Hence their moralism, their tendency to lecture others. The hippies’ penchant for peasant clothing and arts was always an aesthetic and ideological performance; even their experiments in back-to-the-land farming had an ideological core. They were fundamentally thought workers. And so the steamy atmosphere of politicized dinner-table critique in which I grew up was inevitable, in a way.
there’s a strange continuity between the Deweyian, technocratic establishment of the 1950s and the later hippie movement. Both centered on a utopian faith in progress, trusting in the powers of creativity and unleashed human potential to solve not just the workaday problems of the world, but its basic existential and spiritual quandaries.
the commodification of hippiedom as a status lifestyle really is a travesty. Yuppies in chic coastal neighborhoods get to gorge on high-quality fake meat products and splash on essential oils without ever having had to listen, as children, to Peter Pan adults simper at them that their auras were a beautiful purple while failing to impart any basic life skills. It doesn’t seem fair, somehow.
But the commodification of hippiedom is a tragedy for an even deeper reason: the hippies were right about some important things. Exhibit A is that consumer culture really is toxic. I’m relieved that my parents limited television time and so the exposure my brothers and I got to advertising, and I’m glad for all those crunchy hikes they took us on while other kids were playing Nintendo. My mother could be paranoid, but she wasn’t wrong to distrust the shallowness of consumerism.
The songs of the slaves in the fields, the spirituals, the fiddle laments of the Civil War, the poetry of Walt Whitman and Julia Ward Howe and Phillis Wheatley — they are all our heritage, things we should know and treasure. I know these things because my parents were hippies. Hippiedom, with its often naïve, clumsy, and idealistic attraction toward the earthy and folksy, offers a richness of cultural experience, of smells and stories, that mainstream life in a consumerist democracy simply doesn’t and never will.
my mother took my brother and me on countless field trips to Civil War and Revolutionary War battlefields, to the Smithsonian, to the Inner Harbor of Baltimore where slaves were once traded and Frederick Douglass was forced to work. We knew that George Washington owned slaves and that this was evil.
ours was the country that set up a national shrine for a black leader, Martin Luther King, who spent his life publicly condemning our deepest moral failings. Not just any country would do that.
But hippiedom’s passion for oneness actually pushes it this direction. The real world, with its obvious distinctions between things and between individuals, invariably fails to live up to hippies’ imaginative hopes. Frustrated and disillusioned, many hippies withdraw into idealism, doubling down even more strongly on visions of spiritual unity while unconsciously rejecting the actual world for its baffling refusal to get with the program. Voilà : monism mutates into dualism.
Hippiedom, then, claims to offer a cheery, monistic vision of human nature unencumbered by original sin. But then its prescriptions for spiritual growth invariably seem to fall back onto gnosticism: greater spiritualization, dematerialization, a liberation of our true inner natures from the artificial prisons of society, bodies, culture. It can become a lust for escape from the prison of particularity, of existence itself. This lust eventually devoured my mother.
You had to protect yourself from her; she would take up all the space in your life if you didn’t. Her seemingly spiritual idea of “oneness” really boiled down to projecting herself onto everyone else, onto the world. The hippie worldview simply lent a kind of convenient spiritual legitimacy to her preference for chaos and self-absorption.
There is a version of creative projection that collapses the boundary between self-expression and self-imposition. When “oneness” becomes a vehicle for projecting oneself onto others, the craft of expression tips into erasure of the audience — the opposite of genuine creative work, which holds space for distinction.We humans should relish material sights and smells and sounds. It’s a fundamental human trait that, from the traditional Christian point of view, reflects the basic goodness of material creation, the odd fact that God chooses to disclose himself through matter, not merely immaterial spirit.
American Christianity is often a strangely disembodied affair, with pared-down aesthetics and an emphasis on the individual, the decontextualized, the spiritual. We casually say that people “go to heaven,” implying that the afterlife is exactly what the gnostics claimed: a lasting freedom from matter and its constraints. But the Bible makes it clear that the Christian hope is in resurrection, not a disembodied afterlife. God promises a “new heaven and a new earth,” not an eternity of floating around on clouds. Matter is part of the eternal plan. Maybe even feathers and incense are, too.
. It isn’t atheism that’s scooping up all the newly disaffiliated “nones,” the people who claim no religious identity. Competitor religions aren’t really conquering the market either, not even Buddhism. The big winner is clearly hippiedom’s odd amalgamation of New Age and reconstructed paganism, warped to fit the individualist and borderless experience of a globalized era. Let me repeat: this diffuse spirituality of hippies is by now the major competitor religion to Christianity. It’s not Islam that’s displacing the ancestral faith of the West. It’s not atheism. It’s consumable hippie woo.
for the vast unchurched middle, which is getting to be a lot of people, the need and love for material things, for a connection to the earth, the love of beauty and pattern, isn’t going anywhere. It hasn’t gone anywhere for me. And that’s a good thing. It reflects the incarnation, God’s loving plan for the eternal entwining of matter and form. I still like incense. I still love patterns and folk music. I just burn better incense now, the kind blended by Catholic monks in Britain. And I’ve added Gregorian chant and Hildegard of Bingen to the listening rotation alongside Gordon Bok and Johnny Cash.
