Morris Dickstein - Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties

Copyright 1977, 1997, 2015 by Morris Dickstein

First published as a Liveright paperback 2015

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Dickstein, Morris.

Gates of Eden : American culture in the sixties / Morris Dickstein.

pages cm

Originally published: New York : Basic Books, 1977.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-87140-432-9 (paperback)

1. United StatesCivilization1945 2. United StatesHistory19611969. 3. United StatesSocial conditions19601980. I. Title.

E169.12.D54 2015

973.9dc23

2014042737

ISBN 978-1-63149-038-5 (e-book)

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For Lore, who lived through it all

WHEN SHE FIRST HEARD the title of this book my mother asked me, with a twinge of hope, whether it had anything to do with religion. Ive asked myself the same question many times. Religion, after all, has many guises, and its sometimes hard to recognize in modern dress. Theres one great vein of religious feeling that expresses contempt for the world and pity for mortal man; it stresses the transience and tragedy of life and the constraints of the human condition. It counsels stoicism and otherworldliness and exhorts us to rise above the temptations of the flesh, hinting that we can attain spirituality and transcendence in a purely mental sphere. Even the most bleak and absurdist writers of the sixties had little in common with such a vision.

But theres another strain of religious thinking that is utopian rather than tragic. In line with a long heretical tradition, it tells us that we can achieve spiritual and moral victories even in the fleshpots of the world, through what Blake called an improvement of sensual enjoyment. It encourages us to make exorbitant, apocalyptic demands upon life and tells us that we can break through the joyless forms of everyday existence toward a radiant communality and wholeness. It insists that we and the world we live in are more malleable, more alive with possibility, less restricted by circumstance, than society or the notion of original sin would have us believe.

Many students of early American culture have shown how deeply rooted this latter tendency was in our nations first conception of itself. Early preachers and writers saw Europe as a decadent and corrupt old order, a culture in its dotage. They portrayed America as a virgin land, a garden world, and the individual American as a redemptive new Adam, untainted by history, free of corruption and moral decay. The new land was a fulfillment of scriptural prophecy, whose mission was to give history a fresh start, if not to usher in the millennium. The persistence of this idea helps explain the peculiar moralism of Americas vision of itself on the world stage. By the time of Henry James, the stereotypes of the innocent yet wily American and the corrupt, worldly European were already material for the most subtle social comedy. American writers, of course, were rarely as innocent or high-minded as the characters they loved to portray. Even the most visionary transcendentalist could not fail to notice at times how intractable the world could be, how little it might collaborate with his grandiose hopes. The beautiful enigma of Melvilles white whale shows how fiercely reality can resist our compulsion to master it. Great aspirations may finally harden rather than dissolve our sense of tragic limit.

We Shall Overcome was a Baptist hymn which became the anthem of a social movement. The spirit of the sixties witnessed the transformation of utopian religion into the terms of secular humanism. Just as Hegel and Marx turned Christian eschatologythe faith in the progress of history toward a specific goalinto secular theories of social change, so the sixties translated the Edenic impulse once again into political terms. This is why my account of the sixties doesnt stress the blissed-out side: the fascination with the occult, the attraction to Eastern gurus and meditative practices, the short-lived Nirvanas that come by way of drugs, polymorphous sexuality, or quickie therapies. In the seventies, when avenues of political change were suddenly closed off, these shortcuts to heaven became much more popular. But in the sixties the religious impulse took a more political turn, starting with the civil rights movement, which was propelled by the millennial spirit of Southern black religion.

The cultural synthesis of the sixties doesnt fit our usual presuppositions about the pursuit of the millennium. Millennial thinking was the special bte noire of fifties ideologues who celebrated the end of ideology. They taught us to see utopianism as inconsistent with the painstaking business of reform, just as we learned to believe that the pleasure principle, the cultivation of the self, ruled out altruism and social concern. These distinctions were articles of faith of the ascetic Old Left, and they continued to color the viewpoint of disaffected ex-Leftists. But the sixties gave impetus to both revolution and reform, and tried to combine the quest for social justice with the search for personal authenticity. The civil rights movement and the human potential movement were agreed on one thing: mans right to happiness in the here-and-now.

The culture of the fifties was European in its irony and sophistication. It put its faith in what it called the tragic sense of life, a fateful determinism that affirmed the obduracy of mans nature and his surroundings. But for the culture of the sixties the watchword was liberation: the shackles of tradition and circumstance were to be thrown off, society was to be molded to the shape of human possibility.

Today, when the sixties have come to feel like a distant memorywas it that long ago? did all that really happen?its easy to see through the nave, youthful ardor that contributed to this vision. To grow up is to feel for the first time a sense of the irretrievable, the irremediable; we learn that for each road taken there must be many not taken, many that never will be taken. The bittersweet wisdom of maturity always differs from the impulsive ardor of youth; but the path of experience neednt end in futility and frustration, any more than the vision of youth is confined to innocence and hope. The cold war, the bomb, the draft, and the Vietnam war gave young people a premature look at the dark side of our national life, at the same time that it galvanized many older people already jaded in their pessimism. Both the self and the world proved more resistant than the activism of the sixties dared to hope, but the effects of a decade of struggle are still there to see. Theres an agenda of unfinished business that wont be put off; much as the American people have recoiled from the instability of the sixties, they recently refused to reelect a president who campaigned solely on complacency and fear of change. If we have as yet little reason to rejoice, we have even less cause for bitterness and disillusionment.

What happened in the sixties was no ones deliberate choice, but one of those deep-seated shifts of sensibility that alters the whole moral terrain. Grasping these inward changes requires an experimental approach to cultural history. Ive chosen to exploit the ambiguity of that slippery word