"The Great Relearning"

In my humble opinion, best-selling author Tom Wolfe is one of the most insightful critics of contemporary American life. Even when I don’t agree with him (see this article), Wolfe always has plenty of interesting things to say which stimulate new ideas, visions, and theories. His latest novel, I am Charlotte Simmons, is probably the second-best novel I’ve ever read (after Atlas Shrugged).

But I digress…

In 1987, Mr. Wolfe wrote an article for the American Spectator called, Brave New World Bites the Dust (unfortunately, it isn’t available online). The thrust of Mr. Wolfe’s piece is that American culture – after surviving the transformational shocks of the 1960s and 70s - is experiencing a social conservative awakening; what he calls a “Great Relearning.”

The hippies, as they became known, sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero. At one point Ken Kesey organized a pilgrimage to Stonehenge with the idea of returning to our civilization's point zero, which he figured was Stonehenge, and heading out all over again to do it better.

In politics, the twentieth century's great start from zero was one-party socialism, also known as communism or Marxism-Lenin-ism.

Today the relearning has reached the point that even ruling circles in the Soviet Union and China have begun to wonder how best to convert communism into something other than, in Susan Sontag's phrase, successful fascism. The great U.S. contribution to the twentienth century's start from zero was in the area of manners and mores, especially in what was rather primly called 'the sexual revolution.' In every U.S. hamlet, even in the erstwhile Bible Belt, may be found the village brothel, no longer hidden in a house of blue lights or red lights behind a green door but openly advertised by the side of the road with a 1,000-watt back-lit plastic sign: Totally All-Nude Girl Sauna Massage And Marathon Encounter Sessions Inside.

The great U.S. contribution to the twentienth century's start from zero was in the area of manners and mores, especially in what was rather primly called 'the sexual revolution.' In every U.S. hamlet, even in the erstwhile Bible Belt, may be found the village brothel, no longer hidden in a house of blue lights or red lights behind a green door but openly advertised by the side of the road with a 1,000-watt back-lit plastic sign: Totally All-Nude Girl Sauna Massage And Marathon Encounter Sessions Inside.

But in the sexual revolution, too, the painful dawn has already arrived, and the relearning is imminent. All may be summed up in a single term, requiring no amplification: AIDS.

The concept of a “Great Relearning” was taken up and expanded by several commentators, including Daniel Yankelovich (see his speech, “Lurch and Learn,” delivered in 1997), Francis Fukuyama, in his excellent book, The Great Disruption (published in 1999), and David Frum, in his equally fine, How We Got Here: The 70’s--The Decade that Brought You Modern Life--For Better or Worse (published in 2000).

From Yankelovich’s speech…

Towards the end of the 1960s, our market research studies were picking up more and more reverberations of the nation's changing values…Across the board, in life insurance, cars, foods, cosmetics, housing, women's clothing and other products and services, the new values began to express themselves both in consumer behavior and on the societal front.

These value changes were strongest among young people, creating what was famously called a "generation gap."

By the end of the decade the enormity of the change was unmistakable.

Our research uncovered several extraordinary discontinuities in values which we later came to think of as "lurches." There were two such lurches that later turned out to be closely related. One was a lurch from a depression psychology to a psychology of affluence. The depression psychology had taken hold in the 1930s and, remarkably, had persisted throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, even when the economy was steadily improving. Indeed, it wasn't until the middle of the 1960s that people began to think, "Well, maybe these good times will continue. Maybe they will really last." Almost overnight, people shifted from the conviction that "it won't last and we had better save every penny" to the conviction that "it's here forever; there's no limit to what we can now do with all this new affluence.

The other lurch was, as stated earlier, a shift from automatic sacrifice for the family to a questioning of the need for sacrifice in an affluent society. Unfortunately, questioning the desirability of unnecessary sacrifice in the 1960s and 1970s evolved in the 1980s into questioning the desirability of any sacrifice whatever. We have been struggling with the consequences of this shift ever since.

Yankelovich then goes on to say…

We have come to the conclusion that the theory that best accounts for the discontinuities, the seeming contradictions, and the odd patterns of movement in the tracking data we have been collecting over the past 35 years is a theory we call "lurch-and-learn." It is a pattern that starts with a sharp discontinuity, often a reversal (a lurch), which is then followed by a complex series of modifications based on social learning, some of which are valid and some of which are false learning…

Society's lurch and learn process is far more mistake-prone than individual learning. Society's lurches can lead to serious mistakes before corrective learning takes hold. We have developed some useful insights into the kind of learning that occurs in the lurch phase. When people find themselves in the full heat of a reactive lurch, their mood is unstable. Learning occurs exclusively in the direction of the lurch. In the lurch phase, people are quite error prone because of their strong emotions.

People don't like to change. They don't like to admit to mistakes. They don't like to be reasonable when they are frustrated. So it takes a very long time for post-lurch learning to take place. In brief, what we are living through right now in the late 1990s are the results of both valid and false learning from lurches in value changes that took place in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. It has taken us a long time to deal with mistakes made in that period, and we still have a long way to go.

This is fascinating stuff. I share the opinion that social mores have experienced a two-pronged phase of “lurch and learn,” and here in 2009, we are probably in the final phases of a two-decade “Great Re-Learning,” which encompasses the initial “Lurch” part (in the 60s and 70s) and the “Learn” part (the 80s, 90s, and 2000s).

So what does all this have to do with The Mustard Seed?

Well, first of all, I think these concepts put a lot of meat on my May 12 post: "Will the Economic Crisis Inflame the Culture Wars or End Them?"

While none of the authors say this directly (after all, they were talking about event prior to 2000), we might infer that today – in the year 2009 - the current “Lurch and Learn/Great Relearning” may be nearing completion, and that we’re on the cusp of a new “Lurch/Learn” cycle (the content of which we can hardly know).

But even more grandly…can we entertain the idea that perhaps Science and Religion are experiencing their own “Lurch and Learn?”

If we are so bold…let’s mark the beginning of the “Lurch phase” of aggressive, militant Christianity in 325 A.D. with the Council of Nicea…then let’s begin the “Learn” phase with the Renaissance of the 1500s.

Then began the Scientific Revolution.

The “Lurch” phase can be dated to Darwin’s unveiling of his theory of “natural selection” in 1859…and the “Learn” phase could be dated to Brandon Carter’s articulation of the “Anthropic Principle” in 1973.

To help facilitate this “Great Relearning” in the scientific community, Christians can promote “scientific concepts” which support religion such as Intelligent Design.

As I wrote on Mar. 23: “History has an odd habit of repeating itself. But never in the way you expect.”

-Todd