PETER
L.
BERGER
193
what you have long wanted?) Utopianism is not falsifiable either.
Thus each terrible disappointment in successive Marxist revolu–
tions, after a period of desperate denial of the grounds for
disappointment , led to a transposition of the locale of "true
socialism" in the making:
If
not Russia, then China.
If
not China,
then Cuba.
If
not Cuba, then Nicaragua. Or Vietnam, or Tanzania,
or Mozambique. And so on, presumably ad infinitum.
It
is as if the
Crusaders, having failed to find the Holy Land where it was
supposed to be, roamed all the shores of
outremer
in search of a
plausible landing place.
If
Jerusalem does not exist, it must be
invented . Paul Hollander' s political pilgrims have demonstrated
that the capacity to invent socialist utopias in the most unlikely
regions of the Third World is sovereignly free of empirical restraints .
The Marxist or more broadly leftist use of the Third World
must be distinguished (despite some affinities) from the way in
which the Third World has figured in less political camps within the
" adversary culture" of the West. The most important phenomenon
here is what,
in
the 1960s, was called the counterculture, which today
survives in various forms , some of them quite successfully adapted
to the cultural mainstream. For convenience's sake, the term
counterculture, though not completely timely or accurate , is used to
designate
all
of these manifestations of discontent with major themes
of Western civilization.
It
is possible to differentiate two
subcategories-countercultural primitivism and countercultural
orientalism. Both represent continuations of ideas and images going
back at least two centuries.
The counterculture has understood itself as a protest against
the allegedly dehumanizing artificialities of industrial society.
It
has
posited nature against convention, spontaneity against planning,
pleasure against repression. This self-understanding led almost of
necessity to a sense of kinship with the primitive-or, more precisely,
with what the primitive was perceived to be. Insofar as the primitive
can be imagined to have any geographical location at
all
in the
contemporary world , this, of course, can be only in the countries of
the Third World . Hence one can understand the affinity of the
counterculture with whatever peasantry was available for empathy
or, funds permitting, for actual visitation . The best-selling success of
Carlos Castaneda' s seemingly endless accounts of his relations with
Don Juan , the Yaqui magician , and of the saving mysteries
supposedly revealed by the latter, may be taken as prototypical of
