400
LEO BERSANI
availability to the new is a permanent intolerance of the specific ways
in which the new performs
itself.
No one confirms this better than
Theodore Roszak in
The Making of a Counter Culture.
Am I being
unjust? Mter all, Roszak not only gives perceptive and sympathetic
summaries of the thinkers associated with the so-called counterculture
(Brown, Marcuse, Goodman, Ginsberg); he
also
comes right out
and attacks technocratic civilization and heartily defends that "re–
formulation of the personality," that 'effort, on the part of "beat–
hip bohemianism . . . to work out the personality structure and total
life style that follow from New Left social criticism."
If
the glibness of "follow from" in this crucial and mysterious
formula puts you on your guard, so much the better. First of all,
Roszak's attack on what he calls "the myth of objective consciousness"
is
modishly moralistic and, intellectually, suspiciously superficial.
(Compare
his
attack on the scientific mode of thought to Marcuse's
critical analysis of the history of that thought since Aristotelian for–
malism in
One-Dimensional Man.)
The early sections of Roszak's
book testify to his intelligence, and I wonder why he becomes so
trite when he tries to describe what is being offered to us, in the
way of radically new styles of life, by the young, by primitive peo–
ples and by the thinkers he considers. "What
is
of supreme impor–
tance is that each of us should become a person, a whole and in–
tegrated person in whom there
is
manifested a sense of the human
variety genuinely experienced, a sense of having come to terms with
a reality that
is
awesomely vast." And "the primary purpose of
human existence is not to devise ways of piling up ever greater heaps
of knowledge, but to discover ways to live from day to day that in–
tegrate the whole of our nature by way of yielding nobility of con–
duct, honest fellowship, and joy."
Goodness gracious, is that what all the fuss
is
about? ask
mil–
lions of reassured mothers and fathers, heaving a sigh of relief as
they discover in their guerrillalike children the comforting tones of
Norman Vincent Peale. But of course Roszak has very little use for
the young. The "miserably educated" young "bring with them almost
nothing but healthy instincts." Many of them have very "small"
minds; they like Paul Goodman, but "to be sure, the depth and
complexity of Goodman's thought deserve an audience of greater
maturity." Roszak finds the music of the young "difficult to take,"
"much of it too brutally loud and/or too electronically gimmicked
