During a 1957 Notre Dame conference entitled “What America Stands For,” Karl De Schweinitz, Jr., examined the “contemporary problems of the American economy.” His major themes should be familiar: the effect of concentration of power and production on the functioning of the economy; the instability which the economy exhibits from year to year; and the continuing tension in the economy between individual preferences and economic imperatives.

In any Discussion of American community life two beliefs are likely to quickly come to the fore. First, that we have over the last 50 years undergone a revolution in community settlement patterns and today we are an urban nation with more and more of our population crowding into our urban areas. Many now speak with disdain about the runaway urbanization and the emerging “ant-hill society.” A second theme that almost always accompanies the first is that the quality of life in our urban communities is deteriorating rapidly. One can hardly read a daily metropolitan newspaper without spotting a headline which sounds the alarm. Not long ago, for example, the New York Times had a front-page spread with the startling headline, “Eleven Mayors Warn Here of Collapse of U.S. Cities.” Stewart Alsop, in a Newsweek column with the foreboding title “The Cities Are Finished,” managed in the course of one page to inform his readers that the cities may be “finished” because they have become unlivable; that the net population of cities will continue to fall; that the future is statistically predictable—in another 10 years most of our cities will consist mostly of blacks; and that the cities will come to resemble reservations for the poor and the blacks surrounded by heavily guarded middle-class suburbs. More recently, Sol Linowitz, Chairman of the National Urban Coalition, declared, “We have abandoned our cities … [and while they] are not on fire today, most of the conditions that caused the civil disorders in recent years have worsened.”

When I was an undergraduate I could never understand the reluctance of a historian to analyze in print the happenings of the most recent 20 years. To my mind that reluctance was best exercised with respect to events and societies thousands of years ago. For those ancient societies we might have fragments, clues, a few sketchy outlines. But for the years immediately preceding our own we had literally mountains of material in newspapers, books, periodicals, and of course our own personal memories and on the spot analyses. After reflecting back on my own assessment of things in that year, the spring of 1963, in which I was literally a sophomore, I understand more fully the reluctance of the historian. In understanding the immediate past we are implicitly claiming to understand the present and the future. Almost none of my perspectives about the future, based on my “understanding” of the then recent past, turned out to be correct even in broad outline.

Culture, in the simplest language, refers to the thoughtways, feelingways, and actionways of a people, be they a nation or a subsociety. As a concept, it refers to the established orientations which a people has for managing its relationships in the collectivity and its relationships to the forces and conditions of the physical environment. The key elements of culture are beliefs, sentiments, norms, and values. Almost all behavioral scientists would include in the realm of culture all the cognitive, affective, behavioral, and value orientations shared by a people. With these basic elements of culture, a people constructs complexes which we call ideologies, social structures, institutions, organizations, laws, and policies.

My title calls the relationship of theology and the new American culture “problematic.” That relationship is a problem, I think, on many sides and various levels. The issue involves questions I do not even know how to ask meaningfully, let alone resolve.

Areal cultural shift doesn't happen very often. Skepticism about whether one took place in the 1960's is quite natural, especially in view of the rapidity with which cultural fashions have come and gone in the past 15 years. The New Conservatism had hardly crested before it was succeeded by the End of Ideology, which was displaced with equal speed by the New Left. In the religious sphere, the revival of the early 50's gave way to the Death of God 10 years later. This proved even more ephemeral. With its companion, the Secular City, it was left behind in a welter of new movements—occultism, mysticism, and various forms of millenarian religious revolutionism. Paradoxically, the dizzying pace of change itself seemed to argue that nothing very profound was going on.

Norman mailer observed several years ago that American Protestantism, with the exception of Tillich and other Protestant existentialists, had become “oriented to the machine, and lukewarm in its enthusiasm for such notions as heaven, hell and the soul.” The religious tradition of the West had been preoccupied with the soul and had delineated its progress from earth to heaven and its struggling movement between darkness and light, Satan and God, as part of a cosmic and apocalyptic drama. Although Roman Catholicism had remained somewhat more concerned than Protestantism with such conceptions, argued Mailer, Christianity in general had left them behind and become tepid in the process.

When the question of a “new age” is put to a philosopher there are two quite different ways in which he can define the issue and accordingly respond. On the one hand, he might construe his task as that of a clarifier of some general claim about cultural revolutions. From this perspective he would set about the task of analyzing the concept of a cultural revolution in terms of some loose analogue of necessary and sufficient conditions. These criteria having been laid down, he could then make suggestions as to whether or not those conditions obtain which would justify the claim that we are in the midst of such a cultural revolution. On the other hand, he might construe his charge more specifically as that of assessing the present state of his own field to see if something like a shift in perspective is manifest in this narrower domain. In this paper I am going to take the latter tack. I will, first, briefly survey the contemporary scene in philosophy to illustrate the “changing temper” I am to talk about; secondly, locate these phenomena in a broader historical context; and, thirdly, try to get at the reasons underlying the changes on which I am focusing. The major part of the paper will be devoted to the third point.

Are we now in, or entering into, a new age? Is this a revolutionary period in the history of man? This paper will consider these questions, especially as they relate to science and technology.

Consider the following statements, all of which cite evidence in support of the thesis that a new age is upon us.

You must pardon our audacity in presuming to say anything of substance about the foundations of cultural change in such brief space. Our apology for undertaking such a task lies in part in our spirit of adventure, and in part in our qualified intention to be suggestive rather than comprehensive. We are not aiming at conclusive scientific or scholarly documentation. We are being speculative, as scientists and scholars are sometimes prone to be when they are away from the laboratory or library, or when they are nagged by some of the nettlesome questions they feel compelled to come to terms with as men, but which professional prudence generally forbids them to talk about in formal conference or print. We would also like to make public our belief in the deep friendship between the sciences and humanities by unabashedly talking to each other in public, proclaiming common interests in common problems, and suggesting that in collaboration we will find the best basis to our problems' solution.

We live in a world of constant change. Western society as opposed to Eastern society has always been characterized by change, though perhaps today Eastern societies such as China and Japan are changing faster than we of the West.

Our folklore in America pictures the “new” world that Rip van Winkle found when he awakened. Every day we listen for the news. What's new in the world? We have a newspaper. We have newscasters on the media. We greet each other with, “What's new?” Our scientists set out for New Worlds to conquer. We have New Math and Art Nouveau. We change washing machine models every year. We change dress and hair styles. In most cases anything 100 years old is fit only for discard. We tear down our old buildings and move to the suburbs. Things change so fast we don't have time or the inclination or the ability to evaluate whether it was really necessary to have a new style of car or washing machine or a new design for the detergent box. We are driven by maximizing of profits, by being efficient, and by moving people and things.

Three films circumscribe the counterculture of the last decade. These three films have as their subject the counterculture, and they themselves became cultural events. Woodstock, Easy Rider, and A Clockwork Orange: they define, warn, and predict. Woodstock (the event) and Woodstock (the film, which became the event for millions of the young) defined the counterculture of the 1960's. Of course, that definition did not begin the phenomenon of a youth culture that runs counter. Nor was Woodstock the first description of it. Anthony Burgess wrote his counterculture novel A Clockwork Orange over 10 years ago, and he has told us in a June 8, 1972, Rolling Stone article that he planned the book nearly 30 years ago. The droogs in that novel were some version of Teddy Boys or greasers or hipsters projected into an apocalyptic future: “The work merely describes certain tendencies I observed in Anglo-American society in 1961 (and even earlier).” Some of those tendencies, and several others, were exposed by the counterculture itself in Easy Rider, just before Woodstock. But Woodstock purified and refined the counterculture—and successfully made it self-conscious, mythologized it. And thus defined it.

Stuart hampshire has used the term “irresponsibility” to describe or set apart creative activity of an artistic sort from a code of behavior as it is defined and practiced by society. This code is a product of the society's value system and establishes what is or is not responsible behavior.

Most of the new developments in the mass media during the 1960's turned out to be unfulfilled promises, for good or ill. A partial list is suggestive:

1. The tapering off of the underground press.

2. The inconclusive, still smoldering Agnew controversy.

3. The decline of the mass magazine.

4. The rise of pornography as a mass medium.

5. The gradual eclipse of McLuhan and his theories.

6. The ambiguous influence of TV in politics following the excitement of the Kennedy-Nixon debates.

7. The blunted impact of the big reports: Kerner, Eisenhower, Pornography, and the Surgeon-General's report on violence.

8. The failure of educational TV to get up a full head of steam.

9. The failure of commercial TV to develop new, innovative, and imaginative programs.

10. The technological promises unfulfilled: the electronic newspaper and magazine, TV cassettes, CATV's slow march, home video tapes, 3-D TV, and so on, along with the persistence of raised-type printing, radio, comic strips, newsboys, and much else often proclaimed obsolete.

Despite inevitable overlapping, it is convenient to divide the foregoing into print and broadcasting.

“I conspired to convince the McGraw-Hill Book Company that I was in communication with Howard Hughes, and in fact I was not.” With that it was over. Looking back, a brief fling for Clifford Irving: the whopping advance for an “autobiography” of Hughes, certain to become the book of the year; then the day-by-day disclosures on front pages and evening newscasts that it was all a hoax; the Time cover story (“Con Man of the Year”) with color portrait by Elmyr de Hory, the art-forger subject of living's prophetic book Fake!; the slide from media sight in favor of Nixon in China and politicians on the primary stump; finally the terse confession in Manhattan District Court. A very brief fling—though at the time, the late winter of 1972, the Hughes-Irving story seemed to run on endlessly, and of course isn't over yet. The legal tangle goes on and rumor is that Irving is coming out with a book about the other book—which, we now guess, might have been the point all along.