Permissive California - 6 December 1996

Everybody knows that California is not only the home but the cradle of eccentric movements, religious, pseudo-religious, political, educational, the declared aim of most of them being the offer of a shortcut to wisdom or utopia, or heaven, or peace and serenity.

My first trip out here – I shouldn't say "out here," a phrase that can be as offensive to Californians as "he's gone out to the states," is offensive to all other Americans, "out" suggesting "out" from the centre of civilisation. Alright then, my first trip to California a very long time ago, was enlivened and sometimes enlightened by several cults that were then in their heyday. It was the depths of the Depression and for many people Roosevelt's massive deficit, borrowing and spending on huge public works was not enough.

A famous novelist ran for Governor of California on a ticket known as EPIC. End Poverty In California. And a doctor had a similar plan to abolish poverty by giving everybody $60 a month. Both these campaigns are long forgotten. For one thing, nobody explained where the federal government or the State of California, or any other philanthropic body, was going to get the money to disperse. The population of California was then 5.7 millions which I calculate would require some good Samaritan, who never showed up, to dispense just over $40 billion a year. Today incidentally, the population is not 5.7 millions but 29.7, involving a handout of billions and billions that would boggle the mind even of the United States Secretary of the Treasury.

On the spiritual side, apart I mean from the wealth of genuine established religions, apart from the legitimate known religions, there flourished, even then, some very odd and very popular cults created and run by usually a large lunged orator. I forget the name of the man who ran a fervent religion of self-affirmation known as "I am". So these cults were presided over either by a resounding orator or by a mysterious or charismatic woman. Such a one in the early 1930s was the transplanted Canadian Aimee Semple McPherson, who really was a gorgeous creature and also had the evangelists' gift of making people believe that if she beckoned you, you would no longer be blind, crippled, or whatever. I personally saw her perform her peculiar miracles, the miracle being that when she summoned the lame and the old, they pattered up to her, she blessed them, and they went back in a euphoric daze even though they were still on their crutches.

Well there've been many cults, many movements that promised the great good life and they've come and gone. One of the most pathetic was recalled the other day by a cab ride through Haight-Ashbury, the very staid looking San Francisco district which promised the young for a decade or more, a blissful release from the aches of the flesh and the grief of the soul. Which in some cases was no more, no less, than the ability to stay in school or get a job. Peace through the holding out of flowers, especially under the influence of drugs, by now universally well-known, which blighted the lives of too many youngsters in the 1960s.

I just looked up Haight-Ashbury in the Yellow Pages of the San Francisco telephone book and I recalled that not so long ago there were more than a few entries under the district's name, all for drug care, rehabilitation, detoxification. Today there is only one number, one entry, which can only mean not that there is less drug addiction but that the junkies are now widely dispersed. For there are I'm sad to say, under other numbers, at least, I'd say 40 different entries for emergency or regular or long-term treatment for drugs. Sometimes called substance abuse programmes or chemical dependency.

It's quite a legacy that those children of the 60s left us. Though I have to say that as far as San Francisco is concerned it was always from the, well the 1860s on, a tolerant town, hospitable to every sort of weirdo and eccentric. To new forms of poetry. To pioneer, and sometimes barmy, medical research. As well as tolerating a population of winos and junkies. No other city in America has accepted so readily a whole tight knit homosexual population, in one district, with its own congressman.

So San Francisco has survived many fads, many liberation movements, from the emancipated so-called "flappers" after the First World War, to the present population of baby-boomers, products of the warriors returning from the Second War. The generation that asserted in the 60s the counterculture and that now finds itself in its late 40s and early 50s with teenagers and sprouting college kids, and is discovering some painful home truths that were denied or defied through the 20-odd years of resisting wars, avoiding the draft by taking off for Canada, defying their parents with great rock celebrations in huge meadows, dense with the haze of marijuana.

At least the baby boomers are now facing their own generation of rebels – their children – with the unexpected result that they are just as baffled by their children as their parents were with them. Just as baffled but angrier. Lately, a dozen books or more and the success of men and women going round the country giving hundreds of lectures, testify to a problem that has always been with us but in small doses. The problem of defiant, rebellious, out of control children. In a small town in Maryland last week a psychologist, unknown to national fame so far, was being lovingly greeted and cheered by swarms of baby-boomer parents, who, having found themselves at their wits' end over the raucous or defiant or troubled behaviour of their children, have at last, heard the message. The new, exciting, healing message of these books and these lecturers? Simply there must be, in a family, as in a nation, rules, chores, discipline. A very old message surely, rediscovered after a very long period of what, 40 years ago we called, and boasted of as "permissive parenting".

It was a late outgrowth of the progressive educational theories of John Dewey who lived from the middle of the last century to the middle of this one. In this country at least, he had an immense and far ranging effect on teaching. The teaching of practically everything. His theory was a revolt against learning by rote and having information and dates forced fed. Undoubtedly he let a shaft of light into schoolrooms darkened by dull teachers producing mechanical answers to everything. Undoubtedly too there was a minority that was over-responsive to the new ideas and acted in the foolish belief that nothing should be taught a child that didn't excite it, that there was no tedium involved in learning and that maybe children should, themselves, choose the subjects they wanted to learn.

This trend, this distortion of Dewey, in some universities overwhelmed the true faith. One dreadful result was the campus riots of the 1960s and early 70s in which students wrangled over which subjects they'd be taught, tried to rewrite the syllabus, maintained that classroom discipline was a form of totalitarianism and, most fatuous of all, here, across the bay at Berkeley, the Athens of the counterculture, troupes of students bearing obscene banners, chanted four-letter words to express their understanding of what the Constitution called freedom of speech.

Well the storm and stress of the 60s has died down, the adolescent rebellion against what somebody called "the silent majority", which meant aggrieved and bewildered parents, not saying much. But what has lasted I think into our time is a sort of settled acquiescence in new standards that the young baby boomers set for themselves for their generation and, under protest, for the older generations.

There were more offhand, casual standards of manners, drastically more casual dress, for once the inspiration came up from the working class to the upper instead of, what had been true for centuries, the other way round. In education a more relaxed, less demanding standard of scholarship which is now being exposed, to the alarm of the government, in an international study that puts the average American way down the list of industrial nations in science and mathematics.

An early critic of American public education, a friend of mine, racy, funny, young, unpompous man, once wrote, and this was in the 30s that: "The trouble with American public education was its standards were easy and dithering." A famous American educator recently put it another way: "We had easy expectations of our children and they have met them".

But if there's one thing on which each succeeding generation in all countries is cocksure, perhaps I should say in all countries that have freedom of religion, it's knowing the proper way to bring up children. Now that the baby boomers of all enlightened, liberal types, are taking a beating from their children, they should know one thing, that by whatever method you brought up your children, by religious rule, by Dr. Spock, by Dewey's permissive system, by strictness, by looseness, by smothering protectiveness, or by distant approval, you have one consolation.

Whatever you did, you were wrong.

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