This is a message to people of my generation and general political stripe: educated, socially-aware baby-boomers who, as we came of age a quarter century ago, helped launch the progressive movement called the counter-culture. Have you noticed that the moral energy these days is on the cultural right? The most impassioned social analyses are no longer coming from those who are trying to create a new kind of society but from those who are trying to restore traditional values. This is not the way it was a quarter-century ago when we formed our basic political attitudes. Confronted at that time by a society in need of serious self-examination, we in the counterculture had a lot to say and, resisted though we were, we managed with our fervor to change the terms of the cultural discussion and some of the directions of America's development. Racism and sexism didn't disappear, but they lost their protected status as acceptable notions. Likewise, a self-congratulatory historical self-image was made to incorporate a darker side, as we disinterred the hearts at Wounded Knee and exposed the lies and crimes of those --at the White House, the CIA, and at the head of the FBI-- who were supposed to safeguard our constitutional democracy. We were heard then because much of what we had to say was what American society as a whole needed to hear to correct what had gone wrong. But the situation today is different. Now, in many arenas it is the very forces we helped to unleash, taken to unreasonable extremes, that threaten the health of our country. These excesses have spurred the conservatives to do something of which they seemed incapable a generation ago-- to think with clarity and depth about American society and to argue with conviction for values that make sense and serve real human needs. It would be a mistake for us to dismiss all their arguments as mere reactionary "backlash." It is time now for us to listen, so that we can gain a more balanced vision of how a better society is to be achieved. == We were right that America had a long-standing history of racial injustice and a responsibility to set things right. But neither white liberals nor black activists served either justice or black social advancement by making civil rights a matter of redressing collective grievances more than of providing equal individual opportunity. This approach to civil rights helped to freeze a generation of African-Americans into the sterile role of aggrieved victims. Acknowledging the responsibility of society is important, but it cannot be allowed to replace an ethic of personal responsibility. Shelby Steele argues persuasively, in The Content of Our Character, that though white racism still exists, it is no longer at the heart of the problem. Now by far the greater obstacle to black advancement lies in those attitudes among many blacks that impair their vigorous pursuit of available opportunities. However much that obstacle may be the legacy of past wounds inflicted by a racist society, there are significant limits to the role the larger society can now play in removing that obstacle. As Steele argues, it is crippling to treat reasons as excuses. == We were right that established judgments of right and wrong are often heavily tainted with narrow-minded prejudices and self-serving assumptions. But that doesn't mean judgments of right and wrong are wholly relative. It is one thing to acknowledge that the American way of life is not the only right way; it is a different matter to assume, say, that what the Nazis did at Auschwitz was OK because it made sense to them. Our cultural system may have needed shaking up, but such moral relativism threatens instead to dash it to pieces. William J. Kilpatrick makes a compelling case, in Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong, that the effort to bring a more tolerant moral vision into the classrooms of America has fostered the idea that morality is purely a matter of subjective preference, like one's taste in ice cream flavors. And this has helped to create a morally confused generation of American youth. == We were right that society has traditionally stigmatized differences, and enforced conformity, in unjustifiably punitive ways. But that does not mean we should replace such stigmatization with the idea that all differences are equally to be celebrated. A child should not be made to feel less worthy if he or she comes from a "broken home," but there is no point in denying that the increasing number of single-parent households is bad news. Barbara Defoe Whitehead, David Popenoe and James Q. Wilson all make a good case that America has seen an erosion of "family values," and that this abandonment of traditional understandings has helped set the stage for some of the frightening dramas now being played out in the schools and on the streets of the United States. The list could go on: a much-needed movement to increase the respect women are afforded and the power they wield has led to the denigration of men and the virtues they have traditionally embodied, virtues on which --in a dangerous world-- we have all depended for our survival; the appropriate critique of Western civilization has become an unjustifiable demonization of our cultural roots, as if profound flaws were not to be found in all human cultures, and as if our free and prosperous society did not have its own remarkable virtues; the appreciation of cultural diversity has extended into a disregard for the importance of a shared core culture to hold us together... It is not surprising that our efforts to correct the deficiencies of the established order failed to produce a pure embodiment of social wisdom. That is not the way human affairs work. Instead, one extreme view gives rise to another-- the pendulum swings. Encountering conservative values in a toxic form, many of us naturally found it difficult to discern how those values, cleansed of their contaminants, are essential to a healthy society. No one side of our cultural disputes has a monopoly on the truth. The challenge is to find a wise way of integrating the various truths. From where will this integration come? On the right --where basic truths are supposed to have been handed down and thus to be easily known-- it is often regarded as a sign of weakness to admit error and to change course. That world view, with its virtue of steadfastness, has the defect of making self-correction difficult. It is we who have believed that the answers to life's questions can be found only through honest exploration who can see the admission of error as a sign of strength. Therefore it may be up to us on the progressive side to lead the way out of the polarized discourse of our moral controversies. To heal our cultural rift, we can begin by hearkening to the impassioned critiques of our excesses.

Andrew Bard Schmookler's most recent book is Fool's Gold: The Fate of Values in a World of Goods. ??