Theodore Roszak popularized the phrase in his book from '67 or so. "The Making of a Counterculture, " if memory serves. Better book than Charles Reich, "The Greening of America." Are we, heh, in, Consciousness 1, 2 or 3?
<URL: http://www.thegline.com/book-of-the-week/2001/09-25-2001.htm > ter cleaning my closet, I often find myself with piles of books that I can't stomach the idea of ever having owned. The Making of a Countercultureis hardly that odious, but it makes for an interesting example of a book that has such an uneasy combination of good ideas and bad that I have trouble ditching it. Roszak was a prolific and remarkably intelligent cultural critic, and he managed to make his points without lapsing (at least at first) into the sort of goofy babble that predominated cultural criticism in those days. The bad news is that he spends a lot of time quoting from, analyzing, and taking rather seriously a great many of those people -- folks like Herbert Marcuse and Norman Brown, considered heavyweights in the Sixties, now little more than footnotes. The Making of a Counterculturewas culled from a number of pre-existing articles, with some editing, plus a good deal of newly-written material. It purports to be an overview of countercultural aesthetics, ideology, outlook, and thinking, and it actually does a fairly good job of summing up and encapsulating a good deal of what the more exuberant strands of the Sixties Left was all about. But it also contains the strains of Roszak's nascent anti-rationalist outlook, which exploded later in books like the almost unreadably bad Where the Wasteland Endsand influenced a whole strain of books that are borderline pathological in their outlook (such as Earthwalk). The first parts of the book concern themselves with the general position of the counterculture and the nature of what they stand in opposition to. Roszak sees the great new hunger among disaffected youth for a radical politics of experience (the ties to R.D. Laing's thinking are more than casual) as being a reaction to modern society's self-alienated, cold, overly rational, technologically-obsessed outlook. This makes sense -- after all, it's hard these days even among the technological elite to find people who thought the Vietnam War was a good idea. Of course, Roszak's outlook on this would be to point out that perhaps all this means is that the technocratic society, as he calls it, has just gotten a lot smarter at concealing its merciless thirst for assimilating everything. Roszak's picture of the rebel generation that is responsible for the outcry against technologized mass society is both accurate and sympathetic, and he isn't above finding fault with some of said generation's stances. He's quick to point out that it is all too easy to take "rebellion" and package it for a bored consumer audience, and he wonders at one point if Jesus and his disciples could have survived today's mass-media saturation. He has a lot to say about how sexuality has been integrated into industrialized society, about how magazines like Playboyare examples of what Marcuse calls "sublimated repression", where formerly anarchic impulses are tamed and domesticated, put to use in the machine. (There's some valid thinking: it's hard to see how pornography poses a threat to much of anything except maybe one's taste buds these days.) Roszak starts to tip his hand a bit when he starts talking about Marcuse and Brown, two of the Elder Gods of the hippie rebellion. Both wrote voluminously about many of the subjects that presaged the quests for the expansion of consciousness in the Sixties. Of the two, Roszak seems to side with (or at least empathize with) Brown the most, who wrote books that teetered on the line between ecstatic revelations and sexually provocative cultural criticism. For Brown (and ultimately for Roszak), the world we live in cannot be populated by science alone. It leaves no room for personal revelation; it is too reductionist, too sterile, too oppressive. Of course, Roszak and Brown's outlook is a little absurd in the light of the many scientists who are fervent believers in God or ESP, or the number of other folks who put credence in angels or voices from the dead. Most of the book uses in one form or another an argument against reason and science as being hopelessly damaging to the human soul. Nowhere in the book does Roszak seem concerned that religious regimes like the Taliban or even Jerry Falwell's ministry are many times more damaging to human dignity, since they deny even the self- and outwards-directed investigation that science demands. I suspect one of the ways Roszak gets around this is by casting his sympathies with Zen Buddhism, Dr. Timothy Leary and other proponents of ecstatic personal experience, rather than the comparatively dry and boring "mainstream" religions. But this is a disingenuous approach, and only shows that Roszak is willing to entertain just about any bedfellows in his broadsides against scientism. The whole anti-rationalist subtext of the book comes to the fore with the chapter "The Myth of Objective Consciousness," an audacious and extremely confused essay that indiscriminately mixes cultural criticism with Kuhn- like analyses of science. When Roszak talks about how the objective outlook has infected the culture at large, he makes the mistake of assuming that the outlook of a few arrogant people who happen to be scientists is thescientific outlook -- a mistake he reinforces when he selectively quotes from several scientific journals to show the dehumanizing aspects of science. He is not interested in criticizing specific mistakes or short- sightedness. He seems annoyed by the fact that science does work to produce testable answers, and he goes to great lengths to show that the only way to conduct science is to be a callous, soulless monster. "Objective consciousness isalienated life promoted to the most honorific status as the scientific method," Roszak writes, later following that up with the declaration that we must make our lives "as bigas possible." The science he slams is one of the most dependable ways to do this, though. Through this Roszak descends to the stereotyping of scientists as unfeeling eggheads and primitives as all-knowing, all-wise shamans, a view which insults everyone involved. Other arguments, in which Roszak defends the poet's vision of the world against the scientist's, are mostly pointless exercises in false dichotomies. I suspect a good deal of this has to do with the fact that the book has simply not aged well. Scientists no longer try to boil Mozart down to formulas or write poetry-generating programs; many of them areartists or poets. Even worse is when Roszak laments how little we know about the way our science-driven world works, without once recommending that thinking skills be part of anyone's curriculum. "No society... can ever dispense with mystery and magical ritual," Roszak asserts. "But there is one magic that seeks to open and vitalize the mind, and another that seeks to diminish and delude." This breakdown sounds pretty convenient and facile on the face of it, but it's puzzling that he can talk of "good magic" which "makes available to all the full power of the magician's experience" without once noting that well-practiced science allows for relatively open-ended participation. Roszak himself addresses this in a footnote, saying that the notion that scientific knowledge is public knowledge is "severely qualified" given how "esoteric" scientific work has become. Rather than discuss this in detail, he refers the reader to a quote from Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Even this qualification has to be contrasted with the total free-for-all of mysticism -- UFOlogy, pyramid power, ESP, etc. -- in which men of some wisdom are often forced to sit side by side with cranks and charlatans of the rankest sort, and in which there are no real standards of evidence or operational guidelines for anything. Roszak even touches on the idea that the populace needs to stay on guard against scientists pulling a fast one on them, a notion that Charles Fort never tired of harping on. What Roszak never seems to realize is that the way to do this is to teach science, not scapegoat it or demonize it. Further, Roszak makes it clear that he is not objecting to the way science is practiced, but to the fact that it is practiced at all, and that the very practice of it in any form is debilitating to man's soul. This is questionable at best, and he doesn't back it up in a way that amounts to much more than foot-stamping and near ad hominemattacks. His view of primitive man is only slightly less romantic than John Zerzan's, a writer who seems to have derived what few ideas he has from Roszak but taken them to the furthest imaginable extreme (Zerzan is against allartifacts of man's devising, including language and socialization itself). This isn't to say the book is worthless. One of the few very good chapters in the book, "The Counterfeit Infinity," properly takes the rebel generation to task for assuming that liberation can be packed into a pill. There's also a good deal of bulwarking against the idea of chemical solutions to social problems, something I personally agree with up to a point. "Exploring Utopia" is a fine assessment of Paul Goodman, one of the better American writers and thinkers, and that man's attempts to talk about how we could live together reasonably and peaceably. The book really shines here, where Roszak talks about how Goodman and his cronies found ways around the officious, callous operators of city planning boards and the like. There's also much discussion of how Goodman's background as a Gestalt therapist gave him an underpinning of psychological acuity, and how he used to that to his advantage. After this, I want to find more of Goodman's work. But the downside of the book is plain. It is now about thirty-one years since the book first saw print. In that time, it seems, Roszak got his wishes: science is now considered humbug by many, despite the fact that we have more of a vested interest in it than ever, and the worst sort of irrationalities are passed off as higher learning. A longish study could be written showing how a lot of this sort of thing comes straight from Roszak and his contemporaries; it's mutated into new forms, but the core anti-rational sentiment remains. We are also no closer to the kind of world that Roszak hoped could come of a repudiation of scientific obsessions, but I suspect he's willing to blame that on the technocratic outlook, too. Roszak went on to write Where the Wasteland Ends, in which the last half of Counter Culturewas expanded on to the point of redundancy. I read the book in college and made the mistake of taking it seriously. Most of the book is a savage blast at technological living that is indistinguishable from the Unabomber Manifesto. Roszak's conclusions are much the same, too: dump the whole stinking system and do without, we'll be better off as a species. He even sinks to quoting the tired myth about primitive man needing to work less for a higher standard of living -- a theory which was widely discredited decades ago, but which lives on urban-legend style in many leftist circles. Roszak is against science whether it's responsible for antisepsis or atomic bombs, with no golden mean. Lately Roszak has since gone on to extol the virtues of Neo-Luddism and write books like The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science. In this embarrassingly silly work, Roszak lambasts (among others) physicists who "smash" atoms, likening them to snotty two-year-olds demolishing their toys with hammers. The most ridiculous segment by far is when Roszak notes that the European CERN particle accelerator is built beneath the ground Mary Shelley could have seen from from the window of the Swiss villa where she wrote Frankenstein. He ruminates, in all seriousness, that perhaps Shelley had a premonition of the future "horror" of atom-smashing. Where he gets this, apart from his own overheated imagination, is never clear. Aside from the fact that it was written with a straight face, the worst thing about the book is how many people seem to take it seriously as some kind of Kuhn-esque critique of science. It is all very depressing. What little insight Roszak had has since been traded in for attacking easy targets for waiting audiences, for which there seem to be greater and greater numbers. Abuses of science deserve voluminous criticism, either from other scientists or from educated laymen, but Roszak's baby-and-bathwater approach only hurts everyone, no matter what the initials on their diploma.Af -- Michael Pugliese
"Without knowing that we knew nothing, we went on talking without listening to
each other. Sometimes we flattered and praised each other, understanding that
we would be flattered and praised in return. Other times we abused and shouted
at each other, as if we were in a madhouse." -Tolstoy