[WS:] Problem? It depends to whom. To the humanity? Hippies were just a drop in a bucket, hardly noticeable outside the US-centered pop-culture.
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I don't want to make too much of this, but like the politically dominated period just before it which went through several transitions, there was an early period here say `66-69 when what became known as hippies were indistinguishable from the political movements and aspirations of revolt. What it felt like was definitely more of a cultural movement and a Europeanization. I don't mean simply the Beatles or the Rolling Stones (or sex and drugs), although these were pop icon representations of what was occurring.
There was a kind of generation based dialog going on between the US and Western Europe. We were all engaged in intimately related battles with the western regimes of the post-WWII era. The almost simultaneous explosions of 1968 across Europe and the US, including the Mexico City Olympics was a phenomenal thing. This has been historically symbolized by various cities with the same date: Paris `68, Chicago `68, Prague `68, Berlin `68, Mexico City `68 and so forth. The international urban icons or symbols for almost all that became Amsterdam and San Francisco.
In those few moments there was a balance between the politics and the culture of revolt. It was a very scary mix that folded light and dark in surreal ways. For example during the Martin Luther King riots that had spread all across the US that spring, one of my friends from Iowa City was killed in the Cincinnati riots. He took a wrong turn trying to get out of the city after a job interview at Univ of C art dept. The absurdity was he had been one of the Mississippi Freedom riders.
But the point was that what became known as `hippies' involved a whole cultural revolt, and it was that culture of revolt that was, I think, the medium of an international communication. It was completely immune to censorship and cut across class divides because of the internationalization of mass media and mass culture. Sure it could and was repressed, but some how that didn't really work very well. Ultimately, the delicate balance between a politics and a culture of revolt was not immune to being co-opted into a commodity because of its cultural and symbolic aspect---the material expression became the commodity and thereby turned its political aspect into a mere symbolic posture.
It was the latter posture and its attending commodities that most later generations find silly, irrelevant, and mostly obnoxious.
On the other hand these cultural revolts were not dismissed as silly by the most reactionary elements from that generation, since here we are right smack in the middle of their attempt to re-erase them, if such a thing is possible. Just about all the current wave of rightwingism in the US is devoted to resurrecting these battles and re-fighting them so as to `win', whatever that means.
(I don't want to make this too long, or stretch the points too thin, but..)
Ravi mentions India and Feyerabend. These were part of an intellectual and spiritual revolt, enmeshed in the broad cultural spectrum of revolt, that was also trivialized or commodified into `peace and love', beads, incense, and Ravi Shankar's music---all of which adorned a later apartment of mine.
About that time, Shankar on a US concert tour came to SF to a wild reception in the Haight and was probably horrified at the SF hippie fetish for anything Indian. But he shouldn't have been. (There was a material explanation also, since a warehouse store off The Embarcadero had just opened and began a thriving import business in Indian arts and crafts, furniture, cloth, and knick-knacks. They also had smaller sections from Thailand, Mexico, and Latin America. This was the source of all that stuff.)
I certainly spent hours and hours listening to Shankar, and think Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy, particular the first one Pather Panchali were extremely powerful ambassadors. (I saw this again two years ago, when Joanna lent me a copy.)
Because they arrived when they did, they validated in humanistic and spiritual (philosophical) terms a severe critique/revolt against the great western icons of Rationalism, Christianity, and the Atomic Bomb---state, church, and military. (India had a profound effect on Octavio Paz who was the Mexican ambassador during the Nehr period, and Andre Malraux, French cultural minister, particular their concepts of time, poetic time for Paz as the poetic cycle, cultural time for Malraux as a living metamorphosis---too much off topic to go into here...)
How was that possible? I don't know. But that is how it appeared to me, how it was communicated as I listened to Shankar's musical cycles, particularly the sad ones, linked to early morning...until you've faced each dawn with sleepless eyes, you don't know what love is. Really these were extraordinary resonances.
Carl Remick writes, `That's beautiful tribute, Ravi' and I certainly agree.
But let me close on something strange and interesting here. The few wondering hippies who Ravi met in India, and later how he read Feyerabend were somehow reflecting what they had gained from India in the first place---part of this cultural, counter-cultural exchange/revolt that took place in the electrified atmosphere of the late 60s.
CG