Roszak's Making of a Counter Culture

Reclaiming 60s' Ideals in an Elder Culture

Theodore Roszak's The Making of an Elder Culture and his earlier work The Making of a Counter Culture, question the hippie commitment to social change.

Tie-dye t-shirts and rock music, once symbolic of a youth alienated from the so-called establishment, have now become kitsch commercialism and mainstream entertainment.

The Making of a Counter Culture

In The Making of a Counter Culture, Roszak argues that consumerism and technocracy co-opted the 60s' revolution by enlisting young rebels and outlaws to the cause of what are now essentially conservative politics.

Big business requires efficiency for the large scale co-ordination of materials and personnel. Centralized and modernized techniques of the global economy provide us with creature comforts and mechanical marvels that obscure the propaganda behind claims of progress.

Elite managers reign in regulatory bodies such as the World Bank and the U.S. military complex. Technocrats rely on empirical evidence, behaviour management, information control, market and motivational research. Science has become "the dominant force in designing the psychological and metaphysical basis of our politics."

In an increasingly complicated world, experts in areas of sexual behaviour, child-rearing, mental health, recreation, etc., undermine our ability to think independently. In an era of newness everything seems to be in a state of change, allowing the status quo to remain unexamined.

The combined machinery of media, government and industrial might is the Modern Goliath that does more than simply dissuade social change; it eliminates the very desire for change.

We are losing the circadian rhythm of all animal life, every moment of work-a-day life is regimented by digital clocks and coffee cups. Values are measured out in terms of time and cost.

Democracy has become a "spectator sport" where we watch the experts battle it out, often using language no more intelligible to us than was Latin to "the medieval peasantry." The result has been a serious impairment, if not a total dissolution, of an entire socio-historical movement.

The Making of an Elder Culture

What is needed, Roszak observed over a decade ago, is a "massive scaling down" and "decentralization" in our governing systems. A new sensual and ethical sensibility that "counsels compassion, gentleness, and the selfless community of all living things" is championed in The Making of an Elder Culture, to help restore that lost commitment to the ideals of liberation.

See Maclean's Interview