Someone told me that in we often forget why things work. Somebody long ago figured out the architecture and we mindlessly continue it, like hierophants in a ceremonial temple.

This is the thesis of Tom Wolfe’s 1987 essay, “The Great Relearning.” Relearning the whys and wherefors of Western civilization, he says, “seems to me to be the leitmotif of the twenty-first century in America.”

The answers that should be so obvious, or that once upon a time were obvious, having been arrived at through centuries of bloody agony, appear to have been lost somewhere between, say, 1910-1970. As a country and as a culture, we don’t know, or at least we certainly don’t seem to be capable of articulating, the answers to basic questions anymore.

What is the purpose of marriage?

Why is a marriage between one man and one woman to be desired and encouraged over and above all other arrangements?

Why have children?

What are the dangers inherent in according a foreign terrorist the Constitutional rights and due process of an American citizen?

Why does the Constitution give the powers of prosecuting a war to the executive and legislative branches of the American government and not to the judicial?

Why is it inadvisable to use public tax dollars to support a woman who has three, four, five, and six children out of wedlock?

Why was there once a stigma against having children out of wedlock to begin with?

In what way are taxes a liberty issue?

What is the purpose of government?

Why not have open borders?

Aren’t all religions just different paths to the same God?

Is private property really a better system than communal property?

Is an epidemic of public cursing just an etiquette issue or does it signify something deeper?

And on and on the cultural amnesia goes ….

(More from Tom Wolfe)

“In 1968, in San Francisco, I came across a curious footnote to the hippie movement. At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, there were doctors who were treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot. And how was it that they had now returned? It had to do with the fact that thousands of young men and women had migrated to San Francisco to live communally in what I think history will record as one of the most extraordinary religious fevers of all time.

“The hippies sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start from zero. At one point the novelist Ken Kesey, leader of a commune called the Merry Pranksters, organized a pilgrimage to Stonehenge with the idea of returning to Anglo-Saxon civilization’s point zero, which he figured was Stonehenge, and heading out all over again to do it better. Among the codes and restraints that people in communes swept aside — quite purposely — were those that said that you shouldn’t use other people’s toothbrushes or sleep on other people’s matresses without changing the sheets or, as was more likely, without using any sheets at all, or that you and five other people shouldn’t drink from the same bottle of Shasta or take tokes from the same cigarette. And now, in 1968, they were relearning … the laws of hygiene … by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.”