Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (119 page)

Zen received a massive boost from an entirely separate book,
Robert Pirsig
’s
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
(1974).
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This was a road book. Pirsig took his young son and some friends on a vacation through the backroads of America – as the book opens, they are biking between Minneapolis and the Dakotas. The text alternates between lyrical passages of life on the road – the sheer walls of canyons, the soft beds of pine needles that the bikers sleep on, the smell of rain – and rhetorical discussions of philosophy. Pirsig’s main target is what he calls the Church of Reason. He moves between Eastern mystics, Zen Buddhism, and classical Greek philosophers in particular. For him the motorcycle maintenance manual shows the typical dead hand of reason: meticulously
accurate, dull, and before you can use it you need to know everything about bikes. Opposed to that is the ‘feel’ that a true mechanic has for machines. Pirsig’s most original ideas are new ways to conceive experience: rhetoric, quality, and ‘stuckness.’ Reason does not have to be a dialectic, he says. Rhetoric carries with it the idea that knowledge is never neutral but always has value and therefore leads somewhere. Quality is a difficult entity to describe, but as Pirsig uses the idea, he says that we recognise quality in art, say, or literature, or in a machine, and that such recognition is
unthinking.
‘Stuckness’ is being immersed in a line of thought with an inability to shake free. The form of Pirsig’s book, itself rhetorical, was designed to show his appreciation of the quality of nature, and the way he had come unstuck in his own thinking.

‘What the counter-culture offers us, then,’ concluded Roszak, ‘is a remarkable defection from the long-standing tradition of sceptical, secular intellectuality which has served as the prime vehicle for three hundred years of scientific and technical work in the West. Almost overnight (and astonishingly, with no great debate on the point) a significant portion of the younger generation has opted out of that tradition, rather as if to provide an emergency balance to the gross distortions of our technological society.’
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Although it has long since disappeared as the entity described by Roszak, the counter-culture was not a complete dead end. Besides its input into the green movement and feminism, many of the psychotherapies that flowered under the counter-culture bordered on the religious: Erhard Seminar Training (est), Insight, primal therapy, rebirthing, Arica, bioenergetics, and Silva Mind Control were more than therapies, offering group experiences and ritual similar to church. All of them involved some form of body manipulation – rapid, chaotic breathing to build tension, shouting or screaming as a form of release. Often, such activities ended in group sex. Equally often, these therapy-religions had quite a complex set of ideas behind them, but it was rarely necessary for the ordinary members to be familiar with that: there was always a clerisy on hand to help. What mattered was the experience of tension and its release.
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Judged by the numbers who still followed the mainstream belief systems, the new therapy-religions were small beer; they never comprised more than a few hundred thousands. Their significance lay in the fact that people turned to them because life had become ‘so fragmented that they [found] it increasingly difficult to draw on their public roles for a satisfying and fulfilling sense of identity.’
⁴⁰
This is why the historian of religion Steve Bruce called these new movements ‘self-religions,’ because they elevated the self, if not to centre stage, then at least to far more importance than the traditional mainstream faiths: each individual had his or her turn at the centre.

One man who was fascinated by this idea, and ran with it in a series of brilliantly witty essays, was the American journalist Tom Wolfe. Wolfe was the inventor (in the 1960s) of something that came to be called the New Journalism (the capitals are customary). This was Wolfe’s attempt to get beyond the ‘pale beige tone’ of most reporting, and to do so he employed many tricks and devices from fiction in an effort to get inside the minds of the people being written about; far from being mere neutral reporting, his journalism was
enriched (victims would say distorted) by a point of view. Essentially a comic, even a manic writer, Wolfe’s main aim was to chronicle the fragmentation and diversity of (American) culture, which has evolved its own, often bizarre art forms, lifestyles, and status rituals.
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The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
(1968) included an hilarious account of a journey across America in a psychedelic-painted bus with a crew of ‘acid-heads,’ complete with vernacular conversation and punctuation.
Radical Chic
(1970) was about the svelte sophisticates of New York, conductor Leonard Bernstein in particular, entertaining the Black Panthers (‘I’ve never met a Panther – this is a first for me!’) and conducting an auction to help their cause where the bidders included Otto Preminger, Harry Belafonte, and Barbara Walters.
Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
(also 1970) chronicled the way black recipients of welfare hopelessly outwit the various functionaries whose job it is to see that the system is not abused.
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But it was in
The Me Decade
(1976) that Wolfe took up where Daniel Bell, Theodore Roszak, and Steve Bruce left off.
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For Wolfe actually attended some of the sessions of these self-religions, and he wasn’t taken in for a moment – or at least that’s how he saw it. He called them Lemon-Sessions, and ‘Lemon-Session Central’ was the Esalen Institute, a lodge perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific in Big Sur, California; but Wolfe made it clear that he included Arica, Synanon, and Primal Scream therapy in this pantheon. Although many people wondered what the appeal was of spending days on end in the close company of people who were complete strangers, Wolfe knew: ‘The appeal was simple enough. It is summed up in the notion: “Let’s talk about Me.” ‘Wolfe saw the obsession with the self as a natural (but unwholesome) development of the counter-culture, a follow-on of the campaign for personal liberation that went with the sexual revolution, experiments with drugs, and the new psychologies. It was, said Wolfe, the natural corollary of alienation (Marx), anomie (Durkheim), mass man (Ortega y Gasset), and the lonely crowd (Riesman). But then he added, in his usual style, ‘This [alienated] victim of modern times has always been a most appealing figure to intellectuals, artists, and architects. The poor devil so obviously needs
us
to be his Engineers of the Soul, to use a term popular in the Soviet Union in the 1920s…. But once the dreary little bastards started getting money in the 1940s, they did an astonishing thing – they took their money and ran! They did something only aristocrats (and intellectuals and artists) were supposed to do – they discovered and started doting on Me!’
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Wolfe identified the Me decade, but it was
Christopher Lasch,
a psychoanalyst and professor at the University of Rochester in New York State, who went further than anyone else had done on the theme of
‘the Me decades’
and what would shortly be known as
‘the Me generation.’
In
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979) Lasch’s thesis was that the whole development of American society (and by implication other Western societies to a greater or lesser extent) had, since World War II, brought about the development of the narcissistic personality, so much so that it now dominated the entire culture. His book was a mixture of social criticism and psychoanalysis, and his starting point was not so very different from Daniel Bell’s.
⁴⁵
The subtitle of Lasch’s book was
‘American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations,’ and it began, ‘Defeat in Vietnam, economic stagnation, and the impending exhaustion of natural resources have produced a mood of pessimism in higher circles, which spreads through the rest of society as people lose faith in their leaders.’
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Liberalism, once the only game in town when Lionel Trilling was alive, was now ‘intellectually bankrupt…. The sciences it has fostered, once confident of their ability to dispel the darkness of the ages, no longer provide satisfactory explanations of the phenomena they profess to elucidate. Neoclassical economic theory cannot explain the coexistence of unemployment and inflation; sociology retreats from the attempt to outline a general theory of modern society; academic psychology retreats from the challenge of Freud into the measurement of trivia…. In the humanities, demoralisation has reached the point of a general admission that humanistic study has nothing to contribute to an understanding of the modern world.’
⁴⁷
Against this background, Lasch said, economic man had given way to psychological man, ‘the final product of bourgeois individualism.’ Lasch didn’t like this psychological man. Having set the scene, he waded into all aspects of a society that he thought had been affected by the essentially narcissistic personality of our time – work, advertising, sport, the schools, the courts, old age, and the relations between the sexes.

His first target was the awareness movement. ‘Having no hope of improving their lives in any of the ways that matter, people have convinced themselves that what matters is psychic improvement: getting in touch with their feelings, eating health food, taking lessons in ballet or belly-dancing, immersing themselves in the wisdom of the East, jogging, learning how to “relate,” overcoming their “fear of pleasure.” ‘
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Echoing Steve Bruce, Lasch argues that we have entered a period of ‘therapeutic sensibility’: therapy, he says, has established itself as the successor to rugged individualism and to religion, though he prefers to characterise it as an antireligion.
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He further argues that eventually this approach will serve as a replacement for politics. Norman Mailer’s
Advertisements for Myself
Philip Roth’s
Portnoy’s Complaint,
and Norman Podhoretz’s
Making It
are all examples of the self-absorption on the part of the middle and upper-middle classes, designed to insulate them against the horrors of poverty, racism, and injustice all around them. The new narcissism means that people are more interested in personal change than political change, and encounter groups, T-groups, and other forms of awareness training have, in effect, helped to abolish a meaningful inner private life – the private has become public in ‘an ideology of intimacy.’ This makes people less individualistic, less genuinely creative, and far more fad- and fashion-conscious. It follows, says Lasch, that lasting friendships, love affairs, and successful marriages are much harder to achieve, in turn thrusting people back on themselves, when the whole cycle recommences. He goes on to identify different aspects of the narcissistic society – the creation of celebrities who are ‘famous for being famous,’ the degradation of sport to commercialised entertainment rather than heroic effort, the permissiveness in schools and courts, which put the needs of ‘personal development’ above the more old-fashioned virtues of knowledge acquisition and punishment (and thus treat the young gently rather than inculcating the rugged individualism
that was once the tradition). In this context he also raises an issue that assumed greater relevance as the years went by, namely the attack on elites and the judgements they arrive at (as for example in the canon of books to be studied in schools). ‘Two contributors to a Carnegie Commission report on education condemn the idea that “there are certain works that should be familiar to all educated men” as inherently an “elitist notion.” Such criticisms often appear in company with the contention that academic life should reflect the variety and turmoil of modern society instead of attempting to criticise and thus transcend this confusion.’
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But, and here we get to the nub of Lasch’s criticism, he argued that the awareness movement had failed, and failed completely. It failed because, in so many words, it had produced a false consciousness. The emancipation that it supposedly brought about was in fact no emancipation at all, but merely a more sophisticated and more subtle form of control. The new awareness still involved old tricks to keep power and control in the hands of – generally speaking – those who had it before. The feminist movement may have brought about greater freedom for many women, but the cost was a huge rise in one-parent families, overwhelmingly a mother and child, which in turn put greater pressures on women and on the children, in many cases breeding a ‘revulsion’ against close personal relationships that made loving friendships more difficult and promoted a dependence on the self. One-parent families are often narcissistic families. In business, too, greater discussion and worker participation led in most cases only to talking shops, which may have made the management more liked but did not substantially change anything else. ‘The popularisation of therapeutic modes of thought discredits authority, especially in the home and the classroom, while leaving domination uncriticised. Therapeutic forms of social control, by softening or eliminating the adversary relation between subordinates and superiors, make it more and more difficult for citizens to defend themselves against the state or for workers to resist the demands of the corporation. As the ideas of guilt and innocence lose their moral and even legal meaning, those in power no longer enforce their rules by means of the authoritative edict of judges, magistrates, teachers, and preachers. Society no longer expects authorities to articulate a clearly reasoned, elaborately justified code of law and morality; nor does it expect the young to internalise the moral standards of the community. It demands only conformity to the conventions of everyday intercourse, sanctioned by psychiatric definitions of normal behavlour.’
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