Courtesy of Knowledge@ Wharton

Forty years after
the Summer of Love, the 1960s are still in style. The Rolling Stones are still
looking for satisfaction in packed arenas. The Grateful Dead have their own ice
cream flavor. Hair has returned to off-Broadway, hip huggers are back
and young Americans are still into peace, love and pot. Our politics, our
products and our popular culture all bear the unmistakable marks of the Age of
Aquarius, and, as David Brooks observed in his bestselling Bobos in
Paradise, we have managed to make -- or market -- our countercultural past
into an integral part of our far more staid, strait-laced present.

But the story we tell ourselves about our ties to the 1960s -- and that we
reflexively memorialize in everything from our tastes in clothing and music to
our attitudes about love and war -- is only half the story of what happened
then. It's also only a partial explanation of who we are now.

What we tend not to recall -- or even to know -- is that while flower
children flocked to San Francisco during the spring and summer of 1967, a very
different sort of symbolic gathering was taking place in Tulsa, Okla. In early
April, just three days before Haight-Ashbury hippies held a press conference
announcing the Summer of Love, 18,000 people converged on Tulsa for the formal
dedication of Oral Roberts University. Attended by government officials, higher
education leaders and the Reverend Billy Graham, the ceremony marked the success
of modern evangelical Protestantism, giving it a legitimacy that set it apart
from the counterculture's own mind-altering spiritual style.

Superficially opposed, the movements exemplified by these events actually had
a great deal in common. Both were Great Awakenings formed in the long tradition
of American millenarianism, both spoke to young Americans' quest for
transcendence and both embraced a rigid idealism that prevented them from
achieving the transformative success they craved. As such, countercultural mass
consciousness-raising and a charismatic faith healer's move into higher
education were two sides of a cultural coin: While the Bay Area worshipped
flower power, the Dust Bowl was spreading the Word.

In the U.S., we tend to see ourselves as emerging from one or the other of
these histories, depending on our lifestyles and beliefs. But, as Brink Lindsey
argues in The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's
Politics and Culture (Collins), we are all descendants of both.
Twenty-first century America is as closely tied to the religious revivalism of
Bible Belt America as it is to the Aquarian enthusiasm that bloomed in the
Haight; contemporary American culture, Lindsey contends, is a remarkably
elastic, if largely unrecognized, synthesis of movements so polarized that they
seem to connect only in the acrimonious zone of the culture wars. Moreover,
Lindsey argues, we cannot understand ourselves until we grasp the fact that we
come from both of these histories -- and that, crucially, they are the same
history.

New Dimensions in Freedom

In order to explain this paradoxical premise, Lindsey embarks on an ambitious
rewriting of recent American history. Principally concerned with the cultural
shifts we have undergone since World War II, The Age of Abundance aims
to show how the unprecedented prosperity that the United States has enjoyed
since the 1940s has allowed Americans to become the first people in history to
find out what freedom really is. His thesis is ultimately centered on the
American economy, and involves an imaginative and inspirational account of how
our country's thriving market has become an engine for a vibrant new culture of
choice and opportunity.

In a swift summary of 20th century American cultural and social progress
(rising income, reduced want, lengthening lives, better education, better health
care, better standard of living, suburbia, youth culture, rock and roll, sexual
revolution, civil rights, Stonewall, self-esteem, tolerance, technology)
punctuated by dazzling anecdotal set pieces (Nixon arguing with Khrushchev about
washing machines, Charles Manson winning praise from Students for a Democratic
Society, Silicon Valley's countercultural roots), Lindsey tells us how, by the
1950s, American culture had moved from a "scarcity-based mentality of
self-restraint" to an "abundance-based mentality of self-expression." That move,
in turn, enabled Americans to uncover, explore and exploit entirely new
dimensions of freedom.

Capitalism, Lindsey argues, made it possible for Americans to climb Abraham
Maslow's motivational pyramid, a "hierarchy of needs" that begins with basic
physiological requirements (food, sleep, air), passes through safety (security
of body, family, property) and belonging (love, family, intimacy), rises to
emotional needs based on esteem (self-respect, respect for others, the respect
of others), and culminates in self-actualization (personal growth based on
morality, creativity, awareness, trust, fairness, love and individualistic
expression). In other words, as health improved and lives grew longer, as
disposable income increased and daily life came to center on choice, Americans
began to be able to devote themselves to the "pursuit of happiness" that was so
central to the Founding Fathers' conception of independence.

Material security enabled us to turn our attention inward, Lindsey says, to
focus on ambitions, desires, dreams and pleasures. Popular culture rose to the
occasion, with new music, new entertainments, new fashions and new distractions.
By the middle of the 20th century, there were Mad magazine and
Leave it to Beaver, teen angst and drive-in movies, Dr. Spock and the
Kinsey Reports. And, as Elvis gyrated and James Dean rebelled, some began to
recoil in response to what they saw as a disturbing loss of moral tone. The
modern conservative movement thus arose out of the same conditions that created
the Age of Aquarius (William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale was
published in 1951).

In Lindsey's terms, "mass affluence" triggered a "mirror-image pair of
cultural convulsions" in which movements we now associate with the left and the
right were born. The left, Lindsey notes, embraced the personal freedoms created
by wealth, but rejected the engine of wealth itself, capitalism. The result was
its romantic preoccupation with collectivism and its emphasis on tolerance,
rights and free expression. By contrast, Lindsey observes, the right embraced
capitalism but rejected the manner in which a thriving market inevitably opens
up new choices and broadens the range of acceptable behavior. Each movement was,
and is, urgently felt and relentlessly advanced, Lindsey notes, but each is
ultimately misguided in its failure to comprehend that mass affluence involves
both a free market and a free society. As such, they offer "conflicting
half-truths" about what America is and ought to be.

Possums, Pizzas and Bow Ties

Instead of taking sides in what is by now a rigid ideological standoff,
Lindsey attempts to offer a more rounded and complete story about what America
has become. Our polarized politics are a sign of a nation that has yet to
understand its own immensely stable, ultimately centrist synthesis of left and
right, he contends. The American middle has pragmatically combined parallel
appreciations for the free market and the cultural abundance it supplies. At
once fiscally conservative and socially liberal, mainstream America represents
the real heart of a nation that has found a way to finance a free society
organized around almost infinite variety -- one with health food and yoga,
therapy and religion, civil unions and sex changes, Wal-Mart and Amazon, MySpace
and microwaves, cell phones and laptops, blogs and iPods, home pregnancy kits
and soft contact lenses, and societies for every hobby, profession and interest
group imaginable, including the Possum Growers and Breeders Association, the Bow
Tie Manufacturers Association and the Frozen Pizza Institute.

As the consumer-oriented cast of this list might suggest, the founding
premise for Lindsey's exuberant rewriting of American history is that abundance
is the prerequisite for freedom. "Liberation from material necessity marks a
fundamental change in the human condition," Lindsey explains in apocalyptic
language reminiscent of Karl Marx. And in this he is consciously and somewhat
ironically reworking Marx's theories, acknowledging how very much the Victorian
visionary got right in order to offer a modern libertarian analysis of what he
got fundamentally wrong. According to Lindsey, "the realm of freedom came as a
new stage of capitalist development"; far from yielding the tranquil utopia of
Marx's fantasy, mass affluence unleashed a "clamorous desire" that has not only
transformed American culture, but has reshaped our souls.

The vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute, Lindsey is a free
market advocate whose economic ideals color his understanding of American
history. If The Age of Abundance is a bit thesis-driven -- libertarian
think tanker writes a book proving that modern American culture is naturally and
inevitably libertarian -- it is nonetheless compelling and provocative, a heady
mix of detailed anecdote and sweeping analysis that offers us a chance to view
our present and our recent past through new eyes.

There is a lingering suspicion in America that prosperity is somehow shameful
-- that, like power, it corrupts us absolutely. But, Lindsey notes, that is a
sign of just how luxuriously free our wealth has made us. People who can afford
to despise the economic system that sustains them are very rich indeed, he
observes; so are those who feel free not to tolerate the social choice and
cultural expressiveness that comes with mass affluence. But one risk we can all
safely take, Lindsey asserts, is to contemplate alternative accounts of who and
what we are.

In this, Lindsey's analysis of American history is itself quintessentially
American. It hearkens back to the first, hopeful premises of the Founding
Fathers, who put life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness on a level. It also
optimistically reworks the dour admonitions of American thinkers who have
contended that the only way to rise above "lives of quiet desperation" is to
leave concerns about money and material well-being behind. In post-World War II
America, Lindsey argues, material well-being has finally made us free enough to
find our own, idiosyncratic paths to contentment. And -- if there are those of
us who aren't able or willing to exploit that remarkable opportunity, as there
most certainly are -- Lindsey offers an explanation straight out of Ben
Franklin's book: All they need to do to get ahead is practice self-discipline.

The Age of Abundance is an artifact of our era, a theory of modern
American culture that is also a piece of that culture. Its thoughtful ingenuity
and detailed, documentary profusion speak eloquently to the moment of its
creation -- which is, we should note, the same moment that brought forth the
iPhone, Will Smith's Oscar-contending The Pursuit of Happyness, the Drudge
Report and "American Idol". They are, in their own way, testimonials to
liberty American-style, in all its quirky, inspired variety. Of course, this is
also the moment of Michael Moore's Sicko, skyrocketing college costs,
calamitous prophecies of environmental destruction and a crashing housing market
-- all of which could be used by an enterprising historian to assemble a very
different tale about contemporary American culture's hold on both prosperity and
freedom.

But that's an argument for Lindsey's book, not against it. As Lindsey himself
points out, how we think about who we are depends on the details we choose to
consider, and historical "truths" can be fashioned through compelling stories
assembled from facts. Lindsey's is one such story, and, in seeking to set a tone
of hope, determination and informed appreciation for the sheer moral and
material bounty that liberates latter-day America, it is a timely and necessary
one.