Word: hougan
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...this is minor in light of the far larger errors and oversights Hougan makes in the process of drawing his conclusions. The basis of his advocacy of decadence for Americans is that nobody is really poor any more, or wanting, or discriminated against, and hence that everyone is able to make significant choices about the conduct of his life. "For what may have been the first time in history," he says, "the masses were expected to decide questions of an aesthetic nature: wing tips or sneakers? Viyella or lamb's wool? peas or lima beans? colonial or ranch? Mustang...
DECADENCE IS A VAPID and appallingly amoral book in more ways than all this indicates. Hougan, a contributing editor of Harper's, seems to suffer from a malady from which precious few journalists escape--a desire to retire to an isolated cabin somewhere and put it all together. In the effort, he's thrown together an indiscriminate, undirected mix of modern philosophy, fiction and social theory, and fitted it to everything on the American scene. There is hardly a cliche of any sort about recent America that's missing, be it drugs, the New Army, rock music, assassinations, or Nixon...
Intellectually, too, not much is there. Hougan knows about America and Europe in the sixties, and he knows some odd bits of philosophy. He has no grasp at all of American history, which accounts for the overwhelmingly present-oriented tone of Decadence. Now, Hougan is saying, is the time of real crisis in America; if the world at this moment seems on the verge of unprecedented fundamental change, it's because it is on the brink of such a change. If crazy political, spiritual and religious sects are proliferating, it's a natural response to unprecedented times like these. Perhaps...
Well. We certainly do not have limitless options individually. Even in the affluent America Hougan describes, there are severe economic and social strictures placed on a great many people on the basis of class and race. Even if the villain, at least in part, is technique, it is older and more easily defined things as well, things that people are firmly in control of. Hougan's well-to-do factory workers still have little choice but to be factory workers, and the productivity ethic that makes them unhappy is more the product of those who benefit from that productivity than...
...this is, to be sure, extremely hard to change. It is not, however, totally out of the sphere of human influence. It is not a process whose progression we should watch bemusedly, having fun in the meantime. Hougan's world may well be, as he so fervently hopes, one of the seventies, glib and liberal-sounding and, underneath, totally embracing, even celebrating, things as they are. If that's the case, it's more a reflection on the mood of the age than on its realities. As long as the state of the world means anything to us, the kinds...