Roszak - The Making of a Counterculture, Mass Counter Avant
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The Making Of A Counter Culture
Author: Theodore Roszak
Publisher: University Of California Press
Date: 1968
ISBN: 0-520-20122-1
Table of Contents
Introduction To The 1995 Edition
I
In fact, it seems to me quite possible that the 1960s represented the last
burst of the human being before he was extinguished. And that this is the
beginning of the rest of the future, and that from now on there will simply be
all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there
will be nobody left almost to remind them that there was once a species
called a human being, with feelings and thoughts. And that history and
memory are right now being erased, and that soon no one will really
remember that life existed on the planet.
Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory,
My Dinner With Andre
(1981)
History is not sensibly measured out in decades. The period of upheaval we conventionally
call "the sixties" is more appropriately seen within a broader setting that stretches from
1942 to 1972. These dates too are arbitrary, but they define with somewhat greater
accuracy a remarkable period in American history. Let us call it the Age of Affluence.
The year 1942 marks the point at which the United States finally emerged from the Great
Depression. That transition was embodied in Franklin Roosevelt's landmark announcement
of the new wartime economic order. "Dr. New Deal has retired," FDR proclaimed. "He has
been replaced by Dr. Win the War." In the brief three and a half years that followed, all the
grim antagonisms and oppressive necessities of the depression rapidly melted from the
scene. Corporate leaders who had spent the past dozen years vilifying FDR as a "traitor to
his class" now Hocked to Washington as "dollar-a-year men" in return for bulging, cost-plus
military contracts. By the time the war was over, the entire industrial plant of the United
States had been rebuilt from the ground up to become the world's only state-of-the-art
technological establishment. A new skilled workforce had been trained and booming new
industries (electronics, chemicals, plastics, aerospace) had been born. Unscathed by the
damage that other nations had suffered in the war, the United States had no economic
rivals. It had emerged from the war as king of the world industrial mountain, so vastly
wealthy that it could afford to export the capital needed to revive the European and
Japanese economies that would one day become its major competitors.
Move forward a generation to 1972 and we find ourselves in the midst of the oil shortages
that hit America where it hurt the most—in the pocketbook via the gas tank. However it was
engineered, the gasoline-pump crisis represented the first sighting by the general public of
any advanced industrial society of a serious ecological constraint. An unsettling lesson was
about to be learned:
Things deplete. You can't have it all. The sky is not the limit; the earth
is
.
What I have called "the counter culture" took shape between these two points in time as a
protest that was grounded paradoxically not in the failure, but in the success of a high
industrial economy. It arose not out of misery but out of plenty; its role was to explore a
new range of issues raised by an unprecedented increase in the standard of living. For a
period of some twenty years the world's most prosperous industrial society became an
arena of raucous and challenging moral inquiry the likes of which we may never see again—
at least not if those whose wealth, power, and authority are at stake have anything to say
about it.
1
During the mid to late sixties, I was living in England editing a small, radical pacifist journal.
The publication was closely connected with the great Aldermaston disarmament marches
that were calling for an end to the arms race, which most European protesters were
prepared to blame primarily on the United States. The early sections of this book were
written and sent home as articles for
The Nation
while I participated in a characteristic
experiment of the period: the founding of a turbulent, short-lived "Antiuniversity of London"
where transient students arrived with little more to their names than guitars, begging
bowls, and a stash of magic mushrooms to study the teachings of Timothy Leary, anarchist
politics, and Tantric sex. I mention this as a reminder that the upheaval of those years was
more than an American phenomenon; it extended to western Europe. Living abroad in so
intense and often anti-American a political ambience offered me an odd, distancing
perspective on all I saw transpiring in my own country. I became aware of nuances between
protest in America and abroad. I could not help but become more severely critical of the
way the United States abused its prodigious power around the world, but at the same time I
became more sympathetically appreciative of the strange new significance that the
American protest movement had assumed in our time. Youthful insurgents in Europe tended
to fall back on a long-established left-wing tradition that was all but nonexistent in this
country. At first I was inclined to agree that this was a sign of America's political
immaturity. But before this book was completed, perhaps because I felt so stung by the
somewhat smug remarks my European colleagues often made about the ideological naiveté
of the United States, I had concluded that the very weakness of conventional ideological
politics in the United States lent the counter culture its unique insight. Questions about the
quality and purpose of life, about experience and consciousness, about the rationality and
permanence of industrial growth, about our long-term relations with the natural
environment arose more readily in America than in the older industrial societies. The United
States was closer to the postindustrial horizon where issues of an unusual kind were coming
into view.
Oddly enough, many of those issues could be traced to pre-industrial origins. They stemmed
from a dissenting sensibility as old as the lament that the Romantic poets had once raised
against the Dark Satanic Mills. But as a factor in the political arena of the modern world,
that cry of the heart was distinctly new—so new, in fact, that it was difficult to imagine it
being successfully communicated to society at large. And, of course, it wasn't. Little more
than the sensational surface of the protest filtered through the mass media: gestures of
irreverent disaffiliation that had to do with drugs and sex, jarring new styles of music and
dress, obscene language and bizarre alternative lifestyles. Nevertheless, matters of
remarkable philosophical substance did come to be hotly debated by a larger public than
had ever participated in the serious political deliberations of any modern society. Members
of a rising, college-educated generation—the "new class" as some commentators called
them—were using their well-trained wits not to bolster the system in which they were
meant to find their fortunes but to shake it to its foundations. Of course, most members of
the new class were on the fast track into the technocratic elite, the regime of expertise that
has since emerged in every advanced industrial society. More of them would become
button-down junior executives at IBM and ITT than mangy hippies. But it was those who
elected to drop out of the privileged middle class and make trouble who would stamp the
era with its special character. The ingratitude of these malcontents could not help but
attract concerned attention. Even the spectators who stood by bewildered before this
thankless outburst could not fail to register this much of the message:
Something isn't right
here. Something has gone desperately wrong. And those in charge cannot be trusted to fix
it.
Or words and music to that effect.
II
2
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