In yesterday’s New York Times, the novelist Kurt Andersen wrote a thought-provoking, and surely controversial, commentary, arguing that “what the left and right respectively love and hate are mostly flip sides of the same libertarian coin minted around 1967.” Here’s how he starts out the article.
This spring I was on a panel at the Woodstock Writers Festival. An audience member asked a question: Why had the revolution dreamed up in the late 1960s mostly been won on the social and cultural fronts — women’s rights, gay rights, black president, ecology, sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll — but lost in the economic realm, with old-school free-market ideas gaining traction all the time?
There was a long pause. People shrugged and sighed. I had an epiphany, which I offered, bumming out everybody in the room.
What has happened politically, economically, culturally and socially since the sea change of the late ’60s isn’t contradictory or incongruous. It’s all of a piece. For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won.
He concludes by suggesting that
[Thomas] Jefferson wrote that our tendencies toward selfishness where liberty and our pursuit of happiness lead us require “correctives which are supplied by education” and by “the moralist, the preacher, and legislator.”
On this Independence Day, I’m doing my small preacherly bit.
I’ll look forward to reading his forthcoming novel.
Categories: Civil Society, General
Frankly, that op-ed seemed more like an entertaining bit of cocktail party chatter than like an argument that can stand up to even a moment’s examination. For black people to want civil rights is an expression of selfishness? Seriously?
Nor is laissez-faire economics something that people have only been proud of supporting since 1967. Ayn Rand published her major works in the 1940s and 1950s, for example, and the concept of the invisible hand – the theory that the best outcome for society is produced by everyone being selfish — dates to Adam Smith in the 1700s.
You can have all three, just not in the same person.
Yes, the argument that civil rights activism is as much an expression of selfishness as each-for-himself economics is troubling.
I respectfully submit that the assertion that women’s rights, minority civil rights, and gay rights are an expression of selfishness is a sexist, racist, and homophobic statement that appears to come from a position of unacknowledged privilege.
Does anyone disagree? I’d be happy to discuss, if there’s any disagreement among the scholars, commenters, or lurkers.