The Making of a Counter Culture  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Related e

Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (1969) is a book by Theodore Roszak which chronicled and gave explanation to the European and North American counterculture of the 1960s. The term "counterculture" was first used by Roszak in this book.

The Making of a Counter Culture "captured a huge audience of Vietnam War protesters, dropouts, and rebels--and their baffled elders. Theodore Roszak found common ground between 1960s student radicals and hippie dropouts in their mutual rejection of what he calls the technocracy--the regime of corporate and technological expertise that dominates industrial society. He traces the intellectual underpinnings of the two groups in the writings of Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown, Allen Ginsberg and Paul Goodman."

Alan Watts wrote of The Making of a Counter Culture in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1969, "If you want to know what is happening among your intelligent and mysteriously rebellious children, this is the book. The generation gap, the student uproar, the New Left, the beats and hippies, the psychedelic movement, rock music, the revival of occultism and mysticism, the protest against our involvement in Vietnam, and the seemingly odd reluctance of the young to buy the affluent technological society--all these matters are here discussed, with sympathy and constructive criticism, by a most articulate, wise, and humane historian."

Table of contents

Technocracy's children -- An invasion of centaurs -- The dialectics of liberation : Herbert Marcuse and Norman Brown -- Journey to the East ... and points beyond : Allen Ginsberg and Alan Watts -- The counterfeit infinity : the use and abuse of psychedelic experience -- Exploring utopia : the visionary sociology of Paul Goodman -- The myth of objective consciousness -- Eyes of flesh, eyes of fire -- Objectivity unlimited.

See also

• North American counterculture
• American culture
• Counterculture
• Technocracy

Bibliographical notes

Chapter I: Technocracy's Children and Chapter II: An Invasion of Centaurs

Much of what is most valuable in the counterculture does not find its way into literate expression-a fact well worth bearing in mind if one wants to achieve any decent understanding especially of what the more hip-bohemian young are up to. One is apt to find out more about their ways by paying attention to posters, buttons, fashions of dress and dance-and especially to the pop music, which now knits together the whole thirteen to thirty age group. Timothy Leary is probably correct in identifying the pop and rock groups as the real "prophets" of the rising generation. Unfortunately, I find this music difficult to -take, though I recognize that one probably hears the most vivid and timely expression of young dissent not only in the lyrics of the songs but in the whole raucous style of their sound and performance. While one cannot avoid being impressed with the innovation and dazzling sophistication of the best pop music, I fear I tend to find much of it too brutally loud and/or too electronically gimmicked up. I am not particularly in favor of turning musicianship and the human voice into the raw material of acoustical engineering. I also feel that the pop music scene lends itself to a great deal of commercial sensationalizing: the heated search for startling new tricks and shocks. However . . . In the way of reading matter, the most timely sources are the innumerable and often ephemeral underground newspapers. (Is anyone anywhere collecting a decent file of this material?) It is a measure of how contagious the counter culture is that even medium-sized towns (Spokane, Northampton, Massachusetts, Dallas ... ) are now producing these journals of militant irreverence. The major papers include The Berkeley Barb, The East Village Other, the San Francisco and Southern California Oracles, the Los Angeles and New York Free Presses, and, in London, The Intenuztio7Utl Times, Peace News, and Oz. There has been an effort to anthologize this scat- 292 THE ~KING OF A COUNTER CULTURE tered material in the Underground Digest, published by Underground Communications, Inc. (PO Box 211, Village Station, New York, N.Y.). The vice of these papers is that they easily slide off into the bizarrely salacious or the psychedelically mushy. Worse still, some of the more militant examples seem to be fabricated out of a crude and frenetic contempt for everybody but the editorial staff. However, amid the sheer smut and windy anger one often finds some wry wit (especially in the comic art), a cry of the heart that is gentle and innocent, and even a reliable piece of reporting. At the national level, The Realist appears to do the best job of keeping up with the more wild and woolly dissent of the day. One of the pioneer efforts of the underground press was the one-shot Journal for the Protection of All Beings (San Francisco: City Lights, 1961), a fantastic and delightful collection of essays which must now be a collector's item. The catalogues of the various free and experimental universities provide another convenient way of keeping abreast of counter cultural interests. Norman Mailer's eccentric essay The White Negro (San Francisco: City Lights Pocket Poets Series, 1957) is still one of the best early evaluations of youthful dissent. More currently there is Revolution for the Hell of It (New York: Dial Press, 19~) by Abbie Hoffman, who has become androgynous (apparently) and now goes by the name of Free. Hoffman, a leader of the Youth International Party (of Battle of Chicago fame) conveys the foul-mouthed whimsy of hip a-politics. The New Left offers more articulate materials. Its periodicals include The New University Conference Newsletter (Chicago), Liberation (New York), and at the slick mass-circulation level, Ramparts. Mitchell Cohen and Dennis Hale, eds., The New Student Left, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967) is a good anthology. Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau, The New Radicals: A Report with Documents (New York: Vintage Books, 1966) provides a knowledgeable handbook especially on historical background and the distinctions between the many left-wing student groups. On some of the more important student insurrections, see Hal Draper, The New Student Revolt, with an introduction by Mario Savio (New York: Grove Press, 1966); S. M. Lipset and S. S. Wolin, eds., The Berkeley Student Revolt: Facts and Interpretations (New York: Anchor Books, 1966); Jerry Avorn, et aI, Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis (New York: Atheneum, 1968); Herve Bourges, ed., The French Student Revolt: The Leaders Speak (New York: Hill & Wang, 1968). If revolutionaries must still wait for history to vindicate them, American publishers are clearly making sure that history gets down in black and white no more than nine months after the event. Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit's Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969) is a shrewd and brightly phrased analysis of the May '68 Paris insurrection by its most prominent anarchist spokesmen. The Cohn-Bendits display a marvelous libertarian sensitivity to managerial manipulation of both the technocratic economy and its would-be revolutionary opposition movements. "The real meaning of revolution is not a change in management," the authors argue, "but a change in man. . . . the revolution must be born of joy and not of sacrifice." But I fear they overestimate the potentialities of what the "spontaneous resistance" of "insurrectional cells" can accomplish in the absence of a deep and pervasive critique of the mythos of the technocracy. Lacking that, I doubt that their strategy of ad hoc agitation in the streets can lead to more than temporarily therapeutic outbursts of frustration. A thoughtful discussion of "The New Left and the Old" appears in The American Scholar for Autumn 1967. The participants are Dwight MacDonald, Richard Rovere, Ivanhoe Donaldson, and Tom Hayden.

There are searching studies of the problems of achieving adulthood these days in Kenneth Keniston, Young Radicals (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968); Edgar Friedenberg, The Dignity of the Young and Other Atavisms (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965); and of course, Paul Goodman, Growing up Absurd (New York: Random House, 1960). Goodman's book is flawed by the quaint idea that females have no special problems about growing up. No doubt because they have the option of passing into a prefabricated social subordination-something our own black youth seem to have decided is no great favor. For some reflections on how the ethos of dissent affects the learned professions, see Theodore Roszak, ed., The Dissenting Academy (New York: Pantheon, 1968). On the technocracy, the best theoretical statement is Jacques Ellul, 294 THE MAKING OF A COUNTER CULTURE The Technological Society, trans. John W. Wilkinson (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1964). The book suffers from being far too verbose and crushingly pessimistic. Just as pessimistic, but less verbose is Roderick Seidenberg, Posthistoric Man (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Univer· sity of North Carolina Press, 1950), which attempts an evolutionary explanation of our technological obsessions. The best attempt so far to work out a full socioeconomic anatomy of our burgeoning American technocracy is John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industridl State (Boston: Houghton MifHin, 1967). The thesis of the work is that "the imperatives of technology and organization, not the images of ideology, are what determine the shape of economic society." Lacking the inclination to step outside the mystique of scientific knowledge, Galbraith fails to see that "the imperatives of technology and organization" comprise a very definite ideology, but one which cannot be challenged without calling into question the myth of objective consciousness. For this reason, too, his proposed reforms are pallid, especially where he laments the philistinism of the "technostructure." Strange that Galbraith does not recognize how magnificently cultivated a society we are fast becoming. I have little doubt myself that within another generation our National Security Council will hold its deliberations while performing string quartets. We shall indeed be a society of warrior and industrial humanists. Galbraith's proposals for expanding the "aesthetic dimension" of higher education (by which he seems to mean good taste) should be checked against some important articles on the denaturing of the humanities: Louis Kampf, "The Humanities and the Inhumanities:t The Nation, September 30, 1968; and William Arrowsmith, "The Future of Teaching," The Public Interest, Winter 1967. Norbert Wieners The HUmdn Use of HUmdn Beings (Boston: Houghton MifHin, 1950) established the concept of "cybernetics" and worked out one of the key propositions of technocratic managerialism: namely, that man and social life generally are so much communications apparatus. Along the lines of this unfortunate metaphor we arrive at all sorts of commonplace contemporary idiocies which small minds are now busily elaborating into a Weltanschauung, such as that a photoelectric cell is a "sense organ," that feedback is "proprioception," that computers have "memories," can "learn," "teach," "make decisions," and "create." Despite Wiener's intelligent forebodings about the potential abuses of cybernation (see his tenth chapter), the book is a painful example of how a scientist of great BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 295 conscience contributes in spite of himself to the degradation of human personality. For some healthy doubts about the purely technical capabilities of computers, see Mortimer Taube, Computers and Common Sense (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961). For a recent expression of the technocratic mentality at work, see Robert McNamara, The Essence of Security (New York: Harper & Row, 1968). Two further voices of technocratic orthodoxy are James R. Killian, Jr., "Toward a Research-Reliant Society," and Jerome B. Weisner, "Technology and Society," both essays in Harry Woolf, ed., Science as a Cultural Force (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1964). With respect to research, development, expertise, and government support thereof, the invincible argument of these essays is as follows: more, more, more, MORE. Against such mighty logic, no public authority can or wants to stand. Beyond this, simply give attention to anything that derives from past, present, and future presidential policy advisors on defense, economics, or foreign affairs: McGeorge Bundy, A. A. Berle, Edward Teller, W. W. Rostow, Henry Kissinger, and such. Anything by Herman Kahn will also serve as an authoritative sample of the technocratic style, as will whatever publications one comes across from RAND, the Harvard University Program on Technology and Science, Kahn's own Hudson Institute, the Stanford Research Institute, Technical Operations Incorporated .•. and ever so many other military-industrial-university think-tanks.

For a fictional presentation of utopian social engineering, there is B. F. Skinner's Walden Two (New York: Macmillan, 1948). John Wilkinson, ed., Technology and Human Values (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1967) contains several interesting essays relating to the Ellul] thesis. Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove is the strongest comment on the obscenity of it all. Unhappily, such satire of absurd exaggeration is pretty nearly defunct in an age whose so-called reality exceeds the insanities of the satirical imagination. Not even Jonathan Swift could have invented such pernicious lunacy as the balance of terror or thermonuclear civil defense. Much of the best thought on technocratic social forms and practices appears throughout the works of Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman, as listed below.

Chapter Ill: The Dialectics of Liberation

Herbert Marcuse's major works are: Reason and Revolution: Hegel and The Rise of Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941); Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958); Eros and Civilization, for which one should see the Vintage Books edition of 1962 with its important "new preface"; One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964) . Marcuse's essay, "Socialism in the Developed Countries," International Socialist Journal, April 1965, pp. 139-51, is a good, brief exposition of his social theory, free of much of the Germanic ponderousness of his longer works. One of Marcuse's most widely read essays, especially among the European young. is "Repressive Tolerance," which appears in Robert Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and H. Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965). The unhappy thesis of this piece seems to be that tolerance ought to be withdrawn from repressive right-wing spokesmen and extended to progressive left-wing spokesmen-if necessary (and how else?) by invoking the "natural right" of "oppressed and overpowered minorities to use extralegal means . . ." Ideas of this vintage hardly require the heady philosophical justification Marcuse offers them. Their legitimacy tends to be generated spontaneously whenever righteous indignation and revolutionary power are compounded. I am more inclined to agree with Tolstoy, who, when asked if he did not see a difference between reactionary repression and revolutionary repression, replied that there was, of course, a difference: "the difference between cat shit and dog shit."

A number of essays dealing with Marcuse's thought appear in Kurt H. Wolff and Barrington Moore, Jr., eds. The Critical Spirit: Essays in Honor of Herbert Marcuse (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). Marcuse's interpretation of Freud should be compared with the doctrinaire Marxist reading of Paul Baran in "Marxism and Psychoanalysis," Monthly Review, October 1959. On Marxist Humanism, see Daniel Bell, "In Search of Marxist Humanism: The Debate on Alienation," Soviet Survey, No. 32, April-June 1960 and its bibliographical notes. Erich Fromm's Marx's BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 297 Concept of Man (New York: Ungar, 1961), is a good, if often too adulatory, essay on the subject. The book contains translated excerpts from Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, the whole of which has been published by the Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1959. Some interesting remarks by Marcuse on Marxist Humanism appear in "Varieties of Humanism," Center Magazine (Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Santa Barbara), June 1968. Norman O. Brown's major works are Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959) and Love's Body (New York: Random House, 1966). His essay, "Apocalypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind" in Harper's, May 1961, is vital to the understanding of Love's Body. So too is the exchange between Marcuse and Brown in Commentary for February and March 1967.

Chapter N: Journey to the East ..•

Allen Ginsberg's poetry has appeared in too many places to be listed here. Collections of his work are easily located. A statement on his poetics appears in Donald M. AlIen, ed., The New American Poetry 1945-1960 (New York: Grove Press, 1960). His collection of early poems, Empty Mirror (New York: Totem Press, 1961), with its preface by William CarIos Williams, makes an important contribution to the understanding of his later poems. While Ginsberg's work is one of the best and most visible weather vanes of the times, and while it is always charmingly big-hearted, I cannot think very highly of it as poetry, except for folie laide passages here and there which invariably come across better when he reads them aloud than they do in print. Ginsberg says all the right things, but I prefer the way poets like Gary Snyder, Robert Bly, and Denise Levertov (among the poets of the 1950S and 1960s) say them. Lawrence Ferlinghetti seems to me a marveIous comic poet. His wise and wry Coney Island of the Mind (New York: New Directions, 1958) is probably the most widely read book of verse among the college-age young of this century. Michael McClure's poetry also appeals to me; but his muchpraised play The Beard is a sad example of how easily the counter culture weakens toward pretentious (and commercially advanta- 298 THE ~AKING OF A COUNTER CULTURE geous) pornography-and with such unabashed self-congratulations it weakens I At some point along the way, one must mention Kenneth Rexroth, whose influence on our youth culture has been subtle, pervasive, and entirely healthy. His poetry, which I find superior to anything his younger colleagues have produced, makes it obvious that he was there before the counter culture arrived. Jack Kerouac's latest book, Satori in Paris (New York: Grove Press, 1966), only makes one wonder if he was ever worth taking seriously, alas I Of Alan Watts' many books, those I have liked most are The Way of Zen (New York: Pantheon, 1957) and Psychotherapy East and West (New York: Pantheon, 1961). This Is It (New York: Collier Books, 1967) contains the essay "Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen." The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are (New York: Collier Books, 1967) is a good example of Watts playing "philosophical entertainer" -in this case primarily to college audiences. D. T. Suzuki's Zen Buddhism, edited by William Barrett (New York: Doubleday, 1956) carries his most widely read essays. My own slender knowledge of Zen and Taoism owes much to all the standard Arthur Waley translations; to Nyogen Senzaki and R. S. McCandless, eds., The Iron Flute (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1961); and to Thomas Merton's translations in The Way of Chuang Tzu (New York: New Directions, 1965). Also to the music of John Cage ... which may be questionable as music, but is, I think, delightful nonsense.

Chapter V: The Countedeit Infinity

Robert S. DeRopp, Drugs and the Mind (London: Gollancz, 1958) is a good survey of the psychedelics and the influence they have had on cultural expression since the time of De Quincey. William Tames, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Modem Library, 1936) is still the most comprehensive attempt to bring the states of transnormal consciousness into the philosophical mainstream-though not one that has had much impact on academic thought. The most influential recent books are Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception (New York: Harper, 1954) and Alan .watts, The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness, BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 299 foreword by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (New York: Pantheon, 1962). Timothy Leary's contribution is summed up in High Priest (New York: World, 1968) and The Politics of Ecstasy (New York: Putnam, 1968). The former, the first of a projected four-volume autobiography, is a perfect caricature of most of the counter cultural themes discussed in this book, well larded with a most unbecoming egotism. Ralph Metzner, ed., The Ecstatic Adventure (New York: Macmillan, 1968) anthologizes about forty accounts of psychedelic experiments. It strikes me that those interested enough in the subject to wade through this much reportage should probably stop reading and start doing it themselves. There is also Jane Dunlap (pseud.), Exploring Inner-Space: Personal Experiences under LSD-25 (London: Gollancz, 1961), a small sampling of which should be enough to scale down anyone's evaluation of the psychedelic promise. Carlos Casteneda's The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968) places the psychedelic experience in the context of an Amerindian shamanistic world view and is therefore a distinctive contribution to the literature on the subject.

Chapter VI: Exploring Utopia

Paul Goodman's works are too numerous and by now too well known to be listed here. I would, however, emphasize the importance of The Empire City, (New York: Macmillan, 1964) and Gestalt Therapy (New York: Delta Books, 1951), coauthored by Frederick Perls and Ralph Hefferline, in the understanding of Goodman. His Persons or Personnel: Decentralizing and the Mixed SyStem (New York: Random House, 1965) offers important reflections on the technocracy and its alternatives. Goodman's essay "The Diggers in 1984," in Ramparts, September 1967, is a nice example of his visionary sociology. Goodman's short stories, some of which are fine pieces of writing, have been collected in the volume Adam and His Works (New York: Vintage Books, 1968). Some of these stories capture the essential Goodman in a few pages' space: the anarchist social theory, the athleticism, the Reichian sexuality, the Taoist-Gestalt mysticism. 43 K 300 THE MAKING OF A COUNTER CULTURE On anarchism generally, George Woodcock's Anarchism (Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian Books, 1962) is a good basic summary of the movement's history and the classical theoretical works. Alex Comfort, Authority and Delinquency in the Modem State: A Criminological Approach to the Problem of Power (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950) is a classic analysis of the corruptions of power, by a leading English anarchist theorist (and physician, and poet, and novelist, and critic . . .) whose work is remarkably similar to Goodman's. The English periodical Anarchy (London) offers the best continuing coverage of anarchist thought on current problems. Prince Kropotkin is, I think, the most winning of the tradition's great ideologues. On communitarianism, I would suggest Arthur Morgan, The Small Community (New York: Harper, 1942), and Clare Huchet Bishop, All Things Common (New York: Harper, 1950), which deals with the Boimondau community of work in France, in whose image we ought to have more experiments. Above all, there is Martin Buber's absolutely superb Paths in Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960). Finally, I think one must mention Aldous Huxley's novel Island (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), which is cluttered with brilliant communitarian ideas and insights, and which has had great influence among its young readers.

Chapter VII: The Myth of Objective Consciousness

The recent literature dedicated to celebrating the virtues of the scientific world view is extensive. Jacob Bronowski is among the most cultivated of the science boosters. See his The Common Sense of Science (London: Pelican Books, 1960) and Science and Human Values, rev.ed. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965). I find it interesting how Bronowski's views (e.g., " ... men have asked for freedom, justice, and respect precisely as the scientific spirit has spread among them") parallel those of the right-wing "objectivist" ideologue, Ayn Rand. Julian Huxley's Religion Without Revelation (London: Max Parrish, 1959) advocates the transmutation of science into a secular religion. See also P. B. Medawar, The Art 'of the Soluble (London: Methuen, 1967) and the widely cited (and cheerfully technocratic) C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cam- BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 301 bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). C. C. Gillespie, The Edge of Objectivity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960) is a strong, stoical presentation of the alienative trend of scientific thought-though it frankly mystifies me how anyone can settle for such a grimly masochistic conception of what the pursuit of truth leads us to. Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media (New York: McGrawHill, 1964), along with his other writings, carries to a revealing extreme the subordination of personality to technology. I rather feel that the young who have taken to McLuhan fail to understand the full implications of what the man is saying. My thoughts on McLuhan appear in "The Summa Popologica of Marshall McLuhan" in McLuhan Pro and Con, edited by Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968). The fullest and most exuberant recent survey of technological art is Jasia Reichardt, ed., Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts (New York and London: Studio International, 1968). The following are the works I have found helpful in one degree or another in taking issue with the conventional scientific world view: Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Mentor Books, 1925); Suzanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 2d ed. (New York: Mentor Books, 1962); Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959 )-an outstanding critique of scientific objectivity; Rene Dubos, The Dreams of Reason (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961) and The Mirage of Health (New York: Harper, 1959). The latter raises some startling questions about our most commonplace assumptions regarding the progress of medical science. Jacques Barzun, Science: The Glorious Entertainment (New York: Harper & Row, 1964); Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (New York: Macmillan, 1967) is especially good for its forceful criticism of behavioral psychology; Barry Commoner, Science and Survival (New York: Viking Press, 1966); Catherine Roberts, The Scientific Conscience (New York: Braziller, 1967). Of the many wise contributions of Lewis Mumford, I find the following the most important for the purposes of my discussion here: The Conduct of Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1951); The Transformations of Man (New York: Collier Books, 1956); The Myth of the Machine (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967). 302 THE MAKING OF A COUNTER CULTURE The latter develops a highly significant conception of the origins of machine technology and its relevance to civilization. Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science (New York: Harper & Row, 1966) is absolutely essential to an intelligent evaluation of scientific objectivity. Lynn White's "Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," Science, March 10, 1967, attempts to assess Christianity's contribution to our misconception of nature. The Society for Social Responsibility in Science Newsletter (published in Bala-Cynwyd, Pa.) carries on an admirable discussion of the professional ethics of science. S. P. R. Charter's periodical Man on Earth (published in Olema, Calif.) is an ambitious effort to criticize the bad ecological habits of our society. By far the most searching, on-going discussions of science I know of appear in the remarkable publication, Manas (POB 32112, El Sereno Station, Los Angeles, Calif.) I will also mention Bertrand Russell's Autobiography, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967-68), which offers some heartrending expressions of the spiritual inadequacy of the scientific world view on the part of one of its greatest investigators and promoters.

Chapter VIII: Eyes of F1esh, Eyes of Fire

Much of what is said in this chapter derives generally from the Romantic sensibility. Anything Blake ever wrote seems supremely relevant to the search for alternative realities. Shelley's, "Defence of Poetry" is surely a key statement. From an earlier period, the poetry of Thomas Traheme also seems to me especially important to renewing our capacity for experience. Henri Bergson's Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1954) taught me a basic distinction in the discussion of religion which is invariably overlooked by the secularized humanism of our time. Among more recent works that impinge on this chapter are John Beer, Blake's Humanism (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968); Ernst Lehrs, Man or Matter: Introduction to a Spiritual Understanding of Nature Based on Goethe's Method, rev. ed. (New York: Harper, 1958); R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise (London: Penguin Books, 1967). Everything I have ever read by Martin Buber, but especially his Hasidism (New York: BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES Philosophical Library, 1948), speaks with beautiful cogency to the problem of cleansing the doors of perception. The anthropological notions contained in the chapter are probably eccentric from the viewpoint of professional orthodoxy. I am inclined, however, to agree with Paul Goodman's contention (in Gestalt Therapy, p. 3°7) that the great task of anthropology is "to show what of human nature has been 'lost' and, practically, to devise experiments for its recovery." I draw principally upon: Mircea Eliade, Shamanism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964)-an indispensable survey and analysis-and Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (New York: Harper, 1961); Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon, 1949); Dorothy Lee, Freedom and Culture (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1959); Robert Redfield, The Primitive World and its Transformations (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1953) and The Little Community and Peasant Society and Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960); Geza Roheim, Gates of the Dream (New York: International Universities Press, 1952); R. H. Lowie, Primitive Religion (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924). The latter makes the critical point that the essence of religion (and magic) is the sense of "the Extraordinary." On this primitive awareness of the sacred, now being so relentlessly driven toward inadequate secular substitutes ("bad magic" as I term it), see also B. Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion (New York: Doubleday-Anchor, 1948) and Roger Callois, Man and the Sacred (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1959)' The latter is rather lightweight as anthropology, but like Rudolph OUo's classic The Idea of the Holy (New York: Galaxy Books, 1958), it is stimulating philosophical speculation. Kaj Birket-Smith, The Eskimos (London: Methuen, 1936) is an excellent study of the world view of one primitive culture and of the role of the shaman. C. M. Bowra, Primitive Song (New York: Mentor Books, 1963) examines the magical vision as it is expressed in the songs of surviving primitives. Along the same lines, see Jerome Rothenberg, ed., Technicians of the Sacred (New York: Doubleday, 1968), a very fine anthology of primitive poetry, equipped with brilliant commentaries by the editor.