The Hippies and American Values

Chapter 6: Legacy

Chapter 6 Legacy Like, two years ago you could walk down the street and see a guy who looked real weird . . . and you knew. Now, I look out here and, well, everyone looks weird. You just can’t tell anymore. —Janis Joplin, Great Speckled Bird, July 21, 1969 Decades later, America is a different place than it was in the days of hip. Capitalism and what’s-in-it-for-me? values are stronger than ever. The airwaves and blogs are dominated by demagogues who ridicule peace, love, and cooperation . There is no flowering counterculture, no vital New Left, no innovative rock and roll, no generational consciousness—and not much of a sense of enchantment or wonder in any part of society. Peace and love and flower power are no longer standard argot. Methamphetamine has, to a fair degree, supplanted LSD and marijuana; dynamic new music has given way to formulaic sound. More fundamentally, the imagination that so characterized the sixties, the optimistic and naive anticipation that the world was moving into an age of Aquarian harmony and understanding, seems utterly gone in a time when leading public figures want to clamp down on artistic expression, when the rare political world leader with vision or imagination is relentlessly thwarted by a ruthless and cunning opposition, when cynical materialistic self-indulgence rules the land, when grim environmental realities render the future of the race 106 Legacy unpredictable. In many ways hip culture has bloomed and died like a century plant, spectacularly but only once in a lifetime. On the other hand, the new ethics of the hippies has changed the culture in far-reaching ways, even if the vision of revolutionary upheaval has clearly not come to pass. the counterethics: Just How new Was it? The hippies fervently believed that what they were about was something entirely new. The past was rejected, forgotten. With the dawning of the age of Aquarius, an entirely new consciousness was entering the human race, and the hippies were the vanguard of a revolutionary future that would inevitably sweep the world. The claim that everything hip was new was hardly on the mark, however. Actually, the counterethics had three strata: a reaffirmation of some very traditional ideas and values; a championing of ideas that had been around for some time but were unfamiliar to or unaccepted by the majority; and, yes, some ideas that seem to have been truly original, or at least quite unusual in an American setting. The reaffirmation of traditional ethical precepts Much of the counterethics simply reaffirmed time-tested American values and tendencies, albeit sometimes in new clothing. The valuing of community in a country of individualists is an example of that. Americans have always been great champions of individualism. It was in America that the Bill of Rights was adopted, spelling out the rights of the individual to a degree unthinkable to most of the world of two centuries ago and not, conspicuously, specifying where individual rights needed to be bounded for the common good. Yet those individualistic Americans have always been participants, volunteers, community dwellers. As Henry Steele Commager once wrote, “For all his individualism , the American was much given to cooperative undertakings and to joining.”1 The hippies did their own thing, but a key part of the hip vision was generational community. The hippies were iconoclasts, but iconoclasm is another classic American virtue. Americans early on slaughtered sacred cows—rejecting, for example, traditional government (monarchy), the traditional relationship of church and state, and a formal social class structure. In the nineteenth century, a gaggle of traditional institutions—slavery, the subordination of women, the use of alcohol as a beverage, and others—found themselves under attack by a new generation of reformers. The iconoclasm of the hippies was distinctive only in that new icons came under attack. Slavery and monarchy had already Legacy 107 been abolished; the new gods assaulted by the counterculture were rationality, technocracy, and materialism. Rural romanticism and the desire to protect the earth were also simply new expressions of old instincts. The disavowal of big cities as corrupt and unlivable has been a popular cultural theme for well over a century. Although massive environmental pollution was a new part of the equation in the hip era, the desire to flee to the country was not. The establishment of thousands of communes in rural areas was a replay of the agrarian ideal—not to...