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As Patrick Moynihan points out in The Public Interest, youth of the 1960s was highly isolated from the rest of society. And in isolation is bred arrogance and unworldliness. Age, on the other hand, did not have the benefit of easy contact with youth. There was a tendency either to defect rather mindlessly to youth, accepting uncritically an alteration of values, or to develop a siege mentality and fear and resent one's own children. It was all too easy, depending on one's point of view, to hold youth responsible for what was good in society or to blame it for what was bad. In this way, one could avoid the complexities and ambiguities of a genuine analysis of American life. Historian Eric Goldman expects the 1970s to be a "period of re-emerging consensus, when the young will not be so critical of the old and when the old will not be so rigidly protective of their values." That may be a somewhat sunny view of a decade that could produce almost anything —and probably will. But at least one fissure in American life has been partly patched, which shows that it can be done.