Roger Kimball - The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

Table of Contents

To Hilton Kramer

Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, 1856

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790

In May 1994, The New York Times reported in its science pages on the unhappy fate of one Phineas P. Gage, a foreman for the New England Railroad. In 1848, Gage was helping to lay track across Vermont. His job involved drilling holes in large rocks, into which he would pour blasting powder and lay down a fuse. He would then cover the explosives with sand, tamping it all down with a long metal rod. One day, he inadvertently triggered an explosion. The metal rod went hurtling through his skull, entering just under his left eye and landing some yards away. Amazingly, Gage survived the assault. He was stunned but able to walk away. And although he lost an eye, he seemed otherwise to recover.

It soon became clear, however, that Gage was a sharply diminished man. His intellectual powers were apparently unimpaired; but what the writer for the Times called his moral center had been destroyed. Before the accident, Gage had been an intelligent, socially responsible, hard-working fellow... But in the weeks after the tamping rod pierced his brain, he began using profane language, lied to his friends and could not be trusted to honor his commitments. Phineas Gage had become a moral cripple, utterly unable to make ethical decisions.

Pondering the state of contemporary American cultural life, I have often recalled the sad story of Phineas Gage. Like him, our culture seems to have suffered some ghastly accident that has left it afloat but rudderless: physically intact, its moral center a shambles. The cause of this disaster was not an explosion of gunpowder, but a more protracted and spiritually convulsive detonationone that trembled with gathering force through North America and Western Europe from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s and tore apart, perhaps irrevocably, the moral and intellectual fabric of our society. Even now, at the dawn of a new millennium, we are far from done tabulating its effects.

The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America contributes to that task. It is part cultural history, part spiritual damage report. It looks behind the received wisdom about the Sixties to the animating ideas, passions, and personalities that made that long decade a synonym for excess and moral breakdown. Above all, The Long March aims to show how the paroxysms of the 1960s continue to reverberate throughout our culture. The Age of Aquarius did not end when the last electric guitar was unplugged at Woodstock. It lives on in our values and habits, in our tastes, pleasures, and aspirations. It lives on especially in our educational and cultural institutions, and in the degraded pop culture that permeates our lives like a corrosive fog. Looking afresh at the architects of Americas cultural revolution, The Long March provides a series of cautionary tales, an annotated guidebook of wrong turns, dead ends, and unacknowledged spiritual hazards.

What is most obvious is often the easiest to overlook. To a casual observer, Phineas Gage might have appeared almost normal. So it is with our culture. Such blindness is a common by-product of cultural and moral upheaval. In his book on the ancien regime and the French Revolution (1856), Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that great revolutions which succeed make the causes which produced them disappear, and thus become incomprehensible because of their own success. Acceptance breeds invisibility, the ultimate token of triumph. For an American writing at the end of the 1990S, Tocquevilles words fit our current cultural and political situation seamlessly. Although sometimes tempted to ignore it, we are living in the aftermath of a momentous social and moral assault. As David Frum observes in How We Got Here, his new book about the 1970S, we are the heirs of the most total social transformation that the United States has lived through since the coming of industrialism, a transformation (a revolution!) that has not ended yet. Even now it is difficult to gauge the extent of that transformation. In 1991, looking back over his long and distinguished career in an essay called A Life of Learning, the philosopher Paul Oskar Kristeller sounded a similar melancholy note. We have witnessed, he wrote, what amounts to a cultural revolution, comparable to the one in China if not worse, and whereas the Chinese have to some extent overcome their cultural revolution, I see many signs that ours is getting worse all the time, and no indication that it will be overcome in the foreseeable future.

Revolution, of course, is a strong word, one that covers a multitude of disparate activities and phenomena. And it is well at the outset to note that a cultural revolution is not the same thing as an intellectual or artistic revolution, though the three things often go together. The writings of Copernicus fomented a far-reaching intellectual revolution, as did, for example, the writings of Darwin. The development of one-point perspective in the Renaissance sparked a fertile artistic revolution in Italy and elsewhere. When Virginia Woolf, referring to a London exhibition of Post-Impressionist painting organized by her friend and fellow Bloomsbury figure Roger Fry, wrote that in or about December 1910, human character changed.... All human relations... shifted, she was indulging in comic exaggeration. And yet Post-Impressionism did mark a revolution in artistic culture, just as the writing of Joyce and Eliot did in literary culture.

But a cultural revolution differs from an intellectual or artistic revolution. And it also differs from a political revolutionthough, again, the two sometimes go together. A cultural revolution, whatever the political ambitions of its architects, results first of all in a metamorphosis in values and the conduct of life. In this context, it is also worth noting the differences between those political revolutions that aim at establishing a limited, constitutional government and those thatnotwithstanding the proliferation of slogans about freedom and liberationactually aim at or result in tyranny. The Glorious Revolution in England in 1688 and the American Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century are the chiefperhaps the onlyexamples of the former; the latter, regrettably, are much more common: the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution provide archetypes of actual tyranny staging a coup under the banner of imagined liberation. As the Marxists say, it is no accident that proponents of cultural revolution overwhelmingly favor the latter.

In a democratic society like ours, where free elections are guaranteed, political revolution is almost unthinkable in practical terms. Consequently, utopian efforts to transform society have been channeled into cultural and moral life. In America, scattered if much-publicized episodes of violence have wrought far less damage than the moral and intellectual assaults that do not destroy buildings but corrupt sensibilities and blight souls. The success of Americas recent cultural revolution can be measured not in toppled governments but in shattered values. If we often forget what great changes this revolution brought in its wake, that, too, is a sign of its success: having changed ourselves, we no longer perceive the extent of our transformation.