The enthusiastic centralizers had made a profound mistake.  They forgot that government is the social agent of force and compulsion, and it is also the locus of the one-size-fits-all.  Government of any kind is remarkably resistant to change, for even the most arbitrary government finds itself ensnared by a multitude of special interests that resist with passion any attempt to reduce their pensions or subsidies.  It’s a good thing to entrust to the government tasks that require rigid consistency, resistance to change, and national uniformity.  A government like the United States of America and its subdivisions, deliberately designed by its founders to be limited, has even less ability to respond to changing circumstances and requirements.  So it’s a bad thing to assign responsibilities that require flexibility, responsiveness, and the need to treat different people in different ways to an institution designed to resist change.  From a purely practical point of view, as F.A. Hayek taught us, government just doesn’t have the bandwidth to be flexible and responsive.  It is designed to be deliberative, to consult all points of view, and only to move when consensus has been achieved.  When a government starts to act with dispatch it starts to foment heads of rebellion in those who find themselves damaged by its sudden action; when a government begins to treat people differently, it starts to set one group against another, and it finds itself forced to declare endless emergencies in order to short-circuit its natural inclination towards deliberation and delay.  All of this was comprehended by the classical liberals when they designed the minimal bourgeois state of the nineteenth century.  It became ugly reality in the monstrous leviathans constructed by centralizing enthusiasts in the twentieth century.

It is not surprising that in the years after World War II’s bloodbath of pure red consciousness, people returned to a blue bourgeois ethos in the conformist Fifties, when the unemployed kid who had rallied to Roosevelt in 1933 and gone off to war in 1942 returned to wive and thrive in the utilitarian Levittown suburbs that were built around the old industrial cities of the Northeast.  But as the working stiffs of the 1930s were driving their Fords and Chevies into the respectable middle class, a new wave of Romanticism was born.  Beginning in coteries and subcultures in the 1940s and 1950s, it exploded into world consciousness in the Sixties.  A new generation of bourgeois sons and daughters found that they wanted to transcend the world of the gray flannel suit, the culture of the dutiful middle class worker who played by the rules and didn’t rock the boat.  The form and the content of this new Romantic wave was the same as the earlier waves in the nineteenth century and the 1920s, but this time the middle class was much larger.  Like its earlier incarnations, it made the mistake of supposing that the orange creative life required its devotees to throw away the false consciousness of blue rules and traditional roles.  Genius would make its own rules.  Thus, the creative revolutionaries in the advertising industry imagined that they could completely dispense with the careful analysis and market research of their older colleagues that had sold consumer goods to the American people in the 1950s.  They did not seem to understand the irony of selling to the young millions of identical Ford Mustangs as badges of rebellion against conformity.

The Sixties came crashing down in the 1970s.  This was hardly surprising.  Rejecting the ethos of rules, the creative revolutionaries regressed to the red consciousness of addiction and pathology.  The creative life is not, after all, a matter of inspiration and intuition.  It is mostly a hard slog of earthly dedication relieved for a divine moment by heavenly inspiration.  Unfortunately the anti-bourgeois ethos of the Sixties generation had also seeped into the nation’s politics.  The hard slog of the American Dream, the climb from immigrant scrabbling to respectable middle-class competence was abandoned.  The poor would be whisked into the middle class by a War on Poverty.  The hard money of the 1950s would be replaced by a policy of inflation to avoid paying the real costs of the Vietnam War.  And when the inevitable corrective recession hit, it would be masked by a disastrous policy of wage and price controls.  But the idea of creativity as a desideratum endured and spread across the spectrum of educated Americans.  Republican cheerleader Peggy Noonan wrote that at the turn of the twenty-first century that we were all creatives now.  And social critic David Brooks noted the reconciliation of the commercial creatives and the artsy creatives in the rise of the Bobos, the bohemian bourgeoisie.  This meant that the creative spirits were beginning to acknowledge that creativity must operate on the shoulders of the rules.  The watchword was no longer Down With Rules, but Transcend The Rules.

The Sixties did not just mark an outburst of orange secular creativity.  As in the Romantic creative upwelling of the nineteenth century it also marked an outburst in spiritual creativity and a New Left that represented a new outburst of green consciousness, a desire to rise above ego—in the arts game or the writing game—and find a new sense of spiritual growth or universal community.  Yet again, its leaders and followers seemed to be determined to repeat the mistakes of the nineteenth century Romantics.  They were ashamed of their bourgeois roots and their parents’ rigid conformity.  They dreamed of a world of nonviolence, and caring and sharing.  They picked apart the heroic myth of the civilizing white man and exhumed the cultural genocide and imperialist violence that was buried beneath the tombstone of the White Man’s Burden.  Theirs would be a world in which all the cultures of the world would freely mix, enriching each other with their variety and diversity.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill