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Saturday 22 November 2008

The new Woodstock generation

Reihan Salam predicts the dawning of a new hippy era as critics of consumerism head to the hills

The hippies are now remembered mostly as foul-smelling, tie-dye-clad libertines who, when not covered in a thick haze of marijuana smoke or indulging in ‘free love’, could be found protesting against the Vietnam war or some other supposed outrage perpetrated by ‘AmeriKKKa’. At the same time, the hippies represented a very American rebellion against the cultural conformity and political stupor of the 1950s. As the prime beneficiaries of postwar prosperity, the hippies briefly became the first ‘postmaterialist’ generation. After all, it was, and is, easy to be postmaterialist when all your needs are cared for by doting parents. So began a series of occasionally bold, at times ingenious, and often imbecilic ‘experiments in living’, ranging from the proliferation of middle-American ashrams to anti-authoritarian homeschooling, a cause later embraced by socially conservative evangelicals. The downside of all this is by now very familiar. Licence led, inevitably, to licentiousness. The patriarchy the hippies so bitterly opposed had the advantage of providing children with reliable material support, something children of the Me Generation couldn’t always count on.

And yet a great deal of good came out of this fertile moment. America’s technological leadership is arguably rooted in the tinkering of young techno-bohemians like Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs and software visionary Richard Stallman, who fiddled with computers out of utopian enthusiasm. As the left-wing cultural critic Thomas Frank argued in The Conquest of Cool, Madison Avenue eventually cracked this countercultural code. The hippie quest for freedom was co-opted by the capitalists. Consider the advertisements that, during the age of cheap petrol, showed hulking SUVs breezily wending their way through exotic landscapes, this despite the fact that in real life these monstrosities would inch along congested roads from subdivision to office park to supermarket and back again in a hellish loop of suburban torment.

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