The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand’s “Whole Earth Catalog”
9th December 2018
As one might expect from an article published in a Voice of the Crust like the New Yorker, the main premise is that these wonderful kids were okay in their day but now they’ve ‘grown up’ to realize that Government Is Good and Individualism Is Defective.
Certain elements of the “Whole Earth Catalog” haven’t aged particularly well: the pioneer rhetoric, the celebration of individualism, the disdain for government and social institutions, the elision of power structures, the hubris of youth.
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Brand now describes himself as “post-libertarian,” a shift he attributes to a brief stint working with Jerry Brown, during his first term as California’s governor, in the nineteen-seventies, and to books like Michael Lewis’s “The Fifth Risk,” which describes the Trump Administration’s damage to vital federal agencies.
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“We didn’t know what government did. The whole government apparatus is quite wonderful, and quite crucial. [It] makes me frantic, that it’s being taken away.”
This points up, I think, the danger that exists for so-called ‘libertarians’ who are at heart ideologues and temperamentally more at home with other ideologues, even those of a contrary viewpoint, than with anti-ideologues who want to see ideology constrained to maximize freedom. Like electrons, once they lose their excitement and come to a rest state, the rest state they come to is with the ideology that rules the Establishment.