Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (118 page)

A further factor of significance, Bell says, is that intellectual property is owned not individually but communally. This means that politics become more, and not less, important, because the planning, which maximises scientific output, requires national rather than regional or local organisation. ‘Politics therefore becomes the “cockpit” of the post-industrial society, the visible hand that coordinates where the market can no longer be effective.’
¹⁸

Bell’s third ‘big idea,’ published a year later, in 1976, was
The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.
This too had three themes bound together by the thesis that contemporary society is dominated by irreconcilable contradictions. These were: (I) the tension between the asceticism of capitalism (as defined by Max Weber) and the acquisitiveness of later forms of capitalism; (2) the tensions between bourgeois society and modernism – modernism, through the avantgarde, was always attacking bourgeois society (the rejection of the past, the commitment to ceaseless change, and the idea that nothing is sacred); and (3) the separation of law from morality, ‘especially since the market has become the arbiter of all economic and even social relations (as in corporate obligations to employees) and the priority of the legal rights of ownership and property over all other claims, even of a moral nature, has been renewed.’
¹⁹

Put another way, for Bell there is a contradiction between the drive for efficiency in modern capitalism and the drive for self-realisation in modern
culture. Culture is all-important for Bell, first, because art has taken upon itself (under the mantle of modernism) constantly to seek ‘innovative forms and sensations,’ and second, because culture is now no longer a source of authoritative morality but ‘a producer of new and titillating sensations.’
²⁰
For Bell, modernism was ending by 1930 and exhausted by 1960. ‘Society and art have come together in the market so that aesthetic aura and conceptions of high culture have disappeared.’ But the endless quest for novelty was taken up by the mass media, which themselves largely took form in the 1920s and adopted the same quest of feeding new images to people, unsettling traditional conventions and ‘highlighting … aberrant and quirky behaviour.’
²¹
Along the way, the traditional sociological categories of age, gender, class, and religion became less reliable guides to behaviour – ‘lifestyle, value-choice and aesthetic preference have become more idiosyncratic and personal.’
²²
The result, says Bell, is chaos and disunity. In the past, most cultures and societies were unified – classical culture in the pursuit of virtue, Christian society unified around divinely ordained hierarchies, and early industrial culture unified around ‘work, order, and rationalisation.’ In contemporary society, however, there has been a massive dislocation. While the techno-economic side of things is still ruled by ‘efficiency, rationality, orderliness, and discipline … the culture is governed by immediate gratification of the senses and the emotions and the indulgence of the undisciplined self.’ The contradictions, for Bell, imply a major change in the way we live, but this has to do not only with capitalism: ‘The exhaustion of modernism, the aridity of Communist life, the tedium of the unrestrained self, and the meaninglessness of monolithic political chants, all indicate that a long era is coming to a slow close.’ There is a heavy price to pay for modernism: ‘Modernity is individualism, the effort of individuals to remake themselves, and, where necessary, to remake society in order to allow design and choice…. It implies the rejection of any “naturally” ascribed or divinely ordained order, of external authority, and of collective authority in favour of the self as the sole point of reference for action.’
²³
‘Under modernity there can be no question about the moral authority of the self. The only question is that of how the self is to be fulfilled – by hedonism, by acquisitiveness, by faith, by the privatisation of morality or by sensationalism.’
²⁴
Technology, of course, had something to do with this change, in particular the automobile. ‘The closed car became the
cabinet particulier
of the middle class, the place where adventurous young people could shed their sexual inhibitions and break the old taboos.’
²⁵
Advertising also played its part, ‘emphasising prodigality rather than frugality, or lavish display rather than asceticism.’ Financial services helped, so that debt, once a source of shame, became a component of the lifestyle.
²⁶

Perhaps Bell’s most profound point is that modern culture emphasises experience, with the audience placed central. There is no longer any sense in which the audience engages in a dialogue with the artist or the work of art. And because the appeal is to the emotions, once the experience is over, it is over. There is no dialogue to be continued inside the head of the members of the audience. For Bell, this means that the modern society, in effect, has no culture.

*

Theodore Roszak
disagreed. For him, and countless others, the changes described by Galbraith and Bell had provoked a shift in the very nature of culture, so much so that they needed a new term, the
counter-culture.

One way of looking at the counter-culture is to regard it as one of the ‘soft landings’ of the New Left that formed in several Western countries in the late 1950s and early 1960s, brought about, as we have seen, by disillusionment with the Soviet Union and the horrors of Stalinism, and especially the brutal Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. But the other important influence was the discovery of some early writings of Marx, the so-called Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, written in 1844 but published only in 1932. These new papers did not catch on generally until after World War II and the 1950s when neo-Marxists, as they were called, were trying to develop a more humanist form of Marxism. In the United States there was an additional factor; there the birth of the New Left is usually traced to the Port Huron Statement, a manifesto issued in 1962 by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which read in part, ‘We regard
men
as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom and love…. We oppose the depersonalisation that reduces human beings to the status of things…. Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today. These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man.’
²⁷
The concept of alienation underpinned the counter-culture, which like the Beats, another progenitor, rejected the main concepts of mass society. Other influences were C. Wright Mills, in
The Power Elite,
and David Riesman, in
The Lonely Crowd.
Very rapidly a whole ‘alternative’ set of media was created to disseminate its ideas – newspapers (such as the San Francisco-based
Journal for the Protection of All Beings),
films, plays, music, and the
Whole Earth Catalogue,
which taught how to live off the land and avoid engagement with ‘mainstream’ society. These ideas were set down by Roszak, a professor of history at California State University, in 1970, in
The Making of a Counter Culture.
²⁸

Roszak makes it clear that the counter-culture is a
youth
revolt and, as much as anything, is opposed to the reductionism of science and technology. Youth,
especially
educated youth, Roszak said, loathed the direction in which ‘technocratic’ society was headed, and the form of its protest was to mount an alternative lifestyle. It was a living embodiment of the cultural contradictions of capitalism. For Roszak, the counter-culture had five elements: a variety of alternative psychologies; Eastern (mystical) philosophy; drugs; revolutionary sociology; rock music. Together, these were supposed to provide a viable basis for an alternative way of life to technocratic society, in the form of communes of one sort or another, which also helped counter the alienation of ‘normal’ life. Aspects of this counter-culture included free universities, free clinics, ‘food conspiracies’ (to help the poor), an underground press, ‘tribal’ families. ‘Everything,’ says Roszak, ‘was called into question: family, work, education, success, child-rearing, male—female relations, sexuality, urbanism, science, technology, progress. The means of wealth, the meaning of love, the meaning of
life – all became issues in need of examination. What is “culture”? Who decides what “excellence” is? Or “knowledge,” or “reason”?’
²⁹

After an opening chapter criticising reductionist science, and the way it produced a ‘one-dimensional’ society, deeply unsatisfying to many people (he records in loving detail the numbers of British students turning away from science courses at university), Roszak addressed the main agenda of the counterculture, ‘the subversion of the scientific world view, with its entrenched commitment to an egocentric and cerebral mode of consciousness…. In its place, there must be a new culture in which the non-intellective capacities of the personality – those capacities that take fire from visionary splendour and the experience of human communion – become the arbiters of the good, the true, and the beautiful.’
³⁰
In essence, Roszak says, class consciousness gives way ‘as a generative principle’ to
consciousness
consciousness.
³¹
One can discern,’ he argues, ‘a continuum of thought and experience among the young which links together the New Left sociology of Mills, the Freudian Marxism of Herbert Marcuse, the Gestalt-therapy anarchism of
Paul Goodman,
the apocalyptic body mysticism of
Norman Brown,
the Zen-based psychotherapy of
Alan Watts,
and finally
Timothy Leary’s …
narcissism, wherein the world and its woes may shrink at last to the size of a mote in one’s private psychedelic void. As we move along the continuum, we find sociology giving way to psychology, political collectivities yielding to the person, conscious and articulate behaviour falling away before the forces of the non-intellective deep.’
³²
All this, he says, amounts to an intellectual rejection of the Great Society.

Roszak’s first stop, having set the scene, is Marcuse and Brown, whose significance lies in their claim that alienation is a psychological condition, not a sociological one, as Freud said. Liberation is personal, not political, and therefore resolution is to be found in changing society by creating first a set of individuals who are different – liberated in, say, a sexual sense, or freed from the ‘performance principle,’ i.e., having to perform in a certain prescribed way (at work, for example). Whereas Marx thought that the ‘immiserisation’ of man came when he was confined by poverty, Marcuse argued that psychological immiserisation came at the time of maximum affluence, with people governed by acquisitiveness and ‘subtle technological repression.’ Roszak makes room for one sociologist, Paul Goodman, whose main skill was an ‘inexhaustible capacity to imagine new social possibilities.’
³³
Goodman’s role in the counterculture was to imagine some practical ‘alternative’ solutions and institutions that might replace those dominating the technocratic society. Among these were the free universities and ‘general strikes for peace.’ But above all there was Goodman’s idea of Gestalt therapy, the basic idea of which was that people should be treated as a whole, not just by their symptoms. This meant accepting that certain forces in society are irreconcilable and that, for example, violence may be necessary to resolve a situation rather than burying one’s feelings of anger and guilt. In Gestalt therapy you do not talk out your feelings, you act them out.

Abraham Maslow,
another psychologist, was also part of the counterculture. In
The Psychology of Science
(1966), taking his cue from Michael Polanyi’s
Personal Knowledge
(1959) and Thomas Kuhn’s
Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(1962), Maslow put forward the view that there is no such thing as objectivity, even in the physical sciences.
³⁴
The ‘discovery’ of order is really an imposition of order on an untidy world and corresponds more to the scientist finding ‘beauty’ in, say, tidiness rather than to any real order ‘out there’ in an objective sense. The imposition of order undervalues subjective experience, which is as real as anything we know. There are, say Maslow and Roszak, other ways to know the world that have just as much subjective impact – and that is an objective fact. In discussing psychedelic drugs, Roszak was careful to place marijuana and LSD, in particular, in what he saw as a legitimate tradition of William James, Havelock Ellis, and Aldous Huxley (in
The Doors of Perception),
all of whom studied hallucinogenic substances – nitrous oxide and peyote, for example – in a search for ‘non-intellective powers.’ But he concentrated on marijuana and the experiments on LSD by the Harvard professor Timothy Leary. Roszak was not entirely convinced by Leary (who was eventually dismissed from Harvard) and his claims of a ‘psychedelic revolution’ (that if you change the prevailing mode of consciousness, you change the world), but he was convinced that hallucinogenics offered emotional release and liberation in a difficult world and were no less damaging than the enormous numbers of tranquilisers and antidepressants then being prescribed for the middle classes, often the parents of the children who comprised the ‘drug generation.’
³⁵

In his chapter on religion Roszak introduced Alan Watts. Watts began teaching at the School of Asian Studies in Berkeley after leaving his position as an Anglican counselor at Northwestern University. Aged fifty-five in 1970, he had been a child prodigy in his chosen field, Buddhist studies, and the author of seven books on Zen and mystical religion. Zen was the first of the Eastern mystical religions to catch on in the West, a fact Roszak put down to its vulnerability to ‘adolescentisation.’
³⁶
By this he meant its commitment to a ‘wise silence, which contrasts so strongly with the preachiness of Christianity’ and which, he said, appealed strongly to a generation raised on wall-to-wall television and a philosophy that ‘the medium is the message.’ Watts was himself highly critical of the way Zen was used, sometimes by pop stars, as little more than the latest fashion accessory, but the fascination with Zen led to an interest in other Eastern religions – Sufism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and then on to primitive shamanism, theosophy, even kabbala, the
I Ching,
and, perhaps inevitably, the
Kama Sutra.