Looking Back on the Seventies: Notes Toward a Cultural History

Green grew America, when the whirl was young. Remember?

Turning and turning, a puzzle no less to themselves than to their elders, the new youth were clearly contemptuous of old metaphors, had formed a habit actually of spitting at their pretensions, and could not be taught to stand still. “The rat race,” “making it,” “the bitch goddess,” “the competitive way of life,” success, failure.The Rise of Silas Lapham, The Rise of David Levinsky, at length (at midcentury) The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Declining the Top Job—these icons and symbols, trivial or exotic to our ears, had been compelling figures for generations, holding fluidities of dailiness in a vessel of pseudo-understanding, providing evaluative measures for experience, determining the texture of imaginations, molding contours of hope. That the myths and figures mentioned were antihuman and perfunctory is demonstrable. Yet no less demonstrable is that their grip upon life (when God died they survived) was wonderfully intense. In a word, the moment of their own passing—we may safely date it after midcentury—was, for the elders of an entire culture, eerie, fearful, grave.

For a time, inevitably, the decline in symbolic authority went unacknowledged: revolution is not ingested overnight. A debate raged, in magazines and books, on television and lecture platforms, and during election campaigns, whether major changes truly were in progress. What could be more probable, said some, than that exploiters and commercialists were attempting to create a “revolutionary youth” out of the void for vulgar purposes of profit? A pollster, Samuel Lubell, reported that “only 10 percent” of his interviewees saw the work-world differently from their parents. A California sociologist pronounced that in his area 400 out of 500 youngsters thought well of the elders. A psychologist at Michigan University, Joseph Adelson, argued that talk of a break in continuity was extravagant, and attributed its prevalence to “essays on youth” in quality magazines:

Not too surprisingly perhaps [wrote Adelson, confidently] the most likely writer of these essays is an academic intellectual, teaching humanities or the social sciences in an elite university. Hence he is exposed, in his office, in his classes, to far more than the usual number of radical or hippyesque students. (And he will live in a neighborhood where many of the young adolescents are preparing themselves for such roles.) On top of this, he is, like the rest of us, subject to the common errors of social perception. . . .

But the comfort derived from such voices was of short duration, for those whose family lives had been touched by change demanded the right (in the contemporary phrase) to enter the dialogue. The magazine Fortune published a poll contradicting the conclusions of Lubell. The celebrated anthropologist Margaret Mead set her weight behind the thesis that the new youth were “like the first generation born in a new country,” that they were in rebellion “all around the world, rebelling against whatever forms the governmental and educational systems take,” and that the “deep, new, unprecedented, worldwide generation gap” was in no sense whatever fictive.

Few forces were more influential in shortening the debate in question than the news media. Their attentiveness to the emergent sensibility was unrelenting; they soon put beyond doubt that a transformation was occurring; their doggedness provided later generations with all that was to be known of The Early Ones, Ur-Metamorphics, whose example still speaks so tellingly.¹

As every schoolboy knows, it was during Richard Nixon’s first White House term, in the pages of a business paper, the Wall Street Journal, that the first reports of The Early Ones appeared. CollegeTrained Youth Shun the Professions for Free-Form Life, said the headline above an account of Primitive Metamorphic Life-style. A San Francisco Sextuple Darter named John Spitzer, in his twenties (cabdriver/bartender/magazine editor/Harvard summa cum laude/pianist/playwright), revealed that he was contemplating Septenary—a position as disc jockey. A second Early One, Clara Parkinson, proved to be a Fem Tyrowhirler. Clara had majored in government at Smith College, graduating in 1968, and thereafter taken up work as a letter carrier, because impelled to “get off the treadmill.” “I’ve discovered,” said the pioneer Tyrowhirler, in terms that may have stirred dread in contemporary readers’ minds, “I’ve discovered a new sense of my physical strength from lifting mail sacks.” And a third Early One was the Trimorph Chip Oliver (professional footballist/guru/cook), whose word for the press was that he had never felt “more together,” and that he had lost a lot of weight (“50 pounds from his playing weight of 230”).

To speak of one or another of The Early Ones as having “stirred dread” is, of course, speculative. (The present writer, a Dimorph whirled only recently from Playfiction to Playhistory, wishes to note here that he has already learned that few tasks are harder for the historian than that of imagining the familiar as it seemed to men when it was strange. More of this shortly.) But it does seem clear that attention wasn’t long diverted from “the decline of the rat race.” It seems equally clear that the first efforts to confront transformation were couched in

moral vocabularies—assessments of the ethics of “dropping out.” And it is no less certain that the pre-eminent moralists of the period were those of the Yale School.

Nervous, ill-informed, beamish, lacking in analytical foundation, the Yale School nevertheless played no small role—in collaboration with the media—in releasing the public from bondage to the fantasy that human nature would everywhere and always be the same. The chief spokesmen for the School were the novelist/youth-authority/undergraduate - counselor John Hersey, Charles Reich, a professor of law, and Kenneth Keniston, a psychologist. These writers laid it down that the rejection of “rat-racing,” or competition, signified the advent of a higher moral consciousness, a new goodness, possibly the longheralded perfection of the race. Hersey considered that the new youth had committed itself to a war on greed:

Relating and helping are more important than making it. . . . “Relating” really means being able to give and take. The impulse to give, in a time when there is so much misery and pain at large, is very strong and takes many forms, from the handing out of oranges to total strangers at the Woodstock rock festival fa contemporary saturnalia], to the fevered, devoted work a Peace Corps volunteer may undertake. . . . Each young person in his way has had his urge to do something to make the world a better place. . . . The vast majority of young people believe that greed is at the root of most of the misery of the world, and that most businesses systematize greed. [Letter to the Alumni, 1970]

Reich concurred, attributing the movement toward moral self-improvement to nebulous (possibly nonexistent?) cultural and historical forces:

Consciousness III [a name for New Youth] does not think much of fighting for change from the comfort of personal security and elegance. He feels that if he is to be true to himself he must respond with himself. . . . He may take a job teaching in a ghetto school, which offers neither prestige nor comfort but offers the satisfaction of personal contact with ghetto children. He does not assume that he can fight society while luxuriating in its benefits. He must take risks—the risk of economic loss, of discomfort, of physical injury, of a jail sentence. . . . Consciousness III is . . . seeking to replace the infantile and destructive self-seeking that we laud as “competition” by a new capacity for working and living together. [The Greening of America, 1970]

And Keniston claimed that young people were “taking the highest values” for their own, internalizing “these values and [identifying] them with their own best selves, [and struggling] to implement them.”

As would be guessed, youth was not averse to learning of the achievement, by it, of moral distinction superior to that hitherto known. When, for example, the business paper quoted above asked Trimorph Chip Oliver about the moral dimensions of his dartings, this Early One slipped comfortably into self-congratulation:

We’re putting on a demonstration. . . . We’re showing people a new way of life. We’re showing people that as soon as you start loving and relating to people you’ll find those people loving and relating to you. [Wall Street Journal, June 24, 1970]

And it can be imagined that parents were heartened by his words: was not (if a small joke may be ventured), was not Chip off the old block?

But dourer voices—knockers not boosters—demanded hearings. Reviewers and commentators took exception to Charles Reich’s The Greening of America, objecting to the book’s thesis that the young truly cared about others (an acerb New York Times writer named Lehmann-Haupt proposed the young were in love with their boots). The sociologist Edward Shils, writing in chilly tones in the English journal Encounter, doubted the content of the new morality: these children, said Shils, discover nothing but “the vacuum of the expanding and the contentless self.” Bruno Bettelheim, the psychologist, spoke fiercely against children “fixated at the temper tantrum stage.”

Within months, furor about the MEtamorphics’ virtue (or lack of it) filled the press. An account of the moralized justifications, apologia, attacks, and counterattacks of the sixties and seventies—a survey of the Byzantine complications of casuistry on such matters as “arrogance” and “nihilism" versus “frankness” and “freshness”—is beyond the compass of a short monograph. We cannot begin to suggest the range of obsessions that seized those resolved in this period to be “fair to youth.” Observer after observer —artists, social scientists, politicos—was waylaid by trivia, edged off from sustained, penetrating study of the new behavior by marginal, if furiously argued, considerations. There was—choosing one example at random—the Costume Issue. What was the meaning (so ran the momentous query) of the MEtamorphics’ dress code? The Yale School’s Charles Reich found the clothes redolent of ethical significance:

The new clothes express profoundly democratic values. There arc no distinctions of wealth or status, no elitism; people confront each other shorn of these distinctions. . . . [The old clothes] spoke of competition, advantage, and disadvantage. The new clothes deny the importance of hierarchy, status, authority, position, and they reject competition. . . .

Others found the clothes merely redolent. The novelist Saul Bellow affirmed, in Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), that the new costume constituted a descent into chaos and self-destruction:

What one sees on Broadway while bound for the bus. All human types reproduced, the barbarian, Redskin, or Fiji, the dandy, the buffalo hunter, the desperado, the queer, the sexual fantasist, the squaw, bluestocking, princess, poet, painter, prospector, troubadour, guerrilla, Che Guevara, the new Thomas Becket. . . . Just look [at this] imitative anarchy of the streets—these Chinese revolutionary tunics, these babes in unisex toyland, these surrealist warchiefs, Western stagecoach drivers— Ph.D.’s in philosophy, some of them. . . . They sought originality. They were obviously derivative. And of what—of Paiutes, of Fidel Castro? No, of Hollywood extras. Acting mythic. Casting themselves into chaos. . . ,

The critic John Aldridge construed the costume as a badge of banality:

. . . the U.S. army tunics of World War I . . . the broad-brimmed hats and plunging sideburns of the Western plainsman . . . the headbands of Comanche braves . . . Edwardian suits, the smocks of French Bohemian painters, or the gaudy saris of guruland. . . . The young need to have something to do with their banality. . . . [In the Country of the Young, 1970]

Scores of other opinions were sternly set down.

Or consider the battle about sexuality. Did the Metamorphics intend to banish Masculinity? Would Matriarchy come again? A sleuth known for probes of homosexuality in classic American fiction, Leslie Fiedler, looked warily at “The New Mutants” (1965) for evidence of the feminization of culture. A psychologist, Karl Stern, took up cudgels on the other side, in a work called The Flight From Woman (1965), hinting that any weakening of competitive energies might mean a coming-to-terms at last with the long-suppressed femininity of the male psyche itself: all hail an imminent reign of tenderness. Everywhere, as it seemed, intellect drove itself toward the peripheral, the inessential, the sensational, the reductive, with the result that, as at many an earlier moment in human history when breath was departing a ruling myth, and the path ahead was darkness, confusion and distraction mounted.

And at length were overcome. That latter part of our story, the brilliant fin-de-siècle effort at reconstruction, has been well told elsewhere. Heroic names and achievements have been recorded; the classic texts have had their scrupulous exegetes; minor technical problems alone remain. One further word may be said here, though, toward the end of dispelling the impression, rather widespread just now, that the age we survey was in every intellectual quarter inane. Granted, a backward glance over those troops of self-important, preening “youth authorities,” pundits, moralists, social science “experts,” cynical political revivifiers (on the right) of a dying superego—granted that such a backward glance gives small encouragement to the belief that the age knew any growing points save the Early Metamorphics themselves. Granted too that, with the quality of the general mind of the day firmly before us, it seems likely that the Early Ones’ refusal to articulate a program, their preference for doing it rather than saying it, was at bottom a response to the lambent dullness roundabout.

Amid so much muck, madness, nonsense, and false piety, who could possibly have grasped the truth?

Yet while impatience with the age is understandable, it is not altogether just. The language we now speak, the conceptual schemes on which we now rest, were, true enough, little dreamed of then. Dartings, whirlings, substitute lateral gratification, possibilitarianism, the movement from Tyrowhirler to Septenary and on across the band toward LifeExhaustion—few could have comprehended the bearings of these terms. Our commonplaces: awareness that life-meaning resides wholly in the exploration of human possibility, in the process of multiple self-creation, not in any goals, results, or consequences; our commitment to the maintenance of open-mindedness and universal Playwork Participation in all public and private roles—these commonplaces of our times have no precise counterparts in late-twentieth-century thought.

Yet from this it does not follow that the period must be dismissed out of hand as a blank. Calling the roll of the insightful of those times is saddening: some voices have been lost, and none that survives achieved life-contact with The Early Ones themselves. Still, a few of these minds matter. One notable, if abstract, formulation of proteanism appeared in the mid-sixties, for instance, in a foundation-supported journal called Daedalus. The formulator was a young political scientist, G. Kateb by name, who wrote as follows:

We have . . . referred to the utopian possibility of making life as a whole “more plastic.” What we mean to suggest by these phrases is the allowance for a greater relaxation in the definitions of self, role, vocation, than the world customarily allows. Proteus could become the symbol of the tone of utopian life. The aim would be to encourage selfexpression to the point where the traditional boundaries between fantasy and reality would become more blurred, to allow individuals to assume various “personae” without fear of social penalty, to allow groups to come together and affect diverse communal relations and then disband, to allow for the greatest possible accumulation of vicarious, mimetic, or semi-genuine experience, to strive to have each self be able to say, in the words of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” “I am large, I contain multitudes,” and, finally, in the name of heightened consciousness and amplitude of being to diminish the force of the duality of male and female. And for this “playing at life” to take worthwhile forms and conclude in splendid enrichment of character, the mind and feelings must be cultivated, the capacity to experience the higher pleasures must be developed, the higher faculties must be in control. Otherwise the playing at life would remain just that, and not be, instead, an instrument of self-transcendence. [“Utopia and the Good Life,” Spring, 1965]

The strongest work of the period, however, was that of the still-remembered Henry S. Kariel. It was Kariel who, in The Promise of Politics (1966), drew attention to metamorphic, self-exploratory, nonauthoritarian dimensions of “such disparate personalities as Socrates, Diogenes, Montaigne, Voltaire, Franklin, Henry Adams, Brecht, and Kennedy, and . . . Don Quixote and Huck Finn,” and who delivered, in a remarkable chapter which is entitled “Man in Process,” a virtual prophecy of the present age:

In this . . . newly framed picture, man may be seen as an elusive, incomplete being forever in the process of self-discovery and self-development. He is pre-eminently an innovating creature. In the concise terms of Christian Bay, he is “free to the extent that he has the capacity, the opportunity, and the incentive to give expression to what is in him and to develop his potentialities.” There is no effort here to fill in what he is to be free for. He is simply free from those self-mutilating traits that produce the mindless fanatic, enthusiast, or nihilist, that keep him from acknowledging and developing himself.

In the language of Marx, he is free “to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning. fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.” He is free to play these roles, Marx significantly added, “without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic. . . .” He is a probing, experimenting being, always in motion, attaching and detaching values, inflating and deflating alternatives, unsure of his place in the order of things, skeptical and above all, aware of his skepticism.

Kariel moved on from these themes to the greater issues, in Open Systems: Arenas for Political Action (1968), even coming to face the question that has preoccupied our own century: “How open an area for protean action can we contemplate?” In a most moving preface to the latter work, he speaks of the gulf separating him from The Early Ones, both Primitive Metamorphics like Clara and Chip and John, and the Great Early One, Jerry Rubin himself:

... I also know there are roles I could play [Kariel writes wanly]. . . . There are a great many . . . roles I can conceive of myself playing. And yet, it is obvious to me, I fail to play them.

I do not travel readily or lightly. Not for me Ishmael’s voyage. I am tenured, committed, identified, defined. I still have various options—not playing Ahab, to be sure, but possibly Ishmael. Yet I fail to exercise them. I am aware not only of being limited (which no longer depresses me) but of being needlessly limited. I could without damage to myself test more possibilities and be at least somewhat more playful. I could play more parts, participate more. Nevertheless, here I am, voluntarily limited and enclosed.

Who among us, reading these sentences, can fail to be touched by the pathos of this address, and by the implicit difficulty of the struggle in those years to Break Free? And who among us can be unmoved by the tale of Kariel’s neglect in his own time? His pioneering essays rationalizing the Metamorphics as “proto-types of the open-ended personality system” were printed in literary reviews with subscription lists of a few thousand. None of the great university presses or trade publishers of the period undertook to bring out his pioneering volumes on enlarging experiential range, or those works contending that men “must test the degree of tolerable disruption,” that politics must be injected into all closed systems, that men must pry open their personality systems, their science and knowledge systems, their social systems, and that the aim of life is to disrupt imposed experiences. (The seminal volume, Open Systems, was brought out in a tiny unnoticed edition by Loyola University Press.) Kariel held no honored chair in his teaching lifetime (much of his career was spent at the University of Hawaii!), and the bibliographies of that age, which show endless special issues and festschrifts for the likes of “Herman Marcuse,” “Norbert O. Brown,” “N. Mailer,” and other unidentifiables, reveal no interest in his name. Even within his own profession, when his themes were glancingly touched upon—process orientation, for instance, or the protean psychological style (see an essay published in 1967 called “Protean Man” by a professor named Robert Lifton)—Kariel ‘s name went unmentioned. The clear case is that the quest for the new gospel began in his pages, and the story of his neglect is truly depressing.

Were there others? A few. None of their writing has the force of the classic texts, to be sure. None matches, say, those extraordinary paeans to self-disorientation found in Jerry s touchstone parable of the Yippies freaking the college newspaper editors:

The room echoed with hysterical screams. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” A voice boomed over a bullhorn: “Attention! This is Sergeant Haggerty of the Washington Police. These films were smuggled illegally into the country from North Vietnam. We have confiscated them and arrested the people who are responsible. Now clear this room! Anyone still here in two minutes will be arrested!”

The editors fell over themselves rushing for the door. People were trampled. Noses bloodied. Clothes ripped to sheds. ... A husky crewcut cat, in suit and tie . . . climbed up on a chair and yelled, “I’ve just come back from Vietnam. My brothers died in my arms. The fools in the White House are going to kill us all. We are college editors. We have power. We must be brave! ”

Is this guy real? Or part of the Washington Theater group? I didn’t know. But did it make any difference. Everything was real and unreal. The editors were stunned. Chaos and anarchy reigned. . . . “You will have to decide for yourself whether the police are real or not. . . .” People broke down, crying. . . . They began talking to one another. ... It was an emotional breakthrough. Through theater they learned something about themselves.

Such words do not abide our question.

Yet on occasion, the cause of disorientation, and of movement through roles, was articulated, even this early, in terms of specific changes in public servants and public policy. An urban planner, Richard Sennett, argued, in a work called The Uses of Disorder (1970), that people of his profession victimized themselves and others by over-rigid self-definitions. Sennett compared the city planners to certain overprotective young doctors:

. . . these young doctors have ... a peculiar kind of strength—a power to cut themselves off from the world around them, to make themselves distant, and perhaps lonely, by defining themselves in a rigid way. This fixed self-definition gives them a strong weapon against the outside world. . . . The threat of being overwhelmed by difficult social interactions is dealt with by fixing a self-image in advance, by making oneself a fixed object rather than an open person liable to be touched by a social situation.

Sennett argued that the same rigidity afflicted planners, and that it must be overcome, for, as he declared:

This attitude is a way of denying the idea of history, i. e., that a society will come to be different than it expected to be in the past. In this way, a planner at his desk can steel himself against the unknown outside world in the same way that a young doctor steels himself against his fear about the experience of dealing with his patients. . . .

And in 1970 a striking paper was read to the Committee on Social Stratification and Social Mobility of the Seventh World Congress of Sociology at Varma, Bulgaria. Entitled “Strategies for Social Mobility,” it was the work of two scholars, S. M. Miller of New York University and Pamela Roby of George Washington University, who acknowledged uncompromisingly that the metaphor of the rise had lost substance for the commonality. Better henceforth, they proposed, to imagine mobility as a progress through various kinds of work, not as linear upward movement in a particular organization. “Higher and lower positions are not so much the issue,” they opined; the crux is movement, change, variety, freshness. Theirs was, admittedly, a primitive effort. There was no hint of relish of Self-Whirl or SelfExplore in this paper. The motive was merely to patch up programs of compensatory education originally aimed at guaranteeing “upward mobility” to what were called “the disadvantaged.” Yet, studied in its own context, it stands as a landmark.

And, as may as well be added, something of the same landmark quality attaches to the early commune-meditation centers. For invariably these institutes stressed rolevariousness in their programs— witness an advertisement for a center called CUMBRES, founded in 1970 at Dublin, New Hampshire:

All permanent members of the staff share all the work. There is physical labor in gardening, maintaining the grounds, cleaning, preparing and serving food. There are creative and intellectual efforts in conducting seminars, leading groups, writing and designing brochures, coordinating programs, etc. There is spiritual work in study groups and in meditation. A member of the staff may be found preparing breakfast for the community in the morning, answering correspondence in the afternoon and leading a discussion group in the evening.

But subtly, almost imperceptibly, the act of drawing together such documents teases us out of proportioned perception. We yield to the supposition that these documents were widely studied, that men “must have learned” from them the true character of the age struggling to birth. (Surely they knew as much by the beginning of the century’s eighth decade —how else explain the quantity of evidence, as attested by our clusters of citations, bearing the date 1970?) Altogether easy for us to riffle through the museum of the past, collecting the prefiguring texts that have touched us, fashioned our being—great early works like Emerson’s “Circles,” key apothegms from “Self Reliance”:

When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way . . .—the way, the thought, the good shall be wholly strange and new.

Power ceases in the moment of repose, it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.

How could process-orientation have remained a mystery?

But our question is, in the end, inadmissible. Best to speak flatly: what is obvious to us now—our way of reading the great texts, Marx, Sorel, Dewey, Bergson, Pirandello, and the rest—was not obvious to them. Those who struggled, those who perceived the future and did not bog down in puerile squabbles about clothes or feminization or moral improvement or stabilization of egos, those who refused to meet the challenge of a dying age by scrambling back into the political rejuvenation of Superego—to these we owe full respect. They are our fathers, indeed, our very selves.

But that such minds breathed—and were met with opprobrium or laughter—must not muffle our compassion for the others: even for the mockers themselves, the wholly blind. The historical hour they passed through had been transversed before. Serious disturbances had been known by their great-grandfathers, in the mid-nineteenth century, when the continuity of man and nature was disclosed, and again, two centuries earlier, when the planets were set in motion and poets shuddered:

But the human fact is that the birth of the new is not made easier by memory of earlier births. The coming of an age when self too would “move,” would seek endlessly, richly, appetitively the experience of transformation and metamorphosis: this was an eruption of terror like the quaking of planets. It cannot too often be repeated that for generations men had told each other the meaning of life lay not in the afterlife, not in the service of divinity, but in work itself, the struggle upward. “We must work!” cried Vershinin in Chekhov’s Three Sisters. “There is nothing for us but work, all of us must work!”

And then all at once, as we have seen, work turned meaningless. Children shrugged, smiled condescendingly to their fathers. A university president of the period, Martin Meyerson, appears often to have repeated, in public speeches, the words of one of his students: “I know one thing, though. I know work isn’t my thing. I do know work isn’t my thing.” Seemingly his tone was bemused—troubled but not hysterical. He doubtless hoped to allay fears of parents as he repeated the phrases, surrounding them with hopeful easing words. But it cannot have been easy for those listening then to hear life-values lightly mocked. —My children won’t work , . . But what then will they do? Who will discharge their obligations? How can society’s labor be performed? How can human civilization be preserved? Are men to be orgiasts for life, grooving endlessly down the ringing grooves of change? People gazed into each other’s eyes, frowning, looked away in fear. Old Scripture promised that “thy children shall return to thy borders”; but Old Scripture had no authority, and New Scripture was as yet unimaginable. Dismay, a steadily deepening sense of uselessness, worthlessness, purposelessness—the death of meaning. This was the experience, these were the torments.

For us, thinking backward, penetrating the period imaginatively, perceiving the emotional excess of its depressions, reflecting on the ingenuity of our own open structures, our devices for nonviolent testings of freedom, our marvelously flexible patterns of disruption, above all our opportunities for exhilarating lifetimes of self-whirling—for us the temptation is strong to consider that there is no lesson here save that of our superiority, our huge distance from their mean level of achievement. But here as elsewhere, as always for men, the truest lesson is the most compassionate. There is but one meaning in these years of quest and seeming defeat now far gone from living memory, that of human resiliency: the superb, trustable permanence of men’s power—no matter what blankness oppresses our days—forever to renew and reconceive ourselves. □