How the Monism of the Sixties Counterculture Prepared for Wokeness
Discussion
David Chapman:
"“Left” and “right” would be the obvious names for the two countercultures, but that could be misleading. These terms are not well-defined, and had different meanings during the countercultural era than they did before or after.
Our current left and right like to be called “progressive” and “traditional”; and the countercultures might have liked that too. However, I will suggest that this characterization is a deliberately misleading fiction, promoted by both.
It would be more accurate to cast the countercultures in religious terms, as “holism” versus “holiness.” Or, in ethical terms, as “permissive” versus “restrictive”; or in social terms as “egalitarian” versus “respecting hierarchical differences.”
These contrasts concern boundaries and distinctions, one of the main dimensions of meaningness. So I call the two countercultures “monist” and “dualist”:
Monism seeks to deny, dissolve, or weaken boundaries and distinctions. (Holism is nearly the same thing as monism.) It seeks to discover and strengthen connections.
Dualism seeks to fixate, establish, or strengthen boundaries and distinctions. (Holiness is all about sharpening the difference between the sacred or Godly and the profane or sinful.) It seeks to sever connections that cross apparent boundaries. Monism and dualism are both wrong, and both harmful. Every boundary is always both patterned and nebulous. Boundaries are not, cannot be, and should not be, either non-existent nor perfectly sharp. Severe problems, including our current culture war, follow from trying to eliminate or absolutize them. An understanding of participation, the stance that the resolves the monism/dualism confusion, may help resolve these conflicts.
This page explains what made the “hippie” counterculture monist, first; and then what made the “Moral Majority” counterculture dualist. We’ll see also that the monist counterculture had some dualist elements; and that the dualist counterculture tacitly accepted some “hippie” monist boundary-blurrings.
Much of this material is controversial. Reading it, you may have strong emotional reactions, categorizing particular countercultural moves as good or bad. I would suggest trying to suspend such judgements. Each had, I think, both good and bad effects.
I hope you will recognize that I do not support either counterculture against the other. I find some aspects of each attractive, and some repellent. Overall, it is most important to understand why both were wrong, and both failed. But it is also valuable to understand what was right in each, and what might be worth saving from their wreckage.
On this page, I go into the history of the dualist counterculture in somewhat more detail, because it’s probably less well-known to most readers, and because I’ve written about the monist-countercultural religious left extensively elsewhere. If I seem critical of the 1980s Religious Right here, I assure you that I was just as hostile to the monist left there.
How the monist counterculture was monist
The specific contents of the monist counterculture—from recycling to Vietnam war protests—are familiar. Less obvious is the general pattern: that the specifics reflect the monist stance. It attempted to dissolve many particular boundaries, on the theory that they were illegitimate, alienating, and needlessly limiting. I’ll discuss these boundary erasures here only briefly. Some I’ve explained earlier in the book; many, I’ll return to in greater detail later.
Psychedelic drugs were a cornerstone of the counterculture; boundary-blurring is one of their major effects. They can give a sense of ultimate, cosmic unity—the supposed accomplishment of the monist stance. Short of that, they often melt distinctions of all sorts. It’s common, for instance, to have experiences of the commonality of all people, of humans with other creatures, and of the animate and inanimate.
Ecology—a new science—revealed that all life is connected in an intricate web of mutual dependencies. A cultural and political movement based on it began with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. Taking the unification of concerns a step further, countercultural theorist Theodore Roszak promoted “ecopsychology,” collapsing the distinctions among the natural, political, psychological, and spiritual worlds.
When you have experienced your intimate sameness with a tree, it is hard to take seriously human categories such as religions, nations, and races. The political universalism of the counterculture—the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, feminism—was based in this monist conception of human commonality.
The feminist slogan “the personal is political” expressed the essence of monist politics. The private/public boundary, a foundational principle for Victorian systematicity, disintegrated. The distinction between ethics (“ought” in the personal realm) and politics (“ought” in the public realm) collapsed. This collapse caused the culture war we’ve been cursed with since, so I devote a full page to it later.
Blurring the self/other distinction also contributed to the collapse of the boundary between psychology and religion (or “spirituality”). Monist religion holds that one’s True Self is the same as God, and the entire universe. Thus, exploration of one’s personal psychology gives direct insight into the most profound metaphysical questions. Monism erased the boundary between sacred and profane matters; nothing was any longer outside the purview of spiritual concern.
Since the personal was now both political and spiritual, the distinction between religion and politics also collapsed. Demands for political change were considered not merely a matter of one social group promoting its material interests against others, but to reflect Ultimate Truth as given by the monist eternal ordering principle.
The “sexual revolution” dissolved the sexual boundary of marriage, and eliminated most distinctions between “morally” acceptable and unacceptable sexual acts. The sexual revolution also reflected a collapse of the division between private and public morality. Privately, sexual mores had been loosening for half a century. A considerable gap had opened between what people did in their bedrooms and what they said in public. This was one of the most obvious forms of the 1950s moral hypocrisy that motivated the counterculture. To a significant extent, the sexual revolution merely allowed everyone to acknowledge what many had already been doing.
Feminism broke down boundaries between male and female social, sexual, and family roles.
The nuclear family home—a mainly Victorian middle-class invention—had long been found restrictive and isolating by many. The monist counterculture advocated replacing it with communes, collectives, and intentional communities: social structures that emphasize connections across biological families, and that break down the private/public boundary."