Slackers 90s: Land of the Frazzled, Home of the Frayed

Above: interior of The Beehive on Pittsburgh's South Side, an expression of Gen X and Slacker culture in the 1990s.  Below: art on the walls of the South Side cafe, and interior of the Oakland Beehive.

The plight of "Generation Z," young Americans born between 1997 and 2012 (and so as of 2026, from ages 14 to 29, though by some measures Gen Alpha began in 2010) has engendered some alarmed and alarming coverage.  Being an old person, when I read these articles I can't help thinking about the various plights of earlier generations, such as my own, the one before and the one after, which came to be called Generation X.  I am reminded that I wrote about those earlier three, around the time that the movie Slacker was defining the youth of Gen X in the popular mind in the early 1990s.  I'm posting that piece now, for contemporary readers to draw their own conclusions about contrasts and similarities.

Every generation is different, of course, especially in this era when things very large and small change so quickly.  One of the more disturbing analyses of Gen Z's difficulties that I've read was a New York Times opinion piece by Jessica Groce.  In addition to a scary job market, especially at entry level, there is the pernicious effect of technology that poisons both the work and the experience of applying for that work.  Computer monitoring and AI are being used as tools of oppression, creating workplaces that in their own way are akin to the sweatshops of yore (though these exist elsewhere in the world, combining classic as well as new technological oppression.)

Within today's "grim" job market, Grose writes, "the entire process of getting and keeping an entry-level job has become a grueling and dehumanizing ordeal."  She describes a process in which the "first levels" of job application scrutiny is often done now by AI, including interviews on line. (The Guardian goes into more detail about today's Orwellian hiring process.)

Jobs themselves are often micromanaged and otherwise abusive, as well as poorly paid and with negligible benefits. Electronic surveillance has become the slave-driving boss, as has the speed with which computers perform tasks--instead of being "time-saving" they function as employer expectation-raising for the amount of work and the speed with which it is done: a more intense workplace.  One result:  An annual study of nearly half a million American workers finds that workers under 25 are as unhappy as the unemployed.  When job satisfaction rose for other age groups, it fell for the young.

However, Grose begins and ends by referring to prejudices of older generations. "The older generation always discounts the workplace complaints of the younger generation," she begins. "Gen Z-ers don't even deserve this perfunctory slander...Whatever is going to happen for Gen Z-ers as we all live through the A.I. revolution, I hope that their elders approach them with more compassion than disdain."

I certainly hope so as well, though that would be easier if these generation stories didn't so often end up blaming the boomers for, among other things, having the temerity to remain alive.  The New York Times in particular keeps harping on the boomers responsibility for what ails everybody else, as if all members of this giant generation are as responsible--or have as much in common-- as say billionaires.  If any other group were singled out like this, it would be considered some kind of awful 'ism.' (For more thoughts--and photos--on this, I refer to my post about one such presentation.)

Perhaps subsequent generations have (or are having) a tougher time.  Apparently they think so, because the prevailing image of boomers is how easy everything was for us. That sort of revisionism is hard to swallow.  I was reminded of this when I stumbled across an old book, an early look at my generation, which I write about here.  But my memories are clear enough, even if the emotional edge is a bit worn.

We, too experienced the egotistical brutality of the workplace, and those new to it are apt to get the brunt of it, and feel it more acutely. In fact I'll never forget the dazed look of a beautiful young woman I knew in college who'd just experienced her first forays into the working world, in the early 1970s.  When faced with a smug employer who demanded to know why he should hire her, she said that the first response that came into her head was: "Because I'm smarter than you."

I'm not making comparisons of severity. By reviewing past perils and contexts, my intent is not to dismiss or downplay the plight and soul-destroying experiences of today's young, but to offer this as an expression of empathy.  And maybe a little hope based on the ultimate survival of others, however misshapen.

The following piece was published in Pittsburgh City Paper in March 1993.  The editors titled it "Talkin' Bout X Generation."  The now generic name of generation X was just coming into wide use.  I referred often to "twentysomethings," which was how Time Magazine titled their generational analysis in 1990. It comes from the TV show Thirtysomething, about later boomers that ended its run in the early 90s.

At the time, Gen X was being defined in the movies (Slacker, The Breakfast Club, and John Hughes films in general) and television (Beverly Hills 90210 and especially as the MTV generation) and a growing number of books and articles.

I was living at the Greenfield edge of the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh then, after working for an editorial firm and a different alternative weekly, both on the South Side.  It was there that a prominent expression of Generation X outsider culture began in a funky cafe called the Beehive in 1991. It was one of the first cafes in the city (and so earned a place in another piece I wrote later on Cafe Culture in Pittsburgh.)

 

Eventually the Beehive opened another location in Oakland, near the University of Pittsburgh campus, taking up much of the building that had been the King's Court movie theatre.  It spilled over two floors and absorbed the movie theatre itself, showing indie films to people sprawled on couches.  (Both are gone, though the South Side location hung on for almost 40 years.  A book has since been published about it. Here's a story about it, and another--in the Pittsburgh City Paper. 

These were the days that outside bands--some about to be famous--played the Decade and Graffitti, the Artery and Metropol, as did local bands like Rusted Root, the Spuds, the Clarks and Affordable Floors (though the venues are gone, all of these bands are still playing), with holdovers from the 80s like the Iron City Houserockers. Pittsburgh was a happening place for Generation X, coexisting with the earlier musical cultures of jazz and folk. 

Eventually the Gen X rebellion got commodified, including the whole Slacker thing.  By now, it's all nostalgia--with an ongoing Gen X Pittsburgh podcast. But in 1993, this was the local context for the essay I wrote, though its reach is broader. 

Slacker culture as a category was seen as the rebel or outcast culture of Gen X, though (as earlier outcast cultures) harbingers and awkward articulators of what many others in that generation were facing.  As such they suggest those broader aspects.  If there is any more specific relationship to a rebel faction within Gen Z, that's for others to discern. 

   

In this piece I refer to "the speed of life," and I wrote about that more specifically around this time.  This was one of the last "trend" pieces I attempted.  The culture was moving on and in some ways leaving me behind.  But I could then--as I can even more now--offer some historical perspective.  So here it is:

1993: Slackers Culture in the Land of the Frazzled and the Home of the Frayed

Suddenly culture mavens are focusing on the twentysomething generation. Cover stories have recently appeared in Time, the Atlantic Monthly, Business Week, and New Republic, while demographics-hungry television producers unveiled a new wave of sitcoms designed to catch this prime market's primetime channel-surfers. While most of the attraction seems to be to the twentysomethings' viability as workers and consumers, some attention is being paid to their rebel subset known as slackers, a name popularized by Richard Zinklater's movie called "Slacker," about the post-college young who hang out on the university's scruffy fringes in Austin. 

 In the book version, James L. Haley calls this movie a non-fiction look at a "netherworld of space cadets, goonballs, punk groupies, gently aging iconoclasts, coffee-shop feminists-going around the bend, conspiracy dweebs lurking in used bookstores, artists and anti-artists, and a whole purgatory of other refugees from the world of productive sanity." 

 While the film is specific to Austin, there's some Pittsburgh resonance here. It's dangerous to define any generation or subculture too closely: people are more complicated that these categories. The sixties generation, for example, has supposedly gone from Yippie to Yuppie, from war-protesting, acid-dropping, guitar-playing, civil rights activist flower children, to cynical status seekers and hypocritical entrepreneurs. In fact, in that generation as in most, the rebels against the established culture were a firm minority (even if they define a generation in history and fashion.) Not all of those became 80s entrepreneurs or stolid suburbanities.

 The difference was that the Boomer generation was so huge, so even a small percentage added up to influential numbers. Still, it was a relative few that suffered the slings and arrows of an outraged culture as well as the sneers of their more conventional, career-bound contemporaries. Similarly, in the late 1960s much was made of the differences between hard-edged political dissenters and soft hedonistic 'hippies'. The lives of most young outsiders contained a mix of both, plus more conventional and traditional pursuits. This is probably just as true now; all the names and categories are mostly and at best a conversational convenience. 

 Today's twentysomethings are characterized as apolitical cynics or defeated idealists who feel helpless in a world gone mad, as well as inflamed activists increasingly involved in politics, from "Rock the Vote" to in-your-face environmentalism. They are ignorant and arrogant illiterates, and the most sophistication generation in history.

 These contradictions can describe different people, or elements of the very same people. Some may resent the heavy cultural and economic presence of the Boomers (as the magazines say), and still listen devotedly to sixties music. So slackers may tend towards dour Depression era overalls and Satanic jewelry, and they may also be (in the words of Douglas Copeland, author of the prime twentysomething novel, Generation X: Tales From An Accelerated Culture) "...dreamers on the edge...characters out of key, in and out of love, drifting, slightly twisted, still willing to listen--childlike and full of wonder with their world..." 

 What seems undisputed is that slackers, however defined or self-defined, are the outsiders of their generation. As such, they're linked with outsiders of the past-- a recurrent if not perennial phenomenon, at least among the middle class. There always seem to be those who need a few more years of low-impact living and unfocused searching than college provided. They may play at graduate school or work unpressured jobs, live loose in cheap and communal settings, and float from one activity to another, but (as in the movie) they are always willing to indiscriminately discuss with anyone whatever subject pops up at any moment, the more momentous the better. 

 The impulse to slack off is especially tempting (and often involuntary) in today's depressed economy, when jobs are scarce, as well as low paying and demeaning. But what the main culture sees most of all is that slackers don't get real jobs, pursue careers, join the rat race. As Copeland writes, "People gripe that it's some horrible crime against society not to work in a creepy job that has no loyalty to you, and is killing you anyway."

 

This quandary has faced succeeding generations in this century, in bad economy or good. The Lost Generation of the 1920s escaped prosperous American Babbittry for the garrets of Paris. Woody Guthrie's impoverished 1930s generation rebelled with political art and radical politics. From Holden Caulfield and Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd ("But the question is what it means to grow up into such a fact as: 'During my productive years I will spend eight hours a day doing what is no good,'" Goodman wrote in 1956) to Mike Nichols' film of The Graduate ("I have just one word for you--plastics!" the wise elder whispers to young Benjamin); from Jack Kerouac and his Dharma Bums through Richard Farina's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me to Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, the absence of meaning fueled personal and generational rebellions. 

 So in some ways, slackers are hippies without the ideology, beatniks without the bongos. They may even have some of the flavor of the mid 60's pre-hippies who called themselves Seekers, who informed their intellectual and spiritual quests with the physical explorations of sex and drugs. Though they have some of the wanderlust of the Kerouac cult, they also seem more likely to stay put, to revert to campus, where they have made their first and only homes away from their parents. 

 Slackers seem less cynical as well as less energetic than their high-sheen, high achiever, go-getter contemporaries. Their low affect irony also separates them from the more ebullient and angry outsiders of the 60s, though it links them to the rebel style of the 1950s--the last time the idea of "cool" was so prominent. 

 

But in important ways, today's slackers come out of a different context. Whereas the rebels of the 50s and 60s were resisting a repressive culture, the slackers of the 90s are avoiding a neglectful one. In the 60s, the older generation was not to be trusted. In the 90s, they are simply not to be relied on. Parents aren't there. Authorities don't care. The young depend on each other, and only on each other. Watch twentysomethings (as well as their teenage siblings) and notice how often they greet each other with affectionate hugs. Young men and women in earlier generations seldom hugged each other unless they were actual or prospective lovers. If sex is dangerous in the '90s, friendship is vital. 

 Twentysomethings have more often grown up with divorced, overworked and overextended parents, and now face a constricted economy and a shaky society. Surrounded by the appearance of freedom, they soon learn that the rules of the game are few but exact. Those who screw up may suffer outlandish consequences; those who make an invisible mistake may never be forgiven. Even those who hew to the line can find themselves out in the cold.

 Like their cultural ancestors, today's slackers who live on society's edge may find themselves among the truly desperate, the seriously confused, the irresistibly doomed, and the seductively evil. Anyone who leaves the beaten path can get lost, and life can get seriously consequential. 

 On the other hand, some within it as well as outside it say the slacker culture is mostly a tedious avoidance, a pretense, an excuse. That has been said from within as well as outside other bohemian scenes as well. Though few slackers will be assaulted in the streets or beaten in bars for having long hair, and none face the long arm of the law drawing them to the killing fields of Asia, it is still risky to stand out as a rebel, even a relatively quiet one. In a time of relative scarcity, society's poobahs can use any excuse to lock you out.  

So why do they rebel? What are they rebelling against? The latter is the same question a cynical waitress asked the biker in black leather played by Marlon Brando in "The Wild Ones," prompting his famous answer: " Whataya got?" 

They were born in the late 1960s or early 1970s. As children they unknowingly saw the hopes of the 60s coopted and marketed as fashion merchandise, and perverted into self-indulgence; the light flipped on its back, showing only the dark side. As adolescents they became aware of the world in the decade of apocalyptic cynicism and self-righteous greed: the 1980s.

 Everything in the 80s was exaggerated, because only extremes sell. Image was everything: every necktie must be a Power Tie, every paid thug in Central America must be a Freedom Fighter battling The Evil Empire. Language was inflated: every crisis had a Day One; nothing was sad or unfortunate, it was always Tragic. As images are inflated they are simplified, sensationalized. Everything is advertising, and everyone knows it. You are even expected to "sell yourself." 

 

Any sense of values or morality is irrelevant except as a marketing tool, because the only question anyone asks is will it sell? In one of the most trenchant and terrifying few pages written in the 80s, an essay published as the introduction of his play Aunt Dan and Lemon, Wallace Shawn wrote: "So when a precipitous slide really does take place, a particular effort is required in order to see it. Sophistries, false chains of reasoning, deception, and self-deception all rush in to conceal the fact that any change has occurred at all. If we live from day to day without self-examination, we remain unaware of the dangers we may pose to ourselves and the world."

 Compare this to a passage from Generation X, in which Copeland's narrator is trashing a Yuppieish friend named Tobias: "I realize I see in him something that I might have become, something that all of us can become in the absence of vigilance. Something bland and smug that trades on its mask, filled with such rage and such contempt for humanity, such need, that the only food left for such creatures is their own flesh." 

 One legacy of the 80s' excesses is the increasing tyranny of time. Technology, greed and economic contractions resulting in 'downsizing'all mean people are racing faster with less rest or respite. They speed from poorly paying jobs at understaffed workplaces to the necessary second job, to childcare or commuter deal-making on the cellular phone. Even the middle class is now engaged in an around-the-clock struggle for survival. 

The 1980s can be summed up in a bumper sticker: "The rat race is over. The rats won." In the 90s, it's not a rat race the rest of us are involved in anymore. We're hamsters in a cage, engaged in spinning somebody else's wheel--all the while worrying that the cage will tip over, or that we'll be replaced by a cuter, more energetic pet. Few have enough money or stability to feel safe. The middle class equity cushion is gone, replaced by debts that won't go away. Jobs disappear helplessly. 

 So who can afford standing up for their rights against bosses who bully them into working uncompensated overtime, or under illegally unsafe conditions? Who can afford to be gossiped about, to fall out of favor, to blow one deal, offend one crazy customer, let one unguarded word slip out? The stakes are too high.

 Artists may be the antennae of the race (as poet Ezra Pound maintained) but the young are its raw nerve endings. Some are feeling this widespread vulnerability and its fundamental insanity more acutely. It's clearest for people on the economic edge--and these days, that's quite a few. An illness, an accident, a mistake can send you spinning through a merciless legal system, or bounce you off a merciless medical system, or drop you down fast into the endless pit of a pitiless economic system. 

 In this context, the slacker culture may be the only sane one going: Keep down costs, maximize mobility and flexibility, value time and control over your time, stay involved in your community as well as the hamster cage of money.

 But the basic thrust of the slacker culture, the one that gives it its name as well as its special place in outsider history, is the attitude towards time. It's expressed by an interesting range of twentysomethings. "Experience, living, being, cannot be measured by time," writes Jonathan Barnes, a Pittsburgh writer in his mid-twenties. "[But] those of us who experience life in any other way than Clock Time are perceived to be nuts."

 "I was finally really getting involved in what I was doing," a graduate student in the high pressure Carnegie Mellon Drama department told me, "but you can't really do that. You're always supposed to be anticipating what's next, BAM BAM BAM, get it all done. You never experience what's in front of you." She's since dropped out.

 "I thought the city would be exciting, but it's not," said a Pittsburgh woman in her early 20s who was raised on a farm, and came to the city to be a writer. " It's just empty and fast. I wanted intellectual excitement, but nobody has time to talk about anything but careers and survival." She's since moved back to her family's farm, and has begun writing again.

 "I just wanted to drop a few hours a week," says another young woman who worked in a psychology lab. "I wanted to read, walk my dog, just break the stress and monotony. Actually, my therapist advised it. I was willing to take a pay cut. I was even willing to take work home with me, as long as I didn't have to be there at the same time every day. Instead of working forty hours, I asked to work thirty-five. My boss looked at me like I was crazy." 

 When the adult world simply doesn't make sense, it may be clearer to those who are just entering it. Perhaps they intuit what those more experienced can barely admit to ourselves, that the speed of our lives is out of control. America looks increasingly like the land of the frazzled and the home of the frayed. In what Joni Mitchell memorably calls this "land of snap decisions, land of short attention spans", we are overworked, overbooked, overstimulated and overloaded. 

 Future shock has become the daily numb-out. Our memories are overrun, and our battle to just keep up obliterates our appreciation of the present and our vision of the future, so that today we are literally destroying the forests for the trees. It not only makes us crazy and sick, it leaves us with split focus, divided selves and cognitive dissonance that have become the norm. 

 Leisure is disappearing, and so is civility, tolerance, deliberation, craftsmanship and reflection. We're outrunning our own senses--of sight, smell, taste and hearing as well as of perspective, decency, hope and humor. Our lives are increasingly driven by fax machines in the bathroom and telephones in the air, none of which save time so much as insist that we work and remain accessible everywhere and every second. We are the servants of our technology. 

 Apparently we would like to become the machines we behold, since like them our conversations now are "interface" and our leisure is "downtime." But we are not made of silicon and plastic. We are made of flesh and blood. We are not tireless machines, powered by electric current. Time is part of our nourishment. We do not operate at the speed of light. We live at the speed of life.

 According to the dictionary, "slacker" is a term describing someone who shirks work, hangs back, stays slow. "Slack" means not lively or moving. But it also means a lack of tension, a looseness, as in the loose condition of a rope or a sail. That's the sense of it when we say "cut me some slack." 

This is precisely what our tense, speed-obsessed society does not do. Ruthless competition borne out of fear on top of ambition, and a standard of belief and behavior perhaps permanently revved by technology, are combining to create a new social Darwinism that eliminates those unwilling or unable to keep up with the new machines. It's a race flesh and blood cannot run for long, let alone win. If we don't cut ourselves some slack soon and slow down the speed of life, those slackers will seem less like a low-end category of the youth market and more like instinctive and prophetic survivalists.

Pioneers of the Heart: Altruism and the Big Question

From some 3000 miles away, one of the attractions of Humboldt State University and the North Coast of California in the late 1990s was something called the Institute For the Study of Altruism and Pro-Social Behavior, located at HSU.  I was not yet familiar with the academic use of the term "Institute," so I imagined a stately building filled with researchers.  When we arrived to stay we discovered it was actually embodied completely in two people in the Sociology Department: Pearl and Samuel Oliner.

By now in 2026 such research is a fairly big deal at a number of universities. Pro-social behavior is a well known concept,  the ins and out of altruism, empathy and compassion are debated in almost every academic field and beyond, with some currency in today's politics, though not always in a good way.

In 2003, around the time of my more expansive project for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Skills of Peace, I wrote a cover story for the North Coast Journal on the Oliners.  Along with "Skills" and some other pieces in those years, it's an article I'm especially proud to have written and published.  That's one reason I'm posting it now.  Another is that particularly these days, we badly need this area of inquiry and the acknowledgement of altruism's reality.  In that regard as well as historically and more generally, the pioneering contributions of the Oliners deserves to be remembered and honored.

I interviewed Pearl and Sam in their home, and spoke with Sam at length on other occasions.  We kept in touch after this piece was published, and I used to see them walking together in Arcata from time to time. Later they moved to the Bay Area to be nearer to their children and grandchildren.  Pearl passed away in February 2021, and Sam in November that same year.  Also that year, Humboldt State published his last book, What Kind of Future Will Our Children Inherit? 

What follows is essentially that piece with some additions from a contemporaneous book review, so the present tense is 2003.  The following "Hitch-Hiker's Guide to Caring" was included as a sidebar to this article.

 

by William Severini Kowinski 

 They live on a calm hill in Sunny Brae, with Humboldt Bay barely visible through the veil of trees across the street. In their early 70s, Pearl and Samuel Oliner are retired from teaching at HSU (she is a professor of education, he of sociology.) But their apparently quiet life is deceptive. They are pioneers is an ever-expanding field of inquiry that is changing how human nature is perceived, and may yet help to create a more caring, peaceful future. And they’re still working at it. 

 They began it with a question. Why did they do it? Why did these people risk everything---their safety, their lives, even their families-- for strangers?

Because some did: they harbored those they were forbidden to help, by aiding Jews escaping from the Nazis in World War II. At other times and places, they leapt into rivers to pull drowning strangers from cars being sucked to the bottom. They ran into the devastated Twin Towers to lead others to safety on September 11. 

 But why? Why did they do it? For a long time the question wasn’t even asked. Some individuals were honored as heroes and saints, but that was all, as if what they did wasn’t really human. They embarrassed the experts, because what they did ran counter to every prevailing explanation for human behavior, from philosophy and theology to biology, psychology, economics and the social sciences. Self-interest, rational choice, the struggle for survival, original sin, the dark unconscious—there was no room anywhere for altruism. 

 Auguste Comte, the father of sociology, coined the term in the mid 19th century, but altruism (unselfish behavior on behalf of another) soon sunk out of sight. Today it’s an academic growth industry. Scholars from all the above- mentioned fields are struggling to answer that question, why did they do it? Because once it was seriously asked, and addressed in a systematic way, it became the elephant in the halls of ivy: it couldn’t be ignored. 

 Altruistic behavior calls all those old explanations into question, and it begins to suggest new ways of examining what being human is all about. Now those answering that question are part of a movement to find out what’s right with human nature as well as what’s wrong, to discover why and how we can cooperate as well as compete, be compassionate as well as egotistical, and devise, learn and use the skills of peace as well as the skills of war. 

 And in an irony that is inescapably part of the inquiry, this contemporary search for the sources of good began in response to an historic eruption of evil: the Holocaust.

Restless Memories

 He has told the story many times: a third-person account in his first book with Pearl, The Altruistic Personality, a first person narrative in his new book, Do Unto Others, and at length in his memoir, originally titled Restless Memories (and again in 2000 as Narrow Escapes.) 

 It is always powerful and always vivid. Samuel Oliner was 12 when the Nazis raided the ghetto in southern Poland where he and his extended family had been forced to live. His stepmother told him to run and hide. By the end of the day, everyone in the ghetto was gone. Only Samuel, hiding on the roof, remained. 

 In these accounts he remembers with seemingly uncanny precision every moment, every emotion, every sight and smell of that day. Neuroscientists are familiar with this phenomenon: it is common when someone experiences intense fear. Every perception is heightened, every moment lengthens. The memory of it all remains inescapably clear for a very long time.

 Already resourceful, he made his way out of the ghetto and into the countryside. He took a chance and asked a farmer for bread. As they walked from the field to the house, the farmer chatted about the Nazi raid. They took all the Jews into the woods and shot them all, he said.

 Samuel could not reveal the intensity of his emotions, only a boy’s curiosity about the mechanics of death. He asked how they could kill so many. With machine guns, the farmer told him. It took them all day. 

 He wandered the countryside for days, until hunger and the risk of being in the open forced him to seek out someone in a nearby village who had known his family. When he knocked on their door, he faced the possibility of being turned over to the Germans. Instead the woman who opened it hugged him, and gave him a home.

 He learned to pass as a non-Jew, and survived the next three years until the war ended. In the last days of the war he was taken by German soldiers to a labor camp as a non-Jewish boy, and during the confusion of a bombing attack, he escaped. 

 Then he was forced by advancing Russian soldiers to drive a wagon for them to the front, and he escaped again. When the fighting was over, he joined with some Jewish survivors, and snuck into Czechoslovakia. On his way to West Germany, he met his first black man—an African-American GI who saw him hitch-hiking and gave him a ride. 

 A postwar program relocating war orphans got him to England. “Only in England did life begin for me,” he wrote at the end of his memoir. “In an old mansion, which served as a temporary youth hostel, I was one of hundreds of children given decent food, kindness, and the opportunity to rebuild my spirits. Education was made available to us and at the age of fifteen I took the first small step toward literacy."

 "From about the age of nine, at which time the Germans first entered Dukla, until the age of fifteen, when they were driven out of Biesnik and defeated, I had lived in a state of darkness, in a state of uncertainty, in a state of primitivity, in a state which is a complete void; only filled with misery, with killings and bad memories.” 

 Soon a Jewish network for finding relatives willing to sponsor immigrants got him to an Oliner in New Jersey. He was there less than a year when in 1951 he was drafted into the U.S. Army, as part of a Korean War program that would grant him citizenship in exchange for his two- year hitch. Sam went to the extent of learning German to get posted to Europe but still he was sent to Korea, where he guarded prisoners of war. His most dangerous moment, he recalls, was the flight east from Seattle upon his return, which ended in a bellyflop landing in Montana.

 But he eventually got to New York, the GI Bill got him started in college, and the wife of a married army buddy set him up with her friend on a blind date. Not much more than a year later, he and Pearl were married. 

 New York was exciting but a struggle, and then Sam told Pearl about the sunny expanses of California. He’d seen it on his way to Seattle to ship out to Korea, and she’d never been there at all. But the friends who had introduced them were there, and so they arranged to go: Pearl became the principal of a school in Oakland, and Sam would get his masters at San Francisco State. Some years and three sons later (as well as several academic degrees each), Sam got a one-year appointment at Humboldt State. They arrived in the rain. But they stayed anyway.

What Else Can We Learn? 

 

The past seemed safely tucked away, but by the early 1970s Sam was alarmed by a wave of Holocaust denying: the systematic murder of European Jews had never happened, some people were claiming, and that horrific footage shot by Americans liberating concentration camps was all faked. Not many were saying this, but it was easy enough to see that this is how it could all get started again. Outright lies about the Jews in World War I became the seedbed of fascism in Germany in the 1920s and 30s.  So Sam Oliner and colleagues at HSU began teaching one of the first college courses in America on the Holocaust.

 In a century of unparalleled destructiveness, the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps suggested a human capacity for evil beyond ordinary expectations. The experience of American writer Susan Sontag, recalled in an interview with Bill Moyers, was widely shared: she was 12 when she first saw pictures of Dachau and Bergen Belsen as they were being liberated in 1945. “I suddenly thought, ‘Oh my God. This is what human beings can do to other human beings…’ I could say that my whole life is divided into before I saw those pictures and after.” 

 Sam Oliner taught the evils of the Nazis and of anti-Semitism. He studied and taught the evils of racism, homophobia and other oppressions. Later he would begin one of the first courses in the nation on genocide, with Native American Studies professor Jack Norton, who applied the concept of genocide to the attempted eradication of Native peoples in Northern California. 

 But in the early 1980s, something happened while Sam was teaching the Holocaust course. After one of the first sessions of the term, a young woman came to him in tears. She was German, married to an American student. She had to drop the course, she told him, because it was too painful to hear “what my people did to your people.”

 “I was moved by this,” Sam recalled. “First of all, she had nothing to do with it, she was innocent. But her pain got me thinking. What else can we teach besides horrors and murder and torture? What else can we learn?”

 He remembered the family that had helped him evade the Nazis and survive the war, at great risk to themselves. He began thinking about them in a new way. The Israeli government had begun to officially honor rescuers, and some stories of rescue turned up in memoirs. But there was very little scholarship, and almost nobody was going deep enough to begin asking that essential question, the one that might lead to deriving some greater meaning, perhaps even a way to encourage such altruistic behavior in the future: why did they do it? 

 It was the question nobody knew how to answer, especially when applied to Holocaust rescuers. It was about this time that an award-winning screenwriter got in touch with Annette Insdorf, author of Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, the best known and most complete book on the subject (she tells this story in the revised 2003 edition.) The screenwriter wanted to write a movie about Oskar Schindler and his rescue of more than a thousand Jews, but he couldn’t figure out how to handle the question of Schindler’s motivation. Why had he done it?

 “Neither of us could find a sufficiently satisfying answer,” Insdorf writes. Both her parents were Holocaust survivors. A few years later, Steven Speilberg solved the problem of “why” by more or less ignoring it. In Schindler’s List, Schindler’s motives remain mysterious. Even in this year’s hit film about the Holocaust, The Pianist, the rescuers’ reasons are mostly implied or obscure. 

 Why this question should be so puzzling is easy to explain, though it may be hard to face. Evil might be shocking, and the motives of informers and bystanders might be shameful, but just about every discipline can supply a reason for such behavior. Beginning with Plato, the mainstream of western philosophy maintains that people naturally act in their own interest, an approach refined and applied to economics and political science. The dominant interpreters of Darwin approve: even our genes are selfish. 

 “Look out for number one” is a law of nature as well as an axiom of common sense, explaining if not always fully justifying every conceivable evil and indifference, from the white lie to the black market, from not getting involved to genocide. Add the explanations for malevolence by the unlikely tandem of Freud and the Bible (Freud suggested dark drives in the unconscious that seemed to express the sinful state of humanity ejected from Eden) and it all seemed awful, but also the way we are. 

 But the family that saved Sam Oliner seemed human, too, even though they were acting against their own interests. Maybe it was time to look at good as well as evil in human beings, and perhaps the place to start was with the people who risked everything for others, at a time when everything was being taken away from those others. It would be a huge task. Sam began looking around for help. He didn’t have to look far. 

There Should Be Joy

 

Pearl Merkur grew up in the tenements of Brooklyn, where the Jewish neighborhood was next to the black neighborhood, and they were all poor. She was an excellent student who earned degrees from Brooklyn College and the Jewish Theological Seminary at the same time.

 She loved the intellectual atmosphere at her college and in the cafes of Greenwich Village, and she got involved in social causes, particularly the early 50s issues that would soon become the Civil Rights movement. Pearl knew about the Holocaust, but it seemed a part of the past compared to the searing issues of the day. Besides, she didn’t want to be buried in sorrow, under the heaviness of Jewish history. There should be joy in life, too. 

 As she began her professional career, Pearl Oliner had reacted to the one-sidedness of education theory and the teaching of social sciences, which was her principal area of interest. The prevailing wisdom was that education should develop rationality, with little regard for feelings. She was also told that if research into social subjects was going to be real science, it would have to be as rigid and quantitative as physics. 

 Pearl believed in scientific analysis, but was still wary of what social science was leaving out. People had feelings, and they were important. So she began tentatively adding elements of emotion and of qualitative research—that is, stories---to her work. Her first book title reflected this duality: Teaching Elementary Social Studies: a Rational and Humanistic Approach. 

 By the time she had secured a full time position at Humboldt State, her views on the Holocaust had matured, thanks in part, of course, to Sam. But when child development expert Paul Henry Mussen spoke at HSU, he used an expression she’d never heard before: “pro-social behavior.” 

 It turned out nobody had heard it before; one of Mussen’s graduate students had invented it, as the opposite of “anti-social behavior.” It was behavior that made things better, that contributed to the common good. 

It said what Pearl had been searching for without necessarily knowing it. She could combine the rational with something hopeful, something to do with the heart. She had written articles on pro-social behavior when Sam suggested that they work together on a research project, investigating altruism among rescuers. They would be looking at compassion in an extreme form, when its cost could be fatal.

 It was a major commitment, professionally and personally. But despite the dangers inherent in a couple combining work with marriage, there was a certain logic to it. It seemed that their separate journeys had come to the same point. 

 Besides, it would only take ten years.

 Why Did They Do It?

 

In some ways, what they wanted to do seemed crazy. How do you study compassion, or quantify goodness? But they believed that the tools of social science would help illuminate that basic question: why did they do it? 

 So with the support of grants and the participation of graduate students and colleagues at HSU and elsewhere, the Oliners designed detailed questionnaires for rescuers of Jews in World War II and a control group of bystanders, and interviewed some 800 people in seven countries. 

 They correlated variables, they ranked responses and they listened to the voices telling stories. Their findings were complex and detailed, but a few impressions jumped out. Few rescuers sought fame or reward, but none regretted what they did. 

 Some had forged papers and smuggled Jews to safety. They lied to Nazi officials and their neighbors, and a few committed acts of violence. For some, these activities went on for years. But almost all of them professed something close to astonishment that anyone had to ask why they did it. They said that of course they didn’t have to do it, but at the same time, they had no choice.

 Some said it was what their parents taught them, or what their faith or ethical code dictated. Some said it was just the natural thing to do. Why did they do it? Because strangers in trouble were still people in trouble, who needed their help. Because their hearts and sometimes even their heads told them it was the right thing for them to do, that if they didn’t, they would damage or even lose the essence of themselves. 

 There could hardly be a more shocking conclusion, at least to the many scholars and scientists who still can’t figure it out or even accept it. But for others this study opened a door, and on the other side of it is the possibility of a new way to think about humanity and perhaps even the universe. 

 It isn’t the only such door, but it is one that is now wide open, and other explorers are eagerly stepping through it. “The Oliners’ work was so careful and so broadly based that it opened the field,” says Kristen Renwick Monroe, professor of politics at UC Irvine and author of The Heart of Altruism. “It gave us a much more sophisticated understanding of the altruistic personality, and made our knowledge much deeper, closer to the root of it. People like me are very deeply indebted to them.”

 By the time the Oliners were finishing their research, editors at the Free Press had heard about it and asked them to write a book. The Altruistic Personality was published in 1988. It led to dozens of speaking invitations (“People need hope,” as Pearl Oliner said), then to an international conference on altruism in Poland. That led to a collection of studies presented there, which the Oliners edited along with four other scholars, published as Embracing the Other. They authored an essay for this anthology that suggested lessons from their research that could be applied to fostering pro-social behavior. 

 That essay soon led to another book they co-authored, called Toward A Caring Society, which offers practical lessons on encouraging compassion, empathy, caring behavior and the peaceful resolution of conflict.

 Their work continues. They established the Institute for the Study of Altruism and Pro-Social Behavior at HSU. Sam Oliner’s new book, Do Unto Others, expands beyond the rescuers and health workers in previous studies to examine ordinary people who performed heroic acts for others, including heroes of September 11, soldiers, and people who risked their lives at accident scenes or during a race riot. 

 Next year, Yale University Press will publish Pearl Oliner’s new book, tentatively titled Outsider as Insider: Religious Culture and the Rescue of Jews in Nazi Europe. [Update: In 2004 Yale Press published Saving the Forsaken: Religious Culture and the Rescue of Jews in Nazi Europe, statistical analysis by Jeanne Wielgus and Mary B. Gruber.] 

 They continue to share their work with HSU and the community. Sam recently spoke at the annual Diversity Workshop and the North Coast Education Summit on campus, and Pearl set the framework for discussion at the “Building Communities That Care” workshop, co-sponsored by the Growing Caring Communities Alliance and the HSU sociology department. 

 Meanwhile the field is expanding all around them. All kind of social and political theorists have to appraise the evidence of altruism. While their anthology a decade ago contained contributions in seven or so disciplines, mostly within social studies, a similar anthology entitled Altruism and Altruistic Love published in 2002 contains essays by scholars in at least 16 different disciplines, including evolutionary biology, neuroscience and biomedical ethics. They studied altruism and empathy not only in rare individual humans but in human societies, the human brain and genome, and even in animals. 

 Essays in this anthology suggest that at least some evolutionists are conceding the likelihood of a genetic basis for behavior that benefits the group rather than the individual or even close kin. “Moral thinking is inherent in the development of human consciousness,” asserts ethicist William Hurlbit in this volume, “for as the self becomes aware of other selves, the ethical issue inescapably arises as to how one person should treat another. He points out that the Latin root of the word “conscience” means “joint or mutual knowledge.” "

 Here and elsewhere, biologists can look at animal cooperation and the fundamental role of symbiosis from a different perspective. A prominent neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, believes that human reason requires feeling, and ethics regulated by emotions are necessary to evolutionary success. A theoretical physicist wonders if there might be something he calls “quantum empathy.” 

 Even psychology no longer dwells exclusively on individual illness and bad behavior. There’s a new Center for the Development of Peace and Well-Being at UC Berkeley, that sponsors research focusing “on what contributes to the greater good,” according to its director, Dacher Keltner. There’s a broad new movement called positive psychology, and another called peace psychology. 

 The Oliners were part of starting all this. Despite the skeptics, “altruism exists,” Sam Oliner maintains. “It can be taught, it can be cultivated… If the Holocaust is western civilization’s nightmare, then helping, caring and compassion are our hope.”

The Oliners: A Hitch-Hiker's Guide to Caring

 

A HITCH-HIKER’S GUIDE TO CARING

A very brief summary and interpretation of the eight elements of caring described in TOWARD A CARING SOCIETY by Pearl M. and Samuel P. Oliner.

The “attaching” processes:

1. BONDING: forming positive connections to places and people, wherever you live and spend your time. Bonding environments often meet basic needs (i.e. the kitchen) and include formal or informal rituals.

DO: create or take advantage of opportunities to share with others, even if it’s a simple as a meal. Understand that forming bonds takes time, attention and commitment.

DON’T: smother individuality, or set insiders against outsiders. Don’t be phony just to be part of the group, or insist that others meet all your expectations.

2. EMPATHIZING: understanding others’ feelings. Empathy arises from awareness in depth of others’ situations, and from common experiences.

DO: know yourself, so you can imagine the role of another without losing your identity.

DON’T: decide you know what others need. Ask them!

3. LEARNING CARING NORMS: learning the responsibilities and expressions of caring, especially from parents, is often a crucial factor in altruistic and compassionate behavior.

      DO: teach your children well with a few positive caring concepts that can be applied to a wide variety of situations. Talk about the reasons for fairness and compassion. Encourage balance between doing for others and doing for themselves.

DON’T: rely only on rules or punishment. Accentuate what’s right rather than what’s wrong: the positive acts of caring.

4. PRACTICING CARE: from common courtesy to careers in helping professions, taking care of others and empowering them.

DO: Learn to listen and respond.

DON’T: feel guilty when you have to pull back. Care involves choices.

The “including” processes:

5. DIVERSIFYING: making an effort to know different kinds of people.

DO: overcome cultural distortions by engaging in common experiences with others.

DON’T: think you know everything about another culture after one encounter.

6. NETWORKING: working together with others on something you have in common. Networks can be teams that work together every day, or groups connected only by the Internet.

DO: identify stakeholders in a common agenda. Think holistically, share information.

DON’T: let pursuing the goal override caring behavior.

7. RESOLVING CONFLICTS: learn and use skills and strategies to solve problems without force or intimidation.

DO: learn the skills to transform enemies into partners in a solution that meets everyone’s needs as they perceive them.

DON’T: assume all conflict is bad. Some conflict leads to creativity. Don’t avoid problems---address them.

8. ESTABLISHING GLOBAL CONNECTIONS: “linking the here and now with people and places far-and-wide throughout the planet in the service of care.”

DO: seek out ways to connect what you do with benefits to the larger world---to society, the environment, the future.

DON’T: get crazy because you can’t change the world overnight. Don’t lose sight of caring goals by getting lost in power games.