Out of the Nursery

DECENT AND INDECENT: OUR PERSONAL AND POLITICAL BEHAVIOR by Benjamin Spock, M.D. 210 pages. McCall. $5.95.

"You know more than you think you do," Benjamin Spock reassured mothers at the opening of Baby and Child Care. Your baby "can care for himself pretty well." Spock's message, which has sold more than 23 million copies was a pacifier for parents. But as everyone knows by now, the doctor who shaped the care and feeding of the babies who have become America's most restive generation is troubled about the nation in which they have grown up.

His title proclaims Spock's values: not good v. evil so much as decency v. indecency. Spock is an almost luminously decent man himself. If translated into a television series, he might well be played by Robert Young. Despite his defiant opposition to the war in Viet Nam, the edifice of his thought is a white clapboard New England house where tolerance, patience and kindliness prevail. But his middle-class values are rescued from complacency by an articulate and increasingly outraged social concern. It is difficult to imagine "Marcus Welby, M.D.'' standing trial for conspiracy to subvert the nation's draft laws.

Decent and Indecent is a series of essays, not a systematic treatise. Spock apparently could not decide whether he was writing an edification manual for a general audience or an outraged diatribe against the Establishment. In fact, Spock speaks in a bewilderment of voices: part Dear Abby, part pop anthropology, part sex manual, part vintage Spock ("When, during toilet training, he feels cross at his mother, he may withhold the B.M."). At times, though entirely truthful, he is also relentlessly obvious: "Black people continue to be identified and barred by their color."

For all his indignation, Spock is engagingly oldfashioned. He is by no means a total permissivist. The closer he gets to home, the more Spock embraces a traditional, family-centered morality that a Nixonian nation would approve. Stubbornly, if apologetically, he condemns the plague of pornography. The battle for some reasonable enlightenment has been won, he says, but "now it is mainly writers, artists and producers with little discernible artistic or social integrity who are leading the assault on standards." Members of Women's Liberation (Kueche, Kinder und Karate) will pulverize a few more practice bricks when they read Spock's thoughts on the woman's role: "It would be fairer [to women] if they were brought up at home and educated in such a spirit that they would enjoy, feel proud of, and be fascinated by child-rearing rather than frustrated by it."

In his best, most intense passages, the doctor castigates the nation's institutionalized offenses--among them: social injustice, pollution, and a war brought on by what Spock calls "paranoid self-deception." His moral objection to that war led Spock to join the antiwar movement. But perhaps because no pediatrician would ever throw out the baby with the bath water, Spock shies away from the violent implications of revolutionary radicalism.

Spock's most useful perception, perhaps, is his understanding that man in the 20th century has indulged in such an orgy of self-depreciation that he grows violent in self-revulsion. There is, mourns Spock, "an unprecedented loss of belief in man's worthiness." Art becomes grotesquerie, music a concert where the players splinter their instruments in a convulsion that suggests strychnine poisoning. "This represents emotional regression all the way back to the one-to-two-year-old level," Spock writes briskly, "when the child in a spell of anger wants to antagonize and mess and destroy on a titanic scale." What troubles the doctor is that such impulses escape the nursery; fathers and mothers, artists, politicians, scientists and generals--all of them go around breaking things. Medicine cannot cope with civilization as tantrum.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.