ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
74
the landscape of the Old Left, creating a new sensibility that resonated with
that of the Brethren of he Free Spirit from centuries before.
The anarchist sensibility of he American New Left re-articulated he
concept of social desire as an expression of desire informed by a social and
political vision. While he civil rights movement called for an end to racial
inequality, it also made pleas for universal ‘brotherly love’ and compassion;
while he anti-war movement called for an end to military aggression, it also
appealed to ideas of sexual and sensual liberation, painting placards with he
slogan, ‘make love not war’. The qualitative flavor of these events, emphasizing
he
quality of social relationships and artistic and sensual expression,
represented a rejection of a society hat had been eviscerated by a post-war era
of gross commodification and social conformity.
The civil rights movement, whose ideals are most equated with he
brilliant speeches of Martin Luher Ring, were also articulated within he
literature of essayist and novelist James Baldwin. While Baldwin, as an African
American gay man, addressed he need to overcome he material injustices of
racism, sexism, and classism, he also wrote prolifically of he vital role hat
creativity and sensuality play in he struggle for society to reclaim its humanity.
Like
others
of he New Left,
Baldwin was
critical
of he
qualitative
impoverishment hat characterized Anglo-American culture, an impoverishment
hat led many white Americans to appropriate he cultural riches of African
American culture without questioning racial injustice. For Baldwin, the struggle
to overcome cultural and social impoverishment intensified by racism entailed
a qualitative reconfiguration of the psychic world itself. To overcome racism,
Baldwin reasoned, white Americans must transform not only structural, but
aesthetic and psychic practices, addressing deeper cultural and sensual
longings:
[Racial] tensions are rooted in the very same dephs as hose from
which love springs, or murder. The white man’s unadmitted, and
apparently,
to him, unspeakable—private fears and longings are
projected onto the Negro. The only way he can be released from the
Negro’s tyrannical power over him is to consent, in effect, to become
black himself, to become part of that suffering and dancing country
that he now watches wistfully from he heights of his lonely power
and, armed with spiritual traveler’s checks, visits surreptitiously after
dark.8
In the literary works of Baldwin we witness a valorization of social desire: an
acknowledgment of the transformative role that desire, art, and empathy may
play in remaking society itself. For Baldwin, the role of the artist is to
‘‘ifiurninate hat darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will