Preface

The World Elsewhere Is Not

The title of this book is a variation on a theme found in the Old Testament—
in Isaiah, it’s in the epigraphs—and developed in Christopher Hill’s great book of 1972, The World Turned Upside Down. The prophet Isaiah predicted what servants and slaves everywhere called “jubilee,” the redistribution of property that would change everything. The historian Hill wrote about a “revolt within the [English] Revolution” of the 1640s, which, if successful, would have enfranchised more people and more rights than resulted from that extraordinary upheaval. This movement of radicals, of Levellers and Diggers, of beggars, vagabonds, poets, and thieves—this movement, he wrote, “might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, [and it] might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic.”

There are no “might have beens” in this book. I write about the cultural and intellectual revolution that changed North America and the world after 1975. It was so successful—it was so formative, causative, and measurable—
that we can take it for granted, and then look past it, to the point where some of us even argue that conservatism took over American thought and culture after 1980.

But this cultural and intellectual revolution did turn the world inside out, in three related senses. First, it complicated the ways we could perceive the relation between our insides and all of what we normally designate as outside. The difference between private and public, for example, became a problem rather than an assumption at the end of the twentieth century. So, too, did the distinction between foreign and domestic policy get blurred when the post-Vietnam all-volunteer army rebuilt itself as a social program dedicated to affirmative action and when terrorists without state sponsors became a central feature of globalization. Meanwhile, excremental visions became the norm of performance art and the mainstream of cartoon politics as anal probes from outer space and the Santa (Satan?) from the sewer challenged Disney’s constituency—what had been expelled from our bodies somehow became the raw materials of our revised interiors, that is, the stuff of our thinking.

To put it another way, the personal became political, and vice versa, but not just because feminists said it should—although we must attribute the original slogan and its radical connotations to feminism. We were all confused by the shifting boundaries between the so-called private sector and the so-called public sectors whether we were speaking of economic growth or the relation between our inner selves and our outward appearances. We still are. For example, we still ask, can public spending stand in for private investment? Should the government supplement or replace private enterprise? Does the specter of socialism still haunt the American imagination? We still ask, what is the outer limit of the family, a presumably private domicile? And what is a family, anyway? Where’s Dad, the family guy? We still ask, can the government invade this familial space and tell the females that they don’t have control over their own bodies?

Second, the cultural and intellectual revolution of the late twentieth century brought the world that was once elsewhere into the room and onto the screen where we were watching TV or sending e-mail and later Googling ourselves. Either we turned the machine off or we became citizens of the whole world, no borders allowed. There we were, face to virtual face, with every imaginable kind of person—also every imaginable kind of cyborg, vampire, angel, or demon—and what did we do? We let them into our lives and turned the world inside out. Even the difference between animals and human beings or between machines and men seemed to dissolve at the end of the twentieth century.

Third, and this may be the same thing, all those strangers, all those Others out there—cyborgs, simians, animals, Asians, immigrants, women, homosexuals, people with disabilities, whatever—suddenly acquired substantive identities that required our very close attention and our scrupulously ethical attitude toward their prospects. The world once elsewhere had moved into the cultural space where white, male heterosexuality had long been the norm. All these believably sentient beings were close by, and they were demanding their rights, even the animals and the immigrants and the homosexuals.

This book explores American thought and culture in the aftermath of the fabled 1960s. The argument is that the tendencies and sensibilities we associate with that moment decisively shaped intellectual agendas and cultural practices—from the Congressional Budget Office to the cartoon politics of Disney movies—in the 1980s and 1990s. By this accounting, the so-called Reagan Revolution was not only, or even mainly, a conservative event. By the same accounting, the Left, having seized the commanding heights of higher education, was never in danger of losing the so-called culture wars. At the end of the twentieth century, in short, the United States was much less conservative than it had been in 1975.

This book takes supply-side economics and South Park equally seriously. It treats Freddy Krueger, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ronald Reagan, and Judith Butler as comparable cultural icons. In doing so, it formally recapitulates the aesthetic movement specific to the late-twentieth-century moment of “postmodernism”—when artists, writers, and intellectuals working in every imaginable medium, from movies and TV to novels and newspapers, adjourned any remaining distinction between high and low culture. In doing so, that is, by depicting this moment on its own terms, the book recaptures the complexity, the pathos, the idiocy, and the achievements of a past that is not even past.

Everything from skeletons to sexuality came out of the closet toward the end of the twentieth century, and we’re still wondering what to do about it. This book could help us decide.