But as the sixties unfolded, the new media made spiritual leaps, expanded their horizons, and developed into genuine moral educators. They taught their readers and listeners to think of black people, poor people, Vietnamese people, and victimized people everywhere as part of their neighborhoods. Maybe it won't, and crews of Bounderbys and Panglosses and mixed megapirates will rule the world forever. Or maybe only violent economic collapse will shake Americans out of their narcolepsy. On the other hand, it may be, as it was forty years ago, that the country's very prosperity will give us slack, that it will create imaginative space where people can begin to think about a better life than this.
Some people think there are no critical ideas left.
My own feeling is that there is a superabundance of critical ideas in the air, if we can learn to inhale. Marxian and Freudian thought are both immensely provocative, capable of endlessly new syntheses, spin-offs, and hybridizations. No one has the authority to say definitively what these ideas mean. Not even the founders could close the floodgates they had opened. Regardless, we should recognize that, with Marx and Freud, we are all living on top of radical gold mines.