The Counter Culture: Tranquilizer or Revolutionary Ideology?
Pitts, Jesse
Tranquilizer or Revolutionary Ideology? N AN ESSAY I wrote a while back, "The Hippies as Contrameritocracy," (Dis SENT, July—August 1969), I argued that the movement was essentially a...
...Long practice is necessary if one is to obtain proficiency...
...In most cases there will be THE COUNTER CULTURE a return to these principles, but the experiences that the adolescent may in the process go through can sear his mind and body for life.a Those whose interests in the legalization of marijuana comes mainly from an antagonism to the Puritan ethos must accept the fact that the illegality of drugs reinforces their antiestablishment significance...
...Part of this counter culture is seeping down to the high schools and private schools where, in conjunction with the drug and music culture, it contributes to the development of the "freak" grouping, somewhere between the "frats" and the "grease...
...ture, more and more fictitious, saves the street people from being defined as common juvenile delinquents...
...Heroin users (not necessarily addicts) were rare, but 1 percent in a student body of 1,500 still makes 15 users...
...These, however, are rare...
...Indeed, the commune is different from the urban hippie community in that people in the commune are forced to interact and reach some form of harmony...
...Drugs, however, are a constant temptation for an ego that is put on the block at each performance...
...with a fundamentalist reaction, or St...
...JESSE PITTS from the Satanic with Manson, to the humor ous as with the Hog Farm, will insure a steady supply of mass-media interest...
...It is the intellectual's urgent task, at this juncture of history, to teach through the word and his example that the passion to know must replace the passion to conquer...
...For many personalities at loose ends the drugs provide a motivational center, a substitute identity, and an occasion to relate meaningfully to others, even if in the process they may kill a certain percentage of those who use them...
...This is certainly one case where the medium is the message...
...Such centers, heavily steeped in the counter culture, are often directed by a swingy psychologist or psychiatrist aided by mother types out of Alice's Restaurant...
...The counter-culture hatred for the nation is parochial, often too bitter to be the result of a greater love...
...What an opportunity for the professional intellectual to expand his influence if he will only resist the temptation of power...
...Keeping one's cool" is not an expression one hears very frequently among street people, and this means more than a mere passing of argot...
...But the instability of rock musicians, whether due to their personality types, drugs, life on the road, or the temporary allegiance to music as a career, makes such groups transitory and the quality of their music hard to sustain...
...By 1964 the whole college scene (i.e., the 200 most selective establishments) was permeated with marijuana, and by 1965 LSD became widely available...
...New value conflicts lead to new areas of repression...
...One might hope that the positive advantages of destruction and reconstruction created by the counter culture will be gained without disorder and reaction...
...For most, the moratorium is temporary...
...Then, the faculty would take toward the student movement the same stance it took toward the jock and fraternity cultures which provided much of the contrameritocratic ideology before 1960...
...While the original hippie movement had many aspects of radical Puritanism, this tendency is now found mostly in the rural commune...
...The dealer is a semibenevolent merchant who barely makes expenses over the long run, wholesalers being the real money-makers...
...The hippie communes feature a persistent attempt to organize group life without overt leadership and with a minimum of sex-role differentiation...
...What seems to be wanted is an end to the guilt that attends some of the processes necessary to creative work: the careless as well as the careful experimentation, the trials and errors, the sloth of discovery and the failure to discover anything, the painful fact that most innovations are useless...
...The drug culture has its own scale of prestige where the bottom rung belongs to the marijuana experimenter and the top rung to the JESSE PITTS users of the needle, who inject methedrine, seconal, or heroin...
...hippie work avoidance, hippie stress on equality of the sexes, the promotion of career aggressiveness in women and of sensualism in men...
...The latter are quite different from the hippies and their teeny boppers, even if their hair and dress are similar...
...The drug culture gets its organization from "dealers" who in turn secure their supplies from wholesalers...
...The fact is, there are times when in the necessary process of emotional disengagement from parents adolescents do become very vulnerable to outside influences, even if their upbringing has given them "good" principles...
...In the 1930s Proper bohemia, besides being much smaller, was influenced by the Stalinist version of Marxism and held real power in some publishing houses...
...Urban types tend, after a while, to miss the excitement and variety, or even more the privacy, of city life...
...By contributing to this erosion the counter culture orients the search for the sacred toward an international community of students...
...Tools are lost or broken through careless use...
...The Weathermen might well take for their hero Nechaev, who wrote with Bakunin the famous Revolutionary Catechism (1869) . They have seized the imagination of the revolutionary students by their undeniable courage and flamboyant actions, as well as their luck in avoiding arrest...
...It was probably the collapse of the Communist party as a vital political force after the 1956 Hungarian uprising that provided an opportunity for the development of a tenderhearted and expressive oppositional movement, free of the bureaucratic discipline and "rule or ruin" tactics characteristic of Bolshevik politics...
...Such groups have flourished in the U.S., in part because of our abundance of land and space, so that people have been able to "do their thing" without too much popular opposition...
...Communes can select their members and impose some sort of vows upon them...
...JESSE PITTS demics could not supply...
...But in the commune problematic intimacy is the rule rather than the exception, Some are helped by this atmosphere, some put off...
...Hippie musicians, combining rock, blues, and English sound (the Yard Birds, the Cream) and using Dylantype lyrics, gave young America a music all its own, relegating jazz to the paternal generation...
...But the significance of this movement goes beyond these small figures...
...As of the early 1970s the hippie movement has divided itself into four major cultural streams and organizational patterns: the commune, the drug culture, the music culture, and the political youth movement...
...Some of it may be the result of the changing composition of the student body, or of a redefinition of stealing by middle-class students as a matter of taste...
...the second, the Che Guevara type of political activism where the effectiveness of the action is subordinated to the exaltation of the participants...
...One frequently meets college freshmen who have already been "heavy" into the drug scene and are ready to leave it, now that drug use is becoming identified with the "freak" part of high school culture, rather than with college sophistication...
...A synthesis between the two at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the sixties gave us the particular Detroit sound known as "Motown...
...In the process of this search for a new definition of work the counter culture seems to have been instrumental in the destruction of the post-Sputnik university, whose excesses contributed to the development of the hippie movement and to the spread of drugs...
...Its namedropping related more to the New York Review of Books than to the Social Register...
...for some, even beneficial...
...Too often when opening Trans-action and even Psychology Today one can predict the argument of the article from a mere knowledge of the title, at least if one follows the principle that the WASP establishment and the Silent Majority are oppressive, dehumanizing, pig-dominated, exploitative, polluting, inefficient, sexist, afraid of sex, racist, authoritarian, rigid, frigid, fearful, paranoid, white-collar criminals, desperate, sick, sadistic, infantile, and ignorant...
...At the present time the ideological tenets are more of the hippie variety...
...Not that hippies inFor a good description of this milieu, see Mary McCarthy's The Company She Keeps (1942...
...This argument seems to me still decidedly to the point, but I would now like to go a little further...
...Communes that are successful in limiting the contacts of their members with the outside world can develop private cultures that are very demanding and also sometimes rather deviant...
...Meanwhile, its search for intimacy often seems like a Hollywood version of the shoe salesman's pseudo-Gemeinschaft, a ploy for Portnoy on the make...
...In some form or other, communes have always existed in the United States...
...Drugs were publicized heavily by the underground press until 1968...
...F F V ROM THIS COALITION two major currents have emerged as the standard-bearers of the counter culture...
...Communes frown on "play boy" types, and we know that the threshold of "sexual frustration" is determined more by the norms of the group than by any sort of "biological urge...
...The first is based on the hypothesis that the academic community will not be further influenced by the counter culture and will not attempt to increase its own political power—and that the liberal-left faculty will let the peace movement die on the vine and not allow the Guevarists to use the university as a sanctuary...
...It mocks work discipline and suspects the poor of "Uncle Tomism" if they take "blind-alley jobs...
...Through an interval in the student movement, an irresistible momentum of social assimilation would be imparted to the ethnic and racial minorities that provide its more determined militants...
...Rock music has become a transmission belt for antiestablishment views, through both the lyrics and the orgiastic color of the music...
...On the other hand, the critique of nationalism too often takes on a shrill quality that denies any obligation of the citizen to the nation...
...THE COUNTER CULTURE At the same time, one of the barriers to the diffusion of drugs, the frat culture of football games and beer busts, began to disintegrate...
...Their panhandling is aggressive while the hippies' was humorous, hiding behind a joke the guilt they experienced...
...A few rich businessmen contribute heavily to the financing of the local underground press and often own the FM stations which provide them with tax write-offs and their younger friends with job opportunities...
...Since most of its adherents work in bureaucratic organizations where they do not own the means of teaching or administration, contempt for private property may seem to have a revolutionary meaning: the property is that of the pig landlord, the pig stockholders, the pig establishmentarian government...
...Lack of discipline is so much more frequent that it reduces the capacity of the commune to test systematically new forms of social relations...
...IV P P ERHAPS BOTH the drug and music cultures would have developed without the hippie phenomenon...
...A new elite appeared on Eastern and California campuses...
...It comes from the same ideological outlook that sees in the concept of "bad company" an authoritarian or segregationist prejudice, and ignores the insight it contains...
...The mass media and especially TV will give favorable exposure to the New Left, but with this proviso: it must fit the interests of the technico-professional complex of which they are a part...
...Professors know this problem well who feel guilty when they have an enjoyable conversation with their colleagues, a conversation that often leaves a sediment of new ideas, while their superego associates work with the careful reading of Talcott Parsons or the thorough preparation of a lecture which leaves little room for response to the audience...
...Regular mail will, as a rule, be adequate and more convenient...
...In liberal circles which dabble in depth psychology one frequently hears that "if it had not been marijuana or barbiturates it would have been something else...
...The rural commune is where the hippies have retreated in order to escape being swamped by the young "premoral" types and exploited by individuals ready to use any kind of violence that will insure them bed, board, drugs, and sex...
...Heavy drug use will s In many suburbs, therapeutic youth centers havesprung up with batteries of phones available togive help to anxious youths whose problems range from boredom to "bad trips" to a need for an abortion...
...It is difficult to press for restrictions on tobacco and pollution while advocating the legalization of a hallucinogen about which little is known as to long-range effects...
...And be sure to keep a carbon of all manuscripts...
...one might look at the problems of the legalization of marijuana...
...This sort of fatalism, based on no data whatsoever, is not very convincing...
...The mass media have a way of banalizing and sterilizing new cultural forms by giving them instant success...
...A movement in the U.S...
...It probably does help the youth in getting himself "together...
...The disaffection of the intelligentsia and the near-monopoly of the mass media held by groups hostile to the WASP establishment would result in widespread alienation of the youth for whom meritocracy would cease to be meaningful...
...They have organized courses entitled Where It's At and The Revolution of the Sixties, the prototype of which is Harvard's full-year course Social Relations 147148, taught to some 600 students rewarded by easy A's...
...Popular his toriography presents the Pilgrims as a band of men and women whose religious principles led them to come to the New World and found a commune of their own...
...Yet it cannot accept the uncertainty of scientific truth, its perpetual renewal, its rejection of the temptation of power...
...To Our Confribufors In sending manuscripts, letters, and other material, please do not use special delivery unless requested...
...The professional intellectual has a crucial role to play in the solution of the problems created by the meritocracy if he can find a way to show the society that the true goal of man is the understanding of nature and that the face of God "can be found in the anatomy of the louse...
...Inevitably many of these "intellectuoids" are young instructors and assistant professors who in their professional fields are ready to accept the burdens of uncertainty but revert to self-serving ideologies when it comes to social issues...
...Reaching an apex in the Woodstock festival, it derives its organization from the musicians, the promoters, the disk jockeys, and the record industry...
...Another cross pressure is that the steady use of marijuana does lead frequently to further experimentation with other drugs, (A colleague of mine doing research on marijuana effects and using medical students as his subject population, noted that it was hard to find cases where marijuana smoking had not been followed by more or less broad experimentation of other drugs, so that it became difficult to distinguish between the effects of marijuana smoking and those of other drugs...
...The children of these families went to college and there met with at least two currents that would help their conversion to drugs...
...a greater equality for women...
...Second, that the counter culture will reach the white working-class youth...
...To EVALUATE THE FUTURE of drug consumption in the U.S...
...The first was the poetry-reading fad, often against a background of jazz music, with its heroes the beat poets, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, and Brother Antoninus, who gave recitals in colleges followed by late-hour gatherings where the "in" crowd would "turn on...
...Commune dwellers avoid words like "directed," "requested," "ordered," as Victorians avoided "thigh" and "belly...
...While heroin was considered uncool by the hippies, its usage is not rare among street people...
...Marijuana and hashish will probably remain illegal as prostitution is illegal...
...While the hippies were attached to nonviolence even when it delivered them to the exactions of hoodlums, the "street people" use knives and guns without much reluctance...
...Various writers have described this phenomenon under the generic term of "counter culture...
...They hope for rehabilitation through revolutionary uplift and opportunity...
...In the disenchanted world of the meritocracy people long for a sense of purpose and meaning...
...It has contributed to the isolation of youth culture from adult culture by creating a much sharper break between big band music and rock than there was between ragtime and big band songs—a process symbolized by the end of the "Hit Parade" program in the late 1950s...
...The small-time dealer becomes a "taste leader" to his clients and this leadership is not necessarily limited to drugs...
...Under these conditions the pros and cons of the legalization of marijuana are complex and there is not likely to be a major push in that direction, certainly not while Mr...
...The civil rights battles were their first experience with mass politics, after which came the peace movement as it found its real start on the campus in the 1965 "teach-in" organized at the University of Michigan...
...Other strands of the music culture were the rock and roll of black popular music and the blues, the latter being one of the great contributions made by the blacks to American and world culture...
...Neglects Social Needs"): "History will assign television a major role in the black revolution and in the anti-Vietnam war revolution...
...Meanwhile the result is more often the spreading of a new set of hip rationalizations for aggressive acting out, which includes bombing and arson, and a rip off on the new brand of self-appointed social workers...
...During Prohibition alcohol rarely had this effect, if only because it was part of a traditional male culture resonant with the aggressive toughness of the Puritan ethos and therefore lacking, even in illegality, the tone of subversion...
...In the Eastern colleges, only the few students who were real jazz aficionados might have some casual contact with marijuana...
...What seems to work best is some form of monogamy plus some 10-20 percent adultery...
...a blurring of the lines between work and play...
...Drug use of a heavy and prolonged nature will be the tranquilizer of the stagnant and the defeated, the novocaine of downward mobility...
...The Guevara movement has had some success (though more apparent than real) because it was carried along for a time by the peace movement created by professors of the elite colleges and universities...
...On a shortrun basis, we all know that cheating and thievery on campuses have reached epidemic proportions...
...There is much competition in the music field and the rewards for excellence are enormous, both in prestige and money...
...9 The present fading of the peace movement has left the Che Guevara groups stranded...
...Everywhere, perhaps even in Soviet Russia, there seems to be an erosion of classical patriotism...
...Were this Czarist Russia, the disaffection of the mass media gatekeepers (if not of the intellectuals) might herald revolution...
...In many localities it has created a level of political contentiousness and law-suit proneness that did not exist before it gained a substantial following...
...Freudianism is not "in" within the commune...
...The bulk of the aid they give is precisely the chance to find a congenialgroup with a new form of self-righteousness whichabates the adolescent's guilt...
...The experience of downward mobility from the college student status, if not tranquilized sufficiently by the counter culture, would create much resentment and smoldering aggression, especially in a climate where the dignity of labor, the last fortress of pride, had been debunked out of existence...
...The politicization of the colleges and universities would lead to the growth of influence of "Proper bohemia" over the "straight" faculty...
...Their coverage of the Vietnam war in 1967-68 was an extraordinary boost to the peace movement and yet remained "invisible" in its political intent...
...The third force was the hippyization of antiwar students and the New Left...
...It continued during the war in "Cafe Society Downtown" and "Uptown" and eventually developed its own momentum in the 1950s to culminate in the TV Hootenanny (with a little assist from 4 Cf...
...The hippie cultivation of mood has become the emotionalism of sensitivity training...
...Most of history is dull rather than dramatic, and the 1970s seem more likely to result in the stabilization of a contrameritocratic movement, which would blunt the cutting edges of meritocratic competition...
...Here it is not a question of learning to dream in a Freudian manner so as to please the "shrink," but becoming innocent through a put-down of the establishment...
...Meanwhile the WASP establishment, bereft of the symbols of legitimacy, as well as of intellectual advice and support, would lose its nerve and its capacity for social control...
...N AN ESSAY I wrote a while back, "The Hippies as Contrameritocracy," (DisSENT, July—August 1969), I argued that the movement was essentially a response to meritocratic pressures bearing down not only upon youth but upon the society as a whole, and that it represented a first-line structural response that probably would not endure in its initial form...
...One cannot 2 The retort by record companies that most listeners cannot tell the meaning of the words and care only about the music neglects the fact that those who understand the words operate as translators...
...There is a higher percentage of revolutionaries among the students at the Uni versity of Michigan than at the three other uni versities...
...They assume the permissiveness of the upper class but not its noblesse oblige...
...The result is that economic and military institutions could not be staffed with adequate talent...
...But this is multicentered America...
...It may promote a commitment to the "counter culture" through the prestige it gives to deviant life styles and also has impact THE COUNTER CULTURE in promoting the counter culture among a segment of working-class white youth who enjoy the contact and occasional sexual opportunities that rock will give them with college youth...
...But, especially among some teenagers, drugs have become an end in themselves, a subject of interminable conversations, part tranquilizer, part escape, part dare, a form of Russian roulette with which the middle-class adolescent can demonstrate to himself he has "heart" without engaging in the fights and gang bangs dear to the "grease...
...press for limits to fertilizers, pesticides, and cyclamates, and wish to generalize the unsupervised use of a drug that has a powerful and little understood impact upon the brain...
...While hippies would delight in "blowing the mind" of an ogling tourist, the street people are more ready to roll him...
...an identification with those too powerless to be guilty...
...For those not so sick, Miltown became a fashionable remedy against anxiety and tension...
...Three social forces were to give unexpected impetus to the New Left...
...The literary-sociological assault has been carried out by a group essentially marginal to the academy, but which desires to keep the aura of the academic commitment to scientific truth...
...JESSE PITTS Tennessee Ernie Ford's "Sixteen Tons") . Joan Baez with her voice and Bob Dylan with his poetical talent were to give a new dimension to folk singing in the first half of the 1960s...
...Rock musicians (Am rock in working-class districts, Five rock in middle-class districts) have become in the high schools an alternative to the athlete as nonacademic and even antiacademic models...
...The period 1957-66 saw the height of the post-Sputnik meritocratic campus, where professors attempted to impose upon adolescents from all social classes the ideals of the intellectual jock...
...Some switching takes place without too much overt pain...
...Group marriage" also creates problems...
...There are other aspects which might turn out to be effective solutions to major problems of the postindustrial world: the development of an international community of the young...
...Musicians tend to be "situationists," prompt to underline and act out the absurd...
...If we are to solve the problem of work meaninglessness (and I am aware that there is a lot of romantic drivel being peddled under that expression), it is likely that a definition of work less associated with the routine deprivations of discipline must become more generally accepted...
...The smoking of marijuana became one of its rituals of solidarity, just as the heavy drinking of alcoholic beverages had been the ritual of the frats...
...The mystery, the rich fantasies that surround communes, 1 Commune dwellers would fiercely deny that they show amused condescension...
...It will be a while before the police effectively penetrate the organization and corrupt it—which seems to be the fate of all underground movements unable to come quickly above ground and relate directly to the political public...
...While the Puritan ethos implied a commitment to abstract values and a suspicion of ascriptive group ties and unearned pleasure, the counter culture promotes a sort of organic groupism in battle against the enemy camp and an existential concern with body pleasures from which active sports are usually excluded...
...Its activists try to take the leadership of a new mass of American bezprizorniki, the "street people...
...a put-down of the WASP majority for having chased the Red Man from his God-given territory...
...The music culture does not lead per se to political commitment...
...Today middle-class drug addicts on pills or heroin or plain "pot-heads" are not uncommon, and the group most affected is that of children who participate in the antiestablishment culture centering around the school's swingy teachers...
...The Guevarists (and the Bolsheviks) thus used the peace movement as a cover and a resonance box, and in return provided an energy and drama that aca 8 This is the result of a poll of 1,200 students in these universities in May—June 1970...
...The second force was the cooperation of the mass media, especially the TV networks and the national news magazines (Time, Life, Look, Newsweek), which saw in these movements not only a source of dramatic news happenings but also of an ideology commonly shared by cameramen, reporters, news commentators, and even the vice-presidents in charge of editing the six-thirty news show...
...This was the New Left...
...T T HE SECOND MAJOR CULTURAL STREAM picked up and amplified by the hippie movement is the drug culture...
...The first was the development of the "technicoprofessional complex" as a political tendency led by left-wing academics...
...a considerable decline in status formalism...
...Yet the intolerance that the straight upper-middle class reserves for THE COUNTER CULTURE bad manners is more than matched by the intolerance the counter culture shows to those who disagree with its views...
...But this hope seems unrealistic...
...III N N OW TO THE THIRD and most creative cultural form in the hippie movement—the music culture...
...Newsweek guesses that there now may be 500 communes functioning at any one time, with a total membership of 10,000...
...Yet the legalization of marijuana, like the legalization of pornography (already accomplished sub rosa by the courts), could have a strong impact as a symbol of the weakening of the Puritan ethos...
...The urban-based Hare Krishna, which has an involved set of rules and real discipline, is limited in its impact by its conservatism in regard to sex roles and its Hinduist spiritual and vestimentary transvestism...
...Somehow, the pessimistic scenario does not seem convincing...
...It received considerable momentum from the FSM movement at Berkeley (1964), where it first discovered the vulnerability of the university to political protest...
...First, that the faculty—partly because of the threat of downward mobility implicit in the "high-schoolization" of college, partly because of the charisma of science THE COUNTER CULTURE which it generates, and partly because it is the most articulate segment of the technicoprofessional class—will try to develop the peace movement into a political battering ram, using masses of students and new voters as its army...
...To middle-class youth this seems to have more appeal than the authoritarian "delegate from the Central Committee" typical of the Bolshevik tradition...
...Yet rural life, because of the premium it places upon physical strength, tends to sharpen the division of labor by sex, especially if there are children around who require close watching...
...Of course, such a disequilibrium of the capitalist order in America might lead to atomic war...
...Instead of replacing nationalism by a thoughtful dedication to an entity beyond the nation that requires even more self-sacrifice, there is a tendency toward a premoral affirmation of the primacy JESSE PITTS of self-interest...
...This movement contains the political spectrum that made up the non-Bolshevik section of SDS of 1968-69, and independent groups like the White Panthers, whose leader John Sinclair was one of the original Midwest hippies and a good jazz critic...
...They promote "dropping out" of structures that require postponement of gratification (college...
...In other cases the best way to describe what happens is to say that a top male is replaced in the affections of one of the best-looking females by another male, with the displaced male leaving for another commune or deciding it is time to go to work outside in the flatland for the wages that will replenish the cash pool...
...In standard rural life a sharp division of labor, clear-cut lines of authority, and a stress on getting the work done reduces the areas of "problematic intimacy...
...By 1963-64, however, the ideals of the contrameritocracy—affirming the right, nay the superiority, of dropping out, and the claim that drugs gave access to a knowledge superior to rational knowledge—all became part of the hippie "backlash," which gave the diffusion of marijuana, soon followed by other drugs, a new impulse and legitimacy...
...They meet their best response in the "swinging" and "Proper bohemians" of the middle class, and of course among the college students and/or middle-class dropouts from either high school or college...
...While all of these could be found in some form prior to the rise of the hippies, it is the hippies who provided them with momentum, style, and legitimation, so that the hippie look came to serve as their badge of allegiance...
...The worship of the Black Panthers whereby Proper bohemia atones its guilt—sometimes intellectual guilt, sometimes a disguise for ethical vanity, sometimes guilt as to the sources of the parental fortunes—has become another badge of membership and a gambit for claiming moral superiority over the conservative old rich...
...The proponents of legalization find themselves caught in several cross pressures...
...Within a generation, more than half our population may well be involved in the learning process, as learner, as student, and more often as both...
...At the other end of the scale, there would be an accumulation of college diplomates or partial diplomates having to settle for jobs which in the generation of their parents did not even require a high school degree...
...The counter culture would then be preempted of its useful elements and the rest encapsulated, so as to provide a permanent justification for those whose rewards in the capitalist-bureaucratic society do not seem commensurate with their ambitions...
...No Stalinist front has ever been so successful in endowing the young with its distinctive aura as has the coalition of antiwar students, New Left, hippies, and the mass media, operating without any formal committees, secret accomplices, or central apparatus...
...The radical movement, in its Communist, Trotskyite, or other varieties, was dead-set against all drugs...
...Most communes have more men than women and hence some men are always left out...
...Legalization might also accentuate the pacifier aspect of drug intake and facilitate the co-opting of the drug users into the system...
...As a result, until 1969-70 the revolutionary activists benefited not only from the support of Proper bohemia, but from the indulgence of some antiwar professors, and the favorable publicity of the mass media which played down their provocations but gave maximum publicity to police excesses in repression...
...the Che Guevara tendency is much more overtly anti-Puritan...
...In the present permissive atmosphere of academe most students can accommodate a commitment to the music, drug, and political cultures without any need to drop out from either the university and/or their families...
...The connection to high culs Figures derived from the Michigan survey men tioned above...
...For nonpolitical but disaffected youth, the musicians legitimated the hippie garb...
...Solid bases for comparison are lacking, hence we cannot be sure that there is really more stealing in the stores than 40 or 50 years ago, or much more cheating in school...
...Another scenario requires at least two postulates...
...Meanwhile Elvis Presley had made a national fad out of his particular fusion of "mountain" music and rock, getting white audiences to accept a much more orgiastic and openly sexual message within the medium...
...From the hippies the New Left took its life style, clothing, hair, language, sex life...
...Most exponents of the counter culture are of petty-bourgeois origin, and most petty bourgeois, not having been raised in bourgeois manners, try to bypass them...
...Weeding is not done...
...And with time, drugs have lost much of the mystical aura with which the hippie movement had surrounded them...
...Folk singing expressed the wisdom of the American folk and as such deserved the support of the progressive...
...The hippyization of the New Left enabled it to attract the drug and the music fans, giving them a political identity of sorts as well as feelings of solidarity...
...This movement has its roots in several strands of American popular music...
...For when the mass media speak of "youth" or "the students," b Richard W. Jencks, head of the CBS broadcast group, declared in a recent conference on the problems of broadcasting, where he was being attacked from the Left ("T.V...
...Yet even for them the requirements of professionalization conflict with the cult of spontaneity...
...They imitate the aristocracy's disregard for proper form, believing that they thereby partake of its elegance...
...The counter culture takes from the upper class its casualness about rules, and also its willingness to use four-letter words that show it to be above middle-class constraints...
...The same can be said about the political culture, which was born separately from the hippie movement and eventually merged into it without losing its identity—just as the communal movement, the drug and music cultures have done...
...In the mid-fifties a new phenomenon began: the widespread use of drugs in the treatment of mental disorders...
...As long as they don't try to seduce the top males away from their women, their constant state of availability will receive gratitude and amused condescension.' Successful farming or even gardening requires a good deal of repetitive and careful work...
...Meanwhile he must put his house in order, dampen his snobbery, strengthen the community of equals and the international community of scholars, take more seriously his teaching responsibilities...
...Clients and dealers meet in an "underground" atmosphere that seems exciting...
...The 1970s would then see a period of university and social adjustments to the strains of the meritocracy, which would motivate a new creative surge at the end of the decade...
...The core of the Guevarist movement is made up of the more romantic and antibureaucratic revolutionaries who remind one of the Russian Narodniks (Populists) of the 1860-70s, except that our Narodniks have little desire to convert the white working class and peasantry, and are not often welcomed by the blacks...
...There are some in Europe as well, and a number have lasted for several generations, like the Communaute Boismondeau which, with an 1848 ideology, makes watch cases as a producers' cooperative...
...Drugs are used, of course, by members of other hippie cultures such as the communes, the music culture, and the political culture...
...This was the period when the movement took to square dancing and Pete Seeger was a major troubadour...
...In 1970 a questionnaire, distributed in two middleclass high schools located in the suburbs of a large midwestern metropolis, showed that only one-third of the students had never taken any drugs, one-third had had only an occasional experience with them, and onethird took drugs (overwhelmingly marijuana or hashish) once a week or more...
...Many a potential candidate for an Ivy League college turned on as a high school junior and found in his senior year his grades slipping to the point where even graduation is in danger...
...In 1967 drugs had begun to infiltrate the high schools...
...In contrast with the ascetic patterns of the Bolsheviks, the strength of the American Narodniks resides in their capacity to combine the delights of moral righteousness with the underwriting of sensual release through drugs, sex, music, vandalism, "ripping off," and violence...
...Through instant nirvana they lure some of the young away from the Puritan establishment culture...
...On the contrary, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones became new culture heroes...
...and from 1967 onward many hippies renounced nonviolence and political indifference...
...I have described it, with an eye toward its structural origins, as a contrameritocracy...
...but they did not...
...In many professional families, where anxiety, hypochondria, and nonconformity describe the social climate, taking tranquilizers became a fashionable exhibit of how many of the world's troubles one had to carry...
...He must incorporate the adult community into the universities, and recuperate his legitimacy as the leader in the search for elusive truth...
...Drugs serve an antiestablishment function through the promise of unconditional pleasure (pleasure without having to "earn" the right to it), and through their relation to an antirationality where astrology and good or bad "vibes" replace the belief that hard work, learning, and persistence will get you where you want to go...
...Sam Blum, "Marijuana Clouds the GenerationGap," New York Times Magazine, August 23,1970...
...They also benefited from the inexperience of college administrators and police in coping with the type of disorder created by a group that amounts at most to 1.5 percent of the student body in the Michigan universities, and probably to no more than 3-4 percent of the Ivy League undergraduates...
...It is possible that the revival of Rousseau's ideas on education, which the counter culture is promoting, may have a positive impact on teaching...
...This, paradoxically, would contribute to the longrange stability and productivity of the meritocracy...
...The weakness of the counter-culture analysis, once it tries to go beyond the exaltation of mood and personal freedom, is partly reflected by the weakness of the political movement it sustains, and which I here describe as the Che Guevara movement...
...Drugs also have an antiestablishment function through the dissonance of illegality...
...The United States would then enter a phase of disorganization, with lesser growth in industrial productivity leading to relative deprivation among the working class...
...The discipline of playing, and the organization of the show that accompanies the playing, stimulate self-control and self-distance...
...Since communes have the same appeal for people with sexual hang-ups as nudist camps used to have —and with the same sedative effects—the Hare Krishna also suffer the public relations consequence of their apparent sexual frugality...
...The street people, roaming, turning on, panhandling, ripping off, raping (i.e., a "gang bang" with a bit of force at the beginning), once in a while getting killed (and killing), hanging around the universities (preferably the prestige ones) from which they secure some crumbs and protection, resemble the sometime students, sometime bums, sometime hoodlums that lived around the medieval universities...
...Leadership is repressed as sex was repressed by the Victorians, and just about as successfully...
...Mean while, little is done about teaching, and the decreased power of the deanery makes it less likely that anything constructive (hence somewhat painful) will be done...
...This seems to have been one of the major functions of drugs in relation to the lower strata of India, China, the Arab countries, and the South American Indians...
...So far the older faculty, puzzled and frequently demoralized, laments the passing of the post-Sputnik university, while young faculty want to transform academe into a sanctuary from which to lead students into forays against the Establishment...
...The small-time dealers "turn on" frequently with their customers...
...Efforts are made to resist the crystallization of leadership, and when they are successful during the season when much hard and monotonous work is necessary, the result is often disastrous for the capacity of the commune to survive on its own...
...Whatever their antics, political or recreational, these students supported values in tune with high culture even if the search for the "golden screw" did not allow them to turn in papers on time...
...From there one can choose his climax: Berlin 1930...
...They find political rhetoric boring, and at the rock festivals the mood seems hardly conducive to radicalization...
...Marcuse, Fanon, Kenneth Keniston 6 (who sees in the student radicals a breed of moral supermen as, more realistically, Richard Flacks sees in them the new Social Register), and Jerry Rubin's and Abbie Hoffman's non-books, Roszak's Counter Culture and Charles Reich's Greening of America are typical resources of the radical faculty...
...Many professors who looked with disdain on the frats looked with approval, if not fondness, on the new student leaders...
...On any campus there are a number of students who experiment with "communal living," which means sharing the money and housework...
...Time-Life waxes sentimental over communes...
...It is probably too much to ask that they should approach social science in an intellectual fashion when many of their own peers in sociology, psychology, and political science seem to have transformed their disciplines into a sort of muckraking journalism where the basic "theoretical" orientation is a new version of delenda est Carthago or Voltaire's Ecrasons l'infdme...
...Still the communes represent the hubris of the Puritan tradition, the attempt of men and women who feel moved by the spirit to create a perfect community, where the person can meet God face-to-face and be as unique, as true, as giving as God must be: Promethean arrogance that is the dignity and the curse of our Judeo-Puritan civilization, and shall always deserve our respect and our hope that one day we can make it work...
...It is unlikely that the impulse will come from the students now that they have gained soft grading, Mickey Mouse courses, and mixed dormitories...
...instead of claiming upperclass and old-settler connection, it claimed legitimacy on the basis of political awareness and intellectual activism...
...People disappear at harvest time...
...Thus the counter culture's stress upon the legitimacy of ephemeral art, the poetry of mood, the immediate sensitivity and positive response to others, may just possibly create conditions for a solution to the problem of work, play, and rank in the postindustrial world...
...The norm of universal love and keeping one's cool worked toward self-control and personal responsibility...
...Similarly, the counter culture seems to be trying to create the elements whereby the traditional division between work and play can be overcome by a new synthesis...
...For some middle-class adults who follow the New York Times Magazine section in asserting the chicness of marijuana smoking,4 it will become the equivalent of bathtub gin in the 1920s...
...JESSE PITTS they certainly don't mean the average youth with a vocational orientation toward college, good relations with his parents, coolness toward drugs and promiscuous sex, and a political outlook slightly to the left of Hubert Humphrey...
...One might have expected the hippies to look down their nose at the Beatles and return to the records of Ornette Coleman and Leadbelly...
...soon becomes a fad, overwhelmed by the problems of success before it has had time to deepen its insights...
...It is a juvenile delinquency with low risks, where prosecution does not alienate you from your peers...
...Luckily, commune life does not seem to raise the level of sexual desire among men...
...a means of self-assertion and rebellion, yet a way of imitating older adolescents in the search for maturity...
...No doubt hippie centers were not without some of these pathologies, but they were recognized as deviant...
...As such, it is already spreading to the junior high schools...
...There seems to be an irresistible tendency for the leading "nonleaders" to exercise a powerful attraction upon the more beautiful girls, a tendency that has also been observed in "encounter" and "sensitivity" training groups...
...For others it may become a middle-class equivalent of what the gin shop in Zola's L'Assommoir was to the working class...
...Another common way that resolves the shortage of women is for one or two girls to be on a "promiscuous kick...
...vented them (the sophisticates will refer to young Marx and Wilhelm Reich), but they provided the symbolic rejuvenation for some of the old utopian standbys: arts-and-crafts communism, elegant pastoralism, the poor as noble savages (more specifically the black and Indian poor, certainly not the Polack poor...
...And if the mortality rate of communes and the turnover of members seem rather high, only in the communes do the nonviolent themes of hippie culture retain some vigor...
...How much lasting alienation from the Puritan ethos the music creates is a moot point...
...In the commune one would speak less of "adultery" than of "experiences" or "switching...
...Again the medium has been the message...
...VI T T HE MEANING OF THE COUNTER CULTURE is not exhausted by referring to its obvious protection against the pains of possible failure and its utilization as a weapon of class struggle...
...The first is the literarysociological assault on the Puritan ethos and the WASP establishment...
...Although sales promotion is not unknown, the dealer prefers to think of himself as servicing a need rather than creating it...
...The decline in status formalism may facilitate social mobility and reduce the costs of marginality...
...Gifts to customers are not uncommon...
...Many even wanted to join the profession...
...Heroin addiction, instead of being horrible, become a sort of secret cult—dangerous, of course, but also a curse of greatness that revealed to the initiates how many jazz musicians were addicted to it...
...Such youth movies as Easy Rider and Getting Straight (there is a lame attempt in Getting Straight to oppose the heavy use of drugs by showing the "head" to be unreliable), and the rock songs have glamorized marijuana and LSD.2 At the present time the irony of drug education programs (it is one way of employing excess language teachers) is that they finish the publicity job the rock songs and the movies have begun...
...Petersburg October 1917 with the assumption of power by a theocracy of politicized intellectuoids, which would bring back order and the comforts of a sacred orthodoxy...
...The musicians are also close to the drug culture, which they have popularized by their songs and example...
...Many communes, even those made up of dropouts from Ivy League and New York universities, attempt a pathetic imitation of Indian life: a search of roots for the rootless...
...The urban communes, by contrast, find it easier to reduce, if not abolish, the sexual division of labor...
...The Beatles created the new music by synthesizing the rock of Elvis Presley with Motown sound...
...But if the Puritan ethos were not mortally wounded in the process, the violent attacks upon it could lead to a fundamentalist reassertion which might crush liberalizing movements and lead to drastic changes in the personnel that mans the gates of the mass media...
...The legalization of marijuana would destroy the social influence of the benevolent dealer, as well as the dissonance of illegality which tends to promote allegiance to the counter culture...
...Now that they have disbanded, there seems to be a certain exhaustion of inspiration throughout the rock movement...
...It seeps down to the youth society as indulgence for "ripping off...
...THE COUNTER CULTURE $40,000 level), the publishing-house readers and editors, movie directors, actors and actresses between jobs, and other professionals and paraprofessionals who gravitate around the university...
...Some girls are better looking than others, and prejudices against homeliness die hard among liberated men and even liberated women...
...The second current was the civil rights movement, whose undeniable greatness was marred by the transformation of the Negroes into angels with black faces: a form of ouvrierisme, probably inevitable, which led some to imitate the objects of compassion in their speech, their ghetto separation, their music, and even their "vices...
...In this contemplation the search for the sacred finds a solution in which achieved rank differences, so emphasized by the meritocracy, are shriveled to insignificance by the cosmic perspective of learning...
...Since blacks smoked marijuana it had to be a good thing...
...Luckily enough, there are checks from home or dividend checks, and people can go away to work for wages and return when they have accumulated enough to buy brown rice and beans for several months...
...ON THE BASIS OF THIS DIAGNOSIS, two scenarios can be constructed...
...The connection with the latter's love and freedom ethos gave the "practitioners" a feeling of group membership and self-righteousness, which greatly increased their proselytizing capacity...
...New solutions for tomorrow may come from a few of the communes, but so far the intellectual caliber of the blueprints for tomorrow proposed by the literary-sociological assault has been disappointingly low...
...Though it would create difficulties with the world of square adults, the fact that the mass media customarily saw the hippyfied youth as the exemplars of the new style and the new rebellion also helped to push antiwar students toward the New Left...
...They have developed a style of leadership that permits their roving bands or campus-based groups to have the benefit of direction without the penalty of felt subordination...
...There is little doubt that the youths who become either players, band followers, or aficionados of the rock culture have a strong antimeritocratic bias...
...Although the great bulk of drug experimenters settles down eventually to a "Martini-type" consumption of marijuana or hashish, a certain percentage is sucked into a process of hard-drug addiction, which may last for years before death or remission occurs...
...Some of the writers used by the counter culture can become quite distressed by their fans...
...5 "The Breaking of the President 1968" was also a major success, although of course they had a major assist from their victim...
...There is the folk singing strand, which had remained an antiquarian interest until it began its slow climb to popularity under the aegis of the Popular Front...
...Besides Trans-action, Ramparts, the New York Review of Books, the intellectual ammunition of the counter culture on campus is provided by the radical paperbacks dealing with street violence, racism, and the Third World...
...Because of their talent, their unusual stability as a group, and the widespread belief that financial success had not spoiled them, the Beatles were the role models...
...Before the late fifties, marijuana smoking was limited to blacks, Puerto-Ricans, and Mexicans, and among whites to jazz musicians who had picked it up from black colleagues...
...The communes remind us that no man is free not to search for God and that in this search resides his honor even if in the end he meets but his fallible self...
...Nixon is in the White House...
...Drugs and music have made a much bigger impact on youth society than has the "dropout" message of the hippie movement...
...The doctrine of "crystallized establishment violence" has facilitated the transition from the pacifism of the civil rights movement to the legitimation of the violence perpetrated (way downtown) against the establishment and its Irish cops...
...Within that movement—which, for instance, in the mainstream (Michigan) campuses of the University of Michigan, and of Oakland, Michigan State, and Wayne State universities receives the support of 70 percent of the liberal arts students s—the Che Guevarists were like fish in water...
...During the summer and after graduation there are many who try with more or less conviction to live in a communal way in the country and share in the farm labor...
...A tenth of the student body could be called "serious" users...
...This group, which might be called the "intellectuoids," searches for a theology in science, a fighting faith which will help to destroy the country club set, the yacht club set, the deanery, the professorial establishment, Palm Beach, the military-industrial complex, and install in their place a brotherhood of freedom...
...They brought to the states their "rocker" or young British workingclass style, and it caught fire immediately...
...The Che Guevarists are trying to dignify the amoral violence that prevails in this group by politicizing it...
...A personality in search of its identity and strong enough to face the demands of others may find in the commune greater support for the changes he is going through than he can find in his own parents...
...The girls find themselves working in the kitchen, doing the sew THE COUNTER CULTURE ing, and caring for the babies—while the men work in the fields, fix the fences, repair the barn, and make expeditions to the square world for canned goods, pot, and spare parts for cars...
...Communes may allow for greater role shifts in their members than do most other forms of small group organization...
...The hippies have provided a pattern of dress which, interpreted by the jet-set boutiques, becomes a badge of being "with it" and a challenge to the status of the traditional Puritan elites...
...Yet dropping out can take place, even while serving time in high school or college, simply by the withdrawal of motivation from occupational and family roles...
...probably lose its fad appeal as it reaches the junior high schools where it can be controlled more effectively by parents...
...It was partially on the wings of the music created and played by John Mayall, Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield, the Frugs, the Jefferson Airplanes, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendricks, the Canned Heat, and many others that the hippie movement became a mass movement, only to explode under the strains of its success, leaving the music culture to develop on its own...
...Thirty years ago, 17yearold alcoholics were practically unknown...
...Although they might come from prestigious private schools and have rich parents, they did not snub their professors...
...The literary-sociological assault has "radicalized" the culture of "Proper bohemia," to which belong the young college instructors, the civil liberties lawyers, the Unitarian militants, the Quaker work camps, the mass media specialists (especially those below the 6 Kenneth Keniston seems to be having some second thoughts as he discovers the self-serving aspects of moral righteousness in the student radical...
...Furthermore, the professional intellectuals have begun a criticism of the counter culture, which should soon result in a decline of its prestige with the mass media...
...A greater rate of discovery and change, even if limited to the expressive spheres of life, will demand a greater solidarity, a willingness to put up with the higher rate of obsolescence and disorder that creativity implies...
Vol. 18 • June 1971 • No. 3
