In short order, the unconventional became the established convention; the perverse was embraced as normal; the unspeakable was broadcast everywhere; … - Roger Kimball

The Beats are crucial to an understanding of America's cultural revolution not least because in their lives, their proclamations, and (for lack of a more accurate term) their 'work' they anticipated so many of the pathologies of the Sixties and Seventies. Their programmatic anti-Americanism, their avid celebration of drug abuse, their squalid, promiscuous sex lives, their pseudo-spirituality, their attack on rationality and their degradation of intellectual standards, their aggressive narcissism and juvenile political posturing: in all this and more, the Beats were every bit as 'advanced' as any Sixties radical.

Like the medieval heretics that Norm Cohn wrote about in The Pursuit of the Millennium, the Beats cultivated an extreme narcissism that bordered on self-deification and that 'liberated them from all restraints' and allowed them to experience every impulse as a 'divine command'. What Norman Podhoretz observed of Ginsberg was also true of the Beats generally: they 'conjured up a world of complete freedom from the limits imposed by [bourgeois] responsibilities'. Podhoretz added, 'It was a world that promised endless erotic possibility together with the excitements of an expanded consciousness constantly open to new dimensions of being: more adventure, more sex, more intensity, more life'. Alas, the promise was illusory. Instead of an 'expanded consciousness', the Beats purchased madness, ruination, and, for many, an early death. Their attack on bourgeois responsibility led not to greater freedom but to greater chaos. The erotic paradise they envisioned turned out to be rife with misery.

Some people regard the astonishing collapse of manners and civility in our society as a superficial event. They are wrong. The fate of decorum expresses the fate of a culture’s dignity, its attitude toward its animating values.