arrival of the year’s first seed catalogs. We may even developna taste for Wordsworth.nWestern Civ teachers frequently tell their students thatnthe Greeks displayed little appreciation for nature. I don’tnknow. It is true that classical Greek poetry does not aboundnin landscapes and rural scenes; it took the urbanization ofnthe Hellenistic Age to inspire the pastoral poetry of Theocritus.nBut Socrates was enough of a Romantic to gush overnthe trees and running brook at the beginning of thenPhaedrus, and when Odysseus tries to describe a girl’snbeauty, he draws upon the same simile of a young tree thatnlater inspired Ezra Pound. For the Greeks any tree or springnor mountain glen might be inhabited by a divine spirit, butnliving as closely as they did with the real world they had nonpressing need for descriptive poetry. We are not told thatnAdam ever composed verse in the Garden. After the fall, henmight well have joined the ranks of poets who wrote ofnparadises lost.nThe ancients typically imagined the Golden Age as angarden or at least as a life of rural simplicity. They knew, nonone more than Theocritus and Vergil, that the reality ofnrustic life was harsh and often brutal. It was Vergil who innhis poetic farmer’s almanac declares: “It is work, miserablenwork that conquers all” — a parody by anticipation of Ovid’snfamous testimony to the power of love.nModern man, who has cut himself off from the facts ofnlife, is still condemned to dream of primitive Edens wherenmen and women live in touch with nature; but with nothingnsolid on which to anchor our illusions, we must project ourntribal memory upon the future. Some day, we shall escapenfrom all this to a James Barrie world of Peter Pans andnAdmirable Grichtons. Even though “getting and spendingnwe lay waste our powers,” there is a better world where nonman will have to work to support himself, and even thoughnwe devote most of our energies to acquiring and supportingna wife (with attendant children), we can look forward to anMuslim paradise filled with irresponsible pleasures beneathnthe forest canopy. Our Eden is like the evolutionists’ god: Itnnever existed, but with a little luck we shall all get therensome day.nAgrarian nostalgia lies behind many of the more exoticnsocial and intellectual movements of the past two centuries.nThe Romantics and Southern Agrarians come most easilynto mind, but a similar back-to-nature impulse drove thenearly socialists into communes; it also explains more than anlittle of Marxism’s appeal. In the early 20th century,nEuropean agrarians were as likely to jump into NationalnSocialist parties as into the Socialist International, but it isnprecisely at this point that the reactionary right meets thenrevolutionary left: In opposition to a value-free, industrializednmodernization, both hold out visions of a communalnand traditional life in touch with nature. Paul Goodman’snGrowing Up Absurd and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes ofnWrath could be read as either radical or reactionary books;nhowever, today no one would call them either liberal ornconservative, since in contemporary terms, most conservatives,nno less than liberals, devote themselves to a cautiousndefense of status quo post-Eranklin Roosevelt.nAll of these elements — the egalitarian itch, the desirenfor unwashed innocence, and the very natural libidondominandi — played a major role in what we jokingly usednto call, back in the 60’s, “The Revolution.” The height ofnthe 60’s is now some 20 years distant, and yet it is again thensubject of television documentaries and New Republicnarticles in which balding (still long-haired) Marxists andnex-Marxists ask themselves, “Why did we fail?”nBy we they generally mean the SDS and other loudmouth/softcorenrevolutionists who barely knew enough tonload a shotgun, much less to plant a bomb or knock over anbank. The truth is, hardly anyone on or off the campus everntook the New Left seriously either as a promise or a threat.nThey were convenient for a liberal establishment thatndesperately needed the peril of a red menace to unite thencountry behind. Predictably, most conservatives endorsednthe liberal propaganda by backing the Johnson-KennedynWhat began in youth and gladness went bad verynquickly somewhere between 1966 and 1968. I saw thendifference in San Francisco before and after LovenSummer. Even the campus radicals of the mid-60’s hadnnot been complete cretins, but filling out the ranks ofnthe Hippies and Yippis were the dropouts failures, andnvillage idiots of every suburban high school in America.nWar and supporting the semi-literate progressives whonmasqueraded as college presidents. If students disruptednGlark Kerr’s multiversity at Berkeley, what difference did itnmake? Campus riots were only a temporary interruption innthe orderiy manufacture of bureaucrats and ideologues. But,nalmost inevitably, conservatives continue to take the bait: thensoft left’s latest gimmick is to stage “second thoughts”nconferences at which paunchy SDSers repent publicly andnpass the hat. Token conservatives are invited to lend an air ofnrespectability to the Punch-and-Judy proceedings. Well,nthere’s a conservative born every minute, and as a groupnthey seem inexhaustibly willing to embrace anyone withnleftist credentials, no matter if he’s never had any first, muchnless second, thoughts.nMy own experience of student radicalism is somewhatnlimited, to say the least — a few demonstrations, a strategynsession or two, several unpleasant experiences of beingncaught in the wrong places at the wrong time, but mynimpressions of those days have been confirmed by a greatnmany other 60’s refugees. At Chapel Hill, for example,nwhere SDS was said to have a strong chapter, they werenregarded as a small group of out-of-state students with funnynnames, led by equally out-of-it professors. They werenboring, pompous, and as undereducated as the footballnteam — they still are. (As early as the mid-60’s Berkeleynphilosophy professor John Searle was pointing out thatncampus radicals had actually litde in common with campusnintellectuals.) As John Lennon so sagely observed, quotingnthe slogans of Chairman Mao was rarely a good openingnline, at least not with any girl not making a career out ofnugliness. Early campus Bohemians had lived a life of wine,nwomen, and song, but the New Left contented itself withndope, dogs, and mimeographed propaganda.nMost of the 60’s “kids” were simply out for the usualngood time. Of those who did take things seriously, anconsiderable number went off the deep end with music,nnnFEBRUARY 1988 / 7n