Hippy Culture:An introduction
The 1960's stand out as the most fertile period in recent history for radical thought in America. Historian Terry Anderson described the era as "an endless pageant of political and cultural protests" where "the irrepressible issues, the shocking events, forced citizens to consider disturbing questions... and decide publicly about policies concerning a legion of new topics... America was opened to scrutiny. Nothing was sacred, everything was challenged." The calls for change were led by the new left, a broadly student-based movement encompassing free-speech campaigns at universities in the first half of the sixties and anti-war campaigning in the second. The new left's overt political action was accompanied by new trends in culture, culminating in the 'hippy' movement of the late 1960's. These new cultural trends, taken together as a reaction against the prevailing mood, have been labelled the 'counterculture.'
In popular memory, the hippy has become the prevailing image of the 1960's, and has become associated with many of the new left's political goals. However, many historians have argued that he counterculture was a reaction against politics and against the new left, a means of escaping the pressures of society's worst tendencies rather than attempting to change them. "While marchers in the streets were attempting to reform social conditions in America, there were others who were attempting to change "the human condition," or to escape from it," notes historian David Chalmers. "The counterculture was more of a value shift and a withdrawal than a political assault." He argues, for example, that the counterculture flirted with, rather than committed itself to, anti-war activism. "Vietnam was a lyric to the counterculture, not an all -encompassing cause. The most important political concern at the end of the sixties was the war, and the counterculture was antipolitical." David Stiegerwald argues that
It is doubtful that the majority of those who constituted hippie culture had ever made the conscious decision to be radicals. Many political radicals embraced the style as an act of defiance, but for other young Americans, the hippie life was less a cultural statement than a temporary refuge or a last resort. They may have been rejecting society, but it is likely that those were personal rejections, the sloughing off of parents, of older community ties, of unfulfilling personal pasts.
Other historians have suggested that the counterculture and new left were fundamentally linked, that subversive or rebellious literature, music and lifestyles were intended as part of the process of change. Cultural historian Morris Dickstein, for example, argues that for the counterculture, "culture was to be seen above all in its practical and political possibilities. If literature, had its utopian and subversive import, if literature was full of incitement to rebellion and self-creation.. then such visions could not be left to literature alone: they could be fulfilled in actuality." This view is supported by contemporary political thinkers. Charles Reich, in his book The Greening of America, published in 1970, argues that the new cultural trends of the 1960's were building a "new consciousness" that would transform America.
There is a revolution coming.it promises a higher reason, a more human community and a new and liberated individual.this is the revolution of the new generation. Their protest and rebellion, their culture, clothes, music, drugs, ways of thought and liberated life-style are.part of a consistent philosophy [which] is both necessary and inevitable, and in time.will include not only youth, but all people in America.
For example, Reich argues that flared trousers and other aspects of hippy clothing express many of the values of the new left:
Bell-bottoms have to be worn to be understood. They express the body, as jeans do, but they say much more. They give the ankles a special freedom as if to invite dancing right on the street. They bring dance back into our sober lives... the new clothes express profoundly democratic values. There are no distinctions of wealth or status, no elitism... in a threatening time, the clothes express a shared set of attitudes and values.
However, unlike many of those involved in the new left, Reich saw "revolution through consciousness" as a replacement for political activism, which he felt entrenched the old ways. "It is time to realise that... activism merely affirms the false," he argues. "Must we wait for fascism before we realize that political activism has failed?"
Another key writer, Theodore Roszak, concurred with Reich, arguing
The New Jerusalem begins, not at the level of class, party, or institution, but rather at the... level of the personality from which these political and social forms issue... building the good society is not primarily a social, but a psychic issue."
There is still disagreement regarding In Roszak's words, "are these not in reality two separate and antithetical developments: the one... seeking to 'cop out' of American society, the other... seeking to penetrate and revolutionize our political life?" Or was the counterculture in fact "an effort to work out the personality structure and total life style that follow from New Left criticism"?
