1968 was an eventful year. I did a post on it (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/08/1968.html) that did not do it justice. I am going to briefly touch on one cultural event that happened in 1968 and spend a considerable amount of time on another.
The movie 2001: A space Odyssey came out in 1968. A wonderful book called Space Odyssey by Michael Benson has been released to commemorate the 50th anniversary of this event. I recommend the book to anyone who has an interest in the subject. The driving force behind the movie and the principal subject of the book is Stanley Kubrick. He was very much of the "it's my movie" and "my way or the highway" school of management. He was terrible to lots of people including Arthur C. Clark, his main collaborator. Clark was then a well established science fiction writer. Many of the other players featured in the book were less well known. But in case after case Kubrick was terrible to them.
In spite of this most of them came away loving the guy. The main contributing factors were that Kubrick was a really nice guy on a personal level. But he was also a tyrant on a professional level and this translated into him doing terrible things to the people that worked for and with him. But they all bought into his genius. And in many cases he raised people out of obscurity and gave them their first chance to show what they were capable of.
So they forgave him. In the case of the obscure people he set many of them up for future professional success and many of them went on to be very successful. Even in Clark's case he came out better off in the end. Kubrick worked him nearly to death and almost drove him into bankruptcy. But the movie was a success and Clark was made financially whole by the money he made on the sale of the companion book. And his association with the movie and the book enhanced his reputation and he went on to have a long and successful carrier. And, of course, the movie was a cultural landmark that resonates down to the present day.
But for the purposes of this post let me leave the this subject with the observation that Kubrick could not have done what he did if he was black. No studio would have given him a ton of money and then let him go off into the wilderness (the movie was made in England) for four years (an eternity in the movie business) and let him make the movie the way he thought it should be made (Kubrick exercised almost complete creative control). And that brings us to someone who is black.
Eldridge Cleaver published a series of letters and essays as Soul on Ice in 1968. It was a big deal at the time but I didn't get round to reading it then. My sister-in-law had a copy she wanted to donate to the Little Free Library (see https://littlefreelibrary.org/ for more information) in my neighborhood. I took advantage of this generosity to read the book before passing it along. It's a quick read and I'm glad I did it. But it has not aged nearly as well as 2001. So what's the big deal?
The most polite thing you can say about Cleaver is that he had a "checkered" carrier prior to the book's publication. (I deliberately did not research him before reading the book. So, unless explicitly noted, everything that follows comes straight from the book.) He ended up in prison for several years on a Marijuana beef. While in prison he engaged in an extensive program of reading (he had no substantial education prior to this - he later characterized his situation as a "higher uneducation"). He emerged from this experience radicalized. He concluded that white people were the source of all his trouble so he set out to do something about that as soon as he was released.
The "something" he chose to do was a systematic program of raping white women. Needless to say, this did not go well for anyone and he quickly landed back in prison. There he continued to read extensively. At some point his cause was taken up by a white woman lawyer named Beverly Axelrod who managed to get him out of jail. Several of the letters he wrote while in jail this second time around and several essays he wrote shortly after getting out (at least as far as I can tell) were combined to create the book. If you are thinking at this point that this is crazy then I would have to agree. So let me start with some general observations.
Cleaver's predominant emotion is rage. This comes through strongly. And, unfortunately, rage is not conducive to clear thinking and a nuanced approach. Cleaver did not do nuance. Cleaver is drawn to the extreme and often violent. Even he admitted it saying "I am extremist by nature". We see this play out in his "rape white women" plan. How could this possibly work out well? By his own way of thinking blacks were powerless and whites were powerful. It is literally incredible to believe that whites would not retaliate. All things considered, they were actually temperate in their retaliation.
And consider this: "Many young blacks out there right now who are slitting white throats and raping the white girl". Did he actually believe this? If it had been true then blacks would have been playing right into the worst stereotypes about them. In reality were NOT slitting white throats, although they were often wrongly accused of doing so. Nor were they (with the exception of Cleaver himself) raping white women. Again, had they been doing so whites would have easily been able to establish this as a pattern of behavior and used that pattern to justify the oppression of blacks. But there was no well documented pattern of this kind of behavior by blacks. And this leads me to a general characterization of Cleaver.
He was a classic intellectual. He was incredibly smart. He was well versed in the intellectual literature of the subjects that interested him. And he was completely impractical. He had dozens of crackpot ideas. But in pretty much every case there was a kernel of truth or an interesting aspect to it. But his ideas were wildly impractical or lacked grounding in the real world. Here's another example "to me the language and symbols of religion were nothing but weapons of war". It is a massive oversimplification but contains a kernel of truth. Religion is often part of the machinery used to justify wars and oppression. But he never attempts to add nuance and context to these kinds of statements. As a result he had no lasting impact.
And that characterized his entire life. He was a gadfly. He had things to say. He was an excellent writer. He was clear, dynamic, and eloquent. You got a real feel for his thinking and his personality. On the other hand, he was terrible at follow through. I will go into where he ended up later but it was apparent from the book, which marked the start of his public life, that he was always on the move intellectually.
And his general approach seemed to be to hunt around, find a guru, fixate on that guru, eventually find fault with that guru and completely abandon him. Then he would start a new cycle by hunting around until he could find and fixate on a new guru. Several cycles of this are on display in the book. And since he was an absolutist ultimately no single guru could long withstand his fierce scrutiny before being found wanting for one reason or another. It never seemed to occur to him to synthesize the best of what several people had to offer as an alternative to being all in for whatever guru was his current favorite.
This approach made him a poor observer of his time, a poor prognosticator, and a poor tactician. Starting with the first, he had a poor understanding of the times (1968, in this case). "We live today in a system that is in the last stages of the protracted process of breaking up on a world war basis." There was no "breaking up" in the offing. "This is the last act of the show." No, it wasn't. And he predicted the "rising nonwhite giant of China". China only started rising after it threw off the shackles of Maoism, the very Maoism that was firmly in charge in China in 1968.
He demonstrates a very Marxist view of society. But Marx was profoundly wrong on the very things Cleaver's analysis depends on. Marx was right that there are classes and a class struggle. But the underclasses are not very good at figuring out that their goals are in direct conflict with the overclasses. So they don't spontaneously rise up the way Marxist analysis predicts they will.
And Marxism predicts that governments will eventually wither away because the triumph of the proletariat will render formal governance unnecessary. But successful revolutions always require leadership. In fact, the great mass of black people did not see things the way Cleaver saw them nor did they behave the way Cleaver predicted they would. This is unsurprising because no people ever behave that way.
Cleaver was off base in other ways too. The Watts riots had taken place a couple of years earlier. He saw them as a big success. They were a big setback instead. Assume for the moment that Cleaver was right and what was important is that blacks get back at whites. Then the Watts riots were a complete failure. The riots burned out businesses in Watts. This did little harm to white elites. Instead it did a lot of harm to small business people who had bet their future on doing business in the black community. Their take away was that nobody should do business in black communities.
It took many decades to undo this damage. I covered this more thoroughly in a post on Magic Johnson (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/04/magic-johnson.html). But the bottom line is that until people like Johnson, who had credibility with both the black community and with white businessmen, came along and bridged the gap, businesses were justifiably reluctant to do business in black neighborhoods. (This is a problem that is still not completely fixed.) Now, if (again according to Cleaver's thinking) the rioters had burned down neighborhoods where powerful white people lived and worked then the riot would have been a good idea.
I have highlighted just a few of the crazy ideas Cleaver puts forward. He was a good writer so it's an interesting read. But he is so wrongheaded so often that it is sad. There is a theory that you need extremists so that there is room and contrast for more sensible moderate ideas to take hold. If you subscribe to this theory then Cleaver's book performed a valuable service. He was so out there that he made even seriously wild ideas sound tame by comparison. But the damage he did also has to be figured into the equation. And he did a lot of damage.
His philosophy at the time was "it's all the white's fault so that anything can be justified". He used this justification to making raping women okay. He also used it to see all incarceration of blacks as being politically motivated and, therefore, illegitimate. And what that meant was that there was no justification ever for incarcerating a black no matter what they had done. A black prisoner literally had no "debt to society". Looking at this from the point of view of the rest of society it means that all blacks should be incarcerated forever.
He also saw fixing older white people as a lost cause. He put his faith in youth. This turned out to be misplaced but it highlights the old/young split that was widening at this time. The old paradigm was that the old are powerful and the young are powerless. The new paradigm coming into being was that although the old had more power the young also had substantial power. This was the time of birth of the "youth market" as the buying power of young people was on a steep rise.
His faith in the young ultimately turned out to be misplaced. I am the correct age to be part of the cohort he was counting on. Over time my cohort's outlook shifted to be decidedly more conservative. And conservatives were not having any of what he was peddling. So the trends he saw were peaking just as he was saying they were growing in strength and influence and would continue to grow. Things turned away from the paths Cleaver was predicting they would follow in trend after trend.
And at bottom Cleaver was making a reasoned argument for his positions. His reasoning may have been flawed but he was eager to lay out his argument on the theory that it was convincing. But we have moved on to a time when justifying your position is no longer important. All that is necessary for a position to be right is for you to believe it to be right. I can point to the flaws in Cleaver's analysis because he provides the analysis. He may reject or ignore my analysis but he would agree that is the way it is done. That is no longer true. "I believe myself to be right" is the sum and substance of many positions advanced by people who are supposed to know what they are doing. Cleaver would have been appalled.
But in a sense he was guilty of hypocrisy. He said "I had always had a strong sense of myself". I find that he actually had a poor sense of himself. He was very judgmental himself but found fault in others for being equally judgmental but coming to conclusions that differed from Cleaver's.
Fundamentally, I believe his approach to be wrong. He blamed "white people" for everything that had gone wrong in his life. The problem is that he put his emphasis on "white" rather than on "people". People in positions of power behave badly. Black people in Africa rounded up their fellow men and sold them to the white people who enslaved them and shipped them across the ocean. If all black people are good and all white people are bad why did that happen? Ultimately, you have to get white people to acquiesce in the transfer of some power to black people. To do that you must convince them it is the right thing to do and that it can be done at a reasonable cost.
Others were doing a better job of convincing white people it was the right thing to do. Cleaver was all for making the cost so high white people would never agree to pay it. I have always been a fan of the South African "truth and reconciliation" process. In this process people confess to the bad they have done but then they are let off. They are not prosecuted. I believe it is important for the truth to be brought out into the open. People need to know what was actually going on. And the "reconciliation" part is manifestly unfair. People who did horrible things are let off and people who were grievously harmed get no recompense. But it is important to focus on the long view.
The people who did the bad things (whites, for the most part) need to acknowledge that they did wrong. But being honest about what happened brings a lot of shame down on the heads of the perpetrators. That may not be a high enough cost to be fair but it can be an acceptable cost. And that makes it possible to move forward.
I note that in the US it has been more than a century since the Civil War has ended but even with all that time having passed we have still done a poor job of acknowledging what actually happened. The US has manifestly not moved on completely. This means the wound never heals and progress is halting at best. A lot of harm has been done since the end of the Civil War. That harm has to be balanced against the harm that would have resulted from letting the guilty go scot free. At some point it is cheaper all around to let them go and let it go.
Cleaver spends a lot of time worrying about his manhood. Blacks were powerless and that is very emasculating. In this context it is not surprising that he chose rape as his tool of choice for getting back at the white power structure. But he never seems to be able to let it go. He comes back to it over and over. He also injects frequent references to homosexuality into the discussion. Is he worried that he is a closet homosexual?
He also characterizes his fellow black inmates as eunuchs and comes back to the subject in many other ways. He characterizes boxing as the sport that receives "maximum expression". It is clear he would be happy describing it as a "manly art". I believe at the time football was a much bigger deal but boxing allows him to bring Mohamad Ali into the discussion so I can understand why he did it.
Boxing has since faded and simultaneously morphed into the minor sport of mixed martial arts. It is interesting that the biggest sport on a worldwide basis today (and probably back then) is soccer. While "blood lust" can be associated with boxing as Cleaver does, it can't really be associated with soccer.
His characterization of the relationship between blacks and whites screams of something we associate with the deep south. This is in spite of the fact that he lived in Southern California. And this too leads him astray. When it was "deep south versus the rest of the country" civil rights made advances. But once the worst and most obvious excesses were dealt with what was left was the more covert discrimination found in the rest of the country. And that caused white support of the civil rights movement to erode.
Cleaver completely missed that. And he also completely missed the women's movement that was to first come to broad public attention in the period shortly after '68. But then he trenchantly observes "which laws are enforced depends on who is in power". So just when you are about to give up on him he finds a way to say something insightful. His observations about the overlap between hostility to civil rights and a militarist approach to foreign policy is also very insightful. And then there's "to me the language and symbols of religion were nothing but weapons of war".
Ultimately I see him as being almost completely lacking in empathy. He seems incapable of seeing things as others see them and that limits his ability to see things clearly.
So what's the rest of the story. Well, it turns out he was a juvenile delinquent before he was old enough to go to prison. But his history of incarceration for more serious offenses is accurately presented in the book. He was busted for pot, served several years of hard time, was freed only to shortly be back I jail for the rapes. And he gives short shrift to his white female lawyer's successful efforts to get him out of jail after his second stretch. Given what she had to work with it is impressive that she succeeded. He also ended up married to a black woman lawyer for 20 years.
Shortly after the book was published he got heavily involved with the Black Panthers. This turned out badly for the Panthers. He talked them into staging an ambush on some Oakland Police. This resulted in two cops being injured and wiped out any good will the Panthers had built up among the public at large. Cleaver immediately fled to Cuba and eventually to other locales. But yet again he was let off and was able to eventually return to the US. There he became a Mormon (at that time a notoriously "white" religion) and a conservative Republican (also the polar opposite of what he espoused in Soul on Ice).
Had things been otherwise would Cleaver been able to match the achievements of someone like Kubrick? It seems unlikely. It may be that his early juvenile delinquency indicated that rage was always there and was always gong to stop him from amounting to much. But what if the rage was a result of his environment? In a different environment and lacking that rage what might his manifest intelligence and writing skill produced? The fact that he managed over and over to wiggle out of so much trouble weighs heavily in favor of the idea that he would have been able to achieve much. But we'll never know.
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