In 1968, in
San Francisco, I came across a curious footnote to the hippie
movement. At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic there were doctors who
were treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered
before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never
even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge,
the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot. And how was
it that they had now returned? It had to do with the fact that
thousands of young men and women had migrated to San Francisco to
live communally in what I think history will record as one of the
most extraordinary religious fevers of all time.
The hippies sought nothing less than to
sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from
zero. At one point the novelist Ken Kesey, leader of a commune
called the Merry Pranksters, organized a pilgrimage to Stonehenge
with the idea of returning to Anglo-Saxon civilization’s point
zero, which he figured was Stonehenge, and heading out all over
again to do it better. Among the codes and restraints that people
in the communes swept aside—quite purposely—were those that said
you shouldn’t use other people’s toothbrushes or sleep on other
people’s mattresses without changing the sheets or, as was more
likely, without using any sheets at all, or that you and five other
people shouldn’t drink from the same bottle of Shasta or take tokes
from the same cigarette. And now, in 1968, they were relearning …
the laws of hygiene … by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch,
the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.
This process, namely the
relearning—following a Promethean and unprecedented start from
zero—seems to me to be the leitmotif of the
twenty-first century in America.
“Start from zero” was the slogan of the Bauhaus School. The story of how the Bauhaus, a tiny artists’ movement in Germany in the 1920s, swept aside the architectural styles of the past and created the glass-box face of the modern American city during the twentieth century is a familiar one, and I won’t retell it. But I should mention the soaring spiritual exuberance with which the movement began, the passionate conviction of the Bauhaus’s leader, Walter Gropius, that by starting from zero in architecture and design man could free himself from the dead hand of the past. By the late 1970s, however, architects themselves were beginning to complain of the dead hand of the Bauhaus: the flat roofs, which leaked from rain and collapsed from snow; the tiny bare beige office cubicles, which made workers feel like component parts; the glass walls, which let in too much heat, too much cold, too much glare, and no air at all. The relearning is now under way in earnest. The architects are busy rummaging about in what the artist Richard Merkin calls the Big Closet. Inside the Big Closet, in promiscuous heaps, are the abandoned styles of the past. The current favorite rediscoveries: Classical, Georgian, Secession, and Moderne (Art Deco). Relearning on the wing, the architects are off on a binge of eclecticism comparable to the Victorian period’s 125 years ago.
In politics the twentieth century’s
great start from zero was one-party socialism, also known as
Communism or Marxism-Leninism. Given that system’s bad reputation
in the West today, it is instructive to read John Reed’s
Ten Days That Shook the World—before turning
to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag
Archipelago. The old strike-hall poster of a Promethean
worker in a blue shirt breaking his chains across his mighty chest
was in truth the vision of ultimate human freedom the movement
believed in at the outset. For intellectuals in the West the
painful dawn began with the publication of The
Gulag Archipelago in 1973. (See above, pp. 101-2.)
Solzhenitsyn insisted that the villain behind the Soviet
concentration-camp network was not Stalin or Lenin (who invented
the term “concentration camp”) or even Marxism. It was instead the
Soviets’ peculiarly twentieth-century notion that they could sweep
aside not only the old social order but also its religious ethic,
which had been millennia in the making (“common decency,” Orwell
called it) and reinvent morality … here … now … “at the point of a
gun,” in the famous phrase of the Maoists. Well before the sudden
breaching of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, the relearning
had reached the point where even ruling circles in the Soviet Union
and China had begun to wonder how best to convert Communism into
something other than, in Bernard Henri-Levy’s memorable phrase,
“barbarism with a human face.”
The great American contribution to the
twentieth century’s start from zero was in the area of manners and
mores, especially in what was rather primly called “the sexual
revolution.” In every hamlet, even in the erstwhile Bible Belt, may
be found the village brothel, no longer hidden in a house of blue
lights or red lights or behind a green door but openly advertised
by the side of the road with a thousand-watt backlit plastic sign:
TOTALLY ALL-NUDE GIRL SAUNA MASSAGE AND MARATHON ENCOUNTER SESSIONS
INSIDE. Up until 1985 pornographic movie theaters were as
ubiquitous as the 7-Eleven, including outdoor drive-ins with
screens six, seven, eight stories high, the better to beam all the
moistened folds and glistening nodes and stiffened giblets to a
panting American countryside. In 1985 the pornographic theater
began to be replaced by the pornographic videocassette, which could
be brought into any home. Up on the shelf in the den, next to the
World Book Encyclopedia and the Modern
Library Classics, one now finds the cassettes: Sally’s Alley; Young and Hung; Yo! Rambette!; Latin Teacher:
She Sucks, She Has Sucked, She Will Have Sucked. In the fall
of 1987, a twenty-five-year-old Long Island church secretary named
Jessica Hahn provoked a tittering flurry in the tabloid press when
the news broke that she had posed nude for Playboy magazine. Her punishment? A triumphal tour of
the nation’s television talk and variety shows. As far as I was
concerned, the high point came when a ten-year-old girl, a student
at a private school, wearing a buttercup blouse, a cardigan
sweater, and her school uniform skirt, approached her outside a
television studio with a stack of Playboy
magazines featuring the church secretary with breasts bare and
thighs ajar and asked her to autograph them. With the school’s
blessing, she intended to take the signed copies back to the campus
and hold a public auction. The proceeds would go to the
poor.
But in the sexual revolution, too, a
painful dawn broke in the 1980s, and the relearning, in the form of
prophylaxis, began. All may be summed up in a single term requiring
no amplification: AIDS.
The Great Relearning—if anything so prosaic as remedial education can be called great—should be thought of not so much as the end point of the twentieth century as the theme of the twenty-first. There is no law of history that says a new century must start ten or twenty years beforehand, but two times in a row it has worked out that way. The nineteenth century began with the American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth. The twentieth century began with the formulation of Marxism, Freudianism, and Modernism in the late nineteenth. And the twenty-first began with the Great Relearning—in the form of the destruction of the Berlin Wall in a single day, dramatizing the utter failure of the most momentous start-from-zero of all.
The twenty-first century, I predict,
will confound the twentieth-century notion of the Future as
something exciting, novel, unexpected, or radiant; as Progress, to
use an old word. It is already clear that the large cities, thanks
to the Relearning, will not even look new. Quite the opposite: the
cities of the year 2000 are already beginning to look more like the
cities of 1900 than the cities of 1980. From the South Bronx in New
York to Southeast in Atlanta, no longer is public housing (“the
projects”) built to look like commercial towers. The new look: the
twee ground-hugging suburban garden villas of London’s Hampstead
Heath. The twenty-first century will have a retrograde look and a
retrograde mental atmosphere. People of our craven new world, snug
in their Neo-Georgian apartment complexes, will gaze back with awe
upon the century just ended. They will regard the twentieth as the
century in which wars became so enormous they were known as World
Wars, the century in which technology leapt forward so rapidly man
developed the capacity to destroy the planet itself—but also the
capacity to escape to the stars on spaceships if it blew—and to
jigger with his own genes. But above all, they will look back upon
the twentieth as the century in which their forebears had the
amazing confidence, the Promethean brass, to defy the gods and try
to push man’s power and freedom to limitless, godlike extremes.
They will look back in awe … without the slightest temptation to
emulate the daring of those who swept aside all rules and tried to
start from zero. Instead, they will sink ever deeper into their
Neo-Louis bergères, idly twirling information about on the
Internet, killing time like Victorian matrons doing their
crocheting, knitting, tatting, needlepoint, and quilting, content
to live in what will be known as the Somnolent Century or the
Twentieth Century’s Hangover.