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15 Jun 2007 08:09 am

Hippies and Christianists

One of the premises of Brink Lindsey's new book, "The Age of Abundance," is that the prosperity of 1960s and 1970s spawned two genuine social movements - the rebellious spiritual counter-culture of the Summer of Love and the religious right's attempt to put the genie of sexual and personal liberation back into the fundamentalist bottle. Brink's thesis is that capitalism's post-war success in creating unprecedented prosperity led to widespread spiritual yearning and the leisure to express it fully. Neither hippies nor Christianists fully won, and their forced truce helped cement modern America's libertarian, federalist politics. Count me convinced of the case for forgoing moral certainty in politics in favor of a shallower, skeptical formalism of live-and-let-live.

The genius of America, it seems to me, is its capacity to include people of radically different worldviews within a loose, flexible and constantly adjusting constitutional system. Given the huge differences between, say, a born-again evangelical in Georgia and a pot-smoking post-boomer in Seattle, no single cultural strait-jacket can ever hold America together. That's why we mercifully don't have such a strait-jacket, despite the excesses of the cultural left and right. We have a constitution that allows us to live together and even learn from each other in a morass of competing life-choices. This kind of politics eschews the dictatorial uniformity of Roe vs Wade and of the Federal Marriage Amendment. Both spring from the same controlling, moralistic urge to compel coherence in a society where freedom and sheer time will always spawn glorious, always-shifting incoherence and moral doubt.

George Will gives "The Age of Abundance" a rave in the NYT:

"Americans," Lindsey writes, "have become a different kind of people," transformed by capitalism's fecundity. Although often "derided for its superficial banality," materialism has resulted in "a flood tide of spiritual yearning." Various scolds and worrywarts have exclaimed, with Wordsworth, that "getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." To such Jeremiahs, Lindsey provides an essentially cheerful, although not altogether so, counterpoint: affluence has made America a more libertarian, and hence a nicer, place.

Brinks' book-blog can be read here. Danny Finkelstein had some thoughts about it yesterday. I've only read the Reason excerpt. But it alone sold me on the book.

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