This page introduces a section containing the following pages:
- What makes a counterculture?
Countercultures defined as new, alternative, universalist, eternalist, anti-rational systems: there were two in the late 20th century.
- Hippies and Evangelicals: monist and dualist countercultures
The hippie counterculture was structurally and functionally similar to the Moral Majority Christian Right counterculture a decade later.
- ⚒︎ The hippie family who invented contemporary conservatism
The Schaeffer family, hippie gurus, created the American Religious Right. Too late, they realized they had created a monster: a tragedy in the ancient style.
- Renegotiating self and society
How—and why!—countercultures sought to reform psychologies and polities: to counteract alienation, anxiety, and anomie.
- Rejecting rationality, reinventing religion, reconfiguring the self
The 1960s-80s countercultures abandoned rationality because they believed it negated all meaning. They were wrong.
- The personal is political
The 1960s-80s countercultures dissolved the boundaries between self and society, ethical and political—setting us up for decades of culture war.
- Rotating politics ninety degrees clockwise
In the 1960s-80s, American politics shifted from economic to sacredness issues. This damaged public discourse, but created a new two-track class system.
- ⚒︎ Countercultures: modern mythologies
The Religious Right and New Age Left both promoted time-distorting meta-myths—imaginary past golden ages and implausible future utopias—to hide their defects.
- Fundamentalism is countercultural modernism
Fundamentalism is not traditional; it is a modern, countercultural movement, opposed to tradition and to post-modernity.
- ⚒︎ Counter-cultures: thick and wide
The hippie and Moral Majority movements both developed broad, deep cultures, with innovative approaches to every aspect of life, from music to dentistry.
- Why both countercultures failed
Failure to find new foundations for meaning, to recognize diversity, to provide community, and to transcend opposition: all doomed counterculturalism.
- Wreckage: the culture war
The culture war, political polarization, Baby Boomer bafflement: the unending zombie slugfest pairing the two countercultures of the 1960s-80s.
- Completing the countercultures
At root, the culture war is not about abortion, gay marriage, or marijuana. It is about shared misunderstandings of the nature of meaning.
This page is in the section How meaning fell apart,
which is in Meaningness and Time: past, present, future.
☜ The previous page is Systems of meaning all in flames. (That page introduces its own subsection.)
General explanation: Meaningness is a hypertext book. Start with an appetizer, or the table of contents. Its “metablog” includes additional essays that are not part of the book.
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Click on terms with dotted underlining to read a definition.
The book is a work in progress; pages marked ⚒︎ are under construction.
Comments
Countercultures
Coincidentally I just read your analysis of countercultures, and today am reading this related article in The Atlantic on America’s descent into post-rational post-reality fantasyland, including a consideration of the New Age movement, the anti-science movement, the rejection of truth, and the relativistic views that all opinions are valid.
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