summer of love – Becoming Human

History suggests that millenarian fears of social breakdown are a device which has often been generated and instrumentalized by the establishment in moments of existential threat. Even if such fears reach the extreme stage of collective psychosis, this does not mean there is a real prospect of such breakdown, and in fact the social conditions which have sometimes underpinned descents into authoritarianism in the past are fundamentally different at the present juncture and hardly seem prone to reconstitution. Insofar as such fears bring latent conflicts into the open, whilst they certainly raise concerns and have unpredictable consequences, they also offer an opportunity to unmask these conflicts and to reshape social institutions. Continue reading “Apocalypticism and the next social revolution”

In a recent post which seems in the meantime to have disappeared (or maybe I am just no good with computers), Michael Samsel asks the question of why the work of Wilhelm Reich and Alexander Lowen achieved a certain popularity in the 60’s and 70’s, and then apparently declined, only, possibly, to resurface very recently.

The question, it seems to me, is just one aspect of the more general question that a lot of us who start to get into some of this thought end up asking: “whatever happened to the ‘Summer of Love’, and the whole hippie/free love movement which expressed values in the 1960s and 70s seemingly so close to those we are striving towards today”?

Samsel seems to suggest that one reason for this “spiritual interlude” is the rise in materialism which characterized the period from the mid-80’s through to the financial crisis which started in 2008. I think the notion of a spiritual interlude is a mischaracterization, but nonetheless he has a point. The baby boomer generation was a teenage rebellion which burnt itself out. Those kids sensed true human values, but had no experience living them, lurched into their rebellion unaware of themselves and of their childhood scars, and made a lot of mistakes in the process. Essentially the movement was authentic, but it was missing a theory of itself and it failed to do much of the groundwork. Humanistic psychology was born, but proved too challenging to an ego that could undisturbedly indulge itself cast adrift in a relativistic world of hedonism. It also took the established order some time to realize what was happening and muster its defenses. Some part was embraced in the mainstream.

In short, the Summer of Love burst into bloom in a soil which was rich, but shallow, and whilst it changed a good part of the political discourse, especially on the left, the seeds it left in the soil of psychology and social organization needed a generation, or even two, to germinate.

There is no doubt in my mind that we are now – 45 years later – much better placed than we were then or have ever been since to realize the utopian agenda of peace and love, life lived according to real human values, if we can seize the moment. We will only get there through brave self-confrontation. But we understand today immensely more than we did in the 1960’s about what makes a human being. Both religion and the creed of materialism are crumbling and people are searching for spirituality. The family and relationships are in crisis. And yet we now possess close to all the answers to these questions. It takes only bravery, but even that is not particularly brave, for there is really no alternative, whether intellectual or existential. I am certain the years ahead of us will rewrite the map of the human heart and leave no discipline untouched. The paradigms we have been brought up to believe in, whether they be economic, social or psychological, will seem, looking back in twenty, thirty or fifty years, crude, barbarous and incomprehensible, much as slavery and racism do today. It is an exciting time to be alive.