It was not just condescension, however, but a remarkably tenacious belief in progress that made it so hard for people on the left to listen to those who told them things were falling apart. That kind of talk had always been the stock-in-trade—hadn't it?—of those who could not bear to face the future, pined for the good old days, and suffered from a "failure of nerve." The controversies in which I found myself embroiled after the publication of Haven in a Heartless World and The Culture of Narcissism gave me a better understanding of the left's quarrel with America. If people on the left felt themselves estranged from America, it was because most Americans, in their eyes, refused to accept the future. Instead they clung to backward, provincial habits of thought that prevented them from changing with the times. Those in the know understood that what "cultural pessimists" and "doomsayers" mistook for moral collapse represented a merely transitional stage in the unfolding process of "modernization." If only everyone could be made to see things so clearly! The transition to a "postindustrial" society and a "postmodern" culture naturally caused all sorts of readjustments and dislocations, but the inevitable supersession of older ways, however painful in its side effects, had to be accepted as the price of progress.

Nor was it only material progress that lay ahead. To my surprise, I found that my friends on the left—those who had not by this time written me off as "part of the problem," who still regarded me, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, as potentially salvageable—still believed in moral as well as in material progress. They cited the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women as indisputable evidence that the ideal of universal brotherhood was closer to realization than ever before. Its realization was chiefly impeded, it seemed, by the persistence of tribal loyalties rooted in the patriarchal stage of social development. The ties of kinship, nationality, and ethnic identity had to give way to "more inclusive identities," as Erik Erikson used to say—to an appreciation of the underlying unity of all mankind. Family feeling, clannishness, and patriotism—admirable enough, perhaps, in earlier days—could not be allowed

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