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A. After you've had every other freedom -- the four that Roosevelt enunciated -- the last hobble on your freedom is religion. We saw it in the '60s in the hippie movement, when tens of thousands of young people quite purposely emancipated themselves from ordinary rules.
In the '60s Ken Kesey told his merry pranksters, Be what you are. It didn't matter what, as long as it was what they really felt they were. Being what you are was a revolutionary, radical notion then. Now it is pretty much accepted
That's particularly true in sexual issues. The sexual revolution -- such a prim term -- was a tremendous change in the '60s. Now we almost don't include it in discussions of morality. We don't think of it in moral terms.
In many ways this new freedom has been a marvelous experiment, without parallel in history. But part has gone to an excess.
Q. Where do you see excesses?
A. The '80s are wilder than the '60s. Rock music is much wilder. Just think how tame the Beatles' music is today: it's almost Muzak. And the sexual revolution -- in the mid-'60s the idea of a coed dorm, putting those nubile young things and these young men in the season of the rising sap in the same dormitories, on the same floors! Now the coed dorm is like I-95. It's there. It hums. And you don't notice it.
Q. An erosion of standards?
A. Erosion, no. It's been much faster than erosion. There's been a sweeping aside of standards. Every kind of standard.
Q. What does a seer of the American scene expect of the '90s?
A. The '70s were almost over when I called it the Me decade. I don't deal in predictions, but you appeal to my vanity, so I'll talk about it anyway. I think that in the '90s we'll probably see a good bit of relearning, even though it might seem boring. It's in the attitudes of college students now. I sense they are already voluntarily putting the brakes on the sexual revolution -- not screeching to a halt, and not just because of AIDS.
I think there will be a lot of discussion in the '90s about morality. It has already begun. I pick it up in talking to college students. I expect a religious revival. We already see an awakening: the new interest in the Evangelicals, charismatic versions of established religions, and new religious forms such as est and channeling. That fifth freedom excites some and upsets others.
When Nietzsche said that God is dead, he said there would have to be created a new set of values to replace the values of Christianity. God was dead, but guilt was not, and there was no way to absolve it. That, perhaps, is exactly the period we are in. No use saying we are going to return to the dissenting Protestant view of sexual morality at the turn of the century. We won't.
Q. These views have marked you as a conservative.
A. When I'm called a conservative, I now wear that as a badge of honor, because in my world it really just means you are a heretic, you've said something unorthodox. You are supposed to conform to certain intellectual fashions, and if you don't, they say, "That's heterodoxy!"
Q. Reading Bonfire, one felt you were writing about the things going on around us now. Did it give you a jolt to see those things and say, "Hey, that's Chapter 7"?