In the December 1987 edition of this magazine there appeared an essay by Tom Wolfe titled “The Great Relearning.” Wolfe’s essay chronicled the excesses and faddish enthusiasms of 20th century movements from politics to architecture, making the case that hard experience had eclipsed utopian fantasy, and that we had learned from our mistakes and would vault into the 21st century armed with this knowledge and avoid making the same mistakes. If only it were so.
Wolfe begins his essay with a vivid depiction of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic in San Francisco. It is 1968 and the hippie movement has reached its saturation point in American culture, swept away all those old-fashioned ideas of morality, dress, and behavior that the Man was using to keep us down. At ground zero in Haight-Ashbury, this cultural neutron bomb has left the building still standing, but within the blast radius, toxic flowers have begun to bloom. The doctors there are now “treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.” Consequently, the hippies “were relearning the laws of hygiene,” such as “you shouldn’t use other people’s toothbrushes or sleep on other people’s mattresses without changing the sheets or, as was more likely, without using any sheets at all.”
[T]hese movements are always emotionally driven and informed by a view of the world as it ought to be rather than as it is.
Wolfe is confident we have learned something from this hubris play. He ends his essay predicting the people of the 21st century will look back on the experiments of the previous century “with ghastly awe … without the slightest temptation to emulate the daring of those who swept aside all rules and tried to start from zero.” But if any enduring moral lesson could have been learned about the sweeping away of hierarchy and tradition, it would have been learned from the French Revolution. And nearly forty years after “The Great Relearning” first appeared, it is clear we have learned nothing.
Consider the wild-eyed enthusiasm for social reforms known as “the racial reckoning” that followed in the wake of George Floyd’s death. “Defund the police” became the cause celebre of every activist, many Democrat politicians (especially at the local level), and hordes of their benighted followers. Like the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, the results of that experiment are in too: According to statistics from the CDC’s WONDER database, black deaths from car accidents spiked enormously in the wake of depolicing, increasing an astonishing 55 percent.
Academia, not wanting to be left out, went all-in on racial reckoning reforms as well. The SAT, which was first instituted as an objective means of leveling the playing field between college applicants, was denounced as racist. Princeton, Columbia, Emory, Duke, Harvard, Brown, and many other elite schools, including the entire University of California system, declared, not without some self-righteousness, that they were going test-optional.
The result of this experiment was a cohort of freshmen who couldn’t do basic math, requiring a slew of new remedial courses, and inspiring a vocal backlash from (presumably liberal) academics. Recently a number of these schools, including Harvard, Brown, Dartmouth, and Stanford have reinstated SAT/ACT requirements, with considerably less celebration than when they eliminated them. Reality won, as it always does.
But of course the phenomenon of discarding decades-old wisdom (as well as common sense) — let’s call it “the great amnesia” — was not limited to racially-inflected reforms. In Oregon, old hippies, those survivors of the Haight-Ashbury diaspora, abetted by a younger cohort of nihilistic, Antifa-addled youth, passed laws decriminalizing drug possession. The predictable (at least for the Tom Wolfes of the world) result was an enormous spike in fatal overdoses, causing the state to reform their reforms and recriminalize drug offenses. (Notably, infectious diseases spiked as well. And not just HIV and Hepatitis C, but syphilis and necrotizing skin infections, “the thrush, the scroff, the rot” from Wolfe’s original article.)
One would assume from the rollback of these and a host of other failed policies that politicians, policy “experts,” and the vast proletariat as a whole must have undergone the relearning but that is not the case. An article appearing today from Fox9 Minneapolis states: “A set of ordinances to the Minneapolis city code that could pave the way for city officials to legalize venues such as bathhouses — where consenting adults can engage in sexual activity legally — moved a step closer toward approval on Tuesday and will now head to a full council vote for approval.” By the time this is published, it will likely have been approved. It is well-known that such bathhouses were the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. The late journalist Randy Shilts, who chronicled the role of bathhouses in spreading HIV (and who faced vicious criticism when he made an impassioned argument for their closing), would look “with ghastly awe” to borrow a phrase from Mr. Wolfe, at our continued and prolific foolishness.
With leftist policies, the moral arc is fairly short and bends toward misery and yet there will be no great relearning. Ironically, it is the painful relevance of Wolfe’s own books Radical Chic & Mau Mauing the Flakcatchers and The Bonfire of the Vanities, which could have easily been written today, that show this to be true. Instead we have these tiny relearnings, in which individuals and policy-makers are forced by the sheer intensity of reality, to course correct. This is learning without learning, a mindless organism’s pain response, without any lasting impressions on memory.
The reason for this is that these movements are always emotionally driven and informed by a view of the world as it ought to be rather than as it is. Emotions have no memory and no more capacity for learning than a pithed frog. They are passionate, intense, and above all, ephemeral. If we can learn anything at all it is that we do not learn, and that emotionally-ruled, reality-averse people, as Jesus says of the poor, will always be with us.
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Chris Jansen is a translator, essayist, and poet. His books include Hamlet Decoded, We Can Be Heroes: A Rehab Memoir, The Last Mayan, and The Lost Poems of Juan Ramón Jiménez. He lives in Athens, Georgia.
