Aftershocks of the "Me" Decade

By John F. Stacks

An upbeat Yankelovich predicts a new "ethic of commitment"

In the late1960s, and through most of the 1970s, some fundamental and widely shared cultural views changed in the U.S. With the economy booming, many Americans were liberated from old anxieties about material success. The belief that hard work, self-denial and moral rectitude were their own rewards gave way to a notion, held fervently and misguidedly by some, that the "self and the realization of its full "potential" were all-important pursuits. This phenomenon was ridiculed as the "me" decade by Writer Tom Wolfe and the "culture of narcissism" by Social Critic Christopher Lasch.

Daniel Yankelovich, a student of the American psyche and chairman of the polling firm of Yankelovich, Skelly & White, now offers a more benign view. In New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down (Random House; $15.95), he suggests that this social upheaval may turn out to be as important as the cultural and political revolution that created the nation. Yankelovich recognizes that selfishness often masquerades as "self-actualization" and that "nothing has subverted self-fulfillment more thoroughly than self-indulgence." But borrowing from Alfred North Whitehead, he notes that "great ideas of ten enter reality in strange guises and with disgusting alliances."

Yankelovich, whose firm's political polls appear in TIME, uses opinion research to justify his conclusions about America's shifting attitudes. He finds that only 17% of the population have self-fulfillment as their principal life goal. Slightly more (20%) still cling to traditional values of hard work, family loyalty and sacrifice. The majority (63%) embrace some traditional values but also espouse views that would have been heretical only a generation ago. They are toler ant about abortion, premarital sex, remaining single, and not having children; they are skeptical about the importance of work, feeling that it does not have to be at the center of their lives.

America's sense of social drift, Yankelovich argues, is not created just by the human-potential faddists and their self-destructive tendency to confuse "needs" and "desires." Rather, the problem is broader based, encompassing the middle group, which developed its semiliberated values in a time of economic plenty. According to Yankelovich, Americans came to believe they could have it all-- wealth without work, sexual freedom without marital problems, self-absorption without loss of community. Then came the rise of OPEC, a decline in U.S. productivity and a huge expansion of federally funded social programs. "Had we not been lost in our introspective reveries, we might have noticed what was happening," Yankelovich says. Instead, many Americans are just now discovering that their high-flying expectations are out of place in more austere economic circumstances.

Yankelovich argues that a new "ethic of commitment" is dawning, in which self-denial and self-fulfillment will be synthesized into a "search for community." Unfortunately, the evidence supporting this rosy vision is fairly flimsy. Even he seems unconvinced: he anticipates an era of conflict as people try to hold on to both their new freedoms and their high standard of living.

The author has little to say about the role of politics, especially the Reagan Administration's overhaul of fiscal and social policy. He also pays limited attention to the tradition-minded 20% of the population (mostly fervent Reagan supporters) who are repelled and embittered by the permissiveness they see around them. Indeed, this old-fashioned but increasingly vocal group could set to a significant degree the moral tone for the 1980s.

-- By John F. Stacks

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