On the Road Again

Reading Jack Kerouac and Kerouac's biography gives me the strong sense that the origin of the counterculture was the trauma of urbanization and greater mobility caused by the automobile.

The "back to the land" thing was a desire to recover the recently lost family farm.

The "commune" thing was an attempt to recover the extended family.

The "ecology" thing was from a sense of loss, of disconnection, from the land and the countryside. The odd conviction that the world was overpopulated was the culture shock of moving to the crowded cities from the vast open land.

The drugs thing was trying to recover lost spiritual roots; as alcohol is among the native North Americans. It was an attempt to recover that layer of interlocking meaningfulness, allusion, symbol, and metaphor, which one has when one lives with all the same people and shares all the same experiences over a lifetime. The sense that life as a whole is coherent. This level of experience is also necessary for sharing deeply, for sharing emotions.

When it is missing, besides drugs, art must wheel into play to recreate it. Hence the burst of creativity in the beat and hippie years.

The sex thing similarly was a hunger for lost intimacy, of the sort one has with an extended family and a tight-knit community.

The distaste for children comes from the sense of crowding in the cities, the disconnect with the procession of generations as a result of the rootlessness, and the relative expense of raising kids in a city as opposed to on a farm. Where they more or less earn their own keep.

The “radical” politics was simply disaffection, of general unhappiness with the situation. Hence its ideological incoherence.

The music, rock and pop, especially the hippie versions of it, was based on folk, country, and blues: rural, traditional styles. Again, urbanites trying to recover the rural past. Pop is rural folk.

The huge increase in depression is an obvious result of the rootlessness, the loss of meaning. Depression is alienation.

Feminism was a different reaction to the same stimuli. Women, isolated in their suburban kitchens, lost the community of the extended family, the church breakfast, and the village well. It was the isolation and rootlessness that drove them screaming out of the home.

My hope, though, is that the computer and the shift from manufacture to services will be able to mend the harm the automobile and industrialization has done. Our communications technology is catching up to our transportation technology, and soon it will be possible for most of us to move back out of the cities into the towns and countryside, thanks to "telecommuting."

In the meantime, the Internet is doing a lot in terms of creating virtual communities. I can stay in touch with old friends from every point in my life, on line, by email or in chat groups. I can find them on the web and reconnect if we get separated. I can link up with people who share my interests at any time, wherever they are. Alienation is getting a lot harder than it used to be.