America's Quest for the Ideal Self:
May, Henry F
An outbreak of cheerfulness AMERICA'S QUEST FOR THE IDEAL SELF DISSENT AND FULFILLMENT IN THE 60s AND 70s Peter Clecak Oxford. $27.50, 391 pp. Henry F. May IN THE present gloomy climate of...
...When the movement of the sixties broke up, he says, the society as a whole absorbed some of its personnel and some of its purposes...
...Rather it turned in part from broad social causes to the pursuit of individual and small-group "salvation...
...Having written several books on American radicalism from within, he has now drifted away from his former socialist assumptions though not from "leftward impulses...
...Clecak insists, underrate the quest because of their snobbish prejudices and pervasive nostalgia...
...From these beginnings sprang the multifaceted and militant "Movement" of the sixties, which successfully "rewrote the American agenda of social and cultural criticisms...
...He is not successful in explaining away all the shortcomings of the seventies, and need not have tried...
...I suspect that he is not yet quite at ease with his new opinions, and has not decided how far to the right they are going to take him...
...This book's honesty, freshness, and generous sympathies are less common...
...This enables him to tolerate, and therefore to see, some sorts of gains ignored by others, but cheerfulness has its price...
...These are common faults in this kind of writing...
...Radicals idealize the mid-sixties and spurn the seventies, liberals reject both and dream of Camelot, neo-conservatives look clear back to the order and world power of the fifties...
...All this proved salutary when seen as a whole, and was too strong to be stopped even by the narrowing economic and political horizons of the early eighties...
...It is in his treatment of the seventies that Clecak breaks most sharply with prevailing opinion...
...Clecak's kind of liberal religion seems to involve a remarkably cheerful view of human nature...
...He would have done better to fit his own cheerful insights into a more balanced view of the period...
...He has also "returned to a liberal branch of the Christian church, in spite of a Pentecostal heart, a Roman Catholic heritage, and a stubbornly skeptical sensitivity...
...Obviously a sensitive and humane man, he occasionally sounds like a nineteenth-century theorist of laissez-faire, demonstrating that all social evils are necessary to freedom, or even like an eighteenth-century poet who finds "all partial evil, universal good...
...It will serve as an example of some of the faults and many of the virtues of the times it deals with...
...It is true that contemporary American society is too various and vigorous to be summed up by fashionable breast-beaters...
...Like many academic writers, Mr...
...Clecak calls "the democratization of personhood...
...While Mr...
...According to Peter Clecak the two objectives of the quest were individual salvation (very broadly defined) and "a piece of social justice" for all sorts of groups...
...The religious content of the quest, latent in the sixties, became manifest in the seventies in the evangelical and charismatic movements, challenging all religious authority, in what Clecak calls the Protes-tantization of the Catholic church, and in the enormously varied search for mental and physical therapy...
...The selfishness of the "Me decade," cultural nihilism, educational failure, mediocrity, and vulgarity are all explained away...
...Intellectual critics of American culture, Mr...
...Clecak has made a brave attempt to deal with the most recent segment of that long history...
...He would also have done better if he had written more carefully and concisely...
...It is significant that the book leaves out foreign affairs almost entirely, and deals only briefly and unsatisfactorily with the nuclear danger...
...His achievement is partly explained by his personal history, which he sketches for us, openly and honestly, much in the manner of the sixties...
...The changing, unpredictable history of American movements of liberation is a fascinating and demanding subject for social historians, and Mr...
...This book, whose scope and style make summary difficult, contains many valuable particular insights...
...Henry F. May IN THE present gloomy climate of opinion it will come as a shock to many readers to encounter a book which presents the last two decades in America as a continuing and successful quest for fulfillment, reaching its peak in the late seventies and continuing into the Reagan period...
...Clecak clearly detests President Reagan, yet is driven to suggest that the ascendance of the right "may turn out to be more salutary than I have been able to imagine...
...If we think hard about the society of the fifties, few of us would want to bring it back, with all its rigidities and discriminations intact...
...Many of the changes of the last twenty years are by now so taken for granted that we fail to see them...
...and second and more important, a widening of personal and psychological options for us all...
...The quest started in the fifties as Catholics, Jews, and others penetrated the Wasp establishment and the Beat Generation writers challenged all cultural authority in the name of feeling and sensitivity...
...The general results were first, concrete gains for blacks, women, students, the handicapped, senior citizens, gays and others...
...Either they are necessary by-products of the quest, or they are exaggerated, or they are-seen properly-partly salutary...
...Clecak is aware of the Movement's failures and futilities, he treats it more sympathetically than many recent writers...
...Clecak spends too much time refuting his opponents...
...The combined result is what Mr...
...There is also something to be said for its general argument...
...Sometimes Clecak's catholic acceptance betrays him into super-Emersonian optimism...
...In the seventies the "quest" by no means stopped...
...His prose, sometimes forceful and persuasive, is occasionally awkward and often repetitive...
...Critics are further handicapped by their anti-religious bias, which prevents them from seeing the quasi-religious character of the sixties' rebellion-still more, from feeling any sympathy with the aspirations of the extremely varied evangelical movements of the seventies...
Vol. 110 • September 1983 • No. 16
