In his brilliant essay "The Great Relearning," Tom Wolfe recounts a "curious
footnote to the hippie movement." In 1968, at the Haight-Ashbury Free
Clinic, doctors found themselves treating diseases "no living doctor had
ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had
never even picked up Latin names." These maladies had such names as the
mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the rot.
These afflictions materialized because those hippie pilgrims believed the
Man had nothing to teach them, so they turned their backs on "bourgeois"
morality, a category of knowledge that included this thing called "hygiene."
So they enjoyed communal toothbrushes, communal sheets, communal sex,
communal bathwater and communal, like, whatever. Living like Rousseau's
noble savages brought back the twitch, the thrush and the rot because it was
a grand lie that savagery was ever noble in the first place, and because a
lot of that stuff your grandmother taught you about everything from washing
your hands to not sleeping around actually had practical relevance.
Wolfe's essay has practical relevance, too. The recent elections are being
interpreted - accurately or not - as a repudiation of religious
conservatism. Obviously, this topic can't be settled here - or anywhere. But
as it's Thanksgiving, there's a basic point worth making: Tradition matters.
It matters whether you believe in God or whether you agree with that
esteemed theologian Elton John, who recently called for a ban on religion
because religion, according to Sir Elton, is bad for gay people.
I respect theological arguments for morality. But unless someone already
believes in God, saying "because God says so" has as much authority as
saying "don't do that because my umbrella stand says not to." The fact is
that traditional morality has practical authority independent of whether God
exists and whether we know His will.
Those hippies got the itch and twitch because they rejected what their
parents taught them. They believed that we could act as if this was Year
Zero and the world could be reinvented and reimagined from scratch. It's
inconceivable that their parents knew what the exact consequences of
rejecting traditional morality would be, but they knew on a dogmatic level
that it was a bad idea.