If nothingness characterized the music and the behavior of the young of the sixties, it is worth exploring where it came from. How did this sense of powerlessness sweep through the people of the most powerful nation on earth? The answer lies, at least partially, in a theory set forth by anthropologist Margaret Mead, a theory that hypothesizes that three different and separate types of cultures exist: postfigurative, in which children learn primarily from their forebears; cofigurative, in which both children and adults learn from their peers; and prefigurative, in which adults learn also from their children.
A postfigurative culture is one in which change is so slow and imperceptible that grandparents holding newborn grandchildren in their arms cannot conceive of any other future for them than their own past lives.1 The children of the fifties who became the radicals of the sixties grew up in a postfigurative culture. Eisenhower was everyone’s grandfather who held the young and predicted their future; Congress was the group of wise old men who guided the actions of the young, serving as modern-day shamans who read the signs and prescribed actions for the younger generations based on their visions. When Eisenhower sent advisers to Vietnam, he did it without the advice and consent of the young, who did not count. Most of the young people at the time could not even legally cast a vote. Only adults, defined as those over twenty-one, were viewed as mature enough to be qualified to vote. The young were disenfranchised and disempowered.
Their education was no better. One man remembered that when his son entered the first grade, he was overjoyed at the prospect. He’d been to a very good preschool and thought that now he’d get down to some first-rate learning, an idea that was reinforced by his tour of the school’s facilities before he registered. When the boy saw all of the science equipment and the technological miracles available in the building, he made the mistake of assuming he would be allowed to use it. At the end of the first day, he came home furious, unable to contain his anger.
“I’m not going back,” he said.
“Come on,” his father replied, “Whatever happened, it couldn’t be that bad, could it?”
“I’m not going back.”
“What happened?”
The boy fought for control and finally said, “They made us all go to the bathroom at the same time. Whether we needed to or not. They made us line up and go to the bathroom.”
On his first day of school, the boy had been taught that he was not important; he and his needs did not count. Administrative convenience was more important. In the sixties educational reformers such as John Holt, George Dennison, Paul Goodman, Neil Postman, and James Herndon all attacked the deadening of the spirit that occurred far too often in America’s public schools.2 These attitudes continue and characterize far too much of American education. One young woman related the story of the day when she, then a high school student, walked into the restroom and interrupted a drug deal between three other students. One of them stabbed her in the arm. She went to the nurse and, after her wound was tended to, was sent to see the principal, where she expected to be asked who had stabbed her. Instead he asked where it happened.
“In the girl’s bathroom.”
“Are you sure?” the principal asked.
“Of course, I’m sure.”
“Stop and think a minute and then tell me: are you sure it didn’t happen off campus?”
“No, it was in the bathroom.”
The girl reports that at this point she was getting confused. The principal continued to question her, implying that the stabbing must have taken place somewhere else. Although his attitude confused her, the young lady continued to insist it happened in the rest room.
Finally the principal said, “I don’t think so. If it happened in the restroom, it would mean we had a drug problem on campus and we don’t have a drug problem here.”
To this man, maintaining a false image for his school was more important than the safety of his students. It isn’t just administrative hypocrisy that creates problems for the young in schools. It is what is taught and how it is taught. Public schools originally existed to help integrate immigrant kids into American culture. To give these kids a boost, the schools passed on the collected knowledge of our past. Today the initiation of foreign-born kids into the society is a much smaller part of the task of the schools, but they still cling to that outdated mission. The result? As Paul Simon wrote, “When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.”3
The kids of the New Left generation went to high schools and colleges that taught from a top-down model. An expert lectured and the neophytes took notes. More than one hundred years of educational research have conclusively demonstrated that the lecture system is the single worst way to learn anything, but it still dominates our classrooms. The operating assumption of the lecture system is that the listeners don’t know anything. Again, the learners don’t count; what matters is that with a lecture system schools can process many more students. If a school does not deal with students as individuals, as people, it can pack hundreds of them at a time in a hall and pontificate in front of them and then evaluate them based on how well they can fill in little ovals on paper with a number two pencil.
Even though, as we noted earlier, Marshall McCluhan pointed out that it was the medium itself rather than the content that created change, we should not overlook what the schools and colleges were teaching. Civics courses taught an idealized version of how our government works, ignoring the dealmaking, the role of lobbyists, and the crazed, politically motivated investigations. Philosophy courses could be taken in which no one ever read a philosopher’s work, instead studying commentaries on the philosophers. As Thoreau said, there were no philosophers left, only teachers of philosophy. English classes taught grammar rules that contradicted themselves and each other and tried to reduce the act of writing to a set of rules. Conformity beat creativity. History was presented to students as a big bag of omissions and lies and the things that were important, like truth, eternal verities, and the spiritual impulse were ignored. Schools created a top-down authoritative world in which the adult held all the power and instead of sharing it doled out the illusion of power as a reward in the form of student governments and administratively approved and absolutely safe political clubs.
For the majority of American youth the situation was just fine. Raised in homes where their parents ruled, attending schools where the administration ruled, they were used to being told what to do and under what conditions to do it by their elders. Having grown up in a postfigurative culture, they were accustomed to it and saw it as natural. It was their whole environment, water to the school of fish. In fact, when the generation gap created tensions, most young adults sided with the adult authority figures. In his essay “On Work,” Bertrand Russell made the claim that the vast majority of workers would rather be told what to do than exercise their own judgment. Like a group of old cons waiting out their time until parole, most of the young in the Eisenhower fifties surrendered their autonomy, trading it for conformity and security. Instead of fighting nothingness, they accepted it as the normal state.
As a result, young America was depressed, feeling disaffiliated and powerless. Many had been through Freedom Summer and found the results of having put their lives on the line disappointing. After the summer they discovered that thirty-five of the churches they’d worked with had been burned to the ground, sixty of the Freedom Houses and homes they’d stayed in were firebombed, and the Freedom delegation to the Democratic National Convention had been turned away. The regular party refused to seat them, preferring instead to give official recognition and voting power to the racists, white supremacists, arsonists, and murderers who made up Mississippi’s Democratic Party.4 Small wonder they felt disillusioned, ready to reject the world of their elders.
The music these young people listened to reflected the world they saw around them. The Monkees, a fabricated group for a fabricated age, sang “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” a Carole King-Jerry Goffin song about the emptiness of suburban life. Dylan contributed “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” a song that attacked the futility of contemporary American life, and “Maggie’s Farm,” about the singer’s refusal to play the game anymore. The Rolling Stones, after their American tour in 1964, wrote and recorded “Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown,” which captured the chaos and intensity of life in this country, and “Mother’s Little Helper,” a song about American housewives’ dependence on tranquilizers to fight off the aloneness and alienation of their condition.
As the civil rights movement was shifting away from its white allies and the war was beginning to escalate, a series of songs protesting all aspects of American life appeared. Bob Dylan sang that he had been “older then” but was “younger now,” signaling a rejection of society’s stated values, while Phil Ochs gave us, “I’m Going to Say It Now,” a declaration of independence from the old ways. Eric Andersen contributed a number of songs about restless young people in search of a direction and a destination, such as “Thirsty Boots.” These songs captured the mood of the young men and women who were in the act of creating the New Left as an alternative way of governing and being.
Even country music—that most conservative music genre—briefly entered the field of social protest. Jeannie C. Riley, who took on hypocrisy in “Harper Valley PTA,” recorded “Generation Gap,” a song that blamed the gap squarely on parents, with lyrics claiming that from the very beginning when a baby was sitting in his mother’s lap there was the start of a generation gap. Her song also complained of bad parenting, the lyrics speaking of the parents’ partying and drug use and their demands for a standard for their children’s behavior while exhibiting none themselves.5 In the hypocrisy of adults, Riley concludes, you’ll find the origin of the generation gap.
One reason would lie in sheer numbers. According to Todd Gitlin, the first generation of baby boomers turned eighteen in 1964. Between 1964 and 1970, 20,000,000 more reached the age of eighteen. These numbers are important because, as Gitlin says, “America’s young were not only multiplying, not only relatively rich, not only concentrated on campuses and, thanks to the mass media—visible as never before. Suppose they were, en masse, in motion, breaking out of the postwar consensus, out of complacency, out of good behavior and middle-class mores, out of bureaucratic order and the cold war mood. Then the unthinkable might be actual, the unprecedented possible. You could safely kick out the jams, dissolve the old hesitations, break with adults, be done with compromises, be done with it.”6
Because these young radicals had grown up in a postfigurative culture, where all power and authority were top-down, their parents had held the role of old wise men; what they said was the operational truth, even if it turned out to be, as was frequently the case, wrong. The problem was that the parents of these new eighteen-year-olds were as riddled with nothingness and nihilism as their children were, but they could not admit they were empty and were trying to cover their emptiness with the correct suburban lives, whiskey and tranquilizers, cocktail parties and television, career climbing for the men and homemaking for the women. It was a life in which conspicuous consumption tried to cover a lack of meaning, where suburban churches sold the good life and rural churches maintained the racism and sexism that characterized the age. When the civil rights movement began to take hold, most churches railed against the granting of rights to minorities.
When the young grew up in situations like these, could they do anything else but revolt? Could there be anything other than a generation gap? Parents had preached to their children to be idealistic, and when their children tried to live up to what they’d been taught, the parents were horrified.