on them. The hairpin by the bed reveals that the woman who had been in the room was a brunette; Steinbeck begins to think of her as Lucille. They drank an entire bottle of Jack Daniel’s together. The second pillow on the bed had been used but not slept on—no lipstick traces. The woman had let Harry get drunk, but she secretly poured her whiskey into the vase of red roses on the desk.
“I wonder what Harry and Lucille talked about,” Steinbeck writes. “I wonder whether she made him less lonesome. Somehow I doubt it. I think both of them were doing what was expected of them.” Harry shouldn’t have drunk so much. Steinbeck found Tums wrappers in the wastebasket and two foil tubes of Bromo-Seltzer in the bathroom. There was no sign of anything unexpected, Steinbeck wrote, no sign of any real fun, no sign of spontaneous joy. Just loneliness. “I felt sad about Harry,” he concluded. This was what happened when your life was lived in a drab manner serving some soulless organization. Not only were you unfulfilled, you lost the capacity to even feel anything.
There was a lot of commentary in those days about the soul-sucking perils of conformity, of being nothing more than an organization man, the man in the gray flannel suit, a numb status seeker. There was a sense that the group had crushed the individual, and that people, reduced to a number, had no sense of an authentic self.
I’M FREE TO BE MYSELF
Steinbeck published Travels with Charley at just about the time that people were beginning to rebel against the “We’re All in This Together” moral ecology of the postwar years, and put a new one in its place. The parade of moral ecologies is usually a story of progress, a rational response to the obsolescence of what came before. Nonetheless, this progress is a bumpy kind of progress.
Often it happens in what geographer Ruth DeFries calls the “ratchet, hatchet, pivot; ratchet” pattern. People create a moral ecology that helps them solve the problems of their moment. That ecology works, and society ratchets upward. But over time the ecology becomes less relevant to new problems that arise. The old culture grows rigid, and members of a counterculture take a hatchet to it. There’s a period of turmoil and competition as the champions of the different moral orders fight to see which new culture will prevail. At these moments—1848, 1917, 1968, today—it’s easy to get depressed and to feel that society is coming apart at the seams. There are gigantic and often brutal wars of consecration, battles about what way of life is admired most. Eventually society pivots over and settles on a new moral ecology, a new set of standards of right and wrong. Once that’s in place, there is a new ratchet of progress, and the stumble of progress takes another step.
When a culture changes, obviously not everybody changes all at once. This is a big, diverse society. But the average of behavior changes. Some desires and values get prioritized, and others are not. Some formerly admirable things are disdained and formerly marginal things are admired.
I want to emphasize who leads change in these moments, because it is relevant to the moment we find ourselves in today. It’s not politicians who lead this kind of change. Instead it’s moral activists and cultural pioneers. Those who shape the manners and mores are the true legislators of mankind—they wield the greatest power and influence. It usually starts with a subculture. A small group of creative individuals finds the current moral ecology oppressive and alienating. So they go back in history and update an old moral ecology that seems to provide a better way to live. They create a lifestyle that others find attractive. If you can create a social movement that people want to join, they will bend their energies and ideas to you.
As Joseph Campbell put it in an interview with Bill Moyers, there are two types of deed. There is the physical deed: the hero who performs an act of bravery in war and saves a village. But there is also the spiritual hero, who has found a new and better way of experiencing spiritual life, and then comes back and communicates it to everyone else. Or, in Iris Murdoch’s words: “Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.”
In the 1960s, small groups of young people on communes and hippie communities went