From the Shelf The Making of a Counter Culture

CRISIS. I have considered myself a radical since last winter, and a revolutionary since last April: a "cultural" revolutionary, as opposed to a social revolutionary. I became convinced that necessary change in our society requires more change in the nature of people than a social revolution can generate. It seemed most imperative that we directly change ourselves and our way of living; that we create the new life, rather than try to attain it.

But I have encountered compelling arguments against the possibility of a cultural revolution before a social one. For instance, I came to believe that educational institutions need immediate, drastic reforms because they exert tremendous influence upon the nature of people. The universities seemed the obvious place to start. But then I read Ridge-way's Closed Corporations and realized how thoroughly the universities have been bought by government and big business, those powerful opponents of any revolution. After that, I coudn't convince myself-honestly-that anything more than token change could be achieved from within the educational system. And what about honesty? In arguments with an acquaintance in SDS (WSA). I invariably had to acqiesce to his terms, for he disposed of mine systematically. My ideas were extremely bourgeois, totally unrelated to the real oppression of the working class, and diversionary from social action to overthrow the profiteering capitalistic order.

From there on, the arguments were merely logical processes of instruction. In the end, I had to ask myself why I wasn't joining him. It wasn't only his intolerant dogmatism. regimentation, and commitment to an armed revolution; there was something more. He pointed again to my bourgeois liberalism. I thought he was wrong, but I couldn't articulate anything. I always came home drained and terribly confused.

Then I read Roszak's book. It was like a psychological transfusion. For the time being, at least; hope is regenerated, commitment renewed, direction refocused.

I

The Making of a Counter Culture must be described as a seminal work. Like any other seminal work, it has flaws, some of them serious-but they don't diminish its singular importance. Visionaries of all sorts have glimpsed the new life that man might lead. Roszak is the first to give us a scrupulously critical celebration of the new life now being made, the emerging counter culture, and to advise us concerning its further creation.

He also reveals the most plausible and terrifying picture vet of what the counter culture is countering. It demands considerable attention. Roszak sees the United States as a technocratic society, in which "those who govern justify themselves by appeal to technical experts who, in turn, justify themselves by appeal to scientific forms of knowledge." Technocracy, to paraphrase an important communist concept, is the highest stage of industrialism: the mature product of a society convinced of the necessity for technological progress and deeply imbued with the scientific ethos. It all meshes quite nearly. Technological progress requires rational expertise, efficiency, order, predictability-all the qualities so cherished in the scientific world-view.

THIS GIVES us a clue to the awesome power of the technocracy in our world. Rationalized in the jargon of industrial necessity and Objective Science, the technocracy transcends political ideology, even revolutionary ideology. It grows without check in all industrial societies-capitalist or collectivist, Roszak emphasizes-while its often disastrous breakdowns are blamed on this political faction by that one. Everywhere, the dominant motives are social integration and control. (E. g.: big business in America, now assured of fairly steady profits, seeks along with the government to "rationalize" -manipulate and control-the total economy of the country and, if possible, the world.) Under technocratic domination, capitalist and collectivist societies come to resemble each other more and more. Compare the United States and the Soviet Union. And give China a chance.

For the time being, though, the United States has the most excellently crafted technocracy of them all. Long removed from political controversy (the think-tanks and universities work for every administration), it has consolidated its power behind a fantastic screen of hypocrisy and cant. Roszak sums it up well enough:

The business of inventing and flourishing treacherous parodies of freedom, joy, and fulfillment becomes an indispensable form of social control under the technocracy. In all walks of life, image makers and public relations specialists assume greater prominence.

Thus, "education," "free enterprise," "pluralism," "democracy," "justice," are phrases invoked for tightly-manipulated processts by which the technocracy maintains itself. The same with "sexuality," "creative leisure," and "recreation."

But most depressing of all is the reaction, or lack of it, of Majority America to the events of this decade. The technocracy has ravaged the natural environment, created an unspeakable thermonuclear arsenal, etc., and hasn't eliminated a single big problem-not even poverty, which it could eliminate easily. Yet most Americans remain convinced that our individual and societal problems are still basically technical, that science and government will solve them, that they need only keep the radical troublemakers from making more troubles and defer all power to the experts, the men on top who know best. (After all, they've put Americans on the moon.) The technocracy in the United States retains the security of "a grand cultural imperative which is beyond question, beyond discussion." That old spectre, 1984, seems only minutes away.

II

That all makes consummate sense to me. Other critics have presented basically the same picture as Roszak's, but they didn't go any further. None of them went ahead to question and discuss the technological impertive for what it is, a profoundly potent ideology in itself.

Roszak deals with that ideology in a shattering critique near the end of the book. I can't possibly convey its power; if you read nothing else, you must read that chapter, "the Myth of Objective Consciousness."

By "myth," Roszak means "that collectively created thing which crystallizes the great, central values of a culture." As the sine qua non of all scientific knowledge, objective consciousness is the foundation upon which the technocracy has built its citadel. Even in our most private lives, we pay homage to that citadel all the time.

But what does being objective mean? Because involvement in or commitment ot whatever we consider would introduce subjective elements, objectivity requires that we maintain a certain distance between ourselves (rational consciousness) and everything else. Rational, objective consciousness is the one most authoritative way of regarding the hending, unreliable. Unless rational consciousness uncomprehending, unreliable. Unless rational consciousness-superior and etached-can reduce or organize it into predictable patterns and categories, all else (stars, atoms, dogs, primitive religons, literature, dreams, cognitive processes, human beings) is without intrinsic dignity or value.

WHAT ROSZAK is saying, in short, is that "objective consciousness is alienated life promoted to its most homorific status as the scientific method." This explains the willingness of social scientists to pursue "truth" for anybody's money and purposes. But its implications about our culture are more telling. We all treat one another and everything else as unresponsive objects from the start. Openness is precluded; locked into our own heads, we are unable and afraid to make real contact with anyone or anything. Psychic alienation, or repression by objective consciousness, is the central fact of our lives: we are all hopelessly alienated from one another and our world.

Alienation, that cliche. But it is a far more plausible explanation for the inhumanity of technocratic capitalists than the supposed social deficiencies of technocratic capitalism. And it is the only explanation for the unconcern of all of us as science undertakes the objectification and mechanization of everything human: intelligence, moral judgment, teaching, creativity, play, even child-making. As Roszak comments, it was once thought that such things were done for the joy of the-doing. Scientific culture, however, "makes no allowance for 'joy,' since that is an experience of intensive personal involvement." Nothing stands in the way of Progress.

This is where our thermonuclear technocracy is taking us. Roszak expresses it brilliantly: under the auspices of objective consciousness.

we subordinate nature to our command only by estranging ourselves from more and more of what we experience, until the reality about which objectivity tells us so much finally becomes a universe of congealed alienation. It is totally within our intellectual and technical power... and it is... worthless...

III

Who is making a culture which rejects this suicidal way of life, and what sort of culture is it? Roszak reveals his urgency. He places all his hope for a humane future in the maturation of a counter culture-which, right now, is just beginning to grow.

Its members, except for a few adult mentors and heroes, are almost all young people under twenty-five. Obviously, they are not conservatives or liberals, for whom objective realism is nuclear deterrence and phased withdrawal from the War. Nor are they black militants or members of any faction of SDS, for whom the only real human suffering is the tangible oppression of the Third World and the working class.

They are, for the most part, youth who consider themselves "apolitical": former New Leftists, hippies, heads, cultists of Eastern philosophy, and communalists; some members of the rock scene, the underground press, the encounter movement, and the free universities. They could be many, for they draw their ranks from the children of the Great Middle Class, who are strung out in adolescence between a permissive childhood and a regimented adulthood, who have been in on American quantitative abundance and want out. So far, though, they are relatively few.

And their embryonic way of life is so fragile. They want to develop new communal ethos, new family patterns, new sexual mores, new acceptance of the natural environment for its intrinsic beauty and dignity, new everything. Their revolution is primarily psychic: they are trying to get out of their heads and to explore the forgotten, non-intellective, human powers. They want to open themselves up to the totality of human experience. But no one can shake off a life-time of indoctrination in amonth or a year. Even as they aspire to joy, love, and honesty, too often their objective minds, which know better, laugh cynically.

THEIR experiments take all forms. The worst degenerate by themselves into inanity. As for the best, the mass media, a thoroughly objective institution, is always eager to neutralize, victimize, vulgarize. Moreover, these experiments can scarcely be understood or tolerated by the middle and upper classes, who embrace exactly what they reject, or by the economically oppressed, who want in on the wealth, not out.

Yet this vulnerable phenomenon, hardly a culture is the only revolutionary movement that is undermining the technocracy today. To identify the intellectual and mystical heritage from which it must continue to draw strength, Roszak takes us on a critical tour of what he calls

the 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 impenetrably occult narcissism ...

In any event, this odyssey takes up nearly half the book; it is a fascinating trip which defies summary. In it Roszak also thinks out many of his own opinions on the directions the counter culture must take for the future.

IV

In the short run, there is only one effective sort of action that the counter culture (and for that matter, everybody) can take in oppositon to the ultimate acsendancy of technocratic totalitarianism: in Marcuse's words, the "Great Refusal."

In its most difficult, most meaningful experiments, the counter culture must refuse official legitimacy and easy publicity, for they will certainly lead to quick vulgarization. The free universities, for instance, have to refuse that absolute corrupter, academic credit. The communes have to decline the slick publicity which will no doubt spawn Communal Weekends at posh resorts. Horny house-wives are already flocking to places like Esalen, looking for miracles and a good lay.

On a broader scale we should all quit our masochistic flag-waving for drugs. Roszak doesn't have much faith in dope as the way to achieve the new life, and as much as I'd rather not. I have to agree with him. The hallucinogens could easily become the opiate of the counter culture.

Most important, we should all stop abiding the inconveniences and hassles with which the technocracy keeps us under control. Although Roszak does not go into it, it is clear that people in the universities are the ones who can take really effective action: they are in a position to ruin the technocracy's system of self-preservation and fairly secure of the necessities of life if they try. It is time to stop tolerating such important strictures as selective admissions, examinations, grades, depart-mentalization, and degrees. This will require action by great numbers of people, but it simply must be done.

TRANSLATED into political terms, the Great Refusal means the refusal to be co-opted. The social revolutionaries already have been. Frustrated by the technocracy's relentless inhumanity, they have come to hold some ideas more important than some human beings, and to place more value on some human beings than on other human beings. Just like the technocracy.

If Roszak had his way, our social action would be essentially apolitical. it would closely resemble that of the civil-rights campaigns and the old New Left, with their emphases on the value of all human life, on non-violence, on what Keniston called "an open, personalistic, unmanipulative, and extremely trusting style." Social action is certainly necessary, and it must go on simultaneously with the development of the counter culture. But warfare terminology and terrorism have no meaning for a humane future. Besides, more humane violence at this late stage of the game is a waste of effort.

V

Roszak poses new and very difficult questions for his counter culture. Many theorists have enyisaged a time of technological case and abundance, and most people in the counter culture have gone right along with them. Now Roszak comes and levels a damning attack not only at technology, but at science as well I have the feeling that even while he was writing about pure science, he was reacting to the perversions of technocratic science. But he has nevertheless opened the debate. The counter culture now has to decide: Should it learn to live without technology? And, should it learn to live without scientific expertise and scientific knowledge?

Roszak is undeniably right on one point, though. The vital question is not "how shall we know?", but "how shall we live?"

What is of supreme importance is that each of us should become a person, a whole and integrated person in whom there is manifested a sense of the human variety genuinely experienced, a sense of having come to terms with a reality that is awesomely vast.

Roszak especially treasures the visionary experience of great artists and poets. But he means even more than that. Taking the counter culture's naturalistic impulses to their extreme, he calls for a new adoption of what Buber called "pansacramentalism," a deep, mystical appreciation for all beings, animate and inanimate.

SUCH IDEAS seem ridiculous to objective radicals. They don't understand that reality is catching up with them. Roszak quotes an old Indian woman who asks, "How can the spirit of the earth like the white man?" Now, we all know there is no "spirit of the earth." Nevertheless, the answer to the woman's question is that it doesn't like the white man at all.

It has already begun to repay him for the violence that he has done it with his industry and technology. We have heard it all before, and it is a measure of our alienation that we ignore it: in the coming years, cities will suffocate; populations will starve; great forests will die, as will great rivers. The oceans may quit photosynthesizing. The plague will start again without the help of Fort Detrick. Mankind will riot. If the technocratic "knowledge explosion" is not ultimately radioactive, perhaps the end of the world will not come. But it will certainly come close.

Roszak doesn't consider all of this; he worries that the technocracy will succeed in reducing all men to automatons, forevermore. No chance. It is too late now. Even the technocracy cannot save itself from its own end.

The counter culture must proceed, then, with the understanding that it may not be a counter culture forever. In the long run, it could conceivably found the culture of post-technocratic, post-Western man. This consideration should not make people in the counter-culture self-righteous and oracular; but it should make them less flippant about what they are doing. Their experiments and explorations have barely begun. They cannot be allowed to stagnate or degenerate. The people in the counter have to assume a new intentness in their quest for human happiness, and a new earnestness in their vision of what will be.