1928. Samoans, she wrote, “rate romantic fidelity in termsnof days or weeks at most, and are inclined to scoff at tales ofnlife-long devotion.”nWe can guess that neither the Mafia nor the Boy Scoutsnwould have thrived in such a society in which nature was putnon the side of the natural, sensual self, where it belongs, innopposition to those crippling personal commitments tonwhich people are inclined when they have been formed bynculture. And even if the Australian anthropologist DereknFreeman is right when he argues that Mead was talking lessnabout real than imaginary Samoans, she has had a halfcenturynin which to spread the welcome news that naturencould be trusted and that puritanical Americans were losingnout on life.nOf course, Mead, Joe Bonanno, and conceivably even anformer Colombian drug lord like Carlos Lehder Rivasn(jailed since the summer of 1988) needed a few of thenuptight bourgeois virtues to succeed in their line of work, nonless than the literary artist does. This need, however, has notnkept artists from feeling uneasy about such virtues, sincenthey appear to be hostile to the generous commitment tonexperience that makes art possible. Lionel Trilling, in a 1933nnotebook entry worried that the enforced decorum of hisnacademic life, especially when measured against the morenunbuttoned life of Hemingway, was ruining his chance to bena genuinely creative writer.nMargaret Mead could trust impulse because she believednthat it had its own Apollonian controls. Timothy Learynseems to have trusted LSD for the same reason: the badneffects of the drug were the fault “not of the drug nor of thendrug taker but of the people around him. who lose their coolnand call the cops or the doctors.” He saw American society,nled by the “puritanical Americans of the older generation,”nbecoming an “air-conditioned anthill.” However, being asnconfident about his LSD as Marx was about his dialectic ornGleason about his rock music, Leary expected that withinnfifteen years a New LSD Man would, to everyone’snadvantage, be in control of the country. Neither the 27neducators nor Joe Bonanno would look foiward withnpleasure to such a future. However, it sounds more than anlittle like what Mead in her 1970 Culture and Commitmentncalled “a prefigural culture,” one characterized by a “continuingndialogue in which the young, free to act on theirnown initiative, can lead their elders in the direction of thenunknown.” A year before she published this remark, somenof those young persons, acting on their own initiative innOakland in anticipation of the arrival of Mick Jagger and thenRolling Stones, announced in a manifesto that “we will playnyour music in rock ‘n’ roll marching bands as we tear downnthe jails and free the prisoners, as we tear down the Statenschools and free the students.”nWe have here, perhaps, several versions of a liberationnscenario in which an irresistible force can be confidentlynsubmitted to, because an Apollonian componentnguarantees benevolent results. It is possible that the Colombianndrug lord believed that the same component was inncocaine and saw no incompatibility between its effects andnthe firmness of character necessary for a principled strugglenagainst American imperialism. Indeed, one might sense anmegamyth-in-the-making that dramatizes a New Man for anNew World. This charismatic cultural hero is, say, a brilliantnand bisexual young general manager of a worldwide distributorshipnof erotic videocassettes; his office portrait of DanielnOrtega is sandwiched between portraits of John Lennon andnYoko Ono; he snorts cocaine during his coffee breaks whilenlistening to the Rolling Stones; he charitably cultivatesnmarijuana plants in his basement for his less favorablynsituated friends; he lives in a comfortable menage a troisnwith his best girlfriend and best boyfriend; he spends hisnweekends working for unilateral nuclear disarmament; andnhe cries easily.nThe expectation has always been that people withncharacter are more likely to give a good account ofnthemselves in crises and to go down with honor, perhapsneven with grace, if they do not survive. It can, of course, benargued that people with character tend to go into crisisnsituations because character formation censors out theninformation that could resolve the crisis, or at least makenpossible a less extreme solution. Certainly, people withninflexible characters (such as Cervantes’ Don Quixote,nShakespeare’s Hotspur, Moliere’s Alceste, or Melville’snAhab) tend to be crisis-prone, which means that they getninto the right kind of trouble for good stories. Perhaps this isnwhy Utopian scenarios are rarely memorable for strongncharacters. (It may also be why Soviet realism, propelled as itnis by Utopian aspiration, has for so long favored a literature ofnhappy endings.) Of course, in Utopias the total censorship ofnnews is often the substitute for character formation. And asnthe dystopias of Aldous Huxley and Ceorge Orwell makenclear, in the effort to install a utopia the managers mightnhave to reinforce this substitute with an artificially inducednorgy experience (something like the soma-induced states ofntogetherness in Brave New World or the ecstatic “TwonMinutes Hate” sessions in Nineteen-Eighty-Four). Thisnsuggests that the organizers of the 1938 Nazi rally atnNuremberg knew something about what Gleason callednsocietal glue, something that one-worlders like Marx, Mead,nand Leary failed to take into account.nWar traditionally has been the supreme crisis. WilliamnJames was appalled at the idea of modern war, but at thensame time he was convinced that the virtues of the militaryncharacter were indispensable to civilization. He resolved thisncontradiction in “The Moral Equivalent of War,” in whichnhe proposed a government-sponsored character-hardeningnprogram of socially useful activities that would have theneffect of a controlled crisis. But since character formationnwas identified with the reduction of options, what Jamesnproposed as pro-civilization could be identified by others asnanti-life. One cannot imagine Mead’s Samoans, Leary’snNew Man, or the creators of the Oakland manifestonenlisting in James’s army. Even the US Army has becomennervous about its identification as an institution that puritanicallynrestricts available options. Indeed, its popular advertisingnslogan, “Be All You Can Be,” suggests that thenPentagon may have been inspired by Helen Curley Brown’snHaving It All.nAt present — thanks to the part bourgeois talents andncharacter traits have played in creating the crises circumstancesnin which the world now lives — the psychologicalnequivalent of war is nuclear anxiety. Nuclear anxiety notnonly reduces options but reduces them in the most frustrat-nnnFEBRUARY 1990/25n