the counter-culture and the technocrats

I’ve often made the point that consumerism is one of the most destructive of all the forces that have undermined western society. Consumerism can be seen as the end-point of materialism – if you accept the materialist worldview then it is difficult to argue against consumerism. If materialism is all there is then we might as well devote our life to consumerism.

While materialism has come to dominate the West it has always had its critics. Christians and mystics have of course opposed it. Another interesting example of an anti-materialist, or at least anti-consumerist, revolt was the counter-culture (this post is an expansion of a comment I left on a recent post at Oz Conservative).

It is crucial to remember that the counter-culture had nothing to do with the Baby Boomers. The counter-culture was created by a sector of the previous generation, and especially the 1935-45 birth cohort. While we usually think of the counter-culture as a phenomenon of the 60s its roots were very much in the late 50s. The counter-culture began with the beatniks, not the hippies.

The generation that actively participated in the Second World War (roughly those born from around 1910 up to the late 1920s) eagerly embraced a materialistic lifestyle after the war. To them suburbia and stores full of consumer goods seemed like Heaven on Earth after the sufferings and deprivations of the war.

But to a significant sector of the transitional generation who were just too young to participate in the war or to have vivid memories of it (roughly those born from about 1930 up to 1945) the postwar world was something to be regarded with a touch of cynicism. Idealism seemed to have vanished from the world. There was prosperity but there was something missing. The more intellectually inclined among this transitional generation saw the society of the 1950s as shallow, conformist and empty. They formed the initial audience for the Beat writers. They saw Jack Kerouac as a prophet. This marked the beginning of the counter-culture.

And it was definitely in part a reaction against the cult of consumerism which had become a replacement for meaning in life. The early exponents of the counter-culture, in the late 50s and early 60s (when the Baby Boomers were still playing with dolls and toy fire engines) were repelled by the consumerism which blossomed after the war. The consumerism was very much a side-effect of the technocratic worldview that came to dominate government and bureaucracy in the 40s, with its obsession with economic growth to the exclusion of everything else.

The counter-culture of the late 50s was not so much a political revolt as an aesthetic revolt and a moral revolt (the main difference between the photo-counter culture of the 50s and the counter-culture of the 60s was that the latter took on a more explicitly political outlook). It was a revolt against suburbia. The world of suburbia was comfortable and pleasant and even civilised in its own way but it was conformist, it could be stifling, it was complacent and it was prudish. The counter-culture was a misguided revolt but an understandable one.

To an extent even the counter-culture’s revolt against marriage and traditional sexual morality was understandable (if also misguided). They felt that marriage in the 50s was mostly about filling a house with consumer goods – married bliss meant having new wall-to-wall carpets and a new lounge suite and a radiogram and a TV set. This was partly accurate and partly unfair.

It was all largely a reaction against the idea that economic growth could give people a reason to live.

Why did the counter-culture become so destructive, fail so completely and leave behind such a sorry legacy? I think the answer is that mostly it was the drugs. As a movement it became more and more incoherent and more and more chaotic, and most disastrously of all it become supremely self-indulgent. Perhaps it was doomed to failure anyway, being mostly a negative rather than a piscine movement, but drugs made its failure a certainty.