The Eighties: A Reader

The 1980s were a turbulent time in America. It was a narcissistic epic in our history full of contradictions and confusing countercurrents. The Eighties is a collection of essays grouped by Gilbert T. Sewall, a writer and education critic based in New York City. From Ronald Reagan to Iran-Contra and the fall of the Berlin Wall to the counter-revolutions of new Puritanism and the anti-ethnic backlashes eliminating equal opportunity or racial preference laws, the 1980s had a profound influence on our current way of life. Michael Milken was wheeling and dealing with billions of dollars, and conspicuous consumption permeated the television airwaves. “Beemers” and “Benzes” were the Beetles of the 1980s.

The 41 essays in this book are by writers both familiar and obscure, all of whom write contemporaneously of the important ideas in education, culture, politics, the economy, and American intellectual history.

Writers like James Q. Wilson with an essay on “Crime and American Culture,” C. Vann Woodward on “The Fall of the American Adam,” and Tom Wolfe on “The Worship of Art” would provide entertaining reading even if they were not both insightful and important. The 1980s, of course, had its origin in the 1960s, a period of much more violent but no less significant change in American life. Reading a selection from “The Closing of the American Mind” by Allan Bloom, we find relativism attacked as the enemy of liberal education. He concludes that books are no longer important in the lives of students, that music is the language of our culture, and that the profound changes in relations between the sexes result in a “listless, nihilistic mood,” producing a promiscuity that “has a dull, sterilized, scientific character.” The attack by William J. Bennett, former Secretary of Education, on the curriculum changes at Stanford and the scholarly attack by Helene Moglen on Bennett and Bloom provide the background necessary to understanding the kind of debate that goes on at Parent-Teacher Association meetings and college board of trustee meetings around the country. Christina Hoff Sommers, in her essay “Ethics Without Virtue,” provides an incisive dissection of the religious and humanist battleground of our public school systems and our colleges.

If culture is the amalgam of shared experiences, including the books, songs, movies, and now the television shows that characterize a people, a nation, and a way of life, this collection of essays will provide a new level of understanding. The advantage of a collection of essays regarding the culture and history of our recent past is that it puts into one place a diversity of views that none of us would otherwise have found in our routine reading. The concept of “cultural literacy,” the proposition that a culture needs to have a universal code of knowledge, is outlined by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., in his persuasive argument that such shared experiences are required for thoughtful reading and writing.

We now live in an age where law is a weapon rather than a system to ensure justice. The separation of church and state has been eroded by politicians disguised as preachers and by fundamentalist groups of every religion attempting to impose their views through political means. We live in a time when the feminist image has changed from Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug to Buffy, Xena, Ally, and Nikita, the glamorous action heroes of television. The Eighties is not a bathroom book for the mildly constipated, providing snippets of culture; rather, it is a sampler or catalog of authors you may wish to study in depth after reading excerpts from their work in this volume. The sections of the book—Antecedents, Cultural Politics, Boomers on the Make, Hot and Cool, The House of Intellect, and The Movement of Culture—are topically arranged to make sense of trends that escaped our notice perhaps as we lived through them. After reading this book, one might wish to have attended a cocktail party with these authors because it would have been a very interesting evening.

As psychiatrists, the more we know of our history as a people the greater will be our ability to understand and help our patients. This excellent collection of essays would be a useful tool toward that end.