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8.
Mysticism and Social Change
Social regroupings dramatized the generational
change of the sixties-the mass gatherings of demonstrations, rock
festivals, happenings, and love-ins, which began in temperate California. For example, the "Human Be-In," subtitled
"A Gathering of the Tribes," which was held in 1967 in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, attracted 25,000 people. It fused politics
with pop music and Asian religiosity: the leading San Francisco acid-rock bands performed; among the speakers
(many in Hindu garb) were Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, and Beat poets
Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
While the political sentiments of young
people at such events were progressive, there was often little understanding
of the slow process and banal practicalities of legislation, administration,
and financial accounting. Repelled by the expanding bureaucracies
of the fifties, the sixties counterculture was suspicious of hierarchy
and embraced a simplistic egalitarianism predicated on quick fixes.
The basic principle of the counterculture began as communality but
ended as the horde, the most primitive entity in social history.
The horde is prey to superstition and panic. It looks for leaders
but ruthlessly slays them, then reveres them as ancestral spirits.
As a survival response to its own flood of anarchic energies, the
horde automatically generates cults and cultic belief.
The sixties horde that was a benign
extended family of music-loving stargazers at the Woodstock Music
Festival in August 1969 turned into a restless, bickering mob four
months later at the Altamont Festival, where a murder was committed
in front of the stage. The sixties never completed its search for
new structures of social affiliation. Fifties liberalism was integrationist,
but sixties Leftism, despite its claims of inclusiveness, disintegrated
into the separatism of identity politics, with ghettoizing reclassifications
and hypersensitive divisions by race, gender, and sexual orientation.
The sixties code of "do your own thing" encouraged individualism
but produced fragmentation. Similarly, the sixties' global religious
vision, inspired by fleeting contact with Hinduism and Buddhism,
would broaden yet dissipate into the thousand cults of the present
New Age movement.
Cults multiply when institutional religion
has lost fervor and become distracted by empty ritual. Early Christianity,
for example, began as a rural rebellion against the fossilized Temple bureaucracy in Jerusalem. In 1950s America, the political and professional elite were
still heavily WASP.
Prosperous congregations were overly concerned with social status
at church or at its annex, the country club. Roman Catholicism,
searching for social credibility, was steadily purging itself of
immigrant working-class ethnicity, a process of genteel self-Protestantization
in music, ceremony, and decor that in middle-class parishes is now
virtually complete. Many of those attracted to cults in the sixties
and early seventies were escaping mainline denominations where bland
propriety was coupled with sexual repression. It is a striking fact
that few young African-Americans joined cults: surely the reason
was that the gospel tradition, rooted in the South, invited emotional
and physical expressiveness, stimulated by strongly rhythmic music.
Dance, universal in pagan cults, had been banned in Christian churches
in late antiquity. Its presence in Southern church tradition is
a priceless vestige of West African tribal religion.
The social changes from the fifties
to the sixties resemble, in compressed and accelerated form, those
of the Hellenistic era following the conquests of Alexander the
Great. In the three centuries of the Alexandrian age, the old city-states
declined, and mercantile metropolises flourished. Hellenism-that
is, Athenian high culture-spread throughout the Mediterranean world
via a bustling commercial network that marketed Greek art works
(often in shoddy knockoffs) as status symbols for the nouveau riche.
The Romans had always clothed their provincial Italian mythology
in borrowed Greek glory. As it transformed itself from republic
to empire, Rome created a massive zone of cultural and
religious exchanges extending from the Near East and North Africa to Northern Europe. Cosmopolitanism of this kind is usually
produced by vibrant commercialism buttressed by military might.
But when politics have overexpanded, there is a loss of psychological
security; hence the rise of cults, which reinforce the borders of
individual identity.
No sooner did the US displace Great Britain and France to attain superpower status after World
War II than a surge
of mysticism overtook the next American generation. The children
born in the postwar baby boom, who would reach college age in the
sixties, had been conceived with a jolt of military energy and were
reared in a climate of national confidence. But they intuitively
absorbed the hidden conflicts of the fifties, with its surface tranquility
masking the anxieties of an older generation whose life experiences
had been economic depression and war. Mainstream fifties values
promoted duty and uniformity, as if to recover the reassurance of
known limits. Trade always opens up travel and tourism. The international
network of Roman roads (so well-constructed that some are still
in use) resembles that of the US interstate highway system, launched in
the fifties as a national defense plan for emergency evacuation.
Ironically, improved transportation weakens regionalism and nationalism
too. Multiculturalism was spurred by the jet plane, which got Ravi
Shankar so quickly to Monterey or the Beatles to India and back.
What commercialized Hellenism was for
the Greco-Roman era, popular culture was for the American fifties
and sixties. Hellenism was an artistic and philosophic system embedded
with pagan mythology. The unifying language of youth culture from
the mid-1950s on was new media-TV,
teen movies, and rock 'n' roll, broadcast by a vast number of privately
owned AM radio stations (then unparalleled in Europe) and received on portable transistors.
America's pop Hellenism spread to England in the fifties and bounced back in the
sixties via the British invasion. Popular culture remains a major
American export, so vital and dominant that it has rightly been
called cultural imperialism. Television has indeed turned the world,
as McLuhan prophesied, into a global village. However, the general
style of American mass media, rooted in nineteenth-century tabloids
and early Hollywood, has always been luridly Hellenistic-extravagant,
emotional, and sensationalistic, with a predilection for sex and
violence.
Mass media inflamed the mind, while
the institutional framework was being rigidified. A major social
shift of the postwar period in America was the massive expansion of colleges and
universities. In the two decades following the GI Bill, which subsidized higher education for veterans, college became an entitlement-still not the case in other nations.
By the eighties, America was in the grip of an overpriced, self-perpetuating
education industry whose principal product is brand names and social
status rather than humanistic cultivation. Fifties prosperity meant
that middle-class young Americans did not have to go to work immediately
after high school, as their parents had done. The down side was
that adulthood, including marriage, was indefinitely postponed.
Despite their material comforts and
privileges, therefore, middle-class students of the American sixties
were also captives, hostages confined at their hormonal height in
institutional frames without the venerable history or in-group identification
of tony British schools. Classes became like warehouses, with students
stacked in primary-school rows-unlike European universities, where
student-teacher contact is either in tutorial or in unmonitored
public lectures. Supervision of student behavior on American campuses
was intrusive and authoritarian-another feature without parallel
in Europe. When I was a freshman in 1964, colleges
still acted in loco parentis (in place of the parent). Parietal
rules were strictly enforced: at my public university, women students
had to sign in at 11:00 pm, while men could roam free. Hence the late
fifties and sixties were a period of high excitation yet repressive
containment.
The paternalistic regimentation of
American colleges was nearly military and thus can be viewed as
a vestige of the national mobilization of World War II.
Students were conscripts who often dressed in army-navy surplus,
and the new brick dormitories of residential campuses resembled
factories or army barracks-all the more ironic since college matriculation
brought exemption from the draft. There have been town-gown problems
since the goliardic carousing of the Middle
Ages, but the frictions of the sixties were highly politicized.
As the sixties counterculture spread, campuses became tense garrison
towns, like the frontier outposts of the Roman legions, who occupied
well-appointed camps of precise, geometrical design.
Roman soldiers were drawn not simply
from Italy but from all over the empire. They were
stationed far from home for years and decades-in forts in the Sahara, on the Danube, or at Hadrian's Wall in northern Britain. They were notorious devotees of cults, above all that of Mithras, the bull-slayer, with his
androgynous face, lanky hair, Phrygian beret, and blousy Persian
trousers. Merchants, with their internationalist orientation, were
another group who venerated Mithras, a Zoroastrian demigod representing
the principle of light and truth. Mithraists, like early Christians,
gathered in secrecy in small, cave-like rooms to memorialize a great
act of ritual bloodshed. Amid the ruins of Roman camps in England and Germany, cult objects and idols from Egypt, Syria, and Anatolia are still being found. Cultic practice
on the Roman frontier, I submit, paralleled that on American campuses
in the sixties, when there was a syncretistic mix of drugs, Asian
religion, and pop idolatry.
Cults arise when the official gods
seem weak or fickle or subject to fate themselves. The cult phenomenon
in the US escalated after the assassination of
John F. Kennedy in 1963-the president who vowed to surpass the Soviet
Union's 1957 Sputnik satellite by putting a man on the moon by the
end of the sixties. The baby-boom generation was the first to grow
up in the shadow of nuclear war. In elementary school, we were shepherded
into dim hallways for civil defense drills requiring us to crouch
down and cover our eyes. We were taught to fear not a rain of bombs
from manned warplanes but rather a single, slim, strangely omnipotent
object that could find its way over thousands of miles to unleash
a monstrous fire cloud that would melt the nation in a split second.
The sixties generation, in other words,
had been injected with a mystical sense of awe and doom about the
sky. This is one possible reason for the sudden popularity and ubiquity
of astrology, which for most of the twentieth century had been a
fringe practice associated with eccentrics in Greenwich
Village
and West Hollywood. Zodiac and Tarot symbolism permeated the
sixties, from jewelry and album covers to wall posters. "Aquarius,"
the signature song of Hair
("An American Tribal Love-Rock Musical," 1967) and a hit single
for the Fifth Dimension in 1969, assumed public knowledge of astrological
lore in its imagery of the moon in the seventh house and Jupiter's
alignment with Mars: "Then peace will guide the planets / And love
will steer the stars. / This is the dawning
of the Age of Aquarius!" With genuine poetry, the song also invoked
"Mystic crystal revelation / And the mind's
true liberation."
Astrology, for better or worse, was
emblematic of the religious vision of the sixties. It countered
the fifties' paranoia about nuclear apocalypse with the promise
of a humanitarian Aquarian age. Astrology is intertwined with the
West's pagan heritage. Despite unstinting efforts from antiquity,
Judeo-Christianity has never succeeded in wiping astrology out.
First refined by the Chaldean magi of Babylonia, astrology was widely practiced in the
Hellenistic and imperial Roman periods, when elusive fortune was
personified as female Tyche-chance or Lady Luck. Different branches
of astrology still flourish in India and China. Like the I Ching, a Chinese book of divination widely used in the sixties, astrology
reverently connects man to nature-the link that Judeo-Christianity
has always tried to sever. Astrology is not the fatalistic determinism
to which its opponents reduce it; on the contrary, it is a study
of nature's rhythms and cycles, to which humanity like the tides
is subject.
This is yet another area where sixties
drugs took their toll. Those most attracted to astrology lost their
ability to defend it. Scientists rightly dismissive of superstition
refuse to acknowledge that astrology anticipated modern theories
about circadian biorhythms or cycles of solar flares whose electromagnetic
storms disrupt telecommunications. The science community's customary
approach of derision and debunking has been futile and counterproductive:
an immense alternative culture survived the collapse of the sixties
and has steadily spread to this day under the name New Age-which
discreetly elides its astrological reference to the Age of Aquarius.
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