Hippies and Fundies

This year marks the 40th anniversary of both the Summer of Love and the founding of Oral Roberts University. It was the summer that my parents met, became Born-Again Christians, dropped out of college, got married and ran off to California, all in the span of two months. Within a few years these two children of suburban professionals were eking out a living on a farm with four kids and no TV. We saw both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans from the window of a yellow microbus with a cross bolted to the front end in place of the big VW logo. They marched against the Vietnam War, but they voted for Reagan (the first time, that is, by 1984 when we had a TV I remember my dad muttering darkly under his breath when the "Morning in America" commercial came on). So it goes without saying that this article in Reason Magazine resonated with me.

That split pits one set of half-truths against another. On the left gathered those who were most alive to the new possibilities created by the unprecedented mass affluence of the postwar years but at the same time were hostile to the social institutions—namely, the market and the middle-class work ethic—that created those possibilities. On the right rallied those who staunchly supported the institutions that created prosperity but who shrank from the social dynamism they were unleashing. One side denounced capitalism but gobbled its fruits; the other cursed the fruits while defending the system that bore them. Both causes were quixotic, and consequently neither fully realized its ambitions. But out of their messy dialectic, the logic of abundance would eventually fashion, if not a reworked consensus, then at least a new modus vivendi.

Personally, I think that I am freer and more prosperous on many levels as a result of rejecting both of these movements, and I believe that there are many (and will be many more) like me.