The basic phoniness of the secular-utopian vision

What a half-century of metastasizing can do to a sociocultural movement.

It was fifty years ago that major news periodicals were reporting, as if back from a Joseph Conrad-esque expedition, on the hippie phenomenon. The tone of the coverage imparted a sense that this was unprecedentedly exotic. Greatest-Generation types - the hippies' parents - bought it, and responded by either walking on eggshells so as to not irreversibly sunder familial ties, or, if financial leverage could be employed, laying down ultimatums while the window of opportunity to exert influence was still open.

But the movement was comprised of strains that had been with American society for some time. The Beat movement in literature had been around ten years, if one dates it to the publication of the genre's major works, longer if one dates it to the antics of its leading lights that became the stuff of those works. Vegetarianism and communal living had been practiced in various times and places for well over a century. Spiritual inquiry based on immediate mystical experience, even of the chemically induced variety, had been around since at least the time of the works of William James and Richard Maurice Bucke.

In San Francisco, before the national media coverage, the movement had really been composed of art students at various Bay Area schools, folk singers recently taken with rock & roll, poets, and the marijuana dealers supplying them.

After the media coverage, busloads of runaway kids - mostly girls - from across the continent were arriving and being immediately greeted with, "Hey, darlin', got a place to crash? We have a real groovy scene happening at my place."

The types of drugs in circulation proliferated, too.

First came the psychedelics, held up by the mystical-experience prophets of the day as a bold leap forward for human understanding. Eventually, Timothy Leary and Alan Watts were found to be alcoholics, and Alan Ginsberg was revealed to be a deeply disturbed sybarite of the homosexual variety.

Then came speed, cocaine and heroin.

The scene boiled down to dope-peddling men preying on teenage girls by offering them lodging and getting them high. The distillation of this scenario into its darkest cult possibilities was, of course, the Manson "family."

Not exactly a novel development. Exploitative guys working angles to get vulnerable chicks to have sex is a story as old as our species.

A few months after the peak, in terms of media making it a trend, of the hippie phenomenon, the student-radical movement came to the fore. Again, it was the confluence of a number of strains that had been present on the political landscape for some time. Students for a Democratic Society had splintered off from the League for Industrial Democracy. William Appleman Williams had founded Studies on the Left in the 1950s. Some of the New Left's leaders were red-diaper babies and had attended Communist summer camps and schools. The campus sit-ins that appeared in the spring of 1965, nearly simultaneously with introduction of US ground troops to South Vietnam and aerial bombing in the North, were explicitly about rallying support for a Communist victory.

But by the end of the 1960s, it was apparent that the hippies and the radicals didn't have much use for each other. Abbie Hoffman was prevented from taking the stage at Woodstock. Saul Alinsky spoke of the uselessness of hippies in the cause of revolution.

Then came feminism. Again, the strains had been in place for a while. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique came out in 1963, and the National Organization for Women was founded in the summer of 1966. The real breakout moment, though, was when women both in radical organizations and on hippie communes felt that they were being elbowed out of leadership positions.

Again, nothing new. Men and women are different, and since time immemorial, groupings of human beings have tended to be patriarchally structured.

Then came the Stonewall Inn riot of 1969, and the push for normalization of homosexuality was underway. This introduced an element that further complicated the dynamic within the structured settings of the counterculture.

In 1970, the first Earth Day was held. The table for that had been set by Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring.

One interesting thing about the birth of the modern environmental movement is that it represents the work-within-the-system / long-march-through-the-institutions approach to which many radicals turned in the wake of the fragmenting of the take-it-to-the-streets front that had held sway since the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964.

Organizer Denis Hayes had his credentials as a vagabond and rabble-rouser in order. He dropped out of college and hitchhiked around Europe and Asia for three years. Even upon returning to school (Stanford), he burnished his radical bona fides by leading a campus takeover of a weapons-research laboratory.

Alas, he graduated and then started studies at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, only to leave at the behest of Senator Gaylord Nelson, who wanted help organizing Earth Day.

This work-within-the-system approach was part of the more general mainstreaming of the notion of a counterculture. Columbia Records had as its slogan for a while "The Man Can't Bust Our Music."  Woodstock is remembered as the crescendo of the hippie ethos, but it was mostly middle-class college students who, after the weekend, got on the freeways of upstate New York and headed back home to pack for the fall semester. Norman Lear's CBS situation comedies, beginning with All in the Family, brought candid examinations of topics such as racial dynamics and abortion into middle class living rooms. (There was even a commendably amusing sendup of the left-leaning perpetual English-lit grad student in the character of Meathead.)

Meanwhile, the counterculture was fragmenting along lines any observer of human nature could have predicted. Feminism devolved into two main camps: abortion zealotry, and lesbian navel-gazing. The civil-rights movement, or rather what it had morphed into, saw environmentalists' emphasis on restoration of natural spaces as benign neglect of urban areas.  Male homosexuals claimed certain professions, particularly and interestingly those focused on enhancing women's looks, as their own, providing them cachet not available to other sectors of what the counterculture had become.

The fragmentation continues. In 2015, Democrat presidential candidate Martin O'Malley was booed offstage for saying that all lives mattered at a Black Lives Matter rally. "Transgender" activists claim that plain old homosexuals don't understand the particular kind of marginalization they experience.

There are still public figures trying to tie all this together, particularly in the realms of entertainment and broadcast journalism. Of course, 2017 has been the year of discovering that they are nothing but sexually predatory charlatans. Talk about ruined credibility.

Oh, and the list of deified rock stars who have died from being extremely unkind to themselves grows by the year.

Grassroots-level left-leaners - the kind who pollute your Facebook newsfeed - generally still hold on to the dream of a united front. They'll gloss over and make excuses for these fissures and turn up the volume on their platitudes.


It's wearing thin, though.

The reason for the Left's howls of anguish as a result of the 2016 election and this year's dismantling of much of the regulatory apparatus is that it's a stark signal that they have not won politically, and that culturally their dream has been exposed as hollow. A plurality of the American populace has said, "Well, if they've ruined all the major institutions of society - education, journalism, arts and entertainment, even much of the business world, and even many churches - we'll just work around the ruin."

Anyone sending a son or daughter to a university, anybody going to work for a Fortune 200 company, anybody subjecting himself, for God knows what reason, to the CBS Evening News, anybody who feels compelled to attend a Presbyterian, Episcopalian or Methodist church, who has had the good fortune to remain immune to the countercultural enterprise, fully understands the agenda that will permeate all dealings with the institution in question.

The crowd gathered at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park a half-century ago would barely recognize the assemblage of mutants and peddlers of delusion that are their descendants.

The whole story boils down to this: yet another failed search for a "dream" that, once and for all, can be realized even though it flies in the face of what we all know about how reality, particularly human nature, works.