Learning from the Fifties
Many Americans long for the virtues of the 1950s--community, security, certainty. To retrieve them, they will have to reconsider their allegiance to other cherished values.
Most of us in America believe a few simple propositions that seem so clear and self-evident they scarcely need to be said. Choice is a good thing in life, and the more of it we have, the happier we are. Authority is inherently suspect; nobody should have the right to tell others what to think or how to behave. Sin isn't personal, it's social; individual human beings are creatures of the society they live in.
Those ideas are the manifesto of an entire generation in America, the generation born in the baby boom years and now in its thirties and forties. They are powerful ideas. They all have the ring of truth. But in the past quarter-century, taken to excess, they have landed us in a great deal of trouble.