Humanistic Judaism, October 1967
San Francisco has always been a bourgeois city, the capital of Western elegance. But images change. Today the slum of Haight-Ashbury has dismissed the old “sophisticated” pose and trans-formed the city into the mecca of the psychedelic cult. A metropolis that prided itself on the impeccable dress of its citizens now features hordes of bearded beatniks chanting Hindu hymns. Adorned with a variety of anti-bourgeois clothing, the “hippies” have turned whole neighborhoods into havens of LSD colors and rock-and-roll rhythms. They have even taken a respectable English word like “straight” and given it a crooked connotation.
The philosophy of “hippiedom” is no mere passing fancy. Sustained by the pronouncements of Allen Cohen, Allen Ginsberg, and Timothy Leary, the faithful have emerged in dozens of other cities and have recruited thousands of eager young people to their cause. Hundreds of students, from the most respected of middle-class homes, have dropped out of school to join the hippie ghetto and to express their total rejection of parental values. While many of the dropouts are fearful rejects of middle-class culture, many are talented and sensitive young adults, who, if they chose to play the bourgeois game, could win the game superbly, achieving all the rewards of money and prestige.
To view the hippie phenomenon objectively is particularly hard for American parents over thirty, whose vested-interest drives them to pursue success in our industrial culture. While the rejection of all that is sacred to our social striving is bad enough, the use of drugs as the chief vehicle to hippie ecstasy is absolutely terrifying. A bourgeois world which cannot cope with its tensions without alcohol, tobacco, and tranquilizer pills, ironically resists the chemical therapy of the hippie mystics. The reaction to the psychedelic message is rarely neutral. If the children respond with applause, the parents react with angry disgust.
How can we evaluate this “happening”? Is it a sign of some revolutionary good transforming our society, a rejection of all that causes hate and war, a genuine perception into the reality of man’s ultimate needs? Or is it, as its opponents maintain, a symptom of social decay; a flight from human responsibility, and a contemptible rationalization of selfishness and failure? In order to be insightful, we must measure the psychedelic claims against the psychedelic reality. We must soberly check to see whether the hippies “achieve” what they claim to achieve. The following observations may help us distinguish pretension from substance.
IF (1) Few people talk as much about “love” as do the hippie philosophers. “Straight society is an irrelevant, cruel, sneaky, dehumanizing, soul-devouring fraud” – which encourages destructive hate through competition and fosters mutual hostility through the greed of private property. Only by rejecting the world of competitive striving and private Materialism, the hippie ideologist maintains, can the essential benevolence of man express itself.
The truth of this thesis is hard to prove or disprove-. Experiments in non-competitive communal living are too few to provide sufficient evidence for-judgment. Whether Man is genetically aggressive or conditioned to hostility by the social games he plays is still open to question. But the sincerity of hippie experiment! is open to observation. It can be tested by how complete their withdrawal from bourgeois culture is effected passing free pretzels out to amused bystander in Golden Gate Park is no indication of basic change at all. Love-ins in public middle-class gardens, in full view of gawking tourists and bourgeois television, may provide less love than the pleasures’ of hostile defiance.
The irony of hippie life is that it chooses to practice its-anti-middle-class way of life in the heart of the bourgeois world. Most of the nineteenth century communal idealists sought, with evident hardship, to establish colonies of communal living outside the “disease” of urban living, the hippie protagonists, in overwhelming number, choose to live in cities. While the logic of hippie philosophy would dictate a total rejection of urban living and a withdrawal to islands of mutual love, the flesh and blood hippies cling to the jungle of ‘the urban slums where they are reduced to scrounging for, survival and defending themselves in subtle warfare with the surrounding natives.
A neutral observer might be led to the conclusion that the dynamic of hippie behavior is not the creation of societies of mutual love at all, but, rather, the establishment of a visible, organized; ritualized rejection of middle-class culture, which derives its psychic energies from the need to express public hate of middle-class values.
Perhaps; a symbolic relationship exists between the hippie ghetto and the bourgeois world. Perhaps, the hippie needs the shocked bourgeois tourist in order to give vent to his Strongest feeling – an almost uncontrollable rage and contempt; just as the middle-class bigot needs the hippie to define his own sense of soCia1 respectability. The two groups depend on each other in their mutual desire to hate. They must live close to each other in order that one side may visibly shock, and the other side play the game of being shocked. The propaganda of love looks a little silly in the setting in which it is publicly advertised.
While the outer violence of the political activist may be absent and deplored, the inner violence of repressed hate lurks underneath. The hippie has chosen to live in the most competitive way possible, by defiantly displaying his wares in the nasty battle of the urban market.
(2) No doctrine is more sacred in the hippie ideology than the suprema of freedom. To be free is to be authentic, to be a genuine individual. To be free is to resist the prison of social roles which forces every citizen to conform to fixed behavior patterns and to see through the morality games of any culture. To be free is to liberate oneself from predictable action and to indulge the surprise of one’s uniqueness. The pleasures of genuine individuality are the reward of freedom.
One would, therefore, imagine that the average hippie devotee would be the supreme individualist, whose behavior pattern conformed to no social role, and whose actions were largely spontaneous and unpredictable. But the evidence is a sad debunker of this pretension. The psychedelist has simply created a new social role – the task of “being a hippie”. From beads, to long hair, to the use of mind-expanding drugs to ritual pronouncements about love, the hippie script has been written to cover every phase of conscious living. Professional psychedelists are highly visible and their behavior patterns are quite predictable, in many cases more predictable than the “conformist” bourgeoisie they denounce. In their imitation of each other, they have simply created a new occupation and a new conformity.
The perceptive social observer knows that social roles are inevitable. He is wary of fanatic attempts to renounce them. He suspects that these feverish rejections only produce equally rigid social patterns in response. Humorful wisdom suggests that there is no way of avoiding playing the game of father, mother, doctor, lawyer, teacher, or “hippie”. An individual, who desires to be more than a hermit, selects or accepts a part in the drama of life – and tempers its demands by laughter, compassion, and occasional surprise.
It is, therefore, highly doubtful that people under thirty, who have developed neither self-esteem or critical skepticism, are capable of extracting the maximum freedom from the social game.
(3) The hippie maintains that our American perceptions are too pragmatic, that we are always judging the values of events and experiences by their future consequences, and that we have, as a culture, become insensitive to the intrinsic value of the present. In our mad pursuit of future success, we are too tense to see the glory of NOW. If we can only acquire the path to “timeless” ecstasy through meditation, mesmeric chanting, or chemical inducement, life will be free of the anxiety-ridden pursuit of the future.
The consequence of such an outlook would seem to be an indifference to the reality and significance of time. Yet, few movements are more time-conscious than the hippie phenomenon. Few psychedelists transcend the barrier, of thirty. Adults who are beyond that age are viewed as fairly “square” senior citizens, who are emotionally incapable of perceiving the hippie truth. Psychedelism seems designed as a cult for youth, with compulsory graduation after ten years indulgence. Unless one is a “guru” like Ginsberg or Leary, a member’s days are limited in the cult. After thirty, the initiate is viewed with suspicion and appears a bit oddball to the newer devotees.
The contemporary psychedelist is frightfully aware of time. He must squeeze in as much “experience” as he can possibly latch on to before the ominous sentence of “old age” reduces him to a hippie emeritus. Despite his professed indifference to the future, the devotee expresses unremitting contempt for those who have passed through the “beyond thirty” barrier and have become inevitably square. One begins to suspect that the hostilities of youth to authority in general have made the hippie the victim of a time obsession. By his own action, he has confirmed the patronizing evaluation of his “straight” mentors that hippieness is “only a phase they are going through”.
(4) The materialism of Western technological culture is the special bugaboo in the hippie devil land. The concern of all economic levels with consumption rather than creativity is especially distressing to the psychedelic ideologists. The quality of experience, and not the quantity of goods should be the most important concern for man. Each man should devote his time to “being himself” and not to achieving power over others through the artifacts he acquires. But, what about the material goods that are required for mere survival, and not for status identity? How does the hippie propose to provide for these?
It is important to note that psychedelism has arisen in an American economy of abundance. In China and Russia, where scarcity prevails, a segment of the potential labor force which chooses to regard itself as a professional leisure class, would be short on endurance. No community, with a shortage of essential material goods, can allow hippie free play. The recruits to the psychedelic ghettos come largely from the secure middle-class, where material security prevailed, and where the presence of adequate food and shelter was taken for granted. Whether they choose to work or not, the economy which provides them with the materials for their survival will very easily endure.
The irony of the matter is that the economic structure that enables the creation of psychedelic records, Andy Warhol movies, and reproduced poster art, must be a highly sophisticated technical culture. The pose of poverty is only a sham.
The hippie critique of our culture is not without merit. The assaults on hostile competition, conformist role playing, obsession with the future, and nervous consumption for status identity are necessary, even though cliched. The dilemma is that the solution creates anew the very same problems it is designed to eliminate. The psychedelists could use a little of their own advice in their assaults on the bourgeois world – a little more humor, and a little less self-righteousness.