(This article originally appeared in CRISIS, America's fastest growing Catholic magazine.)
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Legends of the Woodstock generation’s deeds have risen like yeast in the souls of a new wave of adults who carry no memories of sit-ins, acid trips, and Vietnam; to some who truly weren’t there, those rebellious hipsters inhabit a neo-heroic age of giants.
But perspective has come grudgingly. Perhaps it’s only now, after the radicals of that day have become grandparents and joined the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), that we’re availed of the critical distance to assess the carnage.
The Long March
Roger Kimball began his own pathology of the period many months ago with serial features on what he calls the “cultural revolution” of the 60s in The New Criterion, articles that form the backbone of his book The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America.
Kimball has wielded the spade of an archaeologist. Many of us following the digs with each issue were convinced that he had finally hit the bedrock of understanding with each new vein discovered, only to find the shovel grating against more hard stuff with the next installment. Now that all those expeditions are gathered in one book, we can see how heavy was the yield.
The first job Kimball takes up is defining a “cultural revolution” itself as the most profound of alterations in sensibility after the religious; no quarter of life is left untouched when those terrestrial plates shift under our feet. The very water tastes different.
The introductory essay can, and, by rights, should, stand on its own as an intellectual exposé. A revolution of culture issues not merely in changes of political regime but in a massive “metamorphosis in values and the conduct of life.” This book is, he says, “part cultural history, part spiritual damage report.” It’s also a premonitory call to the future.
The roots of the 60s run deep, and Kimball traces them to their sources, which are, not surprisingly, ideas. As a phenomenon of popular culture, that fugitive decade began in the 50s, most obviously with the “Beat” poets and writers and rock ’n’ roll. But even the Beats weren’t made from whole cloth. Philosophers had long been preparing the way.
Kimball throws special light on Herbert Marcuse, whose Eros and Civilization (1956) gave license, among other things, to break away from the “repressive order of procreative sexuality” holding back western man, as the wise guys put it, from an actualization of self. From Marcuse came the formulation of “working against the established institutions while working in them,” an insurrectionary motto de rigueur for the new revolutionaries. Forgotten heterodox figures like Wilhelm Reich, Paul Goodman, and Norman O. Brown, disciples of Marx and Freud and early architects of much of what was to come, get their due.
It was also during the 50s that art entered the “realm of morally unassailable privilege” while undermining “the realities that make artistic achievement possible: technique, a commitment to beauty, [and] a grounding in tradition.” It was Brown who said art must be “subversive of civilization.”
Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, and the “New Sensibility” are unimaginable without these intellectual underpinnings. How convenient that subversion has had an uncanny way of keeping company with devalued standards, suggesting, as John Simon has written, that “nothing succeeds better than highbrow endorsement of lowbrow tastes.” Without the promotion of such artistic fashion 50 years ago, Robert Mapplethorpe would have been a wedding photographer, or a clerk in the women’s department at Macy’s.
Bohemian Dysfunction
Poets and fantasists of the Beat generation — led by Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac — are now required reading in so many high school and college courses that we are tempted to forget what a flock of loons they were, “artistic anti-matter,” as Kimball justly calls them. But they stood on the cusp of this revolution. Everything they did was calculated to destroy convention and elevate themselves to cultural eminence, which could be forgiven (artistically, at least) if they’d said interesting things in interesting ways.
But they didn’t. Kerouac’s On the Road may be, with charity, the only redeemable production. They shot up on drugs, flouted sexual decency, and committed untold crimes against the English language — Why did these peace-lovers wage such cruel war on punctuation? — and did it all in a painfully public way.
Burroughs typified the bohemian dysfunctions of the period: He went crazy, murdered his wife, and became a writer, a progression that must have seemed inevitable to this group. And the Beats paved the way, of course, for the counterculture public relations gurus like Timothy Leary — “Turn on, tune in, drop out” — when the 60s got going in earnest.
We’re struck now not only by the artistic fraudulence but also the naiveté of the Drop Out movement. For a group that claimed to embrace the “complexities” of life invisible to hoodwinked elders, this was an awfully credulous crowd.
That naiveté extended most devastatingly to politics. Cities burned. This was an age of appeal from the ballot to the bullet. Eldridge Cleaver’s slogan, “If you’re not part of the solution, you are part of the problem,” says volumes about the radical frame of mind.
When Cleaver published his bizarre and violence-excusing Soul on Ice in 1968, the left-wing journal The Progressive called the effort “a collection of essays straight out of Dante’s Inferno,” a comment more true than The Progressive might have realized.
This point of view gave birth to Tom Hayden’s admonition to his spoiled thugs during the Chicago riots raging outside the Democratic National Convention in that same year to “make sure that if blood is going to flow, it will flow all over the city.” (Nice guy.) Here was moral self-righteousness gone mad.
Universities, playing their shameful part in abetting “the infantilization of the American intelligentsia,” capitulated to young people whom, one would hope, we wouldn’t so easily confuse with the intellectually serious today.
The Patient Recovery
The 60s, Kimball writes, “has become less the name of a decade than a provocation,” a rallying cry for spirits of a certain cast of mind and soul. It’s not a time so much as an atmosphere. It left little good behind culturally but a few fine songs, while certainly quickening the loss of a faculty “to discriminate fairly between civilization and its discontents,” as well as replacing virtue with an “insatiable greed for the emotion of virtue,” and raising “self-infatuation” to a “prime spiritual imperative.”
For these reasons the 60s cannot be dismissed or ignored. The period must be reckoned with, and this Kimball does with recondite diligence.
Ginsberg once spoke truly when he promised that the counterculture would get to the future through the children, and it has. But maybe the last word has yet to be spoken. The late Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead said that the counterculture many thought would bring on paradise was, in the end, “just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness,” and this from a man who had a good seat for the show.
Cultural revolutions cannot be reversed at large by will; too many delicate things get axed on the chopping block. Nonetheless, Kimball thinks we all need a long march back to “the patient recovery of lost virtues,” a way open to all—even if you were there.
