As David L. Bromwich (p. 55) suggests, the counter-culture, previously thought to be the way of life of a tiny minority of the “alienated” young at war with the attitudes and values of the general run of their own contemporaries, not to mention those of virtually all their elders, has now been accorded a kind of de jure diplomatic recognition by the United States government itself. Thus the Report of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest (see Robert A. Nisbet, p. 40) asserts that a “‘new’ culture is emerging primarily among students” and from its brief if maudlin description of this culture it is clear that the phenomenon the Commission has in mind is the same phenomenon Theodore Roszak and others have called the counter-culture and that its most recent and most egregiously uncritical celebrant, Charles A. Reich, calls Consciousness III (see Roger Starr, p. 46).

To be sure, the Nixon administration has made its displeasure with the Scranton Commission abundantly clear, but the President has nevertheless accepted its Report, thereby conferring upon this document the status of an official state paper of the United States. Whatever Mr. Agnew may find it politically expedient to say, then, the counter-culture has now been established as a legitimate entity of American life, an alternative mode of living and thinking which, the Report comes very close to declaring explicitly, is superior to that of everyone else. Naturally, the Report identifies everyone else as the “elders” of the dissident students, saying nothing about their contemporaries who do not conform to the most publicized generational fashions, and reinforcing the widespread but altogether erroneous impression that we are dealing here with a generational conflict rather than a political one cutting across all age groups on an axis of social class and ethnicity. In any event, now that the counter-culture has achieved this established state, the least one might hope is that its apologists will deny themselves the note of pathos with which they habitually talk when it suits their propagandistic purposes to describe it as a powerless minority. A minority it certainly is; powerless it certainly is not.

_____________

The epithet most frequently applied to the counter-culture, often even by people hostile to it, is “idealistic.” The Scranton Report puts the case this way: “Most of its members have high ideals. . . . They stress the need for humanity, equality, and the sacredness of life,” while “their elders” (i.e., the rest of us) are so “entrapped by materialism and competition” that we have lost our “sense of human purpose.” Roszak and Reich say much the same thing—Roszak in my opinion with far greater intellectual authority than Reich in whom, to borrow Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s inspired comparison, the counter-culture has found its Norman Vincent Peale. And so debased has the vocabulary of public discourse become that “enlightened” opinion nods its by now thoroughly bored assent to this crude opposition of “idealism” to “materialism.” One wonders why so many people are willing to acquiesce in so insulting and so reductive a characterization of the way they themselves live—I mean, do they really believe that they are exhaustively defined as “entrapped by materialism and competition” and that they are the enemies of “humanity, equality, and the sacredness of life”?

But if it makes no sense—no intellectual sense and no moral sense—to describe the culture of the “elders” as materialistic, it makes even less sense, I would say, to describe the counter-culture as idealistic. If the word “idealistic” has any political meaning at all, it surely refers to action undertaken for the sake of considerations other than immediate self-interest. Now it goes without saying—or at least it used to go without saying—that actions undertaken for the sake of self-interest are not necessarily bad and may even be very good, for others as well as for oneself. Whatever else such actions may be, however, they are not idealistic. For example, when a young man in danger of being drafted opposes the war in Vietnam, he is not being an idealist, although he may well be doing something right or admirable or even, under certain circumstances, courageous. Nor, to take another kind of example, does the protestation of altruistic sentiments or high-sounding opinions by itself mark the protester as an idealist; such protestations may only prove that he is a hypocrite or an unctuous moral narcissist. (There are, of course, political philosophers, including some whose views lie at the basis of the American constitutional system, who have considered that self-interested action was more likely to serve the general good than selfless or idealistic action, which has a habit of becoming fanatical and intolerant in a way that material selfishness rarely has the chutzpah to do; but that is yet another matter.)

So far as I have been able to tell from personal observation and from reading, the “idealism” of the counter-culture consists entirely of self-interested action and in professions of virtue whose unctuousness is hidden, but only barely, by the hip idiom in which it so incongruously expresses itself. Perhaps, paraphrasing Charles Reich, one could call these two varieties of “idealism” Hypocrisy II and Hypocrisy III, with Hypocrisy 1 signifying the more familiar Victorian form. After all, how else but as a species of hypocrisy is one to describe an assertion of natural superiority put forward in the language of egalitarianism? And how else but as hypocritical is one to describe the claim to be distressed by the sufferings of others when this claim coexists peacefully and indeed harmoniously with an indifference and sometimes a positive hostility to the goal of improving the miserable conditions under which great masses of people still live? (Roger Starr and David Bromwich provide instances of both these varieties of counterculture hypocrisy in the current issue.)

But the position is in truth worse, even, than that. For what is it that the counter-culture actually opposes? By its own account it opposes the predominant values of the American middle class. It has every right to do so. But the fact that it describes these values in terms that are drenched in an arrogant contempt for the lives of millions and millions of people, the vast majority of whom are considerably less affluent and less privileged in every other social regard than the typical counter-culture loyalist, is to me sufficient indication of the ludicrousness of the claim of superior humaneness which it is always making on its own behalf. The snobbish contumely with which the Scranton Report speaks of the “elders” is a salient example. Is it humane and idealistic to identify oneself with all moral virtue and to dismiss everyone else as beneath moral consideration? I would have thought that epithets like insensitive, incurious, unimaginative, and smug would be somewhat more precise.

_____________