Boom and Bust

A few weeks ago, on an email list to which I subscribe, other Baby Boomers were lamenting how the revolution they had hoped for in the Sixties never came to pass.

And my response, at that time, was “What do you mean? Baby Boomers are in power everywhere. Necessarily, the world is just about as we wanted it. We have met the enemy, and they is us.

Basically, in my opinion, the entire counterculture screwed up almost from the beginning.

The problem was that our civilization, impressed by the accomplishments of science, had gone overboard and forgotten that there was anything else. Scientism, the elevation of science to an infallible explanation for all existence, had become a serious idolatry. Time magazine announced that God was dead. B.F. Skinner and psychology generally maintained that human beings were themselves no more than programmable machines. Architects were calling homes “machines to live in.” Urban planners were building vast suburbs with spaghetti roads on the same principle. Everyone seemed to have forgotten values like beauty, mystery, emotion, imagination, the heart, the soul. In a word, the spiritual.

Worse, the vast postwar move from the countryside into the suburbs had cut many people’s roots. Much traditional wisdom had been lost.

What was needed was a rediscovery, a revival, of the spiritual.

And this is almost what the counterculture seemed to be; it is almost what it thought it was doing.

But it manifestly turned into the opposite: into the “Me” decade of the Seventies, and the materialism of the yuppies of the 1980s. Only a few Jesus freaks and Moonies and Hare Krishnas seem to have passed through that door into the spiritual realm.

I think this is because the young people who started and first embraced the counterculture made a typical youthful error from the beginning. Perhaps misled by the devaluation of the spiritual in the society they received, they ultimately mistook the physical for the spiritual. Like a TV ad I saw once urging us to look after our “inner being”—and what is was promoting was regular physical exercise!

Isn’t this very like trying to find the spiritual world by taking a pill?

Perhaps it is telling that the two most important creators of the counterculture, Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey, were both serious, national-caliber athletes: Kerouac a football player, and Kesey a wrestler. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe describes almost all the early male hippies as having “a hell of a build.” After all, as Wolfe suggests, it is athletes who are most familiar with the idea of taking drugs to enhance performance. The thing about athletes, though, is that their general focus is pretty skewed towards their bodies and their physical being.

Similarly, everyone in the Sixties seemed to be convinced that we, in modern Western society, were “out of touch with our bodies.” And we were “out of touch with nature.”

This always struck me as absurd. With out concern for our physical comforts, and our fascination with empirical science, I doubt there has been another culture in human history so thoroughly in touch with their bodies and with nature as we are.

To me, Marxism was always a part of the scientistic, mechanistic world view. It saw humans as no more than production facilities. Yet instead of rejecting it, the counterculture embraced it. The same with feminism, which seemed and seems to believe that no human being has any worth beyond what they could earn in the marketplace, denying all the beauty of the difference between the sexes. Denying love itself.

As did the so-called “free love” movement. Symptomatic of the whole, confusing sex with love. But the truth is that casual sex requires a suppression of the emotions, in particular of any emotional attachment to other human beings.

But to the hippies, wasn’t emotion of any kind a bad thing? Doesn’t being “cool” ultimately mean being emotionally cold? Wasn’t it largely emotion that they called being “hung up”?

And besides stripping life of all emotion, weren’t they also stripping it of thought? The whole idea was to be spontaneous: to “be here now,” as Baba Ram Dass put it, not to think of either the present or the future, or, as much as possible, of anything at all? It is as Ken Kesey reportedly said, admiringly, of Neal Cassidy, the idol of the entire movement: “he doesn’t have to think any more” (Wolfe, p. 159).

Far from urging nonconformity, the hippie movement was intensely conformist from the beginning. It was all about living together in constant close proximity, and everyone doing and thinking everything as a group. Nobody was supposed to think independently or go off on their own. “You’re either on the bus, or off the bus,” as Kesey’s slogan went. Read Kerouac’s On the Road and Dharma Bums, and marvel how every single hippie who ever lived was a carbon copy of either Dean Moriarty or Japhy Ryder. The idea was to be a two-dimensional character, and to see others as two-dimensional characters.

The same urge to live only in the here and now also wipes out imagination, of course; one could hardly be daydreaming if one must be forever alert to the moment.

So in the end, the whole point of the hippie movement was to intensify the dehumanization and rootlessness of modern life. To turn living men into machines.

People trekked through Islamic lands, Buddhist lands, Hindu lands, but they remained, for the most part, only tourists. Few seriously delved into what those religions taught, much less sincerely tried to practice them. They bought the handbags; then they went home.

Similarly, people took drugs, said “Oh wow, I have a soul,” and then drew none of the obvious conclusions. It all stayed hopelessly “recreational.” Just another alcohol. Most people went back to making money and gathering material things. Instead of filling up, the churches more rapidly emptied. Instead of rediscovering moral values, everyone took up random sex with random sexes. And killing babies.

The proper response should have been to sign up for one of the great world religions. Some few did, to their credit—but even many who thought they did, fudged it. They didn’t really take the path, they tried to make the path. They reinterpreted Buddhism or Islam or Hinduism or Christianity to suit their own tastes and desires. This does not work: trying to manipulate the spirit world is, at best, playing the sorcerer’s apprentice.


A man was looking carefully for something under a streetlamp. A passerby stopped and asked if he could help.

“What is it you’ve lost?”

“The key to my front door.”

“Exactly where did you lose it?”

“Over there, on my doorstep.”

“Then why are you searching for it here?”

“Because the light here is so much better."