Cultural history is written by dissenters

I've mentioned recently Alan Ehrenhalt's 1995 book "The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America," which is about Chicago in the 1950s, but generally about what it was like to live in community in America in those days. You can read a PDF version of what I'm about to quote (and other passages from the book) here. Ehrenhalt is no nostalgist, to be sure, but he does talk about the world of strong, stable neighborhoods that existed in Chicago in those days, and how the 1960s swept that world away. One lesson he draws from it is that the hope of re-establishing community in America is false one, absent a collective yielding to some binding source of social authority. There is no such thing as a community of strong individualists. I found this part of the opening chapter to be challenging, and something readers would enjoy talking about:

There is no point in pretending that the 1950s were a happy time for everyone in America. For many, the price of the limited life was impossibly high. To have been an independent-minded alderman in the Daley machine, a professional baseball player treated unfairly by his team, a suburban housewife who yearned for a professional career, a black high school student dreaming of possibilities that were closed to him, a gay man or woman forced to conduct a charade in public -- to have been any of these things in the 1950s was to live a life that was difficult at best, and tragic at worst. That is why so many of us still respond to the memory of those indignities by saying that nothing in the world could justify them.

It is a powerful indictment, but it is also a selective one. While it is often said that history is written by the winners, the truth is that the cultural images that come down to us as history are written, in large part, by the dissenters -- by those whose strong feelings against life in a particular generation motivate them to become the novelists, playwrights, and social critics of the next, drawing inspiration from the injustices and hypocrisies of the time in which they grew up. We have learned much of what we know about family life in America in the 1950s from women who chafed under its restrictions, eithr as young, college-educated housewives who foudn it unfulfilling or as teenage girls secetly appalled by the prom-and-cheerleader social milieu. Much of the image of american Catholic life in those years comes from the work of former Catholics who considered the church they grew up in not only authoritatrian but destructive of their free choices and creative instincts. The social critics of the past two decades have forced on our attention the inconsistencies and absurdities of life a generation ago: the pious skirt-chasing husbands, the martini-sneaking ministers, the sadistic gym teachers.

I am not arguing with the accuracy of any of those individual memories. But our collective indignation makes little room for the millions of people who took the rules seriously and tried to live up to them, within the profound limits of human weakness. They are still around, the true believers of the 1950s, in small towns and suburbs and big-city neighborhoods all over the country, reading the papers, watching television, and wondering in old age what has happened to America in the last thirty years. If you visit middle-class American suburbs today, and talk to the elderly women who have lived out their adult years in these places, they do not tell you how constricted and demeaning their lives in the 1950s were. They tell you those were the best years they can remember. And if you visit a working-class Catholic parish in a big city, and ask the older parishioners what they think of the church in the days before Vatican II, they don't tell you that it was tyrannical or that it destroyed their individuality. They tell you they wish they cold have it back. For them, the erosion of both community and authority in the last generation is not a matter of intellectual debate. It is something they can feel in their bones, and the feeling makes them shiver.

I am someone who was unhappy as a teenager in my small town, and who left at the first opportunity. So much of my writing, one way or another, comes from the experience of being a "dissenter" in a small town absorbing the values of the American mainstream of the 1960s and 1970s. My sister Ruth stayed in the town, and is raising a family there. She was always happy there, got along well with everybody, and felt completely at home in the world. Still does. She doesn't write about these things. Do content people ever? Isn't her experience of contentment every bit as valid as mine of dissatisfaction and restlessness? Why does our intellectual culture privilege my kind of experience over hers?