The Endless Rediscovery of the Wheel

By LANCE MORROW

A issue woman of writing Vogue in a began by recent circling her subject -- marriage -- like an anthropologist studying some tribal fetish stumbled upon in a clearing in New Guinea, seven days' march from civilization. The author, Lyn Davis Genelli, analyzed the oddity with brisk dogmatic scholarship: "[Marriage] can be seen as an irrelevant residue of an outworn patriarchal society . . ."

It looked as if matrimony were in for another of the ideological muggings that have become as common in the past ten years as Mickey Ropney's honeymoons were in an earlier age. But wait. A regressively cuddly, softening note sounded: "Nevertheless, snuggled in bed at night, that small voice inside still says, 'I want to be married.' " And it may even be all right, wrote Genelli, to heed that little whisper. Before she had finished with the subject, in fact, she had not only granted matrimony a grudging endorsement (after all, "for some but not all couples, legal marriage offers tax advantages"), but soared to a sort of Ann Landers altitude of uplift:

"[Marriage] is a way of learning how to love."

Something like an emotional equivalent of the back-to-basics movement in the schools has now swept quietly over vast sections of the American psyche. A sneaking preference for what once, generations ago, was called square has broken into the open. Certain values like stable family, satisfyingly useful hard work, competition and excellence have reappeared here and there: the moral equivalents of Bass Weejuns and button-down shirts. A cynic would say that the culture's manic quest for novelty has simply exhausted some of its adventurously kinky experiments (open marriage, bisexuality, a doctrinaire celibacy, banana smoking and roller disco) and so returned to the Real Thing, temporarily no doubt. It is all transient fashion, the cynic would say, like a return of the '40s look. Jerry Rubin, Yippie leader back in the '60s, turns up now on Wall Street as well-dressed broker. The designer Betsey Johnson, a woman who previously went around with her hair dyed pink or green and a lightning bolt tattooed above her left breast, is now being seen wearing a simple little black dress.

Plato said that man kind never discovers anything new, but comes into the world knowing subconsciously all that can be known and simply exhumes it in a remembering process called anamnesis. In a variety of fields-educational, moral political, social-anamnesis is busy these days dredging the pools. The process is not the same as the Moral Majority thundering its "Live clean or die!"

--the gust of primitive certitude blowing in from the right. The grudgingly delighted little rediscoveries of marriage and other products of anamnesis seem part of a new American talent for throwing open the door to the worthy and obvious, to a solid modest vista of common sense or even virtue, and treating it as a revelation that the cosmos has, until now, kept hidden. It is like discovering the wheel all over again.

A psychologist reported this fall that, on the whole, children suffer when their parents get divorced. Educational theorists have "discovered" a high correlation between "time spent on task" (a noisome item of educational jargon) and favorable results -- meaning that if students work at reading and writing, they get better at them. Tax money sweated from the public brow was spent to reach that conclusion, as well as the revolutionary information that well-educated, experienced teachers produce more successful students than do badly educated, in experienced teachers. Other recent expert conclusions: people with good nutrition live longer; rising temperatures make people irritable; men think that family life is important, even crucial, to happiness.

For years, Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire presented his Golden Fleece awards to expensively brainless research projects carried out with taxpayers' money. Prizes went, for example, to an $84,000 study of why people fall in love, to a $46,000 Department of Agriculture study to determine how long it takes to cook breakfast, and to a $27,000 Law Enforcement Assistance Administration investigation of why inmates want to escape from prison. Proxmire's approach carried the danger of attacking worthwhile but esoteric research, but it provided useful comment on the flourishing academic industry in what is either too resoundingly obvious to require exploration or too crushingly inane to deserve it.

The tendency has international dimensions. In France the New Philosophers have found, amazingly enough, that Communist regimes are frequently repressive and brutal. (Jimmy Carter suddenly experienced a similar insight into Soviet character just after the invasion of Afghanistan.) The Chinese are still discovering, the hard way, that a Cultural Revolution that systematically destroys the country's culture, its very brains, is not, on the whole, thinking of its own future. They have reinvented a number of pre-Maoist wheels, including even the incentives of some private ownership.

In the U.S. the rediscovery of the obvious has outgrown professional boundaries and become a kind of cultural style. The phenomenon is sometimes touching, the drama of a prodigal culture now returning, much bruised, but bizarrely amnesic rather than wiser, from orgies in town. In marriage's new respectability, even the formal wedding ceremony, after all those years of Kahlil Gibran's mystic doggerel exchanged by bare footed couples in meadows, has recovered some of its dignity as a matrimonial rite of passage, a signal that the enterprise the couple means to embark upon is not merely emotional kite flying but a serious, premeditated act with both private and social dimensions. Churches have discovered that their congregations did not want them to follow a hip and with-it agenda.

Police tend to be more accepted now as social necessities rather than the ideological symbols. History has regained a little theoretical relevance. Trolleys and trains seem to make sense again. Anita Bryant, the Pasionaria of the Leave It to Beaver morality, admits that "answers are not so simple now."

The strange part is the air of pleased surprise and originality that attends each rediscovery. It is always odd to realize how short the collective memory is. Evidently, in times of tumblingly surreal change in the world, the human does not transmit from parent to child certain basic lore and procedural data. Knowledge that any peasant instinctively possesses now arrives at the front door in a burst of light, like revelation. A doctor who opened a free clinic for hippies in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the late '60s found that his patients were showing up with infections, sores and other maladies that medicine had not seen I since the 13th century. The flower children had simply unlearned centuries of civilization's experience in the field of hygiene; in their bedding, clothing and grooming they had reverted to a state of nature that Rousseau never imagined. Then, gropingly and painfully, they went about reformulating the basic rules of body maintenance: they reinvented soap and water.

A pervasive solipsism may account for the need to go around periodically rediscovering the wheel. The notion that all human history began at one's own birth, a common delusion, remains extraordinarily strong, even in an electronic and allegedly literate civilization capable of reproducing the prenatal past at the touch of a button or the cracking of a book. As the Italian writer Giovanni Papini wrote about his generation of World War I, "For the 20-year-old man, every old man is the enemy; every idea is suspect; every great man is there to be put on trial; past history seems a long night broken only by lamps, a gray and impatient waiting, an eternal dawn of that morning that emerges today finally with us."

The past is not always right, of course, nor the innovator always wrong. The desolate eternalist of Ecclesiastes ("There is no new thing under the sun") should be profoundly boring to anyone under 70. The problem is that values (these days, even elementary skills in how to raise children) vanish into the cracks between generations. Anthropologist Margaret Mead believed ten years ago that the West had entered an age so headlong in its rush toward the future that the old no longer had much of value to teach the young. Well, the future no longer seems quite so wildly original. But even in rigidly traditional epochs, it was human nature for one generation to reject, dynamite and otherwise ridicule the structures and ideas of the previous generation in order to make room for its own. Often enough, when the Oedipal din has died down, the world has been left with a new wheel rather like the old one. St. Augustine detested his fa ther and rejected him with an unholy vehemence. Yet in his later years, Augustine in many ways came to resemble his father almost eerily.

Generational hubris has always been especially robust in the children of the postwar baby boom; their sheer numbers gave many of them a swelling sense of their own inevitability, their unique moral Tightness. Everything they did was done in the incandescent certainty, the grand optical illusion, that it had never, ever been tried or felt before. No doubt as the baby boomers pass on through life, their millennial pretensions will do for middle age and old age what they did for youth in the '60s: in 35 years will come geriatric chic, revolution in the nursing homes. But just now, the baby boomers, in their early-to mid-30s, are grappling for the first time with life's serious, mundane and (in many cases) long postponed business: trying to discover living arrangements more permanent than mere roommating, finding ways to raise children, shelter them, nourish them, educate them, serve as models for them and otherwise turn them into the next generation -- a hopeful and sometimes painful drudgery that is invariably hard on narcissists. The aging baby boomers are now daddies and mommies with careers to build and all kinds of adult banalities to face: failures and divorces and alcoholisms and, yes, now deaths.

Up close, the process of generational amnesia and painful relearning seems wasteful; it leaves the countryside strewn with all kinds of debris -- dead fathers surrounded by the or phan parricides who exuberantly did them in but do not even know yet how to use a spoon. However, as Albert Einstein once observed, "God is subtle, but he is not malicious."

The business of forgetfulness and rediscovery may be part of a vast dialectic sifting and refinement by which history discovers, and interminably rediscovers, whatever is worth keeping.

-- By Lance Morrow

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.