Reedings.com

Two Canadian philosophers, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, give us an analysis of the impact of an earlier generation's youth culture in Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (New York: HarperBusiness, c. 2004). The rebels of the '60s, the baby boomers, talked much about changing the world and making it a non-materialistic utopia of peace and beauty, but as adults they have tacitly repudiated their early idealism. The authors lament this loss, rather like socialists forever insisting on the purity of a system that never quite works as it should, but they insist we understand what happened through an analysis of the false ideas that have flourished since the '60s. Failing to think deeply enough and implement their convictions, counter-cultural radicals simply celebrated the wrong things—hippie attire, mindless music (today's rap most the latest manifestation), mind-altering drugs. They generally imagined that reality could be shaped in accord with one's nostalgia or hopes in anarchical utopias. Radicals imagined they would save the world by "subverting" the dominant culture through "alternative" art, clothing, "appropriate technology," organic food, "free range chicken," fair trade coffee, voluntary simplicity, and protest songs. In fact, as the baby boomers moved into positions of power in various institutions, they brought "their hippie value system with them" (p. 197). "When the Beatles sang 'All you need is love,' many people took it quite literally" (p. 71). Rather than deal with the nitty-gritty problems of poverty and illiteracy and injustice, rather than understand the importance of productivity and personal discipline, counter-cultural rebels followed the lead of folks like Theodore Roszak and fixated on what he called "the psychic liberation of the oppressed." They swallowed aphorisms coined by the likes of Herbert Marcuse, with his curious admixture of Marx and Freud, who lamented "repressive tolerance," a phrase, Heath and Potter say, "makes about as much sense now as it did then" (p. 35). Which is to say it's nonsense. In short: critiquing mass society has failed to change it. The counterculture has majored in critiques for 40 years, but little resulted from their efforts. Sanctimoniously denouncing various kinds of "commodification," radicals have settled into comfortable echelons of privilege (working at "cool jobs," especially in universities, in "cool cities" such as Seattle and San Francisco) appropriate for themselves as the new "creative" class, earning twice as much as the working class. Indeed, "Cool is one of the major factors driving the modern economy. Cool has become the central ideology of consumer capitalism" (p. 188). Consequently, "the modern no-collar workplace, with its casual dress codes and flexible work hours" looks for all the world "like a hippie commune under professional management" (p. 202). Nation of Rebels takes seriously the counter-culture of the '60s, and it merits thoughtful reading. There seems to be much truth in the book's thesis that the impact of the boomers was secondary rather than primary, and the changes they wrought were harmful rather than helpful.