The Power of And
Like Daniel, I happily pondered Reihan’s Spectator prophesy of a yupster Return to the Blue Lagoon of Hippiedom. And the result of that pondering centered around the following two sentences:
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.
I’ve always thought that thought in reverse — with the hippie quest for freedom being capitalized by the hippies. It’s right to note that the real hippies and the ’70s kids that came after them make up two very distinct, different, and in key ways antagonistic generational blocs; and blame for the success of the commodification of post-hippie lifestyles can be laid, in large, at the feet of the latter. But not for lack of trying on the part of those who went in one end of hippiedom and came out the other. And don’t try to lay some authenticity trip on me, so that only people who died hippies were real hippies. Once a hippie, always a hippie, I say. Hippies evolved, and the legacy they left us makes possible the sort of responsible fantasizing Reihan is on about precisely because they took up an American ethos that wasn’t exclusively their own.
That ethic we might call DIY materialism. Somewhere between the ethic of the pious frontier craftsman and the ethic of the secularized soapbox derby grade school boomer can be found a fusion of crunchy ‘spirituality’ and communitarian consumerism. Think Unitarian bake sales, or, um, Burning Man. The great promise of post-hippie civilization is that it’s capitalism which can be co-opted back into freer, more genuine, more stable, and more tangible ways of life. And although this principle in practice has resulted in a lot of silly leftist politics, it’s a powerful, sensible, and very American approach to having our cake and eating it too.
Especially given the development of internet technology that’s well wired into the real world, neo-hippies who ‘head for the hills’ can expect to live crunchy, earthy lives of unprecedented cosmopolitanism. Reihan reads hippie values as inimical to overlarge houses. Correct, but what about his other example — custom cabinets, which might be constructed with loving attention and artisanal care? It’s not entirely clear where hippie-inimical materialism ends and hippie-friendly materialism begins. This is why hippie culture was able to reintegrate into capitalist culture. And this is a good thing, because the alternatives are far worse (e.g., permanent cultural war between the Cleans and the Filthies.)
The closest I ever really want to get to Hegelianism is to say we learn from our mistakes, and neo-hippie lifestyles seem like as good an example of how as any. One can find a fair amount of comfort and repose in the material world without internalizing the ideology of materialism. And one can adopt a rather ad hoc form of therapeutic spirituality without becoming the Love Guru. And one can set up a neighborhood of one’s choosing, or find a suitable one in the country, without establishing a cult. A-a-and one can adopt communitarian consumerism under Christian auspices, too! It amuses me to speculate about how long it would take Marx to recover from witnessing these possibilities in action.