thing outside their fields of specialty.nYankelovich, who is fond of sweeping allusionsnto all Western history and literature,nfails to discover any fruitful parallelsnfor our contemporary social ills. We arcnnot the first society to experience a dissolutionnof norms or an obsession with selffulfillment.nGreeks of the 3rd century,nwho suffered from a breakdown in theirnsocial and political institutions, turnedn—as we are turning now—to the salvationnethics of Epicurus and the earlynStoics. Similar developments in thenRenaissance led to the private search fornTrue Religion, coupled with a desperatenpursuit of mysticism, witchcraft and personalngain. We have come—as otherngenerations have come—to the timesnprophesied by Hesiod, when “Fathersnwill quarrel with children, children withnfathers. . . . Men will dishonor theirnparents and blame them . . . and notnrepay them what they owe for their upbringing.”nWhat is peculiar about ournown era is not the dissolution and corruptionnitself, but the defense of our decayn(and its causes) as an ideal. Europe andnAmerica have always had “sexual revolutionaries”nlike Casanova, de Sade andnsome of the early Caesars— but theynwent by less pleasant names. Offer,nOstrow and Howard provide us with anMorals Scale devised to measure “the extentnto which the conscience or superegonhas developed” and leave out anynreference to sexual morality, respect fornparents or personal honor. Adolescentsngot high marks on the Morals Scale. Yetnthis is the generation of kids that expressesnindifference to the suicide of theirnfriends, and who recently in Californianmade repeated trips to view the corpse ofna raped and murdered schoolmate, inncompany with her boastful murderer. Ofncourse, there are still decent Americansndoing their best to rear decent children.nNonetheless, from the regular reports ofnincreased drug and alcohol abuse, criminalnactivity and sexual promiscuity, it isnhard to escape the impression that a significantnminority of adolescents arengrowing up with the wholesome restraintnand moral character of a Caligula.n18inChronicles of CulturenYankelovich, to give him his due,nrealizes that the pursuit of selffulfillmentninvolves questions of ethics,nbut his philosophical naivete preventsnhim from capitalizing on this insight. Hencannot even tell us what he means byn”self-fulfillment,” which—if it meansnanything— must be an elegant variationnon happiness, the basis of most ethicalnsystems. The modern preachers of selffulfillment—Rogers,nMaslow, Frommn—share with their more recent philosophicalnpredecessors the conviction thatnhappiness depends on, and is a functionnof, the individual. Bentham put it succinctly:n”The interest of the communityn. . . is the sum of the interests of the severalnmembers who compose it.” No socialnor ethical doctrine could be more logical.nNone has been more plainly stated.nNone could be more false, more pregnantnwith ruin. Put aside the obvious anthropologicalnobjections to such annanalysis and confine the question to thenpractical one: Does a man’s happinessndepend on himself? It would be hard fornan honest man to answer yes. Even onnCrusoe’s island, our happiness, limitednthough it be, would be the outcome of anlife of social intercourse. Without thatnsocial life, we would be worse than wildnchildren raised by wolves. As Aristotlenwrote: “man is born for citizenship.”nJixactly. Man is born for citizenship,nand any ethical system or social analysisnthat fails to take our political namre intonaccount will be “born cross from thenwomb” and doomed to irrelevance. Thensolution to our social problems does notnlie in wishing them away with the mocknsolemnity of surveys and psychology or innany new ethic of individual commitment.nThe old one was bad enough. If annoverdose of individual freedom has poisonednthe sources of our happiness, it isnno wonder that so many of our peoplenfind slavery attractive. No healthy personalitynis capable of craving the servitudenoffered by Marx or the ReverendnMoon. The popularity of such ideologiesnof servility is a symptom of our disease.nLike spoiled children, we crave order andnauthority without realizing it. Until thenWest can recover its sense of communitynand spirit of subordination, it can expectnto see little improvement in the dismalnstatistics that measure our hatred of ourselvesnand our despair of the “termsnthat even Daniel Yankeinthe authors of The Adolesce..nunderstand: the 1.3 million abortioii..nperformed annually and the increasingnrate of suicide among our youth. DnPrecision Thinking in AmericanMr. Tom Hayden ends his pronunciamiento in The Nation (onnhow to bring left-liberalism back to glory) thus:nj The test of the 1980’s, and the coming Republican eta, will be oncenagain between the democracy and the narrow vision of the few,n’ We thought that the conservative 1980 victory was the triumph of thenI democracy over the few—like Mr. Hayden—who enforced theirnj vision of the domestic and foreign policies over a large majority whichnwanted none of it, but which was benumbed (with the help of thenmedia) by liberal humbug, bluff, hubris and outright lies. Mr.nHayden is a miserable dirigiste—that is, a despotic totalitarian whonbelieves fervently that his ideals and his rhetoric make him a paladinnof freedom and equal rights for all—and perhaps he actually doesnconsider himself a spokesman fot the masses rather than one of the few narrow visionaries.nThis certainly would lift him from the ttite condition of a demagogue to that morenelevated, pathetic and arch-American stance of a self-deluding cheat. Dnnn