From Satori to Silicon Valley
by Theodore Roszak
Copyright 2000 by Theodore Roszak. All rights reserved.
The Gathering of the Tribes
In these days of instant nostalgia, current events pass from
journalism into folklore before they have had a decent chance
to become history. This is certainly true of the period we call
"the sixties." The American counter culture that flourished
during that period -- from the late fifties to the mid-seventies
-- has already been assigned a canonical image in television dramatizations
and the history texts now being used in our high schools and colleges.
It surfaces there in the latter chapters, where the narrative,
having swept like a stormy surf across the story of Vietnam and
Watergate, begins to ebb sullenly away toward the Carter and Reagan
years. The usual depiction is that of high-spirited young people,
ungroomed, unkempt, and uncouth, disporting themselves in the
open air -- a park, a field, a forest. Their straggly hair streams
free or is banded back Indian style. Their clothes are patched,
befringed, and beaded -- a motley of backwoods dishevelment and
barbaric splendor. Often they are loaded with backpacks, bedrolls,
stash bags that lend the aura of transiency: people on the road
far from home, ready to crash anywhere for the night -- in the
woods, under the stairs, in the back of the van. Mendicant citizens
of the world, pausing to sing or play as they make their way to
Berkeley or Boulder, Cambridge or Katmandu, North Beach or the
North Woods. Sometimes, more soberly, they flourish signs: "Make
Love not War," "End the Bombing Now," "Give
Peace a Chance."
Were there ever such people -- really? Yes and no. Every social
movement leaves behind recollections at once insightful and misleading.
The study of history would be lost without them. The stereotypic
Abolitionist, Robber Baron, Progressive Reformer, New Dealer is
as good a place as any to begin understanding the past, but each
of these inherited images needs critical adjusting. Also remember
that stereotypes in their own right tell us much about social
hopes, fantasies, and fears. And each has its history.
For some years now (since about half way through the seventies)
I have had the oppressive sense of an embarrassed reluctance on
all sides to recall the role that was once played in our society
by the people whom the media named beatniks, hippies, flower children.
When their period in history is mentioned, many hasten to attach
a snide disclaimer, a wised-up dismissal. We peer back in time
through decades of fickle journalism, national self-doubt, and
social backlash, wondering if the dissenting politics of the sixties
might simply have been another media fiction. Certainly in recent
years, the only flesh and blood examples of the countercultural
image I have come across have been the barely surviving casualties
of the era that still haunt downtown Berkeley, panhandling for
spare change. Their sad squalor is evidence of nothing braver
or more inspiring than being bummed out and overaged.
Yet, with a little effort and some candor, I can remember
the happier originals of these faded caricatures as they once
enlivened the streets of the Haight-Ashbury and Telegraph Avenue.
In its time, their persona of ragged independence -- or some reasonable
facsimile thereof -- was a proud and prominent emblem of cultural
disaffiliation blossoming in the streets of every major city,
on the campus of every minor college and high school. It was a
stance that claimed to have broken irrevocably with the urban-industrial
culture that ruled the world then, and more so now. The style
purported to be "natural," "organic," a principled
rejection of well-behaved, antiseptic, upwardly mobile middle-class
habits in favor of a return to folk origins and lost traditions.
A bit of the Bohemian rebel, a bit of the noble savage. Those
who assumed the full dissenting identity of the time spoke of
themselves as "freaks" and assembled in hastily improvised
and ephemeral "tribes" where simple and funky living
was the rule. At the Morning Star Ranch in Marin, the residents
called their way of life "voluntary primitivism," a
design for living that transcended both excessive affluence and
minimal hygiene.
For some, the search for a postindustrial alternative
led out of the cities to rural communes, few of which were destined
to survive. But even in the cities, one could find "collectives"
where the ethos was that of urban cave-dwellers, camping out indoors.
In Berkeley in the late sixties, when my wife and I were looking
for a house to rent, we had occasion to inspect a number of these
domestic experiments -- or what was left in their wake after the
resident tribe had decamped without paying the rent. Musty houses
in a state of advanced disrepair where the inhabitants had once
pitched tents in the living room or spent the night in sleeping
bags. In the kitchens, pantries were filled with stale brown rice
and active vermin; in the refrigerators, one might find several
months' supply of spoiled groceries and well-sprouted soy cakes.
In these quarters, one sensed that organic foods were a sort of
talisman, sufficiently potent in their very presence to repeal
the germ theory of disease. Also there were the signs of many
animals once in residence and still haunting the premises -- unleashed,
unhousebroken, very likely unfed. In the Haight-Ashbury and the
East Bay, there was a cult of the "organic dog" -- the
larger, the less washed and tamed, the better. For a period, there
were neighborhoods in Berkeley and San Francisco that took on
the look and the fragrance of barnyards or hunting camps.
The people who lived through these episodes, once at war with
the parental generation of their day, have themselves become the
parents of the students I now teach. They did not vanish in a
puff of smoke but have lived on as part of the eighty-million
strong baby boom generation to find jobs, raise families, run
for office, play the market. Some of them, mainly women, now show
up in my classes as "older students," often returning
to take up the education they dropped out of twenty-some years
ago. Now in their forties or fifties with easily another thirty
years of longevity ahead of them, these aging boomers sometimes
seek me out during office hours to lament how difficult it is
for them to raise their kids in this era of crack cocaine and
AIDS. Dare they be as permissive as their parents once were when
Dr. Spock was the domestic gospel? Looking back, they, like me,
are left with many questions, not least of all how we got from
the heady idealism of the counter culture to Reaganomics and the
Moral Majority, Nine Inch Nails and the dot.com feeding frenzy.
I'm not sure I know. But I have these thoughts about the line
of descent that led from satori to Silicon Valley.
Contents
Some Afterthoughts in the Year 2000
From Satori to Silicon Valley by Theodore Roszak
Copyright 2000 by Theodore Roszak. All rights reserved.