On Saturday, 6 October 1973, on the fast of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, a surprise attack on Israel was launched from Syria in the north and Egypt in the south. For forty-eight hours the very existence of Israel appeared threatened. Its ‘Bar-Lev’ line in Sinai was broken, and many of its military aircraft were destroyed on the ground by Arab missiles. Only the rapid response of the United States, sending more than $2 billion worth of arms inside two days, enabled Israel eventually to recoup its losses and then hit back and gain ground. When a ceasefire was declared on 24 October, Israeli forces were close enough to Damascus to shell it, and had a bridgehead on the Western bank of the Suez Canal.
But the Yom Kippur War, as it came to be called, was more than just a war. It was a catalyst that led directly and immediately to an event that Henry Kissinger, at the time the U.S. secretary of state, called ‘one of the pivotal events in the history of this century.’ In the very middle of the war, on 16 October, the Arab and several non-Arab oil-producing nations cut oil production, and raised prices 70 percent. Two days before Christmas, they raised them again, this time by 128 percent. Crude oil prices thus quadrupled in less than a year.1 No country was immune from this ‘oil crisis.’ Many poorer countries of Africa and Asia were devastated. In the West, petrol rationing was introduced in places like Holland for a while, and lines at gas stations became familiar everywhere. And it introduced a phenomenon not anticipated by Keynes – stagflation. Before the Yom Kippur War the average rate of growth in the developed West was 5.2 percent, comfortably ahead of the average rate of price increases of 4.1 percent. After the oil shock, growth was reduced to zero or even minus, but inflation rose to 10 or 12 percent.2
The oil crisis, in historian Paul Johnson’s words, was ‘by far the most destructive economic event since 1945.’ But the oil-producing nations’ decision to raise prices and limit production were not only the result of the war or the fact that – in the end – they were defeated and lost territory as a result of America coming to Israel’s aid. The world’s economic structure was changing anyway, if less obviously. Ironically, the year of rebellion, 1968, when black and student violence had peaked in America, was also the time of the United States’ greatest economic influence. In that year, American production was more than a third of the world total – 34 percent. But, like many success stories, this one hid within it incipient problems. Ever since 1949 the Communist Chinese had been worried that America might, in crisis, block any dollars they earned. They had therefore always kept their dollars in Paris. Over the years others had followed suit, and a market in ‘Eurodollars’ had grown up. In turn this spawned a Eurocredit and Eurobond market beyond the control of Washington, or anybody, helping to make money more volatile than it had ever been. Alongside this were two additional factors. One was the ecological sentiment that the earth was a finite resource, which translated into a steady rise in commodity prices. Second was a specific instance of this: from 1970, America’s own oil production peaked and then began to decline. In 1960 she had imported 10 percent of her oil; by 1973 that figure was 36 percent.3 A major shift was taking place in the very nature of developed societies. It had been gathering pace, and visibility, throughout the 1960s, but it took a war to bring it home to everyone.
One of the first to reflect on this change, in his usual elegant way, was the economist J. K. Galbraith. In 1967 he released The New Industrial State, in which he described a new business-economic order that, he maintained, drastically changed the nature of traditional capitalism. His starting point was that the nature of the large business enterprise had altered fundamentally by the 1960s as compared with the start of the century.4 Whereas the likes of Ford, Rockefeller, Mellon, Carnegie, and Guggenheim had been entrepreneurs, taking huge risks to launch the companies that bore their names, by the time these companies had matured, they had changed character in two fundamental ways. In the first place, they were no longer run by one man, who was both a leader and a shareholder, but by managers – Galbraith actually called them the technostructure, for reasons that will become apparent – who owned a minority of shares. One important result of this, says Galbraith, is that the shareholders nowadays have only nominal control over the company that, in theory, they own, and this has significant psychological consequences for democracy. Second, mature companies, mass-producing expensive and complex products, in fact have very little interest in risk or competition. On the contrary they require political and economic stability so that demand, and the growth in demand, can (within certain limits) be predicted. The most important effect of this, Galbraith argued, is that mature corporations actually prefer planning in an economy. In traditional conservatism, planning smacks of socialism, Marxism, and worse, but in the modern world mature corporations, who operate in an oligopolistic situation, which to Galbraith is but a modified monopoly, cannot do without it.5
Everything else in the new industrial state, says Galbraith, stems from these two facts. Demand is regulated, as Keynes showed, partly by the fiscal policy of governments – which presupposes a symbiotic relationship between the state and the corporation – and by devices such as advertising (which, Galbraith believes, has had an incalculably ‘dire’ effect on the truthfulness of modern society, to the point where we no longer notice how routinely dishonest we are). An additional characteristic of modern industrial society, Galbraith says, is that more and more important decisions depend on information possessed by more than one individual. Technology has a great deal to do with this. One consequence is a new kind of specialism: people who have no special skills in the traditional sense but instead have a new skill – knowing how to evaluate information. Thus information becomes important in itself, and people who can handle information constitute an ‘insider class,’ the managers or technostructure, alongside an ‘outsider class,’ the shareholders.6 Galbraith clearly thought this distinction was more important than, in practice, it turned out to be (though for a while, in the 1980s, ‘insider trading’ was a scandal that contaminated business life on both sides of the Atlantic). One effect of all this, he said, was to change the business experience. Instead of being rugged, individualistic, competitive, and risk-taking, executive life became highly secure; when Galbraith wrote his book, recent studies had shown that in America three-quarters of executives surveyed had been with their company more than twenty years. Affluence plays a part, says Galbraith, because the further a man is from the breadline – the more affluent he is – the more his desires may be manipulated, and the bigger the role of advertising, and here it was fortunate that the rise of radio and then television coincided with the maturation of corporations and the rise of affluence.7
But Galbraith’s aim was not simply to describe the new arrangement, important though that was. With an appropriate sense of mischief, he observed how the technostructure, the management of the mature corporations, presents itself. Far from telling the truth about the new state of play, where in fact the corporations rule the roost, the technostructure pays lip service to the idea that the ‘consumer is king.’ The real truth, that the corporation has pretty near total control over prices and a good grasp on the control of demand, goes by the board.8 Galbraith’s next point was that the nature of unemployment was changing – indeed, in a sense, it was starting to lose any meaning; ‘More and more, the figures on unemployment enumerate those who are currently unemployable by the industrial system.’9 This has a domino effect among the unions, who lose power, and the educational and scientific ‘estates,’ which gain it. Galbraith was undoubtedly correct in his analysis of the relative powers of the unions, the education services, and the scientists; where he was wrong was that he expected the latter two estates to acquire a political force, as the unions had been hitherto. This didn’t happen. He also thought that scientists working for private companies would become a voice in society. That didn’t happen either.
After a swipe at the defence industry, examining how the Cold War actually helped economies in a Keynesian sense (though traditional conservatives denied it), Galbraith suddenly changed tack completely and considered what he called the ‘aesthetic experience.’ The world of artists, he says, is quite unlike that of the technostructure: ‘Artists do not come in teams.’ Athens, Venice, Agra, and Samarkand are quite unlike Nagoya, Düsseldorf, Dagenham, or Detroit and always will be. He saw it as the role of artists to attack and criticise the technostructure; there is, he says, an inevitable struggle: ‘Aesthetic achievement is beyond the reach of the industrial system and, in substantial measure, in conflict with it. There would be little need to stress the conflict were it not part of the litany of the industrial system that none exists.’10 Galbraith felt that aesthetic goals would ultimately prevail over industrial ones.
But the main argument of The New Industrial State was that traditional capitalism had changed out of all recognition and that traditional capitalists lied about that change, pretending it just hadn’t happened. At the time his book went to press, Galbraith said, Boeing ‘sells 65 percent of its output to the government; General Dynamics sells a like percentage; Raytheon … sells 70 percent; Lockheed … sells 81 percent; and Republican Aviation … sells 100 percent.’11 ‘The future of the industrial system is not discussed partly because of the power it exercises over belief. It has succeeded, tacitly, in excluding the notion that it is a transitory, which would be to say that it is a somehow imperfect, phenomenon…. Among the least enchanting words in the business lexicon are planning, government control, state support and socialism. To consider the likelihood of these in the future would be to bring home the appalling extent to which they are already a fact. And it would not be ignored that these grievous things have arrived, at a minimum with the acquiescence and, at a maximum, on the demand, of the system itself.’ And finally: ‘There is no natural presumption in favour of the market; given the growth of the industrial system the presumption is, if anything, the reverse. And to rely on the market where planning is required is to invite a nasty mess.12 Galbraith’s was a spirited attack, making some uncomfortable points about the way capitalism had developed, and presented itself. He foresaw the increased role of science, the overwhelming importance of information and the changing nature of unemployment and the skills that would be needed in the future.
What Galbraith missed, Daniel Bell brought centre stage. In his study of Bell, Malcolm Waters describes how in 1973 both men featured in a list compiled by the sociologist Charles Kadushin, who had carried out a survey to discover which individuals were regarded as America’s intellectual elite. Among the top ten were Noam Chomsky, J. K. Galbraith himself, Norman Mailer, and Susan Sontag, with Hannah Arendt and David Riesman further down, and W. H. Auden and Marshall McLuhan even lower. There was just one sociologist in the top ten: Daniel Bell.
Bell’s End of Ideology was covered in chapter 25, on the new psychology of affluence. In 1975 and again a year later, he came up with two more ‘big ideas.’ The first was summed up in the title of his book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. For Bell, life is divided into three ‘realms’ – nature, technology, and society – that determine the basics of experience. History is also divided into three. Pre-industrial society may be seen as ‘a game against nature,’ the attempt to extract resources from the natural environment, where the main activities are hunting, foraging, farming, fishing, mining, and forestry.13 Industrial society is ‘a game against fabricated nature,’ centring on human—machine relationships, and with economic activity focusing on the ‘manufacturing and processing of tangible goods,’ the central occupations being the semiskilled factory worker and engineer.14 A post-industrial society is a ‘game between persons,’ ‘in which an “intellectual technology,” based on information, rises alongside machine technology.’15 Post-industrial society centres around industries from three sectors – transportation and utilities; finance and capital exchange; health, education, research, public administration, and leisure. Among all these, says Bell, scientists ‘are at the core’: ‘Given that the generation of information is the key problem and that science is the most important source of information, the organisation of the institutions of science, the universities and research institutes is the central problem in the post-industrial society. The strength of nations is given in their scientific capacity.’16 As a result the character of work has changed, focusing now on relationships between people rather than between people and objects; ‘the expansion of the service sector provides a basis for the economic independence of women that was not previously available’; the post-industrial society is meritocratic; there is a change in scarcity – ‘scarcity of goods disappears in favour of scarcity of information and time.’ Finally Bell identifies something he labels a situs, a ‘vertical order of society as opposed to a horizontal one,’ such as classes. Bell identifies four functional situses (scientific, technological, administrative, and cultural) and five institutional ones (business, government, university/research, social welfare, and military), a division that would be eerily paralleled in the organisation of e-mail (see chapter 42). Besides the situses, however, Bell identifies a ‘knowledge class’ (of, mainly, scientists). He points out, for example, that whereas only about a quarter of first degrees in the United States are in science, more than half the doctorates are in natural science and mathematics.17 This knowledge class is crucial to the success of the postindustrial society, but Bell remained uncertain as to whether it would ever act as a class in the Marxist sense, because it would probably never have enough independence to undermine capitalism.*
A further factor of significance, Bell says, is that intellectual property is owned not individually but communally. This means that politics become more, and not less, important, because the planning, which maximises scientific output, requires national rather than regional or local organisation. ‘Politics therefore becomes the “cockpit” of the post-industrial society, the visible hand that coordinates where the market can no longer be effective.’18
Bell’s third ‘big idea,’ published a year later, in 1976, was The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. This too had three themes bound together by the thesis that contemporary society is dominated by irreconcilable contradictions. These were: (I) the tension between the asceticism of capitalism (as defined by Max Weber) and the acquisitiveness of later forms of capitalism; (2) the tensions between bourgeois society and modernism – modernism, through the avantgarde, was always attacking bourgeois society (the rejection of the past, the commitment to ceaseless change, and the idea that nothing is sacred); and (3) the separation of law from morality, ‘especially since the market has become the arbiter of all economic and even social relations (as in corporate obligations to employees) and the priority of the legal rights of ownership and property over all other claims, even of a moral nature, has been renewed.’19
Put another way, for Bell there is a contradiction between the drive for efficiency in modern capitalism and the drive for self-realisation in modern culture. Culture is all-important for Bell, first, because art has taken upon itself (under the mantle of modernism) constantly to seek ‘innovative forms and sensations,’ and second, because culture is now no longer a source of authoritative morality but ‘a producer of new and titillating sensations.’20 For Bell, modernism was ending by 1930 and exhausted by 1960. ‘Society and art have come together in the market so that aesthetic aura and conceptions of high culture have disappeared.’ But the endless quest for novelty was taken up by the mass media, which themselves largely took form in the 1920s and adopted the same quest of feeding new images to people, unsettling traditional conventions and ‘highlighting … aberrant and quirky behaviour.’21 Along the way, the traditional sociological categories of age, gender, class, and religion became less reliable guides to behaviour – ‘lifestyle, value-choice and aesthetic preference have become more idiosyncratic and personal.’22 The result, says Bell, is chaos and disunity. In the past, most cultures and societies were unified – classical culture in the pursuit of virtue, Christian society unified around divinely ordained hierarchies, and early industrial culture unified around ‘work, order, and rationalisation.’ In contemporary society, however, there has been a massive dislocation. While the techno-economic side of things is still ruled by ‘efficiency, rationality, orderliness, and discipline … the culture is governed by immediate gratification of the senses and the emotions and the indulgence of the undisciplined self.’ The contradictions, for Bell, imply a major change in the way we live, but this has to do not only with capitalism: ‘The exhaustion of modernism, the aridity of Communist life, the tedium of the unrestrained self, and the meaninglessness of monolithic political chants, all indicate that a long era is coming to a slow close.’ There is a heavy price to pay for modernism: ‘Modernity is individualism, the effort of individuals to remake themselves, and, where necessary, to remake society in order to allow design and choice…. It implies the rejection of any “naturally” ascribed or divinely ordained order, of external authority, and of collective authority in favour of the self as the sole point of reference for action.’23 ‘Under modernity there can be no question about the moral authority of the self. The only question is that of how the self is to be fulfilled – by hedonism, by acquisitiveness, by faith, by the privatisation of morality or by sensationalism.’24 Technology, of course, had something to do with this change, in particular the automobile. ‘The closed car became the cabinet particulier of the middle class, the place where adventurous young people could shed their sexual inhibitions and break the old taboos.’25 Advertising also played its part, ‘emphasising prodigality rather than frugality, or lavish display rather than asceticism.’ Financial services helped, so that debt, once a source of shame, became a component of the lifestyle.26
Perhaps Bell’s most profound point is that modern culture emphasises experience, with the audience placed central. There is no longer any sense in which the audience engages in a dialogue with the artist or the work of art. And because the appeal is to the emotions, once the experience is over, it is over. There is no dialogue to be continued inside the head of the members of the audience. For Bell, this means that the modern society, in effect, has no culture.
*
Theodore Roszak disagreed. For him, and countless others, the changes described by Galbraith and Bell had provoked a shift in the very nature of culture, so much so that they needed a new term, the counter-culture.
One way of looking at the counter-culture is to regard it as one of the ‘soft landings’ of the New Left that formed in several Western countries in the late 1950s and early 1960s, brought about, as we have seen, by disillusionment with the Soviet Union and the horrors of Stalinism, and especially the brutal Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. But the other important influence was the discovery of some early writings of Marx, the so-called Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, written in 1844 but published only in 1932. These new papers did not catch on generally until after World War II and the 1950s when neo-Marxists, as they were called, were trying to develop a more humanist form of Marxism. In the United States there was an additional factor; there the birth of the New Left is usually traced to the Port Huron Statement, a manifesto issued in 1962 by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which read in part, ‘We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom and love…. We oppose the depersonalisation that reduces human beings to the status of things…. Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today. These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man.’27 The concept of alienation underpinned the counter-culture, which like the Beats, another progenitor, rejected the main concepts of mass society. Other influences were C. Wright Mills, in The Power Elite, and David Riesman, in The Lonely Crowd. Very rapidly a whole ‘alternative’ set of media was created to disseminate its ideas – newspapers (such as the San Francisco-based Journal for the Protection of All Beings), films, plays, music, and the Whole Earth Catalogue, which taught how to live off the land and avoid engagement with ‘mainstream’ society. These ideas were set down by Roszak, a professor of history at California State University, in 1970, in The Making of a Counter Culture.28
Roszak makes it clear that the counter-culture is a youth revolt and, as much as anything, is opposed to the reductionism of science and technology. Youth, especially educated youth, Roszak said, loathed the direction in which ‘technocratic’ society was headed, and the form of its protest was to mount an alternative lifestyle. It was a living embodiment of the cultural contradictions of capitalism. For Roszak, the counter-culture had five elements: a variety of alternative psychologies; Eastern (mystical) philosophy; drugs; revolutionary sociology; rock music. Together, these were supposed to provide a viable basis for an alternative way of life to technocratic society, in the form of communes of one sort or another, which also helped counter the alienation of ‘normal’ life. Aspects of this counter-culture included free universities, free clinics, ‘food conspiracies’ (to help the poor), an underground press, ‘tribal’ families. ‘Everything,’ says Roszak, ‘was called into question: family, work, education, success, child-rearing, male—female relations, sexuality, urbanism, science, technology, progress. The means of wealth, the meaning of love, the meaning of life – all became issues in need of examination. What is “culture”? Who decides what “excellence” is? Or “knowledge,” or “reason”?’29
After an opening chapter criticising reductionist science, and the way it produced a ‘one-dimensional’ society, deeply unsatisfying to many people (he records in loving detail the numbers of British students turning away from science courses at university), Roszak addressed the main agenda of the counterculture, ‘the subversion of the scientific world view, with its entrenched commitment to an egocentric and cerebral mode of consciousness…. In its place, there must be a new culture in which the non-intellective capacities of the personality – those capacities that take fire from visionary splendour and the experience of human communion – become the arbiters of the good, the true, and the beautiful.’30 In essence, Roszak says, class consciousness gives way ‘as a generative principle’ to consciousness consciousness.31 One can discern,’ he argues, ‘a continuum of thought and experience among the young which links together the New Left sociology of Mills, the Freudian Marxism of Herbert Marcuse, the Gestalt-therapy anarchism of Paul Goodman, the apocalyptic body mysticism of Norman Brown, the Zen-based psychotherapy of Alan Watts, and finally Timothy Leary’s … narcissism, wherein the world and its woes may shrink at last to the size of a mote in one’s private psychedelic void. As we move along the continuum, we find sociology giving way to psychology, political collectivities yielding to the person, conscious and articulate behaviour falling away before the forces of the non-intellective deep.’32 All this, he says, amounts to an intellectual rejection of the Great Society.
Roszak’s first stop, having set the scene, is Marcuse and Brown, whose significance lies in their claim that alienation is a psychological condition, not a sociological one, as Freud said. Liberation is personal, not political, and therefore resolution is to be found in changing society by creating first a set of individuals who are different – liberated in, say, a sexual sense, or freed from the ‘performance principle,’ i.e., having to perform in a certain prescribed way (at work, for example). Whereas Marx thought that the ‘immiserisation’ of man came when he was confined by poverty, Marcuse argued that psychological immiserisation came at the time of maximum affluence, with people governed by acquisitiveness and ‘subtle technological repression.’ Roszak makes room for one sociologist, Paul Goodman, whose main skill was an ‘inexhaustible capacity to imagine new social possibilities.’33 Goodman’s role in the counterculture was to imagine some practical ‘alternative’ solutions and institutions that might replace those dominating the technocratic society. Among these were the free universities and ‘general strikes for peace.’ But above all there was Goodman’s idea of Gestalt therapy, the basic idea of which was that people should be treated as a whole, not just by their symptoms. This meant accepting that certain forces in society are irreconcilable and that, for example, violence may be necessary to resolve a situation rather than burying one’s feelings of anger and guilt. In Gestalt therapy you do not talk out your feelings, you act them out.
Abraham Maslow, another psychologist, was also part of the counterculture. In The Psychology of Science (1966), taking his cue from Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge (1959) and Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Maslow put forward the view that there is no such thing as objectivity, even in the physical sciences.34 The ‘discovery’ of order is really an imposition of order on an untidy world and corresponds more to the scientist finding ‘beauty’ in, say, tidiness rather than to any real order ‘out there’ in an objective sense. The imposition of order undervalues subjective experience, which is as real as anything we know. There are, say Maslow and Roszak, other ways to know the world that have just as much subjective impact – and that is an objective fact. In discussing psychedelic drugs, Roszak was careful to place marijuana and LSD, in particular, in what he saw as a legitimate tradition of William James, Havelock Ellis, and Aldous Huxley (in The Doors of Perception), all of whom studied hallucinogenic substances – nitrous oxide and peyote, for example – in a search for ‘non-intellective powers.’ But he concentrated on marijuana and the experiments on LSD by the Harvard professor Timothy Leary. Roszak was not entirely convinced by Leary (who was eventually dismissed from Harvard) and his claims of a ‘psychedelic revolution’ (that if you change the prevailing mode of consciousness, you change the world), but he was convinced that hallucinogenics offered emotional release and liberation in a difficult world and were no less damaging than the enormous numbers of tranquilisers and antidepressants then being prescribed for the middle classes, often the parents of the children who comprised the ‘drug generation.’35
In his chapter on religion Roszak introduced Alan Watts. Watts began teaching at the School of Asian Studies in Berkeley after leaving his position as an Anglican counselor at Northwestern University. Aged fifty-five in 1970, he had been a child prodigy in his chosen field, Buddhist studies, and the author of seven books on Zen and mystical religion. Zen was the first of the Eastern mystical religions to catch on in the West, a fact Roszak put down to its vulnerability to ‘adolescentisation.’36 By this he meant its commitment to a ‘wise silence, which contrasts so strongly with the preachiness of Christianity’ and which, he said, appealed strongly to a generation raised on wall-to-wall television and a philosophy that ‘the medium is the message.’ Watts was himself highly critical of the way Zen was used, sometimes by pop stars, as little more than the latest fashion accessory, but the fascination with Zen led to an interest in other Eastern religions – Sufism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and then on to primitive shamanism, theosophy, even kabbala, the I Ching, and, perhaps inevitably, the Kama Sutra.
Zen received a massive boost from an entirely separate book, Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974).37 This was a road book. Pirsig took his young son and some friends on a vacation through the backroads of America – as the book opens, they are biking between Minneapolis and the Dakotas. The text alternates between lyrical passages of life on the road – the sheer walls of canyons, the soft beds of pine needles that the bikers sleep on, the smell of rain – and rhetorical discussions of philosophy. Pirsig’s main target is what he calls the Church of Reason. He moves between Eastern mystics, Zen Buddhism, and classical Greek philosophers in particular. For him the motorcycle maintenance manual shows the typical dead hand of reason: meticulously accurate, dull, and before you can use it you need to know everything about bikes. Opposed to that is the ‘feel’ that a true mechanic has for machines. Pirsig’s most original ideas are new ways to conceive experience: rhetoric, quality, and ‘stuckness.’ Reason does not have to be a dialectic, he says. Rhetoric carries with it the idea that knowledge is never neutral but always has value and therefore leads somewhere. Quality is a difficult entity to describe, but as Pirsig uses the idea, he says that we recognise quality in art, say, or literature, or in a machine, and that such recognition is unthinking. ‘Stuckness’ is being immersed in a line of thought with an inability to shake free. The form of Pirsig’s book, itself rhetorical, was designed to show his appreciation of the quality of nature, and the way he had come unstuck in his own thinking.
‘What the counter-culture offers us, then,’ concluded Roszak, ‘is a remarkable defection from the long-standing tradition of sceptical, secular intellectuality which has served as the prime vehicle for three hundred years of scientific and technical work in the West. Almost overnight (and astonishingly, with no great debate on the point) a significant portion of the younger generation has opted out of that tradition, rather as if to provide an emergency balance to the gross distortions of our technological society.’38
Although it has long since disappeared as the entity described by Roszak, the counter-culture was not a complete dead end. Besides its input into the green movement and feminism, many of the psychotherapies that flowered under the counter-culture bordered on the religious: Erhard Seminar Training (est), Insight, primal therapy, rebirthing, Arica, bioenergetics, and Silva Mind Control were more than therapies, offering group experiences and ritual similar to church. All of them involved some form of body manipulation – rapid, chaotic breathing to build tension, shouting or screaming as a form of release. Often, such activities ended in group sex. Equally often, these therapy-religions had quite a complex set of ideas behind them, but it was rarely necessary for the ordinary members to be familiar with that: there was always a clerisy on hand to help. What mattered was the experience of tension and its release.39
Judged by the numbers who still followed the mainstream belief systems, the new therapy-religions were small beer; they never comprised more than a few hundred thousands. Their significance lay in the fact that people turned to them because life had become ‘so fragmented that they [found] it increasingly difficult to draw on their public roles for a satisfying and fulfilling sense of identity.’40 This is why the historian of religion Steve Bruce called these new movements ‘self-religions,’ because they elevated the self, if not to centre stage, then at least to far more importance than the traditional mainstream faiths: each individual had his or her turn at the centre.
One man who was fascinated by this idea, and ran with it in a series of brilliantly witty essays, was the American journalist Tom Wolfe. Wolfe was the inventor (in the 1960s) of something that came to be called the New Journalism (the capitals are customary). This was Wolfe’s attempt to get beyond the ‘pale beige tone’ of most reporting, and to do so he employed many tricks and devices from fiction in an effort to get inside the minds of the people being written about; far from being mere neutral reporting, his journalism was enriched (victims would say distorted) by a point of view. Essentially a comic, even a manic writer, Wolfe’s main aim was to chronicle the fragmentation and diversity of (American) culture, which has evolved its own, often bizarre art forms, lifestyles, and status rituals.41 The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) included an hilarious account of a journey across America in a psychedelic-painted bus with a crew of ‘acid-heads,’ complete with vernacular conversation and punctuation. Radical Chic (1970) was about the svelte sophisticates of New York, conductor Leonard Bernstein in particular, entertaining the Black Panthers (‘I’ve never met a Panther – this is a first for me!’) and conducting an auction to help their cause where the bidders included Otto Preminger, Harry Belafonte, and Barbara Walters. Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (also 1970) chronicled the way black recipients of welfare hopelessly outwit the various functionaries whose job it is to see that the system is not abused.42 But it was in The Me Decade (1976) that Wolfe took up where Daniel Bell, Theodore Roszak, and Steve Bruce left off.43 For Wolfe actually attended some of the sessions of these self-religions, and he wasn’t taken in for a moment – or at least that’s how he saw it. He called them Lemon-Sessions, and ‘Lemon-Session Central’ was the Esalen Institute, a lodge perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific in Big Sur, California; but Wolfe made it clear that he included Arica, Synanon, and Primal Scream therapy in this pantheon. Although many people wondered what the appeal was of spending days on end in the close company of people who were complete strangers, Wolfe knew: ‘The appeal was simple enough. It is summed up in the notion: “Let’s talk about Me.” ‘Wolfe saw the obsession with the self as a natural (but unwholesome) development of the counter-culture, a follow-on of the campaign for personal liberation that went with the sexual revolution, experiments with drugs, and the new psychologies. It was, said Wolfe, the natural corollary of alienation (Marx), anomie (Durkheim), mass man (Ortega y Gasset), and the lonely crowd (Riesman). But then he added, in his usual style, ‘This [alienated] victim of modern times has always been a most appealing figure to intellectuals, artists, and architects. The poor devil so obviously needs us to be his Engineers of the Soul, to use a term popular in the Soviet Union in the 1920s…. But once the dreary little bastards started getting money in the 1940s, they did an astonishing thing – they took their money and ran! They did something only aristocrats (and intellectuals and artists) were supposed to do – they discovered and started doting on Me!’44
Wolfe identified the Me decade, but it was Christopher Lasch, a psychoanalyst and professor at the University of Rochester in New York State, who went further than anyone else had done on the theme of ‘the Me decades’ and what would shortly be known as ‘the Me generation.’ In The Culture of Narcissism (1979) Lasch’s thesis was that the whole development of American society (and by implication other Western societies to a greater or lesser extent) had, since World War II, brought about the development of the narcissistic personality, so much so that it now dominated the entire culture. His book was a mixture of social criticism and psychoanalysis, and his starting point was not so very different from Daniel Bell’s.45 The subtitle of Lasch’s book was ‘American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations,’ and it began, ‘Defeat in Vietnam, economic stagnation, and the impending exhaustion of natural resources have produced a mood of pessimism in higher circles, which spreads through the rest of society as people lose faith in their leaders.’46 Liberalism, once the only game in town when Lionel Trilling was alive, was now ‘intellectually bankrupt…. The sciences it has fostered, once confident of their ability to dispel the darkness of the ages, no longer provide satisfactory explanations of the phenomena they profess to elucidate. Neoclassical economic theory cannot explain the coexistence of unemployment and inflation; sociology retreats from the attempt to outline a general theory of modern society; academic psychology retreats from the challenge of Freud into the measurement of trivia…. In the humanities, demoralisation has reached the point of a general admission that humanistic study has nothing to contribute to an understanding of the modern world.’47 Against this background, Lasch said, economic man had given way to psychological man, ‘the final product of bourgeois individualism.’ Lasch didn’t like this psychological man. Having set the scene, he waded into all aspects of a society that he thought had been affected by the essentially narcissistic personality of our time – work, advertising, sport, the schools, the courts, old age, and the relations between the sexes.
His first target was the awareness movement. ‘Having no hope of improving their lives in any of the ways that matter, people have convinced themselves that what matters is psychic improvement: getting in touch with their feelings, eating health food, taking lessons in ballet or belly-dancing, immersing themselves in the wisdom of the East, jogging, learning how to “relate,” overcoming their “fear of pleasure.” ’48 Echoing Steve Bruce, Lasch argues that we have entered a period of ‘therapeutic sensibility’: therapy, he says, has established itself as the successor to rugged individualism and to religion, though he prefers to characterise it as an antireligion.49 He further argues that eventually this approach will serve as a replacement for politics. Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, and Norman Podhoretz’s Making It are all examples of the self-absorption on the part of the middle and upper-middle classes, designed to insulate them against the horrors of poverty, racism, and injustice all around them. The new narcissism means that people are more interested in personal change than political change, and encounter groups, T-groups, and other forms of awareness training have, in effect, helped to abolish a meaningful inner private life – the private has become public in ‘an ideology of intimacy.’ This makes people less individualistic, less genuinely creative, and far more fad- and fashion-conscious. It follows, says Lasch, that lasting friendships, love affairs, and successful marriages are much harder to achieve, in turn thrusting people back on themselves, when the whole cycle recommences. He goes on to identify different aspects of the narcissistic society – the creation of celebrities who are ‘famous for being famous,’ the degradation of sport to commercialised entertainment rather than heroic effort, the permissiveness in schools and courts, which put the needs of ‘personal development’ above the more old-fashioned virtues of knowledge acquisition and punishment (and thus treat the young gently rather than inculcating the rugged individualism that was once the tradition). In this context he also raises an issue that assumed greater relevance as the years went by, namely the attack on elites and the judgements they arrive at (as for example in the canon of books to be studied in schools). ‘Two contributors to a Carnegie Commission report on education condemn the idea that “there are certain works that should be familiar to all educated men” as inherently an “elitist notion.” Such criticisms often appear in company with the contention that academic life should reflect the variety and turmoil of modern society instead of attempting to criticise and thus transcend this confusion.’50
But, and here we get to the nub of Lasch’s criticism, he argued that the awareness movement had failed, and failed completely. It failed because, in so many words, it had produced a false consciousness. The emancipation that it supposedly brought about was in fact no emancipation at all, but merely a more sophisticated and more subtle form of control. The new awareness still involved old tricks to keep power and control in the hands of – generally speaking – those who had it before. The feminist movement may have brought about greater freedom for many women, but the cost was a huge rise in one-parent families, overwhelmingly a mother and child, which in turn put greater pressures on women and on the children, in many cases breeding a ‘revulsion’ against close personal relationships that made loving friendships more difficult and promoted a dependence on the self. One-parent families are often narcissistic families. In business, too, greater discussion and worker participation led in most cases only to talking shops, which may have made the management more liked but did not substantially change anything else. ‘The popularisation of therapeutic modes of thought discredits authority, especially in the home and the classroom, while leaving domination uncriticised. Therapeutic forms of social control, by softening or eliminating the adversary relation between subordinates and superiors, make it more and more difficult for citizens to defend themselves against the state or for workers to resist the demands of the corporation. As the ideas of guilt and innocence lose their moral and even legal meaning, those in power no longer enforce their rules by means of the authoritative edict of judges, magistrates, teachers, and preachers. Society no longer expects authorities to articulate a clearly reasoned, elaborately justified code of law and morality; nor does it expect the young to internalise the moral standards of the community. It demands only conformity to the conventions of everyday intercourse, sanctioned by psychiatric definitions of normal behavlour.’51
Modern (i.e., late 1970s) man, says Lasch, is imprisoned in his self-awareness; he ‘longs for the lost innocence of spontaneous feeling. Unable to express emotion without calculating its effects on others, he doubts the authenticity of its expression in others and therefore derives little comfort from audience reactions to his own performance.’52 Both Lasch and Tom Wolfe therefore concur in finding the awareness movement, the obsession with self, and the therapeutic sensibility not only unsatisfying but largely a sham.
Roszak, Wolfe, and Lasch all drew attention to the way in which, for many, the private, confessional, anonymous nature of traditional religions was giving way to the public, intimate, narcissistic nature of the awareness movement. Another way of putting this is to say that one set of beliefs, one kind of faith, was giving way to another. Not entirely coincidentally, three books in the early 1970s by well-known historians examined analogous times in the past.
Described by Christopher Hill as one of the most original books on English history, Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) showed that although the psychological atmosphere of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England was very different from the California or Paris of the late 1960s and early 1970s, nevertheless the parallels were there to be seen in the overlap between rival systems of belief, the link to societal change and political radicalism.53 Thomas explains that magic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is to be understood as being on a par with, say, drink and gambling as a way of coping with the high number of uncertainties of life, and in particular with uncertainties in the medical sphere. Organised religion itself used many magical practices to enforce its way of life. Miracles were regularly reported until the Reformation.54 In 1591 John Allyn, an Oxford recusant, was said to possess a quantity of Christ’s blood, ‘which he sold at twenty pounds a drop.’55 One of the reasons why the Reformation succeeded was because sceptics no longer believed in the ‘magic’ surrounding Mass, whereby the Host was turned into the body of Christ and the wine into his blood.56 Thus Protestantism represented itself as a direct attempt to take magic out of religion.
Sects proliferated because their leaders continued to promote supernatural solutions to earthly problems that the Reformation sternly resisted. (One of these, incidentally, was the interpretation of dreams – Thomas Hill’s Most Pleasaunte Art of the Interpretation of Dreames).57 Many women expected to see their future husband in their sleep. With the outbreak of civil war, the number of people claiming to be the Messiah shot up – William Franklin, a London ropemaker who made this claim, appointed disciples in the role of destroying angel, healing angel, and John the Baptist; his activities attracted ‘multitudes of persons’ before he was forced to recant before Winchester Assizes in 1650.58 Thomas believed that the chaos of the age, helped along by technological advance (in particular gunpowder, the printing press, and the mariner’s compass), was helping to create these sects, the avowed aims of which were only part of the attraction. Satisfaction was achieved by many participants simply by taking part in some symbolic, ritualistic action, irrespective of its purpose.59 There were many names for these magicians – cunning men, wise women, conjurers, sorcerers, witches – offering a variety of services from finding lost goods to healing and fortune-telling. Each had a method that involved an intimidating ritual.60
But perhaps the strongest parallel was in astrology, which at that time was the only other system that attempted to explain why individuals differed from one another, or to account for physical characteristics, aptitudes, and temperament.61 Even Sir Isaac Newton produced The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended in 1728, which attempted to use astronomical data to reconstruct the otherwise lost chronology of the ancient world, the aim being to explain why various peoples had the character, manners, and laws that they did.62 The appeal of astrology was intended to be intellectual, to provide a coherent and comprehensive system of thought, its other avowed aim being to help men resolve personal problems and to ‘take their own decisions.’63 Again, a number of celebrated figures with an interest in astrology are known to have had sectarian or radical associations – Anabaptists, Ranters, Quakers, and Shakers all included. According to Thomas the existence of rebellious feeling (in the political sense) led to prophecies, wish-fulfilment in effect, and these fuelled supernatural speculation.64 Technological change also had an effect on the idea of progress. This may have arisen from the crafts, where knowledge was cumulative; but it was not until the sixteenth century that the ‘modern’ idea that ‘newest is the best’ established itself, and only then after a protracted battle between ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns.’ It rubbed off with sects, people imagining that, even in religion, newest might be best. For Thomas, magic arises at the weak point of the social structure of the time, whether that be social injustice, physical suffering, or unrequited offences. Ultimately, however, magic was a ‘collection of miscellaneous recipes’ rather than a comprehensive body of doctrine, such as Christianity, which was far more fulfilling overall. The century after the Reformation was a transitional period when magic continued because it offered something for those who found the Protestant notion of self-help too arduous.65 The changes are to be seen as a result of the shifting aspirations of people: as the development of insurance took the threat out of everyday setbacks, and medicine made genuine advances, magic contracted. Today it still clings on in astrology, horoscopes, and fortune-tellers.
The World Turned Upside Down, published by Christopher Hill in 1972, overlapped with Thomas’s book.66 Hill considers the years in Britain immediately after the civil war, a time when, as in the 1960s and early 1970s, radical political ideas and new religious sects proliferated. Again, without making too much of the parallels, certain similarities may be noted, in particular the left- wing nature of the political ideas; the fact that these new religious notions internalised the spiritual, making God less ‘out there’ or ‘up there,’ more of a personal matter; and thirdly pacifism. Hill even went so far as to use the words ‘counter-culture’ once or twice. It was, he said, a period of ‘glorious flux and intellectual excitement,’ powered by large numbers of ‘masterless men,’ no longer tied to feudal masters – itinerant merchants, peddlers, craftsmen, vagabonds who, beholden to no one, no longer fitted into hierarchical society and therefore provided the backbone of the new sects: Anabaptists, Levellers, Ranters, Quakers, and Muggletonians.67
Hill discovered several new patterns of thought. One was a belief in the spirit of Christianity – mastering sin – rather than following the letter of the Bible; another was the stirrings of science and a mood of scepticism towards many of the traditional claims of Christianity. There were also many Communist ideas and constitutional criticisms, all of a left-wing kind, as we would recognise them. Property laws were attacked, and squatters appeared (also typical of the 1960s and early 1970s).68 Church services were run along more democratic lines. Members of the congregation were invited to publicly comment on, and criticise, sermons (several ‘riots and tumults’ being the result). With the collapse in traditional beliefs, in hell and heaven in particular, a widespread despair set in, and people talked far more freely than hitherto of suicide (a mortal sin in Catholicism). Many flitted from sect to sect. Hill noted a taste for nakedness and a general attitude to the insane that was a mixture of awe and fear: the mad were routinely regarded as prophets. A number of new schools and universities were started. The change in the status of women was also considerable, as evidenced not only in the higher rate of divorce but in the greater role they had in the sects (compared with the established church), with some sects, like the Quakers, abolishing the vow in the marriage ceremony of the wife to obey the husband, and others, like the Ranters, ceasing to regard sex outside marriage as sinful.69 Indeed, the Ranters’ views at times resembled Marcuse’s: ‘The world exists for man, and all men are equal. There is no after-life: all that matters is here and now…. In the grave there is no remembrance of either sorrow or joy…. Nothing is evil that does not harm our fellow men…. Swearing i’this light, gloriously, and “wanton kisses,” may help to liberate us from the repressive ethic which our masters are trying to impose on us.’70 Hill agreed with Thomas that this was a time when the idea of novelty, originality, ‘ceased to be shocking and became in a sense desirable.’ This was an all-important advance, not only because the acceptance of novelty hastened change, but because it drove man back in on himself, to see ‘what light was inside and how it could be made to shine.’
A further shift took place in the nineteenth century, and it was this change that was described and analysed by Owen Chadwick in The Secularisation of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (1975).71 Chadwick divided his book into two. In part 1, ‘The Social Problem,’ he considered the effects of economic liberation, Karl Marx’s materialism, and a general anticlericalism. This ‘unsettlement’ was also the result of new machines, new cities, massive transfers of population. In part 2, ‘The Intellectual Problem,’ he looked at the impact of science on men’s minds, at the effects of new historical (including archaeological) researches and Comtean philosophy, and at the ethics that developed out of these and other changes. Certain trends, he says, are clear, like churchgoing statistics. There was a downward turn in France, Germany, and England in the 1880s; the larger the town, the smaller the proportion of people who attended church on a Sunday; a cheap press enabled more atheistic literature to be published. But Chadwick’s more original point is that as the nineteenth century wore on, the very idea of secularisation itself changed. To begin with it could be described as anticlericalism, and a fairly aggressive anticlericalism at that.72 With the passage of time, however, Christianity, while undoubtedly weaker, adapted to the new forms of knowledge, so that by the end of the century the secular world was in effect a separate realm from that of the faith. There were still areas of life, or experience, like mourning or providence, which were left to religion, but in general the heat and fury had gone out of the debate; the agnostics and atheists went their own way, following Marx, Darwin, or the radical historians; the religious moved in and out of science, accepting what they wished to accept.73 The secular world thought it understood religion, as a phase or stage on the way to a fully secular society, and the religious denied that science and history could ever address the matter of faith. Despite the tide, Chadwick’s book was in fact a chronicle of the tenacious hold that religion had on many people, the need for a spiritual mystery at the heart of existence.
The works of Galbraith, Bell, Roszak, and Lasch, on the one hand, and of Thomas, Christopher Hill, and Chadwick on the other, complement each other. Two things stand out from the historical studies, as a prerogative for a change of sensibility: new modes of communication (which help change self-awareness), and new forms of knowledge, scientific knowledge especially, which threaten old explanations.
Galbraith and Bell recognised this. No sooner had their analyses appeared than the most important of their predictions were confirmed. In the spring of 1975, two young men quit their regular positions, one as a computer programmer at Honeywell in Boston, the other as a student at Harvard, and started their own company, writing software for the new generation of small computers that had just been announced. A few months later, in 1976, a young microbiologist in San Francisco was approached by an equally young venture capitalist, and they too launched their own company, this one to synthesise a specific protein from strands of DNA. The first two were called Paul Allen and Bill Gates and they named their company Microsoft. The second two were Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson, and because neither Boyer & Swanson nor Swanson & Boyer was acceptable, they named their company Genentech. As the last quarter of the century arrived, the new information technology and the new biotechnology were spawned in tandem. The world was about to be turned upside down again.