Seven Pillars of Hippidom are surprisingly traditional
June 13, 2010
Finger-pointing is the ancient art of deflecting guilt toward a
convenient target, the old ritual of scapegoating, documented in
scripture from Abraham to Jesus.
Recently New York Times columnist David Brooks pointed his nimble
finger at the dread 1960s, saying: "Hippies celebrated disorder,
mayhem and the whole Dionysian personal agenda. By the 1970s, the
menacing results of that agenda were all around." [see below]
The hippies are handy, having coincided with one of the most
turbulent period of cultural change and social upheaval in our recent
history. Entrenched verities were being vigorously challenged and
rudely dismantled. In the ensuing chaos, what would replace the old
order was clear neither to participants nor observers.
One cannot but wonder, though, who exactly were those evil scourges
and what exactly was their agenda. From the hindsight perspective of
a participant-observer, the '60s hippie agenda, rechristened as The
Seven Pillars of Hippidom, turns out to have been surprisingly traditional.
•Love: Our pied pipers, The Beatles, told us "all you need is love."
Bob Dylan rejoined with "love is all there is, it makes the world go
round." How great a departure is this from traditional preaching such
as "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and ... Thou
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." (Matthew, 22.37-39) or "This is
my commandment, that ye love one another as I have loved you." (John, 15.12)?
True, the '60s de-coupled loving one another from loving God, a
serious doctrinal breach. But loving one's fellow humans is still love.
•Sex: The best, most ancient, most effective, most enjoyable love
medicine ever devised by God or evolution is sex. The Bible says:
"Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave
onto his wife, and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked,
the man and his wife, and were not ashamed." (Geneses 2.24-25). True,
the '60s de-coupled sex from procreation, guilt, shame, control and
repression - and it was not easy at the time to predict what effect
these new freedoms would have on marriage, family and child rearing.
But what is so reprehensible about the ancient knowledge that love is
a pleasure?
•Freedom: The '60s' clarion call to freedom, America's bedrock, was
indeed ambiguous, spanning the range from Bob Dylan's over-optimistic
"You can have your cake and eat it too" to Kris Kristofferson's
nihilistic "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose."
But the '60s, with enthusiastic hippie participation, were also
responsible for extending the American dream of freedom and equality
across barriers of race, religion, gender and sexual orientation.
Rapid change invariably breeds chaos, strife and confusion. But
freedom is hardly the culprit, being as quintessentially American as
mom and apple pie.
•Work: The '60s are often blamed for the demise of the proverbial
work ethic. But Tim Leary's indulgent mantra - "turn on, tune in,
drop out" - was woefully unrealistic, it never transcended youthful
antics. Someone had to put roofs over heads, food on the table and
raise the kids.
Many so-called hippies lived off daddy's largess, drug dealing or
blatant exploitation of others. But how long did this fools' paradise
last? Soon, many of the wayward children went back to graduate
school, to eventual careers and marriage and family, to recognizable
middle-class respectability - but with a peculiar, lasting sentiment.
What the '60s taught them was that work could be enjoyable,
spiritually rewarding, exciting, even creative and that the
compulsive workaholic pursuit of conspicuous consumption served
neither sane personal goals nor cogent societal ends. But the new
ethic is eerily reminiscent of older traditional wisdom: "What
profits a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?"
•Mother Earth: One lasting legacy of the '60s is the rising
environmental ethic that views us all as stewards of a fragile
planet. The impetus may be religious, invoking God's creation. Or it
may be evolutionary, observing the destructive potential that one
predator species at the top of the food chain wields over our fragile
biosphere. But spiritual or scientific, there is nothing but
traditional wisdom in this hippie legacy.
•Spirituality: The '60s, with the hippies in the thick of it, saw a
massive religious ground-shift. True, it began with rejection of
power hierarchies and empty rituals, of sectarianism and priestly
monopoly, of patriarchy, misogyny and homophobia. True, the '60s
wound up rejecting one central tenet of mainstream Christianity, the
celebrated passage of John's Gospel: "I am the way, and the truth,
and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me." (John 14.6).
This late-Gospel injunction was a sharp bone of contention in the
Council of Nicea, convened in 325AD by the emperor Constantine for
the purpose of making Christianity the exclusive religion of the
empire. John's version of Christ won the day in Nicea and direct
experience of God's grace, mediated neither by Christ nor the clergy,
was dumped. The Protestant Reformation was, among other things, a
rebellion against John's proscription against direct access to grace,
an attempted restoration of the early church.
Many other features of the '60s religious experimentation, however
wild and wooly they seemed at the time, bore all the marks of
Christ's rebellion against the Judaism of his time. The '60s' search
for more clement alternatives, such as Buddhism, Taoism or Sufism,
was not a rebellion against traditional values but rather their reaffirmation.
In the same vein, the peace movement of the '60s, replete as it was
with less-than-peaceful public display, may find its spiritual roots
in the prince of peace's early preachings. While out in the streets
it may have seemed politicized and bellicose, the peace movement's
spiritual underpinnings were manifestly traditional.
•Family and community: Here, lastly, one wishes that David Brooks had
read an op-ed piece by his fellow Times columnist Ross Douthat
(Herald, May 11), especially the following passage: "First, the
sexual revolution overturned the old order of single-earner
households, early marriages and strong stigmas against divorce and
unwed motherhood. In its aftermath, the professional classes found a
new equilibrium.
--------
Children of the '70s
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/opinion/18brooks.html
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: May 17, 2010
Today you can walk around the Upper West Side of Manhattan in such
ease and safety that you could get the impression it was always this
way. But it wasn't.
On July 5, 1961, a gigantic brawl broke out on 84th Street between
Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues. Two policemen, caught in the middle,
fired warning shots into the air to stop the fighting, but a mob of
400 engulfed them. Traffic was halted on Columbus as bottles rained
down from tenement houses, lye was thrown into one man's face and
knives flashed out.
That section of 84th Street in those days was one of the most
dangerous blocks in the city. The Times described it as "a block of
decaying tenements packed with poor Puerto Rican and Negro families
and the gathering place of drunks, narcotics addicts and sexual
perverts." A local minister, James Gusweller, said there were five or
six stabbings every Saturday night.
The violence built and built. Through the '60s and '70s, crime
surged. John Podhoretz captures the atmosphere of that time in a
wonderful essay called "Life in New York, Then and Now" in the
current issue of Commentary. He describes the Upper West Side of his
youth as a unique small town, an integrated mixture of professors and
psychoanalysts, teachers and social workers, workers and the unemployed.
It was wonderful in some ways, but people in all classes lived in
fear. "Mugging was nothing unusual. Everybody got mugged," Podhoretz
writes. A serial killer nicknamed Charlie Chop-Off menaced the Upper
West Side, emasculating little boys and then killing them, and such
was the general disorder that his crimes were barely mentioned in the
city's newspapers.
The city tried "slum clearance" to reduce the mayhem. Brownstones
were torn down; 709 households were removed from 84th Street alone.
More than 6,000 households were removed from the area between 87th
and 97th Streets.
Crime did not abate. Passivity set in, the sense that nothing could
be done. The novel "Mr. Sammler's Planet" by Saul Bellow captured
some of the dispirited atmosphere of that era the sense that New
York City was a place with no-go zones, a place where one hunkered down.
Things are different now, of course. By 1990, 5,641 felonies were
committed in New York City's 24th Precinct, according to Podhoretz.
Last year, only 987 were.
But some of the psychological effects remain.
We're familiar with talk about how Vietnam permanently shaped the
baby boomers. But if you grew up in or near an American city in the
1970s, you grew up with crime (and divorce), and this disorder was
bound to leave a permanent mark. It was bound to shape the people,
now in their 40s and early-50s, reaching the pinnacles of power.
It has clearly influenced parenting. The people who grew up afraid to
go in parks at night now supervise their own children with fanatical
attention, even though crime rates have plummeted. It's as if they're
responding to the sense of menace they felt while young, not the
actual conditions of today.
The crime wave killed off the hippie movement. The hippies celebrated
disorder, mayhem and the whole Dionysian personal agenda. By the
1970s, the menacing results of that agenda were all around. The crime
wave made it hard to think that social problems would be solved
strictly by changing the material circumstances. Shiny new public
housing blocks replaced rancid old tenements, but in some cases the
disorder actually got worse.
The crime wave made it hard to accept the story line that the poor
were always spiritually pure, noble and oppressed.
The crime wave eroded the sense of solidarity that existed after
World War II. The rich isolated themselves. The middle classes moved
to the suburbs.
Yet eventually crime was reduced, and the neighborhoods were
restored. It's easy to be nostalgic for the supposedly more authentic
New York of days gone by for Jane Jacobs's busy Greenwich Village
block. But, as Benjamin Schwarz of The Atlantic recently observed,
that golden image of New York really only applied to small parts of
the city and only during a transition moment when the manufacturing
economy of the mid-20th century briefly overlapped with the
information economy of the late-20th century.
As Podhoretz rightly notes, if you grew up in a big city in the '70s,
then life is better for you now in about every respect. Today, most
liberals and conservatives have more sophisticated views on how to
build and preserve civic order than people did then, and there is more of it.
The Upper West Side is still integrated. And despite all
expectations, it's actually more religious now. For example, there
are now 4,000 children attending yeshivas, Jewish schools and Jewish
nursery schools in the neighborhood.
The children of the '70s grew up with both unprecedented freedom and
disorder, and have learned, in mostly good ways, from both.
.
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