Comment: Anti-Revolutionaries

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This is the age of revolution, in word even more than in deed. Scarcely a publication can be picked up that does not issue a call for revolution in something: art or education, politics or sex, work or play. Yet amid the now commonplace advocacy of upheaval are quieter appeals to reason that suggest revolution is not all it is reputed to be, that continuity may be preferable to crisis, that peaceful accommodation with one's fellow man may prove to be more fruitful than clobbering him—or even calling him names.

The writers who prefer rationality to revolution are by no means traditionally conservative. In the Sunday New York Times Magazine last month, Benjamin DeMott, chairman of the English department at Amherst, explored the casually violent language of the revolutionary-minded. Among his specimens:

"The family is the American Fascism."—Paul Goodman.

"The white race is the cancer of history."—Susan Sontag.

"Senator McCarthy is one of the Senate's few intellectuals and one of its most obvious hypocrites; the two go hand in hand."—Andrew Kopkind.

To DeMott, this emotional response constitutes a severe case of overkill: "Fits of fury that plucked out eyes from severed heads." It is as if, speculates DeMott, "fury seemed a possible substitute for moral clarity and worth."

Reasserting the Past. A chief characteristic of today's revolutionaries, thinks Zbigniew Brzezinski, professor of government at Columbia, is that they don't really know what they want—other than violent change. Current protesters and rioters, writes Brzezinski in The New Republic, have much in common with the Luddites or Chartists of 19th century England, or even with the National Socialists and Fascists of this century. Unable to cope with the complexities of the present, many of them try desperately to reassert simplistic values of the past. What passes for revolution in their case, says Brzezinski, is nothing more than counterrevolution.

The reasons that are commonly advanced to explain present-day revolutionary action are not persuasive to James Q. Wilson, professor of government at Harvard. Revolutions are commonly thought to be triggered by "material deprivation or unresponsive governments," he writes in the New York Times Magazine. Actually, the more people get, says Wilson, the more they demand. "Competition for leadership among dissident groups will inevitably generate ever more extreme demands faster than less extreme requests are filled." If anything is to blame for revolution, thinks Wilson, it may be prosperity, which has freed an ever increasing number of people, educated and not so educated, to participate in the political process. In this situation, government cannot act hastily. "Concessions sufficient to induce one side to abandon violence might be sufficient to induce the other side to resort to violence. Only when it is clear that neither side can gain through violent protest does the resort to such forms of protest cease."