Who Killed the Counterculture?

 

On a recent JRE episode, Joe Rogan and Bill Murray reminisced sadly about the counterculture of the Sixties. They read a piece by Hunter S. Thompson that described it as a wave that suddenly broke and disappeared. There was a magical spirit of confidence then that was lost, and both pondered why. We all knew we were going in the same direction, we were in the right, and victory was inevitable. But at the same time, we did not know where we were going.

They seemed to agree that spirit died when the Nixon administration made LSD illegal in 1968.

That might be so; but it seems to me there were still plenty of psychedelics around after that date. And LSD was already illegal in Canada in 1962, and the same counterculture throve in Canada, in the same years. We had the Georgia Straight, and Yorkville, and Rochdale, just when America had Haight-Ashbury and The Village Voice. And our hippiedom died around the same time the American scenes died.

I think it was something else, something that came later. LSD was only a gateway drug. It did not account for everything. There was also that excited hopeful spirit in the folk boom of the early Sixties, in early rock and roll, and in the Beats, before drugs became generally involved. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.” 

The counterculture was actually the rebellion against modernism. The culture it was countering was modernism and scientism. It began in the old Victorian walkups of the Haight, which were being stripped of their ornamentation to conform to the modernist style: “a house is a machine to live it.” Hell no. In reaction, hippies moved in and preserved the old Art Nouveau ornamentation they found preserved from the general rebuilding of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. And that same Art Nouveau style inspired much of the art of the counterculture. Natural, flowing, organic forms. Avoid geometry and hints of the machine. We are more than machines.

It was a rebellion against the emphasis on STEM in American education in the early stages of the Cold War and the technological race with the Russians; the popular hysteria over Russia getting the bomb, and then sputnik. I recall my college buddy’s Firesign Theatre albums mocking “More Science High.” And we all knew what they were talking about. Science and math were soulless. We wanted “more poetry in the classrooms.”

And what, after all, was the predictable end point of all this emphasis on science and on competition and on material progress? Mutual assured destruction. Our leaders said it themselves.

Hell no; we won’t go.

And the apex of all, the arch-villain, was B.F. Skinner and behaviourism. Which saw us all as lab rats condemned to a meaningless life on the exercise wheel. “Beyond Freedom and Dignity.” Skinner said we had no soul.

Psychedelics were significant because they were the disproof of all that. Psychedelics were not fun. They were omore often terrifying. There were inevitably “bad trips.” Why would anyone actually volunteer to, in effect, go temporarily mad.

They were a necessary gateway because they proved there was a world beyond the material. People dropped acid to see God. 

But there was of course a contradiction here too: drugs were a material means to transcendence. It was kindergarten. Relying on a chemical was still not making the leap. 

Some made the leap with suicide. Hence Heaven’s Gate. Hence the 27 club. It seemed to make sense. The rocket ship to heaven. 

The majority chickened out, and became yuppies. Back to the exercise wheel and shut up.

But the logical move was to religion: the Jesus Freaks, Transcendental Meditation, the Hare Krishnas, the Moonies, those exploring Eastern mysticism.  We were heading for a Great Awakening.

And what killed it then was not the banning of drugs; most people lost interest in psychedelics naturally once they’d done the experiment. It was the popular anti-cult hysteria of the seventies and eighties. This was the empire striking back. Waco was stormed. And, of course, Charlie Manson, or the People’s Temple, and other frauds, did much to discredit the cults.

Young people who joined the new religions were kidnapped by professionals hired by their parents and “deprogrammed.” Whether or not the religious groups they’d voluntarily joined were brainwashing them, these professionals certainly were. 

That’s what killed it; or at least, threw the rebellion against materialism into a coma for a few generations. 

There are signs we see at last a revival. There is a reason people like Rogan and Murray are looking back now with nostalgia. We are beginning to understand we took a wrong turn, and lost something.

I hear strange echoes of the Sixties when I listen to RFK Jr.; and I begin to remember and feel within me the spirit of that age. Although he is talking about food and drugs, his tones are overtly moral and spiritual. J.D. Vance publicly refers to Catholic moral teaching. Candace Owens converts and declares “Christ is king.” The “New Atheists” of a few years ago seem to have been defeated in the public arena. Bishop Barron and William Lane Craig, their conquerors, have become the more prominent public intellectuals. Jordan Peterson is slowly converting in the public eye, and bringing many followers with him. 

That the revival seems to be rather Catholic is, I think, significant. Catholicism is the most spiritual and least materialist form of Christianity. It is the home of Western mysticism. No “Protestant work ethic”; no “prosperity gospel”; an emphasis on beauty. And, unlike the cults of the Seventies, it has a well-established system of oversight and authority, however imperfect, to prevent scandal, charlatanry and exploitation.

We may, at last, be achieving liftoff.

Why the Kids Ain't Got No Respect for the Law Today

A friend muses on the decline in popular support for institutions of all kinds since the 1960s. He feels that, for him, the trigger was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the fight with the tobacco companies, which convinced him and others that corporations could not be trusted.

That may have been true for him, but I don’t think it explains the 60s generally. After all, corporations and capitalists had been popular villains since at least the Muckrakers of the early 20th century, if not since Marx and Engels. Nothing new there.

What seemed to me to change in the 1960s was a growing lack of respect not for Wall Street or Madison Avenue, but for Washington and government. It was the police force and the army we complained of in the day, not General Electric. Granted, government was not always highly respected in the Dirty Thirties either; but then it was the lower classes complaining, and often demanding more government, just not this government. Now it was the rich kids, and that was more significant.

To my memory, there were three obvious triggers for this:

Don't know where, don't know when...

1. Nuclear weapons and the doctrine of “mutual assured destruction.” This state of affairs seemed to many, as the acronym suggested, “MAD.” Kubrick portrayed the growing suspicion, in “Dr. Strangelove,” that the people who had brought us to this precipice must be nuts. This is where the “peace symbol” came from originally: the “Ban the Bomb” movement.

2. The endless little wars without victory: Korea, then Vietnam. Again, this seemed insane: sending kids off to kill and die without any clear objective. Worse, the people in charge did not seem to understand that this was a problem. I remember Humphrey referring to the “politics of joy” while Vietnam was going on, and referring to Nixon refusing to debate as “our Vietnam.” As if this war was a normal state of affairs. It was as Orwell predicted in 1948: the endless wars without result, among shifting alliances. Eastasia had always been fighting Oceania. Due to the danger of being drafted, this in particular bothered the rich college kids. For the poor, it was probably more like an opportunity.

The process of education as conceived by BF Skinner.

3. Behaviourism. Perhaps this was just me, but I don’t think so. Scientism had run amok, and was seeing the average human being as an object, no more than cattle. It was all too revealing of what those in power really thought of the rest of us; confirmed again later by the tales of the CIA experiments with hallucinogens. Orwell and Huxley saw this early, and it resonated. We forget that a lot of what was happening in the 60s was a rejection of science—“plastics”; “back to the land.”

So the primary enemy was big government, with authority of all kinds under question, notably including science and technology. That is where Rachel Carson and environmentalism comes in: not as some new distrust of corporations or capitalism—pollution was and is worse in Communist countries—but a new (albeit revived from the Romantic era) distrust of science and technology. Which everyone had loved at least since the 1920s.

It is terribly ironic, then, that those who see themselves as the inheritors of the 60’s counterculture also see themselves as the supporters and defenders of big government, on the one hand, and science, on the other. Conversely, it is ironic that those on the right, the real inheritors of the 60’s, still despise the counterculture of those days.

Those who formed the counterculture then often saw themselves as on the left. Not always, though: Kerouac liked Taft, and Dylan liked Goldwater. More basically, they were against big government.

Humphrey, Johnson, to the left, Reagan to the right.

And in those days, it was not a clear choice between big government on the left and small government on the right. Lyndon B. Johnson was the biggest advocate of big government ever to sit in the White House. Humphrey was from the same mold. These were the bad guys. Goldwater was obviously an advocate of smaller government. But so—we seem to forget-- were George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, and Jerry Brown. It wasn’t until Walter Mondale in 1988 that the Democrats clearly chose the path of big government again.

Richard Nixon, on the other hand, was a big government conservative, as were the Ontario PCs of that day. He introduced what was then called “the Imperial Presidency,” tried for his own version of Obamacare, and imposed wage and price controls, an interference with the market that seems shocking now. It was not until Reagan in 1980 that the Republican Party clearly chose the path of small government.

So it has only been since about the 1980s that the left has become consistently big government, and the right has become consistently small government.

And what has happened over the same time to the relatively rich college kids who were the hippies, or at least what we used to call “weekend hippies”? Over time—in fact, circa about the 1980s, their forties, they became yuppies, then dinkys, and then the political (and business) establishment. Once they were themselves in control of the levers of power, their conviction that those in control of the levers of power were corrupt began to waver. There was no longer any constituency for a small-government but left-wing candidate.

Which is understandable; but I wish they’d at least admit the sell-out.

In the meantime, though, the realization that the emperor had no clothes that began with rich kids back in the 60’s has remained and grown. This is what my friend was noting, the decline in public trust for all kinds of authorities since the 1960s.

Leaving aside the specific triggers of the 60’s, this has to do with the rapidly growing access to information of all kinds, bypassing “authorities” in general, which began with TV in the 60s.

The richest and best educated were, naturally enough, the first to take advantage of the greater information flow to think for themselves. Hence middle-class kids began to “question authority” and “question everything.” But that process has now moved down the power and money chain.

Now that we have the Web, it is easy to underestimate the importance of TV when it was young. In the day, it really did seem significant that the Viet Nam War was the first televised conflict: the sordid face of war was now seen in every living room. It was suddenly important that Kennedy looked better than Nixon on TV. Despite its dross, TV was a huge new information medium. It was vastly more important than radio, because we are primarily visual creatures. For us, seeing is believing. Radio at least felt as controlled as print. Television at least gave us the illusion of being able to see things for ourselves. And things turned out to look different from the way they had been described. First politicians, then wars, then other things.

At the same time, the advent of TV left the cheaper radio spectrum available to the young. Hence rock and roll, and the 60s music culture that became in large part the communications medium for its political culture.

The computer, the Internet, the cell phone, the tablet, have one by one expanded that circle again and again. There is no end in sight. So a growing suspicion of social authorities of all kinds is only to be expected. Just as happened, in a smaller way, with the invention of movable type. That led to such things as representative government (i.e., democracy), the Reformation, and modern science, the last a reaction against accepting the authority of the ancients over present experience.

It is interesting to ponder what the current media revolution, far more dramatic in nature, is likely to produce in social and political terms.