Mark Satin
Encyclopedia
Mark Ivor Satin is an American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher. Although often referred to as a "draft dodger" or "draft resister", he is better known for contributing to the development and dissemination of three political perspectives – neopacifism
in the 1960s, New Age
politics in the 1970s and 1980s, and radical centrism in the 1990s and 2000s. Satin's work is sometimes seen as building toward a new political ideology, and then it is often labeled "transformational", "post-liberal", or "post-Marxist". One historian calls Satin's writing "post-hip".
After emigrating to Canada at the age of 20, Satin co-founded the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme, which helped bring American Vietnam War
resisters to Canada. He also wrote the Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada, published by House of Anansi Press
in 1968. The Manual sold nearly 100,000 copies and introduced one of Satin's key themes: self-preservation and self-development are prerequisites for positive social change. After a period that author Marilyn Ferguson
describes as Satin's "anti-ambition experiment", Satin wrote the book New Age Politics, published by Dell
in 1979. Despite what some see as its off-putting title, New Age Politics is widely recognized as the first, most ambitious, or most adequate attempt to construct an original political ideology out of the social movements of the post-Vietnam era. It identifies an emergent "third force" in North America pursuing such goals as simple living, decentralism, and global responsibility. Satin spread his ideas by co-founding an American political organization, the New World Alliance, and by publishing an award-winning international political newsletter, New Options. He also helped express early Green political thought by co-drafting the foundational statement of the U.S. Green Party
, "Ten Key Values".
After a period of political disillusion, spent mainly in law school and practicing business law, Satin started another political newsletter and wrote the book Radical Middle, published by Westview Press
and Basic Books
in 2004. Radical Middle became one of the few non-academic books to win a "Best Book Award" from a section of the American Political Science Association
. In it Satin abandons political partisanship as traditionally understood, in favor of a commitment to mutual learning and innovative policy syntheses across political and cultural divides. Elsewhere he contrasts the old Maoist slogan "Dare to struggle, dare to win" with his own version, "Dare to synthesize, dare to take it all in".
Satin has been described as "colorful" and "intense", and all his initiatives have been controversial. Bringing war resisters to Canada was opposed by many in the anti-Vietnam War movement. New Age Politics was not welcomed by many on the traditional left or right, and Radical Middle dismayed an even broader segment of the American political community. Even Satin's personal life has generated controversy.
came from small cities in the Midwest and Southwest, as did Satin: he grew up in Moorhead, Minnesota
, and Wichita Falls, Texas
. His father, who saw combat in World War II, was a college professor and author of a Cold War-era textbook on Western civilization. His mother was a homemaker.
In high school, Satin appeared to be a model citizen – for example, he wrote a regular column on teenage affairs for the Moorhead newspaper. But another side surfaced within months of his leaving for university. In early 1965, at age 18, he dropped out of the University of Illinois
to work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
in Holly Springs, Mississippi
. Later that year, he was told to leave Midwestern State University
, in Texas, for refusing to sign a loyalty oath to the United States Constitution. In 1966 he became president of a Students for a Democratic Society
chapter at the State University of New York at Binghamton
, and helped induce nearly 20% of the student body to join. One trimester later he dropped out, then emigrated to Canada to avoid serving in the Vietnam War.
Just before leaving for Canada, Satin's father told him he was trying to destroy himself. Satin's mother told the Ladies' Home Journal
she could not condone her son's actions, and added, "Oh Mark, my sweet little Mark, why don't you grow up and become a big boy." The night Satin arrived in Canada, he struggled to hold back tears.
and radicals did not look favorably on emigration to Canada as a means of resisting the Vietnam War. For some this reflected a core conviction that effective war resistance requires self-sacrifice. For others it was a matter of strategy – emigration was said to be less impactful than going to jail
or deserting the military, or was said to abet the war by siphoning off the opposition. At first, Students for a Democratic Society and many Quaker
draft counselors opposed promoting the Canadian alternative, and Canada's largest counseling group, the Anti-Draft Programme of the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA) – whose board consisted largely of Quakers and radicals – was sympathetic to such calls for prudence. In January 1967 its spokesman warned an American audience that emigration "isn't easy" and that the Programme was not willing to act as "baby sitters" for Americans after they arrived. He added that he was "tired of" talking to the press.
When Mark Satin was hired as director of the Programme in April 1967, he attempted to change not just the Programme's culture but the attitude of the war resistance movement toward emigration. His efforts continued after SUPA collapsed and he co-founded the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme, with largely the same board of directors, in October 1967. Instead of valorizing self-sacrifice, he emphasized the importance of self-preservation and self-development to social change. Instead of sympathizing with pacifists' and radicals' strategic concerns, he rebutted them, telling The New York Times
that massive emigration of draft-age Americans could help end the war, and telling another reporter that going to jail was bad public relations.
Instead of emphasizing the difficulties of emigration, Satin emphasized the competence of his draft counseling operation, and even boasted of giving cash grants to emigrants who were without funds. Instead of refusing to "baby sit" Americans after they arrived, Satin made post-emigration assistance a top priority – the office soon sported comfortable furniture, a hot plate, and free food, and within a few months, 200 Torontonians had opened their homes to war resisters and a job-finding service had been established. Finally, instead of exuding indifference to reporters, Satin courted them, and many responded, beginning with a May 1967 article in The New York Times Magazine
that included a large picture of Satin counseling Vietnam War resisters in the refurbished office. Some of the publicity focused on Satin as much as on his cause. According to historian Pierre Berton
, Satin's profile was so high he became the virtual spokesman for war resisters in Canada.
Satin defined himself as a neopacifist or quasi-pacifist – flexible, media-savvy, and entrepreneurial. He told one journalist he might have fought against Hitler. He was not even against the draft, telling reporters he would support it for a defensive army or to help eliminate poverty, illiteracy, and racial discrimination. He avoided the intellectual framework of traditional pacifism and socialism. Sometimes he spoke with emotion, as when he described the United States to The New York Times Magazine as "[t]hat godawful sick, foul country; could anything be worse?" Sometimes he spoke poetically, as when he told author Jules Witcover
, "It's colder here, but you feel warm because you know you're not trying to kill people." Instead of identifying with older pacifists, he identified with a 17-year-old character from the pen of J. D. Salinger
: "I was Holden Caulfield
", he said in 2008, "just standing and catching in the rye."
The results of Satin's approach were noticeable: the Programme went from averaging fewer than three visitors, letters, and phone calls per day just before he arrived, to averaging 50 per day nine months later. In addition, the American anti-war movement became more accepting of emigration to Canada – for example, author Myra MacPherson reports that Satin's Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada could be obtained at every "resistance" and draft counseling office in the U.S. However, Satin's approach was distressing to the traditional pacifists and socialists on the Programme's board. The board clashed with Satin over at least 10 political, strategic, and performance issues. The most intractable may have been over the extent of the publicity. There were also concerns about Satin's personal issues; for example, one war resister claims to have heard him say, "Anonymity would kill me". In May 1968, the board finally fired him. He was 21 years old.
The Programme was initially hesitant about producing the Manual, which promised to draw even more war resisters and publicity to it. "The [board] didn't even want me to write it", Satin says. "I wrote it at night, in the SUPA office, three or four nights a week after counseling guys and gals 8 to 10 hours a day – pounded it out in several drafts over several months on SUPA's ancient Underwood typewriter." When it finally appeared, some leading periodicals helped put it on the map. For example, The New York Review of Books
called it "useful", and The New York Times said it contains "detailed advice" about everything from how to qualify as an immigrant to jobs, housing, schools, politics, culture, and even the snow. After the war, sociologist John Hagan found that more than a third of young American emigrants to Canada had read the Manual while still in the United States, and nearly another quarter obtained it after they arrived.
The Manual reflected Satin's neopacifist politics. Commentators routinely characterized it as caustic, responsible, and supportive. The first part of the Manual, on emigration, suggests that self-preservation is more important than sacrifice to a dubious cause. The second half, on Canada, spotlights opportunities for self-development and social innovation. According to Canadian social historian David Churchill, the Manual helped Canadians re-envision Toronto as culturally inclusive and politically progressive.
Inevitably, the Manual became a lightning rod for controversy. Some observers took issue with its perspective on Canada; most notably, The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature criticizes its "condescending tone" in describing Canada's resources. Elements in the U.S. and Canadian governments may have been upset by the Manual. According to journalist Lynn Coady
, the FBI
and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
(RCMP) attempted to wiretap Anansi's offices. In addition, Anansi co-founder Dave Godfrey
is convinced a 10-day federal audit of the press was generated by FBI-RCMP concerns. Many people did not want the Programme to "encourage" draft-eligible Americans to emigrate to Canada, and Satin routinely denied that the Manual encouraged emigration. But few observers believed him, then or later. The first sentence of an article in The New York Times from 1968 describes the Manual as "a major bid to encourage Americans to evade military conscription". Canadian essayist Robert Fulford remembers the Manual as offering a "warm welcome" to draft dodgers. Even a House of Anansi anthology from 2007 concedes that the Manual is "coyly titled".
Soon after the appearance of the second edition of the Manual, which had a print run of 20,000, Satin was fired and his name removed from the title page of most subsequent editions. According to a study of the Manual in Canadian Notes & Queries
, a literary journal, some later editions experienced a falloff in quality. Nevertheless, the Manual arguably stands as an icon of its era. It has appeared in at least five novels as a "significant 'character, including John Irving
's A Prayer for Owen Meany, and it continues to be pored over by historians, social scientists, and graduate students.
says, memoir
writers tended to conceal their most personal and embarrassing memories. In the 1970s Satin wrote a memoir revealing many such memories as a neopacifist activist during the years 1964–66, Confessions of a Young Exile, published by Gage, a Toronto publishing house soon to merge with Macmillan of Canada
. Confessions is "a remarkable exercise in self-exposure", playwright John Lazarus
says in a review. "The insights into the hero's motives and fears are so honest, and so mortifyingly true, that it soon becomes evident that the [naive] tone is deliberate."
To some reviewers, Satin appears to have had a political goal – encouraging activists to establish common ground with ordinary North Americans on the basis of their shared confusion and humanity. For example, Jackie Hooper, writing in The Province
, argues that the purity of motives projected by many pacifist activists is unconvincing, and recommends Satin's more complex view: "Satin's emigration wasn't dictated totally by his idealism. More often than not, he talked himself into radical positions ... as a result of trying to impress his peers or his girlfriend, or rebelling against middle-class parental authority".
Some reviewers were unenthusiastic. For example, Dennis Duffy, writing in The Globe and Mail
, describes Satin's memoir as a "story about a young man who doesn't grow up". Satin's memoir encountered a more fundamental obstacle than unenthusiastic reviews, however. Many years later, the Toronto Star reported that the publisher decided to not let Satin do any publicity for the book, because of his potentially offensive views.
As the 1970s began, the New Left faded away, and a plethora of movements arose in its wake – among them the feminist
, men's liberation
, spiritual
, human potential
, ecology
, appropriate technology
, alternative education
, and holistic health
movements. After graduating from the University of British Columbia
in 1972, Satin immersed himself in all these movements, either directly or as a reporter for Canada's underground press. He also took up residence in a free-love commune. "One fierce winter's day", he says, "... it dawned on me that the ideas and energies from the various 'fringe' movements [were] beginning to generate a coherent new politics. But I looked in vain for the people and groups that were expressing that new politics (instead of merely bits and pieces of it)". So Satin set out to write a book that would express the new politics in all its dimensions. He wrote, designed, typeset, and printed the first edition of New Age Politics himself, in 1976. A 240-page edition was published by Vancouver's Whitecap Books in 1978, and a 349-page edition was published by Dell Publishing Company in New York in 1979. It is now widely regarded as the "first", "most ambitious", or "most adequate" attempt to offer a systemic overview of the new post-socialist politics arising in the wake of the New Left. Some academics say it offers a new "ideology".
At the heart of New Age Politics is a critique of the consciousness we all supposedly share, a "six-sided prison" that has kept us all trapped for hundreds or even thousands of years. The six sides of the "prison" are said to be: patriarchal attitudes, egocentricity, scientific single vision, the bureaucratic mentality, nationalism (xenophobia), and the "big city outlook" (fear of nature). Since consciousness, according to Satin, "ultimately" determines our institutions, prison consciousness is said to be ultimately responsible for "monolithic" institutions that offer us little in the way of freedom of choice or connection with others. Some representative monolithic institutions are: bureaucratic government, automobile-centered transportation systems, attorney-centered law, doctor-centered health care, and church-centered spirituality.
To explain how to break free of the prison and its institutions, Satin develops a "psychocultural" class analysis that reveals the existence of "life-", "thing-", and "death-oriented" classes. According to Satin, life-oriented individuals constitute an emerging "third force" in post-industrial nations. The third force is generating a "prison-free" consciousness consisting of androgynous attitudes, spirituality, multiple perspectives, a cooperative mentality, local-and-global identities, and an ecological outlook. To transform prison society, Satin argues, the third force is going to have to launch an "evolutionary movement" to replace – or at least supplement – monolithic institutions with life-affirming, "biolithic" ones. Some representative biolithic institutions are: deliberative democracy
as an alternative to bureaucratic government, bicycles and mass transit as an alternative to the private automobile, and mediation as an alternative to attorney-centered law. According to Satin, the third force will not have to overthrow capitalism, since Western civilization – not capitalism – is said to be responsible for the prison. But the third force will want to foster a prison-free New Age capitalism through intelligent regulation and elimination of all subsidies.
The reaction to New Age Politics was, and continues to be, highly polarized. Many of the movements Satin drew upon to construct his synthesis received it favorably, though some took exception to the title. Some maverick liberals and libertarians are drawn to the book. It was eventually published in Sweden and Germany, and European New Age political thinkers came to see it as a precursor of their own work. Others see it as proto-Green. Ever since its first appearance, though, and continuing into the 21st century, New Age Politics has been a target of criticism for two politically disparate groups: Biblical Christians and left-wing intellectuals.
Among Biblical Christians, for example, attorney Constance E. Cumbey warns that the book can be "seductive" to those who lack an adequate Biblical education. Theologian Ron Rhodes is convinced Satin wants a centralized and coercive world government. And philosopher Douglas Groothuis
says Satin's vision is morally unsound because it lacks an absolute standard of good and evil. Among left-leaning academics, political scientist Michael Cummings takes issue with the idea that consciousness is ultimately determining. Science-and-society professor David Hess rejects the idea that economic class analysis should give way to psychocultural class analysis. And political scientist Dana Cloud
criticizes New Age Politics for employing a "therapeutic rhetoric[] generated to console activists after the failure of post-1968 revolutionary movements and to legitimate participation in liberal politics".
to Vietnam War resisters in 1977, Satin began giving talks on New Age Politics in the United States. His first talk received a standing ovation, and he wept. Every talk seemed to lead to two or three more, and "the response at New Age gatherings, community events, fairs, bookstores, living rooms, and college campuses" kept Satin going for two years. By the second year he began laying the groundwork for the New World Alliance, a national political organization based in Washington, D.C. "I went systematically to 24 cities and regions from coast to coast", he told the authors of the book Networking. "I stopped when I found 500 [accomplished] people who said they'd answer a questionnaire ... on what a New Age-oriented political organization should be like – what its politics should be, what its projects should be, and how its first directors should be chosen."
The New World Alliance held its first "governing council" meeting in New York City in 1979. The 39-member council was chosen by the questionnaire-answerers themselves, out of 89 who volunteered to be on the ballot. Political scientist Arthur Stein describes the council as an eclectic collection of educators, feminists, businesspeople, futurists, think-tank fellows, and activists. One of the council's announced goals was to break down the old divisions between left and right. Another was to become one of the organizations facilitating the transformation of society. Satin was named staff member of the Alliance.
Expectations ran high among supporters of a post-liberal, post-Marxist politics, and the governing council did initiate several projects. For example, a series of "Political Awareness Seminars" attempted to help participants understand and learn to work with their political opponents. And a "Transformation Platform" attempted to synthesize left- and right-wing approaches to dozens of contentious public policy issues. But within three years the Alliance fell apart, unable to establish stable chapters in any major cities. Author Jerome Clark
suggests the cause was the Alliance's overriding commitment to consensus-building in all its groups and projects; within months, he notes, one member was complaining that the Alliance had turned into a "diddler's cult". Another proffered explanation focuses on the failure – or inability – of the hyper-democratic questionnaire process to select an appropriate governing council.
Satin was devastated by the decline of the Alliance, and engaged in unhappy bouts of public criticism and self-criticism. "We would rather be good than do good", he told editor Kevin Kelly. "We would rather be pure than mature. We are the Beautiful Losers." As time went on, though, the Alliance came to be regarded positively by many observers. For example, author Corinne McLaughlin
sees it as one of the first groups to offer an agenda for the new transformational politics. And political scientist Stephen Woolpert acknowledges it as a precursor of North American Green parties.
described as "one of the hottest political newsletters in Washington[, D.C.]. ... [It] has gotten a fair amount of [national] attention, and perhaps even some influence, because it self-consciously styles itself 'post-liberal'." Satin published 75 issues of New Options from 1984 to 1992, virtually half a million words. He wrote nearly all the articles. In 1989 New Options received Utne Reader
s first "Alternative Press Award for General Excellence: Best Publication from 10,000 to 30,000 Circulation", and in 1990 the The Washington Post
identified New Options as one of 10 periodicals spearheading "The Ideology Shuffle". Twenty-five of its articles were published as a book by a university press.
Satin wanted New Options to make the visionary perspective of New Age Politics seem pragmatic and realizable. He also wanted New Options to spread the New Age political ideology more effectively than the New World Alliance had done. To those ends, he challenged traditional thinking across the political spectrum, and he expanded the purview of politics to include subjects like love and relationships. In her book Do You Believe in Magic?, culture critic Annie Gottlieb says New Options offered:
"I think the reason New Options works is it has a particular tone", Satin told one reporter. "It's as idealistic as many of us were in the 1960s, but ... without the childishness".
New Options owed its rise to more than just content and tone, however. Positioning was also a factor. The New Age political movement was cresting in the 1980s, and it needed a credible political periodical. Satin's book New Age Politics had helped define the movement, and the New Options advisory board – a collection of prominent post-liberal thinkers – gave the newsletter further credibility. At the outset it included Lester R. Brown
, Ernest Callenbach
, Fritjof Capra
, Willis Harman
, Hazel Henderson
, Petra Kelly
, Amory Lovins
, Joanna Macy
, Robin Morgan
, John Naisbitt
, Jeremy Rifkin
, Carl Rogers
, Theodore Roszak
, Kirkpatrick Sale
, and Charlene Spretnak
, and over the years it added such figures as Herman Daly
, Marilyn Ferguson
, Jane Jacobs
, Winona LaDuke
, and Robert Rodale
.
New Options did not succeed in all quarters. Jules Feiffer
, for example, often seen as being on the liberal-left, called it "irritating" and "neo-yuppie". Jason McQuinn
, often seen as a radical,
objected to what he perceived as its relentless American optimism. And George Weigel
, often seen as a conservative, said it consisted largely of a cleverly repackaged leftism. Satin himself turned out to be one of the newsletter's critics. "I could have edited New Options forever", he wrote in 2004. "But, increasingly, I was becoming dissatisfied with my hyper-idealistic politics". His experiences in the U.S. Green politics movement contributed to that dissatisfaction.
was, "We are neither left nor right; we are in front". Some observers, notably British Green Party
liaison Sara Parkin
, saw the New World Alliance and New Options Newsletter as Green entities; others saw the early Greens as one expression of New Age politics. In 1984, Satin was invited to the founding meeting of the U.S. Green politics movement. The meeting chose him, along with political theorist Charlene Spretnak
, to draft its foundational political statement, "Ten Key Values". Some accounts recognize futurist and New Options advisor Eleanor LeCain as a co-equal drafter. The drafters drew on suggestions recorded on a flip chart during a marathon plenary brainstorming session, as well as on a plethora of suggestions received by Satin and Spretnak during the meeting and for many weeks afterward.
The original "Ten Key Values" statement was approved by the Greens' national steering committee and released in late 1984. The values in the original statement are: "Ecological Wisdom", "Grassroots Democracy", "Personal and Social Responsibility", "Nonviolence", "Decentralization", "Community-based Economics", "Postpatriarchal Values", "Respect for Diversity", "Global Responsibility", and "Future Focus". One unusual aspect, say many observers, is the way the values are described; instead of declaratory statements full of "shoulds" and "musts", each value is followed by a series of open-ended questions. "That idea ... came from Mark Satin", Spretnak told scholar Greta Gaard
in 1997. Its effect, says sociologist Paul Lichterman, was to promote dialogue and creative thinking in local Green groups across the U.S.
The original values statement was, and remains, controversial. U.S. Green Party co-founder John Rensenbrink
credits it with helping to unify the often contentious Greens. However, party co-founder Howie Hawkins
sees it as just a watered-down, "spiritual", and "New Age" version of the German Greens' Four Pillars
statement. Greta Gaard says it fails to call for the elimination of capitalism or racism. And Green activist Brian Tokar says that "the voice of the original [values] questions is distinctly personal ... and aims to avoid fundamental conflicts with elite social and cultural norms." A "modified" list of the Ten Key Values became part of the U.S. Greens' political platform. However, all the open-ended questions were replaced by declaratory sentences, and the U.S. Greens have come to be regarded as a party of the left, rather than one seeking to be neither left nor right.
Satin himself quit the Greens in 1990. He gave a featured speech at the U.S. Green gathering in 1987 urging them to avoid hyper-detailed platform writing and other projects and specialize in one thing – running people for office who endorse the Ten Key Values. But the speech fell flat. After the Green gathering in 1989, he urged them to abandon hippie-era fears of money, authority, and leadership. After the 1990 gathering he complained "I've been Pure before," an allusion to his time in the New World Alliance. According to Greta Gaard, he then bid farewell to the Greens, but acknowledged it as a loss: "Whatever I may think of their internal battles and political prospects, the Greens are My People. Their life choices are my life choices; their failings mirror my own." Within a year of voicing those words, he stopped New Options Newsletter and applied to law school. He was 45 years old.
in 1992, he expressed no desire to abandon his project of helping to construct a post-liberal, post-Marxist ideology. He did admit to being disillusioned with his approach. "I knew my views (and I personally) would benefit from engagement with the real world of commerce and professional ambition", he wrote. Seven years later, he returned to Washington, D.C., to launch a new political newsletter, Radical Middle.
As the title indicates, it sought to distance itself from New Age politics. If the term "New Age" suggests utopianism, the term "radical middle" suggests, for Satin and others, keeping at least one foot firmly on the ground. Satin attempted to embrace the promise but also the balance implied by the term. One feature story is entitled "Tough on Terrorism, and Tough on the Causes of Terrorism". Another feature story attempts to go beyond polarized positions on biotechnology. Another argues that corporate activity abroad can best be seen as neither inherently moral nor inherently imperialistic, but as a "chance for mutual learning". Even the board of advisors of Radical Middle Newsletter signaled Satin's new direction. It was politically disparate, and many of its members sought to promote dialogue or collaboration across ideological divides. By the end of 2004 it included John Avlon
, Don Beck, Jerry H. Bentley
, Esther Dyson
, James Fallows
, Jane Mansbridge of the Harvard Kennedy School
, John Marks and Susan Collin Marks of Search for Common Ground
, Susan Partnow of the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation, and William L. Ury, co-author of Getting to YES
.
Radical Middle Newsletter proved controversial. Many applauded Satin's new direction; for example, a professor of management wrote that unlike Satin's former newsletter, Radical Middle spoke about "reality". Scholarly books began citing the newsletter. And in a book on globalization, Walter Truett Anderson
said Radical Middle "carries the encouraging news of an emerging group with a different voice, one that is 'nuanced, hopeful, adult'. ... It is essentially a willingness to listen to both sides of the argument." But three objections were often heard. Some critics accused Satin of mendacious policy proposals, as when peace studies scholar Michael N. Nagler
wrote that the article "praising humanitarian military intervention as the 'peace movement' of our time, is nothing short of an insult ... to the real peace movement" [emphasis in original]. Other critics accused Satin of abandoning his old constituency, as when author and former New Options advisor David Korten
chided him for consciously choosing pragmatism over idealism. And others accused Satin of indifference to ordinary Americans, as when the executive editor of Yes! Magazine
said Satin favored globalization because it appealed to his interests and those of his "law school buddies".
To some extent, these objections were inevitable. New Options Newsletter was based on the ideals set forth in New Age Politics. But Satin's radical middle project was experimental and inductive. Satin's theoretical statement, the book Radical Middle, did not appear until 2004, the newsletter's sixth year. Until then, the only glimpse Satin gave of his larger vision appeared in an article he wrote for an academic journal.
Satin's book Radical Middle: The Politics We Need Now, published by Westview Press and Basic Books in 2004, attempts to present radical centrism as a political ideology. It is considered one of the two or three "most persuasive" or most representative books on the subject, and it received the "Best Book Award" for 2003 and 2004 from the Section on Ecological and Transformational Politics of the American Political Science Association. It also generated – like all Satin's works – criticism and controversy.
Satin presents Radical Middle as a revised and evolved version of his New Age Politics book, rather than as a rejection of it. The radical middle idea does go back in time with him. As early as 1980, author Marilyn Ferguson identified him as part of what she called the "Radical Center", and in 1987 culture critic Annie Gottlieb said Satin was trying to prompt the New Age and New Left to evolve into a "New Center". But the revisions Satin introduces are substantial. Instead of defining politics as a means for creating the ideal society, as he did in New Age Politics, he defines radical middle politics as "idealism without illusions" – more creative and future-oriented than politics-as-usual, but willing to face "the hard facts on the ground". Instead of arguing that change will be brought about by a "third force", he says most Americans are already radical middle – "we're very practical folks, and we're very idealistic and visionary as well."
Instead of arguing that Americans need to change their consciousness and decentralize their institutions, as he did in New Age Politics, Satin says they can build a good society if they adopt and live by Four Key Values: maximize choices for all Americans, give every American a fair start, maximize every American's human potential, and help the peoples of the developing world. Instead of finding those values in the writings of contemporary theorists, Satin says they are just updates of the values that animated the American Revolution: liberty (maximize choices), equality (a fair start), pursuit-of-happiness (human potential), and fraternity (help the developing world). He calls Benjamin Franklin
the radical middle's favorite Founding Father, and says Franklin "wanted us to invent a uniquely American politics that served ordinary people by creatively borrowing from all points of view."
Instead of refusing to focus on the messy details of governance, a signature refusal of New Age Politics, Satin devotes the bulk of Radical Middle to fleshing out policy proposals rooted in the Four Key Values. (Among them: universal access to private, preventive health insurance, class-based rather than race-based affirmative action, mandatory national service, and opening U.S. markets to more products from poor nations.) Finally, instead of calling on "life-oriented" people to become radical activists for a New Age society, Satin calls on people of every political stripe to work from within for social change congruent with the Four Key Values.
Satin's mandatory national service proposal drew significant media coverage, in part because of his status as a draft refuser. Satin argues that a draft could work in the United States if it applied to all young people, without exception, and if it gave everyone a choice in how they would serve. He proposes three service options: military (with generous benefits), homeland security (at prevailing wages), and community care (at subsistence wages). On Voice of America radio
, Satin presented his proposal as quintessentially radical-middle, drawing from the best of the left and the right. On National Public Radio
he emphasized its fairness.
Radical Middle provoked, and continues to provoke, essentially three kinds of responses. Some respondents find Satin's beyond-left-and-right policy proposals to be unrealistic and arrogant. For example, political writer Charles R. Morris says "Satin's nostrums" echo the "glibness and overweening self-confidence ... in Roosevelt's brain trust, or in John F. Kennedy's." And the policy director of the Democratic Leadership Council
says Satin's book "ultimately places him in the sturdy tradition of 'idealistic' American reformers who think smart and principled people unencumbered by political constraints can change everything." A second group of respondents applauds Satin's capacity to combine the best ideas from the left and the right. But these respondents are typically more drawn to Satin as a policy advocate – or as a counterweight to partisan militants like Ann Coulter
– than they are to him as a political theorist. For example, Robert Olson of the World Future Society
warns Satin against presenting the radical middle as a new "ideology".
A third group of respondents appreciates Satin's work as a policy advocate. But they also see him as attempting something rarer and, arguably, richer – to raise politics to a higher level by synthesizing truths from all the political ideologies. Author Corinne McLaughlin
identifies Satin as one of those creating an ideology about ideologies. She quotes him:
In 2009 Satin revealed he was losing his eyesight as a result of macular edema
and diabetic retinopathy
. He stopped Radical Middle Newsletter but expressed a desire to write a final political book. From 2009 to 2011 he presented occasional guest lectures on "life and political ideologies" in peace studies classes at the University of California, Berkeley
.
Some observers see him as an exemplary figure. David Armstrong, for example, in his study of independent American journalism, presents Satin as an embodiment of the "do-it-yourself spirit" that makes an independent press possible. Futurists Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps portray Satin as a pioneer "networker" who spent two years riding the bus across the U.S. in an attempt to connect like-minded thinkers and activists. Marilyn Ferguson
, author of The Aquarian Conspiracy, says that by engaging in a lifelong series of personal and political experiments with few resources, Satin is playing the role of the holy "Fool" for his time.
Other observers stress the freshness of Satin's political vision. Social scientists Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson, for example, argue that Satin anticipated the perspectives of 21st century social movements better than nearly anyone. Humanistic psychologist John Amodeo says Satin is one of the few political theorists to grasp the connection between personal growth and constructive political change. Political scientist Christa Slaton's short list of "nonacademic" transformationalists consists of Alvin and Heidi Toffler
, Fritjof Capra
, Marilyn Ferguson, Hazel Henderson
, Betty Friedan
, E. F. Schumacher
, John Naisbitt
, and Mark Satin.
Some see Satin as a classic example of the perpetual rebel, and trace the cause back to his early years. For example, author Roger Neville Williams focuses on the harshness and "paternalistic rectitude" of Satin's parents. Novelist Dan Wakefield
, writing in The Atlantic, says Satin grew up in a small city in northern Minnesota like Bob Dylan, but did not have a guitar to express himself with. According to historian Frank Kusch
, the seeds for rebellion were planted when Satin's parents moved him at age 16 from liberal Minnesota to still-segregated Texas.
Although many observers praise or are intrigued by Satin, many find him dismaying. Memoirist George Fetherling
, for example, remembers him as a publicity hound. Literary critic Dennis Duffy calls him incapable of learning from his experiences. Green Party activist Howie Hawkins
sees him as a political opportunist. The Washington Monthly
portrayed him in his 50s as a former New Age "guru", and Commonweal
compares reading him to listening to glass shards grate against a blackboard.
The major substantive criticisms of Satin's work have remained constant over time. His ideas are sometimes said to be superficial; they were characterized as childish in the 1960s, naive in the 1970s, poorly reasoned in the 1980s and 1990s, and overly simple in the 2000s. His ideas have also occasionally been seen as not politically serious, or as non-political in the sense of not being capable of challenging existing power structures. His work is sometimes said to be largely borrowed from others, a charge that first surfaced with regard to his draft dodger manual, and was repeated to varying degree by critics of his books on New Age politics and radical centrism.
Satin has long been faulted for mixing views from different parts of his political odyssey. In the 1970s for example Toronto Star editor Robert Nielsen
argued that Satin's leftist pacifism warps his New Age vision. Three decades later, public-policy analyst Gadi Dechter argued that Satin's New Age emotionalism and impracticality blunt his radical-centrist message. At age 58, Satin suggested his message could not be understood without appreciating all the strands of his personal and political journey:
Nonviolence
Nonviolence has two meanings. It can refer, first, to a general philosophy of abstention from violence because of moral or religious principle It can refer to the behaviour of people using nonviolent action Nonviolence has two (closely related) meanings. (1) It can refer, first, to a general...
in the 1960s, New Age
New Age
The New Age movement is a Western spiritual movement that developed in the second half of the 20th century. Its central precepts have been described as "drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and then infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational...
politics in the 1970s and 1980s, and radical centrism in the 1990s and 2000s. Satin's work is sometimes seen as building toward a new political ideology, and then it is often labeled "transformational", "post-liberal", or "post-Marxist". One historian calls Satin's writing "post-hip".
After emigrating to Canada at the age of 20, Satin co-founded the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme, which helped bring American Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
resisters to Canada. He also wrote the Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada, published by House of Anansi Press
House of Anansi Press
House of Anansi Press is a Canadian publishing company, founded in 1967 by writers Dennis Lee and Dave Godfrey. The company specializes in finding and developing new Canadian writers of literary fiction, poetry, and non-fiction....
in 1968. The Manual sold nearly 100,000 copies and introduced one of Satin's key themes: self-preservation and self-development are prerequisites for positive social change. After a period that author Marilyn Ferguson
Marilyn Ferguson
Marilyn Ferguson was an American author, editor and public speaker, best known for her 1980 book The Aquarian Conspiracy and its affiliation with the New Age Movement in popular culture....
describes as Satin's "anti-ambition experiment", Satin wrote the book New Age Politics, published by Dell
Dell Publishing
Dell Publishing, an American publisher of books, magazines and comic books, was founded in 1921 by George T. Delacorte, Jr.During the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, Dell was one of the largest publishers of magazines, including pulp magazines. Their line of humor magazines included 1000 Jokes, launched in...
in 1979. Despite what some see as its off-putting title, New Age Politics is widely recognized as the first, most ambitious, or most adequate attempt to construct an original political ideology out of the social movements of the post-Vietnam era. It identifies an emergent "third force" in North America pursuing such goals as simple living, decentralism, and global responsibility. Satin spread his ideas by co-founding an American political organization, the New World Alliance, and by publishing an award-winning international political newsletter, New Options. He also helped express early Green political thought by co-drafting the foundational statement of the U.S. Green Party
Green Party (United States)
The Green Party of the United States is a nationally recognized political party which officially formed in 1991. It is a voluntary association of state green parties. Prior to national formation, many state affiliates had already formed and were recognized by other state parties...
, "Ten Key Values".
After a period of political disillusion, spent mainly in law school and practicing business law, Satin started another political newsletter and wrote the book Radical Middle, published by Westview Press
Westview Press
Westview Press is an American publishing house. It publishes textbooks and scholarly works for an academic audience.Westview was founded in 1975 in Boulder, Colorado by Fred Praeger. The press was sold in 1991 to SCS Communications. HarperCollins acquired the company in 1995. Since 1998, it has...
and Basic Books
Basic Books
Basic Books is a book publisher founded in 1952 and located in New York. It publishes books in the fields of psychology, philosophy, economics, science, politics, sociology, current affairs, and history.-History:...
in 2004. Radical Middle became one of the few non-academic books to win a "Best Book Award" from a section of the American Political Science Association
American Political Science Association
The American Political Science Association is a professional association of political science students and scholars in the United States. Founded in 1903, it publishes three academic journals...
. In it Satin abandons political partisanship as traditionally understood, in favor of a commitment to mutual learning and innovative policy syntheses across political and cultural divides. Elsewhere he contrasts the old Maoist slogan "Dare to struggle, dare to win" with his own version, "Dare to synthesize, dare to take it all in".
Satin has been described as "colorful" and "intense", and all his initiatives have been controversial. Bringing war resisters to Canada was opposed by many in the anti-Vietnam War movement. New Age Politics was not welcomed by many on the traditional left or right, and Radical Middle dismayed an even broader segment of the American political community. Even Satin's personal life has generated controversy.
Early years
Many mid-1960s American radicalsLeft-wing politics
In politics, Left, left-wing and leftist generally refer to support for social change to create a more egalitarian society...
came from small cities in the Midwest and Southwest, as did Satin: he grew up in Moorhead, Minnesota
Moorhead, Minnesota
Moorhead is a city in Clay County, Minnesota, United States, and the largest city in northwest Minnesota. The population was 38,065 at the 2010 Census. It is the county seat of Clay County....
, and Wichita Falls, Texas
Wichita Falls, Texas
Wichita Falls is a city in and the county seat of Wichita County, Texas, United States, United States. Wichita Falls is the principal city of the Wichita Falls Metropolitan Statistical Area, which encompasses all of Archer, Clay and Wichita counties. According to the U.S. Census estimate of 2010,...
. His father, who saw combat in World War II, was a college professor and author of a Cold War-era textbook on Western civilization. His mother was a homemaker.
In high school, Satin appeared to be a model citizen – for example, he wrote a regular column on teenage affairs for the Moorhead newspaper. But another side surfaced within months of his leaving for university. In early 1965, at age 18, he dropped out of the University of Illinois
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...
to work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ' was one of the principal organizations of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It emerged from a series of student meetings led by Ella Baker held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960...
in Holly Springs, Mississippi
Holly Springs, Mississippi
Holly Springs is a city in Marshall County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 7,957 at the 2000 census. It is the county seat of Marshall County. A short drive from Memphis, Tennessee, Holly Springs is the site of a number of well-preserved antebellum homes and other structures and...
. Later that year, he was told to leave Midwestern State University
Midwestern State University
Midwestern State University is a public liberal arts college in Wichita Falls, Texas, and a member of the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges...
, in Texas, for refusing to sign a loyalty oath to the United States Constitution. In 1966 he became president of a Students for a Democratic Society
Students for a Democratic Society
Students for a Democratic Society was a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main iconic representations of the country's New Left. The organization developed and expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s before dissolving at its last convention in 1969...
chapter at the State University of New York at Binghamton
Binghamton University
Binghamton University, also formally called State University of New York at Binghamton, , is a public research university in the State of New York. The University is one of the four university centers in the State University of New York system...
, and helped induce nearly 20% of the student body to join. One trimester later he dropped out, then emigrated to Canada to avoid serving in the Vietnam War.
Just before leaving for Canada, Satin's father told him he was trying to destroy himself. Satin's mother told the Ladies' Home Journal
Ladies' Home Journal
Ladies' Home Journal is an American magazine which first appeared on February 16, 1883, and eventually became one of the leading women's magazines of the 20th century in the United States...
she could not condone her son's actions, and added, "Oh Mark, my sweet little Mark, why don't you grow up and become a big boy." The night Satin arrived in Canada, he struggled to hold back tears.
Toronto Anti-Draft Programme
As 1967 began, many American pacifistsPacifism
Pacifism is the opposition to war and violence. The term "pacifism" was coined by the French peace campaignerÉmile Arnaud and adopted by other peace activists at the tenth Universal Peace Congress inGlasgow in 1901.- Definition :...
and radicals did not look favorably on emigration to Canada as a means of resisting the Vietnam War. For some this reflected a core conviction that effective war resistance requires self-sacrifice. For others it was a matter of strategy – emigration was said to be less impactful than going to jail
or deserting the military, or was said to abet the war by siphoning off the opposition. At first, Students for a Democratic Society and many Quaker
Religious Society of Friends
The Religious Society of Friends, or Friends Church, is a Christian movement which stresses the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Members are known as Friends, or popularly as Quakers. It is made of independent organisations, which have split from one another due to doctrinal differences...
draft counselors opposed promoting the Canadian alternative, and Canada's largest counseling group, the Anti-Draft Programme of the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA) – whose board consisted largely of Quakers and radicals – was sympathetic to such calls for prudence. In January 1967 its spokesman warned an American audience that emigration "isn't easy" and that the Programme was not willing to act as "baby sitters" for Americans after they arrived. He added that he was "tired of" talking to the press.
When Mark Satin was hired as director of the Programme in April 1967, he attempted to change not just the Programme's culture but the attitude of the war resistance movement toward emigration. His efforts continued after SUPA collapsed and he co-founded the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme, with largely the same board of directors, in October 1967. Instead of valorizing self-sacrifice, he emphasized the importance of self-preservation and self-development to social change. Instead of sympathizing with pacifists' and radicals' strategic concerns, he rebutted them, telling The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
that massive emigration of draft-age Americans could help end the war, and telling another reporter that going to jail was bad public relations.
Instead of emphasizing the difficulties of emigration, Satin emphasized the competence of his draft counseling operation, and even boasted of giving cash grants to emigrants who were without funds. Instead of refusing to "baby sit" Americans after they arrived, Satin made post-emigration assistance a top priority – the office soon sported comfortable furniture, a hot plate, and free food, and within a few months, 200 Torontonians had opened their homes to war resisters and a job-finding service had been established. Finally, instead of exuding indifference to reporters, Satin courted them, and many responded, beginning with a May 1967 article in The New York Times Magazine
The New York Times Magazine
The New York Times Magazine is a Sunday magazine supplement included with the Sunday edition of The New York Times. It is host to feature articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted many notable contributors...
that included a large picture of Satin counseling Vietnam War resisters in the refurbished office. Some of the publicity focused on Satin as much as on his cause. According to historian Pierre Berton
Pierre Berton
Pierre Francis de Marigny Berton, was a noted Canadian author of non-fiction, especially Canadiana and Canadian history, and was a well-known television personality and journalist....
, Satin's profile was so high he became the virtual spokesman for war resisters in Canada.
Satin defined himself as a neopacifist or quasi-pacifist – flexible, media-savvy, and entrepreneurial. He told one journalist he might have fought against Hitler. He was not even against the draft, telling reporters he would support it for a defensive army or to help eliminate poverty, illiteracy, and racial discrimination. He avoided the intellectual framework of traditional pacifism and socialism. Sometimes he spoke with emotion, as when he described the United States to The New York Times Magazine as "[t]hat godawful sick, foul country; could anything be worse?" Sometimes he spoke poetically, as when he told author Jules Witcover
Jules Witcover
Jules Joseph Witcover is an American journalist, author, and columnist.Witcover is a veteran newspaperman of 50 years' standing, having written for The Baltimore Sun, the now-defunct Washington Star, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post...
, "It's colder here, but you feel warm because you know you're not trying to kill people." Instead of identifying with older pacifists, he identified with a 17-year-old character from the pen of J. D. Salinger
J. D. Salinger
Jerome David Salinger was an American author, best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as his reclusive nature. His last original published work was in 1965; he gave his last interview in 1980....
: "I was Holden Caulfield
Holden Caulfield
Holden Caulfield is the 16-to-17 years old protagonist of author J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. He is universally recognized for his resistance to growing older and desire to protect childhood innocence...
", he said in 2008, "just standing and catching in the rye."
The results of Satin's approach were noticeable: the Programme went from averaging fewer than three visitors, letters, and phone calls per day just before he arrived, to averaging 50 per day nine months later. In addition, the American anti-war movement became more accepting of emigration to Canada – for example, author Myra MacPherson reports that Satin's Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada could be obtained at every "resistance" and draft counseling office in the U.S. However, Satin's approach was distressing to the traditional pacifists and socialists on the Programme's board. The board clashed with Satin over at least 10 political, strategic, and performance issues. The most intractable may have been over the extent of the publicity. There were also concerns about Satin's personal issues; for example, one war resister claims to have heard him say, "Anonymity would kill me". In May 1968, the board finally fired him. He was 21 years old.
Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada
Before Satin was fired, he conceived and wrote, and edited guest chapters for, the Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada, published in January 1968 by the House of Anansi Press in partnership with the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme. The Programme had issued brochures on emigration before – including a 12-page version under Satin's watch – but the Manual was different, a comprehensive, 45,000-word book, and it quickly turned into an "underground bestseller". Many years later, Toronto newspapers reported that nearly 100,000 copies of the Manual had been sold. One journalist calls it the first entirely Canadian-published bestseller in the United States.The Programme was initially hesitant about producing the Manual, which promised to draw even more war resisters and publicity to it. "The [board] didn't even want me to write it", Satin says. "I wrote it at night, in the SUPA office, three or four nights a week after counseling guys and gals 8 to 10 hours a day – pounded it out in several drafts over several months on SUPA's ancient Underwood typewriter." When it finally appeared, some leading periodicals helped put it on the map. For example, The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...
called it "useful", and The New York Times said it contains "detailed advice" about everything from how to qualify as an immigrant to jobs, housing, schools, politics, culture, and even the snow. After the war, sociologist John Hagan found that more than a third of young American emigrants to Canada had read the Manual while still in the United States, and nearly another quarter obtained it after they arrived.
The Manual reflected Satin's neopacifist politics. Commentators routinely characterized it as caustic, responsible, and supportive. The first part of the Manual, on emigration, suggests that self-preservation is more important than sacrifice to a dubious cause. The second half, on Canada, spotlights opportunities for self-development and social innovation. According to Canadian social historian David Churchill, the Manual helped Canadians re-envision Toronto as culturally inclusive and politically progressive.
Inevitably, the Manual became a lightning rod for controversy. Some observers took issue with its perspective on Canada; most notably, The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature criticizes its "condescending tone" in describing Canada's resources. Elements in the U.S. and Canadian governments may have been upset by the Manual. According to journalist Lynn Coady
Lynn Coady
-Life and career:Coady grew up in Port Hawkesbury, Nova Scotia. After high school, she attended Carleton University in Ottawa; after graduating, she moved to New Brunswick, where she worked at odd jobs for several years and began a career as a playwright...
, the FBI
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Royal Canadian Mounted Police
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police , literally ‘Royal Gendarmerie of Canada’; colloquially known as The Mounties, and internally as ‘The Force’) is the national police force of Canada, and one of the most recognized of its kind in the world. It is unique in the world as a national, federal,...
(RCMP) attempted to wiretap Anansi's offices. In addition, Anansi co-founder Dave Godfrey
Dave Godfrey
Dave Godfrey is a Canadian writer and publisher. His novel The New Ancestors won the Governor General's Award for English language fiction in 1970....
is convinced a 10-day federal audit of the press was generated by FBI-RCMP concerns. Many people did not want the Programme to "encourage" draft-eligible Americans to emigrate to Canada, and Satin routinely denied that the Manual encouraged emigration. But few observers believed him, then or later. The first sentence of an article in The New York Times from 1968 describes the Manual as "a major bid to encourage Americans to evade military conscription". Canadian essayist Robert Fulford remembers the Manual as offering a "warm welcome" to draft dodgers. Even a House of Anansi anthology from 2007 concedes that the Manual is "coyly titled".
Soon after the appearance of the second edition of the Manual, which had a print run of 20,000, Satin was fired and his name removed from the title page of most subsequent editions. According to a study of the Manual in Canadian Notes & Queries
Canadian Notes & Queries
Canadian Notes & Queries was first published in 1968 by William Morley as a four page supplement to the Abacus, the newsletter of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of Canada...
, a literary journal, some later editions experienced a falloff in quality. Nevertheless, the Manual arguably stands as an icon of its era. It has appeared in at least five novels as a "significant 'character, including John Irving
John Irving
John Winslow Irving is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978...
's A Prayer for Owen Meany, and it continues to be pored over by historians, social scientists, and graduate students.
Confessions of a Young Exile
Until the 1990s, literary critic William ZinsserWilliam Zinsser
William Knowlton Zinsser is an American writer, editor, literary critic, and teacher. He began his career as a journalist for the New York Herald Tribune, where he worked as a feature writer, drama editor, film critic, and editorial writer, and has been a longtime contributor to leading...
says, memoir
Memoir
A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...
writers tended to conceal their most personal and embarrassing memories. In the 1970s Satin wrote a memoir revealing many such memories as a neopacifist activist during the years 1964–66, Confessions of a Young Exile, published by Gage, a Toronto publishing house soon to merge with Macmillan of Canada
Macmillan of Canada
Macmillan of Canada was a Canadian publishing house.The company was founded in 1905 as the Canadian arm of the English publisher Macmillan. At that time it was known as the "Macmillan Company of Canada Ltd." In the course of its existence the name changed to "Macmillan of Canada" and "Macmillan...
. Confessions is "a remarkable exercise in self-exposure", playwright John Lazarus
John Lazarus
John Lazarus, is a Canadian playwright.He is author of Babel Rap, Dreaming and Duelling, The Late Blumer, Homework & Curtains, Genuine Fakes, The Trials of Eddy Haymour, Medea's Disgust, Village of Idiots, Rough Magic Meltdown and Secrets.Lazarus is also the author of many plays for young...
says in a review. "The insights into the hero's motives and fears are so honest, and so mortifyingly true, that it soon becomes evident that the [naive] tone is deliberate."
To some reviewers, Satin appears to have had a political goal – encouraging activists to establish common ground with ordinary North Americans on the basis of their shared confusion and humanity. For example, Jackie Hooper, writing in The Province
The Province
The Province is a daily, tabloid format newspaper published in British Columbia by Postmedia. It has been a daily newspaper since 1898.According to a recent NADbank survey, The Provinces average weekday readership was 520,100, making it British Columbia's most read newspaper...
, argues that the purity of motives projected by many pacifist activists is unconvincing, and recommends Satin's more complex view: "Satin's emigration wasn't dictated totally by his idealism. More often than not, he talked himself into radical positions ... as a result of trying to impress his peers or his girlfriend, or rebelling against middle-class parental authority".
Some reviewers were unenthusiastic. For example, Dennis Duffy, writing in The Globe and Mail
The Globe and Mail
The Globe and Mail is a nationally distributed Canadian newspaper, based in Toronto and printed in six cities across the country. With a weekly readership of approximately 1 million, it is Canada's largest-circulation national newspaper and second-largest daily newspaper after the Toronto Star...
, describes Satin's memoir as a "story about a young man who doesn't grow up". Satin's memoir encountered a more fundamental obstacle than unenthusiastic reviews, however. Many years later, the Toronto Star reported that the publisher decided to not let Satin do any publicity for the book, because of his potentially offensive views.
New Age Politics, the book
Feminist movement
The feminist movement refers to a series of campaigns for reforms on issues such as reproductive rights, domestic violence, maternity leave, equal pay, women's suffrage, sexual harassment and sexual violence...
, men's liberation
Men and feminism
The relationship between men and feminism has been complex and intricate. Men have taken part in significant cultural and political responses to feminism in each 'wave' of the movement. Such responses have been varied, with some more sympathetic or critical than others, depending on the individual...
, spiritual
Spirituality
Spirituality can refer to an ultimate or an alleged immaterial reality; an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his/her being; or the “deepest values and meanings by which people live.” Spiritual practices, including meditation, prayer and contemplation, are intended to develop...
, human potential
Human Potential Movement
The Human Potential Movement arose out of the social and intellectual milieu of the 1960s and formed around the concept of cultivating extraordinary potential that its advocates believed to lie largely untapped in all people...
, ecology
Ecology movement
The global ecology movement is based upon environmental protection, and is one of several new social movements that emerged at the end of the 1960s. As a values-driven social movement, it should be distinguished from the pre-existing science of ecology....
, appropriate technology
Appropriate technology
Appropriate technology is an ideological movement originally articulated as "intermediate technology" by the economist Dr...
, alternative education
Alternative education
Alternative education, also known as non-traditional education or educational alternative, includes a number of approaches to teaching and learning other than mainstream or traditional education. Educational alternatives are often rooted in various philosophies that are fundamentally different...
, and holistic health
Holistic health
Holistic health is a concept in medical practice upholding that all aspects of people's needs, psychological, physical and social should be taken into account and seen as a whole. As defined above, the holistic view on treatment is widely accepted in medicine...
movements. After graduating from the University of British Columbia
University of British Columbia
The University of British Columbia is a public research university. UBC’s two main campuses are situated in Vancouver and in Kelowna in the Okanagan Valley...
in 1972, Satin immersed himself in all these movements, either directly or as a reporter for Canada's underground press. He also took up residence in a free-love commune. "One fierce winter's day", he says, "... it dawned on me that the ideas and energies from the various 'fringe' movements [were] beginning to generate a coherent new politics. But I looked in vain for the people and groups that were expressing that new politics (instead of merely bits and pieces of it)". So Satin set out to write a book that would express the new politics in all its dimensions. He wrote, designed, typeset, and printed the first edition of New Age Politics himself, in 1976. A 240-page edition was published by Vancouver's Whitecap Books in 1978, and a 349-page edition was published by Dell Publishing Company in New York in 1979. It is now widely regarded as the "first", "most ambitious", or "most adequate" attempt to offer a systemic overview of the new post-socialist politics arising in the wake of the New Left. Some academics say it offers a new "ideology".
At the heart of New Age Politics is a critique of the consciousness we all supposedly share, a "six-sided prison" that has kept us all trapped for hundreds or even thousands of years. The six sides of the "prison" are said to be: patriarchal attitudes, egocentricity, scientific single vision, the bureaucratic mentality, nationalism (xenophobia), and the "big city outlook" (fear of nature). Since consciousness, according to Satin, "ultimately" determines our institutions, prison consciousness is said to be ultimately responsible for "monolithic" institutions that offer us little in the way of freedom of choice or connection with others. Some representative monolithic institutions are: bureaucratic government, automobile-centered transportation systems, attorney-centered law, doctor-centered health care, and church-centered spirituality.
To explain how to break free of the prison and its institutions, Satin develops a "psychocultural" class analysis that reveals the existence of "life-", "thing-", and "death-oriented" classes. According to Satin, life-oriented individuals constitute an emerging "third force" in post-industrial nations. The third force is generating a "prison-free" consciousness consisting of androgynous attitudes, spirituality, multiple perspectives, a cooperative mentality, local-and-global identities, and an ecological outlook. To transform prison society, Satin argues, the third force is going to have to launch an "evolutionary movement" to replace – or at least supplement – monolithic institutions with life-affirming, "biolithic" ones. Some representative biolithic institutions are: deliberative democracy
Deliberative democracy
Deliberative democracy is a form of democracy in which public deliberation is central to legitimate lawmaking. It adopts elements of both consensus decision-making and majority rule. Deliberative democracy differs from traditional democratic theory in that authentic deliberation, not mere...
as an alternative to bureaucratic government, bicycles and mass transit as an alternative to the private automobile, and mediation as an alternative to attorney-centered law. According to Satin, the third force will not have to overthrow capitalism, since Western civilization – not capitalism – is said to be responsible for the prison. But the third force will want to foster a prison-free New Age capitalism through intelligent regulation and elimination of all subsidies.
The reaction to New Age Politics was, and continues to be, highly polarized. Many of the movements Satin drew upon to construct his synthesis received it favorably, though some took exception to the title. Some maverick liberals and libertarians are drawn to the book. It was eventually published in Sweden and Germany, and European New Age political thinkers came to see it as a precursor of their own work. Others see it as proto-Green. Ever since its first appearance, though, and continuing into the 21st century, New Age Politics has been a target of criticism for two politically disparate groups: Biblical Christians and left-wing intellectuals.
Among Biblical Christians, for example, attorney Constance E. Cumbey warns that the book can be "seductive" to those who lack an adequate Biblical education. Theologian Ron Rhodes is convinced Satin wants a centralized and coercive world government. And philosopher Douglas Groothuis
Douglas Groothuis
Douglas R. Groothuis is currently Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary.Groothuis was a campus pastor for twelve years prior to obtaining a position as an associate professor of philosophy of religion and ethics at Denver Seminary in 1993. He was educated at the University of...
says Satin's vision is morally unsound because it lacks an absolute standard of good and evil. Among left-leaning academics, political scientist Michael Cummings takes issue with the idea that consciousness is ultimately determining. Science-and-society professor David Hess rejects the idea that economic class analysis should give way to psychocultural class analysis. And political scientist Dana Cloud
Rhetoric of Therapy
Rhetoric of Therapy is a set of political and cultural discourses that have adopted psychotherapy’s lexicon—the conservative language of healing, coping, adaptation, and restoration of previously existing order—but in contexts of sociopolitical conflict....
criticizes New Age Politics for employing a "therapeutic rhetoric[] generated to console activists after the failure of post-1968 revolutionary movements and to legitimate participation in liberal politics".
New World Alliance
After U.S. President Jimmy Carter gave amnestyAmnesty
Amnesty is a legislative or executive act by which a state restores those who may have been guilty of an offense against it to the positions of innocent people, without changing the laws defining the offense. It includes more than pardon, in as much as it obliterates all legal remembrance of the...
to Vietnam War resisters in 1977, Satin began giving talks on New Age Politics in the United States. His first talk received a standing ovation, and he wept. Every talk seemed to lead to two or three more, and "the response at New Age gatherings, community events, fairs, bookstores, living rooms, and college campuses" kept Satin going for two years. By the second year he began laying the groundwork for the New World Alliance, a national political organization based in Washington, D.C. "I went systematically to 24 cities and regions from coast to coast", he told the authors of the book Networking. "I stopped when I found 500 [accomplished] people who said they'd answer a questionnaire ... on what a New Age-oriented political organization should be like – what its politics should be, what its projects should be, and how its first directors should be chosen."
The New World Alliance held its first "governing council" meeting in New York City in 1979. The 39-member council was chosen by the questionnaire-answerers themselves, out of 89 who volunteered to be on the ballot. Political scientist Arthur Stein describes the council as an eclectic collection of educators, feminists, businesspeople, futurists, think-tank fellows, and activists. One of the council's announced goals was to break down the old divisions between left and right. Another was to become one of the organizations facilitating the transformation of society. Satin was named staff member of the Alliance.
Expectations ran high among supporters of a post-liberal, post-Marxist politics, and the governing council did initiate several projects. For example, a series of "Political Awareness Seminars" attempted to help participants understand and learn to work with their political opponents. And a "Transformation Platform" attempted to synthesize left- and right-wing approaches to dozens of contentious public policy issues. But within three years the Alliance fell apart, unable to establish stable chapters in any major cities. Author Jerome Clark
Jerome Clark
Jerome Clark is an American researcher and writer, specializing in unidentified flying objects and other anomalous phenomena; he is also a songwriter of some note....
suggests the cause was the Alliance's overriding commitment to consensus-building in all its groups and projects; within months, he notes, one member was complaining that the Alliance had turned into a "diddler's cult". Another proffered explanation focuses on the failure – or inability – of the hyper-democratic questionnaire process to select an appropriate governing council.
Satin was devastated by the decline of the Alliance, and engaged in unhappy bouts of public criticism and self-criticism. "We would rather be good than do good", he told editor Kevin Kelly. "We would rather be pure than mature. We are the Beautiful Losers." As time went on, though, the Alliance came to be regarded positively by many observers. For example, author Corinne McLaughlin
Corinne McLaughlin
Corinne McLaughlin is an American author and educator. She is executive director of The Center for Visionary Leadership and a Fellow of The World Business Academy and the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland. McLaughlin and her partner Gordon Davidson founded Sirius, an ecological village in...
sees it as one of the first groups to offer an agenda for the new transformational politics. And political scientist Stephen Woolpert acknowledges it as a precursor of North American Green parties.
New Options Newsletter
After four or five New World Alliance governing council meetings, Satin became tired of what he saw as feel-good rhetoric, and decided to do something practical – start a political newsletter. He raised $91,000 to launch the venture, from 517 people he had met on his travels, and within a few years had built it into what think-tank scholar George WeigelGeorge Weigel
George Weigel is an American author, and political and social activist. He currently serves as a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Weigel was the Founding President of the James Madison Foundation...
described as "one of the hottest political newsletters in Washington[, D.C.]. ... [It] has gotten a fair amount of [national] attention, and perhaps even some influence, because it self-consciously styles itself 'post-liberal'." Satin published 75 issues of New Options from 1984 to 1992, virtually half a million words. He wrote nearly all the articles. In 1989 New Options received Utne Reader
Utne Reader
Utne Reader is an American bimonthly magazine. The magazine collects and reprints articles on politics, culture, and the environment from generally alternative media sources, including journals, newsletters, weeklies, zines, music and DVDs...
s first "Alternative Press Award for General Excellence: Best Publication from 10,000 to 30,000 Circulation", and in 1990 the The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...
identified New Options as one of 10 periodicals spearheading "The Ideology Shuffle". Twenty-five of its articles were published as a book by a university press.
Satin wanted New Options to make the visionary perspective of New Age Politics seem pragmatic and realizable. He also wanted New Options to spread the New Age political ideology more effectively than the New World Alliance had done. To those ends, he challenged traditional thinking across the political spectrum, and he expanded the purview of politics to include subjects like love and relationships. In her book Do You Believe in Magic?, culture critic Annie Gottlieb says New Options offered:
an explosive short course in political possibility. ... What are the best books and groups in the consumer empowerment (not "protection") and neighborhood self-reliance movements? Who is working on practical, compassionate, populist alternatives to the welfare state and the big-business state? What is the best way to cut the budget deficit? What can we learn from the Sri Lankan Sarvodaya (local self-help) and Polish Solidarity movements? Each issue presents ideas, names and addresses, and a crossfire of reader debate.
"I think the reason New Options works is it has a particular tone", Satin told one reporter. "It's as idealistic as many of us were in the 1960s, but ... without the childishness".
New Options owed its rise to more than just content and tone, however. Positioning was also a factor. The New Age political movement was cresting in the 1980s, and it needed a credible political periodical. Satin's book New Age Politics had helped define the movement, and the New Options advisory board – a collection of prominent post-liberal thinkers – gave the newsletter further credibility. At the outset it included Lester R. Brown
Lester R. Brown
Lester Russel Brown is a United States environmental analyst, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, and founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington, D.C...
, Ernest Callenbach
Ernest Callenbach
Ernest Callenbach is an American writer. Life & Work =Born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, he attended the University of Chicago, where he was drawn into the then 'new wave' of serious attention to film as an art form...
, Fritjof Capra
Fritjof Capra
Fritjof Capra is an Austrian-born American physicist. He is a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California, and is on the faculty of Schumacher College....
, Willis Harman
Willis Harman
Willis Harman was an American engineer, social scientist, academic, futurist, writer, and visionary. He is best remembered for his work with SRI International, for being president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California, and for his work in raising consciousness within the...
, Hazel Henderson
Hazel Henderson
Hazel Henderson is a futurist and an economic iconoclast. In recent years she has worked in television, and she is the author of several books including Building A Win-Win World, Beyond Globalization, Planetary Citizenship , and Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy.- Career :Henderson is now...
, Petra Kelly
Petra Kelly
Petra Karin Kelly was a German politician and activist. She was instrumental in founding the German Green Party, the first Green party to rise to prominence worldwide.- Early life :...
, Amory Lovins
Amory Lovins
Amory Bloch Lovins is an American environmental scientist and writer, Chairman and Chief Scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute. He has worked in the field of energy policy and related areas for four decades...
, Joanna Macy
Joanna Macy
Joanna Rogers Macy, Ph.D , is an environmental activist, author, scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology.-Biography:...
, Robin Morgan
Robin Morgan
Robin Morgan is a former child actor turned American radical feminist activist, writer, poet, and editor of Sisterhood is Powerful and Ms. Magazine....
, John Naisbitt
John Naisbitt
John Naisbitt is an American author and public speaker in the area of futures studies. His first book Megatrends was published in 1982. It was the result of almost ten years of research. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for two years, mostly as #1...
, Jeremy Rifkin
Jeremy Rifkin
Jeremy Rifkin is an American economist, writer, public speaker, political advisor and activist. He is the founder and president of the Foundation On Economic Trends...
, Carl Rogers
Carl Rogers
Carl Ransom Rogers was an influential American psychologist and among the founders of the humanistic approach to psychology...
, Theodore Roszak
Theodore Roszak (scholar)
Theodore Roszak was professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay. He is best known for his 1969 text, The Making of a Counter Culture.-Background:...
, Kirkpatrick Sale
Kirkpatrick Sale
Kirkpatrick Sale is an independent scholar and author who has written prolifically about political decentralism, environmentalism, luddism and technology...
, and Charlene Spretnak
Charlene Spretnak
Charlene Spretnak is an American author, activist, academic, and feminist. Born in 1946 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Spretnak was raised in Columbus, Ohio. She earned her B.A. from St. Louis University and her M.A. in English and American literature from the University of California, Berkeley, in...
, and over the years it added such figures as Herman Daly
Herman Daly
Herman Daly is an American ecological economist and professor at the School of Public Policy of University of Maryland, College Park in the United States....
, Marilyn Ferguson
Marilyn Ferguson
Marilyn Ferguson was an American author, editor and public speaker, best known for her 1980 book The Aquarian Conspiracy and its affiliation with the New Age Movement in popular culture....
, Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs, was an American-Canadian writer and activist with primary interest in communities and urban planning and decay. She is best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities , a powerful critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the United States...
, Winona LaDuke
Winona LaDuke
Winona LaDuke is a Native American activist, environmentalist, economist, and writer. In 1996 and 2000, she ran for vice president as the nominee of the United States Green Party, on a ticket headed by Ralph Nader. In the 2004 election, however, she endorsed one of Nader's opponents, Democratic...
, and Robert Rodale
Robert Rodale
Robert David "Bob" Rodale was an American adherent of organic farming and gardening and a publisher focused on health and wellness lifestyle magazines and books.-Early life and education:...
.
New Options did not succeed in all quarters. Jules Feiffer
Jules Feiffer
Jules Ralph Feiffer is an American syndicated cartoonist, most notable for his long-run comic strip titled Feiffer. He has created more than 35 books, plays and screenplays...
, for example, often seen as being on the liberal-left, called it "irritating" and "neo-yuppie". Jason McQuinn
Jason McQuinn
Jason McQuinn is an American anarchist, founder and co-editor of Alternative Press Review, and founder and former co-editor of the journal Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed from 1980 to 1995, when Tad Kepley took it over, and again from 1997 to 2006...
, often seen as a radical,
objected to what he perceived as its relentless American optimism. And George Weigel
George Weigel
George Weigel is an American author, and political and social activist. He currently serves as a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Weigel was the Founding President of the James Madison Foundation...
, often seen as a conservative, said it consisted largely of a cleverly repackaged leftism. Satin himself turned out to be one of the newsletter's critics. "I could have edited New Options forever", he wrote in 2004. "But, increasingly, I was becoming dissatisfied with my hyper-idealistic politics". His experiences in the U.S. Green politics movement contributed to that dissatisfaction.
"Ten Key Values" of the U.S. Green Party
By the mid-1980s, Green parties were making inroads all over the world. A slogan of the West German GreensAlliance '90/The Greens
Alliance '90/The Greens is a green political party in Germany, formed from the merger of the German Green Party and Alliance 90 in 1993. Its leaders are Claudia Roth and Cem Özdemir...
was, "We are neither left nor right; we are in front". Some observers, notably British Green Party
Green Party of England and Wales
The Green Party of England and Wales is a political party in England and Wales which follows the traditions of Green politics and maintains a strong commitment to social progressivism. It is the largest Green party in the United Kingdom, containing within it various regional divisions including...
liaison Sara Parkin
Sara Parkin
Sara Parkin is a former Green Party of England and Wales activist and politician. She rose to prominence during and after the 1989 European election, in which the Green Party received 15% of the vote...
, saw the New World Alliance and New Options Newsletter as Green entities; others saw the early Greens as one expression of New Age politics. In 1984, Satin was invited to the founding meeting of the U.S. Green politics movement. The meeting chose him, along with political theorist Charlene Spretnak
Charlene Spretnak
Charlene Spretnak is an American author, activist, academic, and feminist. Born in 1946 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Spretnak was raised in Columbus, Ohio. She earned her B.A. from St. Louis University and her M.A. in English and American literature from the University of California, Berkeley, in...
, to draft its foundational political statement, "Ten Key Values". Some accounts recognize futurist and New Options advisor Eleanor LeCain as a co-equal drafter. The drafters drew on suggestions recorded on a flip chart during a marathon plenary brainstorming session, as well as on a plethora of suggestions received by Satin and Spretnak during the meeting and for many weeks afterward.
The original "Ten Key Values" statement was approved by the Greens' national steering committee and released in late 1984. The values in the original statement are: "Ecological Wisdom", "Grassroots Democracy", "Personal and Social Responsibility", "Nonviolence", "Decentralization", "Community-based Economics", "Postpatriarchal Values", "Respect for Diversity", "Global Responsibility", and "Future Focus". One unusual aspect, say many observers, is the way the values are described; instead of declaratory statements full of "shoulds" and "musts", each value is followed by a series of open-ended questions. "That idea ... came from Mark Satin", Spretnak told scholar Greta Gaard
Greta Gaard
Greta Claire Gaard is an ecofeminist writer, scholar, activist, and documentary filmmaker. Gaard's academic work in the realms of ecocriticism and ecocomposition is widely cited by scholars in the disciplines of composition and literary criticism...
in 1997. Its effect, says sociologist Paul Lichterman, was to promote dialogue and creative thinking in local Green groups across the U.S.
The original values statement was, and remains, controversial. U.S. Green Party co-founder John Rensenbrink
John Rensenbrink
John C. Rensenbrink is an American political scientist and a co-founder of the Green Party of the United States. Rensenbrink along with others formed the Maine Green Party and Green Party of the United States in 1984....
credits it with helping to unify the often contentious Greens. However, party co-founder Howie Hawkins
Howie Hawkins
Howie Hawkins is an American politician and activist with the Green Party of the United States and Socialist Party USA. He co-founded the anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance in 1976 and the Green Party in the United States in 1984. He was New York's Green Party candidate for the U.S. Senate in the...
sees it as just a watered-down, "spiritual", and "New Age" version of the German Greens' Four Pillars
Four Pillars of the Green Party
The Four Pillars of the Green Party are a foundational statement of Green politics and form the basis of many worldwide Green parties. The Four Pillars are:* Ecological wisdom* Social justice* Grassroots democracy* Nonviolence...
statement. Greta Gaard says it fails to call for the elimination of capitalism or racism. And Green activist Brian Tokar says that "the voice of the original [values] questions is distinctly personal ... and aims to avoid fundamental conflicts with elite social and cultural norms." A "modified" list of the Ten Key Values became part of the U.S. Greens' political platform. However, all the open-ended questions were replaced by declaratory sentences, and the U.S. Greens have come to be regarded as a party of the left, rather than one seeking to be neither left nor right.
Satin himself quit the Greens in 1990. He gave a featured speech at the U.S. Green gathering in 1987 urging them to avoid hyper-detailed platform writing and other projects and specialize in one thing – running people for office who endorse the Ten Key Values. But the speech fell flat. After the Green gathering in 1989, he urged them to abandon hippie-era fears of money, authority, and leadership. After the 1990 gathering he complained "I've been Pure before," an allusion to his time in the New World Alliance. According to Greta Gaard, he then bid farewell to the Greens, but acknowledged it as a loss: "Whatever I may think of their internal battles and political prospects, the Greens are My People. Their life choices are my life choices; their failings mirror my own." Within a year of voicing those words, he stopped New Options Newsletter and applied to law school. He was 45 years old.
Radical Middle Newsletter
The 1990s are remembered, by many in the West, as a time of relative prosperity and satisfaction. According to some historians, visionary politics appeared to be on the decline. However, even after Satin entered New York University School of LawNew York University School of Law
The New York University School of Law is the law school of New York University. Established in 1835, the school offers the J.D., LL.M., and J.S.D. degrees in law, and is located in Greenwich Village, in the New York City borough of Manhattan....
in 1992, he expressed no desire to abandon his project of helping to construct a post-liberal, post-Marxist ideology. He did admit to being disillusioned with his approach. "I knew my views (and I personally) would benefit from engagement with the real world of commerce and professional ambition", he wrote. Seven years later, he returned to Washington, D.C., to launch a new political newsletter, Radical Middle.
As the title indicates, it sought to distance itself from New Age politics. If the term "New Age" suggests utopianism, the term "radical middle" suggests, for Satin and others, keeping at least one foot firmly on the ground. Satin attempted to embrace the promise but also the balance implied by the term. One feature story is entitled "Tough on Terrorism, and Tough on the Causes of Terrorism". Another feature story attempts to go beyond polarized positions on biotechnology. Another argues that corporate activity abroad can best be seen as neither inherently moral nor inherently imperialistic, but as a "chance for mutual learning". Even the board of advisors of Radical Middle Newsletter signaled Satin's new direction. It was politically disparate, and many of its members sought to promote dialogue or collaboration across ideological divides. By the end of 2004 it included John Avlon
John Avlon
John Phillips Avlon is senior columnist for Newsweek and the Daily Beast as well as a CNN contributor. He is also the author of Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics and Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America...
, Don Beck, Jerry H. Bentley
Jerry H. Bentley
Jerry H. Bentley is a world history professor at the University of Hawaii, USA, and founding editor of the Journal of World History since 1990. He has written on the cultural history of early modern Europe and on cross-cultural interactions in world history...
, Esther Dyson
Esther Dyson
Esther Dyson is a former journalist and Wall Street technology analyst who is a leading angel investor, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and commentator focused on breakthrough innovation in healthcare, government transparency, digital technology, biotechnology, and space...
, James Fallows
James Fallows
James Fallows is an American print and radio journalist. He has been a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly for many years. His work has also appeared in Slate, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The American Prospect, among others. He is a...
, Jane Mansbridge of the Harvard Kennedy School
John F. Kennedy School of Government
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University is a public policy and public administration school, and one of Harvard's graduate and professional schools...
, John Marks and Susan Collin Marks of Search for Common Ground
Search for Common Ground
Search for Common Ground is an international non-profit organization operating in nearly 30 countries whose mission is to transform the way the world deals with conflict – away from adversarial approaches toward cooperative solutions. It is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with the majority of...
, Susan Partnow of the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation, and William L. Ury, co-author of Getting to YES
Getting to YES
Getting to YES: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In is a best-selling 1981 non-fiction book by Roger Fisher and William L. Ury. Reissued in 1991 with additional authorship credit to Bruce Patton, the book made appearances for years on Business Weeks "Best Seller" list...
.
Radical Middle Newsletter proved controversial. Many applauded Satin's new direction; for example, a professor of management wrote that unlike Satin's former newsletter, Radical Middle spoke about "reality". Scholarly books began citing the newsletter. And in a book on globalization, Walter Truett Anderson
Walter Truett Anderson
Walter Truett Anderson is a political scientist, social psychologist, and author of numerous nonfiction books and articles in newspapers and magazines....
said Radical Middle "carries the encouraging news of an emerging group with a different voice, one that is 'nuanced, hopeful, adult'. ... It is essentially a willingness to listen to both sides of the argument." But three objections were often heard. Some critics accused Satin of mendacious policy proposals, as when peace studies scholar Michael N. Nagler
Michael N. Nagler
Michael N. Nagler is an American academic and peace activist.-Life:He graduated from New York University, and University of California, Berkeley with an M.A. and Ph.D...
wrote that the article "praising humanitarian military intervention as the 'peace movement' of our time, is nothing short of an insult ... to the real peace movement" [emphasis in original]. Other critics accused Satin of abandoning his old constituency, as when author and former New Options advisor David Korten
David Korten
David C. Korten is an American economist, author, and former Professor of the Harvard Business School, political activist and prominent critic of corporate globalization, "by training and inclination a student of psychology and behavioral systems". His best-known publication is When Corporations...
chided him for consciously choosing pragmatism over idealism. And others accused Satin of indifference to ordinary Americans, as when the executive editor of Yes! Magazine
YES! Magazine
YES! Magazine is a non-profit, ad-free magazine that covers topics of social justice, environmental sustainability, alternative economics, and peace. The magazine is published by Positive Futures Network, founded by David Korten and Sarah van Gelder; Korten's wife, Fran Korten, is the publisher. ...
said Satin favored globalization because it appealed to his interests and those of his "law school buddies".
To some extent, these objections were inevitable. New Options Newsletter was based on the ideals set forth in New Age Politics. But Satin's radical middle project was experimental and inductive. Satin's theoretical statement, the book Radical Middle, did not appear until 2004, the newsletter's sixth year. Until then, the only glimpse Satin gave of his larger vision appeared in an article he wrote for an academic journal.
Radical Middle, the book
Satin presents Radical Middle as a revised and evolved version of his New Age Politics book, rather than as a rejection of it. The radical middle idea does go back in time with him. As early as 1980, author Marilyn Ferguson identified him as part of what she called the "Radical Center", and in 1987 culture critic Annie Gottlieb said Satin was trying to prompt the New Age and New Left to evolve into a "New Center". But the revisions Satin introduces are substantial. Instead of defining politics as a means for creating the ideal society, as he did in New Age Politics, he defines radical middle politics as "idealism without illusions" – more creative and future-oriented than politics-as-usual, but willing to face "the hard facts on the ground". Instead of arguing that change will be brought about by a "third force", he says most Americans are already radical middle – "we're very practical folks, and we're very idealistic and visionary as well."
Instead of arguing that Americans need to change their consciousness and decentralize their institutions, as he did in New Age Politics, Satin says they can build a good society if they adopt and live by Four Key Values: maximize choices for all Americans, give every American a fair start, maximize every American's human potential, and help the peoples of the developing world. Instead of finding those values in the writings of contemporary theorists, Satin says they are just updates of the values that animated the American Revolution: liberty (maximize choices), equality (a fair start), pursuit-of-happiness (human potential), and fraternity (help the developing world). He calls Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin
Dr. Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat...
the radical middle's favorite Founding Father, and says Franklin "wanted us to invent a uniquely American politics that served ordinary people by creatively borrowing from all points of view."
Instead of refusing to focus on the messy details of governance, a signature refusal of New Age Politics, Satin devotes the bulk of Radical Middle to fleshing out policy proposals rooted in the Four Key Values. (Among them: universal access to private, preventive health insurance, class-based rather than race-based affirmative action, mandatory national service, and opening U.S. markets to more products from poor nations.) Finally, instead of calling on "life-oriented" people to become radical activists for a New Age society, Satin calls on people of every political stripe to work from within for social change congruent with the Four Key Values.
Satin's mandatory national service proposal drew significant media coverage, in part because of his status as a draft refuser. Satin argues that a draft could work in the United States if it applied to all young people, without exception, and if it gave everyone a choice in how they would serve. He proposes three service options: military (with generous benefits), homeland security (at prevailing wages), and community care (at subsistence wages). On Voice of America radio
Voice of America
Voice of America is the official external broadcast institution of the United States federal government. It is one of five civilian U.S. international broadcasters working under the umbrella of the Broadcasting Board of Governors . VOA provides a wide range of programming for broadcast on radio...
, Satin presented his proposal as quintessentially radical-middle, drawing from the best of the left and the right. On National Public Radio
NPR
NPR, formerly National Public Radio, is a privately and publicly funded non-profit membership media organization that serves as a national syndicator to a network of 900 public radio stations in the United States. NPR was created in 1970, following congressional passage of the Public Broadcasting...
he emphasized its fairness.
Radical Middle provoked, and continues to provoke, essentially three kinds of responses. Some respondents find Satin's beyond-left-and-right policy proposals to be unrealistic and arrogant. For example, political writer Charles R. Morris says "Satin's nostrums" echo the "glibness and overweening self-confidence ... in Roosevelt's brain trust, or in John F. Kennedy's." And the policy director of the Democratic Leadership Council
Democratic Leadership Council
The Democratic Leadership Council was a non-profit 501 corporation that, upon its formation, argued the United States Democratic Party should shift away from the leftward turn it took in the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s...
says Satin's book "ultimately places him in the sturdy tradition of 'idealistic' American reformers who think smart and principled people unencumbered by political constraints can change everything." A second group of respondents applauds Satin's capacity to combine the best ideas from the left and the right. But these respondents are typically more drawn to Satin as a policy advocate – or as a counterweight to partisan militants like Ann Coulter
Ann Coulter
Ann Hart Coulter is an American lawyer, conservative social and political commentator, author, and syndicated columnist. She frequently appears on television, radio, and as a speaker at public events and private events...
– than they are to him as a political theorist. For example, Robert Olson of the World Future Society
World Future Society
The World Future Society is a nonprofit educational and scientific organization in Bethesda, Maryland, US, founded in 1966.The Society investigates how social, economic and technological developments are shaping the future...
warns Satin against presenting the radical middle as a new "ideology".
A third group of respondents appreciates Satin's work as a policy advocate. But they also see him as attempting something rarer and, arguably, richer – to raise politics to a higher level by synthesizing truths from all the political ideologies. Author Corinne McLaughlin
Corinne McLaughlin
Corinne McLaughlin is an American author and educator. She is executive director of The Center for Visionary Leadership and a Fellow of The World Business Academy and the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland. McLaughlin and her partner Gordon Davidson founded Sirius, an ecological village in...
identifies Satin as one of those creating an ideology about ideologies. She quotes him:
Coming up with a solution is not a matter of adopting correct political beliefs. It is, rather, a matter of learning to listen – really, listen – to everyone in the circle of humanity, and to take their insights into account. For everyone has a true and unique perspective on the whole. [Many] years ago the burning question was, How radical are you? Hopefully someday soon the question will be, How much can you synthesize? How much do you dare to take in?
Later life
Life changed for Satin after writing and publicizing his Radical Middle book. In 2006, at the age of 60, he moved from Washington, D.C., to the San Francisco Bay Area to reconcile with his father, from whom he had been estranged for 40 years. "With the perspective of time and experience," Satin told one reporter, "I can see he was not altogether out to lunch." Later that year Satin discovered his only life partner. He describes it as "no accident".In 2009 Satin revealed he was losing his eyesight as a result of macular edema
Macular edema
Macular edema occurs when fluid and protein deposits collect on or under the macula of the eye and causes it to thicken and swell. The swelling may distort a person's central vision, as the macula is near the center of the retina at the back of the eyeball...
and diabetic retinopathy
Diabetic retinopathy
Diabetic retinopathy is retinopathy caused by complications of diabetes mellitus, which can eventually lead to blindness....
. He stopped Radical Middle Newsletter but expressed a desire to write a final political book. From 2009 to 2011 he presented occasional guest lectures on "life and political ideologies" in peace studies classes at the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
.
Legacy
Mark Satin has been a controversial public figure since the age of 20. Assessments of his significance vary widely.Some observers see him as an exemplary figure. David Armstrong, for example, in his study of independent American journalism, presents Satin as an embodiment of the "do-it-yourself spirit" that makes an independent press possible. Futurists Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps portray Satin as a pioneer "networker" who spent two years riding the bus across the U.S. in an attempt to connect like-minded thinkers and activists. Marilyn Ferguson
Marilyn Ferguson
Marilyn Ferguson was an American author, editor and public speaker, best known for her 1980 book The Aquarian Conspiracy and its affiliation with the New Age Movement in popular culture....
, author of The Aquarian Conspiracy, says that by engaging in a lifelong series of personal and political experiments with few resources, Satin is playing the role of the holy "Fool" for his time.
Other observers stress the freshness of Satin's political vision. Social scientists Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson, for example, argue that Satin anticipated the perspectives of 21st century social movements better than nearly anyone. Humanistic psychologist John Amodeo says Satin is one of the few political theorists to grasp the connection between personal growth and constructive political change. Political scientist Christa Slaton's short list of "nonacademic" transformationalists consists of Alvin and Heidi Toffler
Alvin Toffler
Alvin Toffler is an American writer and futurist, known for his works discussing the digital revolution, communication revolution, corporate revolution and technological singularity....
, Fritjof Capra
Fritjof Capra
Fritjof Capra is an Austrian-born American physicist. He is a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California, and is on the faculty of Schumacher College....
, Marilyn Ferguson, Hazel Henderson
Hazel Henderson
Hazel Henderson is a futurist and an economic iconoclast. In recent years she has worked in television, and she is the author of several books including Building A Win-Win World, Beyond Globalization, Planetary Citizenship , and Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy.- Career :Henderson is now...
, Betty Friedan
Betty Friedan
Betty Friedan was an American writer, activist, and feminist.A leading figure in the Women's Movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the "second wave" of American feminism in the twentieth century...
, E. F. Schumacher
E. F. Schumacher
Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher was an internationally influential economic thinker, statistician and economist in Britain, serving as Chief Economic Advisor to the UK National Coal Board for two decades. His ideas became popularized in much of the English-speaking world during the 1970s...
, John Naisbitt
John Naisbitt
John Naisbitt is an American author and public speaker in the area of futures studies. His first book Megatrends was published in 1982. It was the result of almost ten years of research. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for two years, mostly as #1...
, and Mark Satin.
Some see Satin as a classic example of the perpetual rebel, and trace the cause back to his early years. For example, author Roger Neville Williams focuses on the harshness and "paternalistic rectitude" of Satin's parents. Novelist Dan Wakefield
Dan Wakefield
Dan Wakefield is an American novelist, journalist and screenwriter. His best-selling novels, Going All the Way and Starting Over were made into feature films...
, writing in The Atlantic, says Satin grew up in a small city in northern Minnesota like Bob Dylan, but did not have a guitar to express himself with. According to historian Frank Kusch
Frank Kusch
Frank Kusch is a historian of American history, who writes on post-1945 political and cultural events. Kusch is the author of Battleground Chicago: the Police and the 1968 Democratic National Convention and All American Boys: Draft Dodgers in Canada from the Vietnam War .Kusch has served as an...
, the seeds for rebellion were planted when Satin's parents moved him at age 16 from liberal Minnesota to still-segregated Texas.
Although many observers praise or are intrigued by Satin, many find him dismaying. Memoirist George Fetherling
George Fetherling
Douglas George Fetherling is a Canadian poet, novelist, journalist and essayist. One of the most prolific figures in Canadian letters, he has written and edited more than fifty books, including more than a dozen volumes of poetry, two novels, and a multi-volume memoir...
, for example, remembers him as a publicity hound. Literary critic Dennis Duffy calls him incapable of learning from his experiences. Green Party activist Howie Hawkins
Howie Hawkins
Howie Hawkins is an American politician and activist with the Green Party of the United States and Socialist Party USA. He co-founded the anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance in 1976 and the Green Party in the United States in 1984. He was New York's Green Party candidate for the U.S. Senate in the...
sees him as a political opportunist. The Washington Monthly
The Washington Monthly
The Washington Monthly is a bimonthly nonprofit magazine of United States politics and government that is based in Washington, D.C.The magazine's founder is Charles Peters, who started the magazine in 1969 and continues to write the "Tilting at Windmills" column in each issue. Paul Glastris, former...
portrayed him in his 50s as a former New Age "guru", and Commonweal
Commonweal
Commonweal is a American journal of opinion edited and managed by lay Catholics. It is headquartered in The Interchurch Center in New York City.-History:...
compares reading him to listening to glass shards grate against a blackboard.
The major substantive criticisms of Satin's work have remained constant over time. His ideas are sometimes said to be superficial; they were characterized as childish in the 1960s, naive in the 1970s, poorly reasoned in the 1980s and 1990s, and overly simple in the 2000s. His ideas have also occasionally been seen as not politically serious, or as non-political in the sense of not being capable of challenging existing power structures. His work is sometimes said to be largely borrowed from others, a charge that first surfaced with regard to his draft dodger manual, and was repeated to varying degree by critics of his books on New Age politics and radical centrism.
Satin has long been faulted for mixing views from different parts of his political odyssey. In the 1970s for example Toronto Star editor Robert Nielsen
Robert Nielsen
Robert Nielsen is a journalist who is known for his time with the Toronto Star. Nielsen was employed by the newspaper for 33 years and served in several capacities, including as a correspondent, foreign correspondent, chief editorial writer, editorial page editor, investigative reporter and...
argued that Satin's leftist pacifism warps his New Age vision. Three decades later, public-policy analyst Gadi Dechter argued that Satin's New Age emotionalism and impracticality blunt his radical-centrist message. At age 58, Satin suggested his message could not be understood without appreciating all the strands of his personal and political journey:
From my New Left years I took a love of political struggle. From my New Age years I took a conviction that politics needs to be about more than endless struggle – that responsible human beings need to search for reconciliation and healing and mutually acceptable solutions. From my time in the legal profession I took an understanding (and it is no small understanding) that sincerity and passion are not enough – that to be truly effective in the world one needs to be credible and expert. ...
Many Americans are living complicated lives now – few of us have moved through life in a straight line. I think many of us would benefit from trying to gather and synthesize the difficult political lessons we've learned over the course of our lives.
Books
- Radical Middle: The Politics We Need Now, Basic BooksBasic BooksBasic Books is a book publisher founded in 1952 and located in New York. It publishes books in the fields of psychology, philosophy, economics, science, politics, sociology, current affairs, and history.-History:...
, 2004, orig. Westview PressWestview PressWestview Press is an American publishing house. It publishes textbooks and scholarly works for an academic audience.Westview was founded in 1975 in Boulder, Colorado by Fred Praeger. The press was sold in 1991 to SCS Communications. HarperCollins acquired the company in 1995. Since 1998, it has...
, 2004. ISBN 978-0-8133-4190-3. Radical-centrist ideas presented as an integrated political ideology. - New Options for America: The Second American Experiment Has Begun, The Press at California State University / Southern Illinois University PressSouthern Illinois University PressSouthern Illinois University Press, founded in 1956, is a university press located in Carbondale, Illinois.The press publishes approximately 50 titles annually, among its more than 1,200 titles currently in print....
, 1991. ISBN 978-0-8093-1794-3. Twenty-five cover stories from Satin's New Options Newsletter. - New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society, Delta Books / Dell Publishing Co.Dell PublishingDell Publishing, an American publisher of books, magazines and comic books, was founded in 1921 by George T. Delacorte, Jr.During the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, Dell was one of the largest publishers of magazines, including pulp magazines. Their line of humor magazines included 1000 Jokes, launched in...
, 1979. ISBN 978-0-440-55700-5. New Age political ideas presented as an integrated political ideology. - Confessions of a Young Exile, Gage Publishing Co. / Macmillan of CanadaMacmillan of CanadaMacmillan of Canada was a Canadian publishing house.The company was founded in 1905 as the Canadian arm of the English publisher Macmillan. At that time it was known as the "Macmillan Company of Canada Ltd." In the course of its existence the name changed to "Macmillan of Canada" and "Macmillan...
, 1976. ISBN 978-0-7715-9954-5. Memoir covering the years 1964–66. - Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada, House of Anansi PressHouse of Anansi PressHouse of Anansi Press is a Canadian publishing company, founded in 1967 by writers Dennis Lee and Dave Godfrey. The company specializes in finding and developing new Canadian writers of literary fiction, poetry, and non-fiction....
, 1968. No ISBNInternational Standard Book NumberThe International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering code created by Gordon Foster, Emeritus Professor of Statistics at Trinity College, Dublin, for the booksellers and stationers W.H...
, but see OCLC 467238. Preserve oneself and change the world. Satin wrote Part One ("Applying") and solicited and edited the materials in Part Two ("Canada"). OCLC accessed 28 September 2011.
Newsletters
- Radical Middle Newsletter, 120 issues, 1999–2009. . Originally hard-copy only, now largely online. Newsletter accessed 17 April 2011, ISSN accessed 28 September 2011.
- New Options Newsletter, 75 issues, 1984–1992. . Always hard-copy only and not online, but 25 cover stories are collected in Satin's New Options for America book. ISSN accessed 28 September 2011.
Selected articles and interviews
- "Mark Satin on the Politics of the Radical Middle", National Public RadioNPRNPR, formerly National Public Radio, is a privately and publicly funded non-profit membership media organization that serves as a national syndicator to a network of 900 public radio stations in the United States. NPR was created in 1970, following congressional passage of the Public Broadcasting...
audiotape, 9 July 2004. Interview by Tony CoxTony Cox (journalist)Tony Cox is an American radio and television journalist who is host of the syndicated radio talk show UpFront with Tony Cox and previously was host of News & Notes on National Public Radio ....
for The Tavis Smiley ShowThe Tavis Smiley ShowThe Tavis Smiley Show is an American public broadcasting radio talk show. A television show, simply titled Tavis Smiley, is a late night television program on Public Broadcasting Service . Both shows feature Tavis Smiley as host....
. Accessed 17 April 2011. - "Where's the Juice?", The Responsive Community, vol. 12, no. 4 (2002), pp. 70–75. Critical review of Ted HalsteadTed HalsteadTed Halstead is a Think Tank executive as well as an author. His areas of specialty are environment, economics and energy and he has authored several articles and books on these subjects.-Education:...
and Michael LindMichael LindMichael Lind is an American writer. Currently Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., Editor of New American Contract and its blog Value Added, and a columnist for Salon magazine. Lind was a guest lecturer at Harvard Law School and...
's book The Radical Center. Accessed 17 April 2011 - "Law and Psychology: A Movement Whose Time Has Come", Annual Survey of American LawNYU Annual Survey of American LawThe New York University Annual Survey of American Law is a student-edited law journal at New York University School of Law.- Mission :...
, vol. 51, no. 4 (1994), pp. 583–631. Early argument for what is now called "therapeutic jurisprudenceTherapeutic jurisprudenceTherapeutic jurisprudence is a term first used by Professor David Wexler, and University of Puerto Rico School of Law, in a paper delivered to the National Institute of Mental Health in 1987...
". - "20th Anniversary Rendezvous: Mark Satin", Whole Earth ReviewWhole Earth ReviewWhole Earth was a magazine which was founded in January 1985 after the merger of the Whole Earth Software Review and the CoEvolution Quarterly. All of these periodicals are descendants of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog...
, issue no. 61, winter 1988, p. 107. Interview by Kevin Kelly. Reproduced on BNETBNETBNET was an online magazine dedicated to issues of business management.It was owned by CBS Interactive and was a part of its business portfolio alongside ZDNet, TechRepublic, SmartPlanet before it was folded into CBS MoneyWatch, a sister personal finance site that was launched on April 6, 2009.BNET...
with a different title. Accessed 17 April 2011. - "Do-It-Yourself Government", EsquireEsquire (magazine)Esquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.-History:...
, April 1983, pp. 126–28. Early attempt to present New Age political ideas as pragmatic and centrist.
External links
- Mark Satin's website. Features selected Radical Middle Newsletter articles from 1999–2009. Accessed 17 April 2011.
- The Future 500. Satin was a senior fellow here from 2010–2011. Accessed 5 September 2011.
- Green Party of California. Green politics with the original Spretnak-Satin "Ten Key Values" statement largely intact. Accessed 28 August 2011.
- In Context: A Quarterly of Humane Sustainable Culture. Satin was a founding advisor here from 1983–1992. Accessed 3 November 2011.
- New World Alliance and New Options Correspondence Files, 1977–1992, in the Contemporary Culture Collection at Temple University Libraries. Includes over 5,000 letters to Satin's New Options Newsletter. Accessed 28 August 2011.
- Vietnam War Resisters in Canada. Essays, memoirs, and documents. Includes a self-description of the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme and an excerpt from Satin's Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada. Accessed 17 April 2011.
- Civil Rights Movement Veterans. Essays, "testimony," and documents. Satin's contribution is here. Accessed 17 April 2011.