Variations on such themes are as plentiful as they are preposterous. Wilhelm Reich, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, the Black Panthers, Paul Goodman, Charles Reich, The Beatles: the list of agents for utopia is long and varied. It includes artists and intellectuals, entertainers, political activists, blatant poseurs, and professional gurus. In their different ways, these people pandered to a generation’s vanity, ambition, cowardice, and lust for sensation; increasingly they pandered to a generation whose vanity was its lust for sensation. They also served, as Susan Sontag illustrated in her campy meditations on Camp, as a defense against the alarming assaults of ennui. Many promulgated —like Rousseau before them—that insatiable greed for the emotion of virtue which makes the actual practice of virtue seem superfluous and elevates self-infatuation into a prime spiritual imperative.
- Roger Kimball
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