Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

426 I HOW THE MIND WORKSand careers. The new consciousness, emerging like flowers through thepavement, was expressed in their music, communes, hitchhiking, drugs,moon-gazing, peace salute, and even their clothing. Bell-bottoms, hesaid, "give the ankles a special freedom as if to invite dancing right on thestreet." The new consciousness promised "a higher reason, a morehuman community, and a new and liberated individual. Its ultimate creationwill be a new and enduring wholeness and beauty—a renewed relationshipof man to himself, to other men, to society, to nature, and to theland."Greening sold a million copies in a few months. It was serialized inthe New Yorker and discussed in a dozen articles in the New York Timesand in a volume of essays by the leading intellectuals of the day. JohnKenneth Galbraith gave it a positive review (though with a caveatexpressed in his title: "Who's Minding the Store?"). The book recentlycame out in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition.Reich wrote his book in the Yale dining halls, and based it on his conversationswith the students there. Those students, of course, wereamong the most privileged individuals in the history of humanity. WithMom and Dad paying the bills, everyone around them coming from theupper classes, and Ivy League credentials about to launch them intothe expanding economy of the 1960s, it was easy to believe that all youneed is love. After graduation day, Reich's generation became the Gucciwearing,Beemer-driving, condo-owning, gourmet-baby-breeding urbanprofessionals of the 1980s and 90s. Universal harmony was a style asephemeral as the bell-bottoms, a status symbol that distanced them fromrednecks, jocks, and the less hip preppies. As the post-60s rock musicianElvis Costello asked, "Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine no possessions'?"The Woodstock Nation was not the first Utopian dream to be shattered.The free-love communes of nineteenth-century America collapsedfrom sexual jealousy and the resentment of both sexes over the leaders'habit of accumulating young mistresses. The socialist Utopias of thetwentieth century became repressive empires led by men who collectedCadillacs and concubines. In anthropology, one South Sea island paradiseafter another has turned out to be nasty and brutish. MargaretMead said that nonchalant sex made the Samoans satisfied and free ofcrime; it turned out that the boys tutored one another in rape techniques.She called the Arapesh "gentle"; they were headhunters. She saidthat the Tshambuli reversed our sex roles, the men wearing curls and