Randolph Bourne

Lew, it is terrific that you have recently posted several wonderful items in reference to the great Randolph Bourne. Like many older LRC readers I was introduced to Bourne decades ago when Murray N. Rothbard cited him in the concluding paragraphs of his seminal essay, Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty on setting forth the spirit of radical long-range optimism which should guide libertarians. Here are those bold inspirational words for the younger LRC audience unacquainted with Bourne’s eloquence;

youth is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition. Youth puts the remorseless questions to everything that is old and established-Why? What is this thing good for? And when it gets the mumbled, evasive answers of the defenders it applies its own fresh, clean spirit of reason to institutions, customs, and ideas, and finding them stupid, inane, or poisonous, turns instinctively to overthrow them and build in their place the things with which its visions teem. . .

Youth is the leaven that keeps all these questioning, testing attitudes fermenting in the world. If it were not for this troublesome activity of youth, with its hatred of sophisms and glosses, its insistence on things as they are, society would die from sheer decay. It is the policy of the older generation as it gets adjusted to the world to hide away the unpleasant things where it can, or preserve a conspiracy of silence and an elaborate pretense that they do not exist. But meanwhile the sores go on festering, just the same. Youth is the drastic antiseptic… It drags skeletons from closets and insists that they be explained. No wonder the older generation fears and distrusts the younger. Youth is the avenging Nemesis on its trail…

Our elders are always optimistic in their views of the present, pessimistic in their views of the future; youth is pessimistic toward the present and gloriously hopeful for the future. And it is this hope which is the lever of progress–one might say, the only lever of progress…

The secret of life is then that this fine youthful spirit shall never be lost. Out of the turbulence of youth should come this fine precipitate–a sane, strong, aggressive spirit of daring and doing. It must be a flexible, growing spirit, with a hospitality to new ideas, and a keen insight into experience. To keep one’s reactions warm and true is to have found the secret of perpetual youth, and perpetual youth is salvation. 21

21.Randolph Bourne, “Youth,” The Atlantic Monthly (April, 1912); reprinted in Lillian Schlissel, ed., The World of Randolph Bourne (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1965), pp. 9-11, 15.

Here is Bourne’s brilliant book, Youth and Life, in its entirety.

 

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11:57 pm on May 7, 2017