The counterculture that emerged in the United States in the 1960s--and pretty much simultaneously in all the Western democracies--is certainly one of the most significant events in the last half-century of Western civilization. It is reshaping our educational systems, our arts, our forms of entertainment, our sexual conventions, our moral codes. So it is important that we understand it. It is not enough for us to criticize it--to point out the fallacies and incoherence of its arguments, the absurdities of its self-righteous dogmatism, the shocking social problems it has either generated or exacerbated, the folly of its presumptions, the shallowness of its pretentious claims. The criticisms are all valid but surprisingly ineffectual. The counterculture seems quite immune to them. This suggests to me that we do not, as yet, have a grip on the phenomenon. We fail to realize that it is always more important to understand why fantastical beliefs are entertained, often by very intelligent people, than simply to refute them.

I do not find much more understanding in the other kinds of literature that have developed around the topic of the counterculture. The apologetic, self-justifying literature, of course, points to the "iniquities" of our society and our civilization, and assumes that further understanding is superfluous. The critical literature of a social-scientific bent is unhelpful since it is obvious that nothing happened to provoke this rebellion--there was no visible crisis, or even any sense of crisis, in the economies, the societies, the politics of the West. The emergence of the counterculture, for example, antedates by several years America's serious involvement in Vietnam, and in any case such a parochial explanation overlooks the international nature of the movement.

I think the place to begin with any understanding of the counterculture is with its self-designation as a "counterculture." We are dealing here with a movement that is against culture. Not a dissenting cultural movement within our culture, not an urge to reform and reshape our culture, but an avowed hostility to "culture" itself--and this on the part of intellectuals, professors, and artists. What can this possibly mean?

I think we can come closer to the meaning of "counterculture" by looking more closely at the idea of "culture"--an idea so familiar to us that we tend to think of it as ageless. It is not. The very word "culture" in our present usage is a modern term--which gives the countercultural term "post-modern" a more than stylistic meaning. It is only in the latter part of the eighteenth century that the modern idea of "culture" was born, to refer to a new, autonomous sector of human activity--a sector in which poets and playwrights and novelists offered an intensity of spiritual experience that traditional religion could no longer provide. The young Goethe's novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, supposedly caused dozens of suicides all over Europe. The days of religious turmoil were pretty much over; spiritual turmoil was now a cultural event.

At about the same time was born the modern idea of "Art." Previously, there were the various arts, of course, whose purposes were ornamental, pedagogic, or entertaining. But just as there was no such comprehensive term as "culture" so there was no such comprehensive term as "art."

Both of these concepts, culture and art, came into being in order to designate a new self-consciousness, and a new sense of mission, on the part of those engaged in "cultural" and "artistic" activities. Their mission was secular, humanistic, and redemptory. All traditional ties with religion were severed. The sacred was now to be found in "culture" and "art," where "creative geniuses"--two old terms now given a completely new definition--were in the future to give meaning to our lives and sustenance to our spiritual aspirations. There are still intellectual laggards who believe that "culture" and "art" are successfully performing this function today. Susan Sontag, for instance, has written that art is "the nearest thing to a sacramental activity acknowledged by our secular society." These people really believe that if the Museum of Modern Art were destroyed the American people would suffer a trauma so severe as to require years of therapy.

Both the counterculture and its younger twin, postmodernism, are a rebellion against culture and art as autonomous, secular human activities--activities, it is now felt, quite correctly, that have been emptied of all spiritual substance even while claiming a quasi-sacred mission.

*** 

Inevitably, the very first target of this rebellion was the modern university, which for the past century or so had established itself as the central institution of secular-humanist orthodoxy--the place where the Bible was read as one great book among many others, thereby reinforcing the idea, implicit in secular humanism, that we live in a post-Judaeo-Christian era. This rebellion was spurred on by trends, over the past century, in the world of modern literature and modern art--a world that originated outside the university and, indeed, in opposition to it. In this world, free of institutional constraints, there emerged what we now call the "adversary culture." Robert Nisbet has reminded us that, prior to World War II, the term, "academic" was a term of contempt in the avant-garde world of arts and literature.

That this adversary culture was hostile to bourgeois society was obvious enough. That it was also adversary to secular humanism was not so obvious, because it seemed so unthinkable, even to most of those involved in that adversary culture. Yet in retrospect it is clear that the leading novelists and poets and painters, with hardly an exception--those whom we now call the "modernists" (Eliot, Yeats, Kafka, Picasso)--could not be enlisted in a secular humanist canon, which is what some conservative professors are now trying to do. Oddly enough the literary critic and philosopher who saw this early on, and most clearly, was the Marxist, Lukacz, whose commitment to a Communist secular humanism provided him with enough intellectual distance from bourgeois secular humanism to see how its arts and literature were a sign of an impending crisis. What he didn't understand, of course, was that Marxist secular humanism was destined to experience an even more shattering crisis, precisely because it was so much more radical a version of secular humanism.

In the 1960s the counterculture started to recruit adherents among the junior faculty. Still, the professors who constituted the senior faculty were a majority. And they were, predictably, the last to understand--most, in truth, still do not understand--what was going on. They, together with most commentators in the media, kept looking for proximate causes of the students' discontents, and persisted in trying to appease these discontents. Lionel Trilling once referred to "the humanist belief that society can change itself gradually by taking thought and revising sensibility." This is exactly how our professoriate responded, offering all kinds of institutional reforms and procedural concessions, blissfully unaware that they were being attacked for what they were, not for anything in particular they did. They were comfortable in their orthodox humanism as incarnated in their institution, the university, and could not see that the students--at least many of their brightest students--believed that secular humanism had made the university into a soul-less institution. And it is in the nature of an institution that has lost its soul to be experienced as "oppressive," even though thoughts of oppression may be furthest from anyone's mind.

In this misconception, the professors were aided and abetted by the students themselves who, grossly undereducated in the American way, and despite the efforts of a handful of countercultural professors, found it close to impossible to articulate or even to comprehend, their own discontents. One gets a deeper insight by listening to the more sophisticated French students who, in 1968, actually came close to making a revolution. What were they saying? Well, they spelled out their message in the graffiti on the walls of the Sorbonne. There one could read such slogans as "All power to the imagination," or "Real life is elsewhere," or "Art is dead, let us create everyday life." How superior to the American "Nietzsche is peachy"!  But looking at the French, one can see that the American students too were undergoing a similar kind of existential crisis, a crisis revealed in their turbulent sexuality, their drug addiction, their desperate effort to invent new "life styles," and their popular music, at once Dionysiac and mournful.

***

We, in our secular, rationalist world are utterly unprepared for such existential, quasi-religious, and most certainly spiritual spasms--and the international counterculture of these past three decades has been, I would say, just such a spasm. In general, we do not study the history of religion in any serious way. We look for a sociological explanation, or an economic explanation, or even a political explanation of religious phenomena because we find it so close to impossible to posit spiritual appetites and spiritual passions as independent, primary forces in human history.

I first encountered this problem of religious history when, for reasons I no longer remember, I got interested in the rise of Puritanism in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare's England. At that time the Anglican church was the most tolerant of all national churches. It was a popular church, with a beautiful liturgy and a host of first-rate thinkers attached to it. At the same time, England itself was the most prosperous and the freest society in the Western world, with a glorious secular culture. So why on earth should people, especially young people among whom were many women, suddenly decide that they wanted to be Puritans, of all things? All one can say is that these things happen, that the spirit bloweth where it listeth, and that all you need to generate a counterculture is an orthodoxy against which it can rebel, since no orthodoxy can ever fully satisfy everyone's spiritual appetites and all spiritual passions.

The granddaddy of all countercultures, of course, was Christianity itself. And we have a wonderful document of the bewilderment and incomprehension with which the rationalists of that period viewed this event. Unfortunately, we have no record of the orthodox Jewish response--if ever written, it was destroyed. But we do know how a Greek philosopher of the second century A.D. responded to the Christian challenge.

His name was Celsus and he wrote a polemic against Christianity. All copies of this polemic were eventually destroyed by the Church but what we do have is a counter-polemic by the Church Father, Origen. It was called Contra Celsum, and being the work of a Church Father, it has been preserved. In the nineteenth century, a British historian and rationalist, James Anthony Froude, wrote an essay in which he reconstructed Celsus' argument from a close study of Origen's rejoinder. And what was Celsus saying? He was saying that it was ridiculous and absurd for people to go around believing in miracles, believing that a God-man had been buried and then resurrected, when such things were an affront to reason and utterly impossible. His baffled critique of Christianity made all the sense in the world, if by sense you mean the sense of pure rationality. His was philosophy's response to Christian dogmas and the Christian faith, and has remained philosophy's response ever since--though, for prudential reasons, this response has more often than not been muted and only implied rather than stated.

But philosophy, inherently rationalist, is always disarmed by religion when not ignored by religion--just as our own academic, rationalist culture is disarmed or ignored by our counterculture. The counterculture rejoinder to the rationalist is always something like, "You just don't understand." That is not, technically, an argument but it is a powerful and, for some, persuasive way of ending the discussion.

***

And ending this discussion is, precisely, the goal of a counterculture, which always aims to create a new vocabulary, establish new terms and new parameters of discourse--to create, in short, a new human and social reality. It rarely succeeds--orthodoxies have far greater staying power than a counterculture. After all, there have only been two orthodoxies--enduring orthodoxies--in the history of Western civilization. They are Christianity and secular, rationalist humanism. Obviously, creating a new orthodoxy is very, very hard. But countercultures do have an effect, sometimes a lasting effect, for the world is never quite the same again. Orthodoxy itself is never quite the same again, when all is said and done.

I have been using the terms "counterculture" and "orthodoxy" loosely. "Counterculture" refers not only to a dissent from orthodoxy but to an effort to create an alternative to orthodoxy. It reaches deep into the human soul for a whole new way of looking at the world, at man's place in the world, at human destiny, and, of course, at all human relations within the existing order. Albert Camus, in his book The Rebel, uses the term, "metaphysical rebellion," to designate this dimension of a counterculture, and it does point to the spiritual energy that fuels a counterculture. Eric Voegelin, the political philosopher, uses the term "gnosticism," which is in some ways more powerful and illuminating though also a bit restrictive since it is a term that generalizes from a specific historical experience, and the generalization doesn't always neatly fit subsequent experiences.

The gnostics, you will recall from your college course on the history of Christianity, were Christian heretics in the first two centuries of the Christian era. They didn't think of themselves as heretics, of course, but they acquired that label once they lost their challenge to the Church Fathers, as we now call them in retrospect. This challenge was rooted in their rejection of the Old Testament, which taught that God created the world, that this creation is good in that it is a fit habitation for human begins, and that humanity could and should be at home in the world and should be fruitful and multiply within it. The gnostics contemptuously rejected all of these propositions as violations of their spiritual integrity. They believed that the world was created as the result of some accidental, terrible deviation of the divine purpose, that this sublunar universe is not good, but bad, characterized as it is by change, suffering, and death, and that a truly spiritual Christianity would create, not a church, but a community of believers. These believers would find their redemption by despising all worldly things and, through ritual and prayer, "purifying" themselves, thus rediscovering the true God and elevating themselves above this radically imperfect world. The emerging Catholic church argued against the gnostics and, lest argument not suffice, persecuted them rigorously, destroying most of their literature.

These are the bare essentials. Those of you wishing to learn more about the gnostics should read Hans Jonas' wonderful book, The Gnostic Religion (now available in paperback, naturally), which uses surviving texts and fragments of texts to reconstruct the gnostic beliefs. Now, as it happens, Jonas was a student of Heidegger's in the 1920s and at the end of his book he points out how Heidegger, in his first great book, Sein und Zeit ("Being and Time"), quite independently reinvents so many of these gnostic themes. And it is also worth noting that Heidegger is the philosopher of what we call "postmodernism," just as he was the philosopher of postmodernism's predecessor and progenitor, existentialism.  

The gnostic impulse, in some version or another, seems to be a permanent feature of Western civilization. Indeed, once one is alerted to the prevalence of the gnostic impulse, one finds it almost everywhere, at every time. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the history of Western civilization, since the advent of the Christian era, is a history of countercultures challenging orthodoxy, with the orthodoxy resisting, co-opting, adapting. In those rare, occasional periods when there is no such challenge, nothing happens. As Hegel observed, "Periods of happiness are blank pages in the History of the World."

***

These challenges take different forms at different times but there is a common substratum of attitudes and belief that is discernible.

To begin with, there is the experience of what we now glibly call alienation, and all the forms in which this experience is expressed. Not to feel alienated is, from the point of view of gnosticism or the counterculture, to be "inauthentic," to be deficient in a fully human sensibility. We have witnessed this phenomenon among the intellectual and artistic classes in the West over the past hundred years. If you are not an alienated intellectual and artist, you are not an intellectual or artist at all. This notion of the alienated intellectual and artist is, by now, so familiar to us that we read it backward into history and see it as the very definition of the intellectual or artist. This is a misreading. I do not see that it makes any sense to think that Bach and Mozart, Titian and Raphael, Dante and Shakespeare, were alienated from the civilization in which they lived. They were, I suppose, discontented often enough, and unhappy often enough. But who isn't? Mere discontent and normal unhappiness do not add up to what one can, with any accuracy, call alienation, which is a far more profound experience. Alienation is the experience of being homeless in the world that orthodoxy has created for us.

Associated with this sense of alienation is a corresponding sense of indignation, even outrage at the orthodoxy that is perceived to be the cause of this alienation. It is this indignation at what is felt to be intolerable that unites people into a countercultural movement, as distinct from a collection of tormented individuals, or a school of thought. And all movements, whether in politics, the arts, or religion seek power, which in turn leads to conflict. It is astonishing how frequently the defenders of orthodoxy fail to see that power is at issue, and deceive themselves into believing that a benign, therapeutic approach would pacify the passions of indignant alienation.

And then there is sex, always sex. Women's liberation is a consistent feature of all countercultural movements--liberation from husbands, liberation from children, liberation from the human condition of womanhood. In addition, these movements proclaim and promote a generalized sexual heterodoxy, at least at their beginnings. "Sexual liberation" is always very near the top of a countercultural agenda--though just what form this liberation takes can and does vary, sometimes quite wildly. But it doesn't really matter, since the object of all such sexual heterodoxies is to disestablish the family as the central institution of human society and, therefore, as the citadel of orthodoxy.

Just how one goes about such disestablishment is of secondary importance. There have been gnostic and countercultural movements which promoted sexual promiscuity, on the grounds that the members of this movement were of the "elect," the already redeemed who have regained humanity's lost innocence. But though they might have orgies, a woman who became pregnant as a result of an orgy was an object of shame and contempt. She had fallen away into orthodoxy in the sense that she was now engaged in being fruitful and multiplying--as if the world were fit for such an activity. At the other end of the sexual spectrum there were countercultural movements that practiced abstinence--and, so long as they didn't go around preaching and advocating abstinence--another way of subverting the family--they could be ignored by the orthodoxy. But if they did so preach and advocate, they were banished to the wilderness, or if they merely chose to practice abstinence on their own, they were respectfully confined in monasteries and nunneries.

*** 

Incidentally, there is a wonderful novel by Marguerite Yourcenar called The Abyss, which deals with the disastrous Anabaptist rebellion in Germany in the 1520's. The origins of the Anabaptist sect were located in a medieval heretical movement called the Brethren of the Free Spirit--though, at various times and places, it had other names. This was a movement that emphasized Spiritual Christianity as against organized, institutionalized Christianity, and which preached spiritual devotion rather than orthodox piety. Obviously, it deplored sex and the family as distractions from spirited devotion, so the Church quite ruthlessly suppressed it. But the impulse kept bubbling up, again and again, for some two centuries until Luther's reformation liberated it--or so it thought. The Anabaptist movement preached doctrines inherited, somehow, from the Brethren of the Free Spirit, and their movement was sufficiently numerous that they gained control of the city of Munster. There, the wheel came full circle and soon Munster was a city notorious for its uncontrolled licentiousness--since, after all, to the pure all things are pure. There is a very fine line between absolute sexual purity and utter sexual licentiousness, and human beings walking that fine line can easily lose their balance--especially if they are bereft of institutional guidance and support. In the end, the German secular authorities laid siege to the city and, after some months, conquered it, slaughtering the inhabitants. In this, the princes had the blessing of Luther who (like Calvin) was a staunch defender of the family and sought--and achieved--a reformation of the prevailing orthodoxy, not a liberation from orthodoxy itself. And no one is more emphatic in its defense of the family today than our own Baptists, who have inherited the anti-institutional animus of their forbears but little else of their counterculture.

Another digression--which is not really a digression: We have all witnessed the extraordinary collapse of Soviet Communism, and most analyses have focussed on the inevitable disaster that accompanies efforts to create a centralized, planned economy. These analyses are utterly convincing, but I do not think they tell the whole story. There have been in the West quite a few "naive," unsophisticated people, who know little of the theory of free-market economics, but who have been convinced all along that the Soviet religious orthodoxy--described, somewhat redundantly, but accurately enough, as "godless, atheistic materialism"--could  never sink roots among the Russian people, because all people, everywhere, at all times, by their very human nature, are "theotropic" beings who cannot live for long without having a transcendental dimension to their lives. These naive people, too, have been vindicated, though our academics and our media and our intellectual world prefer not to take notice of it.

But there is another point to be made, which involves not only twentieth-century Communism but the socialist tradition itself. This tradition has always been hostile to the family as an institution because the family is not only the crucial vehicle for the transmission of specific traditional ideas and values, but because it is in the family that the very sense of tradition itself is preserved and conveyed. Socialism, seeking to create a brave new world, is of necessity hostile to tradition. It agrees with Tom Paine that the dead are a "nonentity" (his word), that we should "let the dead bury the dead," and that we must resist "the vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave." Paine was a pre-socialist thinker, of course, but no one has expressed more forcefully what soon became the new socialist credo.

And in this credo, contempt for the family was universal. All those thinkers who, following Marx's usage, we call "utopian socialists" were agreed on this point. Godwin professed to despise not only marriage and the family but also sexuality, reasoning that the truly rational man would be liberated from such lowly passions. Fourier, on the other hand, insisted that in his ideal communities sex would be absolutely free, including the abolition of the incest taboo, and that as a result of such liberation of the passions, men and women would live to 144 years of age, 120 of which would be spent in active love-making. (For some reason, the last 24 years are unaccounted for.)  A nut, you might say. But the fact remains that Fourier was respected and influential throughout Europe and even among Transcendentalist circles in the United States. When you are in the grip of a countercultural passion, you can so easily lose or repress the ability to distinguish the nutty from the sensible.

Take Marx. When I taught a graduate seminar in social thought we read, in a class dominated by Marxists and quasi-Marxists, the Communist Manifesto. There Marx launched a vitriolic attack on the bourgeois family as an institution of legalized prostitution for the unfortunate wives. I asked my students what they thought of these remarks and got no response--it is clear that they hadn't bothered to think about them, though they regarded the Communist Manifesto as a kind of scripture. So I then asked whether they thought that their mothers were prostitutes. An uneasy and baffled silence reigned. What I found so fascinating was not that there was no one with the courage to say "yes," but that there was no one with the courage  to say "no"!  Keeping their Marxism intact was obviously more important to them than anything else.

I think it perfectly valid to claim that one of the inherent and fatal weaknesses of even moderate socialist movements and governments is hostility to the family, often cloaked as indifference. And I believe that we are coming to recognize that this hostility, cloaked as indifference, is a major factor in the political torment of what we still call "liberalism" in the United States. That the hostility is there is revealed by the complaisance of liberalism before the assaults on the family by contemporary radical feminism and the "gay rights" movement. All liberal politicians today speak highly of the family--and some are doubtless sincere--but they cannot bring themselves to defend it against its enemies.

***

And what about our own orthodoxy--the secular, humanist, rationalist orthodoxy against which all the countercultures of the past two centuries have rebelled? How has it been coping? On the whole it has been coping badly, its survival ensured mainly by its toleration of older religious and moral traditions that govern the lives of most of the citizenry, and by the unqualified faith in progress, material and moral--a faith that is grievously wounded but not yet dead. It was this modern faith that permitted rationalism to believe that it could be, not only a philosophy for the learned, but also an orthodoxy for all.  

It was because of this certainty of progress, moral as well as material, that our modern orthodoxy could ignore the basic principle of any orthodoxy, which is virtue--a principle that all countercultures find intolerable. The word itself has suffered a degradation in our time. As Leo Strauss once pointed out, a term that used to refer to the manliness of men now had its meaning limited to the sexual purity of women. In the context of an orthodox orthodoxy, if I can use that phrase, the term refers to neither. Orthodox virtue is a prescription whereby people find contentment in their lives by doing the right thing, in the right way, at the right time, and in the right frame of mind. This last qualification is the weakest of the four. All orthodoxies believe that if you do the right thing, in the right way, at the right time, you will end up in possession of the right frame of mind even if you didn't begin with it. This is why orthodoxy is always suspicious of its members who go around talking enthusiastically about "spirituality." Orthodoxies have known forever that virtue is a practical, existential discipline, not simply a matter of faith, and definitely not an application of abstract doctrine to behavior. Pray and ye shall eventually believe, as any priest or rabbi will tell you. Don't bother me, they say, with your whinings about your inability to believe.

Beneath the priority that orthodoxy gives to right practice, there lies a basic, more primordial intuition. This is to the effect that leading a life according to virtue--or trying to, anyhow--is of metaphysical significance. Nietzsche saw this well enough when he declared, defiantly, that "art rather than ethics constitutes the essential metaphysical activity of men." Virtuous practice disagrees. It sees itself as pursuing the ethical sanctification of the mundane. In this pursuit, it gains strength from linking the living to the dead and to the unborn. In a traditional orthodox community, both the dead and the unborn have the right to vote.

Secular rationalism looks at things differently. It is essentially contemptuous of the very idea of tradition. It also lacks a central principle of virtue. Instead, it proposes a whole set of virtues--toleration, pluralism, relativism: the "liberal" virtues--which, one might say, construct a supermarket of possible good and decent lives, with no discrimination permitted. This is a prescription for moral anarchy, which is exactly what we are now experiencing. And there is no way that moral anarchy can pass for moral progress, though there are today, especially in our educational system, a fair number of people who pretend this to be the case--rarely, however, when it comes to their own children.

For secular-rationalist humanism, the idea of moral progress, accompanying scientific and technological progress, is absolutely crucial. Without a sense that moral progress is being achieved, scientific and technological progress assumes something like a demonic cast, threatening our very humanity. The existence of such a threat is keenly felt today, as anyone who reads science fiction can testify--or as can anyone who reads newspaper reports on new developments in human fertility. Witness, too, the strength of the environmentalist movement, particularly in its more radical form. And then there is the hostility of radical feminism to science and technology, attacked as a form of male hegemony that imposes on us a "cognitive rationality" that offers only an abstract sense of reality, in contrast to the more "natural," more intuitive, less rationalist, perception of reality that radical feminism wishes to celebrate. Some feminists have even gone so far as try to create an alternative, self-styled "neo-pagan" religiosity, a kind of nature worship--a desperate and rather pathetic effort to recreate long-dead pre-Christian, mystery religions. What bothers me most about this phenomenon is their appropriation of the term, "neo."

*** 

Liberals and conservatives who today express concern about "standards" in literature and the arts, are often put in the ironic position of opposing post-modernism in the name of that modernism that Lionel Trilling called "the adversary culture." It is ironic because it was the adversary culture of yesteryear that, in time, gave birth to our contemporary counterculture, which is busily engaged in "trashing" its elders and betters. Essentially, postmodernism's critique of the previous "adversary culture" is that it was "academic," seemingly designed from the outset to constitute a "canon." Our current counterculture is opposed to canons, just as it is opposed to Culture (with a capital "C") or to Art (with a capital "A"). Its ethos is the ethos of a carnival. It is cynical, nihilistic, and exploitative; it is candidly keenly interested in money. What is utterly lacking is the intense spiritual energy to be found in the poets and painters of the previous adversary culture. This was an energy derived from their overweening ambition to replace religion as that which gives meaning to our lives. It was the inevitable failure of this ambition that provoked such an unprecedented number of suicides and wilfull self-destruction among writers and artists in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.*

***

In contrast, the energy of the postmodern counterculture goes into self-promotion, public relations, and seeking grants from the National Endowment for the Arts or the MacArthur Foundation, both of which boast of the "progressive" heresies they promote. It has become an extension of the modern media, favoring exhibitionism in place of intellectual or spiritual ambition. Shopping for, not whoring after, strange gods is the order of day.

Secular humanism remains trapped within a universe in which man aspires to make himself. But man cannot make himself, only various simulacra of himself. This is what the counterculture is so busy doing--inventing "selves" and "life styles" to suit. The original excitement of this game does not last very long. There is already a sense of tedium about the whole business--too many transient selves, "protean" selves, too many "life styles."

The real danger, it seems to me, is that the collapse of secular humanism will bring down with it, will discredit, human things that are of permanent importance. It is easy to foresee that a spiritual rebellion against the constrictions of secular humanism could end up in a celebration of irrationalism and a derogation of reason itself. It is also easy to foresee that the idea of liberty--even ordered liberty that disowns license--could collapse under pressure from a new spiritual and ideological conformity, in which the temporal power once again is intimately involved in what was once called "the guidance of souls."

Countercultures are dangerous phenomena even as they are inevitable phenomena. Their destructive power always far exceeds their constructive power. The delicate task that faces people in our position today is not to reform the secular rationalist orthodoxy, which has passed beyond the point of non-redemption. Rather, it is to breathe new life into the older, now largely comatose, religious orthodoxies--while resisting the counterculture as best we can, adapting to it and reshaping it where we cannot simply resist.

Resistance is important because it buys time during which the contradictory and self-destructive impulses of the counterculture can work themselves out. The current conflict between radical feminism and simple-minded "sexual liberation" is a case in point. At the same time, we have to recognize that some ground may never be recovered. As for breathing new life into the spirit of older orthodoxies, it must be said that no one can foresee how that will happen, what it will entail, and in what ways a newly-inspirited religious orthodoxy will differ from the old. We must be prepared for surprises, not all them, perhaps, to our liking. One thing we can reasonably be certain of--so long as men and women have children, the family as a tradition-guarding institution will never be transformed into something else, though it can be temporarily shaken and unnerved.

***

The recovery in some form of an older religious orthodoxy may sound like a mission impossible, but we can take solace from the fact that, historically, this is the way the clash between orthodoxy and counterculture is in fact always resolved. It is the rarest of human events for a counterculture to establish itself as a new orthodoxy, as distinct from imposing changes or reactions on the old. There is no reason to think the wave of the future will be different from the waves of the past. It is a thought worth keeping in mind while coping with the turbulence such waves always create.

Note
 
* Writers: Rimbaud, Virginia Woolf, Hart Crane, Randall Jarrell, Mayakovsky, Hemingway, Dylan Thomas, Camus, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman.
Painters: Van Gogh, Modigliani, Arshile Gorki, Mark Gertler, Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko.

Irving Kristol is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.