When the Berlin Wall fell, a set of propositions seemed settled. Now, it seems those conclusions have been forgotten.
The novelist Tom Wolfe gave us the phrase in a 1987 essay about the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, who decided that hygiene, monogamy, and other rules of polite society were bourgeois inventions. They threw them out, moved into communes, and were visited by afflictions that modern medicine had not seen in generations. Doctors at the free clinics started teaching sanitation lessons that Victorian housewives once took for granted. Wolfe called that the Great Relearning: Civilization that discards its hard-won knowledge does not leap ahead to utopia but is dragged back to the starting line.