[John]
But all things considered, I don't judge
[returning to the last static latch] as the right
place to go... I say we need something new.
[Arlo]
Although Platt serves up nothing but the expected
anti-hippie drumbeats of the conservatives
whenever its mentioned, I think its very valuable
to consider that, according to Pirsig, the
"Hippie Revolution" WAS the new, moral direction we should have gone.
Yes, yes... the Hippies got bogged down in
confusing Dynamic with biological quality. But
for where to go, or where we should have gone,
its a worthwhile dialogue to go back to the
beginnings of the so-called Hippie Revolution and
see where they should have gone.
Some thoughts...
"From World War I until World War II the
intellectuals dominated unchallenged. From World
War II until the seventies the intellectuals
continued to dominate, but with an increasing
challenge-call it the "Hippie revolution" -which
failed. And from the early seventies on there has
been a slow confused mindless drift back to a
kind of pseudoVictorian moral posture
accompanied by an unprecedented and unexplained growth in crime.
Of these periods, the last two seem the most
misunderstood. The Hippies have been interpreted
as frivolous spoiled children, and the period
following their departure as a "return to
values," whatever that means. The Metaphysics of
Quality, however, says that's backward: the
Hippie revolution was the moral movement. The
present period is the collapse of values." (LILA)
"The Hippie revolution of the eighties was a
moral revolution against both society and intellectuality." (LILA)
Pirsig's Catch-22 about this continues to define where we are today.
"If [intellectualism] continued to advocate more
freedom from Victorian social restraint, all it
would get was more Hippies, who were really just
carrying its anti-Victorianism to an extreme. If,
on the other hand, it advocated more constructive
social conformity in opposition to the Hippies,
all it would get was more Victorians, in the form
of the reactionary right." (LILA)
"... more Victorians, in the form of the reactionary right"... worth noting.
"Phaedrus thought that this Hippie revolution
could have been almost as much an advance over
the intellectual twenties as the twenties had
been over the social 1890s..." (LILA)
"The Hippie rejection of social and intellectual
patterns left just two directions to go: toward
biological quality and toward Dynamic Quality.
The revolutionaries of the sixties thought that
since both are anti-social, and since both are
anti-intellectual, why then they must both be the
same. That was the mistake." (LILA)
Although Pirsig doesn't give year-cutoffs as to
when on the calendar the Hippie movement went
astray, we can at the least infer that the "good"
Hippie time was likely from around the
publication of "On the Road" in 1957 until the
popularized Summer of Love in 1967.
In fact, Pirsig sort of alludes to the idea that
Keroac is one of the voices of this early "good Hippie" stage.
"The culture-bearing book of the period, On the
Road, by Jack Kerouac, was a running lecture
against intellect. ". . . All my New York friends
were in the negative nightmare position of
putting down society and giving their tired
bookish or political or psychoanalytic reasons,"
Kerouac wrote, "but Dean" (the hero of the book)
"just raced in society, eager for bread and love;
he didn't care one way or the other."" (LILA)
Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Ken Kesey and
Tom Wolfe are other "good Hippies" (IMHO) whose
ideas express this early "moral revolution"
before the movement was derailed by indiscriminate biological degeneracy.
Pirsig's own Peyote Experience, that acted as a
catalyst for his formulation of the MOQ, reflects
the early Hippie ideas towards the use of
mind-altering substances. As Pirsig points out,
though, the language itself is clearly biased.
" The majority opposition to peyote reflected a
cultural bias, the belief, unsupported by
scientific or historical evidence, that
"hallucinatory" experience is automatically bad.
Since hallucinations are a form of insanity, the
term, "hallucinogen," is clearly pejorative. Like
early descriptions of Buddhism as a "heathen"
religion and Islam as "barbaric," it begs some
metaphysical questions. The Indians who use it as
part of their ceremony might with equal accuracy
call it a "de-hallucinogen," since it's their
claim that it removes the hallucinations of
contemporary life and reveals the reality buried beneath them.
There is actually some scientific support for
this Indian point of view. Experiments have shown
that spiders fed LSD do not wander around doing
purposeless things as one might expect a
"hallucination" would cause them to do, but
instead spin an abnormally perfect, symmetrical
web. That would support the "de-hallucinogen"
thesis. But politics seldom depends on facts for its decisions." (LILA)
It would also place Pirsig himself squarely in
the "good Hippie" category, even though these
books were not published until after 1967, the
Peyote Experience with Dusenberry clearly shows
Pirsig as a contemporary thinker to Kerouac and Wolfe and these others.
We likely can't recreate a failed revolution, the
symbolism is too entrenched, too cliche, too
"old" to serve as the new direction now.
As Campbell reminds us, "Only birth can conquer
death; the birth, not of the old thing again, but
of something new. Within the soul, within the
body social, there must be- if we are to
experience long survival- a continuous
recurrence of birth to nullify the unremitting
recurrences of death. ... Peace then is a snare;
war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence is
a snare." (Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces)
But it is, I am convinced, a high quality
endeavor to go back to the formations of the
Hippie's moral revolution, see what it is they
were trying to accomplish, what it was the early
Hippies were saying, before the movement got
derailed, and ask what about what they were
saying made it "the next moral revolution".
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