian soul was a lust and a longing for infinite space, a drive to express its will and expand itself boundlessly. If this was so, then this Pentagon, the generator of America’s voracious imperial expansion, had to be the most Faustian place of all; and the Kissingers and the Kahns inside, the little men we could see peeking out from their windows (windows were ultra-Faustian, Spengler said) at us and all the rest of the world, a world they were determined to make their own, where they did not own it outright already, were the true Faustian heroes of our time. But there was another side to Faust, a side that seemed to me deeper and more vital: introspective, morally sensitive, anguished, determined to be equal to the super-human forces of cosmic darkness, not only to make deals with them, but to bring them to terms, to harness them for the sake of mankind. So the Faustian soul found itself on both sides now. Maybe that made sense, I thought: maybe only the hand that had made the wound in the modern world could heal it. Then I stopped thinking on this plane, forgot Faust for a while, and tried to deal with what we had to do that day.

As we advanced, slowly and tentatively, unsure of our next step, the Ritual of Exorcism took shape. I heard it before I saw it, across a vast distance, then suddenly very close: people chanting and wailing weird harmonies and cacophonies of a hundred musical instruments sounding at once, legions (a couple of hundred) of familiar and strange gods invoked, to drive out the demons that infused this Pentagon with its evil power. As we got closer the “priests” looked bizarre (sackcloth and Merlin’s hats are all I can remember now), probably stoned out of their minds, yet surprisingly straightforward and earnest about what they were doing. “End the war, end the fire, end the plague of death,” we shouted antiphonally after each invocation. Even the grimmest of us had to laugh, for there was something marvelously comic about the cosmic chutzpah of two guys from Kansas (Ed Sanders) and Brooklyn (Tuli Kupferberg), helped by our motley crew, daring to defy the foul fiend. Part of the joke was our mutual feeling that, of course, there weren’t really any demons—just as there weren’t really any gods. And yet, there was something irresistibly real about this rite. “Back to the darkness, servants of Satan, demons, out!” It made us see and feel that we were up against an awesome elemental power, a power whose malignancy not only ate into our body politic, but menaced our own souls. After the dreamy sweetness and light of our day, the ritual forced us to face the reality we had come here to fight. Norman Mailer would write, “goodbye to easy visions of heaven”—and there were so many easy visions offered to us through the ’60s—“no, now the witches were here, and rites of exorcism, and black terrors of the night.”

I felt then, and I still believe today, that this was one of the great moments of the ’60s, a moment of communal self-awareness and courage and initiative and growth. But it was a moment of collective failure and pathetic inadequacy as well. Our ritual, in order to strengthen us for the struggle, assured us that we possessed the power to overcome the destructive forces we faced—that we could be, to use another phrase of Mailer’s, “revolutionary alchemists.” And yet, alas, the more seriously we took our confrontation with these demonic powers, the more futile and hollow we were bound to feel—for we knew, after all, that our magic could not work. Even as we closed in on the Pentagon, we knew that computers were being programmed and orders given inside, and bombs were being dropped a half a world away, and people were being killed, and we had no power to stop it. For an hour or so, thousands of us played running games with soldiers and police, trying to outflank them or break through their lines, to make it up the stairs to the building’s front door. (Many succeeded—they would get beaten up savagely later that night—but many more failed, including me: I got teargassed, along with a few hundred other people, and we all tumbled and got pushed down a hill.) Soon it was cold and dark, and the Pentagon became an enormous solid implacable malevolent mass slumbering above and around us, and we stopped running and threw draft cards into piles, and lit them to start small bonfires. And gathered around, still shaky and oddly stoned from the gas, and tried to come to terms with what we had done. We had faced up to some of the black terrors of the night, and called them by their real name; and our deed, like our campfire, had brought us a little light and warmth; but it had done nothing to bring the dawn.

For all of us who were there, that day and night at the Pentagon constituted a psychedelic trip in the most genuine sense, an expansion of our minds, an opening up of our souls. It was the closest our culture could come to a real journey to the underworld. We took this trip under the best of conditions, with plenty of company, good guides, and assurance of getting back to the daylight world again. (Even if some of us, when they next saw daylight, would see it from a cell.) But it was a deeply frustrating and unnerving experience, because once we actually reached the underworld—or at least got a look at it—we didn’t know what to do down there. We had no magic that could defeat the forces we faced, and not even a clear vision of a happy ending. So we groped and thrashed about, and mostly kept to the shadows and got out fast, while we could still find our way home. On the bus back to New York, in the middle of the night, while my teeth chattered (the heating system had broken down) and my eyes and nose ran continuously (aftereffects of the gas), I thought of Faust’s brief encounter with the Earth Spirit. Although Faust is terrified of this dread spirit—he knows its presence can kill him—he uses his most powerful magic to summon it up. As the spirit surges up phantasmagorically in a flash of red flame, Faust is full of fear and trembling, but he stands his ground. But the spirit laughs derisively and mocks both his terror and his longing. “What abject fear grips you, oh, Superman!” Is this the man who dared to assert his equality with “us, the spirits,” to claim the status of an Übermensch, a superman? Faust is determined to look the Earth Spirit in the face, but he has no idea what to do with it: the spirit laughs in his face, and vanishes, leaving him unbowed but alone.

Sympathy, Empathy, Identity with the Devil

Our day and night at the Pentagon, like Faust’s encounter with the Earth Spirit, marked a deepening of thought and desire, a new awareness of ominous, fearful powers that had to be dealt with before our dreams of freedom and self-fulfillment could be made real. As the sexual, emotional, moral, and political liberations of the ’60s progressed, and became more stridently and militantly intense, there was, as if to compensate, a greater insistence on the dark and demonic side of what we were doing. Many of the most expressive and provocative songs of the late ’60s—Bob Dylan’s, Laura Nyro’s, Jim Morrison’s—rework and develop the stark theme of Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil Blues.” These songs express very vividly the liberated but tormented sensibility that Spengler saw as archetypally Faustian: a structure of feeling that is “all will, but a will full of fear for its freedom.”

The most striking and memorable late-’60s evocation of the demonic is the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” which first appeared in the winter of 1968. The song focused specifically on the process of political change, and addressed an audience that was avid for radical changes in the immediate present. The song is sung by the persona of the devil, who introduces himself to us, and tells us we already know him better than we think. He then recounts a series of political and social catastrophes, for which he holds himself and us jointly responsible. Some of these are achievements with which we would gladly identify ourselves: the French and Russian revolutions. Others, however, are horrors from which the devil knows we will recoil: the Nazi blitzkrieg, for instance, or the assassinations of the Kennedys. The devil realizes that we will be puzzled by the nature of his game. He never tells us exactly what it is, but leaves it for us to think and feel out. His point seems to be that whenever political violence is in the air, he is likely to be around, and hard to control. It we identify ourselves wholeheartedly with the “good” violence, while trying to wash our hands of any responsibility for the “bad” violence, we will be deceiving ourselves. What he seems to want from us is an honest acceptance of our own responsibility for our own dark history.

Is this supposed to mean that all of us are equally responsible for everything? Probably not. But the devil warns us that if there’s trouble and we should meet, we had better extend him some sympathy, or else he’ll lay our souls to waste. One of the crucial words is sung unclearly: it is uncertain whether, in dealing with the devil, we must use all our “politesse,” or all our “politics.” (In Jean-Luc Godard’s film with the Rolling Stones, 1+1/Sympathy for the Devil, Mick Jagger, always gnomic, seems to sing it sometimes one way, sometimes the other.) In either case, the point is that we had better recognize our kinship with him: make ourselves aware of our own destructive, malevolent, vicious, evil impulses, of the volatility and irrationality of those forces once they are let loose. This perception makes all human action tricky, but it makes action for radical social change especially perilous. It means that every one of us who wants to overcome the power of the Pentagon must come to terms with the Pentagon within himself. The actors who are most endangered are those who most deny the danger, who extend no sympathy, who ride high on self-righteousness, who think they can change the world without dirtying their hands or their hearts. The souls that are most bloated with false innocence now will be the most inwardly corroded and laid waste in the end. The devil’s game, finally, turns out to be annoyingly vague; the song does not offer us any advice as to what sorts of things we should or should not do. What it does offer is another trip into the underworld and back to ourselves, leading to a further expansion and opening up of our souls, a deeper awareness of the ambiguities of radical will and action, a tragic self-knowledge.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? We all remember Altamont: if we weren’t there for the murder, we saw it at the movies, or on the television news, or read endless eyewitness accounts and analyses—it was one of the best covered murders in history—or simply played back endlessly inside our heads. The black man in the green jumpsuit and beret with a gun, the enormous Hell’s Angels with their black leather, swastikas and knives, the stunned, fragile-looking longhaired people screaming helplessly, we know them all. A detail that makes the event even grimmer is that the man is killed just as Mick Jagger is starting to sing “Sympathy for the Devil.” In the Altamont film Gimme Shelter, we see Jagger stop the music, not yet aware that a man is dead, but knowing that something is terribly wrong. For once—maybe there were other times before this, but we never got to see them—he is in a situation he cannot control. He looks into the dark spaces of the audience, then quickly around and behind him, shaky, unable to focus, and says “Why is there always trouble when we play this song?”

The action has moved away from him, and his question is unnoticed and unanswered. On one level, we have to be angry with this man. Both in the content of many of his songs, and in the performing style he developed in the late ’60s, he has been creating a diabolical role; he has poured all his energy and mimetic brilliance into the part, striving to make its perversity exciting, alluring, tempting; and yet, when people are actually tempted, and there’s trouble, he wonders why.^[1] “Sympathy for the Devil” tries to infuse satanism with tragic awareness and wisdom; but Jagger turns out to be even more puzzled, stunned, numbed, fatally innocent than the rest of us, when the catastrophe comes. He shakes his head dumbly, he cannot even cry out; his soul has been laid to waste. And yet, we cannot deny him our sympathy. After all, he only asked us to sympathize with the devil, he wasn’t urging us to act it all out, to try to be the devil. “Why is there always trouble when we sing this song?” No one knew enough to warn him how deeply the message of the song had been misunderstood. And even after the deeds were done, no one knew enough to tell him why.

In the next year or so, as the ’60s turned into the ’70s, we were forced to learn more about the black terrors of the night than most of us wanted to know. As the facts of the Manson case began to come out, we discovered a spiritual underworld of witches, sorcerers, Satan-worshipping cults: men and women who took their occult diabolism straight, without irony, and apparently with any human scruples or sympathy; who drank blood, ate corpses, practiced ritual violence and torture on animals and people, and sometimes even ritual murder. The Manson “family” was only one small bubble on the surface of a big caldron; ironically, it turned out that some of their victims, those in the Polanski circle, were seated happily in the same caldron. What made the Manson case especially unnerving was the way Manson’s little world overlapped with, and sometimes blended into, the ’60s “counterculture” that my students and my friends and I admired and sometimes shared: their music, their drugs, their sexual openness, their spiritual militancy, their contempt for private property and acquisitiveness, their attempt to live an underground communal “alternate life.” Once again, the idea of sympathy for the devil, the romance of a journey to the underworld, had been horribly misunderstood. But what did it really mean, if it could be misunderstood this way? Anyway, from this point on, our vocabulary went through subtle changes, and words such as “bizarre” and “weird” gradually ceased to be used as terms of praise.

More shattering to me, because they were closer to home, were the Weatherpeople: instead of Southern California redneck desert rats, they were often Jewish intellectuals from my own New York; not only did they speak the same language as my students and friends, they actually were my students and friends. They included people with whom I’d sat up at night, talked about books, marched and leafleted at our alma mater Columbia in ’68, got gassed at the Pentagon—they were fighting against the devils then. Now in the winter of 1969-70, at a conference in Michigan—their last aboveground appearance—they cheered and celebrated the Satanic horror of the Manson murders as an exemplary political act. The victims were simply “pigs”; and having been thus written off they could be righteously rubbed out: their murder was a triumph of the revolutionary will. It was not made clear how many other people were being condemned as “pigs.” But if the net could catch Sharon Tate and her friends—as it happened, a group well on the left of the Hollywood political spectrum, speakers at antiwar rallies, supporters and friends of Bobby Kennedy (who dined with Tate and Roman Polanski the night he was killed, and whose murder was also applauded)—it had to be cast pretty wide. The Weatherpeople reveled in the language of revolutionary demonology, and promised drastic action ahead on the Manson model. Before they had any chance to kill any “pigs,” something went wrong with a fuse, and they killed three of themselves instead. I had gotten to know Ted Gold a little at Columbia in ’68—a sweet, smart kid—and I was sick with grief. And yet, when I heard that the kids in the town house had been assembling antipersonnel weapons—cluster bombs, like the ones our air force uses in Vietnam—I thought, maybe it was for the best that the explosives went off in the cellar, and the killing stopped there. That was my Altamont, and I shook my head numbly, dumbly, as Mick Jagger had done, and asked why.

As the ’70s got underway, we were flooded with a nightmarish eruption of Altamonts, public and private, big and small. The casualties have been heavy, reports are still pouring in. It was not just the kids at Kent State and Jackson State and People’s Park and Southern University, shot down by soldiers and police, or the physics grad student at Madison who was blown to bits in his lab by radicals’ bombs—there are slaughters of the innocent in every age. It was not just the stars: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison;—those whom the gods love have always died young. The worst part was the countless anonymous kids who didn’t get into the big papers or on the national networks, but who lived in our towns, or who went to our schools, or whose parents shopped in our parents’ stores—kids who threw themselves into the storms and stresses of the ’60s, but who were too fragile to survive them; who participated actively in the life of that wild world, but who fell or jumped or simply stepped off the edge of that world in the end. Usually they were just ordinary, decent, nice kids, though sometimes they were brilliant or beautiful, too brilliant and too beautiful for their own good. Some of them wound up throwing themselves off roofs and cliffs (gorging out, it was called at Cornell), or turning on the gas, or ODing—purposely or not, who knows, they’re just as dead. Some disappeared into madhouses, or into the impenetrable pain of real madness. Some, who were acid-headed flower children in 1967, “grew up” into desperate predatory junkies by 1970, preying on people even more helpless than themselves, longing only for something or someone to take them, as Baudelaire said, anywhere out of the world. Some of the smartest and most sensitive yearned, and eventually learned, to junk their minds—Rennie Davis’s conversion was the most notorious, but there were many, many more, less public but no less pathetic; there is, as they like to say, a new light in their eyes, but it is the arid, blinding, empty glare of a desert afternoon. And the body and soul count goes on rising. A former activist friend of mine shrinks back whenever his phone rings, wondering which of his old movement friends will be the next to go. If, as I have been suggesting, life in the ’60s was a collective journey to the underworld, it is terrifying to notice how many of those who bravely took the trip with us have failed to come back.^[2] And even those of us who have made it back find ourselves too shaky, too precarious to think about any new voyages for a while. Like the Ancient Mariner, we are only too glad to tell and retell our story endlessly—memoirs, confessionals, critical, and self-critical reappraisals of the ’60s have become both a major literary genre and a minor addiction of the ’70s—but don’t talk to us about going to sea.

As I think back on the vision and energy that propelled me and so many other Americans through the ’60s, as I lament our loss of vision and energy today, and yet force myself to face the losses that the ’60s inflicted on us—the human devastation and wreckage and heartbreak—the tragedy of Doctor Faust feels closer than ever to home. Faust seems to me to be the patron saint of all contemporary overreachers. For as long as there has been a distinctively modern culture—since the age of the Renaissance and the Reformation, when he first burst on the scene—Faust has been one of its cultural heroes. He is that most modern of creations, as well as creators, the self-made man. Unlike the traditional heroes of tragedy—Oedipus or Antigone, Hamlet or Phaedra—he is a plebian, respectably middle class at best; he is not born to greatness, but achieves it on his own. He creates his heroic and tragic stature by force of his own will and thought and action. But he knows—Goethe’s Faust brings this out with brilliant clarity—that the only way for him to truly “make himself” is to radically transform the physical and social and moral world around him. Thus he makes his mark as a liberator of tremendous, long-repressed human energies, other people’s energy as well as his own. But his great dreams and desires, as they are fulfilled in the real world, carry great, undreamt-of human costs. This is the meaning of Faust’s relationship—not only sympathy, but intimacy—with the Devil: human powers can be liberated and loosed only through deals with “demonic” powers, dark and fearful forces that may erupt horribly and take on momentum beyond all human control.

Thus Marx saw Faust, “the Sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the underworld that he has called up by his spells,” as a perfect symbol of the wonder and the horror of “modern bourgeois society” as a whole.

As Faust’s story unfolds, his real, typically modern virtues—a largeness of vision and generosity of spirit, a passionate drive to change the world—generate unforeseen disaster, and hurl him into implosions of despair. When the Earth Spirit calls out to him, derisively, and contrasts his present paralysis with the heroic aspiration and activism of his recent past—“Where are you, Faust, whose voice ranges out to me, / who forced himself on me so urgently?”—he can’t tell the spirit where he is, because he no longer knows. Any veteran of the ’60s knows only too well the sadness and shame Faust feels.

I have been suggesting up to now that our experience of the ’60s and its aftermath can open us up to new dimensions of human meaning in the tragedy of Faust; it can make us sensitive to resonances that have always been there, but that we have only just learned how to see and feel. I want, now, to explore systematically some of the intricacies and depths of Goethe’s Faust, using memories and perspectives of the ’60s to light the way. I believe that this sort of inquiry can, in turn, yield fresh insight into our own tragedy. It can help us get at some of the deepest sources and structures of our present pain, help light our way through the disarray of the armies of the night. If we trace Faust’s life story through three metamorphoses (I am borrowing Nietzsche’s phrase, but not his meaning)—first the Dreamer, next the Lover, and finally the Developer—it may help us to unravel where our culture has been in the past decade, and where it and we can go now. I want to read Goethe’s Faust as the first, and so far still the best, tragedy of development.

First Metamorphosis: The Dreamer

Faust’s story begins at a point at which many American intellectuals found themselves in the 1950s. He is a man of vast learning and cultures, and his culture knows no bounds: it encompasses medicine and law, philosophy and theology, empirical science and occult and magical arts. His intellectual powers have been recognized and rewarded, he has “arrived” professionally, as a professor and college administrator, a thinker and writer, a healer of bodies and souls. We find him in his study, surrounded by hundreds of rare and beautiful books and manuscripts and paintings and diagrams and scientific instruments, all the paraphernalia of a fulfilled intellectual life. And yet he does not feel fulfilled at all: he sits and frets alone in his study, and talks endlessly to himself in the middle of the night. “Ach, am I still stuck in this jail? / this God-damned dreary hole in the wall / . . . Away! There is a world outside!” His achievements are hollow to him; he feels he hasn’t really lived at all.

What makes Faust’s very triumphs feel like traps to him is that, up to now, they have all been triumphs of inwardness. For years, through both meditation and experimentation, through reading books and taking drugs—he is a humanist in the truest sense, nothing human is alien to him—he has done all he could to cultivate his capacity for thought and feeling and vision. And yet, the more his mind has opened up and expanded, and the deeper his sensitivity has grown, the more he has isolated himself and the more impoverished have become his relationships to life outside—to other people, to nature, even to his own talents and active powers. His culture has developed by detaching itself from social life.

We see Faust call up his most marvelous magical powers, and a magnificent psychedelic vision unfolds before his (and our) eyes. But he turns away from the visionary gleam, disenchanted: “A great show! Yes, but only a show.” Contemplative vision, whether mystical or mathematical (or both) keeps the visionary in his place, the place of a passive spectator. And Faust craves a connection with the world that is more active, more intimate, more vital than mere contemplation can give. He appeals to nature: “how can I grasp you? where are your breasts, those sources of life, toward which my dry breast strains?” Again,

The God that lives deep within me

Can stir my deepest inner springs,

Has power over all my powers

But cannot change external things.^[3]

He feels that the powers of his mind, in turning inward, have turned against him and become his prison. He is straining to find a way for the abundant energy of his inner life to overflow, to express itself through action, to contact and affect the world outside.

Goethe’s Faust expresses the frustration of the most sensitive and creative minds in continental Europe before the French Revolution. These men and women identified themselves with the vision and movement of modern culture, a scientific and artistic, poetic and philosophical, religious and political culture that, since the Renaissance, had opened up a range and depth of human ideas and desires and dreams far beyond all traditional frontiers. At the same time, however, they were members of traditional, stagnant, closed societies that were still encrusted in the structures and norms of medieval feudalism. As the bearer of a dynamic culture within a static society, Faust is torn between his inner and his outer life, between the self he is striving to be and the social role he is forced to play.

Over the course of the last 200 years, this existential split has come to the be the basic fact of life for intellectuals in countries or regions that perceive themselves as “underdeveloped.” (It is worth noting that eighteenth-century Germany was the first society to perceive itself this way; nineteenth-century Russia was probably the second.) But even in America, the most highly “developed” country in the world, there are plenty of people who would find Faust’s lonely room only too close to home. I have in mind all those intellectuals who, between the late ’30s and the late ’50s, were brought up on that heroic vision of culture that my teachers called “modernism.” This was a culture that was said to begin with, for instance, Goethe and Blake, and to run through Hölderlin and Büchner and Baudelaire and Rimbaud and van Gogh and Cezanne and Picasso, to D. H. Lawrence and Dylan Thomas and Mayakovsky and Brecht, from Rousseau’s Confessions and Büchner’s Danton’s Death to Eliot’s The Waste Land and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. It was a culture of romantic expressiveness, of extravagant rebellion, of radical will; it defied all limitations, social, aesthetic, moral, and prided itself on its readiness to take great risks for the sake of deeper truth and more life. And yet, even as we took this vision to our hearts, we could see, all around us, and growing stronger and more self-confident every day, a society that seemed to float on clouds of complacency, that cared only for its comforts—not only material comforts, but spiritual and intellectual ones, which we, the expanding “new class” of intellectuals, were expected to provide—that was blandly oblivious to all the urgent human questions we had learned to ask. We found ourselves lit up with radical visions and ideas, but powerless to “change external things,” to light up the world in which we had to live. The more our culture inspired us, the more our society dispirited us. So we sat alone in our rooms through the ’50s, surrounded by our books and our music and our art (and even, for a few of us, as for Faust, by our drugs), and talked to ourselves.

As Faust sits through the night, the cave of his inwardness grows darker, till at last he resolves to kill himself, to seal himself up forever in the tomb that his inner space has become. He grasps a flask of poison. But just at the point of his darkest negation, his creator Goethe rescues him and floods him with light and affirmation. Suddenly the whole room shakes, there is a tremendous pealing of bells outside, the sun comes up, and a huge angelic choir bursts into song: for it is Easter Sunday. “Christ is arisen / from the womb of decay!” “Burst from your prison, / rejoice in the day!” The angels sing soaringly, triumphantly on, the flask falls from the condemned man’s lips, and he is saved. This miracle has always struck many readers as a crude gimmick, an arbitrary deus ex machina. In fact, it more complex and honest than it first seems. What saves Faust is not the invocation of Jesus Christ: he laughs off the manifest Christian message of the music he hears. What strikes him is something else: “And yet, I am so used to that sound, from childhood / That even now it calls me back to life.”

These bells, like the apparently random but luminous sights and sounds that Proust and Freud will explore a century later, bring Faust back into touch with the whole buried life of his childhood. Floodgates of memory are thrown open in his mind, waves of lost feeling rush in on him—love, desire, tenderness, ecstasy, unity—and he is engulfed by the depths of a childhood world that his whole adulthood has forced him to forget. Like a drowning man giving himself up to be carried away, Faust has inadvertently opened himself up to a whole lost dimension of his being and put himself in touch with forces of energy that can renew his life. He remembers how, when he was a child, the Easter bells made him cry with joy and yearning—and suddenly he finds himself crying again, for the first time since he became an adult. His tears fall like rain on a land long dry: now the flood can overflow, and he can go out of the cave of his study—and of his mind—and walk out into the sunlight of the world outside. Faust’s miracle of the bells prefigures and typifies the peak experience with which—in the lives of a vast number of Americans—the ’60s will begin: an adult intellectual, increasingly shut up in himself, breaks out of (or is freed from) the caves of thought, recovers deeply repressed springs of feeling, becomes a child again, and goes forth to start a new life.^[4]

To become a child again, to open oneself to feeling and life: this magic moment provides the happy ending in many a ’60s romance—just as in Goethe’s age it furnished the happy ending for many a German romance. But Goethe is a realist as well as a romantic; he understands that this sort of self-transformation can only be the beginning. It is not enough for the shut-in self to open up and grow; the world from which he has withdrawn must also be changed, in order for the growth to be real. And here is where the Devil will have to come in.

At first, Faust is thrilled to be back in the world. It is Easter Sunday, and thousands of people are streaming out of the city gates to enjoy their short time in the sun. Faust merges with the crowd—a crowd he has avoided most of his adult life—and feels vivified by its liveliness and color and human variety. Now he feels a connection between his own closeted, esoteric suffering and strivings and those of the common folk, the poor urban working people all around him. Before long, individual people emerge from this crowd; although they have not seen Faust for years, they recognize him at once, greet him affectionately, and stop to chat and reminisce. Their memories reveal to us another buried part of Faust’s past, that he began his career as physician, practicing medicine and public health with his father among the poor people of this neighborhood. But then he remembers why he left his old home behind. His and his father’s work, he came to feel, was ignorant patchwork, a traditional medieval small craft, in which they groped randomly and blindly in the dark. Although the people loved them, he is sure they killed more people than they saved. It was to overcome this fatal inheritance, he remembers now, that he withdrew from all practical work with people, and set out on his solitary quest, the quest that almost led him to his death last night.

Faust begins the day with a new hope, only to find himself thrown into a new form of despair. He knows now that he cannot fall back on the constricting comforts of a life his mind has outgrown. And yet he knows that he can’t let himself drift as far from home as he has been for all these years. He needs to make a connection between the solidity and sweetness and warmth of everyday life with people—life lived within the framework of a concrete community and society—and the cultural revolution that has taken place inside his head. This is the point of his famous lament: “Two souls, alas, are living in my breast.”

In order to bring about the synthesis he craves, Faust will have to embrace a whole new order of paradoxes, paradoxes that are crucial to the structure of both modern consciousness and modern social life. The Goethean Devil, forsaking (or transcending) his traditional role as father of lies, emerges as the dialectical master of these paradoxes. Characteristically, he appears to Faust just when Faust feels closest to God. Back in his study, meditating again, Faust is overcome with rapture at the idea of a God who defines himself through action—“In the beginning was the Deed”—through the primal act of creating the world. Enthused with the power of this God, he is ready to reconsecrate his life to great creative deeds.

It is at this point, to set the seal on this revelation, and to help Faust imitate this God, that the Devil appears. He explains that his role is to personify the dark side, not only of creativity, but of divinity itself. Does Faust really think that God created the world “out of nothing”? The Devil laughs: in fact, nothing comes out of nothing; it is only by virtue of “everything that you call sin, destruction, evil” that any sort of creation can go on. Thus God’s world creation was itself an act of destruction: God destroyed “the part that once was All,” he “usurped the ancient rank and realm of Mother Night.” The Devil is a creature of this primal night. His calling is to cancel out, to negate, to annihilate all that has been created —“I am the spirit that always denies”—to destroy the world and mankind, those products of God’s primal creative-destructive deed. And yet, paradoxically, just as God’s creative will and action were cosmically destructive, so the demonic lust for destruction turns out to be creative. Thus, Mephisto is “a part of that power that always wills evil and always does good.” Having defined himself, he offers Faust a deal: shake hands with the Devil and work with him, accept demonic destructiveness as his own—then, and only then can Faust’s creative powers break out of the closet and into the world. Moreover, even if Faust does work for the Devil for a while, he will ultimately be working for God, for in the end, as in the beginning, God’s and the Devil’s paths converge. The road to heaven is paved with bad intentions. If Faust will only embrace this paradox, and hang onto it, and ride it as fast and as far as it will carry him, everything will come together in the end. This is the Devil’s dialectic.

Faust’s fears and scruples are powerful. Mephisto’s message to the ex-physician is not to worry about the casualties of creation, not to blame oneself, for this is the way life is. Accept your destructiveness as part of your divine creativity, and you can throw off your guilt and leave your closet. No longer need you be choked by the question: should I do it? Out on the great open road of self-expression and self-development, where you will be free to travel, the only question that really matters is a purely technical one: how to do it? And the Devil will take care of that for Faust—in the beginning, at least. Later on, as he lives and moves and grows, he will learn how to do it himself.

How to do it? In effect, Faust must learn the ways of the emerging and expanding bourgeoisie. His own way will sometimes follow theirs, sometimes run parallel, sometimes diverge, sometimes run ahead, but his relationship with them will always be dense and deep. As the Devil explains:

Hell! you’ve got hands and feet

And a head and a behind.

If I can find delight in things,

Does that make them any less mine?

The point here is that Faust’s (and everyone’s) body and mind, and all their powers, are there to be used. He must learn to regard all his personal qualities, either as tools for methodically extracting “delight” from things and so making them his own, or else as resources to be systematically developed and exploited for maximum return. True, Faust does not want to make money—he is not about to sell his soul to become just another bourgeois; nevertheless, Mephisto says, he will have to learn bourgeois habits if he wants to maximize experience, intensity, action, felt life. He will have to become a kind of experiential capitalist, whose basic investment capital is himself. Moreover, although Faust is not interested in money, money is in fact essential to him, the Devil says. Money matters so much because it can be exchanged for experience: virtually all possible human experience can be bought.

If I can buy myself six steeds,

Then aren’t all their powers mine?

I can race along, and be a real man,

As if their two dozen legs were mine.

In this passage (on which Marx based one of his brilliant early essays, “The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society”) money is exchanged for movement: it buys the frightening but exhilarating experience of speed. It does so by buying the energy of others—horses today, but who knows what or whom tomorrow?—and puts them to work moving the monied man along. Indeed, the faster he can “race along,” the more of a “real man”—the more sexual and the more powerful—he can be. So: money as a source of movement, movement as a source of manhood: by these equations and transformations he must learn to live.

At this point in life, Faust is only too glad to learn what the Devil has to teach: to throw off the yoke of his guilt; to use his whole self, his body and spirit was well as himself, to push both self and others as far as they can go. He sees that the Devil’s fast, expensive, sexy coach is the vehicle of creative power; he feels he has sat still far too long; he is eager to learn to drive, and to get his hands on the reins, and to get going on the fastest road he can find. For this is where the action is. At least, it is the only way the Devil points out. And the Devil seems to be the only one who knows. Faust makes the deal. “Just trust yourself, and you’ll know how to live,” the Devil says, one foot out the door. So it goes.

Second Metamorphosis: The Lover

Goethe and his Devil are consummate ironists, and one of the central ironies of the Faust tragedy is that in the course of working in concert with the Devil, Faust becomes a genuinely better man. Like many middle-aged men and women who experience a kind of rebirth, Faust first feels his new powers as sexual powers; erotic life is the sphere in which he first learns to live and act. And indeed, after a little while with the Devil, Faust becomes strikingly attractive and exciting. Some of the changes come through artificial aids: Mephisto fits him out with clothes that are chic and dashing, and through his connection, the Witch’s Kitchen, supplies Faust with drugs that make him look and feel 30 years younger.^[5] Then, too, Faust’s social role changes provocatively: furnished by the Devil with easy money and mobility, he is free to drop out of academic life (as he has been yearning to do for a long time) and to move more fluidly through the world, a sort of intellectual Easy Rider, whose very marginality makes him a man of mystery and romance. But the most important of the Devil’s gifts is the least external, the most real and enduring: he helps Faust “trust himself”; grow bold, forceful, genial, expansive; overflow with the charm and self-assurance it takes to sweep women off their feet. If he could only turn himself into a blasé, decadent playboy, the Devil would be all the more happy. But Faust is too serious a person to be frivolous with his own  or other people’s bodies and souls. Indeed, he is even more serious than he was before, because the scope of his concern has vastly enlarged: after a lifetime of the narrowest and most obsessive self-absorption, he suddenly finds himself interested in other people, sensitive to what they feel and what they need, ready not only for sex but for love.

The spirit of the ’60s has inspired millions of mature men and women to break out of the rigid and deadening molds of their “maturity”—just as Faust does—and make explosively dramatic changes in their styles of life; to open themselves up to radically new experiences, to express themselves directly and passionately, to confront other people with an instant urgency and intimacy, to do all they could to become more fully and intensely alive. Alas, this Faustian change of life often takes bizarre or grotesque forms: the garish clothes, the turgid hip or revolutionary jargons, the lurid all-night encounter sessions screaming at one’s oldest friends—we who survived the ’60s remember them all too well. Still, it is crucial to see that, both for Goethe’s Faust and for his recent successors, there is real and admirable human growth going on. Moreover, if we fail to see the genuine gains involved in Faust’s self-development, we will be unable to grasp the terrible losses it brings about, and the whole story will shrink into just another melodrama, emptied of its tragic resonance.

We need to keep these ambiguities in mind as we look into the fate of Gretchen, the young girl who becomes Faust’s first lay, then his first love, finally the first casualty in the Faustian tragedy of development, and the first archetypal figure of all “the kids” who have gone under in the developments of our own day. Faust is enthralled with Gretchen’s childlike innocence and small-town simplicity and Christian humility. At first he wants only her body, then he falls in love with her soul, soon he mythicizes and idealizes her whole life. But even as he celebrates her sweet simplicity, his presence in her life is breaking that simplicity down. From the moment she discovers the necklace he has left for her anonymously, things can never be the same. No one has ever given her a gift (she has grown up very poor, in love as well as money); she has never thought of herself as being worthy of gifts, or of the emotions they are meant to express. Now, as she puts the necklace on, and looks at herself in the mirror—probably for the first time in her life—a revolution takes place inside her. All at once, she becomes self-conscious, self-reflective; she grasps the possibility of becoming different, of changing herself—of developing. If she was ever at home in this cramped, grubby cottage—and in the small-town, semi-feudal society that permeates and surrounds it—she will never fit in here again.

As their love affair develops, as Gretchen learns to be both wanted and loved, both lustful and loving, she is forced to develop a new sense of herself in a hurry. Her outlook on life becomes subtle and complex—as it must, for her to live through the summits and abysses of her changes. Her innocence must go—not merely her virginity, but, more important, her naivety—for she has to build up and maintain a double life against the surveillance of family, neighbors, priests, against all the suffocating social pressures of small-town life. She has to learn to defy her own guilty conscience—a conscience that has the power to terrorize her more violently than any external force. As her new feelings clash with her old roles, she comes to believe that her own needs are legitimate and important, and to feel a new kind of self-respect. The angelic child Faust loves disappears before his eyes.

Faust is thrilled to see her grow; he does not see that her forced development is precarious because it has no personal or social underpinning and receives no sympathy or protection or confirmation except from Faust. At first her desperation comes across as frenzied passion, and he is delighted. But before long her ardor dissolves into a child’s hysteria, and it is more than he can handle. He loves her, but his love occurs in the context of a full life surrounded by a past and a future, and a wide world that he is determined to explore; while her love for him knows no context at all, it constitutes her whole world and hold on life. Forced to face the intensity and the boundlessness of her need, he panics—as drifters and Easy Riders characteristically do—and leaves town; not, of course, intending to desert her, but simply to get away from it all for a while, to cool himself out.

While Faust is away, the community he snatched Gretchen out of crashes in on her. Word gets around about her love affair, and suddenly all her old friends and neighbors turn on her with primitive cruelty and bigotry and vindictive fury. Her mother dies, and she is blamed. She has a baby—Faust’s baby—and cries for vengeance mount. The townspeople, glad to find a scapegoat for their own guilty lusts, lust for her death. Alone, with nowhere to turn, Gretchen’s mind cracks, her whole sense of identity disintegrates, she is driven into delirium and delusion. The awful climax comes when her baby dies: she is thrown into dungeon, tried as a murderess, condemned to death.

Where has Faust been all this time? At first he soothes himself in the solitary depths of a romantic forest and cavern. But contemplation does not satisfy him for long: Gretchen, by giving him all she has to give, makes him hungry for more than she has to give. He takes a night trip into the Harz Mountains with Mephisto for an orgiastic Witches’ Sabbath, where he enjoys women who are far more experienced, drugs that are headier, strange and marvelous conversations that are psychedelic trips in themselves. It is only in the heat of the night that Faust gets sudden, ominous flashes of the girl he left behind. He asks after Gretchen, and he learns that she is in prison, insane, and is going to be killed the next day.

It is a beautiful, heartrending scene. At first she does not know him: she takes him for her executioner, and, in mad but horribly apt despair, offers her body up to him for the fatal blow. He swears he loves her, urges her to escape with him. Everything can be arranged; she need only step out the door, and she will be free. She feels moved, but cannot move. She says his embrace is cold, he really does not want her. And there is certainly some truth here: although he does not want her to die, neither does he want to live with her anymore. Drawn impatiently towards new realms of experience, he has come to feel her childlike needs and fears as more and more of a drag. But she does not mean to blame him: even if he did want her, “What good to flee? / They lie in wait for me.” They lie in her head; even as she imagines flight and freedom, the image of her mother looms up, sitting on a stone, shaking her head, barring the way. Gretchen stays and dies.

Faust is sick with grief and guilt. For once,  even his poetry deserts him, and he speaks in stark, bleak prose. The Devil’s response is terse: “Why do you make a community (Gemeinschaft) with us, if you can’t go through with it? You want to fly, but you get dizzy.” Human growth has its human costs: anyone who wants it will have to pay the price, and the price runs high. The Devil answers Faust’s hysteria with cold, detached perspective: “She is not the first.” Although the Devil’s usual role is to deflate Faust’s pretensions and self-deceptions, here, ironically, by subsuming Gretchen’s fate under a general human law, Mephisto acquits Faust of specific personal guilt. For if devastation and ruin are built into the process of human development, what could he have done? Even if he had been willing to stop wandering and growing and being “Faustian,” to vindicate Gretchen’s honor and settle down with her, he could never have fit into her world. His one encounter with a representative of that world, Gretchen’s brother Valentine, erupted into unprovoked lethal violence. Clearly there is no room for dialogue between Faust and the medieval small town. The story is tragic precisely because there is no way out.

Even if there is nothing he could have done, there is plenty for Faust to learn. A man on the move, as soon as he reaches out to other people, sets them in motion too—often on trajectories they have no power to stop or even to control. But while Faust is a man of mobility, Gretchen is a woman with no room to move at all. She finds herself at the mercy of a world that has no mercy for a woman who doesn’t know her place. In this closed culture and society, madness and death are virtually the only places she has to go. It is only after Gretchen’s life is shattered that Faust comes to see that if he wants to get involved with other people for the sake of his development, he has to take some sort of responsibility for their development—or else be responsible for their doom.

And yet, in fairness to Faust, we have to recognize how deeply Gretchen —once more, like many of the sweet kids of the ’60s—wants to be doomed. There is something irrevocably and dreadfully willful about the way she dies: she brings it on herself. Maybe her self-destructiveness is mad, insane, but it is strangely heroic as well. We might try to see her as more than a helpless victim—of her lover or her society and as tragic protagonist in her own right. From this perspective, her self-destruction turns out to be a form of self-development as authentic as Faust’s own. For she, as much as he, is trying to move beyond the rigid enclosures of a traditional world—her mother’s and her father’s world—where blind devotion and self-sacrifice are defined as the greatest human good. But where his way out of the old world is to create a new set of values, her way is to take the old values seriously, to actually live up to them. Thus, although she rejects the conventions of her mother’s world as empty forms by sacrificing herself for something she genuinely believes in and someone she loves, Faust strives to keep on the move, assimilates a variety of drives and lives, and develops a new kind of personality, a complex and integrated wholeness of self. Gretchen, on the other hand, incorporates the loveliest human qualities that the old world could produce, a total purity and nobility of soul. Gretchen’s way is surely the more beautiful, yet Faust’s is more helpful: it can help the self to survive and build up a life of its own.

Third Metamorphosis: The Developer

In Faust’s first metamorphosis, he lived alone and dreamed. In his second, his life was intertwined with another person’s and he learned to love. Now, in his last metamorphosis, he connects his personal drives with the powers that make the whole world go round—and he learns to fight. As he fights, he dramatically expands the horizons of his being in a way that so many of us would learn to do in the ’60s: he moves from private to public life, from personal intimacy to political activism, from communion to combat, from love to power. He dares to pit all his powers against both nature and society: he struggles to change not only his own life, but everybody else’s as well. Now, animated by anger, he finds at last a way to act effectively in the physical and social world around him: to tear this whole world down. And now, ironically, dialectically, just as Faust’s love turned out to be a destructive force, so his hate will prove to be creative: it will drive him not only to break down the old world, but to build up a radically new one in its place.

As Faust’s last act begins, we find him alone again, in retreat from life, perched on a bleak mountain, with a lead gray sky above him, a turbid sea below, and desolate wasteland all around. Heavy with exhaustion, worn down with dejection, he seems ready to sink into the rock. But then, suddenly enraged, he springs up, and comes out fighting. First, he uses the language of post-1789 political militancy in a context no one has ever thought of as political: he denounces “the lordly sea,” and all the other “tyrannical” elements, and all natural life—including his own—for its claim to be inexorable in its movement toward decay and death. Next, he attacks the social and political forces that exploit nature’s scarcity and sterility and decay in order to keep people in their place; all the entrenched traditions, norms, roles, that keep men and women from ever coming fully to life, or else, as in Gretchen’s case, kill them brutally when they do.

As Faust’s anger mounts, his spirits revive, and we see him come to life from moment to moment as new visions grow inside him. But now Faust’s visions take on a radically different form: no longer dreams and fantasies, or even philosophical ideas, but concrete programs, actual blueprints, operational plans for changing the world. Suddenly the landscape around him becomes a site. Thinking on his feet, he plans an enormous reclamation project that will harness the sea’s energy for human purposes: great man-made harbors and rivers and canals that can move ships full of goods and men; dams for large-scale irrigation, green fields and forests and pastures and gardens, a vast and intensive agriculture; waterpower to attract and support emerging industries; thriving settlements, new towns and cities to come—and all this to be created out of the ground of this barren wasteland where human beings have never dared to live. Faust is unveiling one of the earliest and most stunning visions of what our own age has described as “modernization.” As his idea unfolds, we notice that the Devil is dazed—for once he has nothing to say. Long ago, the Devil called up the vision of a speeding coach, as a model of the way to move through the world. Now, however, his protégé has outgrown him: Faust wants to move the world itself.

We find ourselves at a crucial moment in modern history. Two radically different historical movements are converging and beginning to flow together. A great spiritual and cultural ideal is merging into an emerging material and social reality. The heroic “Faustian” vision of self-development is working itself out through a new mode of heroism, the titanic work of economic development. Faust is transforming himself into a new man in history: a relentless mover and organizer of materials and machines and men, a consummate wrecker and creator—that dark and deeply ambiguous figure whom our age has come to call the developer.

Any developer needs politics as a source of power to move people. Hence politics is crucial to Faust’s design. But his relation to political life is always remote and external. Before he transforms himself into a developer, he is indifferent to politics. Afterward, he acquires a vested interest in political institutions and processes, and learns how to exploit them for ulterior ends. But he never really cares about political life in its own right. He finds the reactionary politics of order and hierarchy and the revolutionary politics of liberty, equality, and fraternity equally sterile and irrelevant. What people really want and need, Faust believes, no merely political vision or system can give: honest work, living wages, time to rest, space to breathe. Thus the secret of politics is economics; the vital issue in economic life is welfare; and the way to welfare, the only way, is through growth. Faust develops a strategy that many intellectuals are still following today: he offers his mind to a government in trouble, and trades his brainpower for political power. He becomes the main political adviser to an imperial regime that is menaced by a growing (if inchoate) revolutionary movement. His advice—that the real need is not liberty or equality, but growth—helps confuse the opposition and defuse the threat. The grateful emperor gives him authority over the entire seacoast, with a blank check to transform it as he will. Faust uses traditional authority to set up the social conditions for a movement of modernization that will sweep all traditional authority away. Armed with the imperial mandate, he conscripts a huge labor army; and with much fanfare, the great work of development begins.

Working actively to recreate the world, Faust finally comes into his own: “One mind for a thousand hands.” Faust becomes a hard and merciless autocrat. He urges his overseers, led by Mephisto, to “Use every means you can!”; he lets his workers know that “the master’s word alone has real might.” But if he drives his workers, he drives himself just as hard. He throws himself into the task with a passionate intensity that is new—at least in literature. If church bells called him back to life before, it is the sound of shovels that vivifies him now. Gradually the work begins to come together, and we see Faust radiant with pride. He has tapped and exploited and organized and transformed every source of energy on earth—natural, mechanical, human. He has vastly enlarged the scope of material production, generated an endless flow of exchange, started an inexhaustible movement of masses of men and things, created a vast, intense and thriving economic life. Standing on the mountain where he started out, he overlooks the whole new world he has brought about—and it looks good. Walking the earth with the pioneers of his newest settlement, he feels far more at home that he ever felt with the friendly but narrow folk he walked with before the city gates on Easter Sunday so long ago. These new men are looking for lives of action and adventure, the give off radiant self-confidence, they feel at home in their new world, and proud of it. They are close to each other, as comrades in a great adventure that is as spiritual as material—and eager to face any challenge that their life together might bring. They are as avidly and wholeheartedly and enthusiastically modern as Faust himself. Alongside them, he can realize a hope that he has cherished ever since he left his father’s side: to belong to a concrete community, to work with and for people, to use his mind to enrich and renew everyday life. Thus the process of economic growth generates new modes of individuality and new forms of community for all those men and women who themselves can grow. Economic development is opening up the way to universal self-development.

But the developer’s vision, like every other, must be judged not only by what it sees, but what it does not see—what realities it refuses to look at, what human possibilities it cannot bear to confront. Faust envisions a world in which personal growth and social progress can be had for free, without pain, ruin, waste, death. He goes on to create a world in which new peaks of progress and growth are actually attained. Through striving and action, he becomes a genuine and lasting hero—but a hero who is tragically blind. Ironically, his tragedy stems precisely from his desire to eliminate tragedy from life.

As Faust surveys his work, only one little piece of ground along the coast remains untouched. It is owned and occupied by Philemon and Baucis, a nice old couple who have been there since time out of mind, who have a little cottage on the dunes, a sailors’ and wanderers’ chapel with a lovely bell, and a garden full of linden trees. Goethe borrows their names from classical myth (they appear as background figures in Ovid), but endows their personalities with Christian virtues: charity and humility. Everyone seems in love with them, except Faust himself: he becomes obsessed with them, determined that their land must be “reclaimed”—for an observation tower, “a lookout to gaze into the infinite”—and they must go.

We are bound to be in sympathy with Faust’s desire to destroy the old, undeveloped, repressive order that destroyed Gretchen, and she was not the first. And yet, this old couple, like Gretchen herself, personify all the best that world has to give. They are too old, too stubborn, maybe even too stupid, to adapt and to grow; but they are beautiful people, the salt of the earth, where they are. Faust does not deny their beauty; indeed, this is what frightens him most. “My realm is endless to the eye, / behind my back I hear it mocked.” Somehow, he feels, it would be fatal to look back. “And if I rest there from the heat, / their shadows would fill me with fear.” He had better not stop to rest, or else something dark in those shadows will catch up with him. The little chapel bell “wounds me like a perfidious shot.” Of course, church bells are the sound of guilt and doom and all the inner and outer forces that destroyed the girl he lived. Yet church bells were also the sound that, when he was ready to die, called him back to life. There is more of him in those bells, and in that world, than he likes to think. The magical power of the bells on Easter morning was their power to put Faust in touch with his childhood. Without that vital bond with his past—with primary sources of spontaneous energy and delight in life—he could never have developed the inner strength to transform the present and future. But now that he has staked his whole identity on his will to change—and on his power to fulfill his will—his bond with his past terrifies him: “That bell, those lindens’ sweet perfume / Enfold me like a church or tomb.”

For the developer, to stop moving, to let himself rest, to fade into the languid sweetness of the shadows, to let himself be enfolded—is death. And yet, to such a man, nothing could be so tempting as a return to passivity. There is no one in the world to whom the chapel bell sounds so sweet as it sounds to Faust; no one for who the shadows are so lovely, dark, and deep. And that is why Faust must wipe them out.

Faust summons Mephisto, and states that the old couple have to be got out of the way. Like other political leaders we have come to know, he does not want to know the details of how the job is done; he only wants to see the results. Here we see Faust undertaking his first unequivocally evil act. As one of the great creative spirits of modernity, he will create a distinctively modern style of evil: indirect, impersonal, mediated by complex organizations and institutional roles. Mephisto and his special unit know what to do, and they return the next morning with the good news that everything has been taken care of. Faust, suddenly solicitous, asks where they have been resettled—and learns that their house has been burned to the ground, and they have been killed. He is aghast, outraged, just as he was when he found out Gretchen’s fate: he didn’t say anything about violence, he protests; he calls Mephisto a monster, and banishes him. The prince of darkness departs gracefully, like the gentleman he is, but he laughs before he leaves. Faust has been pretending—not only to others, it seems, but even to himself—that he could create a whole new world with clean hands; he is still not ready to accept responsibility for the violence and misery that cleared the way. First he contracted out all the dirty work of development; now he washes his hands of the job and has no sympathy for the jobber, once the work is done. As much as Faust has developed both himself and his society, his self-awareness and moral imagination are still a wasteland. Indeed, his great, heroic work of development has helped to lay his soul to waste. This is the way the tragedy of development works.

Faust almost grasps the tragedy, but not quite. With the old couple done, and their world fully uprooted, Faust has all he wanted, yet he does not feel fulfilled. As the Devil departs, Faust grows uneasy in the silent night. He is cold and alone; the air seems full of ghosts. For the first time since he began his quest, Faust is afraid. But he is still not ready to accept responsibility for his own ghosts—for the real guilt and remorse he has brought upon himself in the course of his work. Instead of looking his fear in the face and coming to some sort of terms with it, he projects it all outward again, and blames the Devil. He lets himself forget that, most strikingly in this last metamorphosis, the Devil has been no more than an accessory, executing Faust’s own radical will. But now he has a fearful vision of another old lady, hovering around him like another ghost: her name is Care. For what is she calling him to account? He does not what to know; he says he does not care. He banishes her, as he banished the Devil a little while ago. But before she goes, she breathes on him—and with her breath, strikes him blind. And as she touches him, Care tells him he has been blind all along, blind to the real meaning of his acts and his life. Faust becomes a modern counterpoint to Oedipus: a master of thought and action, a murderer of his parents (symbolized by Philemon and Baucis), and a mutilated, blind man in the end. Because his is a modern hero, his blindness does not stop him from doing his work: indeed, it only moves him to drive himself and his workers faster, to finish before darkness closes in for good. Still, the care he would not admit has wounded him very deeply. He destroyed those old people and their world—and the world of his own childhood—so that he might gaze out into the infinite; in the end, the infinite night, whose powers he used but refused to face, is all he sees. He dies as he has lived for so long, in the dark.

Faust in the ’60s

We have followed Faust out from under the crushing gabled roofs of a traditional and feudal society, up the steep and jagged slopes of modernization, toward the great and beautiful vistas opened up by a new industrial world. Wherever Faust has found himself—alone in his study, in bed with Gretchen, at work contending with fretful elements and men—he has found himself driven by a relentless and overpowering will to change. The drive has led him into his three metamorphoses, as dreamer, lover, organizer—but also, sooner or later, it has led him through and out of and beyond them. Faust’s restless urge to move and change and grow has filled his life with romance and resonance, and has turned him into a radically new, distinctively modern kind of hero: the developer. But this Faustian drive for development is a deeply ambiguous and dangerous passion—not only heroic, but demonic—and its creativity is bound to be destructive, and tragic, in the end.

If we look back now on recent American life and ask where in our exploding culture and society Faust would feel at home, it should be clear to us that the answer is everywhere. Faust would have no trouble recognizing millions of Americans who, through all the storms of the ’60s, steadfastly refused to recognize each other. He who has passed through so many different styles of life would understand how a radical conflict of styles can mask a deeper unity of drives and needs. He would see at once how our official culture and our radical “counterculture” are animated by the same insatiable lust for development, the same heroic will and energy and largeness of vision, and courage to move, the same reckless insensitivity to the lives and needs of people in the way. The unity of Faust’s life should help us grasp the underlying unity of our own collective life. His story should help us see how our own economic developers and our psychedelic visionaries and our revolutionary activists—Bernard Cornfeld and Eldridge Cleaver, Robert Moses and Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary and Robert McNamara, Clark Kerr and Mark Rudd, Walt Rostow and Jerry Rubin, Janis Joplin and Lyndon Johnson—are all caught up and whirled in the same maelstrom, all actors and victims in the American tragedy of growth.

The cultural and political explosions of the ’60s will make more sense to us if we remember that they came at the crest of an economic boom, the climax of a generation of spectacular growth. Since the start of World War II, American productive and financial power, technological capacity and creativity, political control and cultural influence, had been expanding at a fantastic rate. The dynamism and energy of our economy seemed boundless. Mutual funds and conglomerates were driving the market to dizzying heights. Enormous freeways were shooting out in every direction, whole new industries and teeming population centers were springing out of the ground. In settled areas, high-rise office complexes were sprouting up in every empty lot, even lots that had been full, obliterating everything transmitted to us from the past. In this period the figure of the developer came into his own. Sometimes he sprang from private industry, sometimes from government bureaucracy, and usually he had links with both. Nothing was sacred to him. Armed with zoning variances, with eminent domain—and, as a last resort, with the police, the national guard, or the marines—he sought the power to tear down and build up anything, anywhere, in the city, the country, the world. In a time when everything seemed, effortlessly, endlessly, to get bigger and bigger (though not necessarily better), and everybody seemed to get richer (though not necessarily happier), the developer was the man of the hour. He thought and acted and spoke for a society that was buoyant, exhilarated, full of an easy confidence in its drives and its innate momentum.

In this climate, America was ready for a “cultural revolution.” As the ’60s began, Americans were growing steadily more permissive and expressive in their sexual and emotional lives, more open in their responses to literature and art, more playful and extravagant in their styles and manners with which they lived their everyday lives. And through it all, the market kept on going up, the economy grew and grew. This economic fact generated a decisive change in millions of people’s sensibilities. For all of us had been brought up to believe that we (and everyone else) had to repress ourselves, grit our teeth, and hold back our feelings and desires if we wanted to survive. But now, as the decade developed, and we began, tentatively at first, to let it all hang out, and act it all out, and bring long-suppressed feelings into the open, and free our bodies and expand and implode our minds, we found—for a time at least—that our new self-expression, far from threatening our survival, was bringing us new sources of life and energy, and helping us cope, not only more happily, but even more effectively, than we ever had before.

No wonder, then, that we embraced the ebullient vision of the developers as our own. We enforced our own variety of zoning variance—this was the real meaning of so many of the sit-ins and teach-ins and love-ins and weird disruptions and outrages of the decade—with boundless confidence that everyone would adapt and everything would be fine, finer than ever, very soon. This expansive faith was especially striking in the knowledge and entertainment and culture industries—industries that were uniquely spectacular in their growth. It is appropriate that LSD was first used and celebrated not in shadowy bohemian enclaves but at Harvard and at the UCLA Medical Center of TV serial fame. When Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were eventually forced to leave Harvard, many of their disciples hung on through the mid-’60s, and proselytized acid with the motto “Better Living Through Chemistry.” I remember asking one of them whether this wasn’t in fact the slogan of one of America’s most sinister pharmaceutical combines. “Sure,” he said, smiling, “but for our drug it’s really true.” He went on to assure me that there were no bad trips on LSD, only slanderous stories spread by “them.” That was the way that people talking in the ’60s. So many sources of life and liberty and happiness, and so few dues to pay!

But even in our most euphoric moments we knew that there were still some dues to pay. We knew that, for the time being at least, all existing institutions were controlled by “them.” We knew, as we came out into the world in the late ’60s, that many of us were going to have to pay a price for our personal growth and our cultural liberation—more for these than for our radical politics—with our jobs. But losing jobs did not seem so bad. We believed our parents’ generation had been too hung up on jobs, and on the respectability and security that jobs could confer. We did not worry so much about a job, because we were sure there would always be other jobs, around the corner or across the country. New schools and colleges and institutes, and free schools and alternate universities and centers for social change, were being created ex nihilo every day. Or else, if we got tired of academic life, there were whole new industries opening up, from computers to rock to dope. Or else, if that didn’t work out, we could always drop out, and drift around, and pick up odd jobs, and live on food stamps, and steal—ripping off the system, it was called, an act that was not only useful but righteous. It was easy, in those boom years, to live off the fat of the land. This made it easier to experiment, to take risks for the sake of our self-development, for we were secure in the knowledge that it was not only possible, but adventurous and exciting, to move on. Thus the growth and dynamism of the American economy provided for us—for an expanding and energetic new middle class—the same sort of support that Mephisto’s money and mobility provide for Faust.

It was only natural that the civil rights movement and the New Left, as they came to life early in the ’60s, should share the same joy in motion and momentum that animated American society as a whale in those days of fervid development. It was natural, too, though full of sad irony, that as the decade went on, and a new radical movement crystallized, its style turned out to be a mirror image of those hotshot stock market operators and real estate developers whom we most despised. Our radical campaigns shared the contours of the “shooters”—the hot new issues that were flooding the market late in the ’60s which, ironically, turned out to be far more subversive to Wall Street than we were: short-term, high-risk. Extravagantly speculative, full of flash and energy, but often built on the flimsiest of foundations, capable of sudden marvelous surges, but just as capable of catastrophic overnight collapse. Our movement thrives on extreme situations—gross and enormous spectacles, dramatic confrontations, “action” on the grandest and most desperate scale. When an extreme situation did not seem to exist, we tried to create one—to force the issue to bring the moment to its crisis—because this was the only wavelength on which we felt at home. For the most part, of course, we did not need to create crises and catastrophes;—the government did it very well. Our movement grew,—along with the pressure under which we had to move. We loved the pressure and urgency, for we were caught up in the magic of our momentum, and we didn’t worry much about the steering, let alone the brakes. When we confronted the demons at the Pentagon, we rejoiced innocently in the spectacular growth of the radical counterculture that was gathered together that day. How sweet it felt, as we converged on them, to shout the words of The Doors’ latest apocalyptic song: “We want the world, and we want it NOW!” We didn’t realize then how close in spirit we were to the genial megalomaniac in the White House, who would have understood our words perfectly if he had heard them, who wanted the world even more than we did, and who was bombing it—for the sake of future development, of course—even as we marched and sang. I am not trying to discredit the New Left when I argue that our style was a mirror of theirs; in the context of the ’60s, this was the only style there was. As Marx said, the bourgeoisie creates a whole world—even its opponents—in its image.

There are many more ironies here. We must face the fact that, for all our Faustian desire to overreach, we didn’t actually reach very far. We fantasized endlessly about drastic and horrific action, expended spirit psyching ourselves up for cataclysmic violence, but very few of us were actually willing to do it, and very little was done. When the radical violence of the ’60s is compared with earlier troubled times—the 1890s, say, or the 1930s—it looks almost embarrassingly puny. For all the murderous rage of their language and imagery and gestures, the vast majority of the ’60s radicals showed by their behavior that they didn’t want to hurt people, not even the people they hated. This is why the fate of the Weathermen was so traumatic: by going all the way in reality on a trip that many radicals had taken only in fantasy, they showed us that this was not after all the way we wanted to go. We were capable of sympathy for the devil, but not intimacy, let alone identity, with demonic ways and means. Any viable post-’60s radicalism is going to have to accept that fact and build on the self-awareness it brings.

Another irony is that while we were talking about violence and violation, the official representatives of “straight” society were actually doing it. Under Lyndon Johnson, this was obvious: he was our Captain Ahab, and he was going to get that whale, if he had to drag us all down with him in the attempt. (Why did he quit? Might he have recognized that, if he stayed in power, he might indeed drag the whole world down with him? To quit, then, meant to pull back from an abyss he yearned for—Johnson’s one indisputably heroic act.) Under Nixon it was more masked—till the Watergate story tore the mask cleanly off—and more sinister. Even as he and his friends were shaking their heads over our violent language, condemning permissive and loose morality, celebrating law and order and the virtues of civilized restraint, they were killing and horribly maiming millions of people abroad, and systematically violating the rights of millions more—of all of us—at home. The continuing Watergate/Ellsberg/ITT/Berrigan/Camden/Gainesville stories, among others, suggest that the radicals of the ’60s, for all their riotous rhetoric, tended to behave with a touching propriety and probity—while the official guardians of law and order were in fact capable of anything. If we are looking for genuine diabolism, rampant nihilism, we should forget about characters in weird clothes who sing songs such as “Sympathy for the Devil”—people like that are bound to be dilettantes, amateurs at best. We should focus instead on the sober organization men in crew cuts and business suits—Mephisto appears as one of these men in the last act of Faust—doing their jobs in a calm and orderly way. This perspective may strip the powers of darkness of their romantic dash, but it will give us a clearer vision of their real power and dread.

As Johnson’s administration went on, and the war escalated, and our lives grew bitterer, and people began to turn against the President (“Turn On Johnson,” a nicely ambiguous button worn at the Pentagon) as a personification of all that was wrong with our country, it was his Faustian spirit that they often blamed: the largeness of his presence, his enormous aims, his sense of a righteous mission, his obsessive will to change the world. If we could only slow ourselves down, reduce our energy level, stagnate a little—if we could learn to benignly neglect the world—we would do ourselves and everyone else a great deal less harm. When Nixon came in, many people who detested him nevertheless sighed with relief. There was a certain feeling that we had wrought so much destruction, so much evil, by force of our great dreams of our noblest virtues. After all this, a man who was utterly devoid of these virtues could help us come down. We could forestall Faustian tragedy if we foreswore Faustian heroism. Now, after five years of Nixonian ferocity and malevolence in the service of nothing—of an abyss of cynicism, an ultimate nothingness—we are rediscovering the banality of evil. In the gray ’70s, the devil is very much with us, even though Faust is not.

Even those of us who most loved the ’60s, as I did, were relieved to feel them come to an end. But the tragedy had different endings for different actors. Faust’s tragedy is the tragedy of a mature man, a man who has lived and grown both intellectually and emotionally, who has developed survival skills and perspective on life, before he ventures into the world. Those of us whose identities had already jelled and crystallized in the ’50s could take special delight in the ’60s: we could let ourselves go, knowing they would come back. Our maturity made us always a bit ironic, reserved even in our wildest moods and our most luminous moments; but those reserves were what kept us together when the bubble burst. When, after all our hopes and struggles, the system didn’t change much after all—and in some ways got even worse, a repressive administration and an economic slump coming down on us at once, we were sad, but we didn’t take it all that personally. We could head for our local forests and caverns and mountaintops, as Faust does—studies or libraries or coffeehouses and bars will do just as well—and consolidate our personal growth, and savor all that the ’60s had done for us. Gretchen’s tragedy, on the other hand, is the tragedy of youth, a youth whose soul is more beautiful than Faust’s, but whose self is far less free. Like so many of the kids who lit up the sixties, she goes all the way, holds back nothing of herself, but consequently has nothing to fall back on when the catastrophe comes: she takes it all too personally, and her personality falls apart. She feels abandoned, not only by a society that hates her, but by the man who loves her—as, not so long ago, many of the kids we loved, or said we loved, felt abandoned by us. We really did love them, as Faust really loves Gretchen; but we did find ourselves getting bored after a while with the narrowness of their pure intensity; we longed for something more complex. And so we Faustians went our separate ways, sad and tired, but opened and enlarged and deepened and developed by the storms we had passed through. And many, too many, of the kids, like Gretchen, hardly grown, fell apart or died alone.

No doubt I am being melodramatic here: after all, even though many did disintegrate and die, most of us, in fact, survived. Still, so many who survived the ’60s brought another typical form of tragedy upon themselves, the tragedy of the survivor, who cripples himself in body and soul rather than face again the terrors of being fully alive. Our campuses and mountain trails and highways are full of languid kids whose deepest ambition seems to be to retire at twenty-five. (And some have actually made it: Woodstock and Marin County, for instance, are full of “retired” dope dealers, grazing in the sun, senior citizens at thirty.) Bookstore shelves marked “Growth” or “Self-Realization” or “Getting Yourself Together” feature T-groups or tantric yoga, shamanism or sensual massage—everything but the Faustian project of growing and developing oneself through action in the world. The great thing now, it seems, is to be “mellow”—which means, as you know if you have ever sat through a few minutes of this mellowness, to be empty. The ’60s brought these kids up so high, so fast; now, in the ’70s, they want only to go down slow.

What hurts me even more is that my own generation of intellectuals, artists, teachers, ex-activists, seems only too glad to let them—even to help them go. This is especially sad because one of my generation’s authentic political achievements was its insistence, in the midst of feverish expansion and construction, that man was not made for economic growth, economic growth was made for man. One of the crucial points of our many struggles over student power, neighborhood and community control, workers’ self-management, was that the bureaucratic drive for unlimited development—whether capitalist or statist—had no right to ride roughshod over the needs and the lives of the people in the way. Even in our fight against the Indochina war, traditional opposition to imperialism was intertwined with a revulsion at the way the imperatives of America’s development had ravaged and shattered traditional societies and given them nothing in return. Economic growth can be justified only where it contributes to human growth—the growth not of hypothetical human beings at some future date, but the actual peoples who are here right now. This idea is part of the lasting legacy of the New Left. Alas, even as more and more Americans were learning to appreciate our vision and make it their own—see the Department of Labor’s Work in America report—many old New Leftists were losing hold on the vision that they had been the first to see. Their sensitivity to the human costs of development desensitized them to its real human gains. Instead of grasping the process of modernization as a tragedy, they came to see it as a melodrama—all bad. Traumatized by the tragedy of their own development, they came to hate all their radical energy and creativity and overflowing of life. When their mocking inner voices, like the Goethean Earth Spirit, called out to them, “Where are you, Faust, whose voice rang out to me, / Who forced himself on me so urgently?” they pulled the covers over their heads and dreamed of forests and caverns of primal listlessness.

I don’t mean to deny the terrible force of all the pain we saw and felt—and sometimes caused. But I do want to suggest that tragedies of development form the deepest core of modern experience; they are not ours alone. It is crucial for us to come to terms with the demonic potentialities of human growth, both individual and social, psychosexual and economic. But although we have to learn to accept responsibility, it is pointless to paralyze ourselves with cynicism or mutilate ourselves with blame. Indeed, if we repress our Faustian vision and energy and will, and recoil from action—as plenty of us have learned to do surprisingly fast—even then we will be to blame. We will be guilty of perpetuating the only alternative to the tragedy of development: the tragedy of underdevelopment—a story that most of our parents, and those who grew old in the silent night of the ’50s, and the 40 million Americans still stuck below the poverty line, and millions more in the undeveloped Third World, know all too well.

It used to be said, back in the ’60s, that we should throw out the tragic sense of life, because it made life seem too complex, and this enervated our will to change the world. On the contrary, I think it is only in the context of militant activism and attempts to change the world that tragedy has any meaning at all. Max Weber, one of the great Faustian heroes of modern times, spoke of this in his luminous essay “Politics as a Vocation.” Writing at a moment of revolutionary activity and exhilaration, Weber said that it required no special virtue to be active in a time like the present; the real test would come in the future, when the forces of reaction triumphed again—as they soon did, in his Germany (though he did not live to see it) and in our America. Weber anticipated a time of torpor and dejection very much like our ’70s, and spoke to it in advance. He restated the discovery that Faust makes at the beginning of his tragedy, that “the world is governed by demons.” In our modern, post-Christian world, personal devils have been rendered obsolete, and thrown out of work, by enormous impersonal organizations; what Weber called “human machines.” Anyone who persists in the belief “that good can follow only from good, and evil only from evil”—who believes, in other words, that he can live in the world and still keep his innocence intact—“is a political infant.” Human life is darkly ambiguous at its core. Nevertheless, everyone—not only everyone who wants to follow politics as a vocation, but “everyone who is not spiritually dead”—is “responsible for what may become of himself under the impact of these paradoxes.” The requirements for being political are the requirements for being a Mensch, “a genuine man,” a full human being. Who has the calling? “Only he,” says Weber’s last line, “who in the face of all this can say, ‘In spite of all!’” This is what tragic heroism, and authentic radicalism, and sympathy for the devil, are all about.

[1] There were plenty of rehearsals for the trouble. I saw the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden at an earlier stage of the tour. (Altamont was the last stage.) The dramatic high point of the night was a song in which Jagger brilliantly mimed the acts of rape and murder. As he twisted himself voluptuously around his unseen victim, teenage girls leapt up onto the stage and threw themselves hysterically at his feet—“Do it to me!” I heard one yell. Before they could reach him, two enormous black men appeared from behind the stage, lifted them bodily and flung them back into the pit—possibly giving them a satisfactory substitute for the thrills they craved. Jagger fluttered his eyelashes, waved his Isadora scarf, smiled slyly through it all.

[2] When Bob Dylan in 1970 was asked by an interviewer if there were any recent records that turned him on, all he could think of was a record by someone named Johnny Thunder, entitled “I’m Alive!” Neither the interviewer nor I had ever heard of either the singer or the song, and Dylan was playfully vague about it all. I assumed—and so apparently did the interviewer—that Dylan was putting us all on, but expressing that he was thunderously glad to be alive; we know how he felt, and we, too, were glad not only for Dylan’s survival but for our own. Later on, I learned that the record actually did exist, and in fact it sounded nice, though one could accuse Thunder of protesting too loudly and too much. I remembered the song again a couple of months ago, when I found myself confused with Marshall Bloom, who sparked student revolts at the London School of Economics in 1967, helped found Liberation News Service in 1968, went to live on a farm in 1969, and killed himself in 1971.

[3] Translations from Goethe’s Faust are an amalgam of my own readings with those of Louis MacNeice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), Walter Kaufman (Garden City, NY, Anchor Books, 1962), and Charles Passage (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).

[4] Ernest Schachtel’s beautiful essay, “Memory and Childhood Amnesia,” makes it clear why these bells, and sensations like them, should have such a miraculous and magical power in our lives. This essay, first published in 1947, is reprinted as the last chapter of Schachtel’s book, Metamorphosis: On the Development of Affect, Perception, Attention and Memory (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 279–322, especially 307ff.

[5] Drugs and their effects on the self form a persistent and important theme throughout Goethe’s Faust. Goethe, like Freud a century later, was always interested in, and generously sympathetic toward, the use of drugs to expand human sensibility and awareness; at the same time, he could be caustic about the use of drugs as mode of deadening and escape.

Marshall Berman was a member of Dissent’s editorial board.

Gerald Howard is a retired book editor. In November Penguin Press will be publishing his first book, The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature.