Chapter 11

What the Sixties Wrought

“One is clever and knows everything that has ever happened: so there is no end of derision. One still quarrels, but one is soon reconciled—else it might spoil the digestion.

“One has one’s little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night, but one has a regard for health.

“‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883

 

We have here the peculiarly American way of digesting continental despair. It is nihilism with a happy ending.

—Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 1987

 

Where’s the outrage?

—Bob Dole, 1996

Of the privileged, by the privileged, for the privileged

“The Sixties,” it seems, has become less the name of a decade than a provocation. As a slice of history, the purple decade actually encompasses nearly twenty years. It began some time in the late 1950S and lasted at least until the mid-1970s. By then it had triumphed so thoroughly that its imperatives became indistinguishable from everyday life: they became everyday life. The Sixties mean—what? Sexual “liberation,” rock music, chemically induced euphoria—nearly everyone would agree with that, even though some would inscribe a plus sign, others a minus sign beside that famous triumvirate. The Sixties also mean free-floating protest and political activism, a “youth culture” that never ages, a new permissiveness together with a new affluence: Dionysus with a credit card and a college education.

Whatever else it was, the long march of America’s cultural revolution was a capitalist, bourgeois revolution: a revolution of the privileged, by the privileged, and for the privileged. In the twentieth century, almost all political revolutions have resulted in oppression (I count phenomena like Solidarity in Poland and the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia as counter-revolutionary movements). By contrast, the cultural revolution in the West really has resulted in a form of liberation—but one must still ask: liberation from what? And liberation for what? The answers to those questions tell us whether the promised liberation is genuine or fraudulent. A dose of heroin may induce the feeling of freedom; in reality, that feeling signals the onset of enslavement.

The socialist economist Joseph Schumpeter was wrong when he predicted, in a postscript to Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1950), that the collapse of capitalism and a triumphant “march into socialism” would occur in America in the near future. What we have seen instead is an explosion of capitalist energy in the marketplace shadowed by a steady creep into nanny-state socialism. But Schumpeter was uncannily right about the dangers bourgeois capitalist societies harbor within themselves. Perhaps he overstated the case when he asserted, in 1942, that “capitalism is being killed by its achievements.” But he was clearly on to something when he observed that

capitalism creates a critical frame of mind which, after having destroyed the moral authority of so many other institutions, in the end turns against its own; the bourgeois finds to his amazement that the rationalist attitude does not stop at the credentials of kings and popes but goes on to attack private property and the whole scheme of bourgeois values.

Rising standards of living, far from increasing allegiance to the regime that provides them, often paradoxically turn out to have the opposite effect: what Schumpeter calls the “emotional attachment to the social order” begins to disintegrate. In this sense, the cultural revolution is not so much anticapitalist as a toxic by-product of capitalism’s success: not so much antibourgeois as an expression of what Allan Bloom described as “the bourgeois’ need to feel that he is not bourgeois, to have dangerous experiments with the unlimited.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge once famously remarked that a “willing suspension of disbelief” was essential to maintaining “poetic faith.” Anyone who has looked back dispassionately at the founding documents and personalities of America’s cultural revolution knows what Coleridge was talking about. The “faith” in question may have been more spurious than “poetic.” But there can be no doubt that America’s counterculture—like all utopian movements—has exacted prodigies of credulousness from its myriad adherents, fellow travelers, and promoters.

Utopian movements succeed because they tell people something they wish desperately to hear. Whether or not the message is true is beside the point. It speaks to a deeply felt need, and that is enough. As we all know, “utopia” literally means “nowhere.” This fact seldom depresses the price of its real estate because, although the down-payment for belief is steep, there are no monthly payments. The housing tracts in utopia remain glitteringly inviolable—that they are also uninhabitable is cheerfully overlooked. For the adepts of the Free Spirit in the fourteenth century, the good news was that they, the elect, were godlike creatures incapable of sin. For Karl Marx, a Communist paradise was waiting for that society brave enough to abolish private property and centralize the means of production. For Norman O. Brown, “the real world, which is not the world of the reality-principle, is the world where thoughts are omnipotent, where no distinction is drawn between wish and deed.” For the cultural revolutionaries of the Sixties, the domiciles of utopia always have numerous vacancies.

Emotions of virtue

Variations on such themes are as plentiful as they are preposterous. Wilhelm Reich, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, the Black Panthers, Paul Goodman, Charles Reich, The Beatles: the list of agents for utopia is long and varied. It includes artists and intellectuals, entertainers, political activists, blatant poseurs, and professional gurus. In their different ways, these people pandered to a generation’s vanity, ambition, cowardice, and lust for sensation; increasingly they pandered to a generation whose vanity was its lust for sensation. They also served, as Susan Sontag illustrated in her campy meditations on Camp, as a defense against the alarming assaults of ennui. Many promulgated —like Rousseau before them—that insatiable greed for the emotion of virtue which makes the actual practice of virtue seem superfluous and elevates self-infatuation into a prime spiritual imperative.

The cultural and moral results of these developments were alternately sad and comic; politically and socially, they were destructive if sometimes risible. When Fredric Jameson, the celebrated Marxist professor of literature at Duke University, waxed nostalgic about the 1960s, he spoke of the “widely shared feeling” that “everything was possible,” that “universal liberation” was nigh. He explained the situation in terms that require not simply the willing suspension but the outright obliteration of disbelief “Mao Zedong’s figure for this process,” Jameson wrote in a state of high excitement,

is ... most revealing: “Our nation,” he cried, “is like an atom.... When this atom’s nucleus is smashed, the thermal energy released will have really tremendous power!” The image evokes the emergence of a genuine mass democracy from the breakup of older feudal and village structures.... Yet ... we now know that Mao Zedong himself drew back from the ultimate consequences of the process he had set in motion, when, at the supreme moment of the Cultural Revolution, ... he called a halt to the dissolution of the party apparatus and effectively reversed the direction of this collective experiment as a whole.... In the West, also, the great explosions of the 60S have led, in the worldwide economic crisis, to powerful restorations of the social order and a renewal of the repressive power of the various state apparatuses.

Let us agree that Mao’s image of an atomic explosion was “most revealing.” What did it reveal? The prospective “emergence of genuine mass democracy”? Or an obsession with absolute power cultivated by the man who was probably the greatest mass-murderer of the twentieth century? Jameson faults Mao not for the homicidal “cultural revolution” he had set in motion in 1966, but for drawing back from its “ultimate consequences.” According to Jameson, in other words, the Great Helmsman was guilty primarily of a failure of imagination. And what was the nature of that revolution whose “supreme moment” he had betrayed? At Mao’s instigation, Leszek Kolakowski writes, “the universities and schools began to form Red Guard detachments, storm troops of the revolution which were to restore power to the ‘masses’ and sweep aside the degenerate party and state bureaucracy.”

Mass meetings, processions, and street fighting became a feature of life in all the bigger cities .... For several years the schools and universities ceased functioning altogether, as the Maoist groups assured pupils and students that by virtue of their social origin and fidelity to the Leader they were the possessors of a great truth unknown to “bourgeois” scholars. Thus encouraged, bands of young people bullied professors whose only crime was their learning, ransacked homes in search of proofs of bourgeois ideology, and destroyed historical monuments as “relics of the past.” Books were burnt wholesale.

Et cetera. And note, finally, how Jameson compares Mao’s betrayal of his “collective experiment” with the reassertion of order in the West following the assaults of Sixties radicalism and the Vietnam War. Jameson has been declaring a “worldwide economic crisis” and a “renewal” of repressive state power for as long as anyone can remember. It is safe to assume, however, that neither has intruded much on his prerogatives or remuneration as the William A. Lane, Jr., Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor of Romance Studies (French), and Chair of The Literature Program at Duke University.

Of course, Fredric Jameson was quite right to discern a “widely shared feeling” in the Sixties that “everything was possible.” The conviction of unlimited possibility—credulousness reborn as policy—is another characteristic of utopian movements. It is what gives them their momentum and allows them to present naïveté as idealism, narcissism as enlightenment, chaos as freedom. It is also what makes utopian movements so susceptible to ideological manipulation. To the extent that one endorses the apotheosis of possibility, one will tend to treat the real world and its occupants with cavalier disregard. Hence the utopian element in all totalitarian political movements. “What binds these men together,” Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “is a firm and sincere belief in human omnipotence. Their moral cynicism, their belief that everything is permitted, rests on the solid conviction that everything is possible.”

The glow of grand ideas

For all its garishness, however, the spirit of the Sixties tends to live on and to reveal itself most clearly in a negative not a positive sense: not in what it champions so much as in what it undermines, what it corrodes. In many respects, the Sixties really did amount to a counter-culture: a repudiation, an inversion of the Fifties—another period that lives on as a provocation. As we enter a new century and a new millennium, the question of what the Sixties wrought is far from settled. Indeed, it has lately assumed a new urgency as it becomes ever clearer that American culture is deeply riven along fault lines first defined by the reverberations of that long, percussive decade.

This emerges clearly in a huge compendium on the period published in 1998, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c.1958-c.1974. Written by the British social historian Arthur Marwick, the tome offers a kind of international sourcebook of exemplary texts, trends, and events from about 1958 through about 1974—Marwick’s definition of the “long decade” that constituted the Sixties. It is an odd book. There is nearly as much about the evolution of English laws regulating the sale of alcoholic beverages as there is about the Beatles and rock music. The social-science apparatus is wheeled on early and often. The reader encounters sixteen “Characteristics of a Unique Era” (“the formation of new subcultures and movements,” “upheavals in race, class, and family relationships,” etc.) as well as numerous statistical summaries and charts. There is, for example, a chart indicating the percentage of Italian families who owned television sets, refrigerators, and washing machines in 1965 as compared with 1975 (more later than earlier) and a chart comparing the relative popularity in France of watching television and going out in the evening in 1967 and 1973 (ditto). Eight hundred pages of such stuff are reinforced by one hundred pages of notes and index. If nothing else, The Sixties provides a kind of running illustration for Schumpeter’s thesis about the self-consuming nature of successful bourgeois-capitalist society.

Marwick makes a great show of being the careful, “scientific” historian, concerned with sources and evidence, not “metaphysical” theories. He begins with a good deal of methodological throat-clearing: just what counts as an historical period? What really constitutes historical influence? —that sort of thing. One might have had more faith in Marwick’s scientific aptitude had the left-wing journalist Paul Berman not appeared as Professor Paul Bearman on page four of The Sixties, endowed not only with a new name and a professorship but also with “a strongly hostile view of the radicals of the sixties.” Hostile? “We ourselves,” Berman wrote in A Tale of Two Utopias, the book to which Marwick refers in his notes,

—the teenage revolutionaries, freaks, hippies, and students, together with our friends and leaders who were five or ten years older and our allies around the world—stood at the heart of a new society ... of spiritual grandeur.... Something soulful. A moral advance. And in the glow of the very grand and utopian idea, a thousand disparate events from around the world—the student uprisings, the hippie experiments, the religious transformations, the rise of Communism in some places and the first signs of its fall in other places, the Black Power movement, and onward through feminism and every insurrectionary impulse of the age—seemed to merge into a single tide.

If Paul Berman’s book expresses “a strongly hostile view of the radicals of the sixties,” what would a flattering view sound like?

Marwick provides both a mood and an argument in The Sixties. The mood is captured by the montages of the Fifties and the Sixties that appear in the book’s opening pages. It is not all that different from the mood evoked by Berman. The Sixties, Marwick writes, prominently featured

black civil rights; youth culture and trend-setting by young people; idealism, protest, and rebellion; the triumph of popular music based on Afro-American models and the emergence of this music as a universal language; ... the search for inspiration in the religions of the Orient; massive changes in personal relationships and sexual behaviour; a general audacity and frankness in books and in the media, and in ordinary behaviour; gay liberation; the emergence of “the underground” and the “counterculture”; optimism and genuine faith in the dawning of a better world.

All of which is to be contrasted with the Fifties, a dark, un-creative time whose “key features” include, among many other abominations,

rigid social hierarchy; subordination of women to men and children to parents; repressed attitudes to sex; racism; unquestioning respect for authority in the family, education, government, the law, and religion, and for the nation-state, the national flag, the national anthem; Cold War hysteria; a strict formalism in language, etiquette, and dress codes; a dull and cliché-ridden popular culture, most obviously in popular music, with its boring big bands and banal ballads.

Marwick is quick to add that “of course” a conservative would regard the Fifties quite differently. And he admits along the way that much of what was done in the name of the Sixties “was downright stupid” (the violence, the “mindless” drug use). But in mood, The Sixties adheres closely to the standard left-wing account: Sixties good, Fifties bad. Toward the end of the book, in a few sentences remarkable as much for their baldness as for their naïveté, Marwick sums up his attitude:

Life became more various and enjoyable. With less rigid conceptions of marriage and new opportunities for divorce, with changing attitudes to fashion and to education, with the abandonment of comfortable fictions about the nature of beauty and the arrival of informal, body-hugging clothing, there was a healthier openness to ordinary living, less need for lies.... Gone was the stuffy conservatism of previous decades, while the radical, divisive, philistine conservatism of Reagan and Thatcher was yet to come.

It is an excellent thing that Marwick early on warned us that “it is very important not to get into the position of idealizing, reifying, or anthropomorphizing periods or decades, attributing personalities to them, singling out ‘good’ decades from ‘bad’ decades.” The unsuspecting reader must be grateful for that warning: otherwise he might think Marwick was doing just that.

The old hope of reorganizing the world

There is, however, another side to The Sixties. If in many respects it embodies the established liberal clichés about the delights of the Age of Aquarius and the depredations of the years before and after, it also challenges at least two important elements of the received story. For one thing, Marwick has no patience with what he calls the Great Marxisant Fallacy. He describes this as “the belief that the society we inhabit is the bad bourgeois society, but that, fortunately, this society is in a state of crisis, so that the good society which lies just around the corner can be easily attained if only we work systematically to destroy the language, the values, the culture, the ideology of bourgeois society.”

As Marwick notes, “practically all the activists, student protesters, hippies, yippies, Situationists, advocates of psychedelic liberation, participants in be-ins and rock festivals, proponents of free love, members of the underground, and advocates of Black Power, women’s liberation, and gay liberation believed that by engaging in struggles, giving witness, or simply doing their own thing they were contributing to the final collapse of the bad bourgeois society.” Or so they said. Revolution in this sense was never more than a pipe dream—partly because, as Marwick notes, modern liberal societies are not the monolithic entities that the radicals and would-be radicals pretended they were. Liberal society—it is part of its genius—tends to absorb opposition instead of rejecting it outright. This does not mean that the cultural revolution did not happen, only that in the end it succeeded by insinuation rather than insurrection. As Marwick puts it, “the various counter-cultural movements and subcultures, being ineluctably implicated in and interrelated with mainstream society” did not so much confront that society as they “permeated and transformed it.” Exactly. In the 1960s, radicals continually bemoaned the specter of “co-optation.” What they failed to see was that this process would result in the ultimate success of the values they held dear.

And this brings us to Marwick’s second challenge. The counterculture of the Sixties is often described as idealistic, utopian, and anti- or non-materialistic. Marwick introduces a salutary dollop of skepticism into the discussion. As we have seen, the counterculture of the Sixties brought us a great deal of rhetoric about the evils of materialism. Marwick shows that there had never been a generation so blissfully immersed in consumerism. The 1980s and 1990s may have perfected the process. But it was the counterculture of the Sixties—supported by the unprecedented abundance the mainstream economy provided—that succeeded in first spreading the gospel. As Marwick notes, “most of the movements, subcultures, and new institutions which are at the heart of sixties change were thoroughly imbued with the entrepreneurial, profit-making ethic.” All those boutiques, experimental theaters, art galleries, discotheques, night-clubs, light shows, head shops, pornographic outlets, and underground films may have challenged the morals, manners, and standards of taste and accomplishment of bourgeois capitalist society. But they did so while profiting generously from its largess.

Marwick is quite happy about all this. In his view, the international movement that “permeated” and “transformed” society constituted a “mini-Renaissance,” with The Beatles, miniskirts, and the art of Andy Warhol having contributed “their mite to the people’s liberation.” Everywhere, people were richer, “franker” (a favorite commendation of Marwick’s), and more intent upon pursuing pleasure:

All the statistical evidence suggests that permissive attitudes and permissive behaviour continued to spread at accelerating rates, with only the utterly unforeseen occurrence of AIDS to bring any kind of caution; single-parent families proliferated, the terms “husband” and “wife” became almost quaint, giving place to “lover” and “partner.” ... The appearance, also, of moralistic crusades simply testifies to the strength of the by now well-established behaviour patterns which the crusades, vainly, hoped to eliminate. The cultural revolution, in short, had continuous, uninterrupted, and lasting consequences.

Of course, Marwick is right. The only question is whether we should be as optimistic about the result as he is. Again, Marwick sounds various cautionary notes: he is disturbed by the phenomenon of political correctness; he notes that the Sixties brought various undesirable excesses. But overall Marwick is a cheerleader for the “multicultural societies” that “exhibit to the full the vibrancy and creative potential which first bloomed in the sixties.”

Marwick makes two basic mistakes. One is equating “more” with “better”—equating, that is, material abundance with what the Greeks called “the good life.” For most people, the good life presupposes a certain level of material abundance; but that is not to say that affluence guarantees or is identical with achievement of the good life.

Marwick’s second mistake is to take the self-evaluation of the Sixties at its own estimation. You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how “creative,” “idealistic,” and “loving” it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. In fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the “herd of independent minds.” Its so-called creativity consisted in continually recirculating a small number of radical clichés; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and its crusading for “love” was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence.

What Allan Bloom said in comparing American universities in the 1950s to those of the 1960s can easily be generalized to apply to the culture as a whole: “The fifties,” Bloom wrote, “were one of the great periods of the American university,” which had recently benefitted from an enlivening infusion of European talent and “were steeped in the general vision of humane education inspired by Kant and Goethe.” The Sixties, by contrast, “were the period of dogmatic answers and trivial tracts. Not a single book of lasting importance was produced in or around the movement. It was all Norman O. Brown and Charles Reich. This was when the real conformism hit the universities, when opinions about everything from God to the movies became absolutely predictable.” Notwithstanding Marwick’s contemptuous remark about the music of the “boring big bands,” stultifying conformism did not become rife in virtually every department of intellectual and cultural life until the Sixties were well advanced.

They did, however, see an astonishing explosion of material prosperity. Marwick alludes regularly to that fact, he pets and caresses it, he produces it whenever he attempts to justify his claims on behalf of the achievements of the period. To be sure, material prosperity is a nice thing, a very nice thing. But it does not guarantee cultural health or moral vigor. The culture of the 1990s has served as a vivid reminder of this home truth. We—the industrialized, technologized world—have never been richer. And yet to an extraordinary extent we in the West continue to inhabit a moral and cultural universe shaped by the hedonistic imperatives and radical ideals of the Sixties. Culturally, morally the world we inhabit is increasingly a trash world: addicted to sensation, besieged everywhere by the cacophonous, mind-numbing din of rock music, saturated with pornography, in thrall to the lowest common denominator wherever questions of taste, manners, or intellectual delicacy are concerned. Marwick was right: “The cultural revolution, in short, had continuous, uninterrupted, and lasting consequences.”

A special nuttiness

Paul Berman’s A Tale of Two Utopias (1996) provides a good illustration of just how “continuous, uninterrupted, and lasting” those consequences have been. Berman worked very hard in his book to memorialize the supposed idealism of the counterculture. He himself is a disappointed radical. But his disappointments have not led him to abandon his radicalism. On the contrary, his disappointments have in a curious way become his radicalism. Perhaps it was this skillful feat of political alchemy that led the MacArthur Foundation to confer upon him one of its famous (left-wing) “genius” awards.

A Tale of Two Utopias is instructive for anyone wishing to understand the long march of America’s cultural revolution. Berman knows that things have not worked out as he hoped, that the utopian schemes he once cherished have, all of them, soured and turned rancorous. The adjectives he employs to describe them now range from “kooky,” “loony,” and “mad” to “criminal”; nevertheless, he comes not to bury the cultural revolution but to praise it. If things haven’t developed according to plan, well, it is not his fault. Beginning at least in 1965, when (he tells us) he went as a “wide eyed” high-school student to Washington, D.C., to join in an anti-war march, Berman has been an absolute sucker for what might be called Westchester radicalism. On that occasion in 1965, the American Socialist leader “Norman Thomas spoke. Joan Baez sang. It was a glorious April afternoon.” Obviously, to be young then was very heaven.

In due course, Berman graduated to Columbia College and joined the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in its period of decline, finding that this organization, despite its “special nuttiness,” delivered on its promise “to take young people who felt empty of identity and give them a sense of control over their own destiny.” For people who felt “offended by the soft life that was their own,” Berman explains, participation in the SDS and similar organizations filled an existential void. Politics in the ordinary sense was only part of the equation. The deliberately outlandish dress, music, and behavior that radical organizations in the 1960s fostered were also important: they all “generated an atmosphere of confrontation, which turned giddy and hot, which created a festival atmosphere.” Which led to the sit-ins, occupation of buildings, and charges of criminal trespassing. Then “off you went to jail, where for once you felt morally at peace.” And here we come to the emotional core of A Tale of Two Utopias. For out of that same festival atmosphere “came a few tiny indications that a new society, organized on novel principles, might at any moment burst into view. ... Sheer madness, those mass meetings were. Yet they took place, and the superdemocratic utopia flickered into reality before your eyes.”

In proposing to trace “the political journey of the generation of 1968,” Berman was at the same time tracing his own political itinerary. But only rarely did he speak in propria persona. When he alluded, say, to a “vague new sensibility” that “managed to be trembly with expectation” or conjured “the dream of a genuine socialism, uncorrupted, untyrannical, de-Stalinized, ultra-democratic,” he did so in the third person. In fact, A Tale of Two Utopias is a kind of spiritual-political credo disguised as a piece of intellectual history. Berman drew upon a motley agglomeration of persons and events in an effort to define a sensibility, the sensibility of a Sixties radical who is thoroughly disabused but not disillusioned. This imparts a certain schizoid quality to the book: Berman’s evidence points in one direction, all his rhetoric in the opposite direction. Ostensibly, he set out to investigate the unhappy logic of revolutionary utopianism, which always begins in moralistic self-infatuation and infallibly ends in disaster.

The basic argument of A Tale of Two Utopias is as simple as it is preposterous: namely, that the fall of Communism and the still tenuous rise of liberal democracy in parts of Eastern Europe and elsewhere are the adult rerun of the radical movements of the 1960s. In the aftermath of 1989, Berman wrote, it suddenly became “obvious that those long-ago utopian efforts to change the shape of the world were a young people’s rehearsal, preparatory to adult events that only came later. Suddenly it was obvious that the authentic political revolution of our era was now, not then; liberal and democratic, not radical leftist in the ’68 style; real, not imaginary.” Obvious to him, that is. How would the people actually living under Communist tyranny regard this feeble effort to establish a moral equivalence between the “liberation” brought by the counterculture of the 1960s and their own political liberation in the 1990s?

Contemplating the triumph of Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia (Havel is one of Berman’s heroes), Berman wrote that

the old hope of reorganizing the world on a drastically new and infinitely more democratic basis, the universal project, the grand aspiration for the poor and the downtrodden, that hope, the forbidden utopian dream, once again seemed, in its newly liberal and anti-grandiose version-well, thinkable.

What we have here is utopianism on a fake diet. The moral is: Sixties radicals never die; they just fade away into the pages of The New Yorker and the comfort zone of munificent “genius” awards.

Such, finally, is the burden of A Tale of Two Utopias: to show that liberal democracy, rooted though it is in capitalism and shot through with a suspicion of utopian enthusiasm, is somehow, really, at bottom, in its fundamental impulse—the latest version of utopia (though we mustn’t call it that) and, moreover, a utopia that depends crucially on the “exhilaration” of a Sixties-style radicalism accoutered in the wariness of the 1990s.

This of course is putting it much more baldly than Berman deigned to do. In his introduction, “The Dream of a New Society,” Berman provided an insider’s sketch of the “utopian exhilaration” that, he rightly noted, “swept across the student universe and across several adult universes as well” in and around 1968:

the student uprisings, the building occupations, marches, strikes, battles with the police, the insurrections that were sexual, feminist, and gay, the bursts of ecological passion, the noisy entrance of the first mass of African-American students into the previously segregated American universities, the slightly crazy effort to raise insubordination into a culture, to eat, dress, smoke, dance differently....

Berman’s enthusiasm for what he accurately described as “an insurrection in middle-class customs” is patent in every phrase. He was equally upbeat about the other Sixties revolutions he describes, the upsurge in pseudospirituality (not Berman’s term)—the “bits and pieces of Buddhism, Beat poetry, transcendentalism, Mexican folklore, psychedelic mind expansions, and God knows what else”—as well as various more overt political agitations against “Western imperialism” and, in a few scattered places, Communist tyranny.

Consider Berman’s ambitiously titled first chapter, “The Moral History of the Baby Boom Generation.” It ought to have been called “The Immoral History of the Baby Boom Generation.” “Every few decades,” Berman wrote, “a pure flame of political rebellion shoots up somewhere and with amazing speed spreads in all directions, until half the countries on earth have been scorched.” It happened in 1776; it happened in 1789; it happened in 1848; it happened in 1917; and, according to Berman, it happened again in 1968. The student rebellions of 1968, he said, were “one more instance of the same mysterious phenomenon, except on a bigger geographical scale than before.” What is really mysterious is how someone with a college education could actually believe that the triumph of the countercultural revolution in 1968 was morally equivalent to the triumph of the American Revolution in 1776 (to take just that one instance). Or perhaps this is the sort of thing that, these days, only someone with a college education could believe?

A Whitmanian critic

For the rest, Berman meanders among familiar signposts of the Sixties. He revisits the Port Huron statement (“longer than the Communist Manifesto” but “not as good”) and the career of Tom Hayden, that one-time admirer of North Korea’s Kim Il Sung whom some people—friends, too —referred to as “the next Lenin.” The Weather Underground and other such criminal groups get some attention. Berman lets us know that he also read some books about the student movements in Europe and Latin America, and he treats readers to a similar digest of events and personalities there: Pierre Goldman, André Glucksmann, Régis Debray; the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Sandinistas. Berman is far from uncritical of these people and movements; he speaks of “childish lives,” of “criminal leftism,” of movements going “mad.” But all his criticism is advanced in an exonerating context of supposed “idealism.” “Faraway solidarity became their religion. They said in effect: I struggle on behalf of others, therefore I am. ... It was a grand idea, morally.”

Berman’s long last chapter, “A Backward Glance at the End of History,” begins by pondering some very large questions, to wit: Is there some “larger meaning” (i.e., utopian impulse) that can be discerned in the liberal and national revolutions that broke out in and after 1989 in Eastern Europe? Some “crucial truth about the nature of man and the shape of history”? Berman reveals that his labors yielded the following insight into the philosophy of history: that some people think that things change without order or meaning, while others believe that there is a discernible meaning in events and even progress to the pattern of history. Of course, it sounds preposterously simplistic when put like that. Alas, that is precisely how Berman does put it. Ipse dicit: “There was the idea that things change ... but without ever arriving at any kind of order or final shape.... And there was the idea that things change, and eventually the chaos adds up to progress.”

Berman spends approximately one hundred pages mulling over this profound thought, drawing on works by André Glucksmann (a former Maoist who advocates the history-is-chaos theory) and Francis Fukuyama (the famous neo-Hegelian who discerns a pleasing shape to the course of history). He treats readers to a great deal of pointless biographical detail about both authors, and he then attempts a summary of their relevant works, Glucksmann’s book The IIth Commandment and Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. I am no fan of Fukuyama’s Hegelian fantasia. But to say, as Berman does, that his idea of progress charts “the same direction in world events that Whitman has invoked in his poetry and prose” is woefully to misunderstand both Whitman and Fukuyama. And what, finally, does Berman make of all this? He expresses a slight preference for the lively chaos espoused by André Glucksmann, but concludes thus: “The messages from these two authors ... are at odds with one another, but since I am a critic and not a philosopher, I see no reason not to say that both messages seem true enough.” No one will accuse Berman of being a philosopher. But even a critic might be expected to stop short of embracing blatant contradiction—unless, of course, he is a “Whitmanian” critic, in which case contradiction need be no bar to affirmation.

At the end of his chapter on the baby boom generation, Berman spoke of his “bafflement” that “a movement so grand and touching in its motives as the student leftism of the 1960s could have degenerated and disappeared so quickly.” He needn’t have been puzzled. The reason is not far to seek. The crucial thing to understand about the student (and faculty) leftism of the 1960s and 1970s is its combination of hedonism and bourgeois antibourgeois animus. That is the real explanation of its attack on middle-class values, its surrender to drugs and promiscuous sex, its infatuation with bogus forms of “spirituality,” and its destructive dabbling in insurrectionary politics. Nor need Berman have waxed elegiac. Students may rarely stage sit-ins today. But the emancipatory ethos that he longingly evoked in these pages has not disappeared; it has been woven into the fabric of American life: bureaucratized, as successful revolutions always are. It has transformed not only the university, but the media and every major cultural institution in this country. It has, in fact, succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of many of its early partisans. It is perhaps debatable whether, as Berman insists, “the left-wing idea ... is a permanent feature of any reasonably modern society.” But it is undeniably an ingrained feature of our society. Berman writes about the Sixties the way left-wing intellectuals write about Communism: as if it were a noble idea that somewhere, somehow went wrong. But neither Communism nor the radicalism of the 1960s went wrong: they were born wrong. Berman’s failure to face up to that fact makes his utopian tale just that: a tale about nowhere.

Is the revolution over?

Charles Dickens’s sentimental portrayal of the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities continues to speak deeply to the left-wing imagination. Andrew Kopkind and Paul Berman were not the only ones to have adapted its title. In May 1998, Mark Lilla, a political philosopher (then at New York University, now at the University of Chicago) also adapted it for “A Tale of Two Reactions,” his reflections on the dynamics of America’s cultural revolution that were published in The New York Review of Books. The fact that the essay appeared in The New York Review had a certain poignancy, of course, since The Review contributed so conspicuously to the counterculture in the 1960s. Lilla’s general point was that when a cultural revolution is finally successful, continued opposition is merely “reactionary,” that is, bootless and intellectually undignified. He gives two examples. The first is the countercultural revolution of the Sixties. Unlike many people on the Left, Lilla has no interest in denying that this revolution actually took place. Indeed, he not only argues that the cultural revolution happened but also that it has been wildly successful in its effect on public authority, the family, and individual morality (and, he might have added, on cultural and intellectual life). In fact, the cultural revolution has been so successful that conservative resistance—and here he cites my own essays on the cultural revolution in The New Criterion as exhibit A—long ago became completely otiose and reactionary. Lilla’s second example is the so-called “Reagan revolution” of the 1980s. This, too, he says, has been so successful in altering our view of certain economic and political matters that left-wing attacks on “Reaganism”—he cites a series in The Nation as an example—are now beside the point or, worse, merely reactionary. (Such attacks, he says, are examples of “progressive reaction.”)

In the end, Lilla’s basic message is not far from the old advice: “If you can’t beat them, join them.” But connoisseurs of cultural polemic will see that its effectiveness depends less on its message than its method. Lilla offers his readers two patently unacceptable extremes and then endeavors to place himself not so much between them as above them: a tertium quid of sweet reasonableness—Lilla invokes “a small stream of liberal thought”—uncontaminated by any “reactionary” sentiments. William Hazlitt long ago described the essence of this strategy in his essay on “the common-place critic” who, Hazlitt observed, “believes that truth lies in the middle, between the extremes of right and wrong.” What makes Lilla’s essay of particular interest is the subtle way he goes about occupying that middle—or, more accurately, “middle”—ground.

One device is a generous deployment of ... well, let us call it “smoke.” Lilla says that conservatives “romanticize the affluent Fifties” and so “are reticent to seek the causes of the cultural revolution there.” In fact, many conservative discussions of the counterculture locate its origins in the Beat sensibility of the middle Fifties. That is the reason that so much space is devoted in this book (and in the original articles Lilla was addressing) to figures like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Herbert Marcuse, and Wilhelm Reich, all of whom made their reputations in the Fifties or earlier.

Then there is the question of causes. Lilla says that “to judge by the essays of Roger Kimball and other conservatives, the cause of the Sixties was quite simply ... the Sixties. They just happened, as a kind of miracle, or anti-miracle” (ellipsis in the original). “Why,” he asks, “did such a profound revolution take place in America when it did? Let us call this the Tocqueville question.” Well, part of what we may call “the Tocqueville answer” is quoted in the Introduction to The Long March: “When great revolutions are successful,” Tocqueville wrote in his book on the ancien régime and the French Revolution, “their causes cease to exist, and the very fact of their success has made them incomprehensible.” All manner of sociological, technological, and demographic phenomena have been adduced to “explain” the rise of the counterculture: a new-found affluence together with the postwar population explosion together with an unprecedented number of people in college; the birth-control pill; increased mobility brought about by the widespread private ownership of cars; the Vietnam War.... The list is a long one, always pertinent, never conclusive. For the truth is, as Irving Kristol observed, “the counterculture was not ‘caused,’ it was born. What happened was internal to our culture and society, not external to it.” In this respect, anyway, Schumpeter was right. Accordingly, the real task for a cultural critic is not etiological—there are a never-ending series of incomplete answers to the question “Why?”—but diagnostic and, ultimately, therapeutic. The pathology is real; the problem is to assay its nature and severity and then decide what to do about it.

The strategy of splitting the difference always depends on a bit of conceptual legerdemain. In Lilla’s scheme, the key evasion comes in his contention that America’s cultural revolution and the policies of the Reagan administration count as “complementary” phenomena. Lilla speaks—as many before him have spoken—of a Reagan “revolution.” But that is a publicist’s (or a polemicist’s) misuse of language. Reagan’s policies were important; they were far-reaching ; in my judgment, most of them were beneficent. But they did not constitute a revolution. If anything, they were an attempt to undo or palliate a set of social and fiscal policies that have a much greater claim to being described as revolutionary: I mean the “welfare state” ideology that began under Franklin Roosevelt and reached its final, malodorous flowering in the “Great Society” of Lyndon Johnson and the sclerotic “nanny state” ideology of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

But it is quite wrong to see in Reagan’s policies a revolutionary departure from the past. On the contrary, they count as a small step in the direction of regaining a foothold in the body of American political and economic tradition. Lilla tells his readers that, “thanks to Reagan, most Americans now believe (rightly or wrongly) that economic growth will do more for them than economic redistribution, and that to grow rich is good.” Note in passing Lilla’s parenthetical remark, which allows him to play both sides of the ideological fence he has erected. The main point, however, is that most Americans are clever enough to have figured out this message all on their own: they didn’t need Ronald Reagan to tell them that economic growth is a good thing or that, given the choice, they would just as soon be well off as taxed into poverty, thanks very much. Nor is this a recent development. Lilla wheels on Tocqueville early and often in his essay. But already in 1835, in the first volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville observed that he knew “of no country ... where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men and where a profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.” I really do not think we can blame Ronald Reagan for Alexis de Tocqueville.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for the reader of Lilla’s essay is trying to determine where exactly he stands. As with Berman, Lilla’s arguments tend to point in one direction, his rhetoric in another. The tone, the atmosphere, the weather of “A Tale of Two Reactions” was orthodox left-liberal. But many of the substantial points Lilla raises would seem to support the conservative indictment of the cultural revolution. Lilla even provides detailed summaries of how the cultural revolution has had a devastating effect on everything from private morality to social policy.

When drug pushers and vagrants are permitted to set the tone in public parks, it is not the police who lose. It is poor urban families who lose their backyards. When children are coddled and undisciplined in the schools, they are the first to suffer, their families next. When universities cater to the whimsical tastes of their students and the aggressive demands of political interests, they cease to be retreats for serious cultivation of the self. When pornography is readily available on cable TV or the World Wide Web, the sleaze merchants profit and we are all demeaned.

Lilla offers these and similar observations as “commonplaces in conservative cultural literature today,” and so they are. He says that he thinks that they are “largely correct.”

But Lilla also says that the cultural revolution represents a “plausible metamorphosis” rather than an “alien distortion” of the American tradition. What can this mean? What can it mean when he says that, because “the revolution is over,” it is useless to criticize its effects? Lilla correctly notes that “the moral views of ‘ordinary Americans’ are approaching those” of the “new class” shaped by the cultural revolution. He cites this as a reason to abandon criticism. But isn’t it rather grounds for even deeper alarm? Lilla observes that many Americans today “see no contradiction in holding down day jobs in the unfettered global marketplace ... and spending weekends immersed in a moral and cultural universe shaped by the Sixties.” He is quite right. But is this really a reason for complacency?

Lilla’s position is a sophisticated variation on the “but everyone does it” defense. Properly brought up children know that that argument doesn’t hold much water, and one must assume that deep down Lilla knows it as well.

In the early years of this century, John Fletcher Moulton, a British judge, observed in a speech that

there is a widespread tendency to regard the fact that [one] can do a thing as meaning [one] may do it. There can be no more fatal error that this. Between “can do” and “may do” ought to exist the whole realm which recognizes the sway of duty, fairness, sympathy, taste, and all the other things that make life beautiful and society possible.

One of the most destructive effects of America’s cultural revolution has been to exacerbate this tendency to the point where the “sway of duty, fairness, sympathy, taste,” and all the rest—everything that Lord Moulton congregated under the memorable category of “obedience to the unenforceable” —has been rendered nugatory. This has plunged our culture into a moral crisis whose dimensions we are only now beginning to reckon. Lilla complained that reactionary sentiment on the Left and the Right has “brought serious political reflection down to absolute zero” and left “the field of common political deliberation” vacant. But as long as he sides with those who “see no contradiction in holding down day jobs in the unfettered global marketplace ... and spending weekends immersed in a moral and cultural universe shaped by the Sixties,” Lilla will find that there is nothing to deliberate about.

The survivalist option

To an extent scarcely imaginable thirty years ago, we now live in that “moral and cultural universe shaped by the Sixties.” The long march of America’s cultural revolution has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of all but the most starry-eyed utopians. The great irony is that this victory took place in the midst of a significant drift to the center-Right in electoral politics. The startling and depressing fact is that supposedly conservative victories at the polls have done almost nothing to challenge the dominance of left-wing, emancipationist attitudes and ideas in our culture. On the contrary, in the so-called “culture wars,” conservatives have been conspicuous losers.

One sign of that defeat has been the fate of the culture wars themselves. One hears considerably less about those battles today than in the early and mid-1990s. That is partly because, as Robert Novak notes in his book Completing the Revolution (2000), “moral issues tend to exhaust people over time.” Controversies that only yesterday sparked urgent debate today seem, for many, strangely beside the point. There is also the issue of material abundance. For if the Sixties were an assault on the moral substance of traditional culture, they nonetheless abetted the capitalist culture of accumulation. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are unimportant to the overall picture. Indeed, it happened that the cultural revolution was most damaging precisely where, in material terms, it was most successful. This put many conservatives in an awkward position. For conservatives have long understood that free markets and political liberty go together. What if it turned out that free markets plus the cultural revolution of the Sixties added up to moral and intellectual poverty? This unhappy thought has lately been the subject of much discussion and disagreement. Among those identified as conservatives, the two most popular responses at the moment seem to be retreat and denial. Both are mistaken.

Probably the most vivid example of the counsel of retreat is “A Moral Minority?,” the now-notorious open letter written by the conservative activist Paul Weyrich to his friends and supporters. Dated February 16, 1999, this heartfelt, eighteen-hundred-word document is clearly the product of profound disillusionment bordering on despair.

Over the last few decades, Weyrich has done an enormous amount to promote the conservative agenda. He has been instrumental in helping many conservative candidates get elected. It was he who popularized the phrase “moral majority.” And yet the impressive political victories he helped to win have clearly not translated into moral or cultural victories. If anything, the culture today is in worse shape than in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected: “our culture,” Weyrich argued, “has decayed into something approaching barbarism.” The reason? “Politics itself has failed. And politics has failed because of the collapse of the culture. The culture we are living in becomes an ever-wider sewer. In truth, I think we are caught up in a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics.”

Weyrich began with a faith in the moral wisdom of the majority of American people. That faith has been broken.

Let me be perfectly frank about it. If there really were a moral majority out there, Bill Clinton would have been driven out of office months ago. It is not only the lack of political will on the part of Republicans, although that is part of the problem. More powerful is the fact that what Americans would have found absolutely intolerable only a few years ago, a majority now not only tolerates but celebrates. Americans have adopted, in large measure, the MTV culture that we so valiantly opposed just a few years ago, and it has permeated the thinking of all but those who have separated themselves from the contemporary culture.

Weyrich may have overstated his case. The MTV culture that he rightly deplores may not have permeated the thinking of quite “all” who have failed to exempt themselves from contemporary culture. And it should be noted that he issued various qualifications and expressions of tentativeness (“I don’t have all the answers or even all the questions”). But by and large, I think it must be admitted that his unhappy diagnosis is right. At the deepest level—at the level of the culture’s taken-for-granted feelings and assumptions about what matters—the hedonistic, self- infatuated ethos of cultural revolution has triumphed to an extent unimaginable when it began.

What is the appropriate response? Weyrich’s “frankly rather radical” proposal was what we might call the survivalist option: opt out, take to the hills. “What seems to me a legitimate strategy,” he wrote, “is to look at ways to separate ourselves from the institutions that have been captured by the ideology of Political Correctness, or by other enemies of our traditional culture.” Some of Weyrich’s suggestions are more plausible than others. Homeschooling, for example, has proven to be an attractive alternative for many families around the country who are appalled by the extent to which both public and private schools have been dumbed-down and have been captured by the ideology of political correctness. But what about his praise for those “setting up private courts, where they can hope to find justice instead of ideology and greed”? Do we really want to encourage efforts to establish a “private” judiciary?

In the last year or so, certain liberals have adopted the strategy of attacking conservatives for aping the radical tactics and anti-Americanism of the 1960s. Although the attack is often ludicrously wide of the mark, it has been enormously popular. Liberals understandably enjoy beating conservatives with the stick that only yesterday was wielded so effectively against them. Regrettably, Weyrich has given his enemies plenty of ammunition for such attacks. Rhetorically and substantively, the most ill-judged part of his letter comes in the peroration advocating adopting a “modified version” of the radical slogan “turn on, tune in, drop out.” It doesn’t matter that Weyrich wants us to turn off our television sets rather than turn on with drugs, or that he advises us to “tune out” the ambient noise of cultural degradation. What catches everyone’s attention is his endorsement in any form of Timothy Leary’s infamous slogan and his final plea that we “drop out of this culture.”

As could have been predicted, Weyrich’s letter created a journalistic firestorm. Liberals savored the evidence of capitulation it seemed to suggest; conservatives for the most part shrank back in appalled silence from the spectacle of political suicide. For his part, Weyrich later declared that “we’re not surrendering—we’re opening a different front.” And in “Creating a New Society,” a response to the storm of criticism “A Moral Minority?” had prompted, he said that his letter had been “misread” and that what he proposed was “nothing less than [what] the early Christians did within the Roman Empire: creating a new society within the ruins of the old.” It remains to be seen how effective his protestation will be.

A brigade of moral ostriches

Even if one strenuously disagrees with Weyrich’s prescriptions, his seriousness and the pathos of his response made his letter a moving document. Here is a man who has fought long and hard for values he believes in deeply. He may be mistaken; he is not supercilious. I wish I could say the same about the conservatives who have adopted the strategy of denial. If Weyrich erred on the side of petulance —threatening to go home and take his marbles with him if the game was not played his way—the happy conservatives neither see nor hear nor speak any evil so long as there is a game going and they are allowed to play. Looking around at our astonishing prosperity, they respond (in answer to Bob Dole’s plaintive question) “Who needs outrage? We’re doing fine, thanks.”

A recent salvo from the camp of contentment was “Good & Plenty: Morality in an Age of Prosperity,” the cover story for the The Weekly Standard of February I, 1999. It is an extraordinary performance. Written by David Brooks, a senior editor at the Standard, “Good & Plenty” is an unashamed paean to philistinism. It seems entirely appropriate that its title recalls a popular brand of candy. Brooks is an intelligent critic and a beguiling writer. But he has nothing except sweet things to say about our cultural situation in this essay. He begins by recounting a trip he made to a small town in northeast Connecticut. “I asked some of the older residents whether the cultural upheavals of the 1960s had affected the town much. They didn’t know what I was talking about. They remember the sixties as a golden age when jobs were plentiful and the factories were buzzing.” Doubtless they did. But so what?

One of Brooks’s main points is that “we shouldn’t leap to conclusions about the supposed degradation of our culture.” That little town he visited was up in arms about a porn shop that had opened down the street. But the town’s newfound prosperity came largely from a local gambling casino: so they are tough on smut but welcome gambling. According to Brooks, the situation in our culture is like a mixed day in the stock market: some issues are up, some are down. It is “hard to tell whether the aggregate effect is positive or negative.” Besides, we shouldn’t ignore “all the social indicators that are moving in the right direction: abortion rates are declining, crime is down, teenage sexual activity is down, divorce rates are dropping.”

Possibly. But as the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb pointed out in The Wall Street Journal,

for almost every favorable statistic, an ornery conservative can cite an unfavorable one. He can even go beyond the statistics to point to the sorry state of the culture: the loss of parental authority and of discipline in the schools, the violence and vulgarity of television, the obscenity and sadism of rap music, the exhibitionism and narcissism of talk-shows, the pornography and sexual perversions on the Internet, the binge-drinking and “hooking up” on college campuses.

And so on. If none of that made much of an impression on Brooks, it is because he wants to scrap all such moral considerations anyway and replace them with pragmatic, “utilitarian” tests. He notes with approval the extent to which society has recast moral—his word is “moralistic” —language in terms of health and safety. Today, he writes, “we regulate behavior and control carnal desires with health codes instead of moral codes. Today in mainstream society, people seldom object to others’ taking the Lord’s name in vain—but watch out if they see a pregnant woman smoking or drinking.” Note the use of “mainstream”—we reasonable people, you understand, do not worry about morals per se: that’s for those poor fanatics who still get worked up about something as outmoded as blasphemy. We enlightened pragmatists are beyond all that.

Brooks acknowledges that many people might consider “morality as mere healthism ... meager, superficial.” But really, he says, in these “happy, prosperous times” “people” —i.e., people like Brooks—have decided that they “want a lower-case morality that will not arouse passions or upset the applecart.” So what if we have a moral pygmy in the White House? Those good folks from Connecticut agreed that “personal behavior has no connection with public performance.” What about the continuing depredations of the culture revolution? “No cause for alarm,” Brooks says: “the counterculture has nothing to do” with contemporary life in America. The counterculture of the 1960s, he assures us, was “utopian” whereas “today’s moral attitudes are anti-utopian. They are utilitarian. They are modest. They are, in fact, the values of the class the counterculture hated most. They are the values of the bourgeoisie.” If we are looking for the origin of today’s spirit, Brooks tells us that we should not look to Abbie Hoffman or Gloria Steinem but to ... Benjamin Franklin, “the quintessential bourgeois.” Well, Benjamin Franklin was a libertine, it is true. But that is not what Brooks means. He wants to enlist Franklin in his brigade of moral ostriches.

What the Sixties wrought

A lot of nasty things have been said about the bourgeoisie over the years. But few people can hold that class in deeper, if unwitting, contempt than does Brooks, for all his praise. According to him, the bourgeois doesn’t want to bother with “grand abstractions,” he is “never heroic” and “has no grandeur,” he “never seem[s] to look up from quotidian concerns to grapple with great truths or profound moral issues.” At most this modern Polonius is “modest, useful, and reliable.” If this is “utilitarian,” no wonder Russell Kirk described utilitarianism as “a philosophy of death.” Brooks wants us to celebrate this stunted caricature because, after all, conservatives have always championed the bourgeoisie. (“Well, my fellow right-wingers, you wanted bourgeois values? You got’em.”)

What Brooks neglects is the fact that what conservatives have traditionally championed are bourgeois values not bourgeois vices. And those values are rooted deeply in a God-fearing Protestant ethic that emphasizes church, community, country, family, and moral honor. The bourgeois ethic is not a form of Romanticism, true enough; its ideal is moderation, not excess. There is a deep sense in which Schumpeter was right that “capitalist civilization is rationalistic and ‘anti-heroic.’” But that does not mean that bourgeois capitalism need embrace the vacuous, feel-good, “I’ve-got-mine” philosophy Brooks apparently wants us to embrace. “Anti-heroism” need not exclude passionate commitments or steadfast loyalty to transcendent values. Irving Kristol once wrote that “if you believe that a comfortable life is not necessarily the same thing as a good life, or even a meaningful life, then it will occur to you that efficiency is a means, not an end in itself.”

Perhaps Brooks would scoff at such distinctions, branding them merely “grand,” “abstract,” or “heroic.” If so, what he espouses is not conservatism but a cheerful, buttoned-down version of the moral vacancy that Weyrich rightly lamented. It is both ironical and dispiriting to realize that the counterculture may have won its most insidious victories not among its natural sympathizers on the Left but, on the contrary, among those putatively conservative opponents who can no longer distinguish between material affluence and the moral good. In other words, it may be that what the Sixties have wrought above all is widespread spiritual anesthesia. To a degree frightening to contemplate, we have lost that sixth sense that allows us to discriminate firmly between civilization and its discontents. That this loss goes largely unlamented and even unnoticed is a measure of how successful the long march of America’s cultural revolution has been.