A Long Way East of Eden
A Long Way East of Eden:&Could God explain the mess we're in? examines the significance of the &God-question' and the impact of atheism & the loss of God in a culture.
Can We Do Without God in the Twenty-First Century?
At the end of the millennium, our western culture feels, as Thomas Hardy suggested, like a cemetery of dreams. And the dreams have died at a moment of global environmental crisis, when we need vision to motivate us for change more than ever before.
It wasn't always so. For centuries Europe saw a 'dialogue of visions' as to the nature of life, truth, and meaning. We but what marks our own time is that the dialogue has ground to a halt & not because it has been resolved, but because we have seemingly run out of ideas.
As we said earlier, this study is a resource with topical modules that different readers may find fruitf what follows is a thought-experiment, a speculative chapter. Some readers less interested in history and literature may prefer to move on to the subsection titled '' where we move on to more recent politics and rock'n'roll. But, at the start of a millennium, it's good to grasp how we got to where we are. To understand our postmodern west, we need to understand what we've inherited.
The story that follows isn't offered as infallible. But isn't it roughly what happened?
The Long Road Out
It's not easy to make sense of history. But the Dutch philosopher Dooyeweerd
offers a helpful way of bringing together our understandings of the past.
We can re-express it like this: In each era since we turned away from the Bible's God, our culture has been shaped by one or more 'god-substitutes'. These aren't gods that we actually 'worship', but they're the next thing to it. They&re the things that 'matter most' to us, the principles that dominate our lives, determining our sense of what' the sources we look to for truth and meaning, for the understanding of right and wrong. Our culture's story is, among other things, the history of successive 'god-substitutes', and of how well they 'reign' as our gods. One after another they hold this role, until their inadequ then we lose faith in them, they are replaced by a different 'god', and the story begins again.
It's a fruitful way of thinking, focusing our attention on what matters most for the hearts, minds and imaginations of an era. It's one that an atheist or Christian can be equally comfortable with. Let's give it a try.
Our long 'succession of gods' can be illustrated from Britain's arts and literature. When an artist writes a poem or a novel, she has to decide what to write about. That is, to choose what is worth celebrating: what is most significant in the world, what is most worthy of record. So may we see the story of our art as a series of judgments as to what really matters? That could chart for us the 'gods' we've used to replace the Father we no longer believe in.
The seventeenth century is a good place to begin: that crucial period when the Bible first became widely available to ordinary people, resulting in a joyous, Europe-wide rediscovery of individual faith. Of course the Reformation was a muddled amalgam of political, economic, and religious factors, with religious banners masking loyalties of many kinds. Yet still it was a crucial historical moment, when the 'nearness of God' & God relating directly to us as individuals, rather than via a cumbersome and dubious religious structure & suddenly became vital to Europe's consciousness. With the liberation of the biblical text, each individual's response to God was seen to stand at the heart of existence. The individual received a significance that was dramatically new.
Such a change of consciousness had massive repercussions. For example in the growth of democracy: if God reveals his ways to individuals, not just to the authorities, and if the most important thing in the world is our individual response, then that has po our own views have significance just as much as those of the authorities. Of course the Reformation left British politics a long way fro but the strong link between the rise of Protestantism and the rise of parliamentary democracy, championed by the Puritans, is not coincidental. There were implications for art as well. As Dooyeweerd's fellow-Dutchman Hans Rookmaaker points out, in the painting of this period we see a marked shift in what is thought to be worth depicting. Where earlier painters had chosen to paint the saints or the heroes of Greek legend, now the ordinary individual seemed worth celebrating. Artists in the Protestant culture of Holland like Jan Steen, or indeed Rembrandt, become concerned to paint realistic scenes of ordinary people going about their ordinary lives. They were working within a culture that grasped that God was deeply interested in ordinary people, not just in heroes and saints.
And when we look at the literature of this period, don't we see that same re-valuing of the ordinary person? We find Christian poets like Donne, Herbert or Marvell, writing about love or worship as they feel to ordinary people. It is in the Reformation context, too, that the novel arises & perhaps the branch of literature pre-eminently interested in the development of the ordinary individual. The English novel may be said to emerge with the radical Baptist preacher John Bunyan, then more clearly with Daniel Defoe (also clearly beginning from a Protestant background, eg. in Robinson Crusoe). The clarity of the sense of the biblical God at the heart of the Reformation worldview affected their politics, their painting, it mattered what God they worshipped.
Today, postmodernity has subverted much of this. We saw in chapter 1 how our loss of the Reformation confidence in individuality has implic we saw in chapter 2 how our loss of confidence in any direction or 'shape' to individual life has (among other things) eroded the feasibility of the novel. To be westerners is to be great-grandchildren of the God-centred R but it is also to be heirs to the dialogue that has happened since.
For in the late seventeenth century, the Reformation worldview was replaced by other ways of thinking. Why? Was it because of fatal contradictions in the thinking of too many 'Christians'? & for example in their failure to take seriously Christ's apparent outlawing of force? They taught, indeed, that personal faith was all-important, and this emphasis on individual choi yet many sought to impose a state church into which all were coerced by law, and were even willing to use the sword to further their religion. Too often, the Reformation was simply incomplete. It was a paradox as brutal as an Ulster 'Protestant' carrying a Bible saying 'Love your enemy' yet hating his 'Fenian' and it could lead only to conflict worsened by passionate conviction. It is true that the bloody Civil War in England and the Thirty Years' War on the continent were at least as much about new political forces and nation-states consolidating their power as about doctrinal disagreements. But did the long years of conflict under religious banners leave a climate of weariness with anything approaching a clear religious stance? At any rate, by around 1680 there came a reaction against much that the Reformation had stood for, with the period we call the Enlightenment.
This, we might say, was the West's first major attempt at a 'god-substitute', centring its culture on faith in 'natural' human reason, rather than faith in divine revelation. Christians insisted that unaided human reason, being part of a broken world, has a fundamental problem in perceiving ultimate truth. Enlightenment thinkers tended natural human rationality, for them, took the place of a 'nearby' God, and was thoroughly trustworthy as the pointer towards a new dawn of civilisation. ('We hold these truths to be self-evident', the starting-point of the American Declaration of Independence, is a quintessentially Enlightenment statement.) We see this optimism in much of the work of Pope, perhaps the most important English poet of the earl a similar easy confidence marks a novelist like Fielding.
In various ways Romanticism offers to find what is truly significant and worthy of celebration beyond the world of everyday reason, but with God continuing to be marginal.
But soon there began to be bad dreams as to whether this was enough to live by. At the end even of Pope's Dunciad, a nightmare of chaos overwhelms human society, and the closing words are 'universal darkness buries all': instead of the clarity of human rationality, the night of Dulness falls on humanity. The terrible final book of Swift's Gulliver's Travels offers a parallel nightmare: human beings, devoid of true reason, are merely animals wallowing in the mud. In both these masterpieces we sense a shared fear: what if reason is not enough? What if humanity will not be governed by it? The anarchic brutality of the world depicted by Hogarth, or by Smollett, undermined Pope's easy confidence that 'Whatever is, is right'. And as the century continues we find writers sensing that rationality isn't enough (see Tristram Shandy), and looking elsewhere for different principles or values around which to orient what they depict: the 'sentimental movement', rediscovering the value of feeling (Mackenzie or S or, from a different angle, Hume); primitivism (Macpherson's Ossian, looking back to the world of Celtic myth, and even, in a sense, Walter Scott); or the dark side of the psyche, in Gothicism. The rationalistic 'god-substitute' had Enlightenment simply didn't satisfy the intuitions which insisted that, somewhere, there must be more. But this breakdown & first, of the old consensus that God's revelation h then, of the replacement faith that human reason is an infallible guide & triggered the search for alternatives that has characterised our history.
So at the end of the eighteenth century comes the emergence of themes we associate with Romanticism, in poets such as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, K writers marked by a rejection of what Blake calls the 'mind-forged manacles' of the Enlightenment, and the rules of neo-classical poetics (as subverted by Wordsworth and Coleridge) and conventional behaviour (see Byron and Shelley) that went with them. The result might have been a whole 'rediscovery of God', and indeed that did take place to a certain extent. But in general the 'marginalizing of God' that began in the Enlightenment continues in the mainstream of Romanticism. As American postmodernist Rorty rightly argues, Romanticism attempts to salvage the spirituality of Christianity by placing it in a de-supernaturalized context & by giving it, in effect, other 'gods'.
What then replaces God, for the Romantics, as source of the ultimately significant? Perhaps childhood, considered as something pure ('trailing clouds of glory') before it is ruined by society (Blake's Songs of Innocence, Wordsworth's Prelude); the natural world, considered now as something untamed, supra-rational, beyond humanity, but also unfallen (Wordsworth again); visionary experience attained through drugs (Coleridge's Kubla Khan, supposedly); the individual consciousness, embodied particularly in the Imagination (Keats, Coleridge). In various ways Romanticism offers to find what is truly significant and worthy of celebration beyond the world of everyday reason, but with God continuing to be marginal. (Can we see a parallel with what happens in Kant's philosophy, where the things that really matter & freedom and ethics, for example & likewise belong to a realm 'independent of the whole world of sense'?)
But it didn't last. As a thought-experiment it would be worth reflecting how the elevation of these qualities to 'god-substitutes' ultimately distorted or destroyed each of them. We could consider how idolization of childhood led to the sentimentalizing of children in Dickens, perhaps a prime factor making
or, how treating nature (divorced from God) as the source of life turned into its becoming the unfeeling source of death in later authors like Z or again, how the emphasis on feeling over thought led to the utter degradation of feeling in de Sade. But a deeper and tragic question lurked beneath the Romantic vision: do we really find a higher truth as we look beyond the rational to the I or are we just 'imagining' it, wandering in our own daydreams?
The question is put powerfully by Keats, at the close of Ode to a Nightingale. Keats listens to and celebrates the beauty of a bird's song. But at the end of the poem the bird is gone, and Keats asks, 'Was it a vision, or a waking dream?' Was it a truly significant glimpse of ultimate beauty, or just the kind of fantasy that comes between sleep and waking? As the nineteenth century continues, the issue becomes more urgent. In Tennyson, guru-bard to the Victorians, we often sense the despair of a man who hardly dares hope that the things he most cares about have ultimate reality. In Browning, too, isn't there a deep sense of loss, of seeking to forget the big questions in the rush into action & everything is lost, but anyway keep riding?
For at the heart of the apparent confidence of nineteenth century Britain was a violent collapse of certainty. Up till now the Christian framework had underpinned the dominant values, even though in many ways the culture had moved far from commitment to the biblical God. But now came the first really major intellectual assault on Christianity, from German biblical criticism and from Darwin's theory of evolution. It was the age of the 'loss of faith': just when the Romantic dream was seeming a fantasy and dwindling into sentimentalism, so too the Christian framework appeared to be collapsing. Don't we see in many Victorian writers & in Tennyson's In Memoriam, in Arnold's 'Dover Beach' (quoted in chapter 5) & a profound sense of loss and doubt as to whether any foundation is left for significance? And is there not doubt, too, as to whether goodness is something with any real basis or source or power? (That is, is there really any 'god'?) Dickens' villains, for example, have tremendous vitality, but his good characters seem pale by comparison (eg. in Oliver Twist); it is very hard to understand why in the end they triumph. The reason, one suspects, is that Dickens himself didn't know. (Dostoevski's The Idiot poses a similar problem.)
'God is silent and that I cannot possibly deny & everything in me calls for God and that I cannot forget& As a matter of fact, this experience can be found in one form or another in most
it is the torment in Jaspers, death in Malraux, destitution in Heidegger, the reprieved-being in Kafka, the insane and futile labour of Sisyphus in Camus'
& Jean-Paul Sartre
So doesn't much of the major literature of the last 150 years reflect a quest for new 'god-substitutes', for alternative bases for values and significance? We see the Pre-Raphaelites & William Morris, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti & looking back to the Middle Ages. George Eliot is almost an early liberal-humanist: for her God is 'inconceivable', immortality 'unbelievable', yet still there remains duty, 'peremptory and absolute'. Others look to science as the key: but the French Naturalists such as Zola reveal the scientific universe as a machine pursuing its impersonal, deterministic purposes, with no care for the human beings trapped in the process. (At the end of L'Assommoir, for example, the heroine is found dead and 'turning green already'.) And none of towards the end of the century a different alternative appears, with the swing away from visible reality among the first precursors of the modernist movement. Even if there is nothing to live by in the mundane world, they seem to say, at least we can look for something meaningful and significant in the separate universe of art and in the personal aes in France with the Symbolist poets, in Britain somewhat differently with the Aesthetic movement & 'art for art's sake', that being all there is to truly celebrate.
Twentieth-century literature offers a vast proliferation of 'god-substitutes', responding to the issue of what is worth living for. But don't we find many of modernism's greatest literary achievements building on this 'aesthetic god'? In different ways Joyce, Yeats, Woolf and Pound seek an autonomous aesthetic construct that will somehow make sense of this meaningless world, or contain an order and meaningfulness that this one lacks. The influential philosopher G.E. Moore pointed to two spheres as containing that which was truly worthwhile: art and relationship. E.M. Forster gave expression to the latter in his famous remark that, faced with the choice of betraying his country or his friend, he hoped he would betray his country. (Perhaps these two remain the central 'god-substitutes' for modernity: Posterski and Bibbey's recent surveys of Canadian youth values likewise highlight music and friendship as the things that really matter.)
Communism and Fascism are two great myths of 'modernity'. Ultimately, didn't they both destroy the 'gods' they had deified? Communism deified the State, the collective & and by the time Russian Communism finally fell, it was obvious to any visitor how anything public, that belonged to the State, was completely neglected by the average citizen. Nazism deified Germany, the 'master-race' & and left Germany divided in two for the next 40 years. What we deify, we destroy?
But these two 'god-substitutes', like their predecessors, had their problems. So many of the best novels of this period struggle with the inadequacy of human relationships (the devouring relationships in Lawrence, Conrad's themes of betrayal and isolation, or the sense of failure in the close of Forster's Passage to India). And art: what is art? In the autonomous universe of art, how do we know what is significant and worthy of record? When we believed in God we could go back to the beginning of the Bible, and see a Creator who makes things and declares tha beauty had real meaning because it came from God. But now that God is dead, what is beauty? Is it purely subjective? Is there any difference between the sound of a Beethoven concerto and of a concrete mixer? What (if anything) is of value? What is genuinely worth the artist's celebrating?
The last thirty years crystallised this problem with the shift to postmodernism. Postmodernism is a complex phenomenon, but isn't one of its characteristics precisely this doubt? Andy Warhol produces a sculpture that is an exact replica of a box of Brillo pads. And why not? In the past we made sculptures of human beings. But what is so special about them? In a chance universe they are no more significant, no more worthy of celebration, than anything else. Jeff Koons made a name for himself with (among other things) a giant stainless steel rabbit. Earlier in the century, Marcel Duchamp presented a toi in the 1960s, Piero Manzoni tinned and sold his own excrement. ('Of course it's art', says Damien Hirst, famous for his dead shark in formaldehyde and his cow's head being eaten by maggots, 'it's in an art gallery.')
The music of John Cage poses a similar question. Beethoven might write symphonies for violins, clarinets, but why are these sounds more 'privileged', more significant, than anything else? In Cage's famous piano piece 4'33"; he does not even play the piano. Why, after all, should we give the term 'music' to pieces of wood striking pieces of wire? The sounds of people laughing or jeering, arguing or demanding their money back, would be as much an expression of music as the wood and wire. The reasoning is logical enough. Cage once wrote, 'I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry.' All that is left at that point is the act of speaking, of words without meaning. It is the last extremity of formalism: the medium is the message because there is nothing else. Many of Beckett's writings present only a voice speaking in the dark (surprisingly often in hell), with nothing worth saying, wanting indeed to stop but unable to do so, therefore going on, meaninglessly, hopelessly, for page after page after page. That end-point is all there is left to be said. And we have to ask: if there is no God, what else is there to celebrate and believe in as a source of significance? Have we any logical alternative to postmodernism?
At the end of a millennium, then, we are heirs to an extended but failed dialogue: from the excitement of the Reformation, with the rediscovery of the individual's enormous significance before G through the Enlightenment's turning away from God's revelation in the name of autonomous human reason, then the swing in turn from the inadequacies of that 'reason', to non-rational sou then on through the searchings of the nineteenth century, through the modernist era often seeking meaningfulness or order in separ and now postmodernity, when those myths too have lost their meaning. Today, all the syntheses and 'god-substitutes' we are 'incredulous towards meta-narratives'; we have little left to build upon, celebrate or rejoice over, little to say except to go on saying very little. In such a world, art may become in so, too, may life. We live in the 'twilight of the gods', as heirs to three centuries of failed 'god-substitutes'.
But perhaps youth culture has taken up the search where its elders failed. Let's explore the story again, starting this time in the '50s.
Once again, we can guess at the 'god-replacements' that briefly flavoured our world before giving way in inadequacy to their successors. Once again, what follows is hypothetical. But we're asking the question, isn't this roughly what happened? Might this story explain where we are?
In these last few pages we&ve focused on 'high culture', but many aspects of 'high culture' have lost their significance now. (Dickens is far better known in Russia than in England, though Russia is changing too.) So this time we'll focus more on popular culture, on rock and fashion and politics. In particular, postmodern art seems, to many people, if the collapse of values means there is nothing left to celebrate, nothing to say, then the whole enterprise of 'high art' is meaningless. Dripping paint on the canvas? Sitting by a silent piano? Nice wo nothing in it for me. But in this same period there burst onto the scene a new set of impulses, and particularly a new music, that clearly could find something to shout about. This this was the time for rock'n'roll.
From Dream to Dream
In many ways, 1950s culture reflected a blithe new confidence. The west had been through a bad time. The late '40s mood contained a sense of something gone wrong beyond the power of idealism to set right: in the bestiality demonstrated at Auschwitz, Belsen and Buchenwald, and the fearful power for destruction revealed even in the Allies' triumph. We can see something of an attempt to confront these issues in the arts & for example in the poetic movement known as New A and, more generally, in a brief return among the intelligentsia to Godward faith. This was the heyday of C.S. Lewis' championing of 'mere', original Christianity, for example, and of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets.
But as the '50s proceeded, it seemed that humankind, empowered by science, was really putting its world in order on its own. Germany saw the Wirtschaftswunder or economic miracle, Britain the rise of the welfare state. At the end of the decade, John Kennedy could tell America that the world's problems had been created by man, and could be solved by man. British premier Harold Macmillan told his electorate, 'You've never had it so good'; and compared to the mass unemployment of the '30s, the privations and horrors of the '40s and the austerity years of the early '50s, the point carried weight. Fasci com standards of living were rising continuously.
In Britain at least, this confidence in humanity's resources was reflected in the rise of a new god-replacement, an overt humanism. In the arts there arose a deep distrust of 'big truths' of any non- hence a dominance of formalism, or (in English poetry) of the Movement & poets who denied any role as 'seer' and disdained the grand concerns of an Eliot or an Auden. ('Nobody wants any more poems on the grander themes for a few years', wrote Kingsley Amis in 1955.) No outside revelation was needed. Even the religious Establishment was in heavily liberal, non- when Billy Graham was invited to address the student Christian Union at Cambridge, his message of the need for 'new birth' was denounced by Michael Ramsey, soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury, as 'heretical'.
Yet soon there were widening cracks in the temple of this humanistic confidence. If the '50s saw the emergence of humanism as 'god-substitute', they soon saw also its implosion. In literature, Leavis became the guru of taste, but his uncompromising humanism was coupled curiously with an insistence that British culture was in its death-throes. Clearly the facade of '50s humanism could conceal unresolved contradictions. (Few things would be more characteristic of the '60s than a loathing of the 'Great Society' '50s humanism could be so proud of.) Elsewhere the '50s saw a sense of unfocused rebellion, distrustful of an establishment incapable of living up to the
and a sense of fresh energies seeking an alternative. John Osborne's Look Back in Anger is the classic expression of the frustration, even if he and his fellow 'Angry Young Men' had little positive to say. The same note sounded through James Dean (Rebel Without a Cause); through the beatniks ('I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked' & Ginsberg in Howl); through the teddy boys. And, most of all, through Elvis and the rest. Beat and rock'n'roll were controver revolting impatiently against the old gods, against the '50s establishment that was modernity's final fling, against liberalism's old order that thought it knew all the answers. Rock'n'roll is rebel-music & 'Move over, daddy-o!' As in Osborne, as with Dean, there was no new big vision to follow, not yet. But there was radical dissatisfaction with the complacencies of the reigning 'gods'; and a hunger for something new.
Early in the '60s, new idealisms & new 'gods' & began to emerge. In America, the inaugural speech of Kennedy's 'New Frontier' administration was marked by words like 'new', 'anew', 'renewal'; the dominant image was of dynamic youthful energy taking over at the top. Of course we now know of the mafia links that lay behind the image, and the sleazy relationships & both Kennedy brothers sleeping with Marilyn Monroe, JFK's chronic gonorrhea. But that wasn't how i Samuel Eliot Morrison's 1965 Oxford History of the American People climaxes with the Camelot song that came to stand for JFK, about 'one brief shining moment'. ('The hardest thing now is to explain how we once felt about the Kennedys', reflected one recent writer. Rauschenberg's Retrospective II (1964), featuring a spaceman and a shot of JFK, was 'the last affectionate tribute to a political figure produced by an American artist', suggested Time; after JFK, no more heroes.) In Britain too, the tired and scandal-prone Conservative administration was swept aside by a young Labour government mouthing idealistic rhetoric about the 'white heat of the technological revolution'. 'It seemed the time had come for young men to take over the world', Roy Hattersley wrote later. (The same optimism was mirrored exuberantly in Pop Art.)
And in pop music, four young men from Liverpool seemed to be doing just this, with the worldwide triumph ('bigger than Jesus') of the early Beatles. That soon merged into the broader '60s counter-culture.
What were the '60s about? They weren't just a period of sexual libertinism, nor of mere overthrow of traditional standards. The culture of these years & hippies, 'flower power' & has taken a great deal of sarcasm, but they were in many ways an era of hope compared to the decades that followed. They were years of conflict, certainly, but also confidence & now almost unimaginable & that huge new possibilities were available, pointing the route to a better world. New principles arose as foundations for identity, new 'god-substitutes' overthrew those of '50s liberal humanism. There was the political New Left inspired by Mao and Marcuse, unifying black power and student power, powerful enough almost to bring down the French government and certainly to terrify the American one. There was the hippie culture, proclaiming not only sexual liberation but a whole new order of 'love and peace'; the drug culture, offering complete transformation right down to the cellular level ('Grass will grow in Times Square within ten years', promised Timothy Leary); and the assured proponents of eastern religion. Indeed, rock music itself was 'going to become the answer to the day's problems', affirmed Pete Townshend. Gods a- and when Eric Clapton&s Blind Faith, or the Rolling Stones, played totally free before a host of flower children in Hyde Park, and still more in the quasi-religious atmosphere of the Woodstock festival attended by half a million, it did seem that there was a 'whole generation with a new explanation'.
But what was that 'new explanation' to be? Bob Dylan had been the voice of the simpler political protests of the earlier '60s, but soon he was concluding that 'Politics is bullshit. It's all unreal. The only thing that's real is inside you.' The Beatles moved in the same direction, from the simple pop of 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand' through the existential questioning of 'Eleanor Rigby' and 'Nowhere Man', thence to confidence in the power of hallucinogenic drugs to unlock reality ('A Day in the Life', 'Strawberry Fields Forever'), culminating in the full manifesto of the Sergeant Pepper album. 'All You Need is Love' became the anthem of the hippie movement, sung on international telecast to an estimated audience of 400 million. Many other voices proclaimed drug experience as the source of meaning & Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead.
For an artist like Hendrix, drugs were not merely a mind- rather, blended with music and new sexual freedom, they offered a source for mystical liberation on a cosmic scale. Back in 1963 Paul McCartney had written God off ('I don't think about religion. It doesn't fit into my life'); now, he declared, he had found God after swallowing LSD. The 'god-substitute' was everything we could need: LSD 'could heal the world... I now believe the answer to everything is love.' Bryan Wilson of the Beach Boys agreed: 'My experience of God came from acid. It's the most important thing that ever happened to me.'
But still one 'god-substitute' gave way to another. If drugs pointed to God, maybe God pointed beyond drugs, to India. The Beach Boys got into transcendental meditation, with the Maharishi opening the concerts in their May 1968 Pete Townshend of the Who was into Meher Baba, and Baba's ideas would turn up in Tommy and Quadrophenia. 'We're all searching for something called God', said George H 'We are all trying to get where Jesus Christ got' & although his fellow-Beatles hit the end of that particular road after their frustrating visit ('just like Butlins') to the Maharishi's Indian headquarters.
Cooling Off
But there was a darker aspect to the decade: the nihilism of the Velvet Underground, singing of heroin and sado-masochism, setting out to reflect the 'wild side' of New York which was hookers, junkies and cross-dressers. Heavily influenced by pop artist Andy Warhol, they became a gateway through which the nihilistic conclusions of 'high art' would move across into the mainstream. Unfortunately, they had truth on their side.
As we look back now to the '60s, there is a delightful childlikenes but none of the ideals quite worked. Politically, the vicious 1968 brutality of Mayor Daley's Chicago police, followed by the re-election of Richard Nixon, showed that the old order was quite capable of re the left itself turned now in an increasingly autocratic direction, confirming Marcuse's comment that every revolution is a betrayed revolution. (The Beatles set their faces against the new, destructive mood in Lennon&s song 'Revolution'.) LSD likewise didn' the girl who wrote down the secret of the universe while tripping, then found that what she had written was 'If I stand on the tips of my toes I can touch the ceiling,' was not the only one to find how this god had failed. George Harrison visited the psychedelic heartland of Haight-Ashbury and reported, 'That was the first thing that turned me off drugs. I expected them to be all nice and clean and friendly and happy and the first thing you see is lots of dirty people lying around on the floor.' One of LSD-prophet Leary's original disciples, Allen Cohen, remarked, 'One of the fantasies we had is demonstrably false. This is the belief that if you take enough psychedelic drugs you will become holy... love will flow from you. It doesn't work... You can't carry over even the profound experiences you have. You can feel very loving under LSD but can you exert that love to someone who previously you didn't like? The long range answer is no.'
If Harrison was unimpressed by Haight-Ashbury, his fellow-Beatles became equally underwhelmed by eastern religion, expressing their deep disillusionment in 'Sexy Sadie', originally titled 'Maharishi'. All they had needed, seemingly, and, unable to figure that one out, they broke up. Most painfully, the mass idealism of the free Woodstock festival proved reality broke in four months later at a similar event in Altamont, California, as Mick Jagger sang 'Sympathy for the Devil'. A man was beaten to death by the Hell&s Angels the Stones had brought in to Jagger & the same Jagger who had declared 'I'm free to do what I want any old time' & was left pathetically pleading, 'I mean, like people, who's fighting and what for? Hey, people! I mean, who's fighting and what for? Why are we fighting? We don't want to fight... I mean, like every other scene has been cool...'. 'It was like a nice afternoon in hell', said Jerry Garcia afterwards, 'It was so weird.'
Altamont, the Grateful Dead's manager remarked later, was the end of the '60s; the day the music died. Bob Dylan had retreated into country pastoralism on Nashville Skyline (1969), the Byrds likewise with 'Sweetheart of the Rodeo'. Back in the cities, a craze for witchcraft began to sweep the counterculture. (This was also the heyday of the 'Jesus movement': things were tending to go one way or the other.) As the '70s began it became clear, as John Lennon said, that the dream was over. The deaths within ten months of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and the Doors' Jim Morrison symboliz Paul McCartney began proceedings to dissolve the Beatles in the same period.
The gods had failed. 'Won't Get Fooled Again', sang the Who. To Frank Zappa the 'whole hippie scene' was 'wishful thinking. They wish they could love, but they're full of ****'. Lennon's summary of the counterculture was deeply depressed:
Nothing happened except that we all dressed up. The same bastards are in control, the same people are running everything... I no longer believe in myth and Beatles is another myth. I don't believe in it, the dream is over. And I'm not just talking about the Beatles. I'm talking about the generation thing. The dream is over. It's over and we've got to get down to so-called reality.
(Somehow a straight line leads from that to the greed-is-good 'realism' of more recent times.)
'Talkin' 'bout my degeneration.' Jesus dead, '50s humanism dead, and now the '60s these were the days of the scandal of Watergate, and idealism gave way, if not to the outright courting of corruption, then to cynicism and an overt loss of hope for any real meaning. (And, in fashion, an almost deliberate tastelessness.) The cover of the 1963 edition of Colin Wilson's bestseller The Outsider had announced, without irony, 'an inquiry into the sickness of mankind in the mid-twentieth century'; an emblematic '70s moment came when Monty Python denied any such inquiry, recycling the phrase at the close of one episode as patently ludicrous. Something had grown old and died in the meantime & or between the days of '60s songs like 'Blowing in the Wind' and 'Where Have All the Flowers Gone?', where the ideals and values seemed so real, and the '70s dominance of 'cool', pessimistic, uncommitted, maintaining a safe distance. Logically enough, on the religious scene the huge promises of the eastern-based cults of the '60s (TM, Divine Light Mission, Zen Buddhism) gave way to psychotherapeutic self-help groups (EST, Synanon, Insight). With so many other dreams dead, what remained to self-expression, self-discovery. The '70s became known as the 'Me Generation' (Tom Wolfe), or, in the title of Christopher Lasch's celebrated volume, the 'Culture of Narcissism'.
But again, '70s cool seemed to have realism on its side, unlike the god-alternatives of the preceding decade. What the '60s had deified was now despised. David Bowie told Newsweek, 'I hated the whole togetherness, peace, love thing. It was conceited, flabby, suffocating & and didn't mean what it said' & exactly what a beatnik might have said about the hollowness of an earlier humanism. Thus if the dominant musical voice of the '60s was the Beatles' idealism, in the early '70s the keynote was contentlessness: the Europop of Abba or Boney M, the self-indulgent triple-LP fantasias of 'art-rock', or the mindlessness of 'Get It On' & the result of Marc Bolan's profitable switch away from his earlier sub-Tolkien hippie anthems. (1960s hero John Peel refused to play the new Bolan.) Hippie kaftans gave way to the poseur-flamboyance of glam-rock (Bowie and Iggy Pop, both heavily influenced by Velvet Underground nihilism), or the black, even satanically-oriented pessimism of heavy metal, which NME's Phil McNeill described as 'the sound of the '70s. It has underpinned the whole decade.' Lester Bangs listed:
a representative sampling of song titles from heavy metal albums by the genre's acknowledged punjabs: "Paranoid", "Killing Yourself to Live", "Children of the Grave", "Into the Void" (Black Sabbath); "Aimless Lady", "Winter and My Soul" (Grand Funk Railroad); "Dier not a Lover", "D.&ead& O.&n&A.&rrival&", "Hangman's Dances" (Bloodrock); "Into the Fire", "Living Wreck" (Deep Purple)... Heavy metal music in its finest flower had one central, obvious message: There is no hope. Whatever you do, you can't win.
Perhaps this collapse of values in white-dominated culture helps us understand the repeated importance of black music as a source for new life. It is striking how often fresh momentum comes from this direction & with its roots in gospel, in convictions that certain things are right, are wrong, are worth celebrating, that love is a reality, that people matter.
When such certainties have lost their grounding in white culture, there comes a desire for the conviction voiced by an Aretha Franklin, a Stevie Wonder, a Bob M the sound of a reality for which our hearts are hungry. Don't we sense that, after the '60s, white popular culture oscillates between cynicism, irony or nihilism on the one hand, and romantic longings for something deeper, something with tradition and value? And, tragically, that these longings seldom encounter anything credible, no 'gods' so as a result they grow purely commercial, economically-oriented, hollow at their heart?
'I have nothing to say and I am saying it...'
1950s humanism dead, '60s a little left to believe in. But the story goes on. The main musical (and stylistic) movement of the late '70s amended that 'little' to 'nothing whatsoever'. In 1976 punk burst onto the scene.
Here indeed was a new but its motivating 'god' was a radical nihilism, expressed in posed violence and deliberate ugliness. Punk was the music of the 'blank generation' struggling with recession and unemployment, angrily in reaction against its predecessors. Sting told a TV Times interviewer, 'Supergroups like the Who and Led Zeppelin had things all their own way, releasing records of over-produced, over-rehearsed, hackneyed music' while a 'whole generation is being flushed down the drain. Many have no work, they feel unfulfilled, humiliated and abused. Punk groups articulate their frustrations.' In furious reaction to the previous generation's 'concept albums' (Mike Oldfield, Yes, Electric Light Orchestra), punks proudly declared their lack of musical skills, proclaiming themselves 'garage bands', 'three-chord wonders'.
But the nihilism went deeper. The Sex Pistols called for 'Anarchy in the UK'; 'No Future' was the slogan their followers painted on walls across Britain. If the 'fascist' establishment' was rejected, from the monarchy downwards (as per the Pistols' 'God Save the Queen'), so, equally, were the gods of '60s idealism. 'Dosed out of their heads the whole time', sneered Johnny Rotten about the hippies. 'Yeah man! Peace and love!'
But there was something profoundly pessimistic & to put it kindly: massively selfish, to be less generous & about the 'looking after number one' that resulted from this rejection of 'peace and love': 'I'm in love with& my pretty little self, and nobody else', to quote the Pistols. Punk was consistent, but punk was hate: 'I Hate Pink Floyd' was Johnny Rotten's trademark t-shirt, and 'I hate them, I'd love to murder them' was his comment on his fellow-Pistols after the band broke up. The results were consistent too: the punk habit of bands spitti the movement's self-image as exploitation, embodied when Malcolm McLaren, the Pistols' creator, proudly presented his machinations in The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle. ('Of course I exploited them', McLaren said of his next project Bow Wow Wow, 'and I'm proud of it!') Consistent, too, was the image of aggression cultivated at punk concerts & the girl blinded by a glass thrown at the stage at the 100 Club, and, finally, Pistols bassist Sid Vicious overdosing on heroin while facing a murder trial for killing his girlfriend after the Pistols' acrimonious breakup. In punk, the kids with nothing to lose from consistency had pushed '70s me-generation nihilism towards its limit.
But man cannot live by nihilism alone, any more than music can survive on three chords alone. (Though John Lydon & Johnny Rotten & did the best he could. When his next 'anti-rock' band, Public Image Limited, toured America, they deliberately recruited a novice bassist, band members might stop playing after half an hour, and once the whole group played from behind a screen. Lydon taunted the fans for having paid to hear them.) Thus what followed in the 'new wave' included a turning away from 'three chord wonders', and a willingness to concede the meaning of musical values. When ex-Pistol Glen Matlock formed his new band, Rich Kids, his change of direction was signalled in his announcement 'We're here to play music'. Sting said of the Police, 'We wanted to sing songs that people could remember and that were not necessarily anti-social.' Along with this, in contrast to punk's logically-consistent ugliness, came a rediscovery of style: Blitz Kids, New R Adam Ant, Culture Club, Ultravox, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet. And, in place of the punks' hostility to their audience (spitting on their fans), came the audience-friendly approach of Bruce Springsteen or U2. ('I don't like music unless it has a healing effect', said Bono & not very punk, but in those days most of the band were committed Christians, involved in a Dublin charismatic fellowship and influenced by Chinese Christian writer Watchman Nee.)
Outside U2, however, the swing away from nihilism didn't mean the nihilists' questions had found an answer. Culturally, emphasis on style tends to occur when there is not very much credible to be said. This was certainly the case with, say, Boy George, who deliberately presented himself as a 'man without convictions'. ('I don't want people committed to an ideal', he told one interviewer, 'coz ideals go out of the window after a while. I could say something to you now and tomorrow something could happen that could make me change my mind.') Yet there was at least an opening for something positive. The change of climate was symbolised most strikingly by the Live Aid event of 1985, when most of rock's biggest names joined in a huge concert for the sake of the world's hungry. It would have been impossible to imagine the Sex Pistols, the Stranglers and the Damned arranging such an event i but now Santana, Sade, even Elvis Costello sang of brotherhood, love, togetherness. It was gut-reaction altruism, as its organizer Bob Geldof made clear in an interview the following year:
I'm not this completely selfless individual... I'd like to be as selfless as Mother Teresa, but I'm not... I will never stop thinking about those people and wanting to help. But if I were to go on and do that I'd be bored and tired, and upset easily... I don't care what people say or don't say, I just want to be a success.
Altruism as this year's fashion choice, the cynic might say. Yet there was clearly in Geldof a serious desire for the ideals to make sense.
Perhaps this explains the curious resurgence of religious motifs in the next few years. Steve Turner observes that several key figures in early '80s music, like Sting or Simple Minds' Jim Kerr, were
lapsed Roman Catholics who, while not subscribing to the ethics and power structure of the church, nevertheless found themselves using the symbols... These were people often deeply respectful of religious ritual, moved by the language and typology of the Bible but sceptical of church teachings.
Sprin these musicians express a sense that there is power associated, somewhere and somehow, with what might be termed 'religion'. Even more fascinating is Madonna. The archetypal 'Material Girl' rode on a wave of religious symbolism ('Like a Virgin', 'Like a Prayer', 'The Immaculate Collection'), notching up en route the astonishing feat of hijacking one of humankind's great religious words and making it refer primarily to herself. Madonna embodied the '80 on the one hand, unashamed materialism and quintessentially postmodern manipulation of i yet drawing on the vestigial power of religious imagery, which & and here is the crucial paradox & she herself partly believed in. (Witness the bizarre fact of her prayer meetings with her dancers during a Canadian tour that was nearly cancelled for obscenity.)
It is in these terms that we can understand the link between what was happening in youth culture and in politics in the '80s. A comparison between Madonna and Margaret Thatcher is oddly illuminating. Both were as far from the un-materialistic idealisms of the '60s as was Johnny R yet both were comfortable deploying religious symbolism as part of their packaging, and neither apparently lacked some genuine belief in it. But if the dark side of the rejection of '60s utopianism was the naked materialism embodied in punk and then in Madonna, that was the achilles heel of '80s Thatcherism too. Its gods were at war with each other.
Style guru Peter York observed that '80s conservatism embodied a fundamental contradiction. There was an uneasy marriage between the religion-based values it professed, and the radical economic Darwinism it practised. On the one hand, there was a genuine desire to turn the clock back to traditional social values, including (as Thatcher said in 1988) a 'fundamental sense of fairness, integrity, honesty and courtesy for your neighbour'. Conservative government ministers appealed unashamedly (if selectively) to the churches to reintroduce morality to Britain. But their real devotion lay with the gods of market forces ('Let the market decide'); and in practice, the economic individualism outweighed the desire for moral renewal. This led logically to the exaltation of Darwinian competitiveness, rather than neighbourly collaboration, as the and then, equally logically, to the glorification of 'loadsamoney' individualism, with all the designer trappings, for the winners who came out on top. Margaret Thatcher herself embodied this individualism in insisting that 'There is no such thing as society'; the climate she created was increasingly one where everybody had to compete for themselves, whether the arena was health, schooling, or provision for old age. Whatever the quasi-Christian rhetoric, the results were close to the Darwinian law of the jungle.
The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for want of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all its forms & greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge & has marked the upward surge of mankind. & Gordon Gekko in Wall Street
The story of '80s conservatism might suggest that attempts to combine devotion to God and Money are as unsuccessful as Christ predicted they would be, two thousand years earlier. It also raises the issue we examined in chapter 3: What is the underpinning necessary for effective moral values? Without a far clearer rediscovery & even 'vision' & of God, were not the conservatives' 'moral values' doomed to be swept aside by the economic forces they emphasised, and the self-orientation that that emphasis engendered? Neo-conservatism but outside the context of direct relationship with God, 'traditional values' become just another god-replacement. And an ill-defined we remember the '80s not as the 'moral decade' but as the 'designer decade', an era whose gods were money and style, one nearly as short of values as the '70s.
The dominance of that ethos can be illustrated by the completeness with which it took over the pop scene, formerly the bastion of counterculture ideals. Here, yuppie had comprehensively displaced hippie. A 1985 Radio Times article wrote of star singer Paul Young,
Like most of his contemporaries he talks about his recordings as "product" and measures his sales in "units"... Somehow, I can't imagine pop stars of the previous generation & Pete Townshend, say & slapping backs and giving handouts at the annual sales beano.
Young himself admitted, 'It's more to do with business than it is to do with music in some ways.' Michael Jackson's 1983 hit album Thriller was the biggest but as Time's critic commented, it was
not the kind of great album one has come to expect since the tumultuous days of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: a record that provokes, challenges, raises questions. Thriller is not Who's Next or The White Album or Blonde on Blonde... records that were argued over or championed like talismans that could change lives. It is like a piece o slip right into it, shrug it off.
The change was mirrore as William Leith remarked, argumentative tabloids like New Musical Express gave way to 'a different type of magazine altogether. It is smaller, less serious, more lurid. It contains more photographs and fewer words. It is celebratory, rather than suspicious, of success, massive sales and media hype.' And the growing significance of video accelerated these trends: 'Nowadays, the product (the pop group) is tailored to suit the marketing device (the pop video), rather than vice versa.'
Thus with the eclipse of the intellectual left in the west, and communism heading towards final collapse in the east, neo-conservatism's gods had their chance. But the result was the triumph of naked economics & and widespread destruction in the health service, education system, and many other areas of culture as everything began to be controlled by the bottom line. (Independent on Sunday writer Michael Bywater defined 'what being British has become' as 'an unlovely struggle against the cost-accountants, who believe that money is the only motivation, profit the only measure, and that an enlightened pianist would play all the notes of a Beethoven sonata in one cacophonous crash, in the name of efficiency.') The corollary of Thatcher's 'fondness for business and management', former Tory MP Sir Christopher Tugendhat remarked, was a 'lack of respect for most non-profitmaking activities. A certain harshness, even brutality, entered the picture.' That was true both at the affluent end of the social spectrum, with Gordon Gekko's gospel of greed in Wall Street & 'Greed is good. Greed is right. Greed works' & being worn proudly by City stockmarket traders on th and at the opposite end, where 'in-your-face' self-glorification marked the lyrics of rap, heavy metal, and hardcore house. There was something quite Thatcherite about gangsta-rapper Dr Dre announcing bluntly on MTV, 'I'm just here to make money'; or the Wu Tang Clan&s slogan C.R.E.A.M. & 'Cash Rules Everything Around Me'.
(One post-'80s trend whose effect we shouldn't underrate is the changing source of new impulses in black music. These now tend to come, not from musicians with roots in the black churches, but rather from the violent and anarchic world of the ghettos. Rap pioneers Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five focused on ugliness such as a teenage mother tipping her newborn child into the trash ('New York, New York'); respected African-American critic Armond White describes the high-selling gangsta rap as taking a 'capitalist approach to nihilism, finding it marketable. It fills up that moral hollow where Black pop&s heart used to be', with its 'key subjects... sexual power and male competition' in an 'unabashed celebration of power and greed'. 'Nobody cares about me so why should I care about anyone else', one gangsta rapper told an MTV special. But the music&s deliberate violence and miso Snoop Doggy Dogg was acquitted on a murder charge after a shoot-out, but Tupac Shakur was convicted of real-life sexual abuse of a female fan and then gunned down, as was Notorious B.I.G., in what seemed a deadly feud between east an hip-hop turning murderously inwards to consume itself. Meanwhile, the rappers' standard use of 'bitch' or 'ho' to describe women underlined again what logically happens to respect for women once the Ch once it is every mutha for himself.)
In Search of the 'Vision Thing'
Of course the '80s gods didn't last. The idolatry o first with the 1987 stockmarket crash, then in a series of court actions demonstrating the dishonesty of one key player after another in the economic free-for-all. In Britain, Robert Maxwell was revealed as in Australia, tycoon Alan Bond received a two-year sen in America, Michael Milken, once the most powerful player on Wall Street, ended up with a 22-month term. Suddenly, the bottom line and the economic imperative proved untrustworthy deities. As the shock worked through the system there came a sense of need for new vision & made doubly urgent by the desire for vigorous leadership in the deepening environmental crisis. 'One by one our gods fail us', an Independent editorial remarked. 'Paternalistic capitalism, corporatism, communism and, latterly, untrammelled individualism have been advocated, tried, and wholly or largely abandoned. The old isms are in disarray. Yet the Nineties are not characterised by a retreat into pragmatism and materialism. On the contrary, there is a search for meaning...'
This question-mark hung over the early '90s like a neon sign over a motorway motel. On one side of the Atlantic, George Bush (senior) hankered after a 'kindlier, gentler' America, even as he lamented his own lack of the 'vision thing' that could further that desire. On the other, John Major was voted in as a leader who could temper the more destructive aspects of capitalism. But he too confessed being 'uneasy with big ideas', and the only 'vision thing' he could muster was a wistful elegy for old maids cycling through the mist to communion as the true spirit of Britain. Nor was much guidance to be found among the intelligentsia. Edward Said bemoaned the 'disappearance of the general secular intellectual'. The deaths of Sartre, Barthes, Foucault, Raymond Williams and others marked, he said, the
passing of an old order: figures of learning and authority, whose general scope over numerous fields gave them much more than professional competence... As opposed to this there are technocrats, whose principal competence is... to solve local problems, not to ask the big questions.
Thus both Bush's demise and Major's signalled a desire for some new framework. Soon after her husband's election Hillary Clinton expressed her desire to find a 'unified field theory of life... a way of looking at the world that would marry conservatism and liberalism, capitalism and statism and tie together practically everything'. In Britain, the Labour Party had set about a radical change of direction after its old-style leftism was discredited by the d it is interesting that its electoral breakthrough was grounded in a new ideology consciously constructed by John Smith, and then Tony Blair, on the principles of Christian Socialism.
The same question-marks appeared, thought-provokingly, elsewhere. In fashion, white briefly became the theme-colour, supposedly reflecting the new decade's more 'spiritual' mood. ('The 1980s was about materialism', said Vogue fashion booking editor Zoe Souter. 'The 1990s is all about individuality, personality and spirit. People are becoming spiritual.') A major feature of early '90s youth culture was the 'rave' scene, and here there were hints of a rediscovery of community not seen since the '60s. It had its roots in the legendary 'Summers of Love' & Ibiza, house music, smiley faces, Ecstasy, clubs like Shoom and Spectrum. These had been powerful experiences for those involved: 'Friendships became all-consuming. Suddenly all they could talk about was love, togetherness, sharing, the sheer joy of life& Everyone had a story about spontaneous acts of kindness', writes Matthew Collin in his respected survey Altered State, and many others have said the same. Likewise, when the 'raves' began, the 'sheer spon it felt like something wonderful could happen anywhere at any time.'
But again, the 'vision thing' didn't last. By the time Collin wrote his book in 1997, t indeed the 'Summer of Love' had proved to be short on the ingredients needed for lasting community within a very few months. Collin tells how the original participants couldn't handle the influx of newcomers wanting what they'd got, and soon 'began to close ranks' in an attempt to protect their community from interlopers. But that community was already fracturing internally. 'I made deep friendships around that time', says Marc Almond of Soft Cell, 'friendships that I have to say didn't last. With all that group of us who first took Ecstasy, it all turned a bit sour in the end& There was nothing really there to cement the friendship.' The same story comes from a key player in the Manchester ('Madchester') scene, of the shift from 'I wish the whole world felt like this' to 'You were convinced that everybody was going to be your friend for life, and even that went sour.' And it wasn't merely the Ecstasy-fuelled dreams of total consciousness change that proved unable to match reality. What is more painful is the story Collin tells of rave culture's powerlessness to resist infiltration by organized crime, resulting in its eventual suppression by the authorities. In the clubs, meanwhile, the scene splintered into consciously e and the emergence of 'hardcore' and 'jungle' marked a deliberate rejection of acid house and all that went with it. ('That false high, that false hope. That false love.')
'False love'? But Marc Almond's comment had already raised the question: acid house offered little to underpin the community that sprung up in the first golden idealism. Collin quotes remarks from the early participants that show how the exuberance felt 'religious' but lacked the underpinning any real-world religion needs to keep going: 'It was almost like a
a combination of taking Ecstasy and going to a warm, open-air club full of beautiful people'; 'We all had the same mentality, which was to have a really good time and try as far as possible not to think about anything else& It felt like a religion.' 'Have a good time and try not to think'; I remember watching John Lydon & n& Johnny Rotten, Sex Pistol & blasting house music on MTV as a music of 'no content & "Don't worry, be happy, get on the floor and shut your mouth."' 'Saturday night fever, or a new way of life?', asks Collin, and the answer was obvious all too soon. Ecstasy culture, he adds, 'was a culture with options in place of rules'; there was no robust base of convictions for the hoped-for sense of community, but rather a space for a pluralistic potpourri: 'Its definition was subject to individual interpretation.'It looked back to the '60s, but
it lacked ideologies & 'gods' & such as those that (despite their weaknesses) underpinned the '60s counter-culture and gave it the ability to reshape the face of the west. 'In some ways it was a throwback to the sixties but it was very much something else & it was totally non-political', says leading rave promoter Tony Colston-Hayter. 'It was the ultimate hedonistic leisure activity. It was about going out and having a good time.'
To all this there were surely exceptions, most notably associated with groups like Spiral Tribe, drawing often on a serious commitment to 'New Age' spiritualities such as Paganism, shamanism or witchcraft. Unfortunately, all too much of what the New Agers verbalized would, in another climate, have been discarded instantly as crackpot. Their very success showed the hunger existing for some rediscovered
but too often there was no claim to any truth that could be discussed sensibly with an adherent of a different worldview. The gods were becoming tribal, closed- there was just a set of experiences to be shared, or not. Still, it was among these parts of the scene that the 'direct action' movements arose, most often with regard to 'green' issues, that had significant impact during the '90s. But the mainstream became inc it was often commented that club atmospheres had become much more sexualised, much more a matter of being 'on the pull'. Where the mainstream had any interest in social issues, it was largely selfish & 'You've got to fight for your right to party'.
('Club culture promotes a very hedonistic lifestyle, and its followers are often accused of being self-centred', said the Independent in a feature on club events sponsored by Amnesty International to focus on worldwide human rights issues. 'Yet, far from being apathetic, clubbers traditionally respond well to a wide range of charities.' The feature was titled 'Charity begins in clubland'. But in fact it showed all too clearly how apparent 'worldwide'-oriented altruism can actually be about rather more self-centred concerns. 'Alisha's Attic's motivation for performing is typical of the artists on show. "This is a unique opportunity to reclaim our rights, to learn what they are and to tell the world's governments that we know our rights and will keep on shouting until they listen and respect them."' 'I have never heard of it', another rapper said about Amnesty, 'but we are glad to be part of it if it's helping human rights, you know. Everybody wants to have the right to do what they wanna do.')
Collin observes that although acid house began as a rejection of the '80s style-hierarchy and designer ethos, in fact it reflected the same issues: 'Ecstasy culture seemed to ghost the Thatcher narrative & echoing its ethos of choice and market freedom, yet expressing desires for a collective experience that Thatcherism rejected and consumerism could not provide.' Ultimately it was an 'uneasy synthesis of individualistic [that is, self-oriented, hedonistic] and collective [that is, community-oriented] impulses.' The failure of '90s rave culture, then, was a very '90s failure. And by the mid-'90s, Collin argues, mainstream club culture was 'hedonism distilled to its purest essence', lacking 'any ideology bar the ceaseless pursuit of sheer pleasure'. 'The dream was finally over'; the revolution had turned into style again, and rave culture into something formulaic and corporate.
After the Gods Have Gone
By 1996 Oliver Bennett could write in the Independent on Sunday, 'The Nineties were forecast to become a soft, a time for caring and sharing, nurturing and spiritual... In the event, we work harder, have less faith and are more nihilistic, pessimistic and downright anxious than before.' One way or other the hopes of the early '90s had given way to somet a self-centred hedonism largely under the domination of contentless cor or, at best, alternative spiritualities whose truth could not be set out and debated in any really meaningful terms. And this collapse of confidence in the proclamation or discussion of truth is a discouraging hallmark of contemporary pluralism in general. There is no longer much faith that issues of value, belief or meaning can be settled by factual discussion.
This has a serious consequence. All we can then have is a plethora of competing lifestyles and worldviews & competing, not on the grounds of truth, but on the grounds of power. And the '90s have indeed been distinguished by the steady balkanization of society, at least in America. Palestinian Edward Said has castigated the current fragmentation into a collection of competing ghettos, based on gender and ethnicity. Pos}