The Past as Future: A Nonlinear Probe

Looking at the decade that has just passed, even from close range, no one could fail to sense that there was something very special--and terrible--about it. The Sixties weren't just another ten years of our lives. Generational continuity vanished; the quality of behavior was radically altered. This alteration showed itself most dramatically, most beautifully and most brutally in the children of the decade, those who were in their teens at its inception and came of age toward its close. They were different, perhaps fundamentally, from all the generations that preceded them; and it is by watching them that their elders are beginning to realize how really different the world is--and will be.

There has always been conflict between generations--more so as the rate of change has accelerated. But those who see the present split as only quantitatively greater than that between the Beats and the pre-Beats, for example, are sorely self-deceived. What we may discern today is not the high point in an evolutionary graph, it is a revolutionary quantum leap. The line graph no longer applies: The growing edge of the new generation that is emerging from the Sixties does not constitute merely a new line; it confronts a geometrically expanding cluster of lines, of myriad options freed from the clutches of the past.

Clearly, there are those of the new generation, perhaps a numerical majority, who are emulative of their elders, whose goal is to find a niche within the establishment, from which some of them may strive to improve it. But early in the Sixties, the direction of emulation was reversed. Not only did Junior stop looking up to Dad, the generation in power began looking down to its children as the sources of ideas and attitudes, and as models for action and participation a world away from the anomie, disaffiliation and passivity of the Forties and Fifties. In the Sixties, youth became the model for age in everything from fashions in cars and clothing to idiomatic speech: New words in hipster patois were barely coined before being adapted by Madison Avenue. Today, the aim of many parents, consciously or not, is to be chips off the new block.

Meanwhile, we continue to hear much--mainly from the obsolescent generation--about the "noisy minority" that distracts our attention from the "good" mainstream of young straights. But the magnetism of the avant-garde is working its way on the majority. The depth of the resulting schism between the generations may be measured by the fact that the activists of earlier "new" generations castigated their elders for a betrayal of shared ideals, whereas today the ideals, the assumptions concerning desirable goals, are no longer the same. The new life style and world view are not bred of disillusionment; rather, they reflect outright rejection--and the will to totally restructure society.

A year ago. Fortune magazine published the results of an intensive survey it had conducted with 718 young people between the ages of 18 and 24. Among its key findings was the fact that a full 50 percent of those whom Fortune called "the forerunner group"--students, mostly in the humanities, who said that they had gone to college primarily for other than practical reasons--thought that the American society was sick. There is no evidence to suggest that a clear majority of under-30-year-old Americans are radically at odds with adult society; but there is evidence on every hand--the Fortune survey, the Woodstock rock festival, the extent of the participation in the October 15, 1969, Vietnam moratorium--to support the assertion that the current generation gap is unique in our history.

We are speaking of a group that has little past reference beyond the generally bland Fifties--and the youngest don't even have that--with which to compare and put in perspective the incredible input of the Sixties. They have grown up with careening technology, racial tension, ecological suicide, nuclear terror, affluence, assassination, riot--and a war that fills most of them with shame and loathing. And what they didn't see of all this out of their front windows, they watched on television. When the radicals in Chicago shouted at police, "The whole world is watching," they might just as well have added, "And we have been watching everything."

Not only TV but all of the media proliferated explosively. Even ten years ago, intelligent fathers and sons--no matter how violently they disagreed--could enter into a dialog from an overlapping corpus of books read, movies seen, music listened to. Today's youth has its own books, movies, music--a music that is privately, fiercely regarded as its own.

Further, the young people find themselves with a power their age group never had before: the power of numbers. There are simply more of them than anyone else. Suddenly, they are no longer a subculture; they are emerging as a counterculture--not just nationally but worldwide. Beyond finding new ways to do old things, a large slice of this generation is finding new things to do. They don't argue with or just sneer at their parents, the way most generations before did; they ignore or attack them. They have stopped drinking and started using drugs. They have let their hair grow and they dress in funky clothes--or not at all. They have turned their backs on furtive and guilt-ridden coupling in favor of sexual honesty and freedom. Thousands of them went off to Dad's alma mater not to reform it but to revolutionize it, even at the cost of burning it down. And, finally, when the establishment gave them the biggest gift it could conceive--a moon landing--a lot of them didn't care. Indeed, for many in this generation, especially for the spearhead group, the space program comes not too far after the ABM as a prime symbol of the crazily skewed priorities of a society that they want to transform, not merely to reform, as generations before them had wished to do.

Jacob Brackman is a young writer who grew up with this generation. His writing style--personal, nonlinear, disjunct--is very much a product of what he's seen and the way he's seen it through these years. In "The Past As Future," he plays his impressions of the Sixties against one another in order to project something of what the years ahead may bring. He makes no pretense of speaking for his generation; the very thought of spokesmanship often seems irrelevant to a generation questing for individualism. If anything about Brackman's words may be said to typify his peers, it is that he is speaking for himself, that he is holding an internal dialog wherein he proposes questions and examines possibilities, rather than codifying conclusions. Brackman's probe is complemented visually by artist Harry Bouras' four-page foldout collage, in which a juxtaposition of faces, objects and events from the Sixties predict as much as they recall. Both words and pictures make it clear that only man's knowledge of inner space--his own--will see him through the Seventies and beyond.

At the beginning of the decade now ended, I was 16 years old. marginally adjusted. It seemed no sign of precocity then to be just barely making it through my days. I was. after all, adolescent. I believed my condition biological, not historical.

I believed being lost led, in due course, to getting found. Certainly, I never envisioned a career of being lost.

In periods of hopefulness, I conceived my confusion as a prelude to some state of "maturity." Seeing no maturity around I could emulate, I'd have to invent that for myself. I'd not choose Richard Nixon for my model, not Ken Kesey--not anyone visible. Me and my friends. We would redefine adulthood.

I'd heard terrible tales of the struggle for survival. Meanwhile, freed from that, my own struggle--more awful for its puniness--was to hold myself together. Resist consciousness, not let it overwhelm me. Brush my teeth. Comb my hair.

Now it seems that anyone I meet who is not completely lost is completely lost. Conversely, anyone who seems to the least degree found now seems lost. Otherwise, I would test for something peculiar in my chemistry.

I abandoned waiting for the bottom to drop out of my bewilderment, gave myself up to the currents of the decade. I repeated to myself, "Float downstream," at times too frightened to understand the words. I could not believe in any Pilgrim's Prayer. "OM" never succeeded in calming me.

After a rash of senseless multiple murders, I stayed indoors for some days. I lost all empathy with people who felt they could continue walking in the streets, going to the grocery. Most likely, some guy in Food Fair would tell them to lie on the floor, feet together to form an asterisk, and then shoot them to death one by one, with a sawed-off shotgun.

Each scene of my mind's movie contained its unmistakable portents of catastrophe. When the telephone rang, my camera zoomed in and framed it in sinister close-up. Knocks on my door came amplified through echo chambers.

Was I merely madder those several days or closer to awareness? Afterward, thinking back on them, I kept changing my mind. One moment's paranoia became the next moment's sure premonition. Sometimes I would realize with ephemeral conviction that the future would be like that. For long periods, one would not venture out of doors. Later, one would be unable to say for certain why one had stayed inside.

What would "inside," then, be like? More comfortable, to reckon euphemistically. Tiny, space-capsule-inspired, supercontrolled environments. Not only the seasons but day and night grown arbitrary. Built-in stimulation for every sense, ingestible mood rectifiers, direct ticklings of the brain. Who could say exactly why we'd find ourselves not going out much anymore? Our reach hasn't got longer. It's just that everything's being moved into reach.

Ok, if you really want to know the truth. All remarks about the future are at best remarks about the present--at worst, about one's own temperament. You can now predict a comparably wide range of futures for an individual, a nation, the planet.

Our dispositions fluctuate. The scenarios of our personal futures metamorphose in an hour's daydreaming.

We see ourselves enlightened: working, grooving, intimate, potent. Laughing at the funny stuff. Actively alive and celebrative--yes, even while hosing down the conflagration that rages around us.

We see ourselves diminished: puttering, dispirited. Lolling anxiously in leisure that seems a calm before the storm. Purchasing potions for bed, potions we would not need if they could help us. Exciting ourselves with spoon-fed fantasies of other places and other, more excessive mates.

We see ourselves destroyed: numbered, computerized, propagandized, spied on, tapped, hounded, busted, lobotomized, big-brothered to smithereens.

Similarly, the grand scenario of our collective future revises itself according to the disposition of the moment. It undulates, soars or plunges.

One uses the future as a metaphor. By pretending to forecast, one responds to the present moment, brings certain of its features into relief. Prediction turns into a stylistic convention.

Generations to come will be no better able to measure the "truth" of our divinations than we. Suppose none of our fantasies come to pass--what could, matter less? What counts, and will count whenever they're disproved, is simply that they were our fantasies.

We had hallucinations of Eden at the end of the tunnel and hallucinations of torment, of abyss. But because we could do no more than fumble through our particular lives, each vision produced its own paralysis in us. Each had a way of sapping our most present energies.

The unsettling Sixties: I could not possibly have imagined that magical mystery tour. There was no way to get from Port Huron to the Pentagon, from Birmingham to Memphis, from Tonkin to Khe Sanh, from the West Village to the Haight, from Berkeley to Cornell--no way to get from then and there to now and here; none, anyhow, that I can reconstruct. The Sixties put me through the soak-churn-wash-rinse cycles.

Yes, there were months flecking the decade when I burned with one salvation or another. That happened to many of us.

The uncertainty around us was often so intense that scarcely had we begun to rap out our manic riffs--our answer or attitude--when crowds would gather. By the ring of our conviction, by the fire in our eyes, we would gain disciples.

Before long, we would return to them apologetically. "Back to Go," we would say, with evanescent wisdom. "We must have been crazy back then. We were a little stoned out. It's back to Go for all of us."

What was the decade to the children who knew no other? It sent us (we in our 20s now) into aberrant stratospheric orbits. We'd absorbed ideas of continuity in the late Forties and Fifties. The Sixties played havoc with them. But what were the Sixties as a launching pad?

Can I decipher that from the babble of some 11-year-old amphetamine freaks I know? If I listen as hard as can be?

We have reached that moment in human history when our capacity to alter our environments and selves no longer has any foreseeable limit. Once prediction would concern itself with gadgetry. Now that gadgets are all in the cards, prediction must deal with adaptation, with social stress. With mountainous confusion and overwhelming choice.

Those of us who postponed the irrevocable decisions could never tell for sure, for long, what was coming off. At the end of the decade now beginning, I will be 36. Can I flow with changes around the bend?

Will the Seventies put me through spin-dry? Will they patch up my outlook for the Eighties? Will there be well-oiled institutions to cope with my kind of uncertainty?

I understand. I must let the times massage me. I must lie loose and flabby, etherized. Mustn't think so goddamn much. "Every time the train of history goes around a corner, the thinkers fall off," Marx said.

How can we dwell upon probability, anyhow? Won't a dozen more nuclear capacities arise in the next so-many years? Rocket megatons will be aimed from here to there to here, crisscrossing the globe like tourist routes. Each season will bring its cacophony of international crises, threats, counterultimatums, rattled warheads. We citizens will wait dumbly, fingers crossed, never knowing what may arrive out of tomorrow's skies, what contretemps has our number on it.

That situation will not persist indefinitely. Perhaps not for long at all, in the scheme of human time. What smart money will make book on your dying of natural causes?

So shall we march and join? Found impotent disarmament cells? Draw up imposing documents for world confederation? Work toward a whispery voice within the system? Or shall we simply give a nod devastation's way, exclude her from our talk of what's in store? All prediction rests upon one unspoken absurdity: Let's assume nothing terrible happens.

Light-years more than any previous future, ours remains a future that has to be, and will be, made. And we will make it, surely, though we may do so with such paucity of insight that it will seem, like futures past, simply to have happened to us.

We moved the planet so close to the brink that forestalling apocalypse became an hour-by-hour affair. We were under pressure. No breather for long-range plans. Anyway, for years we'd harbored, half consciously, the suspicion that apocalypse was already upon us.

Waiting for the climactic nuclear attack--under polluted skies, euthanasia to our jammed cities--we would not notice an apocalypse as obvious and acceptable as the traffic lights.

Do we correctly imagine that the planet itself has been extended the chance for conclusive failure within the span of a single human life? That the best we can do is hang on for a bit? We have never felt nearer to hell--or heaven.

The variables--for good, for ill--have grown imponderable. Chances for our degradation mix in each fine option. Catastrophe and Utopia locked everywhere in double strangle holds. Can we picture, say, an intolerably controlled, synthetic scene in which everyone feels terrific, "fulfilled"?

The future? A matter of mood. You can now read any future in the present, so tell us first how you've been feeling.

There will be no respite, no deceleration. Forget about the isolated breakthrough. Rather, on all technofronts: collectively facilitating "advances." Their cumulation has become not merely inexorable. It has become ordinary. What obvious capabilities the next decades will usher in!

We've passed utterly out of the era when you got Eli Whitney so you got the cotton gin, you got Tom Edison so you got the light bulb. Revolutionary momentum no longer comes about discretely, by particular leaps and bounds. The very process of progress snowballs.

Dream something up. Mobilize the necessary competencies. Presently have it on the table before you, realized.

Oh, we're talking about revolutionary stuff, all right. But if I listed several score imminent bold faced breakthroughs, there'd be nothing terribly alarming among my items. If only because they seem, en masse, to follow so inevitably. Even what you've never imagined sounds logical, familiar.

The stars of each breakthrough, heroic figures that we fasten to a feat, will be accidental. They will be elevated arbitrarily; their visibility will satisfy an old need of ours. They will be interchangeable with others. More surprising, we will apprehend their interchangeability.

How, precisely, did the moon shot inspire kids? Perhaps it showed them that even the most spectacular feats will succumb to dull teamwork.

Henceforth, our greatest possible triumphs will be associated with regimented insipidity. Who wants the giant leap when it depends on crewcut aggregates?

We whip through "generations" in a fortnight now. But though we are already half a dozen different species, all of us now alive and young--from parents born as we exploded bombs on Japan to infants born after men romped upon the lunar surface--participate in a single, numbing generation as well. We are the touchstone. By a hairsbreadth, we precede the future.

Taunted our whole lives with promises of wellness to come. In every sense, we will be the age that barely missed the boat. Missed not only its material, medical, informational advantages but its unconsciousness as well.

Are new sorts of humans in the womb, or born already? Our children, who experience such changes, will themselves be different. They will be accommodated to change. Change will define them.

With no capacity to share the nostalgia and regret that we feel in advance, how they will terrify us! How they will fail to appreciate our terror.

What was it we found to resent in our parents? Not their treatment of us. We'd been conscientiously, superbly Vaselined. No, we bristled at their distraction from us, their distraction from any trenchant nitty-gritty.

For much of their lives, scrambling, they'd had no time for consciousness. Now, never having cultivated the habit of it--having ruminated insufficiently about what games might be worth the effort--they fill their vacancy with compulsive rituals.

Yet however we ridiculed them, we must have introjected those rituals of expectation for ourselves, their children. How else did we come to expect so unreasonably much of ourselves? And for such slight exertion!

Our parents cautioned us not to look for trouble, not to scrounge too avidly for life's red meat. They told us we would come round in a few years' time. They did, though they were once as boneheaded as we.

We imagined we, too, would get to occupy all the usual positions in the immemorial cycle of generations. Wouldn't our children, in turn, half envy, half despise our blindness? And yet, by what eternal rules would they be hipper than we?

Suppose we find ourselves, many years after having begrudged our (continued on page 216)Past as Future(continued from page 176) parents' unconsciousness, begrudging our children's unconsciousness? That might become the burden of our terrible resentment. For we will surely resent their having made it under the line into some new age.

Watching a small boy intent upon a meager television fantasy, peopled (and evidently created) by inhuman nincompoops, I wonder how his mind develops the trick of devising moving pictures of its own; pictures no one else has ever seen. He talks with you (unmistakably clever, spookily reflective ...) until he very slowly begins to give himself away. He has no idea of his own meanings. You've been listening to television.

There'll be some compensations, of course. Already, we are making up in special effects what we lack in depth.

Our dreams have begun taking over all the optical conceits of movies: cutaways, slow motion, freeze-frame, zoom shots. If we could remember dreams clearly enough, we might name directors to whom our psychic styles are indebted.

A moviemaker's skill at such devices enables him to conceal his vision, his intent. His dexterity alone marks the measure of his artistry.

If movies enrich our dreams technically, what will that progress cost us? Dreams may become the remotest thing we need: another form of entertainment.

When our children are equipped to influence, perhaps even to program their dreams, where will they look for inspiration? Revelation shrouded in muslin, flights of fancy cloaked in lead.

Reconsider: What changes will go down when inexpensive lip-sync sound-on-film super-eight cameras are in everyone's hands? When everyone--parents, offspring--is an amateur cinematographer, when all of our enterprises become fitting subjects for our movies. Perhaps then the distortion of infancy will never be allowed to harden. Perhaps they will be unable to cause trouble for long.

Suppose you were perpetually reviewing the ongoing film library of your life. Could you continue to lie to yourself about the past?

Could you believe it was more crushing than it was, that its prominent figures were more fabulous? Could you remember any trauma or triumph as more than ordinary?

Our lives will be there, fat and plain and forlorn. They will bind us, leave us no room for the lovely legends we once used to repair and elaborate them.

Will the developing child constantly revise his responses to the events and personalities on film? Will he be habitually reinterpreting his past; in effect, psychoanalyzing himself?

Or might it take a child too long to distinguish truly between his family and all the other cinematic characters he'll grow up with? How long is too long?

Driving down Los Angeles boulevards, I wonder what kids will have to be like not to sense the invidious emptinesses between the car lots and the barbecue havens. By what reference might these spaces seem less than full to them?

There's a kind of emptiness here that leaves too much room for thoughts. Kids mill and loiter on the street corners, waiting, rarely conversing. "Grooving."

This landscape can turn any thought into a daydream. No purchase anywhere for a kindness or discretion. Nowhere to grab hold. Miles of sightless glass, not exactly windows, for they offer no privilege. They are a vantage point to nothing, conceal nothing.

Some miles farther, one sees within a single block English manors, French town-houses, Swiss chalets, split-levels. Style need no longer be determined by environment, nor by the indifference of builders. Each person's home can offer a total fantasy of himself.

Why does no one care what his neighbor's house looks like? To show he doesn't have to care? Our insulation is complete--of taste as well as space. What manner of man builds here, is born here? So what if it's ugly, or someone else's, as long as it insulates us from the whoosh of the freeways?

The food that nourishes our children will have no visible relation to its source. Hams will be made out of algae, carrots out of fish meal. All food will taste of chemicals; eating will be like smoking on a hot, bright day.

Did taste once depend on our feelings of merit and reward, of replenishment at the expense of life?

What, then, will our children, about to be born, resent in us? Our marginality. Our consciousness. We will not be with it, that goes without saying. Moreover, we shall not cling to anything staunch and passe. We shall offer no resistance, nothing to thrust up against.

Might we become the first parents to pray that things hold together just long enough for us to make it through our own lives?

Standing weak-kneed on the messy threshold of their world, will we simply cast off our impossible guilt? "We inherited capacities too monstrous and complex," we will whine to them. "It wasn't our fault. We gyrated helplessly from one personal solution to the next. We couldn't seem to find the goddamn handle."

The future breathes on us. We feel diffuse, disorganized in its presence. Wait a minute, we want to say, sit down, let's talk things over for a minute. But we know it has no time to waste on us.

We will respond in the same way to our children. Sit down, we'll want to say, listen to our experience. But what benefits for them will reside in our perplexities? What lessons can be wrested from maladjustment?

Some futurists merrily advise us that when there is nothing to do, when cybernetic slaves oil and operate society's machinery according to our bidding, when work becomes the privilege of a superspecialized elite--why, then we shall be a planet of puppeteers and skindivers, of perpetual tourists, students, collectors, ceramists, film makers, cricketeers.

Who will fret about cumulation, "contribution"? Picture us at the beach, modeling and remodeling our intricate sand castles, with no thought to the incoming tide.

"If everyone in the world would only play the violin," said the 2000-year-old man, "we would be bigger and better than Mantovani." Sociologists in the Sixties foresaw a new hedonism, a living for the moment. Picture a loftier enterprise for the future, an effortlessly dedicated attempt at living in the moment: occupying its territory fully. That alone would be a feat.

Play is a child's way of mastering the world, of making its order visible to himself. Will we, indeed, pass our hours with the concentration of children at play? Or will we try to muster, as if from memory, their careless seriosity?

When there's no necessity to our freely chosen enterprise, how shall we focus our attention upon it? Can we bear a lifetime of apprenticeship, taking lessons without end? Can we embrace selfrealization for its own sake? Or will we dumbly persist in the worn-out notion that business is business? Kick the sand into aimless piles--with the distracted minds of vacationing adults.

"Wasn't there something, though I can't remember what, that I had to do?"

Can we elude preoccupation? Or will we play, not like children but like old people--just to keep busy? Frantically, desperately, to ward off brooding. Peel a stick. Hit a tree with it, hit earth with it. Look at the sun. Watch each other.

Through possessions, their getting and mending--through our need for the next improvement on the new model of frammis--we will keep our minds pressurized.

"All those things you wanted when you was a kid," Roger Miller told an interviewer, "like that motorcycle and that Model A, and all that stuff--all those things, when you get money you can't think of a damn one of 'em. Sometimes you run out and buy and buy, just trying to run across one of 'em."

Purpose. Worthiness. Self-esteem. Once, when our rituals became compulsive, we could attribute their grip on us to overwork. But when there is no work to be done, how will they survive without our becoming ashamed of them?

Each mind like a fish tossing, flopping (continued on page 259)Past as Future(continued from page 216) wildly on a pier. A fish that no amount of beating kills, a fish one first and only wants to still.

Before long, of course, we will learn to still our minds--artificially.

Certain vestigial chemical reactions accompany our persistent sense of danger and insecurity. They were useful when we lived in a relatively unprotected state. Anxiety, palpitations, adrenal shock. Now these reactions are unnecessary. They live on uselessly, crippling people. We shall learn to cool them out. Our chemistry will be made appropriate once again.

Meanwhile, we find ourselves inventing games that promise to call forth our vestigial reactions, as if naturally. We must hope that our games will be able to expend them, to contain them.

If outside chemicals could eliminate guilt and fear--leave us pleased with our purposelessness--they'd have a huge and welcome effect. But they would also eliminate much that was dear to us. A curiosity about ourselves that could never be exhausted. Patience, which we took perverse pleasure in trying. A connoisseurship of our own symptoms. A certainty that every credit has its debt, every debt its credit; that the piper must be paid.

Still, the easiest thing to change about yourself is your name. You remain the same. You simply have a new name. You can change your nose, too, now, of course, if you don't like your nose. Like the new name, the new nose is yours--an appendage to the big immutable mind-body you.

Your eyeglasses are not exactly you. But your 20-20 vision when wearing them, that is you. Are contact lenses more you than eyeglasses?

Suppose we could change many important things about ourselves. Should we still be allowed to change our names? What, then, will identity consist of? How will we keep track of one another?

Say you are Miriam Rabinowitz with a hook nose. And then you are Dawn Thursday with a ski-jump nose; but still with small breasts, squat legs, frequent flu, poor memory, destructive temper; still lethargic, nervous, defeatist. Say that chemicals, electrodes, cosmetological operations, transplants, cyborg techniques can effect any changes you like. What, then, is the difference between a graft and you? Between a graft and your clothes? Between your clothes and you?

What is a body but this organ, this limb, this sense? What integer of personality will remain immune to our control? What remains immutable when we play even with the consciousness that orders our improvement?

When Dawn Thursday is finished and formed and ready to meet the world, where will Miriam Rabinowitz be? And what will she, faultless, now worry about? What will 10,000,000 teenagers worry about, when they have perfect complexions, flower-sweet breath? The sense of blessedness that only "popularity" could formerly win?

Without the necessity of imperfection, our entire make-ups will be no more inalienable than our names. We will be able to redesign ourselves.

No one will have a fate. No one will be constrained by inevitabilities he does not impart to himself. A person's every aspect will become an appendage. But to what? What happens when everything--even the mind that is stipulating the rearrangement--becomes an appendage?

It will be more and more difficult to resist what others think of us. We may design ourselves, in fact, with others in mind, the way we now design our hairdos.

Say that one is no longer stuck--not simply with one's deformities but with anything. Say Dawn Thursday can play with her looks, her mood--her character. What, then, is fundamental to her? Only her experience.

Alongside what is changed through her will or experimentation, there must be something constant to which things happen. But Dawn will participate in fewer and fewer of her experiences. They will not be encounters, interactions subject to her influence. Other people will manufacture most of the experiences that occupy her waking time.

Dawn's power over her experiences will be primarily the power of veto. She won't be able to do anything much about them, except to tune them out.

Will that power be the sole meaning of her privacy? What kind of privacy can we have without a fund of uniquely personal experience to savor and protect? We may feel as transparent as glass, and as brittle.

Think of all the uses we once found for privacy. When the world was out to prove us foolish or inept, we could point inward and say, "Here is our dignity; here it doesn't hurt."

Official infringements of privacy may be arrested. The people may yet retain the power to roll back Orwellian invasions--sophisticated surveillance and eavesdropping techniques, computerized dossiers. Nonetheless, one of the main effects of our bewilderment--the plethora of options, the scarcity of "good" options--will be to leave us without any sense of privacy.

When chromosomes can be doctored, when simple decompression treatments during pregnancy can change the makeup of a child's mind, what sense will it make for us to work at character, at intelligence or talent?

We have feet of clay. Generations to come will have feet of iron. How may we hope to stack up against those new men? With the passage of years, they will surpass each other helter-skelter, leave forebears in the dust like hairy beasts.

Once, we might have dared to trade botched and hassled lives for immortality. But immortality will be no bargain if it cannot last a generation. Warhol predicted that in the future everyone would be world-famous for 15 minutes. Will anything we do make any difference when it can be forgotten in the twinkling of an eye? When our work is not long important to anyone, how will we pretend it is still important to ourselves?

We never coveted immortality for its flattery, but as a way of growing, sure that the meaning of our deeds would stay fixed and untouched. Sure that no one could meddle with our measure when we were gone and could defend ourselves no more. How many homers would the Babe have racked up had he been swinging at a jack-rabbit ball? What supermen would we have been, given access to our chromosomes?

Asked to choose an incipient characteristic of our time that would dilate, come more fully to characterize the future, one might choose a term favored by the Church fathers: incuria sui, or "lack of care of self." Not exactly a disregard for oneself, and certainly nothing like selflessness, but a failure to engage passionately with how one's soul is turning out. A certain incuriosity about oneself, though not yet free from agitation. The condition was frequently related to sloth, or "inquiet idleness." And deemed the opposite of peace, of the "peace which passeth understanding."

A: Why shouldn't I stay high all my life?

B: That would be too conclusive. Too impermissible an escape from reality.

A: Whose reality? Why is straight more real than high? I'm crazy when I'm straight.

B: Turning on is counterproductive. It makes you not want to do anything.

A: Who needs what I might produce? I'm traveling around, keeping my eye open. Soaking up the scene. What's so a priori heavy about doing something?

B: But stay away at least from freak drugs that pummel and twist your mind, turn you into someone else.

A: I must experience whatever's psychotic in me. Psychosis can be valuable. Drugs are only a catalyst. They don't introduce ideas or feelings.

There's an answer for every argument, an argument for every answer. Accusations--of madness, of deadness--fly across empty space, from one planet of presumption to another. The question--"Why not stay high?"--will arise more and more, in ever wider-ranging circles. The ensuing debate will form a context for all our plans.

To dopers, it seems no one can make an adequate case for leaving one's head untampered with. Yet, they confront the prospect of perpetual intoxication freighted with ambivalence. But when the question seems to meet no resistance--why, then, maybe a lifelong stone would be suspiciously advisable. Why not? Have we been bullied into moderation by engendered fears?

How will we deny ourselves pleasures when only another pleasure might induce us to do so? What secondary or tertiary pleasure--one that arrives as a release, after self-imposed abstention--will compete with potions that directly romance the pleasure centers of the human nervous system?

Where will we find thought to deny ourselves? Where if not from denial itself? We shall see a kind of self-indulgence historically restricted to the few who had every privilege and no "constructive" ideas, and to some who had nothing, not even hope. We shall see that indulgence on a massive scale.

Thus far, it may be said, the problem has been technological. The chemicals themselves have fallen short.

"Every lust wants eternity," Nietzsche wrote. "Deep, deep eternity." The natural drugs, those that had been widely used (even worshiped) in pre-Christian eras, appeared, after a time, to turn against the user. The more so as his idleness flowered.

He could not get high as he remembered getting once; nodded off, grew logy and wasted, difficult to rouse. Finally, gratification became fleeting, elusive. After a day's first rush, he found himself unable to count upon a quarter hour's buzz. Turning on wasn't the difficulty; that was easy enough. The difficulty was getting off.

Can it be very long before science, investigating how humans come to feel good, synthesizes more deeply gratifying compounds? Gratification will become reliable and instantaneous. Even more alarming, it won't need to be temporary.

And yet, by definition, gratification must be temporary. Otherwise, it eliminates the need for itself. A lust desires its own perpetuation: to be explored and pampered, indulged but not satisfied. Every lust becomes incoherent once it has its eternity.

If you can get high whenever you like, and even stay stoned for the duration, then you are completely accountable for whatever miseries you feel. Grown accustomed to regarding misery as a state of chemical imbalance, you are at a loss to correct it nonchemically.

Dolphins and laboratory monkeys adore nothing so much as a well-placed electrode. It is also well known that rats will ignore sex, food and water to pound the bar that zaps them waves of pleasurable excitation. Pound until they collapse of exhaustion, expire upon bloodied paws. When pharmacology becomes a gourmet cooking of the mind, when brain electrodes can be located and charged with exquisite precision, shall many of us take a pass on them?

When men can arrive at that sort of self-containment--become, in effect, closed-circuit pleasure systems--there will be no need to come to terms with one's intellect, nor with anything outside. Why even develop the ability to observe, when every sensation that accompanies observation can be extracted through artifice?

When one can be assured of gratification, self-mastery will be unnecessary as deodorant. There will be no sense to striving. Nothing worth winning.

Frederick Jackson Turner postulated that in the 19th Century, our Western frontier acted as a safety valve for social and economic dissension back East. Shall we herald drugs as the safety valve of our century?

When we begin to run over each other in the outside world, goes the argument, we can turn inward, and there find relief. Yet the metaphor suggests that some kind of freedom lies yonder through the valve. The hunkies who covered-wagoned to Colorado ended up as miners at Telluridle and Silver City.

We can find clues watching where long-term heads come out, but not many. We may feel unable to trust in their reports. Our words will have lost all precision, all common definition.

When one who's socked himself away for 40 or 50 years leans back and murmurs, "Groovy," how will we decide whether he's talking about something groovy enough to turn our heads, or about something so groovy we could give our lives for it?

Once we knew we would have to overcome a certain amount of disappointment along the way. Our ability to bear that disappointment was constantly in doubt, but never so much in doubt that it could not be resourcefully proven. There was work to be done. A call for pluck, or grit. We knew as much as we could take. When we could take no more, we made ourselves stupid.

When too much is present to us, we must be stupefied a bit to restore our balance. Previously, we used compulsive activity, imaginary slights, dreams of revenge, as antidotes to secret pain. Our new antidotes will be more dependable.

Perhaps, then, in the future, the tragedies of suffering--Lear's or Willy Loman's--will seem completely avoidable. They may strike us as anachronistic legends of men who lacked the right tool--the right upper, or downer, or coole-outer--at the right time. Men who missed their connection.

Will suffering come to mean discomfort? A simple state of mind, no longer possibly educating or uplifting; no purgatory along the way to higher sanity? An annoyance, merely to be avoided? Like flutter in the stereo, overcool air conditioning. Too many milligrams, too many volts.

If you knew discomfort to be correctable, and if you still felt discomfort after the adjustment were made, the pill taken--would you be sure you were insane?

Resolute misery will be too heady for future generations. It would demand of them that they knew how to distinguish the joyful and the miserable in themselves. They will plug into joy. It will have no honesty, for it won't need to be honest about anything. Their joy won't contrast with the trials that made ours a relief and a home-coming.

Men once valued suffering in more ways than we can now imagine. It provided no concrete lessons, of course, nor any instruction in how suffering was to be borne, but a kind of knowledge, to be sure.

Penitence and remorse once found their answer, or their issue, in suffering. We could foresee a time when something like repentance might overwhelm us, when we'd be forced to take hold of our selves, in order to change. Or when deep change would burst upon us, effortlessly. Someday the ground might fall away from beneath our suffering. We could say--someone could say--when we had suffered enough. There would be some way of knowing.

But who, when suffering means discomfort, can tell us when we have felt discomfort enough? Enough, that is, to balance our guilts and debts. Will our remorse then be infinite? Who would tell us, say, that we had felt the blahs enough? What kind of forgiveness is there for discomfort?

Who will be left to detect our suffering, to ensure that we get some benefit from it? Who will demonstrate that it wasn't in vain--that it didn't merely succeed itself, like boredom, from one minute to the next? Suffering will have no tragedy.

The Stoics felt that men could not survive without protection against the future; more precisely, against expectations about the future. They called the proper state of mind ataraxia. It was somber and dispassionate, "still as light on the water." It held no brief for the future. As if it weren't itself a way of receiving the future, of trying to possess it in advance, before it happened. As if a state of mind could bend time to their will; as if time were itself only a state of mind. When we produce ataraxia in a test tube--won't that be a paradoxical suicide?

Criminals have always showed us what we don't dare, often what we don't dare even contemplate.

Our outlaws were outlaws, typically, because there was no other way for them to ensure that they wouldn't be abused. On balance, they traded into as many rights as had been traded from them. When they were caught, only the deranged made bones about whether their crimes had really been crimes.

The criminals of the future may be like Charlie Starkweather--not thrill or social killers but people who kill with his offhand logic. Because the neighbor was making too much noise. Because the husband failed once too often to juggle the latrine handle. Because someone else had the intriguing car. They'd find it easy to say, as Starkweather did when asked why he'd gone on his rampage, "Always wanted to be a criminal, just not this big a one."

To the extent that criminals fall into crime because of their revolutionary politics, there will be no agreement about what should count as law. What counts as criminal to one class will seem virtuous to another.

We will be able to invoke names like "justice" and "duty" only in the name of some particular idea of justice and duty, not in the name of every such idea. Justice, duty and the like will be so many epithets that a class uses to defend itself.

Spengler said that a culture's decline is the period of its greatest creative flourishing. We can foresee merely its greatest nostalgia. Only the poorest art can flow from nostalgia.

The future will be a time of miniaturists. Of small triumphs. Of artists who aim at nothing beyond the persuasion of our indolence--who needn't aim at more to win a title to beauty.

We believe today that our duties to art are discharged not in the works themselves but in our attitudes toward them, in how we feel they should be "experienced." Yet our immediate experience of the work no longer counts for anything. We are left at the mercy of our opinions. We cannot voice them with any confidence, nor even hold them stationary. Interpretation is disallowed.

"It's boring," one says of a Warhol piece. But one has no valid response until one can meet the predictable reply, "Well, that's just the point...."

One can always be told that a fakable or reproduceable effect, a drip or a shout, is supposed to be fakable or reproduceable. No one cares to argue that these qualities are wrong or bad. We don't want to convince anyone who is not already convinced; we don't care about them enough.

No artist can be uncertain for very long whether or not he is good; whether he is good simply by his own lazy notions of good or bad--whether the self that asks such questions is overexacting. Nor can he find out by testing his work upon a modern audience. Its response is more confused and fearful than his own, may even rely on his.

When art depends on effects, when a legitimate response requires interpretation--when the interpretation gives the work its legitimacy and not vice versa--then the appreciation of art becomes a kind of politics. Indeed, the methods of appreciation begin to resemble in their every detail the methods of politics. Artists may become as irrelevant as politicians.

Those who command attention, from whatever pulpit, will be talking to the people about how they should conduct their lives without falling into confusion.

The swaying power politicians once had is passing into the hands of circus-masters, spokesmen not elected but "happened," like Topsy. Their ancestors: Johnny Carson and Tim Leary. More people have spent more time watching and listening to Johnny Carson than to any human being in history.

Dealing with or filibustering on subjects of immediate peril, politicians speak perfunctorily, if at all, about the quality of people's lives. False statistics and strained cheer.

Circusmasters may rise and fade, linger or be forgotten. But during their time of influence, however brief, they will carry enormous weight. Their fatuous presumptions and remarks will direct millions of lives whose energies are up for grabs.

Just to stay in competition, politicians will be forced to become impresarios. Their votes and programs won't count much for or against them. Everyone will be so muddled, and so past caring.

Only presentation will determine the attention they receive. Showmanship. Even the radicals, with no hope left for meaningful change, will turn to "dramatizing" or "exposing." To performing theatrical acts upon their constituencies.

For a long while, we've not expected politicians to know how to solve our problems. We've not even expected them to enlist the people who might. But soon they will no longer have the cloudiest picture of what the problems were.

As it grows increasingly difficult to find a private nook for our insanities, they will have to become more public. Since an insanity cannot bear to be seen in public, we will compensate by acknowledging them less. We will have to turn our eyes from them, an avoidance that is the root of all insanity.

Our politicians, in their explanation of Vietnam, have become the first to venture a public insanity. The first to be even judiciously insane. But if they aim only at working an effect on people, then they must know those on whom they are working their effect. Slight prospect. They are busy men, and their ignorance may have a terrible price.

Through our parents' youth, through part of our own, America seemed everyone's hope. Now her blindness, her gluttony and her failures of compassion have begun turning her into the most despised nation on earth.

Her empire of influence will be shrunk by the third world. We will come to feel isolated, furtive and nightbound. The violence that we have done a hundred nations will be regurgitated for us, and we won't quite understand.

It will make sense to us someday that we can be defended by a missile network that doesn't work, against missiles that don't exist, for reasons that are not made clear. It will have to make sense, whatever the risks. For we will be unable to tolerate its senselessness.