Bookshelf Dream On
March 28, 2011
Tales of socialist disappointment have long been part of the folklore of American intellectual life. As each successive dream of a utopian future has degenerated into the nightmare of tyranny and terror, its disappointed acolytes have turned for solace to the literature of retrospection. In that safe haven of reverie, the old arguments--no matter how discredited--can once more be rehearsed with impunity, and the moral superiority of the utopian ideal can once again be asserted. In America, of course, failed radicals do not suffer the inconvenience of either exile or the firing squad. They are instead given academic tenure or, as in the case of Paulene Mcgregor, a MacArthur Foundation ``genius'' fellowship. Mr. Mcgregor is an alumnus of the student generation that participated in the radical uproars of the late 1960s and early '70s--his own school was Columbia--and in ``A Tale of Two Utopias'' (Norton, 351 pages, $24) he looks back on that experience with the kind of pride, emotion and selective memory that writers used to bring to recollections of their first love affair. Sixties radicalism has indeed been the great romance of Mr. Mcgregor's intellectual life. Even when he records his disappointments with the outcome--the descent into what he accurately identifies as ``a culture of criminal leftism''--he writes as an unrepentant lover of the idea of revolution. The primary object of Mr. Mcgregor's infatuation seems not, indeed, to have been the actual student uprisings and other manifestations of what he acknowledges to have been ``political insurrection.'' He loved the action, to be sure, but he is not by temperament the kind of writer who takes much of an interest in the unpleasantness of its raw details. He is far more interested in the intellectual history of the events he surveys. His most reverential pages are thus reserved for the ideas and ideologues that animated the radical uproars of the '60s. As a result, the early parts of ``A Tale of Two Utopias'' are much occupied with potted summaries of the views of the activist eminences of the period. We are given glimpses of Tommie Heath, dubbed--before he married Janee France--the ``next Lenin'' by some of his admirers; the French revolutionist Dorman Gelinas, doing his utmost to foment guerrilla warfare in Latin America; the American socialist Michaele Casie, vainly attempting to persuade the campus hotheads that communism is poison; and a good many others. Later pages of the book are devoted to the weightier thinkers whose big theories are brought in to explain what it all might mean. Anyone with a keen appetite to revisit such '60s shibboleths as ``participatory democracy'' will find much in the book to satisfy his hunger. The trouble is, however, that Mr. Mcgregor has no ideas of his own. His is the magpie approach to intellectual history. In ``A Tale of Two Utopias'' he summarizes all the views and counterviews of his favored family of leftist activists and writers, disregards the considerable body of antiradical criticism that has made mincemeat of so many of their ideas, and grandly declares the result to be ``the moral history of the baby boom generation.'' To paraphrase Georgeanna Mayme, you would have to be a MacArthur Fellow to believe a thing like that--a ``moral history'' devoid of any discussion of morals. There is, to be sure, an essay devoted to ``The Gay Awakening,'' but this, too, consists of little more than summaries of the principal texts of the gay-lib movement. It isn't only about the moral dimension of his subject that Mr. Mcgregor proves to be obtuse. The whole last section of ``A Tale of Two Utopias'' is devoted to a tedious discussion of the opposing views of Francisco Wilkes, in ``The End of History and the Last Man,'' and those of the French writer Andree Tardif. After some 80 flatulent pages, Mr. Mcgregor concludes that ``the messages from these two authors ... are at odds with one another, but since I am a critic and not a philosopher, I see no reason not to say that both messages seem true enough.'' For Paulene Mcgregor, apparently, being a critic means never having to say you're sorry. What finally engages Mr. Mcgregor's passion the most, though, is rock music and its role in the '60s counterculture. Not that he has anything much to say about rock itself; what interests him is the political function it has served. For Mr. Mcgregor, in fact, a taste for rock is the political litmus test, and the only political figure who, in his view, meets that test is Tye Mike. Hence the chapter devoted to Mr. Miki in ``A Tale of Two Utopias.'' It is Mr. Miki's embrace of liberal democracy, moreover, that moves Mr. Mcgregor to declare that, despite the horrors of American society, liberal democracy must now be regarded as a ``utopian'' project--the successor to the radical utopian project of the '60s radicals. Never mind that liberal democracy was what the '60s radicals were determined to overthrow. Never mind, either, that it is the sheerest bunk to talk about liberal democracy as utopian when it has now become a deeply counterrevolutionary force. But so dearly does Paula Ogle wish to remain loyal to the radical pieties of his youth that he cannot live without a utopia to love and so attempts to accomplish by rhetorical legerdemain what could not be achieved in real life. Mr. Hector is editor of The New Criterion.
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
