My approach in these essays is consistent—I don’t change assumptions or values from essay to essay, and major concepts like billionaire capitalism and capitalist socialization are likewise stable. This is an analytical method.
One premise is that systemic problems are systemic. By and large, our problems are not the result of individual choices; our social dysfunction is instead structural.
I therefore am careful about the disciplines I draw from in my analyses. Semiology, literary criticism, social psychology, and most of the identity narratives too easily lend themselves to moral judgement and labeling. Even cultural anthropology can be misused in this way. How many articles have we read contrasting the values and mindsets of red states versus blue states?
The end point of socialist analysis should never be that one group is good and another bad; this is not a movie, but an effort to save humanity, civilization, and our planet. It is our duty (and our joy) to shed light, not to blame and scapegoat.
So, in my writing I mostly use history and economics; I am also keenly aware of the role socialization plays. Occasionally I will talk about narcissism, because it’s so characteristic of the Billionaire Capitalism culture. But I don’t talk about any psychological phenomenon without linking it to a wider context.
And most of all, I realize that correctly answering the wrong question is worthless. Finding just the right question, at the right level of abstraction, is invaluable. Wisdom isn’t knowing, it’s not knowing in a precise way.
All that said, what good is my analytical method? For one thing, it allows us to ask (and answer) questions that are otherwise ignored. For example, I didn’t ask what the American class structure was—I also asked what it was for. (See Class and Underclass). And I didn’t just assume capitalism is harmful, I asked precisely how it was harmful—and the answer was capitalist socialization. (See A Greater Power).
But can this method predict the future, or at least allow us to understand it partly? Of course, “nothing is so difficult to predict as the future,” but some insight is necessary for our survival, so we have to try.
To test whether this method can shed light on the future, we could just make predictions and wait, but life is short. Instead, let’s find proxies for the future. A good place to start is with events in the past that no one understands.
Using this method, can we explain, let’s say, the Sixties? Liberals couldn’t explain the Sixties (although they were able to accept it eventually), conservatives attributed the Sixties to the unbounded depravity of hippies—although once in a while they blamed Dr. Spock for the “permissive” child-rearing practices of post-war families. Marxists blamed bourgeois decadence and completely missed what looked for all the world like a revolutionary moment. As for the participants themselves, they felt a sense of liberation which they could not explain other than to assert how oppressive and unsatisfactory the old system was; the value of their path was self-evident to them.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterculture_of_the_1960s#Criticism_and_legacy and personal memory]
And what did they mean by the “old system”? Often they said the Fifties, which were generally perceived as a dead end. But the decade of the Fifties had no existence of its own; it was just a set of experiences that shaped how we saw the world and what we expected from life.
The Fifties were the prelude to the Sixties, obviously. But what does “prelude” mean exactly? What was the deep relationship between these two eras, these two Zeitgeists?
When we look at the Sixties today, it certainly was a complex, wide-ranging movement—-although observers often tried to explain it in simple terms. People made basic and far-reaching changes as a matter of course. They changed how they ate—-how often, in the sweep of history, does a society change its diet, except in the face of severe shortages? They changed their sexual mores, they changed how they saw war and violence—and authority. They completely threw over the Western male socialization around military honor and glory, a system that had led Western men into battle for millennia. They changed their attitudes toward work and money. They adopted (or invented) new religions; Christianity’s appeal faded. They build new kinds of houses—they lived in transparent geodesic domes, or they lived underground, or in teepees. They farmed in new ways, and in old ways. They changed their clothes, their hair, their thoughts.
They turned back to nature in a profound way. And they questioned the structure of consciousness and reality, which they attempted to change (or understand) using psychedelics and meditation.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterculture_of_the_1960s and personal memory]
No one understands the Sixties. It has become a part of our culture in so many ways, but no one can account for it.
Let’s take a deep breath here and remember what Jung wrote about individuals who show some extreme development or other— being highly intellectual or witty or unusually sensitive. He said that all such cases are a compensation. We might ask: a compensation for what? Something unacceptable, perhaps painful or grievous. Something that limits or harms us.
[Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, Carl G. Jung, Vintage, April 23, 1989, ISBN-10: 9780679723950, page numbers to be added later]
The Sixties were certainly an extreme development. What could it have been a compensation for?
Not to go back to Jung for every question, but he also pointed out that the invention of nuclear weapons caused a collective psychological crisis, one symptom of which was UFO sightings.
[Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, by Carl G. Jung. Princeton University Press, January 21, 1979. ISBN-13: 978-0691018225]
What if the Sixties were a reaction to this psychological crisis? But the beginning of the counter-culture—say around 1964—was nineteen years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which would be an extremely delayed reaction, and might suggest there was no relationship between the development of nuclear weapons and the Sixties.
But 1964 was only two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s understandable that people and societies would re-examine their priorities after such a frightening near-miss. But the Sixties went well beyond slowing down to smell the roses, so to speak, and the counter-cultural ferment was center-stage in American society into the mid-seventies—ten years or so. That seems an outsize reaction to the Cuban Missile Crisis by itself; we need to explain why the cultural ferment of the Sixties lasted as long as it did and affected so many areas of life.
It may be plausible that the Sixties was somehow associated with the Cuban Missile Crisis, but what was the specific linkage?
Let’s look at the geo-political and social implications of the invention of nuclear weapons, the overall context of the Cold War. This collective psychological crisis that Jung describes—how did it develop and how did people adapt to it?
At the end of World War II there were only two significant powers left standing—the USSR and the US, and these two had opposing ideologies. There was bound to be conflict, but on what scale? The tension built rather slowly, since the two countries had been allies and neither wanted another war.
The years of 1948 through 1950 were decisive. On New Year’s Day of 1948, the tensions seemed manageable. The Americans had drastically drawn down their forces in Europe and reduced military spending overall. Then in quick succession there was the coup in Czechoslovakia in February, the beginning of the Berlin Blockade in June (and finally ending in May 1949) and then, to the great shock of the West, the Soviets tested an atomic weapon on August 29, 1949.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War#Marshall_Plan,_Czechoslovak_coup_d’%C3%A9tat,_and_formation_of_two_German_states https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War#Berlin_Blockade_and_Airlift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project ]
Further, in October, Mao Tse-Tung proclaimed the People’s Republic of China; the remnants of the Nationalists fled to Taiwan and left the communists in control of the world’s most populous country. Lastly, the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 reinforced the belief that the West was engaged in a global struggle with communism, and that the communists were willing to endlessly escalate this conflict, even where the strategic benefits were minor, as in Korea.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War#Pushing_south
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War#Korean_War]
The collective psychological crisis posited by Jung was well underway by the end of 1950. MacArthur wanted to use nuclear weapons against Chinese troops in Korea, and he didn’t believe the president had the authority to stop him. This was a significant crisis which could have led to a general war. Fortunately, Truman relieved MacArthur of his command.
We were one or two or three mistakes from extinction.
How did Western societies cope? America became apathetic and conformist, unable to resist a policy not of protecting the country and the people but of sacrificing them to protect capitalism, democracy, and Christianity, none of which would survive the sacrifice.
And refusing to oppose Communism wouldn’t work either, because that might mean a 1984 future for the entire human race.
This wasn’t even a dilemma; this was a nihilistic dead end.
The Thirties and Forties had been challenging in the extreme, but Americans responded by taking action; they didn’t lose their sense of freedom; they didn’t stop being Americans. The Fifties were different; we were dead inside.
We could only adapt by changing our socialization. This sounds impossible, but what is our socialization, anyway? It’s a set of memories of what we value, how we solve problems, and how we relate to others. And every time we remember something, we can change that memory if it no longer matches reality—oh, that business moved, I need to write down the new address—and so it was with socialization in the Fifties. Americans had always been future-oriented, and we stopped except in trivial ways—we didn’t plan in detail, but we did read science fiction. We hoped we might have a future, but we tried not to think about it too much.
Hardly anyone built a bomb shelter.
[personal memory]
We made changes where we could, but everything had a price. Americans acquiesced to peacetime conscription because this was clearly not a time of peace, and yet not quite war either. Every young man spent two years in their early twenties in the military. This strengthened conformity and weakened ties between young men and their communities—and the young women they grew up with.
We accepted the suppression of the Communist Party, but this meant no one else could criticize capitalism, either. But the good and ill capitalism does should always be a subject for debate in democracy—so America was de-politicized in an odd way, as Russia and China are today. America wasn’t a dictatorship, but in some ways it resembled one.
[Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, by Ellen Schrecker. Little, Brown and Company, May 1 1998. ISBN-10: 9780316774703]
Male socialization in particular had to undergo some wrenching changes. The combination of militarization and passivity was hard to manage, and of course the basic contradiction of the Cold War that I mentioned earlier—of sacrificing everything for nothing—meant that no man could be a hero, because no possible sacrifice could save one’s people.
I imagine Jung would say that losing the archetype of the Hero would be painful, but that it might also lead a necessary transformation. But the transformation was in the future, while the pain was immediate.
Men began to act out. For the first time, American youth started to oppose society directly. They formed gangs and fought each other and the police. Hells Angels were formed in 1948 and spread rapidly, but the problem went way beyond motorcycle gangs. The word “teen-ager” itself acquired a violent connotation, and every community had violent young men with duck-tailed haircuts. And this happened at a time of prosperity and low unemployment.
Later this discontent took a more refined form in the Beat movement, but those middle-class writers and musicians were just as alienated as the Hells Angels.
The boys weren’t right.
An insidious thing about Cold War socialization was that it took values and mores that pre-dated the Cold War—respect for authority, postponing sex until marriage, stoicism in the face of danger, just to name a few—and remapped those into political passivity, alienation between men and women, and numb acceptance of the unacceptable, respectively. And no wonder—the ancient context that gave rise to those values and mores had disappeared and had been replaced by something as grotesque as it was dangerous: a civilization that could only protect itself by destroying itself.
The ordinary socialization that parents gave children became deeply unconvincing, even to the parents themselves. The generational conflict that we saw in the Sixties did not come out of normal family life. The ties that bind had been loosened during the Fifties.
Take corporal punishment as an example. The only reason to physically punish a child is to inculcate values that will serve the child, and society, for decades to come. Truthfulness might be one example; obeying the law might be another.
But “decades to come”? Few people imagined we could avoid World War III. The conflicts and crises we had with the USSR and China seemed severe and intractable and we knew from experience how it would probably end. We hoped for peace, of course, but we’d just fought two immensely destructive World Wars that hardly anyone wanted, and our odds of avoiding the third seemed slight.
And a parent that can’t protect a child is on emotional thin ice with corporal punishment, and the parents must have known that at some level. Why be severe with a child when it’s likely neither of you has much time left? Why not just enjoy each other?
And yet corporal punishment was widely practiced in the Fifties. But since we doubted our future, it seemed pointless. The Cold War had destroyed the context that justified corporal punishment, but we continued with it anyway, out of habit or cruelty or both.
And this resulted in a hollowing-out of discipline. If the parents didn’t truly believe in the rationale for corporal punishment, then the children wouldn’t either when they were old enough to form an opinion. And this de-stabilized family life generally—slowly at first, beneath the surface, but later so openly that the entire world noticed.
Because it wasn’t just corporal punishment that was discredited. By extension, everything parents did to correct and instruct became questionable.
[personal memory]
There are several ways socialization can change. First, people almost unconsciously change their habits, values and ways of thinking in response to changing circumstances, and that was certainly a factor during the Cold War. Second, people can consciously set out to change, and this happened during the Enlightenment and the Sixties, but not so much during the Fifties. Few people set out to make themselves more passive and despairing.
And lastly, changes in socialization can be made top-down. McCarthyism met this definition, because its goal was not merely to suppress the Communist Party, but to make social change by anyone (particularly liberals) difficult or impossible. This was done by socializing people into a kind of apolitical apathy. And long after McCarthy fell, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover continued McCarthyism less publicly.
[Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, by Ellen Schrecker. Little, Brown and Company, May 1 1998. ISBN-10: 9780316774703]
Another example of this top-down socialization was the effort (by Herman Kahn and others) to convince the people that a nuclear war was winnable. This never really caught on, and President Eisenhower for one did not believe it. When Kahn’s work was mentioned at a cabinet meeting, Eisenhower shook his head and silently drew a finger across his throat.
So Cold War socialization hadn’t pushed reason, including common sense, completely aside. Old soldiers still knew nonsense when they heard it. And in fact, the values of the Enlightenment and of Christianity trudged on; we didn’t have much else. In fact, they were a counterweight to the apathy and despair of the Fifties, and people clung to them all the more for that.
And as time passed we began to recover some hope. After June 1951, when positions in the Korean War stabilized, the Cold War seemed less chaotic. Communist forces took over North Vietnam and later Cuba, but the Soviets were unable to dominate Yugoslavia or make any further gains in Europe. Insurgencies in the Philippines and Malaya were defeated. It was obvious that the big losses of the late forties—eastern Europe, China—had ended. Europe grew stronger and more cohesive through the Common Market and NATO, and European communist parties lost ground. Japan became a democracy and increased trade with the US.
And Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin was a hopeful sign; perhaps the Soviet Union would become less oppressive? At least some communists had the unexpected capacity to recognize the errors of their movement.
Of course, there were some unpleasant surprises. One example was how rapidly the Soviets developed nuclear weapons and another was the launch of Sputnik, which everyone in America could see in the night sky. But these were challenges the West could meet without falling into despair. Even in 1957 Americans were quick to note that Sputnik wasn’t armed—and to explain that to their children.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_space_program#Sputnik_and_Vostok]
So the Cuban Missile Crisis bit deep. The effect on the psyches of Westerners cannot be underestimated, although there was no panic at the time. That the Soviets would place missiles in Cuba seemed like a staggeringly reckless act—-and despite Russian rationalizations, it most definitely was. To keep the missiles secret was even worse, because that meant the weapons were not meant for deterrence, but for a first strike.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis]
Fifteen years after the Berlin Airlift, we had Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba? People were bound to be immensely discouraged about the outcome of the Cold War.
Soviet propaganda pretended that the missiles in Cuba were a fair response to the US placing missiles in Italy and Turkey—but that was done publicly, not secretly, and the strategic importance of Cuba to Russia was grossly out of proportion to the importance of Europe and the Middle East to the US.
In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was a rush on both sides to rationalize what had happened—-Khrushchev was reckless, communication between the leaders was too slow and indirect—but neither wanted to review the larger causes.
The West did not have a strategy to win the Cold War; it had defensive tactics that worked well in the industrialized world, but whether it could defend the post-colonial Third World remained to be seen. The Soviets, on the other hand, did have a strategy to win the Cold War, but it wasn’t working, and hadn’t worked since about 1951. But perhaps blinded by faith in their inevitable victory, the communists didn’t recognize that their strategy was failing. The fact that Khruschev imagined in 1961 that he could muscle the West out of Berlin is symptomatic of that failure; the question of West Berlin had been settled in 1949, and it was absurd and dangerous to revisit it without some change in the power dynamic.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Crisis_of_1961]
On the other side, no one in the West dreamed of trying to change the status quo in East Germany or Poland—that was clearly too dangerous and destabilizing.
So, there was a “reality principle gap” between West and East. The Soviets imagined they could do things they couldn’t, but the Americans were less deluded. And that’s not to say that Americans were always bathed in the light of rationality, but they were capable of calibrated responses, as when Kennedy placed a naval blockade on Cuba rather than invading, and then called that blockade a “quarantine” because a blockade was considered an act of war.
Khrushchev, on the other hand, had no place to go after the naval blockade was in place. His choices came down to shooting at American warships, with an unpredictable escalation from there, or a humiliating withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba. This was, of course, no choice at all.
And yet Khrushchev had thought his plan was brilliant. Apparently no one in the Kremlin had taken a day or two to game out the alternatives before shipping the missiles to Cuba. The possibility that the Americans would find out, make a public issue of it and then use their local naval and air superiority to make the Soviet position in Cuba untenable seems to have never crossed Khrushchev’s mind. Bank robbers plan better than that.
In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the West saw that “peaceful coexistence” had never been anything but a head fake, and that the Soviets were still capable of breathtaking and poorly planned recklessness.
One dramatic consequence was that the Soviets lost the propaganda war forever. The West, with its history of colonialism, militarism, racism and exploitation of workers, might have seemed like easy pickings for the Soviet propaganda machine, and indeed the Russians managed to hold their own to some extent, despite their economic failings, until the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. But the Cuban Missile Crisis the next year finished off their credibility. It’s one thing to be regarded as an undemocratic aggressor, but to be seen as stupid enough to get everyone killed was the end of the line. Even people in the West who wanted fundamental change wrote Moscow off.
A few months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, my Sunday School teacher told the class that some of us would die in a war against communism; there were about a dozen of us. He said that to illustrate the urgency of attending to our souls. I was thirteen.
If the reader has gotten the drift on how Cold War socialization worked, he or she may guess how we reacted: we said nothing, and we didn’t talk about it later, either.
A year later, a history teacher remarked offhand that if the Russians launched their missiles, our government probably wouldn’t tell us, to avoid panic. “Our first warning would be a bright flash,” he said. Again, no one reacted, no one said a word.
The Cuban Missile Crisis also created a new, hard-edged attitude in the West. In 1965-1966, when the Indonesian army massacred 500,000-1,000,000 communists, Western media and politicians openly rejoiced. (Bobby Kennedy was the honorable exception.) But despite the monstrousness of this event, the Soviets and the Chinese were unable to make propaganda hay out of it—nor did they even try much. In the UN, only Albania objected.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965%E2%80%9366]
Western countries had suppressed or isolated communist parties early in the Cold War, but this seldom involved prison terms, much less the death penalty, except for spies. Communists were sometimes murdered in the Third World, but even that was unusual except during active fighting. A massacre of large numbers of ordinary communists—along with their families—had never been contemplated during the forties and fifties.
But after the Cuban Missile Crisis that changed. Communists were feared and hated with a new and particular intensity, and brutalization became part of Cold War socialization.
Think how much American socialization had changed in only twenty years. In 1943-1945, American troops fought in Europe, and without being trained or ordered to do so, they spontaneously fed civilians, including Italians and Germans. European civilians had never met an army like that.
[Up Front, by Bill Mauldin. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1945, pp 65-70]
And although this might have been a surprise to Europeans, it wasn’t to American civilians—-why, anyone would do the same, they thought. The troops were just reflecting the values of their society.
And yet twenty years later Americans were rejoicing at the news that communists—or people accused of being communists—were hacked to death without a fair trial. Further, their families were often killed as well, including newborns.
Naturally, people died so their accusers could seize their land, or because someone owed money they couldn’t pay, or because of unrequited love, or merely out of envy at another’s fine qualities.
At the time, it wasn’t even illegal to be a member of the Communist Party in Indonesia.
Early in the Cold War, Americans assumed the justice of their cause. Our society wasn’t perfect, but we were open-hearted and optimistic; our institutions were better at limiting conflict than those of Europe. We believed in the law; we helped our former enemies via the Marshall Plan. We recoiled in horror at Stalin’s purges and show trials.
But with the Indonesian massacre, (which the CIA helped organize and may even have instigated) we lost our right to feel superior. We had changed, and not for the better. And deep down, we knew it.
Even in the Odyssey, Odysseus orders his followers not to gloat over their dead enemies. It is impious to do so, he tells them. Had Americans become more brutal than people of the Bronze Age?
It was a horrible development, but it’s easy to understand how it happened. Something broke inside us during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We didn’t lose our resolve to resist communism, but we began to hate in a way that alienated us from our own deepest values.
The inevitable reaction wasn’t long in coming. Was it better to revel in the deaths of a million Indonesians, or to hang crystals in your window and put flowers in your hair? Of course, it didn’t have to be crystals and flowers, it could have been anything. But somehow we had to reject the nihilism of our socialization.
However, the geopolitics hadn’t changed. We still had to defend Europe and Japan from the Soviets. Russia was a real threat, and even the few Marxists around were careful to dissociate themselves from the Kremlin.
The social and cultural solution was brilliant: to oppose Cold War socialization, with all its apathy, despair and brutalization, without opposing the strategy of containment where it made sense. By living in peace, love and joy—in opposition, that is, to Cold War socialization—we could at least demonstrate to our enemies that we meant them no harm.
And better yet, we could actually live. We could be free of fear for whatever time we had left.
[personal memory]
Living in opposition to Cold War socialization was a complex task, of course. How do you question and revise everything you know, everything you value? But people managed, because the psyche is capable of transformation; whenever we think something, we have at that moment the ability to ask ourselves, Is that really true? And is that any way to be?
This complexity of changing one’s socialization was reduced because the situation itself imposed a rough priority order. The highest priority was changing male socialization. The Cold War couldn’t exist without young men accepting a socialization that was simultaneously violent and profoundly passive. During the Cold War, there was no way that young men could, by their efforts and sacrifices, protect their people. In fact, they had to accept that their people could disappear in a nuclear flash at any time. They possessed the brutality of helplessness.
So, hair had to grow. Today, young people long to shock without ever quite succeeding in doing so. But the Sixties were different. Long hair was a clear signal that you opposed the current masculine socialization, and it was stunning in the extreme. You didn’t have to be conservative to worry about the destabilizing effect of such a radical step. Even people who longed for change were often frightened. What comes next?
Much later, in 1972 when Americans were starting to leave Vietnam, I had a conversation about long hair with a woman I knew, a graduate student in English. As an undergraduate, she had been in a sorority. She had graduated from high school in 1965; I was two years younger.
She said, “It seemed to happen almost overnight. In 1967 practically nobody had long hair. We saw hippies on TV, Haight-Ashbury and so on. By early 1968 we started to see a few boys on campus with long hair, and then suddenly it was everyone.”
“Did you have long hair back then?” she asked.
“Yes, I started with a beard, in 1968. And then…..you just stop going to the barber.”
“And you protested the war?”
“Oh yes.”
“And it didn’t bother you when people called you a coward?”
“Not really. That whole perspective didn’t have any credibility with me, with any of us. If we fight a war, we need a good reason. We can’t kill and be killed just because someone might call us a coward otherwise.”
“My father and uncles were so negative about long-haired boys and protestors,” she said. “My father was certain it was just a small minority, maybe communist-inspired, and that we would win the war soon and things would go back to normal. And I accepted that, until the Tet Offensive—then I knew the war was going to continue for a while. My sorority sisters mostly didn’t want the war, and they were getting the same message at home I was getting. What could anyone do? We felt helpless.”
“But then,” she continued, “the protests kept getting bigger and we realized the protestors weren’t giving up; it was like the sun had come out. At least someone was doing something.”
In this conversation, we see the struggle of rival systems of socialization. My acquaintance and her sorority sisters felt exactly what they were supposed to feel: helpless. And they did exactly what they were supposed to do: nothing. This was Cold War socialization in a nutshell—at the time, it was shocking that the Vietnam War was seen as political, and that we could debate it. In a de-politicized society, viewing war as a political issue was revolutionary—and I don’t mean “revolutionary” in ironic air-quotes.
People were dying needlessly, and we took to the streets. What decent man could do otherwise?
On my side of the conversation, I took the best-marked escape route from Cold War socialization: the ideals and vision of the Enlightenment. As a bookish youth, the Enlightenment was accessible to me, and of course it was all around us, fossilized so to speak, in our history, our educational system, our form of government and our holidays. But the Enlightenment was an active and optimistic time, and this implied an agency and resilience that hadn’t been available to Americans since World War II. Once free of the passivity and fear of Cold War socialization, there was no chance I would ever go back; the sense of freedom I felt validated my new way of life.
Note that I didn’t go far afield; I did not question the structure of consciousness (at least in the context of the Vietnam War), I did not adopt a pacifism I believed was unrealistic, and I didn’t switch sides in the Cold War. I read Marx, but I didn’t become a Marxist.
I merely insisted on the right to choose, based on Reason, whether I needed to fight or not. And because I chose the Enlightenment instead of Cold War socialization, my acquaintance understood what I meant, because she and I grew up in the same civilization; we were on familiar—and shared—ground.
And when she said, “it was like the sun came out,” she was right. It was the sun of our new socialization, of our new selves. And this newness was immeasurably ancient as well.
No, we would not accept our own extinction.
Of course, my acquaintance and her sisters turned initially to their parents for guidance. But a circumstance of the times was that youth were on average already better educated than their elders, whose education had often been interrupted by the Depression and World War II. So parents were often instructing their college-age children from a position of relative ignorance, and as I pointed out earlier, family discipline had already been weakened by Cold War socialization.
The media at that time wasn’t monolithic, but almost all major newspapers supported the war; for example, 90% of them endorsed Nixon for re-election in ’72. TV news was more balanced, but Walter Cronkite was something of an outlier. TV news in general resisted either condemning the war or supporting it openly.
An important dividing line was how the media viewed the counterculture and war protestors in particular. Some newspapers violently disparaged the protestors on their editorial pages and even in their news articles; others were more civil. This was important because Nixon and Congressional Republicans worked hard to change the subject from policy to the anti-war movement. Nixon knew he couldn’t win the argument over policy, because he planned all along to withdraw while pretending to fight until the communists were defeated. Politicians often lie to avoid looking bad, but Nixon’s entire Vietnam policy was based on a lie. So, while preparing to withdraw, he demonized the people who were demanding he do just that.
[H.R. Haldeman. This was either in his diaries or his book, The Ends of Power.]
And he likewise demonized the media for portraying the war—and not the anti-war movement—as the real problem.
An important part of Nixon’s narrative was that the “silent majority” supported him, and of course they did until they didn’t. But he and his supporters went further and claimed that most young people weren’t burning their bras or taking LSD, and therefore they loathed everything about the counterculture and loved Nixon and the Republican Party. To describe this as a half-truth would be too generous. The problem was this: people were opposing Cold War socialization in all sorts of ways, and which issue most concisely expressed that opposition? It wasn’t marijuana or other drugs, it wasn’t the Sexual Revolution, it wasn’t rock music or civil rights or Asian spirituality. It wasn’t even the Vietnam War, although we’re getting warmer.
It was conscription, and practically every young person opposed it. Conscription was more basic that the Vietnam War, which would have been impossible without it. Conservative young Catholics who went to mass opposed conscription. Fraternity boys and sorority girls opposed it. Young Baptists opposed it. Rural Southerners might have been a tad more accepting of the draft, but they didn’t speak in favor of it or support it.
[personal memory]
Opposing conscription was a rejection of Cold War socialization, particularly male socialization. Opposition meant choosing civilian life; it meant people had decided to believe they had a future, a remarkable act of faith under the circumstances. The Cold War couldn’t be denied as a geopolitical reality, but we didn’t have to let it into our hearts and minds.
This shift couldn’t have occurred unless the state had lost considerable credibility on matters of war and peace, and this wasn’t entirely due to the Cuban Missile Crisis. We fought half the years from 1950 to 1973—a generation, and without a clear victory. If the domino theory required that level of commitment, then we might very well lose the Cold War in the Third World; the burden was unsustainable.
As I mentioned above, the first priority in the reaction against the Cold War was to change male socialization. The second priority was to restore our connection to nature, but this went far beyond window gardens and bird feeders, because we are ourselves part of nature.
Although I am talking about these developments as “priorities,” the reader should understand that this wasn’t a linear, discrete process; everything affected everything else, and each new development sent out waves of influence in all directions, like a stone dropped in a pond. The overall cultural situation quickly became too complex to understand in real time.
These were “priorities” only in a logical sense: restoring our connection to nature was unthinkable if male socialization was still profoundly nihilistic, to take one example. Of course, these two developments could (and did) proceed in parallel, and they definitely influenced each other. It’s even possible to see them as the same phenomenon appearing in different contexts.
The political side of restoring our connection to nature was the environmental movement, which was careful not to widen its critique to include capitalism. It certainly occurred to some thinkers (Murray Bookchin, to take one example) that environmental destruction was rooted in capitalism, but the mainstream environmental organizations didn’t make that case, for obvious reasons: you couldn’t build a mass movement if you sounded remotely like Pravda.
So they pretended that it was mere coincidence that massive environmental degradation was occurring as a result of capitalist activities. That pretense was a political necessity in 1969; it weakened the environmental movement in the long run, but that’s a different essay.
Leaving the political situation aside, when we set out to restore our connection to nature, what implications did that have for our socialization? One obvious change was that we began to appreciate subjectivity again.
The Cold War was harshly materialistic; it was objective in a brutalist sort of way, and decidedly opposed to the subjective. Of course it was opposed to the subjective; if openly discussing—or even consciously acknowledging—our feelings had become the norm in the Fifties it would have been a disaster, because the entire country was teetering on the edge of despair.
The Fifties were the decade when Americans stopped reading poetry. The audience that had only recently read Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Whitman and Tennyson seemed to have disappeared almost overnight. Even Frost’s audience systematically misunderstood him. People complained bitterly about “modern” poetry; they could have simply read the pre-modern poets their parents and grandparents read, but they didn’t do that either. Reading poetry means opening your heart to the poem, and people who live in mortal fear cannot easily do so.
[Poetry and the Age, by Randall Jarrell. Knopf, January 1, 1953 (First Edition). ASIN: B0007DNO8K]
Poetry had been a significant part of Western subjectivity for millennia, and before the Fifties many educated people read poetry. But Cold War socialization mostly destroyed the taste for poetry. Of course there were poets: Frost and Wallace Stevens, Ginsburg and Snyder, but their audience was a mere remnant. By the ‘70s few English professors read poetry, unless they specialized in a particular author, like Shakespeare or Milton. In other words, most of them didn’t read poetry unless they got paid for it.
The Sixties saw a remarkable return to subjectivity, but it seemed the old Western habits had been partly lost. Poetry, painting, classical and ecclesiastical music, prayer and keeping a diary had mostly fallen by the wayside. In the Sixties, poetry and music sometimes had “protest” as their subject, natural enough under the circumstances. But protest weakened the subjective content of these arts. Classical music was no longer relevant—large numbers of people found it unlistenable; they could no longer find any subjective value in it, and how remarkable is that? And likewise for painting and sculpture. Cold War socialization had drained the life from Western artistic treasures.
Fiction did not disappear, but novels lost much of their gravitas. How convincing could the ending of any novel ever be, as long as nuclear war remained a possibility?
Popular music and drugs were the primary subjective modes in the Sixties, with yoga and meditation trailing in the distance. After a long pause, “journaling” came back into fashion, sometimes for therapeutic purposes.
Pop music and drugs were thin fare compared to poetry, paintings, classical music, prayer and keeping a diary. The old system had a richness and subtlety that was lost. Of course, the older modes of subjectivity were largely discredited during the World Wars, before the rise of Cold War socialization. The invention of nuclear weapons occurred in a context of profound spiritual exhaustion.
In the Sixties, there was an objectification of the subjective—we were drawn to subjective experiences that had a strong objective correlative: sex and drugs; somehow, we couldn’t give up the reductive materialism of Cold War socialization. Even popular music became more limited after about 1970, more homogenized. The folk and blues influences were hardly noticeable, and psychedelic visions were pushed to the fringe.
And in Eastern religions, the objectification of the subjective amounted almost to self-parody, as detailed in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Trungpa Rinpoche.
The objectification of the subjective was also correlated with an uncritical acceptance of individualism. The change in male socialization characteristic of the early counter-culture did not include a critique of individualism, for the good reason that Cold War socialization involved the near-obliteration of Enlightenment individualism. Indeed, the Sixties exalted individualism, for example in Thoreau’s influence on conscientious objectors.
But that was individualism in service to peace, reason and humanity. And at the time, people did not generally understand that refusing the draft was entirely different from snorting cocaine; those two were seen as part of a continuum of countercultural individualism.
To take a single moment as an example, it wasn’t clear in 1967 that a permanent hedonistic drug culture would emerge from the counterculture, and yet here we are, and that’s down to the lack of a critique of individualism. If we didn’t understand that misusing individualism was possible, then we wouldn’t see the probable results of that misuse, including addiction.
Likewise, the idea of liberation changed as time passed. Initially, the primary problem was the threat of nuclear war, and the supporting or compensatory socialization already discussed. Although the threat of nuclear war was a collective problem, Cold War socialization could be seen as an individual problem, or as partly individual. With the rise of feminism and the gay movement, liberation came to be seen as primarily an individual affair: “the personal is political” was easily glossed as “only the personal is political.” But “personal” didn’t mean anything in particular because there was no critique of individualism.
And if not personal, then vaguely cultural or psychological. If asked to describe the current system, contemporary progressives say: racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, etc. They will talk about “toxic masculinity” but they won’t talk about “toxic individualism,” or about capitalism or the class structure. In modern progressivism, there is no system.
Eventually, without a critique of either capitalism or individualism, we ended up with today’s situation, where the only paths to liberation are seen as cultural or individual change. Amazingly, the George Floyd protests did not result in an effective organization or a legislative program. No laws passed Congress to deal with abusive policing or to better train police officers—and as far as I know, none were introduced.
And the same was true of the earlier Occupy Movement. Left-wing movements today never result in real change, nor are they designed to do so. They are designed to change the culture, or something. How did the organizers of the George Floyd protests anticipate their movement would improve policing? Through changing attitudes, or changing the culture? And maybe by defunding the police? They seemed to believe that specific proposals with broad popular support were almost in poor taste; they had no plan to govern.
And maybe around the margins they had some effect—the worst atrocities seem to result in cops being fired more often, and sometimes prosecuted. But as long as the current class structure is unchanged, severe policing of the underclass will continue. The purpose of the current class structure is to prevent non-billionaires from uniting around a common set of political goals, and for that to happen the underclass, the working class and the educated middle class must all face starkly different problems—or believe they do, at any rate.
[see Class and Underclass, above]
So, by a decades-long process of ignoring capitalism and individualism we have reached a point in history where mass movements for change never result in any. We can’t solve collective problems with a “personal is political” approach, and most of our current problems are collective: climate change, the assault on democracy and its replacement by billionaire autocracy, the sharp decline in life expectancy and fertility, the replacement of reasonable values and mores with nihilism.
This political decline or stasis is reflected in pop culture. Aside from some honorable exceptions like Pharrell Williams and Shakira, there isn’t much “there there” in modern popular music, particularly country. It’s pretty clear that Johnny Cash wouldn’t get a contract or even a manager nowadays, to take one example.
Nevertheless, the Sixties left much of lasting value. Over many centuries, autocracies have used militarism and military glory to control their populations, as we see in Russia today. But the legacy of the Sixties made that unusually difficult in America. Only 9/11 made Bush and Cheney’s adventurism possible, and in the long run they paid a high political price.
Linked to this anti-militarism was the re-evaluation of male socialization that took place in the Sixties. Although male socialization still needs a critique of individualism and is tragically undermined by the nihilism of Billionaire Capitalism, still: the Sixties set male socialization on a generally more peaceful path.
And the Sixties left us with a tradition of cultural revolution which, though often trivialized, may yet prove transformative.
Also, the renewal of subjectivity is still with us, for example in widespread and effective psychotherapy. Other examples include mindfulness training, the popularity of yoga and writing classes, and the slow but steady spread of Buddhism.
To sum up: we still know that pursuing military glory is harmful; we haven’t forgotten that boys must learn peace; we honor the life of the spirit; and we still believe in cultural and personal transformation. We never forgot the power of change.
All this we owe to the Sixties.
Further, an understanding of the Sixties can be the foundation for a theory of social change. If we compare the Sixties to the Enlightenment, we immediately see similarities. The religious wars, and the socialization required to sustain those wars, almost destroyed Western civilization. And people of good will reacted to that socialization by developing a vision of reason, tolerance, benevolence, and faith in progress. The parallel to the Cold War and the Sixties is obvious; in both cases people were caught in an unbearable situation and were socialized in monstrous ways, and in both cases they rebelled and turned their faces toward the light. They re-socialized themselves and in doing so they changed civilization; they changed what it meant to be human.
Does humanity need to understand how to change society for the better? The question answers itself—as a matter of fact, we could use some of that. To change society, we need to know how social change occurs, or has occurred in the past. And as we see from the Sixties and the Enlightenment, re-socialization is key.
Do we want to change society? And do we want to understand change? I think we do, but we don’t think it’s possible.
But it is. We can understand both the past and the present, perhaps not perfectly, but well enough to create a better future.
The Socialist Investor 