Volume 31, Number 1 · February 2, 1984
The Great American Variety Show
By Christopher Lasch
America's Quest for the Ideal Self: Dissent and Fulfillment in the Sixties and Seventies
by Peter Clecak
Oxford University Press, 395 pp., $27.50
With his latest book, Peter Clecak has joined Daniel Yankelovich, Alvin Toffler, Herman Kahn, and other cultural forecasters who celebrate the diversity and vigor of American culture and predict a 'more abundant life' to come. Although his argument is more complicated and more carefully qualified than theirs, it shares certain features common to the genre of cultural forecasting and assessment. It relies heavily on opinion polls and survey data and on works that summarize this data, like Yankelovich's New Rules and The Connecticut Mutual Life Report on American Values in the'80s.[1] It deals for the most part with the kind of superficial cultural changes that can be measured by public opinion polls: that is, with changes in cultural fashions. The controlling image of cultural change in such studies is that of the balance sheet, in which gains always seem to outweigh losses, not only because losses tend to resist quantification but because they can be dismissed as the 'price of progress.'
Review, 5114 words
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