back and borrowed from the bohemian culture—its preference for long hair, youthfulness, rebellion, revolution, and open sexual mores; its rejection of all things bourgeois. They became, over time, Woodstock freaks, rebels, New Age explorers, and eventually bourgeois bohemians. They dressed differently and talked differently than the 1950s Organization Men. They conducted their relationships differently and organized their living arrangements differently.
What had once been respect for authority became rejection of authority. Once reticence was admired, but now expressiveness was admired. Once experience was revered, but now youth was celebrated. Once life was seen as a cycle of generations rooted in place. But now life was seen as a journey on the open road. Once the dominant ethos was about doing your duty, but now life was about doing your own thing. Where once the group had come first, now the individual came first. Once duty was admired most, now it was personal freedom.
That same year Travels with Charley was published, 1962, a group of student radicals met in Port Huron, Michigan. Their immediate goal was to fight racism in the north, but they ended up having a much broader impact. They had recently formed the Students for a Democratic Society and wrote the Port Huron Statement, which turned out to be a pretty good indicator of the moral ecology to come.
“The goal of man and society should be human independence,” they wrote, “a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning of life that is personally authentic….This kind of independence does not mean egoistic individualism—the object is not to have one’s way so much as it is to have a way that is one’s own.”
Basically, the 1960s counterculture took the expressive individualism that had been rattling around Romantic countercultures for centuries and made it the mainstream mode of modern life.
If “We’re All in This Together” was about the group, this new moral ecology was all about freedom, autonomy, authenticity. You might summarize it with the phrase “I’m Free to Be Myself.” This individualistic ethos, which has sometimes been called “selfism,” was pumped into the boomers with their breast milk, and it will be drained from every cavity by their morticians. It is an emancipation narrative. The idea was to be liberated from dogma, political oppression, social prejudice, and group conformity. This movement had a right-wing variant—the individual should be economically unregulated—and it had a left-wing variant—each person’s individually chosen lifestyle should be socially unregulated. But it was all about individual emancipation all the way down.
I don’t want to spend too much time describing this culture of individualism, authenticity, autonomy, and isolation because it has been described so masterfully by others: Philip Rieff in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism, Gail Sheehy in Passages, Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, Tom Wolfe in “The ‘Me’ Decade,” Erica Jong in Fear of Flying, Charles Taylor in The Ethics of Authenticity, Robert Bellah in Habits of the Heart, and Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone.
I just want to emphasize that the march toward freedom produced many great outcomes. The individualistic culture that emerged in the sixties broke through many of the chains that held down women and oppressed minorities. It loosened the bonds of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia. We could not have had Silicon Valley or the whole information age economy without the rebel individualism and bursts of creativity that were unleashed by this culture. It was an absolutely necessary cultural revolution.
But many ideas become false when taken to the extreme. America has always had a more individualistic culture than other places, which Tocqueville noticed back in the 1830s. But when individualism becomes the absolutely dominant ethos of a civilization—when it is not counterbalanced with any competing ethos—then the individuals within it may have maximum freedom, but the links between the individuals slowly begin to dissolve. The grand narrative of “I’m Free to Be Myself” has been playing out for about fifty years. It has evolved into a culture of hyper-individualism. This moral ecology is built on a series of ideas or assumptions. I’ll just list a few:
The buffered self. The autonomous individual is the fundamental unit of society. A community is a collection of individuals who are making their own choices about how to live. The best social arrangement guarantees the widest possible freedom for individual choice. The central social principle is “No Harm, No Foul.” Each individual has the right to live in any way he or she pleases as long as