So I Reread Tom Wolfe's "The Me Decade"
Tom Wolfe's "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening" is impressionistic and somewhat scattershot, but it's peppered with insights that are still productive almost two generations later. Wolfe is not a systematic social theorist, but one point he makes throughout his writing is that the American working class isn't behaving the way a proletariat should -- instead, in an era of prosperity, they take the money and run. I reread the essay because, reading Emma Jo Morris's series on Survivors of the Trans Panic , she mentions gnosticism, and I recalled that Tom Wolfe mentioned it there as well. Speaking of New Age movements like Arica, Esalen, and Scientology that characterized the 1970s, he said, I, with the help of my brothers and sisters, must strip away all the shams and excess baggage of society and my upbringing in order to find the Real Me. Scientology uses the word “clear” to identify the state that one must strive for. But just...