In Praise of Eccentricity
I’ve been trying to think philosophically about “culture” since college, when it became something of an obsession. That obsession rises and recedes into consciousness like tides on sand: always present, not always prominent. At the moment, however, it’s at high tide, and the culprit is Ted Gioia and his list of the symptoms of a society without a counterculture.
Music and Rebellion
Gioia laments the absence of a counterculture in the contemporary artistic scene. In his book Music: A Subversive History, (which, to be clear, I have yet to read in full — I’ve only snatched appetizers during leisurely browsing sessions at my local Barnes & Noble), he notes that music and rebellion have often cavorted hand-in-hand down the “respectable” avenues of history:
The real history of music is not respectable. Far from it. Neither is it boring. Breakthroughs almost always come from provocateurs and insurgents, and they don’t just change the songs we sing, but often shake up the foundations of society. When something genuinely new and different arrives on the music scene, those in positions of authority fear it and work to repress it. (p. 3)
I have accumulated abundant empirical evidence that Gioia is on to something, at least about the most recent revolution in music: the 1960s and ’70s. I’ve spent the last year-and-a-half burrowing into the rich veins of varied genres riddling the mineshaft of music from that astonishing time — an aesthetic foray prompted by coworkers asking about the Pink Floyd stickers on my car (which came with the stickers when I bought it used). I’m very glad they asked.
Those decades will and should be remembered as one of the most fertile periods of human creativity in history. I began with Pink Floyd, to make sure I wasn’t driving around promoting musical smut — and quickly wondered where they’d been all my life. I was stunned. I’ll never forget the sweltering late summer afternoon when I heard The Dark Side of the Moon for the first time, or the November night when I lay in the dark and listened to The Wall in its glorious entirety. After a few months of listening religiously to every album up to The Final Cut, I branched outward, reasoning that Pink Floyd emerged from an historical context in which it couldn’t hurt to spelunk.
And spelunk I did! Over the last few months, I discovered “acid folk” (e.g. The Incredible String Band) and (re)discovered Krautrock (e.g. Ash Ra Tempel, Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Cluster), sitting like diamonds in a cave-wall. I followed some musical caverns to find the great blues bands of the ’60s and ’70s (The Allman Brothers, of course!), and others into nascent hard rock (e.g. Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple). I deepened my acquaintance with psychedelic “progressive rock” and discovered that my beloved Pink Floyd were very far from the most psychedelic (e.g. Hawkwind) or the most progressive (e.g. King Crimson, Gentle Giant). I enjoyed more “popular” fare like The Eagles and Steely Dan. Most recently, I’ve stumbled upon certain YouTube channels that republish, like treasure buried within the great mountain of the Internet, the rarest and most obscure music of the ’60s and ’70s. In those deep-dolven troves I discovered Dulcimer, Spirogyra, Gypsy, and more.
And make no mistake, all these vastly different kinds of music had roots in the counterculture of the West. In addition to bonding over mutual drug use, many bands gained traction by adding their voices to protesting the Vietnam War and the desolation of the capitalist West; many, too, became emblems for free love. It was a period of ferment which, not despite but because of those weird ingredients, resulted in the intoxicating brew that I have imbibed over the last eighteen months. To paraphrase one canine Tito, “If this is counterculture, chain me to the wall.”
Adding weight to Gioia’s contention are the examples of other recent artistic renaissances that seem to have had their genesis in rebellion. For instance, the most enduring Soviet art of the 20th century — both musical and literary — began with subversives and samizdat publishers. From Vassily Grossman to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and from Dmitri Shostakovich to Arvo Pärt, the greatest works created under Soviet communism were contributions to a nonviolent social rebellion.
It’s not unreasonable to contend, I think, that countercultures are good for art. If Gioia’s right that we don’t have one now, therefore, culture might be in trouble.
Candidates for A Contemporary Counterculture … ?
Surveying contemporary America, I can see why Gioia’s outlook on the future is bleak. Who in 21st century America can we expect to spearhead a comparable mass artistic rebellion? I don’t see many viable prospects.
“Well, actually, polarization would suggest…” begin the last few centrist pundits.
Let me stop you right there. Sure, there’s plenty of mutual “countering” in contemporary American life, but let’s not forget the other part of [that word I’ve repeated too many times]: “culture.” Political and ideological polarization have done their best to hamstring cultural life, contributing to the predictability Gioia mentions in his list.
On the left, the obligation to pay lipservice to the intersectional reveries of academic oracles has generated a fat catalogue of dully action-packed, brazenly moralistic eye-candy. But if you’re hoping for aesthetic and cultural renewal from the right, think again. Other than saturating the market for memes suffused with post-irony (itself an ironic redeployment of academic parlance — I didn’t say they weren’t clever), right-wing influencers pay lipservice to whatever is opposed to “the left’s” offerings.
Political and social revolution formed the backbone of the ’60s counterculture, but things being as they are nowadays (e.g. the almost consistently 50/50 splits in American elections, the aggravating influence of social media, etc.), I don’t think we should expect a mass countercultural movement along those lines.
And that, I’ve realized, is not a problem.
The Counterculture Paradox
While I think Gioia is on to something, my own obsessive thinking about culture leads me to believe that he’s not examining the problem under the right lens. Specifically, he wants a mass counterculture, but I’m not sure that makes sense.
Suppose we characterize the spirit of a counterculture as stubborn and experimental openness to what a prevailing culture stigmatizes. If that’s true, and I think it is, a “successful” mass counterculture would be autophagous.
Recall that counterculture warriors of the ’60s and ’70s resisted the stigmata of both sexual liberty and recreational drug use, and opposed the nominally Christian tone of public rhetoric in the West. In a world where men donned “gray flannel suits” to go to work in colossal office buildings and came home to barefoot wives flouncing about the kitchen in sundresses chatting about the (1.5) kids’ day at school, the semper high and hirsute likes of Jerry Garcia were still a scandalous affront to decency. But since then, casual sex has become a workaday feature of social life, and the last few election cycles have seen marijuana and even certain psychedelics decriminalized in a growing number of states. Meanwhile, the assumption that the West is and should be considered a “Christian civilization” is up for serious debate.
Although the genetics of contemporary American life are complex, I think it’s fair to say that the mid-century Western counterculture was a major factor. But if the mass counterculture of the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead has carried the day, if their vision of life has supplanted the “bad vibes” of gray flannel suits and monogamous nuclear families, I don’t think we can say that what they espoused remains countercultural. If anything, to choose just one example, it’s countercultural not to hold the nuclear family in critical suspense.
I don’t think this phenomenon of autophagy is unique to the 1960s. The liberalization of Europe through reforms inspired by the Enlightenment, another famous “counterculture,” was sorely needed after the Wars of Religion. But as the liberal order, in conjunction with the industrial revolution, reduced the political influence of religious sectarianism, there emerged new movements, like revolutionary anarchism, which the industrialized liberal order wasn’t meant to thwart. The existential “deracination” which came with the industrialized liberal order wasn’t something that liberalism knew how to handle — or even knew it had to handle until it had no choice but to handle it with steel and manpower during the World Wars.
Lest I persist in belaboring the point, let me state succinctly: to permanently and essentially assume a contrarian posture is ultimately self-defeating for any cause. To survive in the long-term, a cause — whatever it is — needs not mere iconoclasts or controversialists, but eccentrics.
What is eccentricity? In reference to people, the word refers to behavior or an appearance that strikes us as unusual, often quaintly so. There are many other ways of describing the same kind of person: they “march to the beat of their own drum,” they “do their own thing,” etc. Underlying all of these pithy phrases, however, is a concept of considerable depth. For these people, however we choose to describe them, have chosen to be themselves.
“Really?” I can hear you thinking, “Almost 1500 words of buildup to that?”
The idea of “being yourself” has a long pedigree which has gone saccharine in recent years — consult [literally any Disney movie]. But it wasn’t always saccharine. One of the earliest advocates of being oneself was Friedrich Nietzsche — certainly no sentimentalist. He wrote a characteristically penetrating analysis of “being oneself” in his 1873 book Untimely Meditations:
In his heart, every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience - why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conventionality and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that constrains the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. With the great majority it is indolence, inertia, in short that tendency to laziness of which the traveler spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than they are timid, and fear most of all the inconveniences with which unconditional honesty and nakedness would burden them. Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone's secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle; they dare to show us man as he is, uniquely himself to every last movement of his muscles, more, that in being thus strictly consistent in uniqueness is beautiful, and worth regarding, and in no way tedious. When the great thinker despises mankind, he despises its laziness: for it is on account of their laziness that men seem like factory products, things of no consequence and unworthy to be associated with or instructed. The man who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: ‘Be yourself! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.’ (emphasis mine)
For Nietzsche, pouty Disney princesses stamping their foot because their parents won’t let them “be themselves” strikes me as one more symptom of the laziness Nietzsche castigates, not what he advocates. Or can you imagine Ariel or Sleeping Beauty saying,
How can we find ourselves again? How can man know himself? he is a thing dark and veiled; and if the hare has seven skins, man can slough off seventy times seven and still not be able to say: ‘this is really you, this is no longer outer shell.’ Moreover, it is a painful and dangerous undertaking thus to tunnel into oneself and to force one's way down into the shaft of one's being by the nearest path. A man who does it can easily so hurt himself that no physician can cure him.
To be oneself is far more than a pithy saying or an excuse for trite self-satisfaction. Nietzsche is here driving at the root of eccentricity: a willingness to delve into oneself, to explore what one loves and thinks beautiful, and to share the fruits of that expedition.
I believe that those who are willing thus to spelunk in their souls rather than rest in socially expedient surfaces are the sine qua non of a healthy culture, even if a healthy culture (or an unhealthy one) is always more than the efforts of specific individuals.
I don’t think I’m naïve about the possible results of choosing to “be oneself” — nor, I dare say, was Nietzsche. Anyone cultivating this willingness has had to confront Theo Decker's question, posed in the peroration of The Goldfinch:
What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted — ? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility, and strong social connections and all the blandly held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?
Theo’s question is crucial, and anyone serious about “knowing themselves” must face it at some point. But it’s one thing to deploy the question as an excuse to avoid spiritual spelunking, on the grounds that since we are fallen, no one’s heart can be trusted. It’s quite another to get to a point where Theo’s question, raised only after more than 700 pages of painful soul-searching, becomes our question, emanating from our own hearts and not simply echoed in our mouths.
Perhaps Job’s friends are apropos here. God’s reply to Job (cf. Job 38-42) differs from the speeches of his friends less in substance than in spirit. They excuse God’s silence because they are discomfited by Job’s lament; God breaks His silence only to reveal to Job that he could not comprehend any other response than that God’s ways are not man’s. Ultimately, God stands with Job, who offers sacrifice to atone for his friends. Atone for what, exactly? For, I think, masking indifference with piety — for laziness in confronting the riddles posed by the human heart, as well as for pretending that such laziness is the true face of virtue.
Conclusion
Though I cherish what the counterculture of the ’60s and ’70s has yielded, I can't accept Gioia's thesis that the counterculture as such was responsible for it. I think the responsibility lies, rather, with the individuals who dared to be themselves, and found encouragement for such daring in the company and “vibes” of Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Jerry Garcia, and so on. It was a dangerous business, and I don’t claim that the people who thus ventured in search of themselves found what they were looking for — or if they did, that they were right to be content with the results. They, too, might have discovered hearts that can’t be trusted. We can't, and maybe shouldn't, seek to replicate that counterculture in all its forms.
But as I said, that’s not a problem. Gioia is fixating on the surface of the solution, not on its soul, and that makes all the difference. We can’t create a mass countercultural movement by fiat, but who cares? Joseph Ratzinger was spot on when he wrote, in the preface to the 2000 edition of Introduction to Christianity, that
mass movements are not the ones that bear the promise of the future within them. The future is made wherever people find their way to one another in life-shaping convictions. And a good future grows wherever these convictions come from the truth and lead to it.
We can’t directly counter mass culture, but we can always dare to be ourselves, no matter the state of the music industry, Hollywood, or the wider world.
But if it’s always possible, it’s also difficult: we all have fallow hearts by default, and convictions need to take root in the heart’s dark soil to become life-giving. For most of us, it’s high time to turn the soil.