Or so says Kurt Andersen, a writer whose acumen and wit I have always admired. ?I mean, the guy was partially responsible for Spy, one of the wittier magazines of the 1990s.
Wednesday, on the opinion page of the New York Times, we had this from Andersen:?"The Downside of Liberty," all about how the "me" generation whose activism fueled the rights movement of the late 1960s really invented American selfishness. Not just the baby boomer banksters of the 1%? No, really:
What has happened politically, economically, culturally and socially since the sea change of the late ?60s isn?t contradictory or incongruous. It?s all of a piece. For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won.Well, after some reflection based on the fact that this COULD in some way be putting us on, I came to the conclusion that he's serious. I'm not really happy with the implications either, but follow me below the great orange scrunchie and I'll try to deal with this.
Andersen gives us the trajectory of American intellectual and cultural history, which he thinks operates on the
tension between radical individualism and the demands of the commonweal.Jefferson, he writes, was concerned with the demands of the commonwealth, writing in the 1810s that self-gratification is the enemy of virtue. I always thought Jefferson was full of contradictions, and here's someone who had children by one of his slaves. Self-gratification or virtue? ?Right.
Then there are the eruptions of radical individuality that happen now and again in American history: the 1840s (I'm hoping he means the Gold Rush here, because if he means the Polk Administration he could have started the 1840s in 1828), the Gilded Age (Matthew Josephson said as much in 1927 in his book The Robber Barons and it has stuck), and the 1920s (that would be Hemingway's 1920s, not Fitzgerald's 1920s although Fitzgerald himself was radically individual). But the late 1960s - the hippie era - overturned an era - the long 1950s, when both the hippies and the acolytes of Ayn Rand were rare, and neither greed nor homosexuality (why is this here? ?We'll see later, maybe) were really talked about.
Here we're getting into a complicated argument. What happened?
Going forward, the youthful masses of every age would be permitted as never before to indulge their self-expressive and hedonistic impulses. But capitalists in return would be unshackled as well, free to indulge their own animal spirits with fewer and fewer fetters in the forms of regulation, taxes or social opprobrium. ?Do your own thing? is not so different than ?every man for himself.?It's actually "different from" but I digress.
However, they ARE different, which means the rest of his analysis in which he conflates the two and their effects. ?But historical memory is something else:
People on the political right have blamed the late ?60s for what they loathe about contemporary life ? anything-goes sexuality, cultural coarseness, multiculturalism. And people on the left buy into that, seeing only the ?60s legacies of freedom that they define as progress. But what the left and right respectively love and hate are mostly flip sides of the same libertarian coin minted around 1967. Thanks to the ?60s, we are all shamelessly selfish.Really? I think this is a bit facile and simplistic ("homosexuality" above is "anything-goes sexuality" here, but let's not forget that the pill gave heterosexual couples, many not married, the same sexual freedom). The political right is losing the cultural war (see my diary, Misogyny? Racism? Meet the Arri?re-Garde from April 2012), and what people on the left think when we look at the '60s legacy of freedom is more complicated: there's a tension between pride in how far we've come and understanding how much work we still have to do.
So snark doesn't work on a topic like this, and I really don't think that the freedom of the late 1960s had anything to do with the repeal of Glass-Steagall which I think was responsible for all the economic problems that followed it. The op-ed page of the New York Times seems to be in a state of decline (think Bill Keller on Sunday) and this op-ed piece didn't do anything to help that.
No, my generation and I are NOT going to take the blame for this. Much too clever, Mr. Andersen. FAIL.
5:43 PM PT: Dinnertime. ?Play nicely, and I'll be back in 90 minutes.
10:00 PM PT: I guess I should have known that this would degenerate into a generational thing here, and I decided to let it play it out by itself. All I have to say to you Gen X commenters is that in a few years you're going to be blamed for the Bush administration. To you Gen Y'ers? You'd better figure out how to make the world that follows Obama better because if it isn't, some younger people will treat you the way you're treating my generation now in a subsequent version of this blog.
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