Books in Brief: New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative

New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative, by Paul Goodman (Random House, 208 pp., $5.95). Here he comes down from the hills again, from those lodes that only he and his ol’ mule know the way to, with a few more nuggets to trade— just enough to keep him in cornmeal, side-meat, molasses and typewriter ribbons. First, the second part of the title: Yes, he is a conservative in his own way: principally because today in nineteen-hundred-and-goddam-seventy, he thinks education should “transmit Culture with a big C, the greatness of Man.” Second, the first part: Young Luther came to Rome in 1510 and was scandalized; so too is old Paul in America today. What we need, now that Science is our orthodoxy, is another Reformation: the scientific military-industrial complex must be purged, with the scientists and technicians becoming Socially Responsible (danger here, Paul: Hitler and Stalin had flocks and flocks of Socially Responsible scientists at their beck-and call) and the government decentralized (two cheers—some functions can’t be decentralized); education must be restructured (three). Goodman is worried about The Young. Here he despairs at their yahoo authoritarianism, there he gets maudlin (they’re our kids), and hopes they’ll be nice to him: “Let them put up with me as I with them,” he says in a poem. Good luck, oldtimer.