'Dropping Out' as Political Thought? Towards a Global Intellectual History of Hippies
Formal academia and hippiedom have long been positioned against each other. This is unsurprising to any reader familiar with Timothy Leary or Richard Alpert (later Baba Ram Dass), who speak of their early experiences with psychedelic substances as freeing them from the intellectual constraints of stellar academic careers, culminating at Harvard in both cases. Many oral histories of British hippies likewise speak of their distaste for the entire system of education, and firm belief that this had nothing of real value to offer them. The animosity cuts both ways, with political historians deriding the chaotic failures of hippie activism and social historians pointing out the hypocrisy of educated white middle-class dropouts who revelled in idolising addicts, oppressed minorities, and people in real poverty. Historians studying hippiedom in modern Britain are presented with similar challenges to those faced by other practitioners of global intellectual history, as it remains difficult to think about uniquely British developments and detach this self-consciously international subculture from the normative centre of hippie thought, often located on the West Coast of the United States. However, by foregrounding three underdiscussed analyses of American hippiedom, intellectual historians can begin the important process of assessing a global phenomenon which often explicitly resisted the possibility of being understood in academic terms.
The most productive analysis can be found in a 1968 discussion paper by the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, entitled ‘The hippies: an American “moment”’. It is notable for taking the hippie movement seriously and investigating where their ideas came from. Hall challenges popular preconceptions by arguing that most American hippies were recruited ‘not from educational rejects but from the brighter, more promising, middle class students’ whose decision to drop out of formal education was in fact ‘a symbolic gesture of withdrawal from the commonplace routines of their generation’. Hunter S. Thompson, the controversial ‘gonzo’ journalist and writer, picked up on similar themes in a 1967 essay. He identified San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury as a ‘magnet for a whole generation of young dropouts, all those who had cancelled their reservations on the great assembly line: the high-rolling, soul-bending competition for status and security in the ever-fattening and yet ever-narrowing American economy of the late 1960’s’. Finally, Jock Young, in a 1973 essay, offered a sociological interpretation of the American hippie movement. This broke hippies down into various socioeconomic classes and competing value systems, as well as outlining the hostile reception of both academics and the wider media. Young remained sensitive to the potential political impact of the hippie moment, seriously engaging with contemporary sociologists who framed Allen Ginsberg as a Voltaire, the hippies as philosophes portending a new American Revolution. Collectively, these three scholarly appraisals of American hippies offer excellent building blocks for intellectual historians trying to make sense of both this specific movement and the broader ‘global 1960s’.
They also pose a unique problem for intellectual historians, often reliant upon textual evidence, as a large amount of hippie or countercultural thought has not been adequately reflected in the written record. Thompson notes that hippies held a ‘strong distrust of the written word’. Hall agrees that hippiedom constituted ‘a way of life which rejects and despises, precisely, the language and act of interpretation’. This complicates both hippies’ ideas and their reception. Thompson suggests that ‘everyone seems to agree that hippies have some kind of widespread appeal, but nobody can say exactly what they stand for’ – not ‘even the hippies seem to know’. Hall’s essay most explicitly reveals the political tensions at the heart of the hippie movement. Should they pursue their aims through existing channels or could they be content to just drop out of mainstream society altogether? Did ‘the Hippies represent a challenge to, or merely a withdrawal from society’? Thompson’s view is that the ‘hippies were more interested in dropping out of society than they were in changing it’. Significantly, Young contends that ‘dropping out’ was a highly political act, an explicit rejection of and challenge to the dominant sociocultural values of late 1960s America. Focusing on representations of – and justifications for – ‘dropping out’, which often go beyond the written record, can help to establish a methodological approach for intellectualising hippie subcultures.
It is in this act of rejection that historians can begin to establish a coherent pattern of hippie thought, political precisely because of its apolitical or anti-political framing. Such an interpretation marks a departure from existing understandings, as hippies have long been dismissed by those within the New Left or progressive movements as being counter-productive to achieving real change, due to their opposition to participating in conventional political or social channels. The ‘Hippie way of life represents definitions of the “situation” different from, counter to, those which are maintained as valid and legitimate in the taken-for-granted routines of American middle class society’. These routines supported a ‘way of life orientated towards work, power, status’ and ‘consumption’ (Hall). In its place, the hippies offered alternative ways of living, including community outreach, back-to-the-land projects, vegetarianism, spiritual regeneration, illegal substance use, sexual experimentation, and artistic expression. Part of this involved the celebration and appropriation of the non-Western Other in the form of indigenous peoples, across North and Central America, and a later turn towards the East, which embraced Asian religions, philosophies and music. Here lies a further challenge for intellectual historians, as such transcultural movements firmly rooted in Eastern spirituality, aesthetics or indigenous practices – despite their enduring influence – have not been adequately represented in the mainstream of persistently Eurocentric approaches to political thought and the history of ideas.
The much-parodied hippie vernacular reveals some of these intellectual influences and also suggests its philosophical aims. Following the Beat Generation of writers, many words were taken from African American culture, ‘jazz’, ‘homosexual or addict sub-cultures’ or from the ‘idiomatic language’ of the ‘streets and Bohemia’. Likewise, the Now Generation’s most commonly-used phrases focused on ‘the continuous present tense’: “grooving”, “balling”, “mind-blowing”, “where it is at” (Hall). If their parents had stressed the importance of hard work and saving for a secure, imagined future, the hippies put all of their emphasis on seeking pleasure and finding joy in the present moment. ‘“Enjoy life now,” they said, “and worry about the future tomorrow”’ (Thompson). This outlook left hippies open to criticism from New Left activists and conservatives alike, as well as providing a clear threat to ‘straight’ society. ‘By invoking a world of pleasure unrelated to productivity, of expressivity divorced from work roles, he <the bohemian> is a caustic to the moral legitimacy of the system’. What is the use of ‘hard work and conformity, if the shiftless youth across the road enjoys all the rewards and openly refuses to work’? (Young).
Ginsberg emerges as an intellectual bridge between the Beats of the 1950s and the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, but Leary is often portrayed as a singular proponent of this strain of hippie thought. Thompson describes Leary as ‘a sort of high priest, martyr, and public relations man for the drug’ of the era – LSD. The centrality of LSD and psychedelic experiences to hippie thought poses further problems for the intellectual historian. Altered states of consciousness, just like the subjective and interpretative experiences of listening to music, are hard to convey adequately in written form. Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954) perhaps remains the most successful, and therefore influential, example. Hall admits that tidying up hippie culture into a neat package, ripe for academic interpretation, has to involve the deliberate falsification of the ‘existential experience’ of hippies. Young goes further, arguing that the underground ‘has instinctively rejected any external analysis of itself, for how can “huge sad books” with their linear logic tell you more about the ecstasy of liberation than the briefest track on the most limited acid rock album?’
Through ‘dropping out’, new slang, borrowings from Indian and indigenous cultures, the embrace of the ‘Now’, and the search for expansive states of consciousness, there are radical ideas within hippie thought that could provide rich material for global intellectual historians. In this enduring battle between academic interpretation and the hippie subculture, Bob Dylan’s 1965 Ballad of a Thin Man might be viewed not as a sardonic put-down but an intellectual challenge: ‘You’re very well-read, it’s well-known / But something is happening here and you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mr Jones?’
Robert James Taylor is a first-year DPhil student at New College, Oxford, where he researches British hippiedom, cultural Indophilia and post-imperial memory. You can hear more from Robert on OxPods, and read more about his research here.
