You really can’t get much of anywhere writing about Generation X or really any vernacular intellectual history in the US without talking about hippies. I’d say they “turn up where you don’t expect” but for people my age who pay attention, you just know to expect them, even if you once had a memory of being surprised by them turning up so prominently in, say, the history of computer and internet technology. If you’re doing a history of the concept of Gen X, you need, at the very least, to talk about the concept of generations itself, and the idea of “alternative” culture. Both will land you squarely back to the sixties, the counterculture, and hippies. A substantial portion of the pop-social-science literature on generation comes from people trying to explain the wayward youth of mid-century, and alternative both played out and reacted against the countercultural script.
All that is to say, I needed to read Theodor Roszak’s The Birth of a Counter Culture at some point.
Roszak was, arguably, the first sympathetic adult observer of the emerging counterculture to write a monograph on it. He might have been the one to give the counterculture its name. Roszak was a historian and peace activist, he was the proverbial “over thirty” by the time he wrote this book (published in 1969), but still well under forty.
His age would not have been that much of a problem anyway- he didn’t do much fieldwork, if any, in researching his “youthful dissidents” against “the technocracy.” Instead, he spent a long introductory chapter defining the “technocracy” that the counterculture opposed, things that the counterculture was not (mostly, a coherent political movement), and then shorter chapters about writers who influenced the counterculture: Herbert Marcuse, Norman Brown, Paul Goodman, assorted Beats.
I wrote last week about how a weird bit of recent-ish intellectual history, the Celtic Thesis, surprised me in a book, and here, I found myself once again with an old conceptual frenemy that pops up in my reading at strange moments: “personalism.” The word only shows up twice, and uncapitalized, but it shows up in an important part of the book, where Roszak was defining what the counterculture was for, after dozens of pages describing the soul crushing, mechanistic Technocracy that it is against, and how the counterculture links up with the New Left. The Technocratic system is bureaucratic, rational, and wants people to be like machines- the counterculture and, to the extent it hasn’t been captured by technocratic communism, the New Left, wants people to be like people. This is how Roszak saw it, and why he was willing to go to bat for the counterculture, excesses and all, in his telling.
A wide variety of people and movements have self-defined as “personalist” since the 1930s. Wikipedia pages aren’t proof of much, but the one for personalism is a real dog’s breakfast, describing disparate theological, philosophical, and political movements and figures as personalist. I get the idea that a few different kinds of enthusiasts and pedants have worried that bone of a page- personalism is at one and the same time an “ism” (hence attractive to rules lawyers), notoriously vague, and an attractive name for an ideology if you don’t know better. Who doesn’t want to be for people, for persons even?
Well… Personalism, as something other than a rather abstruse theological or abstract-philosophical concept, is really more about what it isn’t than what it is. Personalism as a consistent political thread first came into being among somewhat-left-leaning French Catholic intellectuals in the thirties, defining itself as neither communist nor fascist, the two rising ideological formations at the time. In subsequent years, personalists from Emmanuel Mounier (the father of the movement in France) to South Vietnamese strongman Ngo Dinh Diem and his family have often reconciled themselves with right-wing authoritarianism, but never with the revolutionary left. Mounier nearly starved himself to death in a Gestapo jail cell, but after his release, he was perfectly content to teach seminars for higher ups in the Vichy regime. The Ngos, Diem the strongman, his brother Nhu the secret policeman, and sister-in-law Lady Nhu the shit-stirrer (who arguably cost both men their lives), tried to present the Catholic-Confucian mishmash of their version of Personalism as an alternative to western liberal democracy as well as to the communism of the revolution in their country. As far as anyone can tell, the implementation of their ideology meant apology for authoritarian rule, boring the shit out of the US ambassador and anyone else who had to sit down for Ngo for dinner and be subjected to his postprandial lectures, and cheaping out on building the “new villages” that peasants were often forced to move to, to keep them away from the VC. If they only had the Personalist spirit, it was reasoned, they could build their own new homes (after the army burnt their old ones) and not beg for supplies to do so!
Whatever else he thought, Theodore Roszak thought the American war in Vietnam was an atrocious travesty, so I doubt he would have thought the personalism he endorses here had much to do with the Ngo brothers. Roszak wouldn’t have made those poor peasants leave their villages. I don’t even know if Roszak knew that “personalism” as a term had a history, or which strand of its history he’d know if he did.
Personalism doesn’t interest me because it’s especially malevolent (though the Ngo brothers were real rough customers), or especially coherent, or incoherent, or because it has particular insights, or even because it was particularly influential on events. I’m interested in weird intellectual history. Personalism is a little weird, true, but in a pretty bland way. There was nothing zany to it, mostly just bromides about how this or that political system (usually communism or socialism, sometimes capitalism, sometimes fascism when that was around, often some vague looming anti-personalism, like Roszak’s “technocracy.”
Where Personalism comes into my weird intellectual history is its relationship to other ideas. Personalism doesn’t seem to exist in its own right. Personalism, at least in the sense that runs from Mounier to the Diems to Roszak, seemingly only exists as a placeholder. For Mounier and the Diems, it was a way to get to that place so many want to be: to be “neither left nor right,” to get above, beneath, anyway beyond a given political polarity.
Specifically, Personalism seems to exist to evade a polarity based on conflict over the distribution of power. It declines to take a position on the basic conflict of modernity: reinscribe hierarchy as the basis of power, or redistribute power downwards and more broadly in society? Mounier and the Ngos very intentionally set themselves both in between and above ideological formations that existed to take a given side in this debate: fascism versus the Popular Front (communists, socialists, liberals) in the case of Mounier in thirties France, colonialism and communism in the case of the Ngos. The Ngos version was more militant, Diem being more or less a military dictator of a country experiencing an insurgency, and more instrumental. Diem and his American handlers thought that South Vietnam needed an ideology, with an “ism” and a handbook and whatever, to counter communism. Mounier leaned pacifist- among other things, pacifism was popular in a country still recovering from WWI. These, and other differences in circumstance, shaped the circumstances of personalism in the world, but the basic element — seeking to evade or defuse a fundamental power conflict by reference to… well, more on that in a minute.
Roszak, for his part, attempts to make of the personalism he sees in the youth culture of the sixties one side in what he sees as the true conflict. It’s not the class struggle or decolonization. After all, look at complacent (and schlubby) trade unionists opposing the youth in the US and France, and see what a bureaucratic mess “actual existing communism” is! No, the real conflict is between people and the values that nourish them, and “the machine,” “the technocracy,” and its values.
What did any of this mean? What did any of these people actually stand up as the positive proposition of Personalism? Well, one of the reasons I haven’t sat down and defined it yet is because Personalism, from Paris to Saigon to Stanford, has always been notoriously vague. Emmanuel Mounier and Ngo Dinh Diem were both fervent Catholics, and ideas from Catholic criticisms of modern political ideologies influenced both. But there were and are political movements based straightforwardly on Catholic social thinking. Neither Mounier nor Diem went for that. One also wonders how “personalism” relates to a broad but altogether better defined term- “humanism.”
A lot of the reasons why they didn’t are incidental, and that’s part of my point. Mounier would not have gotten anywhere hanging out a shingle as just a Catholic intellectual in 1930s France, because all the oxygen in that space was taken up by fascist groups like Action Francaise. Going in for “humanism,” meanwhile, would lose him what Catholic audience he had, because they would have understood that as tantamount to atheism. The Ngos couldn’t go whole hog on Catholicism because they governed a majority non-Catholic country, and already were in the practice of alienating Buddhists and other non-Catholics (though, there are forms of Christian Democracy that aren’t so bad about religious toleration- but the Ngos didn’t like democracy). “Humanism” would have the same problem for them — tantamount to atheism — and their style of authoritarianism really wouldn’t fit with it, either.
What does an ideology shaped more by incident than by vision act like?
That is the question that finding Personalism pop up in my studies helped teach me to ask. I don’t mean to say that Personalism doesn’t or can’t come from a genuine place. If anything, the closest to a real core of Personalism is made up of feelings: exhaustion with serious political struggle, antipathy towards ideologues both left and right, abstract desire for a better world, etc. Not only does it form the intellectual (as it were) core of Personalism, those feelings also seem to be the genealogical link between the various wielders of Personalism over the years- people who felt those vibes, didn’t fit in elsewhere in a time of political struggle, and knew of its existence. It interests me to see what happens when you try to form an “ism” out of, basically, vibes, and a variety of conditions set by the situation wherein this ism, Personalism, is conjured. To me, questions like this – and you can find them throughout modern intellectual history if you look – are what makes a good weird, vernacular intellectual history, more than zaniness of a given idea’s content (though that can be fun).
Why am I talking about Personalism so much here? Did anyone in the counterculture actually talk about it? Not really- most of them weren’t reading as anything as off the beaten path as Emmanuel Mounier, and most were not into established religions. Theodore Roszak didn’t talk about it that much, for that matter, directly in The Making of a Counter Culture. That said, Personalism fits him. Making the basic question of humanity something like humanity versus technology, or the person versus the machine, or the various other ways Roszak puts it, fits into the same tradition as Personalism: the generations-long effort to find a viable intellectual basis for evading the power conflict at the heart of modern political life.
Eastern spirituality, leftist-but-not-Marxist social criticism, libertarian (read: Americanized) existentialism, heterodox psychology, in Roszak’s telling, all point the way towards cohering an opposition to “the Technocracy.” As with other personalists before him, Roszak comes by his refusal of class struggle honestly. He was scared of nuclear war. Big modern bureaucratic systems, both capitalist and communist, created the whole structure that could make nuclear weapons, plan for their use, and, it seemed all too likely, use them in such a way as to possibly end the human race, or anyway kill billions and billions. Squint a little and that system (plus fascism, and he goes for the “fascist bureaucrat” stereotype versus the “irrational fascist” one, as though they’re opposites) also made the world wars and, seemingly, every other recent disaster. The youth don’t have all the answers, he readily concedes. They might very well find themselves wooed by Playboy-style lifestyle consumerism, or routed into empty doctrinaire leftism, or go off various deep ends that Rozsak delineates through things like drug use. But, he says, at least they’re asking the questions. Conveniently, Roszak doesn’t really get into answers.
You can probably guess what I think of all this. I give Roszak a certain queasy credit for following his line into something like monstrosity when he assails the black freedom struggle for being an effort to join the technocracy, for black people to get their goodies. Honestly, for all most counterculture stuff (beyond some of the music) isn’t my style, and for all the annoying hippies I know, the positive proposition Roszak makes, that someone should try new and different things, is persuasive. But, and maybe this is just me, but Roszak came more alive for me in the negative. He’s a lot more lively when he attacks than when he rhapsodizes. He seems more into it when he rails against the Marxism and Freudianism in Marcuse than when he appreciates the supposedly greater mind in their shared space, Norman Brown. That depiction of civil rights and black power, written around the time that MLK was murdered (note- some wikipediaists have tried to call MLK… a personalist!! It wouldn’t surprise me if he read Mounier and agreed with some of it), had a spite to it that made it vivid (and harder to swallow). His depictions of the union movement are really repellent, with that real hate that comes from a certain kind of artsy gentry type who likes to think he’s got the real answers, and who are these proles with their material wants… It’s worth noting here, as well, that for all the hardhats attacking protestors and AFL-CIO supporting the war, this same period also saw a resurgence of labor militancy, across racial divides, in wildcat strikes across the country.
But who cares, right? One irony is, unlike a French thinker in the thirties or a Vietnamese autocrat in the fifties, an American novelist/historian in the sixties could pretend they had sorted out the material conditions thing, anyway, that everyone already either had a good standard of living or else was about to get one (once they sold out to the Technocracy, that is). Conflict would now be, essentially, psychological and spiritual (to the extent there was a distinction between the two, for these guys). Which side are you on- the atom bomb makers, or the kids doing yoga?
Roszak would, presumably, see me as doing a mirror version of what I see him doing: evasion, avoidance of the real conflict between machine and man, substituting another conflict that doesn’t matter as much at the center of my view of the world. As it happens, a brief look at his later works show his bitter disappointment with the counterculture as it unfolded. Not only did they fall into every trap he worried about – lifestyle commodification/selling out, doctrinaire politics, drugged out irreality – but they even went on to create a technological system far more pervasive and invasive than Roszak could have dreamed of when counterculturalists kickstarted the cyber age. The yoga kids are the atom bomb makers, now, or anyway the data harvesters (and honestly probably also the atom bomb makers at this point). He was mad about this in the eighties- he must have been steeped in anger and disappointment when he died in 2011.
This was, basically, a bad book. It didn’t have to be a bad book. I think one could make the points which Roszak wanted to make and write a good book, even if I’d still disagree with its larger point. What made this book lousy is, for a book about a subculture that thrived on openness and positivity, the writing has a pinched, quarrelsome quality throughout. He stretches the argument and prose out of shape in order to preemptively shit on, well, people like me, people who want to organize to create power and remake our socioeconomic order. It’s less the disrespect I object to – I’ve taken worse – and more what it does to the reading experience. I’m no hippie, but in this book dedicated to defending the counterculture, the author manages to miss the good things about hippies. It’s lame. Why do you think I needed to think about personalism and weird intellectual history while reading this instead?
Who would make an ideology about “persons” when they could instead make one about “cats”
Personalism, a term I’ve never heard before, seems closely related to three other ideas: (1) self-actualization, (2) nonconformity and (3) subjectivity.
Ngo Dinh Diem’s ideologically loaded, dictator-pleasing, bootstraps-style personalism sounds most like self-actualization, which puts the onus on the person to shoulder the burden of escaping communist collectivism.
Nonconformity is the relative of personalism sought out by the 1950s public in George Marsden’s /Twilight of the American Enlightenment/. 50s intellectuals were anxious to shape a persona that could not be dominated by ideology. Marsden, a Catholic, views this a bit ironically, so I’m not sure if we can call this nonconformity equivalent to personalism.
Finally, subjectivity is a term I’m familiar with from the Japanese New Left. There was an ongoing debate between those who felt that the greatest chance for victory came from subsuming oneself in the subjectivity of the Party, and those who felt that total subjectivity rested in the hands of only of those breakaway sects which fully understood the laws of social science (Marxism), and those who felt that a full social awakening came from each individual realizing his (first and foremost “his”) full subjectivity. Hippie personalism obviously overlapping with this third category, but seemingly to different or nonspecific ends.