to stand in the way of the global civilization that was arriving just in time, in fact, to save the human race from the self-destructive consequences of its old habits of national rivalry and war.

The left had no quarrel with the future, I discovered, but only with the backward, benighted, or simply misguided opponents of progress whose blind resistance might prevent the future from arriving on schedule. It was the belief in progress—the death of which I had taken for granted until I began to look into the matter—that explained the left's curious mixture of complacency and paranoia. Their confidence in being on the winning side of history made progressive people unbearably smug and superior, but they felt isolated and beleaguered in their own country, since it was so much less progressive than they were. After all, the political culture of the United States remained notoriously backward—no labor party, no socialist tradition, no great capital city like London or Paris, where politicians and civil servants mingled with artists and intellectuals and encountered advanced ideas in cafés and drawing rooms. In America, the divorce between politics and thought had always found geographical expression in the distance between Washington and New York; and the culture of Washington itself, for that matter, seemed light‐ years ahead of the vast hinterland beyond the Alleghenies—the land of the Yahoo, the John Birch Society, and the Ku Klux Klan.

By the late seventies and early eighties, I no longer had much confidence either in the accuracy of this bird's-eye view of America or in the progressive view of the future with which it was so closely associated. "Middle Americans" had good reason, it seemed to me, to worry about the family and about the future their children were going to inherit. My study of the family suggested a broader conclusion: that the capacity for loyalty is stretched too thin when it tries to attach itself to the hypothetical solidarity of the whole human race. It needs to attach itself to specific people and places, not to an abstract ideal of universal human rights. We love particular men and women, not humanity in general. The dream of universal brotherhood, because it rests on the sentimental fiction that men and women are all the same, cannot survive the discovery that they differ. Love, on the other hand—flesh—and—blood love, as opposed to a vague, watery humanitarianism—is attracted to complementary differences, not to sameness. A feminist, protesting against the excessive attention paid to sexual differences, urges people to enlarge their "narrow

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