Introducing the Inheritance of Cultural Complex

Section 1 of my book: Transmissions From Parents to Children Within The Counterculture

Introduction

I was raised in the counterculture. My mother was a red-diaper baby, the daughter of black listed communists. She was active in the Anti-War movement and other late 60s era consciousness projects. My father came from a bohemian expatriate childhood and became a left wing political organizer, and then a Maoist. My mother and stepfather, whom I lived with, then decided to follow the back-to-the-land trend, and I was immersed in a hippie lifestyle until junior high school. We then moved for financial reasons to the suburbs of a Middle American town, and I was expected to fit in. Because of this upbringing and my later struggle to understand and fit into conventional culture in high school, college, and later the work force, I have tried to modify and integrate the lifestyle and values transmitted to me by my upbringing with the expectations of dominant culture. I have spent much of my adult life learning to identify and understand the places where I can choose to modify my role within society so that I might live an intentional life and thrive in my relationships, work, lifestyle, and my parenting.

The children born into the counterculture of the 1960s and early 70s, now adults, form a group that has never been named, and whose contribution has yet to be understood. Defining this group reveals the existence of an American subculture that continues to evolve in parallel to conventional society and is now a fully formed alternative American identity. Counterculture children were raised to reject the norms of society. They were taught from a very young age that authenticity, lack of material possession, experience based expression, personal connection, and communal interaction, are of primary importance. Among other things this way of being in the world gave them a postmodern perspective. As children it created an alien truthfulness that was often jarring to non-counterculture adults. As adults it becomes a symptom of their otherness, along with a dismissal of hierarchical structures, a preference for simplicity and pro-naturalism, and a multi-schematic worldview. I call this a “Post-Cool” way of being in the world. This name comes from the counterculture parents’ relationship to being “cool” a type of posturing to imply being culturally in the know, and hip. The counterculture child perspective of coolness is complex and self-reflected, often not particularly interested in cool as it was taught to them. Post-Cool Kids are more interested in what really motivates them, and in their loving connections with others. They hold a unique relationship to utopia that is based on an active process of emotional critique, but grounded in the American traditions of individuality, equality, and imagination. They have a psychological relationship to the values of the 1960s counterculture that is not the same as the ideological relationship to these values generated by the revolutionary ideals of their parents. Post-Cool Kids have a postmodern understanding of belief that allows them to hold ambiguity and critique within the context of believing, while still pursuing utopian action without universalized dogma.

This Post-Cool group challenges a number of currently held assumptions. The existence of this group as a definable tribe of people, with shared culture, challenges the belief that the sixties was an ephemeral phase in American culture. The children raised with 1960s era values and experimentation have carried these experiences with them into adulthood. Counterculture children exist in a space where culture and politics merge, they have an intuitive socio-political perception in which daily actions, such as what they eat, and how they raise their children, transmit into environmental action, gender activism, and what is often described as consciousness raising, which is usually a set of psychological and/or spiritual actions that encourage compassion for others.

The childhood experience of these people included an extreme emphasis on an awareness of the body and its naturalness. They were taught to value the experiential over the intellectual, and they were witness to many ecstatic styles of expression. This reality challenges the thinkers such as James Hillman, and Joseph Campbell who in the 1980s were still arguing that “We In the West” are not witness to embodied, Eros filled, ways of being and are still wanting for Nietzsche’s Dionysus to help us feel connection to each other and our environment. The existence of the counterculture children as a group challenges the idea that “Western Culture” or even “American Culture” can continue to be defined as a hegemonic entity that universally experiences a mind body split. Counterculture children were raised with the Dionysian puer energy of their parents. Nietzsche’s Dionysus was already released over forty years ago. For this group the struggle to find a symbolic and often physical container for this intense Dionysian energy is what is at issue, rather than the conventional concern around releasing energy and experiencing embodiment.

Assumptions about a homogeneous cohort titled Generation X are also called into question when counterculture children are identified as a unified group. Though both counterculture children and Generation X share the same demographics; age, country, and education; they do not share the same psychographics; ways of being in the world, perceptions of self, and cultural artifacts. An examination of the similarities and differences of Generation X and the various factions of the counterculture—hippies, new left and new religious groups—yields an obvious delineation between Generation X and their nihilism as it is currently understood and this smaller Post-Cool group of people raised in the counterculture with a complex relationship to utopia rather than the conventional suburban culture defined as the origins of Gen X. 

Adult children of the counterculture straddle an endless list of cultures. Their early identity was formed in a place of cultural experimentation and ideological shift. They received either extremely limited early experience of the dominant culture or a heavily critiqued one. Moreover, counterculture children were not presented with any one dominant culture. The parents of these children often changed belief systems and living styles multiple times in their lives, or gave their children fluid and boundary-less childhoods in which they were left to define for themselves how and why they did anything. Many children were given multiple family structures, which might include communal experiences or multiple and changing dominant parents. If they were given religious instruction it often changed midstream, or included an eclectic array of rituals and myths. Their information regarding gender, politics, societal norms, education, and even hygiene was rarely connected to the views of the external community. 

Because of this multi-culture experience counterculture children are plural in their thinking. They seek out the experience of communitas without wishing to be immersed in community, and are distrustful of ideology while remaining utopian in their values. Holding these disparate tensions rather than choosing one truth and rejecting the other stance is postmodern. They have a similar multi-schematic experience as a group more extensively studied, “third-culture kids.” The description of third-culture kids come primarily out of the experince of military or missionary families, where the children were raised in foreign lands. The difference between the two could go unrecognized by dominant culture academics, but it is very striking. The cultural displacement counterculture kids experience is brought on by extreme internal ideology and a feeling of being exiled within their own country, rather than the displacement of having experienced a departure and return. This postmodern way of being is more liminal than the postmodernism of the Academy. The academic theories of Postmodernism are in reference to, and often include, a large dose of Modernism, what Fredric Jameson calls “High Modernism." The academic reaction of Postmodernism to the Modernism it follows, is similar to the reaction of the counterculture parents to their modernist upbringing. The parental postmodern stance, what Marianne DeKoven calls “emergent postmodernism” includes a continuous reference to the past way of being and thinking. This reactive reference to the original culture is lost in the postmodern stance of the counterculture children whose Post-Cool perspective is a reflection of their multi-schematic understanding that the break-up of the original conventional culture is over and done. They neither know nor follow the rules of traditional cultures as something intact and true. This does not mean they are outside of culture, but that the conventional culture is taken as cultural bits with the same valuation as any other cultural bits. Conventional modern culture does not carry heavier cultural weight than any other parts of their cultural experience as Post-Cool Kids did not experience it as an origin the way their parents had.

The Post-Cool counterculture children are postmodern in the way they put this pluralism into practice as adults through their methods of parenting, ways of working, relationship and lifestyle choices. Post-Cool Kids stand outside of the old dominant myths. At a time when many find themselves forced into a global view, insights into the experience of a truly multicultural perspective may be helpful. These insights are found when comparing the life stories of counterculture children now that they are adults, finding patterns of identity, behavior, and belief, and looking at the meanings they have defined for themselves, as well as the emotional containers that have been created as they have matured, to keep themselves psychologically safe.

As I have moved into midlife, I have attempted to reshape my understandings of how the world really works, but also have in many moments attempted to rescue the dreams of my parents, and heal them such that they might remain, grow in strength, and continue to thrive. I discovered that I was not the first to come to such decisions. While reading the childhood memoirs of Louisa-May Alcott, I realized that my experience was part of an American tradition of entering utopian movements and then returning to conventional culture. Alcott, experienced a style of communal living similar to the communes of the 1960s and 70s when her father and several other transcendentalists, decided to create a utopian community in New England (Transcendental Wild Oats 3). Reading her experience and contrasting it with her common sense novels for young adults I was heartened. Alcott had found a way through her childhood to become a whole person. She was able to transform the emotional confusion of her early years into art. Her novels incorporated the good of her father’s values with the life lessons of her own suffering at the hands of his ideology. I too want to be able to take what I have experienced and make it useful.

My counterculture upbringing gave me a feeling of being a permanent outsider in the world. This feeling of isolation in my teens led me to seek out those with similar backgrounds. The nature of being in the counterculture is that there are no two upbringings alike. A primary function of the counterculture is to be different and unique, so if one were to analyze the intricacy of any two experiences within this culture there would be no overt unifying theme. Yet mapping out the life stories of a relatively small group of counterculture children yields clear patterns: similar inconsistencies of persona and ego, similar struggles with comprehension of the outside world, and a similar mix of distrust and naiveté. In analyzing biographical material, both from interviews and published memoir, as well as identifying the traits in literary and film characters, and the use of some personal narrative, a recognizable group emerges, that of Post-Cool Kids.

I hope with this exploration to bring into focus the existence of a consistent and ever present experience of American culture, often made invisible by the preferences of the dominant culture in any era, but recognizable and relatable across many generations. This specific look at the ideological and bohemian cultural trappings of American utopian upbringings will be especially informative for those people who have been raised within the countercultural movements of the 60s and 70s. Those who are contemporaries of the people in this study. But my goal is also for our stories to support and help all those people who come after us, who may already have reached adulthood in the next generations. I recognized myself in Louisa May Alcott and was comforted by the knowledge that she transformed her difficult childhood into extremely grounded, common sense stories about raising children with love and simplicity. She embodies for me the pendulum swing of American culture away from conventional culture towards utopia and then back again, bringing with it new developments, new insight, and new energy. For me Alcott is the bridge between the Transcendentalists and mainstream America. Not everybody reads Thoreau’s Walden but most American children are given Little Women as assigned reading in school.  I hope to provide comfort, in a similar way, to those raised in either my counterculture or children who come after us. Those who may believe they are alone, misunderstood, and voiceless. In describing the Post-Cool, adult children of the counterculture, this work attempts to hold up a mirror for people who share a teaching in the values of communitas, rituals of disclosure and negotiation, expectations of authenticity, and the myth of being an outsider. It provides some models for ways of transforming this unique perspective into a grounded adult life. It shares some sorrowful stories of those who fell and were thrown against the rocks. It hopefully brings some survival skills and offers methods for bridging the divide between the counterculture of 1960s American values with those of the larger society, continuing the good works Louisa May Alcott did in what has become an American tradition of utopian flight and return.