Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  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.