This story appeared in the July 1968 issue of Fortune.
Every age is, in its own way, an “age of anxiety”—to quote the title of a poem by W. H. Auden, written over twenty years ago. Every generation is convinced that its world is out of control, that “things are in the saddle” (Emerson), that “the centre cannot hold” (Yeats), that the past has lost its glory, the present its humanity, the future its hope. The premonition of apocalypse springs eternal in the human breast.
It is comforting to reflect that for most of humanity none of these premonitions is ever justified: the Day of the Beast has yet to dawn. Somehow, the human race endures, life continues to yield its modest satisfactions; the world doesn’t actually come to an end.
It is less comforting but more realistic to reflect that we don’t live in the world; we live in a particular world; and history records many particular worlds that did indeed come to their ends—sometimes abruptly, more often slowly and insensibly, but always painfully for those who felt themselves to be part of what was being destroyed. And today one does have cause to believe that we are approaching one of those historic watersheds that separate worlds in time.
Who can deny that, in the United States of 1968, as never before in its history, there is a vast unease about the prospects of the republic? It is an unease all the more unsettling in that it is so hard to define. We know the problems of American society—know them with an unparalleled scholarship and an incomparable attentiveness. None of these problems, taken by itself, seems insoluble. But taken together, they constitute a condition and are creating habits of mind that threaten the civic-bourgeois culture bequeathed to us by Western civilization.
A casual subversion
That last phrase is vague, as it must be, covering as it does some four centuries of history, more than a dozen nations, and a great variety of cultural modes. Still, the phrase is not meaningless. It does refer to a social order and a way of life in which the adult population is presumed to be composed of rational, free, and responsible citizens—that very word is itself a kind of key, for the citizen is something different from the subject of a regime, or the member of a movement, or the adherent of a creed. And one gets the distinct impression, surveying the world around us, that citizens are, to an increasing degree, in short supply.
What makes the situation all the more ominous is that the civic-bourgeois culture is not being overwhelmed from without, but is rather being casually and almost contemptuously subverted from within. Those subverting it are hard to identify, since almost all of us have something of a hand in it, at one moment or another. Neither the radical left nor the radical right has been notably successful in creating viable alternatives to liberal democracy, and there has been no massive doctrinal conversion to new orthodoxies. (Indeed, it is where there are totalitarian regimes that the bourgeois-civic values seem most alive in the populace—where people seem to want desperately to become citizens.) Rather, what is happening is something that is both less obvious and more unsettling. It involves the slow draining away of legitimacy from existing institutions and prevailing traditions.
Over the entire world, there is scarcely an institution whose legitimacy is not suddenly liable to peremptory challenge. It doesn’t appear to matter whether the institution is working well or not: only a few years ago, most people thought American universities were working better than ever. And it doesn’t seem to matter whether people are materially well off or not: the French workers are far better off than they were a decade ago. What exists is vulnerable for no other reason than that it exists—and because the citizenry no longer feels any particular responsibility for its existence, any instinctive obligation to sustain or even reform it.
Revolutions unforeseen
The effect is of disengagement and a sense of powerlessness on the part of the majority, of alienation and irresponsible power on the part of every organized minority, and of purposelessness on the part of both. “What do people want?” the politicians wonder, just as confusedly as the rest of us. And when they or we think an answer is at hand, it doesn’t stand up for long. Today’s solution is tomorrow’s dilemma. We study the future more furiously than ever before, so as to be prepared for eventualities. But it is as instructive as it is humiliating to note that no sociologist, in the 1950’s, predicted that the movement for civil rights would give rise to black nationalism in this country, and that no educational leader foresaw the way in which the expansion of educational opportunity would give birth to a revolt on the campus. It’s bad enough when things are in the saddle; it’s worse when we can’t even identify the bloody horse.
It is likely that, a century or two from now, students taking exams will be asked to list the causes of this period’s unrest and to describe how contemporaries viewed the process. No doubt it will turn out that those contemporaries—i.e., we—had only a dim and imperfect comprehension of what was happening to them. Still, we must understand as best we can; and it seems to me that there are five major experiences we are living through that are mainly responsible for those shivers of foreboding now diffused throughout our body politic.
The Technological Imperative: There is a widespread conviction among Americans that the growth of scientific knowledge and the speed of technological innovation have now achieved such self-determined momentum as to make ours “the accidental century” and “the temporary society”—to quote the titles of two recent books. Oddly enough, it is not at all clear that this conviction can be validly inferred from the facts of the case. There really is very little statistical evidence that technological innovation—or the diffusion of technological innovation—today proceeds at a pace significantly faster than that of two or three or five decades ago. Nor is there convincing evidence that men’s personal lives are being directly affected by technology to a degree and extent unknown by previous generations. Most of us live in homes, work at jobs, and play at games that are not radically different from those of our parents. But a feeling of radical difference does exist—and feelings are every bit as real as social statistics.
Besides, it is possible that this feeling expresses a truth that escapes mere statistics. Thus, it may be—as some claim—that technology really is on the verge of drastically changing our lives; that the popular sentiment is caused by a vaguely envisaged future rather than an experienced past or present. The possibilities of our future, at least, are quite different from those envisaged by our parents. In our case, the scientific possibilities include wiping out the human race, space travel into unimaginable universes, breeding human beings to specification, and much else besides. To be even dimly aware of these possibilities is to have one’s vision of what is “natural” quite shattered.
Furthermore, even the direct changes already imposed on our lives by new technology, unsensational as they mostly are, may be having a delayed effect on us. Just as a steady, high speed in a car over a long period of time may induce feelings of nausea and vertigo, the effects of a dynamic society may be cumulative in a way that we cannot easily explain.
Whatever the explanation, however, it is beyond question that Americans do have the sensation that the worlds of science fiction are beginning to pervade, in a strange and threatening way, the familiar, bourgeois American world they have known and loved. And they have the further, queasy sensation that there is nothing anyone can do about it.
The Revolution of Rising Expectations: There is nothing more frustrating than to expect the impossible as a matter of right, and yet such expectations are by now second nature to a large part of humanity. To see something on television is to feel entitled to it; to be promised something by a politician is to feel immediately deprived of it. What is called “the revolution of rising expectations” has reached such grotesque dimensions that men take it as an insult when they are asked to be reasonable in their desires and demands. The reasonable is what they expect to obtain automatically. The unreasonable is what they look to government to provide by special, ingenious effort. And, through its own credulity, or its cynicism, or both, modern government does feel compelled to promise not only the effort but the success of this effort.
But when people are determinedly unreasonable, all promises eventually fail and coercion of one kind or another is inevitable. In nation after nation such coercion is being desperately relied upon. Because the U.S. is so rich and productive, our society has so far been able, far better than any other, to placate the “revolution of rising expectations.” Nevertheless, there is a mounting irritability, impatience, distemper, and mistrust. Each individual and every organized group (racial, economic, professional, etc.), seeing no justification for self-discipline—indeed, holding the very idea of self-discipline in a kind of contempt—calls for ever greater discipline to be exercised against the rest. Self-government, the basic principle of this republic, is inexorably being eroded in favor of self-seeking, self-indulgence, and just plain aggressive selfishness. This may be an inevitable consequence of “affluence,” with its emphasis on material goods. It may be an inevitable consequence of democracy, with its egalitarian dynamic. But it is what is happening. Already an entire generation exists which simply cannot believe that American school textbooks used to extol “self-denial” as a virtue.
The Generation Gap: In every dynamic society there is always a generation gap, for in a changing world the young will always have different habits, viewpoints, and styles from the old. But in the 1960’s the gap has opened to a point where the very fabric of our society threatens to be rent altogether. As with technology, it may well be that nothing “new” is happening, merely that cumulative tensions of decades are beginning to find ultimate expression. Still, the effect is to all intents and purposes the same. The young not only live in a world of their own—they have always done that, more or less. They now live—an increasing number now live—in an anti-world, one whose existence challenges the legitimacy of the adult world.
The turmoil on our campuses is the most obvious sign of these worlds in collision. Any sensible adult knows that young people can be—and there are always some who will be—rebellious, wayward, defiant, dissenting. That youth should desire to see the world different from what it is, should incorporate into their own life styles this desire and this difference, is not an unfamiliar idea. What is unfamiliar is the idea that youth may properly engage in a serious struggle for power against their parents and elders. Young people have always resisted or evaded the moral authority of their parents, on the assumption that it was out of date. But never before has the right of adults to any moral authority whatsoever been challenged.
Our Changing Popular Culture: For more than a century now, there has prevailed a condition of hostility between the high culture of the Western world and the bourgeois society it inhabited. This culture has largely been, in Lionel Trilling’s phrase, an “adversary culture”—contemptuous of capitalism, liberalism, democracy, materialism, organized religion, and all the familiar domestic virtues. As to why this is so, one can speculate endlessly: in the end, it may simply be that artists find a highly civil society less congenial to their imaginations than a heroic and adventurous one, no matter how much bloodier or more barbaric the latter may be.
But whatever the reason, it remains true that a great preponderance of the important poets and novelists and painters in the modern tradition have been hostile to this world, regardless of whether or not this world was hostile to them.
So long as the “adversary culture” was restricted to an avant-garde elite, the social and political consequences of this state of affairs were minimal. (The aesthetic consequences were, paradoxically, enormously fruitful: the anti-bourgeois arts represent one of the great achievements of bourgeois civilization.) The prevailing popular culture, however artistically deficient, accepted the moral and social conventions—or deviated from them in conventionally accepted ways. But in the 1960’s the avant-garde culture made a successful take-over bid, so to speak, and has now become our popular culture as well. Perhaps this is, once again, simply the cumulative impact of a long process; perhaps—almost surely—it has something to do with the tremendous expansion of higher education in our times. In any case, it has unambiguously happened: the most “daring” and self-styled “subversive” or “pornographic” texts of modern literature, once the precious possession of a happy few, are now read as a matter of course—are read in required courses—by youngsters in junior colleges all over the country. The avant-garde has become a popular cultural militia. Hollywood is already a conquered province: neither Bonnie and Clyde nor The Graduate could have been produced—or, if produced, distributed—a mere ten years ago. Television still holds out, but it surely cannot continue to for long.
One wonders: how can a bourgeois society survive in a cultural ambiance that derides every traditional bourgeois virtue and celebrates anything—from promiscuity to homosexuality to drugs to political terrorism—that is, in bourgeois eyes, perverse? Publicly, we are all tolerant of these new cultural modes, in part because we fear not to be “with it,” partly because they often are intrinsically illuminating. But beneath this surface tolerance there lie depths of anxiety. Our world is being emptied of its ideal content, and the imposing institutional facade sways in the wind.
The Decline of Religion: This is the most profound change of all—so profound that it is hard to ascribe any single consequence directly to it, since in one way or another everything is connected with it.
All human societies have to respond to two fundamental questions. The first is: “Why?” The second is: “Why not?” Why behave in such and such a way? Why not behave differently or contrarily? A liberal society can rely on a more or less persuasive, as against an explicitly authoritative, answer to the first question. But no society can endure speechless before the second.
It is religion that, traditionally, has supplied the answers to these questions. In our ever more secularized society, it is still religion that has supplied the answer to the second. Today, it cannot do so: the “why nots” are being insistently asked within the organized churches themselves. Call it “the Death of God,” or “Situation Ethics,” or what you will, the fact remains that religious thinkers today are anxiously posing the very same crucial question we have always looked to religion to answer. This may be theologically exciting; it is also humanly and socially disorienting. The upshot is that—as Professor Earl Rovit recently observed—on an ever larger scale “why not” is ceasing to be a question at all. It is becoming a kind of answer.
