Saved from the sixties

...a measure that lasts...

...FAIR enough...

...Cultural options widened dramatically...

...With the possible exception of some Zen practitioners, however, his subjects do not...

...their modes of courtship, cohabitation, and marriage...

...The alternative religious movements of the seventies, Tipton maintains, permitted young people to be saved: saved in more or less conventional theological senses, and saved also from their former selves, from becoming permanent bearers of the moral and existential conundrums of the sixties...

...Those who find vitality in traditional answers may dismiss alternative religious movements easily, perhaps facilely...

...And like nearly everyone else in America, I have been touched by the expressive ethic, though not, I prefer to think, hobbled by it...

...Nearly all critics on the left, however, agree that the seventies was a bleak decade, a time in which the cultural and political changes they had envisioned in the sixties seemed less and less likely to come about...

...others celebrate the collapse of political radicalism, or certain articulations of it...

...he is even generous to a fault...

...As a consequence, the central American cultural drama of the sixties and seventies is thrown out of focus...

...Recognizing the difficulty of discovering coherent ethical positions in a pluralistic society whose members inhabit many realms at once, he nevertheless admires coherence, perhaps overzealously...

...But we must question the value of the "cues" purveyed by alternative religious movements...

...Whether we take their example as paths to follow or avoid, possibilities to test, or puzzles to solve, the answers they give us about how we should live cannot simply be dismissed...

...Steven M. Tipton avoids such hackneyed readings of popular spiritual and moral concerns...

...The neo-Christians, for example, not only believe in physical resurrection, but in their own physical immortality: they are preparing themselves to govern the world, following wholesale destruction and judgment...

...I therefore remain "uneasy" in the world, yet in and of it...

...In so doing, such movements as the Living Word Fellowship, the Zen Center, and est preserved the expressive ethic of die sixties by supplying a missing ingredient, namely a context of "order and regularity...

...Such coherence may require sweat and sacrifice...

...Tip-ton concludes that . . . alternative religions . . . draw from the old targets of biblical religion, rational humanism, and utilitarian culture itself, as well as from non-Western traditions, in order to synthesize their ethics...

...In Getting Saved from the Sixties (University of California Press, $19.95, 364 pp...

...But if...

...This practice of "praising the victim" - which by no means is confined to the moral left - mars Tip-ton's portraits of marginal movements...

...Of course, Tipton does not claim1 that the movements he studies are images of the future, or even desirable alternatives in all their particulars...

...The tens of millions of Americans who constitute the principal actors in the cultural drama of these decades went about the difficult search for fulfillment more quietly, less singlemindedly, and, in the end, perhaps even more bravely than those who joined themselves to sects (or cults) which promise salvation on the cheap while exacting the price of studied innocence - of life and of death...

...I do so no doubt largely because I fall between his categories...

...In search of renewal, they have come to admire, or at least to sympathize with, other sources of spiritual energy manifested in the counterculture and in subsequent alternative religious movements...

...most of the Zen practitioners are educated "drop-downs" from the white upper middle class...

...In the seventies, then, America allegedly deliquesced into a squalid time of personal "selfishness" (Tom Wolfe's "Me Decade...

...and graduates of est emerge primarily from families in middling white-collar echelons...

...In fact, spiritual responses to fundamental questions of identity, community, and society typically evoke derision...

...We cease to be onlookers...

...Moreover, members of the neo-Christian cult and the most serious Zen devotees submit themselves to total institutions...

...In these decades, the search for fulfillment - for syntheses of personal salvation and a piece of social justice (often only a thin slice) - represented the primary thrust of American civilization...

...More importantly, it may cloud judgments of their probable influence on the larger culture and society...

...Of course, Tipton displays an infinitely more sophisticated sense of the difficulty of sorting things out, and he earns his perspective by an honest intellectual labor...

...Not ignored, for they comprise elements of risk in the quest for personal fulfillment, but not wholly welcomed either...

...For one thing, the movements he examines are fiercely anti-intellectual, not simply critical of a social caste, but hostile to the life of the mind: "All you have to do is obey His Word," one member of LWF claims...

...Tipton's groups, then, finally call attention to realizations of the worst tendencies of the quest for fulfillment - tendencies evident to one degree or another in the radical movement and in the counterculture, as well as in the Christian revival and in the regions of the secular therapeutic search...

...it even may be preferable in some instances to a seeker's statistically likely social alternatives.Nevertheless, it is intellectually , morally, and imaginatively too easy...

...He rather views the expressive ethic as vital and enduring, yet inadequate and incomplete in its fluid, romantic forms...

...Interweaving extensive, often striking, interviews with his own reflections, Tipton draws sharp portraits of the spiritual life and moral concerns of the group as well as fascinating accounts of members' relationships with one another...

...But he does suggest that such movements offer examples of what coherent resolutions to cultural and social dilemmas might look like in terms of abstract directives or ideals...

...In this reading, the decades of the sixties and seventies are seen as culturally connected in important ways, rather than as disjointed, as so many critics contend...

...Thus far, it has proven incapable of sustaining modes of existence which yield answers to serious moral questions and satisfy other demands of adult life in a postmodern, bureaucratic social order...

...All of them turn on simplistic dualisms: ideals and expectations which do not fit the world as they perceive it - unexamined ideas and unexamined realities...

...They have been regarded as superstitious evasions of a personal and social responsibility, symptoms of a civilizational malaise rather than elements of a restoration...

...and est, Werner Erhard's variant of the human potential movement...

...All of the followers are encouraged to retain a grandiose sense of their future roles (and in this respect are slaved not from the sixties, but rather from the seventies...

...Since no general agreement exists concerning the original shape (or shapes) of hope in the sixties, not all commentators lament its presumed passing...

...The product of nearly ten years of research, participation, and observation, Getting Saved is at once an exercise in moral reflection, sociocultural theory, and sociological reportage of the highest quality...

...the gray seventies: critics on the liberal and radical left have regularly cultivated variants of this perspective on recent American culture and politics...

...the "Pacific Zen Center...

...Constituting one sector of what might be called the moral left, these cultural critics are mainline Protestant, or perhaps post-Protestants still fascinated by the idea of ethical coherence, yet emotionally disaffected from what they apparently consider a bloodless religious tradition...

...For another, the movements (with the partial exception of est) require individuals to turn themselves over to charismatic leaders: a religious prophet, a Zen master, a slick supersalesman...

...Moreover, the membership of each group contains a disproportionate representation of young people, "sixties youth" who came to initial consciousness in that decade and passed into their twenties and thirties during the seventies...

...Get a job, get a haircut.' Or 'Turn on, tune in, drop out.' Or 'Support the President,' and someone else says, 'Impeach Nixon' or 'Stop the War, ' or whatever it is, you know...

...The world of alternative religions is a world of know-nothings, of people determined to shed whatever knowledge they may have acquired in an effort to annihilate consciousness...

...political incoherence and politPETER CLECAK teaches social thought and comparative culture and serves as associate dean of graduate studies and research at the University of California at Irvine, ical "reaction" (Henry Fairlie, speaking, one supposes, for the New Republic...

...their attitudes toward work...

...cultural "narcissism" (Christopher Lasch...

...Second, these movements "synthesize moral meanings important to the larger culture...

...The Living Word Fellowship, for example, cannot be taken as a representative example of the powerful revival of evangelical and Pentecostal modes during these years, for although some third-force Christians may hope to elude physical death by being "raptured out," only crackpots declare that they surely will escape death...

...Graduates of est also believe that they create their worlds, and provide an image of the collective future, though I should guess that most of them invest their .energies exclusively in grandiose personal visions: "A graduate writes, 'Dear Werner, This week while driving around I realized that the world is shaped in such a way as to allow everyone to be on top of it at any given time.' " What these groups reveal, then, is the prohibitive personal and social price of achieving mere moral coherence in contemporary society...

...Here I disagree in part with Tipton's judgments...

...Zen practitioners regard themselves as set apart to show others the face of the future...

...In many instances, critics have stressed what they consider perversions of the sixties idea of personal fulfillment, especially in the seventies...

...decadence" (Jim Hougan...

...Eager or unwilling," Tipton declares, "we have already joined...

...But Tipton is alive to differences...

...The many autopsies of the corpse of sixties hope have turned up different descriptions of the fatal process: death by some combination of cooptation, inner exhaustion, and altered circumstances in the larger culture and society...

...Perhaps because he shares their opposition to utilitarian culture and society - the world of cost-benefit analysis, diluted forms of Christianity, and scattered embodiments of human-potential ethics -Tipton comes perilously close to passing from sympathetic understanding to condescension...

...practitioners of alternative religions] in a cultural drama where their efforts to renew tradition or transform it offer us cues...

...But such embodiments as Tipton discusses seem to me cultural locations of minor significance...

...EACH MOVEMENT DISPLAYS a version of salvation and moral coherence, a promise intensely sought by many members of this age cohort...

...they prescribe for their privileged members...

...A highly charged phenomenon, one unpopular in intellectual circles, the emergence of religious movements raises personal questions which, Tipton reminds us, we cannot evade...

...Coherence comes at the cost of amplitude in these misguided searches, an abandonment of what Christians refer to as a more abundant life...

...In this respect they are religious in the literal sense that they bind together heretofore disparate elements within a pluralistic culture, revitalizing tradition as they change it...

...All three movements are based primarily in California, giving the study something of a far-western tilt...

...First, such movements "enable sixties youth to make moral sense of their lives...

...As Tipton rightly suggests, neither novelty nor reaction triumphed...

...When stripped of its left-wing communal and political contexts, the search for fulfillment is said to divide individuals against one another, to intensify loneliness, and to promote greed...

...Tipton's study focuses on three alternative groups: the "Living Word Fellowship" (LWF), a neo-Christian congregation...

...Illogically, he then indicts the dominant culture and society by citing internal tensions between the presumed ideal achievements of alternative movements and the generally unacceptable modes of practice (guruism, vegetarianism, etc...

...Some critics welcome the demise of the counter culture...

...In their very different specifications of salvation-their beliefs, rituals, and practices-these movements respond shrewdly to the social backgrounds and recent cultural experiences of their members, and thereby provide a measure of continuity...

...social options broadened considerably, though far less extensively...

...From diverse moral meanings these religions form alternatives to utilitarian culture (or variations of it, in est's case) better adapted to survival within utilitarian society than was the counterculture, because their ideas are more coherent, their movements more stably institutionalized, and their members' lives more regulated...

...There was, as a consequence, both a remarkable democratization of personhood and an .increasing confusion among citizens concerning the nature of fulfillment...

...Rather than regarding the seventies simply as a time of moral exhaustion and cultural fecklessness, he discerns in this decade an occasion for serious if not altogether successful moral reflection and cultural adaptation...

...He carefully delineates the social backgrounds of members: the neo-Christians are drawn largely from the lower-middle-class or blue-collar sector of society...

...Getting Saved is an important book: it provides a brilliant examination of a slice of American civilization in the sixties and seventies, one which must figure in subsequent attempts to understand the main shapes of culture and politics during these years...

...Under these circumstances, the search for self-fulfillment yields illusions of gratification and liberation which neither satisfy individuals (for long) nor advance the cause of general social justice...

...we find ourselves unsure of what to go by, unmoved by our received ideas and symbols, and uneasy in the world around us, what then...

...Though he often maintains a healthy distance from his subjects, Tipton seems to me frequently too willing to accept the critiques of culture and society proposed by members of the various groups...

...But I think that the main centers of action in this drama, and the most admirable ones, were in the larger culture and society...

...Tipton's masterful portraits form elements of a larger design...

...Emerging in response to the enfeeble-ment of cultural forms embodied in the biblical, rationalist, and utilitarian ethics of the larger culture, the expressive ethic of the counterculture lured people, especially young people, into bold visions of salvation and hopeless traps of personal confusion...

...Individuals and groups rather synthesized novel and traditional elements variously in the course of specifying the terms of their fulfillment...

...It may be that certain survivors of the sixties are better adapted to life in a utilitarian society as a consequence of joining movements which provide coherent moral ideas, stable institutions, and regular daily lives...

...The study is held together by Tipton's central questions: "What are alternative religious movements about...

...and their prevailing views of culture, society, and politics...

...Tipton neither rejects the expressive ethic that gathered momentum in the sixties, nor does he lament the failure of the countercultural and radical political movements to give it articulate intellectual and practical form...

...But these tendencies toward totalization - of ethical schemes, of institutions, of daily life - were resisted by most Americans...

...Though he holds many of the presuppositions prevailing in the left's view of the American sixties and seventies, Tipton comes at these decades from a set of essentially moral concerns shared by such critics as Robert Bellah (who contributes a Foreword to Getting Saved...

...His answer comes in two parts...

...Certainly the ascendance of the expressive ethic powerfully affected American civilization in the sixties and seventies, frequently in salutary ways...

...Furthermore, few of the unanticipated developments of the seventies, especially those of a religious, or quasi-religious character, were welcomed in higher circles of criticism...

...he asks...

...And the Zen Center obviously is marginal in spite of tenuous links to ecological concerns in the larger society and the chic rhetoric of Tipton's primary political exhibit: California's Governor Jerry Brown, a figure lightly regarded in most political and intellectual circles...

...What do they do...

...The claims of biblical, rationalist, and utilitarian ethics still seem powerful to me, though not altogether coherent and persuasive...

...Although the paths to salvation charted by alternative religions strike me as possible ways of approaching the necessarily vague end of fulfillment, I consider them limiting paths, ones which I neither follow nor recommend...

...the Zen community allows for a transition from cooler sorts of chemical highs to the nonattachment of advanced meditative states...

...As one LWF member put it: "One person tells you to do one thing, and the next person says to do the opposite...

...The LWF, for example, replaces drug-induced ecstacy with pentecostal styles of worship...

...It was, I gather, also a very difficult book to write...

...In the end, I find Tipton too sympathetic to the aims of alternative movements and too quick to excoriate contemporary American civilization...

...The sixties form the centerpiece, a hopeful moment between the sterile, conformist fifties and the constricted, lonely, self-absorbed seventies...

...It makes you crazy...

...What do we go by...

...Tipton is more tolerant...