America’s Fourth Great Awakening — Part II
1948 to 2001
Joseph F. McCormick and David A. Palmer, Ph.D
The late 1940’s saw the advent of the Second Red Scare (1947 to 1956) focused this time less on the by then nearly non-existent internal demands of the Utopian Culture than on the external threat of Soviet and Chinese communism, the concerns of most of the populist, progressive, or social-democracy movements having been met by New Deal government agencies (Keynesian Revolution) or suppressed in favor of the patriotic unity needed to again “make the world safe for democracy.”
In this climate “managed capitalism,” the scripted “enemy” of communism, if you weren’t on board with the material version of the post war American Dream — not just one chicken as Hoover suggested in 1928 but “two chickens in every pot, two cars in every garage” — you were potentially suspect of being a “red.” You were possibly un-American.
This definition of what it meant to be un-American, however, again came from people like J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, who got his start in the “red scare” business following the establishment of the Office of Public Information in WWI as the young director of the Radicals Division (evolved into FBI). This warmed-over version of what it meant to be un-American now had a greatly expanded and professionalized FBI behind it as well as the well-oiled propaganda machine of Madison Avenue marketing and public relations firms and Hollywood studios, all professionally managed by emotionally traumatized combat veterans whose loyalty had been tested in battle.
Everywhere you looked in America in the early 1950’s, magazines, billboards, movies, etc. you were confronted with the subtext, “A real American is one who conforms with the consumer culture.” The new American hero was the “Man in the Grey Flannel Suit.”
Predictably, this messaging resulted in a backlash, the beginnings of a counterculture, what may be termed the “Fourth Great Awakening.”
Rise of Counterculture
The polarity to the cold warrior patriot, consumer conformist became the “beatnik,” a spiritually restless, non-conformist archetype rising out of the “beat culture” of the late forties.
The beat movement — “beat” being slang for “beaten down” or downtrodden and beatnik, often spelled with the Russian “k” to give it an anti-capitalist association — spread from counter-culture authors at Columbia University to musicians and artists in Greenwich Village to San Francisco to the pacific northwest. It represented the polarity to economic materialism: spiritual exploration through jazz, eastern mysticism, sex and drugs.
It began with the cult followers of writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. This growing freedom and equality movement, the domestic expression of socialism, was the direct inheritor of the earlier women’s suffrage, labor, emancipation, populist democracy movements. This time, however, the new layers of consumerism, international industrialization, and the advent of “Cold War” made it especially risky to join lest your name end up on an FBI list.
The Second Red Scare gave J. Edgar Hoover license to conduct surveillance on anyone suspected of being un-American. It was an effective deterrent to “un-American” activity which none-the-less grew up quietly in coffee houses and jazz clubs.
Allied to the spiritual warriors of the beatnik movement, the way Kerouac and Ginsberg preferred to view their messages, were the spiritual warriors of the civil rights movement. Just as quietly but decisively black people, particularly in the south, began to stand up in new ways to the vestiges of the old slave culture. Beatniks were often Korean War vets who returned and found post-war America too conventional. Having faced death and dismemberment in an inconclusive conflict many felt lost and alienated, unable to adjust to “normal life.”
By the late ‘40’s and early ‘50’s the Highlander Folk School, founded in 1932 in Monteagle, Tennessee to train labor movement leaders, became a utopian social justice leadership training school for the senior leadership of the Civil Rights movement including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy and SNCC leaders well before they came to national prominence. The co-founder, Myles Horton, referred to by movement leader James Bevel as “The [white] Father of the Civil Rights Movement,” whose parents were members of the 1920’s and ‘30’s Workers Alliance, trained them in the spirit and tactics of Gandhi, non-violent resistence, and satyagraha, or, “truth force.”
With the aid of supreme court rulings in support of desegregation the highly decentralized movement of well over a thousand diverse grassroots efforts gained momentum in the 1950’s. MLK became it’s most recognizable figure, and martyr, but by no means its originator or even acknowledged leader.
The popularization of TV in the early 50's lead to the creation of an important consumer product market segment known as the “teenager.” An unintended consequence of giving this group of 13 to 18 year olds a collective cultural identity was the explosion of the “rock n roll” movement, an adaptation of black beats — originally played by pioneer DJ’s like Dewey Phillips on Memphis radio station WHBQ— by white artists like Bill Haley and Elvis Presley.
Teenagers listening to “black music” facilitated the Civil Rights movement at a time when the South was still segregated. The must-watch teen-TV program American Bandstand, originally disallowing black teens in the audience, by 1956 becoming fully integrated, helped to shift racial opinions among middle class whites. Mussel Shoals Studio in Alabama was also mixed-race (reference to it in Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama: “In Mussel Shoals we have the Swampers”.) The Swampers were a white “redneck” band that could back Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett. Within a decade rock evolved into the unifying social medium of the counterculture.
Socio-cybernetics and biomimicry
One important influence of the counterculture “re-awakening of the feminine” (original awakening, we argue in previous essay, in the 1840’s) was the expansion of the practice of biomimicry — i.e. advocacy for social, mechanical and even mangement, medical, or political systems that imitate nature.
Biomimicry has been a practice of inventors for millennia. Man studied birds to discern the principles of flight, fish for the principles of hydro-dynamics, the heart for principles of fluid dynamics, trees for the principles of resilient structures, even the ears of jackrabbits for principles of heat dissipation. With its awakened reverence for nature counterculture intellectuals began to study ecosystems and contribute the feminine wisdom and insights derived to all systems, heretofore, inorganic in nature.
New academic and professional fields emerged including cybernetics, systems theory, organizational development, mediation, conflict resolution, counseling as well as a range of related fields like environmental science, women’s studies, early education and child development. In the course of decades the results were more creative, more mixed race, mixed gender work teams and more open source cross disciplinary collaborations that sparked waves of innovation, nowhere more so that in the field of information technology.
Prior to IT in the 1950’s, for example, all machines — mechanical systems composed of combinations of the traditional six simple machines (the only machines supposedly used to build the Great Pyramid and all known existing, pre-bronze age megaliths like these in Cusco, Peru)— were controlled by operators using their brains, eyes, hands and feet to govern their operation. With the US-USSR space race and later Kennedy’s vision to “put a man on the moon and bring him back safely by the end of the decade,” the challenge had been laid down to precisely control a here-to-fore uncontrolable machine i.e. the multi-stage rocket flying at many thousands of miles per hour. It was the first machine that was impossible to control by even the most experienced test pilots.
The Pentagon and NASA needed to learn quickly. They searched everywhere for knowledge about control systems and found it in the emerging field of cybernetics.
Cybernetics is a term first used by Plato to mean “the study of self governance.” The technical side of cybernetics took a major step forward in 1950 when Norbert Weiner, a math professor at MIT published The Human Use of Human Beings, which discussed the ways humans and machines could cooperate. In 1954 Chinese American professor at Cal Tech Qian Xuesen, co-founder of AeroJet Corporation (who was later mistakenly detained then returned to China in 1955 to start the Chinese rocket program), published “Engineering Cybernetics.” These and other works in this field resulted in technical solutions using the principles of feedback loops to machines. They worked beautifully.
To solve the rocket guidance problem, for example, an analog controller (P) provided feedback of the “attitude” (precise flight angle) of the rocket from a mechanical gyro in the nose to “servo motors” controlling the gimbaling of the engines in the tail. This allowed for accurate, real time corrections to the thrust vector and fuel flow based on factors like wind, density altitude, and shifts in fuel load. Thus opened the door, with massive government funding, for the development of “Silicon Valley,” the place where the integrated circuit (invented 1959) would emerge — later known as the microprocessor (Intel 4004 invented 1971), the controller/processor/brain in the middle of all modern computer input devices (keyboard, mouse, sensors, etc.) and output devices (monitors, printers, motors, etc.)
At the same time as the technical side of cybernetics was emerging, so too was the study of the social and natural side. People like Gregory Bateson, author of Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, along with his wife/ex-wife cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, had been studying control systems in nature and in social systems in the 1940’s and ‘50’s. Works by Mead and Bateson were based on the insights drawn from the functioning of natural ecosystems and indigenous social systems.
For example, trees, natural water pumps, begin to change their pumping behavior with the incremental changes of seasons (mapped by ancient Chinese in 24 seasonal “solar terms” of about two weeks each) adjusting their root water intake (input) according to changes in air and soil temperature and moisture (feedback). The entire ecosystem makes similiar “intelligent” adjustments based on feedback from the environment. These insights — variously termed systems theory, control theory, complexity theory, conversation theory, etc. — lead to the application of cybernetics to many disciplines.
Curiously socio-cybernetics — the governance of political systems — never seemed to gain traction in the mainstream of academic study. Why is this?
Possibly because such a conversation would be too disruptive of current models of governance which tends toward a more inorganic model of open loop control (i.e. low or no feedback in centralized autocratic systems.) Once you introduce multiple channels of feedback between decentralized, exploratory citizen groups, for example, to centralized, consultative decision makers back to decentralized groups in a continuous loop there is a paradigm shift in control.
Control — an addiction in the truest sense — is the opposite of trust and thus takes great confidence in the maturity of all members of the system to surrender. Thus far in our social evolution the Imperial Project has been unable to see a role for the “wisdom of crowds” in policy making — unneeded in simple or even complicated circumstances, but but vital in complex circumstances— preferring governance by a small group of “best and brightest” (strongest and most highly initiated into Imperial values.)
This evolutionary leap, however, is inevitable, thanks to the work of technical and social cybernetic pioneers. Just as we evolved mechanical systems from “dumb” to “smart” in the 1950’s, so too will we evolve our political and social systems from “dumb” to “smart” by accessing vastly expanded ranges of collective intelligence in policy making. Only in this way will we become capable of consistently navigating complexity.
Collective Trauma and Vietnam
The Kennedy assassination left a huge invisible wound of PTSD in the body politic, even to this day. Like any unaddressed perpetration, it immediately began to eat at us from within, feeding and accelerating the decline in trust for “the establishment.” Many viewed Kennedy, the last president to directly challenge the Military Industrial Complex, as being a disruptor of not only the ambitions of his vice-president Lyndon Johnson — the central figure in the awarding of military contracts during the previous administration and a unabashed servant of Texas oil interests — but the global visions of people like John McCloy and David Rockefeller. Conspiracy theories about his death abound, some more credible than others, but history will one day disclose the full truth about “who killed the Kennedys.”
By 1964 with the intrusion of American cold warriors into Vietnam the beatnik and civil rights movement and now anti-war movements began to combust. The anti-war movement began with activists like Rennie Davis and forty or so other student leaders who traveled to Poland behind the “Iron Curtain” to a conference about the legitimacy of the U.S. intrusion in Southeast Asia. (Rennie would later travel to Vietnam as a peace activist in 1967 during the height of the war and again in 1969 to North Vietnam to negotiate the release of U.S. prisoners as well as to the 1969 and subsequent Paris Peace Conferences.)
With the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, amidst a heated presidential election where Johnson was being accused by Goldwater of being “weak on communism,” that year the war escalated and so did the counter-movements.
History now records that the “attack” on the U.S. naval vessel, the USS Mattox, on which Johnson based his Gulf of Tonkin “blank check” request for escalation indeed never happened. This fact was acknowledged over thirty years later by then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the official messenger of the alleged attack, who confirmed with his North Vietnamese counterpart that no hostile action had in fact taken place. The incident, and thus the entire justification for the escalation and subsequent war, was a fabrication. President Johnson, a former naval officer, commented privately “for all I know our navy was shooting at whales that night.”
The end result, though, was the trigger of a full-blown American cultural revolution. The beatnik, civil rights, and anti-war movements were soon to be joined by a women’s and environmental movement which, like a hundred years before in the “Third Great Awakening” (1886 to 1928, we argue) blossomed by the 1970’s into a full array of cosmopolitan, new thought, new spirituality, personal growth, feminine empowerment, environmental awareness, and healthy living sub-movements that changed the face of America and shook faith in its institutions.
After the deaths of JFK, RFK, MLK and Kent State kids, however, activism was successfully chilled, i.e. freeze response to trauma (as had been proven by Nazi researchers: the hint or threat of re-traumatization was enough to trigger a freeze-like panic response, an effective social control for bringing otherwise unruly groups back into obedience.)
The 1970’s expression of the Utopian movement of movements became quite distinct from the 1960’s expression. No longer would they “confront the system.” Rather than fighting “them”, it would begin to turn inward to find and heal/integrate the “them” within “us.”
One expression of this phenomenon of introversion is the “Hippie communes” and “back to the land movement” that arose in rural Tennessee, Virginia, and northern California in the early 1970's. They were maybe the purest strains of the Utopian Culture dropping the strategy of resistance completely, desiring the freedom to explore in all directions, intellectural, emotional, cultural and spiritual. Rejecting all conventionality they adopted “radical” new hair, clothing, living, eating, childrearing, spiritual, and entertainment lifestyles. Some of their experiments in “alternative living” were unsustainably narcissistic and rebellious, but many began, in time to find their way into the mainstream culture (others, like natural midwifery as taught on “The Farm” are still marginalized by mainstream interests.)
Among the most well established and long-lasting hippie communities was “The Farm” founded in 1971 by Stephen Gaskin and 300 spiritual seekers from Haight-Ashbury and San Francisco. People like Al and Tipper Gore visited or lived on the Farm. They paid close attention, listening carefully to the new ideas, particularly in the area of environmental sustainability (much of Gore’s material for Earth in the Balance is sourced from the Farm community.) The Farm even had its own publishing arm to produce material the counterculture sought to disffuse into the mainstream and was often too threatening or visionary for mainstream publishers. Other representative “alternative movement” publications included the Whole Earth Catalog, Mother Earth News, and Communities Magazine.
As counterculture alumnae returned to academia they energized nearly all fields of academic study with new questions and new directions of research. In the field of engineering, for example, in the 1970’s there were only four primary engineering disciplines: civil, electrical, chemical and mechanical. There are now, thanks to these movements, a couple dozen including environmental, marine, biotech, robotic, textile, ceramic, etc.
The same is true for the field or architecture. The influence of people like Buckminister Fuller, a prolific innovator, futurist, and systems theorist who is most noted for the geodesic dome (one of the least of his contributions) inspired an entire new generation of builders seeking to bring more feminine principles into the “spaces of civilization.” Understanding of resilient structures allowed for the creation of buildings that reflected the patterns of nature, the flows of water, the shapes of flowers or the behavior of trees adjusting their shading and inner temperature, for example, based on available sunlight (see the prolific life’s work of Fuller inspired architect Zaha Hadid.)
Many male alumni having had a child or two shaved their faces and put on business clothes and got jobs. Female alumni committed to social change also entered the corporate or government sectors often after completing graduate education in social sciences. Others entered politics and government. These alumni brought with them new attitudes toward organizational culture and a commitment to equality and justice never before allowed to enter the old bastions of patriarchy.
In the corporate sector, for example, the entire field of Human Resources became the testing ground for applying progressive understandings of individual and group behaviour to traditional corporate forms. In politics it meant the rise of the value of “diversity” and the creation of identity politics where each identity group sought to elevate the status of its members. The result was a social and corporate democracy movement within the institutions of society that diffused much of the “hippie wisdom” incubated in the communes (much being rejected, cropped, or riduculed as well.)
A perverse result of the explosion of identity politics on the left was, by the ‘80’s, the abandonment of the needs and concerns of the traditional progressive constituencies of working class white people who didn’t fit the identity politics model. In some sense it could be argued that this was a skillful co-optation of the Utopian Project by the Imperial Project: divide the Utopians into competing interest groups and leave labor and the poor — “factors of production” in the Imperial mind — without a voice in policy.
As the hippie generation aged, most were in one way or other drawn back into the Imperial system. Like their parents, in time, they naturally became nearly as conservative, valuing stability, control, and predictability over meaningful social progress. Some, however, took the time and did the deep personal, transformative work of analyzing the roots of their imperial attitudes and behavior that contradicted their progressive ideals. This work was facilitated by dozens of forms of group therapy and co-counseling methodologies that in time, and through healthy mirroring, “showed people to themselves” and made “the unconscious conscious.”
Ironically, the opposite also happened. Many who would have identified as conservative in the 1960’s and ‘70’s got progressively more progressive and exploratory with age displaying remarkablely open minded attitudes to new lifestyle choices.
The “line” between what it meant to be Imperial and Utopian was blurring. It was increasingly apparent — as it was with Bacon and Dee and others at the beginning of the Utopian and Imperial Projects (see previous essay)—that these polarities could be held within the same person or even with the same group.
Eastern Mysticism to New Age
Another major face of the counterculture, foreshadowed by Ginsberg and Kerouac and the beatniks, was the experimentation with eastern mysticism. The result in a couple of decades being a full blown New Age movement.
Eastern mysticism took a major step forward in America after the Beatles visited Rishikesh, India in February 1968. Rishikesh is one of the traditional centers for teaching yoga, meditation, and the healing techniques of Ayurveda. All of a sudden these very foreign looking and acting “gurus” became “cool” the world over and the ashrams, yoga and ayurveda centers of northern India became flooded with young people seeking healing and enlightenment.
In time gurus were teaching classes at Esalen and organizing venues in middle American venues like Fairfield, Iowa to teach Transcendental Meditation to everyone from prisoners, to politicians, to corporate and military leaders. Some, like Rajnesshpuram in Oregon, became very large for a time in the 1980’s but imploded as the leaders demonstrated less than enlightened behavior.
The cultural bridge had been built between the east and the west and the heretofore hidden wisdom of Asia known only to a handful of academics and a small subculture of spiritual explorers became mainstream. The hippie alumni turned mainstream consultant, author, or academic translated hundreds of books into english and adapted eastern mystical techniques for western audiences.
The New Age movement was characterized by a turning inward to study one’s self. At its best it helped a broad cross section of practitioners from housewives to professionals otherwise leading mainstream lives understand their inner territory and make peace with themselves. At its worst it was charaterized by slick, vampiric workshop gurus who preyed on people’s vulnerabilities and insecurities after having “opened themselves” psychically and spiritually. Some techniques and “ancient methods” of healing, working with sexual energy, understanding the influence of planets, working with crystals, plants and animal medicines, etc. were valid and some distorted. Indeed some aspects, by certainly not most, were cult-like (the process of developing the inner resources to free one’s self from this predation itself being a major spiritual teaching and accomplishement in the journey of the soul.)
Beginning with the Harmonic Convergence of 1987, a supposed celestial event that coincided with ancient prophesy, diverse elements of the broader social movements indeed seemed to begin to converge. Eastern mysticism, organic food, human potential, recovery, Unity Church, women’s empowerment, spiritual progressivism and dozens of other sub-cultures cross-pollinated into a discernible cultural-creative movement.
One of the central features of this movement was the felt experience of “oneness.” Not only the interdependence of all peoples, but the interconnection of all life. The World Wide Web, founded at the same time, became the external expression of this inner awareness. Unity for those who traveled this path was not just a concept, it was a direct experience gained through participation in a spiritual practice that opened the heart and the inner spiritual gates to higher perception.
By the turn of the 21st century this movement’s informal membership could be counted in the millions in America. Books by “new age” authors like Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson stayed on the top of the NYT bestseller list for weeks. Neale Walsh’s Conversations With God stayed on the NYT bestseller list for 137 weeks and spread around the world into dozens of languages. Oprah Winfrey used her show watched by millions each day to promote people like Eckhard Tolle (Power of Now), Jack Canfield (Chicken Soup for the Soul), Wayne Dyer (Wisdom of the Ages) and dozens of others.
As all things have their polarity, the Imperial face of the movement also asserted itself. Many of the New Age “leaders” who were elevated to “guru” status where quietly building financial and “social capital” empires, creating a new sub-sector of capitalism some referred to as the “God-biz” — selling books, recordings, trainings, and workshops to the awakening and often naive masses.
Clearly people by the millions were in varying stages of waking up from the industrial trance and the nightmare or the corrupted American Dream but the awakening was no longer one that called for resistance or rebellion against outside forces. It was an awakening that called for inner warriorship to master one’s self through love, acceptance and detachment.
Through the process of “facing, embracing, and erasing” even the darkest most shameful aspects of our personal past — or even our family’s or culture’s past — it was the beginning of the end of blame and hatred. It was the beginning of the end of activism that fought for or against some perceived injustice because, in the deeper reality “justice just is.” If one accepts oneself, all aspects of oneself, light and dark, good and bad, the just and the unjust, one can easily do this with others. This is peace, inner peace.
Instead of “turning on, tuning in, and dropping out,” people from all walks of life, of all ranks and stations, races and ages, many maintaining perfectly normal mainstream lifestyles were beginning to go within to a place beyond fear and confusion. A place of stillness and clarity, simplicity on the other side of all the complexity. A place beyond the duality of right and wrong, Republican or Democrat, Imperial or Utopian, even man or woman.
People like this had lived in previous times but were counted in handfuls in each generation. Now some sort of spiritual army seemed to be forming, a Fourth Great Awakening with its origins in the original dream of “the City on the Hill,” bowing to the generations of spiritual pioneers from the First, Second, and Third Great Awakenings.
===
Much appreciation to Steve Bhaermen who read an earlier version of this essay and contributed his insights about the rise and transformation of the counterculture.
