THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL. 20, NO.

12 / DECEMBER 1987

Tom Wolfe

THE GREAT RELEARNING

The twentieth century is over.

I n 1968, in San Francisco, I came

across a curious footnote to the psy-
chedelic movement. At the Haight-
cedented start from zero—seems to me
to be the leitmotif of our current inter-
lude, here in the dying years of the
design man could free himself from the
dead hand of the past. By the late
1970s, however, architects themselves
Relearning on the wing, the architects
are off on a binge of eclecticism com-
parable to the Victorian period's a cen-
Ashbury Free Clinic there were doctors twentieth century. were beginning to complain of the dead tury ago.
who were treating diseases no living hand of the Bauhaus: the flat roofs, In politics the twentieth century's
doctor had ever encountered before, which leaked from rain and collapsed great start from zero was one-party
diseases that had disappeared so long " Q J tart from zero" was the slogan of from snow, the tiny bare beige office socialism, also known as Communism
ago they had never even picked up O the Bauhaus School. The story of cubicles, which made workers feel like or Marxism-Leninism. Given that sys-
Latin names, diseases such as the how the Bauhaus, a tiny artists' move- component parts, the glass walls, which tem's bad reputation in the West today
mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, ment in Germany in the 1920s, swept let in too much heat, too much cold, (even among the French intelligentsia),
the thrush, the scroff, the rot. And how aside the architectural styles of the past too much glare, and no air at all. The it is instructive to read John Reed's Ten
was it that they had now returned? It and created the glass-box face of the relearning is now underway in earnest. Days That Shook the World—before
had to do with the fact that thousands modern American city is a familiar The architects are busy rummaging turning to Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Ar-
of young men and women had mi- one, and I won't retell it. But I should about in what the artist Richard chipelago. The old strike hall poster of
grated to San Francisco to live com- mention the soaring spiritual exuber- Merkin calls the Big Closet. Inside the a Promethean worker in a blue shirt
munally in what I think history will ance with which the movement began, Big Closet, in promiscuous heaps, are breaking his chains across his mighty
record as one of the most extraordinary the passionate conviction of the Bau- the abandoned styles of the past. The chest was in truth the vision of ultimate
religious experiments of all time. haus's leader, Walter Gropius, that by current favorite rediscoveries: Classical, human freedom the movement believed
The hippies, as they became known, starting from zero in architecture and Secession, and Moderne (Art Deco). in at the outset. For intellectuals in the
sought nothing less than to sweep aside West the painful dawn began with the
all codes and restraints of the past and publication of the Gulag Archipelago
start out from zero. At one point Ken in 1973. Solzhenitsyn insisted that the
Kesey organized a pilgrimage to Stone- villain behind the Soviet concentration-
henge with the idea of returning to camp network was not Stalin or Lenin
Anglo-Saxon civilization's point zero, (who invented the term concentration
which he figured was Stonehenge, and camp) or even Marxism. It was instead
heading out all over again to do it bet- the Soviets' peculiarly twentieth-
ter. Among the codes and restraints century notion that they could sweep
that people in the communes swept aside not only the old social order but
aside—quite purposely—were those also its religious ethic, which had been
that said you shouldn't use other peo- millennia in the making ("common
ple's toothbrushes or sleep on other decency," Orwell called it) and re-
people's mattresses without changing invent morality . . . here . . . now . . .
the sheets or, as was more likely, with- "at the point of a gun," in the famous
out using any sheets at all or that you phrase of the Maoists. Today the re-
and five other people shouldn't drink learning has reached the point where
from the same bottle of Shasta or take even ruling circles in the Soviet Union
tokes from the same cigarette. And and China have begun to wonder how
now, in 1968, they were relearning . . . best to convert Communism into some-
the laws of hygiene . . . by getting the thing other than, in Susan Sontag's
mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, phrase, Successful Fascism.
the thrush, the scroff, the rot.
The great American contribution to
This process, namely the relearning the twentieth century's start from zero
—following a Promethean and unpre- was in the area of manners and mores,
especially in what was rather primly
Tom Wolfe is author of The Right called "the sexual revolution." In every
Stuff, From Bauhaus to Our House, hamlet, even in the erstwhile Bible Belt,
and, most recently, The Bonfire of the may be found the village brothel, no
Vanities (Farrar Straus Giroux). longer hidden in a house of blue lights

14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987

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or red lights or behind a green door but mosphere. People of the next century, destroy the planet itself—but also the back in awe . . . without the slightest
openly advertised by the side of the snug in their Neo-Georgian apartment capacity to escape to the stars on space temptation to emulate the daring of
road with a thousand-watt back-lit complexes, will gaze back with a ghast- ships if it blew. But above all they will those who swept aside all rules and
plastic sign: TOTALLY ALL-NUDE GIRL ly awe upon our time. They will regard look back upon the twentieth as the tried to start from zero. Instead, they
SAUNA MASSAGE AND MARATHON EN- the twentieth as the century in which century in which their forebears had will sink ever deeper into their Neo-
COUNTER SESSIONS INSIDE. U p until wars became so enormous they were the amazing confidence, the Promethe- Louis bergeres, content to live in what
two years ago pornographic movie known as World Wars, the century in an hubris, to defy the gods and try to will be known as the Somnolent Cen-
theaters were as ubiquitous as the which technology leapt forward so push man's power and freedom to lim- tury or the Twentieth Century's Hang-
Seven-Eleven, including outdoor drive- rapidly man developed the capacity to itless, god-like extremes. They will look over. •
ins with screens six, seven, eight storeys
high, the better to beam all the moist-
ened folds and glistening nodes and
stiffened giblets to a panting American
countryside. Two years ago the porno-
graphic theater began to be replaced by
the pornographic videocassette, which
The non-issue in Alaska
could be brought into any home. Up
on the shelf in the den, next to the set Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) a peak rate of about 1.5 million barrels a day—
of The Encyclopedia Brittanica and the has in recent months been much shrouded in about a fifth of U.S. production—but will soon
great books, one now finds the cas- controversy. Much of this controversy has cen- enter its inevitable period of decline. The real
settes: Shanks Akimbo, That Thing tered on whether a relatively small portion of issue in Alaska is whether or not America should
with the Cup. My favorite moment in these lands—1.5 million acres along the Beaufort maximize its economic domestic oil and gas
Jessica Hahn's triumphal tour of Me- Sea Coastal Plain, out of a total of 19 million production to reduce the nation's dependence on
dialand this fall came when a ten-year- acres—should be opened to oil exploration. foreign oil and its negative balance of pay-
old girl, a student at a private school, One of the latest salvos fired by the anti- ments—and do so in an environmentally accept-
wearing a buttercup blouse, a cardigan development forces came in the form of a letter to able manner.
an influential newspaper by a spokesman for an What about the environment? Would it truly
sweater, and her school uniform skirt,
environmental group. The letter makes a couple be despoiled, as the environmentalists state, if
approached her outside a television of statements worthy of examination. drilling were to take place?
studio with a stack of Playboy First, the writer states that there is "only a 19 A major issue environmentalists raise con-
magazines featuring the famous Hahn percent chance of finding any oil at all in the Arctic cerns Alaskan wildlife. Of all the animal species in
nude form and asked her to autograph refuge." But even at those odds—and taking risks the area, Secretary Hodel cited the caribou as the
them. With the school's blessing, she is what the oil business is all about—the coastal most likely to be affected. But Senator Frank H.
intended to take the signed copies back plain represents the best hope for a major on- Murkowski of Alaska has pointed out that the
to the campus and hold a public auc- shore oil strike in the United States. In fact, within caribou herd has, in fact, quadrupled at Prudhoe
tion. The proceeds would go to the the context of risks the oil industry usually faces Bay during the oil development years, and since
poor. in wildcat areas, those odds are actually rather construction of the Alaskan pipeline. Indeed, the
attractive. The coastal plain site is less than 100 caribou herd thrives in the area of the pipeline, in
But in the sexual revolution, too, the
miles from the Prudhoe Bay field. If oil is found in spite of dire warnings to the contrary.
painful dawn has already arrived, and the plain, according to Interior Department data, Still, the acreage under discussion does in-
the relearning is imminent. All may be it could represent between 600 million and 9.2 clude the calving grounds. Can the caribou
summed up in a single term, requiring billion barrels. The point is, we'll never know adapt? Senator Murkowski has discussed the
no amplification: AIDS. unless we drill. issue with a university scientist who has been
The letter also argues that if oil is discovered working with caribou herds for many years. His
in the Arctic refuge, "we will not be able to extract conclusion, according to the Senator: If oil devel-
opment were to occur near their usual calving
T he Great Relearning—if anything
so prosaic as remedial education
can be called great—should be thought
all of that oil, given current technology." That's got
to be the silliest anti-development argument ever
raised; ajl the oil in any field is never fully recov-
grounds, the caribou would simply move a mile or
so away.
of not as the end of the twentieth cen- ered. Drilling would never occur anywhere if it The controversy over the Arctic National
became conditional on whether 100 percent of Wildlife Refuge fills us with feelings of deja vu.
tury but the prelude to the twenty-first.
the oil could be produced. Moreover, the Interior The same anti-development arguments were
There is no law of history that says a Department's coastal plain estimates are for re- raised in the '60s and 70s, first over drilling at
new century must start ten or twenty coverable oil. And constant improvements are Prudhoe Bay, and later over the construction of
years beforehand, but two times in a being made in secondary and tertiary recovery the pipeline. We had hoped these questions were
row it has worked out that way. The methods; fields are yielding more and more of the settled once and for all; to raise them now is really
nineteenth century began with the oil as technology advances. to raise non-issues.
American and French revolutions of Dubious quibbles aside, the basic argument The energy and economic future of the
the late eighteenth. The twentieth cen- for development remains cogent, simple, and nation are too important to be sidetracked by
tury began with the formulation of pressing. Any oil found in the coastal plain, or non-issues. Oil exploration in Alaska should pro-
Marxism, Freudianism, and Modern- anywhere else in the U.S., would be more than ceed because the national interest requires it.
ism in the late nineteenth. And now the welcome. Oil imports are rising and domestic The arguments against development, when con-
production is falling. Prudhoe Bay itself, the larg- sidered against the nation's needs, seem to fall
twenty-first begins with the Great under the weight of both past experience and
est field in the U.S. at 10 billion barrels, has been
Relearning. producing for 10 years. It is currently producing at expert scrutiny.
The twenty-first century, I predict,
will confound the twentieth-century
notion of the Future as something ex-
citing, novel, unexpected, or radiant; as
Progress, to use an old word. It is
already clear that the large cities,
thanks to the Relearning, will not even
M@bil
look new. Quite the opposite; the cities
of 2007 will look more like the cities
of 1927 than the cities of 1987. The
©1987 Mobil Corporation
twenty-first century will have a retro-
grade look and a retrograde mental at-

THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 15

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