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"THE SIXTIES " HAD A MORAL
VISION THAT IS STILL History, it is often said, is written by the victors. In America today, it is the conservatives who are triumphant, and the history they are now broadcasting --almost unchallenged-- contains the usual kinds of distortions to fortify the winners' position. Take the Sixties. In the history now purveyed, "the Sixties" has become almost synonymous with immorality. Puritan America's upstanding city on a hill was almost ruined, we are constantly told nowadays, by the Sixties' ethic of irresponsibility, casual sex, mindless drug use, and cultish belief. The leaders of the conservative counter-revolution represent themselves as cleaning up the mess the Sixties left behind and reestablishing the reign of tried and true virtue. Conservative intellectuals are writing books in praise of the virtues of the Victorians (Gertrude Himmelfarb) and are resuming the venerable tradition of McGuffey with collections of edifying tales (William Bennett). So thorough, at this moment, is the eclipsing of the competing cultural current that Newt Gingrich could dismiss his foes as "counter-culture McGoverniks" with no one at center stage rising to defend the value of the counter-culture (let alone anyone questioning whether "McGovern" is a more apt term of opprobrium than the name of the man who defeated him in a landslide only to be driven from the presidency in disgrace). In all this conservative triumphalism, there is an important piece of the truth. But it is only a partial truth. As one who was a counter-culture McGovernik in his young adulthood, I would like to argue for the importance of another part of the truth-- one that conservatives could not handle a quarter century ago and would like to airbrush out of the picture now. For all its moral shortcomings, the cultural movement denoted nowadays as "the Sixties" embodied a vital moral vision. Even if this vision was incomplete, it is one that American civilization can repudiate only at great spiritual cost. At the core of "the Sixties" was a vision of human possibility: We can be more than merely effective instruments in a larger social machine. Each person is endowed with a God-given potential to be something far larger and richer --something more beautiful and sacred-- than can be achieved solely through such traditional iron virtues as discipline, duty, responsibility and sacrifice. And it is an important part of the human calling to nurture the flowering of this inherent potential, in self-discovery, in authentic and vibrant living, and in creative expression. The moral vision of the human potential movement may
have been, for many, simply a convenient vehicle for
self-indulgence and irresponsibility. But the example of
such people no more captures the moral value of the
vision than was the fundamental moral quality of
Victorian culture embodied by the sadistic petty tyrants
depicted by Dickens. People fall short, whether they are
in Victorian parlors or in the U.S. Senate or in the
baths and workshops of Esalen. Which side of our cultural conversation is dominant will change from one era to another. History is never at an end. Back in the seventies, so deeply had the ethic of the human potential movement percolated through the culture that even the U.S. Army --in most other ways on the other side of the cultural divide-- put forth its message in the language of self-actualization. "Be all that you can be!" the Army's ads cried out to the youth of America. The Army's invitation may have represented a different form for the realization of one's potential --as a conservative institution, the military provides the structure and purpose that Esalen would invite people to discover within themselves-- but the call to take joy in the flowering of one's inherent capacities was basically the same. One cannot imagine the Army couching its invitation in that language today. Now, its get ahead, acquire salable skills, find a niche. I wonder, do Esalen catalogues these days try to inspire people with a call to "put this workshop on your resume"? Whether it is traditional culture or counter-culture that is ascendant, we ignore the "loser" at our peril. In recent years, the conservatives have argued persuasively that the defects of the counter-culture contributed to the social ills around us today-- to the waves of illegitimacy, the rise of self-indulgence and the disdain for self-sacrifice, and the loss of many of the traditional glues that weld us into larger communities. But today's victorious conservatives still seem blind to the deadly lacunae in their own traditional vision. Today's America, ruled by the conservative vision, offers its people no larger vision of what human life can be than to fulfill their duties to God and country and family, and to play the market's game to win wealth and power. All these are important accomplishments. But they do not add up to the full realization of our humanity. What is the cost of this truncated vision? One can feel that cost viscerally in the pinched discourse of such outstanding and intelligent journals as the National Review and Commentary: even when the conservative is victorious, the creature is too confined to dance. One can taste that cost in the bitterness and scorn with which, in the same pages and on today's talk-radio airwaves, those are treated whose search for truth has led to a different understanding. One can hear it in the cramped political vision that can conceive nothing higher for us as a people than to have everyone out pushing the wagon. Too petty a vision of what human life can be may not lead to social chaos, but it can wound a society nonetheless. Until we can integrate the conservatives' tighter
virtues with what was morally valid in the liberating
vision of the Sixties, American will not be all that she
can be. |
