Polyester and Pessimism

The 1970s may be remembered for disco but the real hallmark was uncertainty

Yesterday, I noted how 2022 is feeling very 1970s. That vibe reminded me of a chapter in Future Babble that I am publishing here, in sections.

The first instalment looked at the Carter administration and Jimmy Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech. Remembered today as a terrible mistake, the speech in fact struck a deep chord with Americans. The unsettling gloom Carter spoke of — the sense that everything was just falling to pieces — reflected how a large swathe of America felt. There’s a reason why the unhinged tirade of anchorman Howard Beale in the 1976 movie Network — “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more!” — is a defining image of the decade.

In today’s instalment, I get deeper into the trends of the 1970s that generated such intense pessimism, and the tsunami of books and essays from esteemed experts warning that the future would be much, much worse. In the next instalment, I’ll look at the psychology of uncertainty and why feeling bad about the future can actually make you feel better in the present. And why that can lead us to make bad decisions — like taking overconfident pundits seriously.

After reviewing this section for the first time since I published Future Babble, back in 2010, I’m pretty pleased with it. The single biggest barrier to understanding history is, I would argue, hindsight bias. We know how the movie ends. And as psychologists have shown, that knowledge profoundly skews how we see the past. To really get a sense of the past, we have to get over that and experience history as people did when it was the present. They hadn’t seen the movie. They didn’t know how it ended. And that uncertainty — uncertainty is the key word throughout all this — is absolutely central to their perceptions and expectations.

We can’t understand history merely by looking back at it, or by looking down on it, with the condescension of know-it-alls. To understand history, we must understand the feelings of those who lived it. And, if at all possible, feel a little of that ourselves.

The feelings in the 1970s? People fell in love and had fun and all the good stuff that always goes on. But when it came to public affairs, and dreaded question of where the world was headed next, the 1970s were the era of polyester and pessimism, and mood rings detecting fear.

In the 1970s, even Captain America got in touch with his feelings.

We can think of “the 70s” as the years sandwiched between 1969 and 1980 but historian Bruce Schulman considers the real beginning of the era to be 1968. It was the year of the rupture – the violent moment when assassins’ bullets cut down 1960s idealism (Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr.), and setbacks abroad (the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) hinted that America’s might was waning. It was also a cultural watershed, as social changes that started at the fringes in the 1960s began to spread into the mainstream. Schulman notes that a high school yearbook from 1966, “or even 1967 or 1968, shows clean-cut faces, ties and demure dresses; they resemble stereotyped images of the 1950s. But the 1972 or 1974 yearbook reveals shaggy hair, beads, granny glasses.”

The defining feature of the era was change – a tidal wave of young people, women’s lib, black consciousness, gay pride, the sexual revolution, legal abortion. Many basic assumptions about right and wrong crumbled with startling speed. In 1968, three-quarters of Americans told pollsters they disapproved of marriage between whites and non-whites; ten years later, that had fallen to one-half. In 1969, only 57 per cent of Americans said they would vote for a qualified woman to be president; a mere six years later, 76 per cent said they would. In 1970, Yale law professor Charles Reich argued in The Greening of America, which first appeared as an essay in The New Yorker then as a book, that the counterculture was rapidly replacing a consumerist and obedient mindset with a new egalitarian and spiritual way of looking at the world that Reich called Consciousness III. It would be nothing less than a revolution without violence and everything would change. Many were thrilled by Reich’s vision; many more were frightened and appalled. The New Yorker received more mail in response to Reich’s essay than to anything it had ever published, and Reich’s book was an instant smash, dominating best-seller charts for months and generating passionate debates for years.

All this ferment suggested promise and peril, and no change better represented the dual-edged nature of the fast-moving reality than nofault divorce, a legal innovation that swept the Western world in the 1960s. It made splitting up easy, and the “Me Generation” – Tom Wolfe’s coinage – did it with abandon. At first, this was widely believed to be to everyone’s benefit because ex-spouses would be happier, and happier mothers and fathers would make for happier children, but it didn’t take long for people to realize this was naïve. The reality of divorce was captured in Kramer vs. Kramer, the painfully sad story of a couple’s battle for custody of a frightened child that won the Academy Award for best picture of 1979 and was the year’s top box-office draw.

Another big change was unambiguously bad. Crime and disorder soared, especially in the rapidly decaying inner cities, and municipal governments seemed powerless to stop it. New York was in the worst shape – City Hall teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, the subways were a filthy no man’s land, and Central Park was reduced to a punchline: “The city of New York is importing a temple from Egypt to be placed in Central Park,” Johnny Carson told his Tonight Show audience in 1970. “That’s what we need is a temple. We can go in there and pray to get out of the park alive.” No one saw anything good in New York’s future, a sentiment reflected in Taxi Driver, The Warriors, Escape from New York, and other movies and novels that imagined the city becoming an urban ruin populated by the feral, the psychotic, and the terrified. And the plague wasn’t confined to the United States or to garden-variety criminals. Terrorism surged around the world. Even Canada suffered bombings and kidnappings. “From countries as disparate as Britain and Nigeria and the Soviet Union,” wrote New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, “there are reports of increasing criminal violence and of official inability to cope with it. Is there some universal desperation, some loss of social glue?”

The use of illicit drugs rose even more rapidly than crime. In 1969, a mere 4 per cent of Americans had ever smoked marijuana; eight years later, one-quarter had. When Richard Nixon became the first American president to declare a “war on drugs” in 1969, heroin could be found only in a few major American cities, while cocaine was restricted to the elite circles of the “jet set”; a decade later both drugs had spread across the country and cocaine was so popular that Time magazine ran a cover featuring a martini glass filled with white powder – the new cocktail of the upper middle class. The story was the same in every other Western country, but nowhere was the change more dramatic than in Britain. For decades, the British government had allowed doctors to prescribe maintenance doses of heroin and other drugs to addicts. Addiction rates were extremely low and there was literally no black market in drugs anywhere in the country. But in the late 1960s, that program was scrapped and things started to change. Cindy Fazey, an expert on drug use, was working in the Home Office in 1969 when the head of the drugs branch “called me into his office and said, hey, look at this. He opened his drawer and there’s this little plastic bag. And that was the first time we’d seen illegal heroin.” Within a decade, British addicts numbered in the tens of thousands and a previously unimaginable subculture of addiction, disease, squalor, and crime was growing like mould on old bread.

Gerald Ford distributed buttons to beat inflation. It didn’t work.

Then there was the economy. Since the end of the late 1960s, the long post-war boom had slowed – stock markets would be stuck in the mud for more than a decade – but it was the Arab oil embargo of 1973 that finished it off. As oil prices soared, country after country plunged into recession. Unemployment rose. Inflation exploded. Economists were dismayed because, according to standard economic theory, the horrible combination of stagnation and rising prices – “stagflation” – wasn’t possible. And yet, there it was. “Inflation, our public enemy number one, will, unless whipped, destroy our country, our homes, our liberty, our property . . . as surely as any well-armed wartime enemy,” President Gerald Ford told Congress in 1974. Watergate made everything worse because government could no longer be trusted; like a crippled boat in a hurricane, the United States was adrift at the worst possible moment. A Gallup survey released in June 1974 revealed “a profound sense of disillusionment, even despondency over Watergate and economic conditions.” Things went reasonably well between 1976 and 1978, but for the most part the ills that befell developed economies in 1973 continued to worsen as a long-term decline in manufacturing in the United States, Britain, Canada, and many other Western countries left millions of low-skill blue-collar workers without jobs or prospects. The fear was intense. In 1968, the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index hovered in the 130 range: By the end of 1974, it was a miserable 43. Pessimism like that wouldn’t be seen again until the crash of 2008. In the New York Review of Books, the historian Geoffrey Barraclough cited a long list of authors who foresaw either depression or the rise of fascism before delivering his own verdict: “The odds, it seems to me, are that we shall get both.”