Decade of Denial
A Snapshot of America in the 1990s

by Herbert I. London
Lexington Books, 2001. 208 pp. $27.95

Reviewed by Roger Kimball
American Outlook
Fall 2001

http://www.herblondon.org/1676/decade-of-denial

The Nasty Nineties

The most profound question posed during the 1996 presidential campaign was propounded by Bob Dole: “Where’s the outrage?” Why is it that middle America contemplated with equanimity the startling degradation of American culture—soaring illegitimacy and drug use, the normalization of deviance, the politicization and dumbing down of schools and colleges, the toxic mindlessness of popular culture: the whole panoply of excess and collapse that has been accelerating since the 1960s? Why did the Silent Majority remain silent in the face of innumerable challenges to its core values and beliefs about God, family, duty, and citizenship, to say nothing of the revolution in manners, morals, and taste that swept through society in the 1960s and 1970s? Where was the outrage when parents discovered that schools were fast becoming ideological factories designed to obliterate the values they had painstakingly sought to instill in their children, replacing them with a host of politically correct opinions certified by the Left-wing education establishment? Where was the outrage when middle-class families discovered that their children were being systematically discriminated against in the name of that great Orwellian idol, “affirmative action”? (How much less successful the Left would have been had affirmative action been called by its real name: “discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and ethnicity.”) Where was the outrage when one cultural institution after another joined the Bacchanalian whirl that heaped derision on traditional notions of probity, responsibility, and the common good? What moral anesthesia had been administered to keep people from decrying the widespread assault on values and commitments that, only yesterday, had defined their hopes and aspirations?

It says a great deal that Bob Dole’s plaintive question met with a resounding and embarrassed silence. Even many people who sided with Dole politically were put off by his question. After all, Dole’s allies were out to win an election, not indulge in moral finger-pointing. And when it became clear that even to raise the issue of morals and manners was to risk alienating a large percentage of the voting population, embarrassment turned to open hostility. “For God’s sake,” one could hear them mutter, “who cares how people behave so long as the economy whizzes along and we can manage to get ourselves voted into power? Time enough to worry about such frills and furbelows later.”

As Herbert London shows in Decade of Denial: A Snapshot of America in the 1990s, it was precisely that attitude of complicity that helped Dole lose the election and that plunged America even deeper into the cultural quagmire of liberal self-congratulation and moral relativism. In part, London has provided us with a pathologist’s scrapbook. Decade of Denial ranges widely over the landscape of American culture, adducing central examples of cultural decay in the media and entertainment industry, sports, education, moral and religious life, and even in institutions of scientific research, where the imperatives of political correctness are increasingly making themselves felt. (Consider, to take just one example, the way AIDS has become a politically privileged subject of research even though many other diseases pose a far greater public health threat.)

Decade of Denial is a handy compendium of real-life horror stories, a trophy case full of cultural and moral wrong turns, blighted hopes, and malicious misadventures. London has marshaled a wide range of statistics and anecdotal evidence. For example, it is chilling, is it not, to ponder the fact that there are more school administrators in the New York City school system than in all of Western Europe?

But Decade of Denial is not only an intellectual’s rogue’s gallery. It is also an eloquent plea for reclamation. London is careful to balance the picture he paints with signs of health, tokens of resistance. Thus, for example, he describes a visit to Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania, where the clock might have stopped circa 1955. The students are mannerly, neatly dressed, and respectful. They address their elders as “Sir” or “Madam,” follow a traditional “great books” curriculum, and understand that true education has its foundation in character.

Still, an accurate picture of American society in the 1990s is a vista that, while containing bright spots, is on balance troubling. Much of the story London unfolds in the diagnostic portions of the book will be familiar to observers of the cultural scene. Like many other commentators, London locates the origin of this malaise in the utopian ideologies of the 1960s. “The children of affluence,” he notes, “although only a small portion of the baby boomer generation, rocked the foundation of social stability in the late ’60s and early ’70s by espousing adolescent fantasies of utopia and glibly asserting mankind’s potential for sweetness and goodness.” As London points out, the utopian fantasies of the 1960s counterculture soon collided with the recalcitrant realities of human nature. “Something happened on the Eden express to Woodstock utopia,” London writes. “The stops along the way were laden with unexpected tragedy.” Curiously, however, no tocsin from the real world dampened the institutionalization of the utopian impulse. A disappointed utopian rarely gives up his fantasies; he merely changes their format. Thus it is that the cultural revolution of the 1960s bore its most poisonous fruit much later, in the 1980s and 1990s, when the ideas that animated fringe elements of 1960s society became mainstream. “In two decades,” London notes, “the counterculture, composed of the adversaries of every bourgeois belief, has become the culture.” What was outrageous yesterday is today’s established reality.

Whatever else it was, the long march of America’s cultural revolution was a capitalist, bourgeois phenomenon: a revolution of the privileged, by the privileged, and for the privileged. Previously, in the twentieth century, almost all political revolutions had brought on oppression. The cultural revolution in the West, by contrast, really has resulted in a form of liberation—but one must still ask: liberation from what and for what? The answers to those questions tell us whether the promised liberation is genuine or fraudulent. A dose of heroin may induce a feeling of freedom, but in reality, that feeling signals the onset of enslavement.

The socialist economist Joseph Schumpeter was wrong when he predicted, in a postscript to Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), that the collapse of capitalism and a triumphant “march into socialism” would occur in America in the near future. What we have seen instead is an explosion of capitalist energy in the marketplace shadowed by a steady creep into nanny-state socialism. But Schumpeter was uncannily right about the dangers bourgeois capitalist societies harbor within themselves. Perhaps he overstated the case when he asserted, in 1942, that “capitalism is being killed by its achievements.” But he was clearly onto something when he observed that

capitalism creates a critical frame of mind which, after having destroyed the moral authority of so many other institutions, in the end turns against its own; the bourgeois finds to his amazement that the rationalist attitude does not stop at the credentials of kings and popes but goes on to attack private property and the whole scheme of bourgeois values.

Rising standards of living, far from increasing allegiance to the regime that provides them (an allegiance that Schumpeter calls the “emotional attachment to the social order”), often paradoxically turn out to have the opposite effect and begin to foment disintegration. In this sense, the cultural revolution has been not so much anticapitalist as simply a toxic by-product of capitalism’s success: not so much antibourgeois as an expression of what Allan Bloom described as “the bourgeois’ need to feel that he is not bourgeois, to have dangerous experiments with the unlimited.”

These are phenomena with which London is intimately familiar. But Decade of Denial is not simply a collection of admonitory tales. If London rehearses the facts of our cultural and moral decline, he does so because a frank acknowledgment that something has gone wrong is a necessary preliminary to reform. First we must face up to what has happened to our culture. Then we can begin to draft “a guerrilla strategy for reclamation.”

The most conspicuous obstacle to facing up to our situation is the fact that our moral and cultural collapse has coexisted with a robust, indeed an astonishingly effervescent, economy. Who has time for quibbles about morality or cultural decline when everyone is getting rich? “A theme of fat wallets, hollow souls” overtook us in the 1990s, London observes. “Today Mammon is king.” This brings him to his deeper theme: “A free society and a free market must be constrained by virtue. Without it, freedom becomes license and license invariably becomes authoritarian or totalitarian control.” Thus it turns out that London’s book deals with a twofold “denial”: a denial that anything like cultural decline has in fact overtaken American society, and the further denial that the logic of laissez-faire economics legitimately pertains to markets but not to the spheres of moral and cultural life.

This is a point that many commentators, including many putatively conservative ones, have had difficulty digesting. In their enthusiasm for free markets, they have elided the distinction between the market, where freedom encourages growth, and morals, where genuine freedom requires virtue. This is not a new idea, but it is one that seems to have been lost sight of. The one thing that everyone remembers about Adam Smith was his idea that the improvement of civil society was founded not on benevolence but on the “invisible hand” that directed the self-interest of individuals to a higher good. But Smith also argued that the worst form of government was one “directed chiefly by the ends of commerce.” The disposition to improve oneself, so essential to economic health, Smith wrote, was at the same time “the great and most universal cause” of the “corruption of our moral sentiments.” Really to do justice to Smith, one needs to heed not only the argument put forward in The Wealth of Nations (1776) but also the argument put forward in A Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).

Today, many conservatives look around at our nation’s astonishing prosperity and respond to Bob Dole’s question by saying, “Who needs outrage? We’re doing fine, thanks.” For example, one prominent conservative commentator has cautioned that “we shouldn’t leap to conclusions about the supposed degradation of our culture,” partly because it is often “hard to tell whether the aggregate effect [of various cultural changes] is positive or negative,” partly because many “social indicators . . . are moving in the right direction: abortion rates are declining, crime is down, teenage sexual activity is down, divorce rates are dropping.”

Well, maybe. But as the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb pointed out in an article in The Wall Street Journal,

for almost every favorable statistic, an ornery conservative can cite an unfavorable one. He can even go beyond the statistics to point to the sorry state of the culture: the loss of parental authority and of discipline in the schools, the violence and vulgarity of television, the obscenity and sadism of rap music, the exhibitionism and narcissism of talk shows, the pornography and sexual perversions on the Internet, the binge-drinking and “hooking up” on college campuses.

And so on. If none of that makes much of an impression on a good many people, it is because of the overwhelming desire to scrap all such moral considerations and replace them with pragmatic, “utilitarian” tests. But of course a utilitarian test is not a moral test. The philosopher Russell Kirk was right to describe utilitarianism as “a philosophy of death.” It pretends to render moral decisions—decisions, that is to say, about good and evil—beside the point by subordinating them to some extrinsic calculus of pain and pleasure. But the end is not greater common sense about moral matters, only greater confusion. (As G. K. Chesterton put it, “Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.”) Irving Kristol succinctly identified the flaw in ultimate appeals to utilitarian tests when he wrote, “If you believe that a comfortable life is not necessarily the same thing as a good life, or even a meaningful life, then it will occur to you that efficiency is a means, not an end in itself.”

It is both ironical and dispiriting to realize that the counterculture may have won its most insidious victories not among its natural sympathizers on the Left but, on the contrary, among those putatively conservative opponents who can no longer distinguish between material affluence and the moral good. In other words, it may be that what the 1960s have wrought above all is a widespread spiritual paralysis. To a degree frightening to contemplate, we have lost that sixth sense that allows us to discriminate firmly between civilization and its discontents. In Decade of Denial, London has rendered two great services: he has powerfully reminded us of where we have gone wrong, and even more important, he has had the courage and tenacity to remind us of where the right path lies. “The decade of denial,” he writes, “recklessly damaged [our] treasured common life, but it can still be reclaimed.” London is right to argue that the effort of reclamation must begin with the recognition that the affluent life is not the same thing as the good life and that genuine prosperity must be animated by virtue. A couple of months ago, I would have said that his argument was cogent but unlikely to be widely heeded. In the aftermath of the terrorist atrocities of September 11, it may turn out that America’s decade of denial was a prelude to a new decade of decision. Herbert London’s wise anatomy of where we have been also offers a resolute and morally grounded itinerary for the future.

Roger Kimball is managing editor of The New Criterion and author of The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (Encounter Books, 2000) and Experiments Against Reality (Ivan R. Dee. Publishers, 2000).

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