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3.
New Messiahs and Cultural Polarization
What
we think of as the 1960s was really concentrated into the half-dozen
years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Cultural
changes exploded and burnt themselves out with tremendous speed.
The religious impulse of the sixties has been obscured by a series
of scandals that began mid-decade and spilled into the seventies-communes
that failed, charismatic leaders who turned psychotic, cults that
ended in crime and murder. The sensational chain of events began
with the dismissal in 1963 of Timothy Leary and his colleague Richard
Alpert from psychology lectureships at Harvard for experimenting
with LSD on student volunteers. This episode
first brought LSD
to public attention. An Irish Catholic turned self-described prophet,
Leary envisioned a world network of "psychedelic churches" whose
Vatican would be his League for Spiritual Discovery (acronym: LSD),
headquartered in Millbrook, New York, until it was closed after
a 1966 police raid led by Dutchess County assistant prosecutor G.
Gordon Liddy. Though registered as a religious institution, the
League was noted for its sex parties-reportedly a frequent attraction
of Leary's Harvard offices as well.
The optimistic sixties saga degenerated
into horrifying incidents of group psychology gone wrong. Most notorious
is the case of Charles Manson, a drifter who became a fixture of
San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district during its famous 1967 "Summer
of Love" and who gathered a group of fanatical devotees, hippie
girls who thought he was both Jesus Christ and the devil. Though
only 5'2" tall, Manson had hypnotic powers as a cult leader.
He became patriarch of the "Family," a commune on a ranch near Los Angeles where heavy use of a cornucopia of drugs
was promoted and ritualistic group sex practiced. A student of the
Bible, Manson believed that the Book of Revelations prophesied the
Beatles: modern pop culture, in other words, had an apocalyptic
religious meaning. In August 1969, Manson dispatched a hit squad
to slaughter seven people in two nights, including the actress Sharon
Tate, living in a rented house in the Hollywood Hills. The details
still shock: in jailhouse confessions, Manson's girls boasted of
the "sexual release" they felt in their Maenadic frenzy as they
plunged their knives into their victims. Tate, eight months pregnant,
was stabbed sixteen times and a male companion fifty-one times.
By the seventies, cults seemed increasingly
psychopathic. Radical political cells like the bomb-making Weathermen
or the Symbionese Liberation Army, who kidnapped Patty Hearst in
1974 and whose emblem was a talismanic seven-headed cobra, began
to merge in popular perception with nominally religious groups like
Jim Jones' People's Temple, whose mostly black congregation was
drawn from San Francisco at the height of the hippie era. Jones
was a social worker and political activist who claimed to be the
reincarnation of Jesus, Buddha, Ikhnaten, and Lenin and who eventually
emigrated with his followers to a commune called Jonestown in the
Guyana jungle. After a shootout that killed a
visiting US Congressman in 1978, Jones ordered mass
suicide by cyanide-laced punch: 914 people were found dead, including
280 children.
In the nineties, interest in the swinging
sixties revived among curious young people at the same time as an
acrimonious debate about the sixties legacy intensified with the
election of the first baby-boom president, Bill Clinton. Thus, a
coincidental upsurge of cult incidents also triggered memories of
the Manson era. In 1993, a Christian commune of Branch Davidians
near Waco, Texas, was destroyed by fire, with the loss of
eighty-one lives, after a four-month siege by agencies of the federal
government. The Davidians were a branch of Seventh-Day Adventists
with roots in the 1930s. Their leader, David Koresh, called himself
"Yahweh" and kept a harem. In 1997, thirty-nine bodies, all wearing
Nike sneakers and draped in purple shrouds, were found in a house
near San Diego, California. An obscure cult led by Marshall Applewhite,
the son of a Presbyterian minister, had committed mass suicide in
the expectation of ascent to heaven, signaled by the Hale-Bopp comet.
The cult followed a strict code of celibacy: Applewhite and seven
other men had been surgically castrated to avoid homosexual temptation.
These sensational cases further distorted
and distanced the religious dimension of the sixties. Though there
are cults abroad-the Armageddon-style Solar Temple that resulted
in fifty-three suicides in Switzerland in 1994 or the Aum Shinrykyo
group who released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995, killing
twelve and injuring five thousand-it is primarily in American culture
that the sixties drama of idealism and disillusion has been played
out. The sixties lost credibility through their own manifest excesses,
which produced the counterreaction of Christian fundamentalism.
The American evangelical and pentecostal
movements, already stirring again in the early sixties, gained great
momentum. In 1968, Richard Nixon won the White House on a law-and-order
platform; by 1976, a "born-again" Southern Baptist, Jimmy Carter,
was elected president.
The sixties were the breeding ground
for the depressingly formulaic political and cultural pattern of
the last thirty-five years-a rigid polarization of liberals and
conservatives, with each group striking predictable postures and
mouthing sanctimonious platitudes. Gradations of political thought
have been lost. One reason is that liberals have shown continual
disrespect for religion, thereby allowing conservatives to take
the high road and claim to be God's agents in defending traditional
values. Liberals have forgotten the religious ferment on the Left
in the sixties, so that progressive politics has too often become
a sterile instrument of government manipulation, as if social-welfare
agencies and federal programs could bring salvation. Memories of
the sixties have been censored out of embarrassment, since the flakiest
of sixties happenings seemed to delegitimize the period's political
ideals.
On the other hand, it could be argued
that there are traces of sixties religiosity in the liberalism of
recent decades. An obvious example is the Arcadian matriarchal myth
of "the Goddess" that emerged in feminism and lesbian separatism
in the seventies and still flourishes in innumerable books still
in print. A second example is the puritanical feminist ideology
typified in the eighties by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin,
who allied with far-right Christians in an anti-pornography crusade
that threatened First Amendment liberties. With its ironclad dogma
and inquisitional style, the "political correctness" of the eighties
should be regarded as a cult that brainwashed even sophisticated
journalists until their deprogramming in the pro-sex nineties. A
third example is poststructuralism, which infested American humanities
departments from the late seventies through the mid-nineties: the
uncritical academic adulation of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan,
and Michel Foucault was an insular and self-referential cult that
treated pointlessly cryptic texts as Holy Writ.
Religion has always been central to
American identity: affiliation with or flight from family faith
remains a primary term of our self-description. America, of course, began in religious dissidence:
many early Northeastern colonists, such as the Pilgrims, were seventeenth-century
Separatists who had seceded from the Church of England. Psychic
repressions perhaps produced by Protestant rationalism and intolerance
of dissent among the Massachusetts Puritans erupted in the Salem
witch-trials (1692), whose lurid imagery of sex and demonism oddly
resembles that of modern popular culture. The compulsive cycle of
sexual license and puritan backlash remains a deep-seated pattern
in American culture.
The 1960s' combination of spirituality
with progressive politics was prefigured by the reformist world-view
of the Quakers (the Religious Society of Friends), who emigrated to America in the seventeenth-century after persecution
in England. The Quakers rejected materialism, authority,
and hierarchy and espoused pacifism, social activism, sexual egalitarianism,
and liberty of conscience. The Shakers (a slang term that described
their ecstatic transports) were English Quakers who emigrated to America for religious freedom in the late eighteenth-century.
Nineteenth-century Shaker communities were known for their code
of celibacy and communal property as well as their plain style of
furniture and crafts that would influence minimalist modern design.
The Mennonites, another sect in search
of religious freedom, were Dutch and Swiss Anabaptists who fled
to Germany and then to America in the late seventeenth-century. Their
most conservative branch, the Amish, still live in rural central
Pennsylvania and reject electricity, automobiles, and
contemporary clothing. The most successful of America's nonconformist sects, Mormonism (the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints),
was founded by a self-proclaimed prophet, Joseph Smith, in upstate
New York in 1830 and eventually found refuge in
Utah. (The Mormons clashed
with the federal government in 1852 when they adopted the Old Testament
practice of polygamy, later renounced.) There were many,
short-lived utopian communities in the nineteenth-century, such
as Brook Farm (1841-47) and the "new Eden" of Fruitlands (1843-44), both established
by Transcendentalists in Massachusetts. In Central New York, the Oneida Community (1848-81) were
Christian Perfectionists who advocated communal property and open
marriage.
Hence the religious dissidence and
secessionist tendencies of the 1960s were simply a new version of
a long American tradition. The decade's politics loom large partly
because demonstrations, unlike inner journeys, were photographable
and indeed often staged for the camera. Today's young people learn
about the sixties through a welter of video clips of JFK's
limousine in Dallas, Vietnamese firefights, and hippies draped
in buckskin and love beads. Furthermore, the most fervent of the
decade's spiritual questers followed Timothy Leary's advice to "Turn
on, tune in, and drop out" and removed themselves from career tracks
and institutions, which they felt were too corrupt to reform. The
testimony of those radical explorers of inner space has largely
been lost: they ruined their minds and bodies by overrelying on
drugs as a shortcut to religious illumination.
The absence of those sixties seekers
from the arena of general cultural criticism can be seen in the
series of unresolved controversies in the last two decades over
the issue of blasphemy in art. With the triumph of avant-garde modernism
by the mid-twentieth century, few ambitious young artists would
dare to show religious work. Though museum collections are rich
with religious masterpieces from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth
century, major American museums and urban art galleries ignore contemporary
religious art-thus ensuring, thanks to the absence of strong practitioners,
that it remains at the level of kitsch. And the art world itself
has suffered: with deeper themes excised, it slid into a shallow,
jokey postmodernism that reduced art to ideology and treated art
works as vehicles of approved social messages.
By the 1980s, during the conservative
administrations of Ronald Reagan, an artist's path to instant success
was to satirize or profane Christian iconography. Warfare erupted
in 1989 over "Piss Christ," a misty photograph by the American Andres
Serrano of a wood and plastic crucifix submerged in a Plexiglas
tank of his own urine, and then a decade later over a 1996 collage
of the Virgin Mary by the British-Nigerian Chris Ofili, who adorned
the Madonna with breasts of elephant dung and ringed her with pasted-on
photos of female genitalia clipped from pornographic magazines.
The Ofili painting made hardly a ripple in London but caused an explosion in the US in 1999 when it was exhibited, with a deplorable
lack of basic curatorial support, by the Brooklyn Museum. The uproar in all such cases was fomented
by grandstanding politicians with agendas of their own: New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, for example, outrageously
moved to cut off the Brooklyn Museum's public funding. Nevertheless, the ultimate
responsibility for this continuing rancor rests with the arts community,
who are fixed in an elitist mind-set that automatically defines
religion as reactionary and unenlightened. Federal funding of the
arts, already minuscule in the US, has been even further diminished because
of the needlessly offensive way that religion has been treated in
such incidents.
This cultural stalemate was aggravated,
I contend, by the disappearance of voices from the sixties religious
revolution. Even counterculture agnostics had respected the cosmic
expansiveness of religious vision. There was also widespread ecumenical
interest at the time in harmonizing world religions. The primary
guide in this new syncretism was Carl Jung, who was the son of a
Protestant minister and who began to study Asian thought in depth
after his break with Freud in 1913. Jung's theory of the collective
unconscious was partly derived from the Hindu concept of samskaras,
the residue of past lifetimes. His interdisciplinary interpretation
of culture was also influenced by Sir James George Frazer's multi-volumed
work of classical anthropology, The
Golden Bough (1890-1915). Jung revealed the poetry and philosophy
in the rituals and iconography of world religions. But Jungian thought
had little impact on post-sixties American academe, thanks to the
invasion of European theory. French poststructuralism, the Frankfurt School, and British cultural studies all follow
the Marxist line that religion is "the opiate of the masses." The
end result was that, by the eighties, the claim that great art has
a spiritual meaning was no longer taken seriously-and was positively
perilous to anyone seeking employment or promotion in the humanities
departments of major American universities.
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