Tossing away history's greatest opportunity for tawdry little baubles

Decades ago, when I had my head way up my tailpipe, one day I was sitting around drinking beers with a buddy (a real character, a Presbyterian minister with a gargantuan alcohol problem) and we were listening to the Grateful Dead's album Anthem of the Sun. I waxed loftily about what a noble vision the band had, how it embodied a generation's forging of a new, tribal, communal way for society to organize, based on a cosmic consciousness that was breaking like a new kind of daylight onto humanity.

"Narcissism," he tersely offered.

"Narcissism? How can you say that?" I responded. "The counterculture is all about selflessness and real community."

"Narcissism," he repeated.

I now understand that he was spot-on.

The whole countercultural enterprise was one big indulgence in self-congratulation. And historical ignorance. If only all those little tie-dyed brats - and the subsequent waves of wanna-bes that still litter the sociocultural landscape - would take some time to look at the entire sweep of human existence, they'd see that it's replete with such folly, such failed attempts to find the True Dawning of An Unprecedented Era of Peace and Connectedness.

I had the misfortune of coming of age during the apex of the countercultural enterprise, when it was plaguing society in its most concentrated form. You have to give it credit, it was enticingly exotic. It offered a very appealing alternative to the square old bourgeois values recently enumerated by University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax. 

That stuff looked so stultifying compared to what the flower children and the New Left radicals were peddling.

What, once again, it takes a little historical perspective to realize is that us kids of the 1960s and 70s were living through the peak of Western civilization. The technological advancement, economic stability, national security and cultural resiliency that made for the milieu in which we were "maturing" was unprecedented and hasn't been seen since.

In his book Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, Jay Stevens talks about the happenings and love-ins in Golden Gate Park at the onset of the hippie era and points out that the participants weren't  scroungy plebeians from lower social rungs, but students and ex-students of some of the nation's most prestigious institutions of higher learning - Stanford, UC Berkeley, San Francisco State - and from homes in which high-achieving parents had bestowed a level of comfort and opportunity know to few. They were privileged, if you will. And here they were, gyrating, flailing their arms, gobbling psychedelics and engaging in sex with strangers, tossing away their birthrights in a most cavalier fashion.

And all the movements that came out of that initial burst - environmentalism, feminism, mainstreaming of homosexuality - were just refinements of that reckless hissy-fit.

At the most basic level, it's all built on the greatest conceit of all: the perfectibility of the human being. It's all predicated on the notion that the human being can invent himself and refine that invention and achieve mastery over creation.

In fact, the whole panoply of New-Age "spiritual" schemes have as their core the belief that one creates one's own reality.

It's now crashing down upon us, as we realize that the world is what it has always been, and human nature likewise hasn't change one stinking bit.

If our times look particularly cacophonous and devoid of aesthetic richness, if meanness and fear seem to be the most prominent traits of institutional behavior, we have only to look at what we permitted to "blossom" in our midst.

What's required to reverse course? I think you know. And it's not too late. But it's going to require a level of contrition that we'll find most uncomfortable.

We'll have to acknowledge that none of us is the center of the universe. Only one being gets to be that. And He'd like us to get off our high horse and return to His embrace, but he's not going to make us. That is our choice.