In that day and age at Berkeley there was, in truth, a kind of revulsion at the practical demands of everyday living. Fraternities were in sharp decline because they were seen as institutions of outmoded values (connections, wealth, Old Boy networks), and the more free-form aspirations of the Information Age were taking root. Not many of my contemporaries really aspired to make it as Organization Men. Of course, the downside of such a conceit is that organizations have inherent power not generally available to the solo flyer. I think this accounts, in some ways, for the ascendancy of such strange "leaders" as George W. Bush and Karl Rove: the field of "leadership" was to a large extent abandoned by what you might call the intellectual elite.
Many, if not nearly all, of my contemporaries moved into such fields as teaching, law, medicine and careers other than in Big Business and manufacturing (and I don't know anyone who went into politics). The field of business was seen as somehow "co-opted." One problem with this morally rarefied approach is that the things business does nevertheless remain absolutely essential--food, shelter, autos, furniture, energy--and whether my peeps wanted to get involved in the production end of such activities was not an answer to the necessity of participating in the consuming end.
The American Standard of Living, in terms of real earnings, peaked around 1974. This coincides with the first Oil Shock, when America was held hostage by OPEC countries because of its support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War of the preceding year. I doubt that it's coincidental that this was about the time my generation entered the Main Sequence of their careers. It's always extremely difficult (as in impossible) to analyze a system as complex as American society in terms of rigorously controlled variables and equations. Social science dabbles in such pursuits without any real hope of knowing anything; nevertheless, human curiosity always leads us toward a search for some understanding, however partial or notional, of the times we live in. And whether we can really state as a series of provable propositions the factors that led America to its present state, we intuitively grasp that our condition must result from the aggregation, the Σ effect, of all the choices, lifestyles and belief systems of the people living in the society. The "economy" is one powerful indicator of what's going on in a society; even Henry David Thoreau gave his longest chapter this very rubric in Walden. And the economy flat-lined about the time my generation moved into positions of economic power.
That by itself is fascinating. I recall writing earlier about Christopher Lasch's work of pop social psychology, The Culture of Narcissism, which attempted to get a handle on the "therapeutic society" he thought America had become: one less concerned about actually doing things than with the appearance of having done so and the maintenance of high self-esteem based on such images. Lasch had his own agenda, which was driven by a curious mix of Freudian anti-capitalism, and I think he could have seen more clearly than he did if he hadn't been constrained by the Procrustean limitations of his a priori beliefs. Still, I think he was on to something.
My generation might have taken its professed "idealism" and worked out a new way of having an economy; specifically, our generation was the one ideally placed to put the world on a course toward real environmental sustainability. To place humans in a balanced ecological framework is the last frontier of existence and purpose. It is the real solution to the Age of Anxiety, scarcity and the bad conscience that comes from our "Dominionist" arrogance. All during the youth and early middle age of my generation, there were voices that wrote powerfully about what it would take: Wendell Berry, Barry Commoner, Stewart Brand, Amory Lovins, many others. Sustainable agriculture, solar power, desalination of seawater, efficient habitats, mass transporation, localization of markets.
Instead, driven by the consumer choices of my generation, we moved in exactly the opposite direction. The flat-lined Seventies were followed by the go-go Eighties. You may recall the abbreviation "A&M" from that era, from such shows as "L.A. Law" and movies such as "Wall Street." Acquisitions and Mergers. The consolidation of economic power in fewer and fewer hands. It was solid work for the vast phalanxes of lawyers produced by My Peeps. Thus, the rise of holding companies, big box chain stores, franchise food, agribusiness, crap jobs and the "service" economy. By the time the Nineties rolled around, it seemed inevitable that all these bad choices would be followed up with the creation of the most popular form of transportation in American history: the SUV.
I sometimes wonder how a generation which prided itself in such an ostentatious way on the purity of its idealism could wind up in such a wrecked, wasteful, increasingly backward economy presided over by a cretin like George W. Bush. The answer, I suspect, lies somewhere in the ruminations of Christopher Lasch. Maybe what went on is that my generation substituted talking about the ideal society for the actual work of producing the real thing. No one went into politics where policy might have been shaped. We made choices reminiscent of our parents' choices in houses, cars, modes of living, except everything had to be much bigger, grander and more wasteful. The money we didn't earn we borrowed, in increasing amounts. In this we were only following the dubious example set by the federal government, which decided that nothing needed to be paid for now if the money to finance it (wars, a big defense budget, anything) could be borrowed, increasingly from foreign governments in nations where savings were not a thing of the past, as here.
And now we've hit the wall. The automatic assumption is that this "downturn" is cyclical, as all previous recessions have been. Here we return to the Analogy Axiom, which instructs us that apparently analogous situations are useful only if the facts are essentially the same in both cases. And the really bad news can be stated in rather stark terms: they're not.
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