The Sixties Cultural and Counter Cultural Movement - Essay Example

Arthur Marwick argues that the sixties were characterized gby counter-cultural movements across a number of areas. Do you think this view is supported by the evidence Arthur Marwick was right, of course. There were counter-cultural movements in so many segments of western society in the sixties. It was as if many rivers found a confluence during those remarkable years. This essay draws from the areas of religion and music, but these must be seen in a wider context of political foment, and radical changes in the social values of American society during that period. The term 'counterculture' is a term used in sociology to refer to any social group that moves or in opposition to the values and practices of the social mainstream. There are, of course, cultural movements that run against the mainstream in every generation, but the counterculture of the 60s refers to a mass movement that had some staying power, and that truly expressed the spirit of the time. The term was popularized by Theodore Roszak in his book The Making of a Counter Culture (published, in 1969), and remains with us today. Roszak was himself much influenced by Alan Watts, the Anglican priest with a deep interest in Asian thought and culture. Watts was hugely influential in the religious face of the 60s counter-culture. He Watts taught at the School of Asian Studies in San Francisco and was fascinated with Hinduism and especially Buddhism; and his many books, such as The Way of Zen (1957) and Psychotherapy East and West (1961), were widely available and read. Hehad been drawn to the Beat movement, which defiantly rejected organized religion as practiced in America at that time, and their appropriation of Asian thought is clearly seen in Jack Kerouac's autobiography, The Dharma Bums, dharma being a Hindu and Buddhist term for 'the teaching of right living.' Gary Snyder and Alan Ginsberg were other beat poets who came to California in the late fifties and became involved in Zen Buddhism as a result of Watt's teaching. The San Francisco's Zen Center was established in 1959 largely as a result of the influence of Watts' and a Japanese Buddhist scholar, Daisetz Suzuki, whose son later became the spiritual inspiration behind the growth of the center and the Zen community in the States. Watts used the term "cosmic consciousness" in his 1962 book, The Joyous Cosmology, to describe the high states of consciousness which a person can achieve with meditation and other spiritual practices. The term was eagerly taken up, but there is nothing new under the sun, and in this case, as Camille Paglia (2003) points out, Watts was simply recycling a term used by Richard Bucke in 1901, when he compared Asian and Western religious teachings by various leaders, including Buddha, Jesus, William Blake, and Walt Whitman, all of whom Bucke thought had attained spiritual enlightenment. The overlay of Eastern religions, Hinduism, and Buddhism, was accompanied by a deep and new interest in the beliefs and practices of the Native American religions. It was as if at least some of youth of western civilization had suddenly awakened from the dream of White supremacy. The University of California became the first in the nation to offer serious studies into the traditions of those that had been so brutally repressed over the previous century. The huge antiwar protests of 1967-1974 were always accompanied by huge masks, music and painted demonstrators reflecting the curious mixture revolutionary politics, ecstatic spiritual practices and free sex made possible by the newly developed contraceptive pill. The 60s counterculture was committed to political change, and to a truth about life outside religious and social institutions. The political movements of that era, of which the Vietnam War protests were only a part, had their roots in THE great liberation movement of the 60s, the civil rights movement, which was sparked by the Supreme Court's 1954 decision to declare segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The fact that ordained ministers like Martin Luther King, Jr. were so prominent, appealed not just to social justice but also to a higher moral code, they had with regard to abolitionism in the 19th century. It was only natural that the war in Vietnam would attract a similar moral cry, and lead on to other related social change movements based on truthfully spoken moral indignation at a society that had become so materialistic - the enduring social movements for environmental responsibility, feminism, and gay liberation. Drugs played an important role as catalysts for dramatic shifts in public values. LSD in particular, was responsible for a whole generation having access to states of mind that had previously only been available to lifelong meditators, sages and saints. "It remade the Western world-view by shattering conventions of time, space, and personal identity" (Paglia 2003). Hundreds of thousands of young adults were attracted to explore the mysterious chemical sources of the new awareness, and its embodiment in religions of the East. Young Americans on the two coasts of the US did not react in the same way to the mass appearance of mind-altering drugs. The East coast set - as described by Tom Wolf in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, was more formal. The high priests of LSD were two Harvard professors, Timothy Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert, who were dismissed from their lectureships for experimenting with LSD on student volunteers. Alpert's experience took him deeply into Hindu meditation and off to India, where he was transformed into Ram Dass, a name that he has carried as a spiritual teacher since then. Leary took his mission into a more secular way of life, a writer and teacher of 'the acid experience.' There were also demonic leaders. One was Charles Manson, a drifter who came to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury during the 1967 'Summer of Love', attracted a group of devotees, and formed a commune near Los Angeles where the heavy use of drugs and ritualized group sex were reported to be common. In August 1969, Manson orchestrated the demented murder of seven people, including actress Sharon Tate, in a house in Hollywood Hills. Another demonic leader was Jim Jones, a Black social worker who claimed he was the reincarnation of Jesus, and led his several hundreds of followers to Jonestown in the jungles of Guyana jungle, where he ordered them to commit mass suicide, which they did. However, these were aberrations. For the vast majority of young Americans, the 60s was experienced as a time of liberation from dysfunctional patterns of the past. Music was a driving force. Rock and roll, the hallmark sound of the sixties, had its roots in two traditions. One was Black music of the South, the deep rhythm-ed soul songs of former slaves, which were popularized by Black southern guitar pickers like Snooks Eaglin and Joh Lee Hooker, and which was taken up by many bands of the day, including the Rolling Stones. The other tradition was folk music, the troubador tradition of the American people, with its down-to-earth commentaries on life. No one musician was more important in the translation of folk music, and its melding with rock and roll, than Bob Dylan, who left his native Minneapolis in 1960 to visit his hero, Woody Guthrie, in New York, and became a world-wide phenomenon of great cultural force. Dylan would later say of Guthrie's work, "You could listen to his songs and actually learn how to live" (Shelton, 1976). Dylan was able to capture the mood of the times with his own Guthrie-like commentaries, such as "Oxford Town", an account of the first black student to risk enrollment at the University of Mississipi. Dylan became quite unwittingly a spiritual leader, upsetting many with his irreverent changes of style and wickedly wise commentaries on war, social injustice and love. Another prominent musical leader of the counter-culture was John Lennon, one of the Beatles, and a brilliant song-writer. Unlike Dylan, Lennon openly avowed Eastern religions (all four Beatles studied for some months with a guru, Mahara-ji, in India), and went on after the Beatles had broken up to write deeply psychological and spiritual songs. His simple ditty Give Peace A Chance became an anthem to the anti-war protest movement, and was reported to have so incensed President Nixon, that FBI surveillance of Lennon became a routine of his life for many years afterwards. The 1960s' combination of spirituality with progressive politics was not new to America. After all, it was religious persecution that had spurred the Pilgrim Fathers to head for the New World. They were not unlike the hippies who followed them 200 years later, in as much as they rejected materialism and hierarchy, and were dedicated to peace, social activism, and sexual equality. Nineteenth-century Shaker communities were also 'religious refugees', known for their code of celibacy and communal property as well as their plain style of furniture and crafts that would influence minimalist modern design and their deep reverence for nature. The spiritual awakening of the 1960s had at least some of its roots in this lineage of religious and moral dissent, as expressed by a Romantic writer who became a darling of the sixties Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Unitarian minister who resigned his position because he could not accept the doctrine of the Church, and was disgusted by the spiritual bankruptcy he saw in communities around him. Emerson had a great love and respect for nature, but it was a book by his friend, Henry David Thoreau - Walden, written in 1854, about his monastic life in the heart of nature - which became the 'set text' for the 60s counter-culture. Emerson's interest in Hindu sacred texts, like the Bhagavad Gita, which had been unknown in the West until the late 18th century, was a direct influence on Alan Watts a century later. Arthur Marwick points out that the 'great events' of the sixties - the emergence of the Beatles, the Columbia uprisings, May '68 in Paris, the Vietnam War protest movement, the murders of King and the Kennedy brothers - were simply the high-points of a systematic period of transformation of old social rules and institutions and the emergence on a grand-scale of new ways. He brilliantly draws together the deeper themes - artistic experimentation, civil rights, black power, the sexual revolution, Vietnam, radical feminism and gay liberation - into a moving story of cultural and social change that 'did not confrontsociety but permeated and transformed it.' He was clear that many of the cultural innovations of the 60's ''were thoroughly imbued with the entrepreneurial, profit-making ethic.'' This was not the creation of a new egalitarian society, even though many early communes espoused just that, and some of the largest gatherings of the day - such as the famous Woodstock concert - were free. Marwick argues that many of the institutions of the day reacted with ''measured judgment'' to the 60's protesters and accommodated many of their demands, knowing that these were the customers of the future. And indeed, huge fortunes were in the end made by the same musicians and new 'religious' teachers of the counter-culture who had promoted a Thoreau-esque vision of a free, loving, non-material future. Marwick's contempt for the notion that rock-and-roll was anti-capitalist seems well justified. On the other hand, it may be that Marwick under-estimated the real powerful effect of radical politics in that era. Many institutions were genuinely influenced by the philosophies of social justice and earth consciousness that evolved from those years. Many leaders of the early movements for social change that blossomed from the sixties understood that this was only the beginning, and that radical 'hard-ball' strategies are needed to move the inertias of the old order. Many of Bob Dylan's so-called protect songs - such as Blowin' in the Wind, The Times they are a-Changin, and Masters of War - had a deeply prophetic aspect that was carried forward by the sixties generation. Not that wars have stopped or corruption eased. But the spirit of those songs expressed a radical truth which had rarely found such mass public exposure as was the case by the end of the sixties, together with a deep longing for something different. An antagonism was born between the 'mainstream' and the 'counter' culture which has persisted for half a century. The marginalized environmental movement of the sixties has become mainstream today; global warming is a fact that almost no one disputes any more, and which calls on us to dramatically change our ways. The anti-war movement, though no longer on the streets of America, has become a very loud and influential voice because of the internet; Eastern religious views have become extremely widespread, and Buddhism - with its emphasis on self-determination - has proliferated; and the music of sixties is now played with love by another whole generation of young people. The counter culture of the sixties has certainly left its mark. References Paglia, Camille (2003) Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s. Search Arion, vol. 10, no. 3 Roszak, Theodor () The Making of the Counterculture Shelton, Robert (1976) No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan Wolf, Tom (1969) The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test Read More