Counterculture Through the Ages by Ken Goffman

Author:Ken Goffman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307414830
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

REVOLUTION: YOU BETTER FREE YOUR MIND INSTEAD?

Each “cause” as it is called,—say Abolition, Temperance, say Calvinism, or Unitarianism,—becomes speedily a little shop, where the article, let it have been at first ever so subtle or ethereal, is now made up into portable and convenient cakes, and retailed in small quantities to suit purchasers.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

The worst, the pure transcendentalists, incapable of effective human relations, terrified of responsibility, given to transforming evasion into moral triumph.

ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR.

A preacher is a bully.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

How does it become a man to behave toward [his] government to-day?... He cannot without disgrace be associated with it.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU, CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

The political dynamics of America as it entered the 1830s were similar to the current ones. Ownership and oligarchical power were solidifying into the hands of the wealthy few. A conservative party, the Whigs, represented this status quo. The Democratic Party presumed to represent a populist challenge to the elite, but was compromised and riddled with corrupt personalities. Hope experienced resurgence when Andrew Jackson, a Democrat, emerged as a moderately more bona fide representative of the populists’ concerns. Jackson was well loved among artists and writers, but our gang of nonconformists was not enticed. In a historical essay, sixties Kennedy advisor and liberal Democrat Arthur Schlesinger complained:

The transcendentalists... constituted the one important literary group nevermuch impressed by Jacksonian democracy.... Both Democrats and transcendentalists agreed in asserting the rights of the free mind against the pretensions of precedents or institutions. Both shared a living faith in the integrity and perfectibilityof man.... Both detested special groups claiming authority to mediate between the common man and the truth. “The soul must and will assert its rightful ascendancy,” exclaimed the Bay State Democrat, “over all those arbitrary and conventional forms which a false state of things has riveted upon society.” ...

But transcendentalism in its Concord form was infinitely individualistic, providing no means for reconciling the diverse institutions of different men and deciding which was better and which was worse.

In parallel with Andrew Jackson’s electoral reformation, a deeper and more radical form of activism was emerging—the abolitionist movement. By the 1830s, Northerners were becoming more vociferous about their moral objections to slavery in the South. Common folks organized to protect escaped slaves (Thoreau’s mother among them) and young idealists were spreading a strong anti-slavery message. Meanwhile their political representatives, even liberal Jacksonians, refused to take up the cause.

In a near-mirror image of the 1960s and 1970s, African-American rights and opposition to an imperial foreign war (in this case, with Mexico) would foment political rebellion in tandem with the entire Transcendentalist epoch. And the Transcendentalists’ role in those times maps almost precisely to the part the psychedelic hippie culture played in its ambiguous relationship to the activist movement of its time. Our spiritual and cultural revolutionaries found themselves simultaneously a part of— and in conflict with—the political rebellion.

To the extent that the Transcendentalists had politics, they were rife with contradiction, a situation that does not contradict the Transcendentalist worldview. Emerson famously wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

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