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STEPHEN SPENDER
precedents. Many of the old Beatniks and new Hippies are sincere
and generous, but
so
were their parents. The difficulty is that the
things that do
distinguish
them too often seem religiously heretical
throw-backs to earlier American sects (the Shakers, the Mormons,
etc. ), or bourgeois deviations (spending money to make yourself
look stagily revolutionary), or they are inconsistent (making a pub–
licity success of being a drop-out). When the hippies, etc., go abroad
to Europe or India they immediately become the leaders of fashions
which are transparently American and which reduce the role of their
admirers to that of hangers-on. In
this
respect they are only a variant
of other crazed American human exports, for instance the thousands
of jazzed-up temporary expatriates of the 1920s. Moreover, the whole
drug and sex cult is built on endless rationalization - forever
ex–
plaining to themselves and others the reasons why they behave as they
do and the benefits they propose to get out of it. In
this
respect the
cult is simply an extension of the idea that everyone's supreme aim
in
life is self-fulfillment and happiness and that one is entitled to wreck
marriages, children and certainly one's own health and sanity
in
pursuit of
this.
After
all,
group sex is only a speeding up of the process
of easy divorce. Instead of having one wife or husband quickly super–
seded by others who are supposed to promote greater happiness, one
has and is had by
all
of them at once. Therapeutic self-consciousness
characterizes
all this.
As
my friend Glenway Westcott observed, de–
spite
all
the deliberate unwashedness, one has the impression of a
sterilized orgy.
Such attitudes cannot be relied on. The young generation is poor
but not under a vow of poverty. It just happens that the things the
older generations like cost money, but this doesn't mean that the
drugs, dress style, motorcycles, etc., of the young generation don't,
It is true that many of the young generation live very miserably. But
so
did many of the expatriates who went to Paris in the twenties:
Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller, for example.
I am not meaning here to attack the young. What concerns me
is whether a society in which people are
so
self-conscious,
so
given
to
rationalizing
all
their actions,
so
subjective
(if
one can use the word
subjective to apply to the group as well as the individual) can really
change and not remain itself always
in
the position of finding solu–
tions to problems by the very simple process of giving them a new
look.
