Today’s commentators typically view postwar American intellectual life as a period of staid traditionalism, stifling uniformity, complacency, and consensus. This reputation is surely warranted. Almost seamlessly, World War II transitioned into the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, which brought intense polarization of American domestic politics, a nervous but belligerent jockeying for hegemony abroad, and a frightening and escalating arms race. The Cold War ushered in a second and even more widespread and feverish Red Scare with it, including loyalty oaths, the House Un-American Activities Committee, the McCarran Internal Security Act, the John Birch Society, and Senator Joseph McCarthy terrorizing Americans about “enemies from within.” This was a period when, if the color of an American’s skin was too dark or his or her sexual orientation too ambiguous, he or she could be accused of breaching national security. The pressure for a smooth, agreeable sameness also extended into American consumer culture. Unprecedented affluence and an ever-expanding culture of consumerism enabled more and more Americans to move into cookie-cutter Cape Cod–style suburban homes, to read the same lifestyle magazines and mass-market paperback novels, to slip into the same ready-to-wear cardigans and loafers, and to watch the same television shows while eating the same TV dinners set atop the same TV tray tables.
While policing and paranoia marked so much of this period—and the Cold War is the appropriate framing for understanding mid-twentieth-century American thought—viewing it only through this frame risks flattening the vibrant intellectual impulses at work at the time. The 1950s and early 1960s saw not only intellectual suffocation but also efforts to widen Americans’ intellectual horizons. The dramatic expansion of higher education, think tanks, and the print culture marketplace; initiatives to create a lively conservative tradition; and the growing American interest in intellectual movements and spiritual practices from around the world all contributed to the opening of midcentury American thought, helping Americans (to use the words of Randolph Bourne) “breathe a larger air.”
America’s new status as global superpower stimulated the development of its intellectual and cultural institutions at a pace and in a scale unprecedented in its history. With the massive postwar investment in higher education, the proliferation of intellectual institutes and artistic foundations, and the continued growth of federal agencies in need of policy experts and political analysts, intellectuals had opportunities for institutional affiliation as never before. American intellectual life became nothing short of a growth industry, and so too did intellectuals’ interest in assessing the promises of these new alignments for American society.
American thinkers welcomed the opportunity to reassess their views of American intellectual culture and their place in it. A 1952 Partisan Review symposium devoted itself to the intellectual “reaffirmation and rediscovery of America.”1 With guarded optimism, contributors including Margaret Mead, Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook, and Reinhold Niebuhr recognized that the experience of the Depression and war had chastened Americans, making them take notice of the valuable insights of intellectuals. Surveying recent history, Lionel Trilling noted with some astonishment that “for the first time in the history of the modern American intellectual, America is not to be conceived of as a priori the vulgarest and stupidest nation of the world.”2Time magazine’s June 11, 1956, article “America and the Intellectual: The Reconciliation,” with a portrait of the cultural and intellectual historian Jacques Barzun and the lamp of learning burning brightly on the cover, captured the widespread feeling that a truce was in order.
But the opening of American thought extended beyond professional intellectuals and into wide-scale efforts to democratize intellectual life. A distinctive feature of the period is the widespread belief that a stable democracy required an educated citizenry, and proper education required extensive funding and a robust infrastructure. During the war, educators had seized on President Roosevelt’s affirmation that “books are weapons in the war of ideas.”3 The Council on Books in Wartime distributed 122 million of their Armed Services Editions, paperbacks of major works of nonfiction, fiction, and even poetry, which helped rouse many soldiers’ intellectual curiosity and yearning. The council reprinted classics like Plato’s Republic, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Love Poems, and Walter Lippmann’s U.S. Foreign Policy and turned F. Scott Fitzgerald’s long-forgotten The Great Gatsby into the Great American novel. Thanks to these editions, soldiers could be enchanted with Whitman’s poetry and be swept away by the mystical philosophy of the Lebanese American poet Kahlil Gibran. Those same GIs then came home to the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (or “GI Bill”) of 1944, which provided, among other resources, educational subsidies for millions of returning servicemen to go to college.
After the war, the expansion of intellectual resources kept pace with the booming economy. Fierce competition in commercial publishing led to a dramatic increase in mass-market paperbacks. The National Defense Education Act passed in 1958 provided federal subsidies to libraries and higher education, which in turn opened up huge markets for textbook publishers. Even primary and secondary schoolers benefited from this surge of collective will and resources, with expenditures on public schools more than doubling between 1945 and 1950.
Given the extensive new opportunities for intellectual access, support, and employment, describing this period of American intellectual life as an “opening” makes sense. Describing it as all sunshine and light, though, does not. Long after the war, American intellectuals were still trying to come to terms with its devastations, which were the result of human choice and action, not natural disasters. This left many people wondering which aspects of the “Western intellectual tradition” (a phrase coined in the early twentieth century), if any, still had integrity, and which had proven themselves utterly inadequate for guiding moderns in the twentieth century. Suddenly progressive and New Deal–era reformers’ sanguine notions of human progress seemed naïve, even a bit taunting. In the words of one historian of the period, “Never before had progress seemed so fragile, history so harmful or so irrelevant, science so lethal, aggregations of power so ominous, life so full of contingencies, human relationships so tenuous, the self so frail, man so flawed.”4
A common concern animating postwar debates was how Americans should root and nourish a common democratic culture. While many intellectuals and educators could agree about the potential perniciousness of science and technology absent any clear moral vision guiding them, they struggled to find a shared language for what that vision—and those values—should be. In his 1959 essay “Two Cultures,” the British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow lamented that the “intellectual life of the whole of western society” was divided between two very different frames of mind: the literary, or humanistic, and the scientific. Though he admitted that his warnings about the disturbing consequences of this “gulf of mutual incomprehension” were a little overdrawn, with regard to the tensions in 1950s American intellectual life, the characterization most definitely fit.5 Different views on the methods of political and ethical inquiry were not the only thing dividing thinkers. More important was the question of what intellectual and moral foundations could support American collective life.
Pragmatism fell on hard times after the war, and it was no longer the promising peacemaker between competing intellectual impulses it was earlier in the century. Intellectuals and educators wanted more assurances about moral universals than pragmatism could give, and they took aim at the pragmatist notion that all truths are nothing more than provisional tools that help people navigate their complex worlds. As John Dewey remained the most prominent face of philosophical pragmatism up through—and even after—his death in 1952, it was his defense of an experimental approach to democratic politics that came under the most heated attacks. This was nothing new to Dewey as he had to continually explain and defend his instrumentalism in education, public policy, and private ethics throughout his long career. But the upbraiding was particularly damaging when it came from formidable thinkers like the theologian, philosopher, and political commentator Reinhold Niebuhr, who shared Dewey’s desire for “a common faith” for political life, but not what he regarded as Dewey’s naïve naturalism. Niebuhr thought Deweyian atheistic empiricism overpromised in its assumptions about the power of human intelligence and clarity of will. Describing himself as a “Christian realist,” he insisted that “the recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.”6
Though Niebuhr and Dewey had long wrestled over the scope and limits of human power to foster a just and sustainable democracy, both were working firmly within a liberal framework. The liberalism that animated their thinking was an inheritance from the early nineteenth century, when the term first entered transatlantic discourse to pull together individual liberty, property rights, and democratic institutions to secure them. It drew on Locke’s vision of a smoothly functioning civil society as a social contract between rational individual actors, as well as Adam Smith’s principle that markets unfettered from state control operate with maximum efficiency and for the greatest benefits to all. In its Progressive era and New Deal iterations, liberal thinkers and politicians had put a higher premium on the role of the government—not to control the economy, but to manage it with knowledgeable experts redressing imbalances and weaknesses in it. Enlightened governance on behalf of the public good and safeguards to protect the disenfranchised took precedence over individual property rights. With the rise of Nazism and fascism in Europe, American liberalism re-emphasized Lockean tolerance for diversity as a core feature of open democratic societies in order to distinguish itself from iron-curtained totalitarian ones.
Both World War II and now a fierce Cold War daunted leading liberal intellectuals, causing them to find the weak spots in their vision of a vibrant liberalism in the charged and dangerous postwar world. But liberal intellectuals like historians Richard Hofstadter and Daniel Boorstin, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, literary critics Mary McCarthy and Alfred Kazin, and sociologists Daniel Bell and Patrick Moynihan did so not to topple liberalism, but to shore up its ruins. When they jabbed American liberal theories with charges of parochialism and facile optimism, they never doubted that, as political scientist Louis Hartz put it in 1955, the “liberal tradition in America,” in some form or another, was the defining feature of American history and should remain so in the future.7
There were nevertheless some intellectual holdouts who begged to differ more fundamentally. Feeling exasperated with what they considered to be a smugness and complacency in midcentury liberals’ worldview, a growing number of political and cultural critics identified themselves as “conservatives” offering an alternative. Though the United States, unlike the United Kingdom or Canada, never had a “conservative” party, conservatism, they contended, did have an American history. They thus worked to sketch out a lost tradition, to persuade Americans to recognize it as their own, and to welcome it as a political term of self-understanding.
In quick succession, three books defining American conservatism appeared, providing momentum for critics who wanted to challenge what they saw as the prevailing orthodoxy of a glib liberalism. The views expressed in Peter Viereck’s Conservatism Revisited (1949), William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale (1951), and Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind (1953) did not always seamlessly line up with one another. Indeed, the elder Viereck identified the young Buckley as “Paul-in-a-hurry [who] skips the prerequisite of first being a rebel Saul” and distinguished his “shallow” campus conservativism from a “profound” one. Buckley offered an “easy booster affirmation that precedes the dark night of the soul” but not “the hard-won, tragic affirmation that follows it.”8 But together these and a growing number of prominent conservative commentators challenged to varying degrees the assumptions of midcentury liberalism by stressing the virtues of individualism over collectivism, capitalism over all forms of economic collectivism, hierarchy and order over egalitarianism, and caution over experimentalism as the “conservative way[s] to freedom.”9 They recognized that a political and intellectual movement, to get moving, needed media outlets to spread its gospel. With that in mind, Buckley founded the National Review in 1955 and Kirk the Modern Age in 1957 to rival liberal magazines such as the New Republic, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s.
Liberals’ and conservatives’ visions of postwar democracy and the routes to it differed sharply; nevertheless, they could agree on a few things. First was their shared interest in—and ambivalence about—the European Enlightenment. The modifier “European” here is significant, because during this Cold War period it becomes necessary in order to distinguish it from a newly discovered “American” one. American historian Adrienne Koch was the first to popularize the notion of a distinctly American (and more wholesome) Enlightenment with a series of books on the founding fathers. According to Koch, “Th[eirs] is not the voice of absolute idealism or doctrinaire liberalism” one sees in eighteenth-century Europe, “but rather the voice of cautious, deliberative, and reasonable pragmatic wisdom.”10 The European Enlightenment also captured the attention of Marxist German exiles Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who looked to it to understand the origins of modernity in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). They argued that the Enlightenment philosophes, with their enthusiasm for “instrumental” rationality, and their view that nothing is beyond human comprehension and the will to dominate, had laid the groundwork for the “administered world” of Nazism. Adorno and Horkheimer were not ones to mince words. As they put it: “Enlightenment is totalitarian.”11 Such an extreme thought would have never occurred to conservative commentators on the other end of the political spectrum. But Russell Kirk, expressing a sentiment shared by other conservatives, did feel the need to put the word Enlightenment in scare quotes throughout his book and to distance himself and fellow conservatives from the “secular cult of the rationalistic Enlightenment.”12
Another thing that liberals and conservatives could agree on was that ideology in any form was an enemy of democracy. “Ideology” was an epithet they hurled hither and thither to disparage a system of ideas or a worldview. It was almost never modified by an adjective because its associations were unmistakable. Fascism and Nazism were ideologies, and Soviet Communism, too, so what possibly could recommend it? Trilling expressed a view shared by commentators on the left, right, and center when he suggested in The Liberal Imagination (1950) that the ease with which parts of Europe moved from imperialism to fascism to “totalitarian communism” revealed the dangers of a society that put limits on the free play of the intellect. Illiberal societies become so, he maintained, because they are “bankrupt of ideas”: “for in the modern situation it is just when a movement despairs of having ideas that it turns to force, which it masks in ideology.”13 Viereck similarly hammered on the dangers of “monolithic, systematized ideology” and a “rigid, ideological definition of the proper role of government.”14 He held that conservativism in America was very different. It was not a program or a dogma but rather “a way of living, of balancing and harmonizing; it is not science but art. Conservatism is the art of listening to the way history grows.”15 By taking up the position that ideology was the absence of critical and careful thinking, both liberal and conservative commentators agreed that democracy was a state of mind.
In addition, liberals and conservatives shared the sentiment of historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who claimed in 1949 that the “politics of freedom” could be found only in what he called “the vital center.” Schlesinger did not mean the center between Americans left and right.16 He meant it in a global context, advocating that the postwar United States steer clear of fascism to the right and communism to the left, and keep itself squarely in the “vital center” of the two.
Neither his liberal colleagues nor his conservative detractors disagreed with the sentiment. They simply could not agree where that vital center could be found, and what it would take to make that vital center hold.
Keeping the American mind open—to new ways of viewing the world, new moral vocabularies, and new aesthetic sensibilities—was in no way easy, given all the very real pressures for conformity during and even after the height of the Red Scare. Midcentury voices of discontent often had to speak in a whisper or in code. But they were, no doubt, audible in popular culture. They could be heard in the aimlessness and antagonism of fictional characters like the disaffected teenager Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), in the dissatisfaction and estrangement explored in movies like Blackboard Jungle (1954) and Rebel without a Cause (1955), and in the anti-establishment restlessness and alienation of Allen Ginsberg’s and Jack Kerouac’s Beat poetry and prose.
The concern about conformity extended into other registers as well, including scholarly studies of American culture and personality. Harvard sociologist David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (1950) showed how the postwar American pressure for uniformity and togetherness was actually producing its opposite. Instead of creating “inner-directed” personality types who are guided by a strong internal conscience, American culture was producing atomized and alienated “other-directed” personalities who run on a “diffuse anxiety” and toggle between conformity and anomie, as they chronically seek the affirmation of others in their schools, workplaces, and leisure activities.17
Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills gave Americans even more reason to worry as he drew attention to the dangers of modern bureaucratic forms of social power and powerlessness. In White Collar (1951), he examined middle-class corporation men and business culture, and five years later, in The Power Elite, he took his criticism higher up on the social status food chain to the troubling behaviors and worldviews of leaders in business, the military, and politics. He sounded similar alarms in both. Instead of self-possessed thinkers and independent actors, he saw status-seeking “cheerful robots” and technicians, and the “organized irresponsibility” and “mindlessness of the powerful that is the true higher immorality of our time.”18
While Riesman and Mills provided a sociological interpretation of dislocation and disaffection of the midcentury self, many American readers craved other ways of coming to terms with a vague and ominous sense of “inauthenticity” (to use a keyword of the day) that settled over them after the war. Philosophy and literature were genres in which intellectuals explored the psychic disorientation they were experiencing. The novels and plays of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus found an eager audience in America, helping to turn them into intellectual stars and French existentialism into a vogue among young, disillusioned Americans. In fashion magazines and journals of opinion, in newspapers and on television, Americans encountered Sartre with his black spectacles and pipe, de Beauvoir with her long locks rolled into a crown on top of her head, and Camus brooding with a cigarette pursed between his lips. They learned that these thinkers were not part of a school or tradition, but rather practiced a particular style of philosophy and way of being in the world that challenged the alienation of industrial capitalism and class warfare, the brutality of imperialism, the empty promises of modern technology to improve humanity, and the bankruptcy of religious comforts. Readers could discover in their writings that these philosophers were not interested in chasing down cold, barren, abstract ideas, but rather explored the way one experiences his or her existence in the world. The French existentialists were greeted with fascination, though also with some revulsion, by Americans who felt that the horrors of World War II had made a mockery of the Western intellectual tradition and thus sought to reset a notion of the self and the world more in line with their feelings of radical indeterminacy and experiences of aloneness in an anonymous, indifferent world.
African American authors did not need a cataclysmic war to tell them that the world was out of whack or that justice was a chimera, or to feel a deep and abiding sense of cosmic abandonment. This was, for too many of them, part of their lived experience from their early childhoods on. Because these feelings were so familiar to them, Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright were able to render a distinctly American existentialism by drawing on their own haunting experiences with such precision and power. For Ellison, this meant studying the forced invisibility or very public demonization of African Americans. Ellison explained black invisibility in the opening lines of his Invisible Man (1950): “I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”19
Wright did not need the European existentialists to articulate his ideas. But because what they described so closely aligned with his own understanding, he gravitated to their writings. After growing disillusioned with Marxism in the early 1940s, Wright began reading works by Heidegger and Kierkegaard, which in turn became gateway drugs to other existentialists, both living and dead. Wright spent long hours with the works of Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and Husserl; and thanks to tight transatlantic publishing networks, he became good friends with de Beauvoir and Sartre, and he had Albert Camus’s help in getting a French edition of Black Boy published. Wright even moved permanently to Paris in July 1947, spending the rest of his life in what he called “voluntary exile,” because he experienced more freedom in Paris as a foreigner than as a black “native son” in his own America.
Figure 7.1 Simone de Beauvoir and Richard Wright and his wife, Ellen, spent time together in New York City in 1947, having begun their warm transatlantic friendship a year earlier in Paris. De Beauvoir had come to travel through the United States and record her observations, as well as her esteem for Wright, in L’Amérique au jour le jour (1954). Nelson Algren papers in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of the Ohio State University Libraries
But it was Wright’s experiences in the United States that gave him a fund of existential dilemmas, hardships, and possibilities to draw from in his fiction and essays. In particular, Wright’s novels explore the theme of the individual, who through sheer will and deliberate action tries to create himself without the help of a divine Creator. He explored this isolation and alienation from institutional religion and conventional morality through his protagonists Bigger Thomas in Native Son (1940) and Cross Damon in The Outsider (1953), and in his own self-portrait in Black Boy (1945). Ever the outcast, Damon “had to discover what was good or evil through his own actions which were more exacting than the edicts of any God because it was he alone who had to bear the brunt of their consequences with a sense of absoluteness made intolerable by knowing that this life of his was all he had and would ever have. For him there was no grace of mercy if he failed.”20 There is no mistaking Wright’s dark examinations of individual self-making with Horatio Alger’s love letters to plucky, rags-to-riches individualism. Wright’s novels were instead deeply unsentimental explorations of the ways in which existential freedom can be an achievement, but also a terrible burden.
In the years following World War II, many prominent thinkers came to believe that the atrocities of the twentieth century were the result of modern spiritual disenchantment—not just social dislocations. Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, a growing number of religious scholars and theologians, psychologists, mythologists, and freelance seekers tried to assess the health of the soul of man under modernity and concluded that it was not good.
And so they found common cause in surveying the world’s historical religions, spiritual practices, and philosophical systems for epistemological and moral insights still available to secular moderns. They tried either to dig deeper into human history for truths buried under the ruins of institutional religion or to reach higher to find what Paul Tillich referred to as the “God above God”21 who did not reside in any one of the world’s religions, not even his own Christianity.
These seekers worked within established intellectual venues and created new ones. Some conducted their investigations from the academy—among them émigré historian and philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade at the University of Chicago and mythologist and literary scholar Joseph Campbell at Sarah Lawrence College. Others bridged academic homes and social justice advocacy, such as émigré rabbi and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, who divided his time and energies between professorships at Hebrew Union College and Jewish Theological Seminary and civil rights activism. Others helped found new religious institutions and para-academic centers, for example, Howard Thurman, who cofounded the interfaith, interracial Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco in 1944, and Shunryu Suzuki, who founded the San Francisco Zen Center in San Francisco (1962) and later authored the blockbuster Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (1970). Some turned to established presses and magazines, like Time, which devoted much of its precious textual real estate—and even lead stories—to religious issues. Others started new publishing ventures, such as the Bollingen Series at Pantheon Books, devoted to translations of Carl Gustav Jung’s psychological mysticism and a mix of ancient texts and cutting-edge studies on related themes.
Critical observers of the time could not help but notice the powerful uptick in this interest in religion—if not religiosity—and tried to make sense of it. Not everyone was impressed. The Partisan Review called together one of its signature symposia in 1950, this time with W. H. Auden, Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin, Hannah Arendt, and Marianne Moore to assess the “new turn toward religion among intellectuals.” Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain had to hold back his disdain for the condescension barely contained by the secular editors. “I am not much interested in the new turn toward religion among intellectuals. . . . What is of interest, from the point of view of faith, are the souls, and their orientation toward eternity.”
Kazin also gently upbraided the editors for somehow suggesting that religious belief and a rigorous intellect could not go hand in hand. He reminded them of Mahatma Gandhi, Christian Socialist Ignazio Silone, and Catholic theologian and labor activist Emmanuel Mounier as examples of men of faith who were also uncompromising intellectuals. Arendt suggested that the return to religion after a “naturalistic” or “positivistic” period is neither unusual nor alarming but just part of historical intellectual cycles. Meanwhile, pragmatist philosopher Sidney Hook, in his typical pugnacious fashion, dusted off an old complaint of his about “the new failure of nerve” of intellectuals gravitating toward “irrationalism” and abandoning the hard-fought achievements in scientific conceptions of open inquiry and verifiability.22
The longing for universals among the world’s different belief systems fueled these quests. Was there something—anything—that all religious beliefs had in common? British expatriate writer Aldous Huxley, who had moved to Southern California in 1937, began taking a serious interest in Hindu philosophy and meditation. The grandson of the nineteenth-century agnostic scientist Thomas Huxley (known as “Darwin’s bulldog”), Aldous inherited his grandfather’s iconoclasm, but one that was inflected with a deep curiosity about religion and a strong mystical bent. After writing an introduction to the 1944 translation of The Bhagavad Gita by fellow expat British novelist Christopher Isherwood and Swami Prabhavananda of the Vedanta Society of Southern California, Huxley turned to writing his The Perennial Philosophy (1945). In it, Huxley focused on what he thought might be the eternally true elements of Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Christian, and, to a lesser extent, Islamic and Jewish scripture and history. He characterized the perennial philosophy as those insights that are deeper than the particularities of any one religion and get beneath the creeds, the liturgy, the practices, and the time- and power-bound conceptions of good and evil, and reach to what he believed were the universal truths at their core. For Huxley, any single religious tradition represents truths that have been battered, altered, or hived off by various groups in the messy process of history. However, by lining up different belief systems and philosophies against each other, he hoped that moderns could tap into their shared timeless, much-needed insights.
This longing for perennial spiritual insights helps explain why Jung made significant inroads into American thought at this time. The son of a Lutheran minister who chose modern medicine over the clergy, Jung became the founder of analytic psychology. Following Freud, he believed that human fears and motivations lay in the unconscious mind. Unlike Freud, however, he thought that primal sexual instincts accounted for only some aspects of human civilization and its discontents. For Jung, the religious instinct—what he called the “authentic religious function”—was as powerful.23 Encoded in man’s unconscious mind were more than simply childhood individual experiences but rather the collective experience of all humankind.
To access that collective unconscious, Jung encouraged his American readers to study “archetypes”—“universally present psychic disposition[s]”—that crop up time and again in the world’s different religions, philosophies, and myths.24 To access these archetypes, and to find the universal in the particular, Jung roamed far and wide, bringing yoga, alchemy, tribal religious rituals, and extrasensory perception into the reach of psychology. Jung rejected Freud’s focus on sexual drives as the seat of all volition and refused to see religion as a neurosis. Jung’s value to midcentury American thought was to make analytic psychology spirituality’s handmaiden. Jung thus sought to restore the “psyche” to “psychology,” and spiritual questing to modern experience.
Figure 7.2Time magazine’s February 1955 cover story, “The Wise Old Man” (top left), celebrated psychological mystic Carl Jung and his appreciation of the “religious instinct” in human beings. The March 1959 issue (top right) featured theologian Paul Tillich with the headline “Religion. To Be or Not to Be,” which played on the title of his 1952 surprise hit, The Courage to Be. The April 1959 issue (bottom) informed American readers of his exile from Tibet into northern India and introduced them to the “serenity and peace” of Tibetan Buddhism. Time, Inc., Meredith Corporation
Jung’s effort to keep modern science from shouting down religion, and “Western” knowledge from overriding the wisdom of the “East,” found common cause with a variety of midcentury spiritual seekers eager for the same. It was in 1949 that D. T. Suzuki, after living and teaching in Japan since his departure from the United States in 1908, returned to present at the East-West Philosophers’ Conference in Honolulu and to commence his career in postwar American life as an ambassador of Zen Buddhism, influencing psychoanalysts Jung, Erich Fromm, and Karen Horney; Trappist monk and popular Christian writer Thomas Merton; and composer John Cage and Zen poet Gary Snyder, among many others.
In 1962, two Stanford graduates, Michael Murphy and Dick Price, founded the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, as a retreat and research center focused on interpenetrations of scientific and religious, Eastern and Western wisdom. Murphy had lived for a year and a half at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India, before meeting Price, who had studied with the Zen philosopher Alan Watts in San Francisco. Lectures and programs combined meditation with gestalt therapy, yoga with humanistic psychology, the occult with evolutionary sciences. In addition, books on the science of spirituality (and vice versa) flooded the 1960s and 1970s marketplace including Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (1975) and Gary Zukav’s Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (1979). Capra posed a question driving all of these movements and authors: “Is modern science, with all its sophisticated machinery, merely rediscovering ancient wisdom, known to the Eastern sages for thousands of years?”25 Their collective answer was yes.
The varieties of intellectual quests of the late 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, each in its own way, represented an effort to open American mental and moral horizons. Intellectual seekers thought that if they could properly do so, they might just find that “vital center” they were after, whether it be between political stability and individual freedom, a vibrant sense of the “social” and an autonomous self, or the rigors of science and the consolations of religions. Seekers for meaning may not have noticed the trickle of “exhaustion” theories calling into question their efforts to find universalizing doctrines. That is likely because the first of them, Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (1960), announcing the bankruptcy of revolutionary worldviews and chiliastic dreams, probably did come about a decade too soon, given that the 1960s was a decade of passionate social and political doctrines of all sorts. But the timing for novelist John Barth’s warning about “the literature of exhaustion” in a lecture he gave at the University of Virginia in 1967 was just about right. He observed a “used-upness” of all heretofore available literary forms and suggested that “ultimacies” in literature were being replaced by a “labyrinth” of endless choices, innumerable directions, but also many, many dead ends. And this is what the postmodern era, just then slowly getting its start, was about to bring.26