Counterculture

A counterculture represents a cultural group whose lifestyle is opposed to the prevailing culture. Countercultures construct an alternative culture that contests mainstream societal beliefs and values while desiring to influence social change. According to Ken Goffman, aka R. U. Sirius, a U.S. writer, countercultures share the characteristics of the following principles and values: they assign primacy to individuality at the expense of social conventions and governmental constraints, they challenge authoritarianism, and they embrace individual and social change. Countercultures are a form of subculture, with their own shared conventions, values, and rituals, yet they are also systematically opposed to the dominant culture. The term counterculture was introduced into public circulation in 1969 by Theodore Roszak in the book The Making of a Counter Culture, which discussed the hippie movement of the 1960s—the largest countercultural group in U.S. history. Countercultures occupy both extreme liberal and conservative attitudes and principles, with historic examples including individuals such as Socrates; traditions such as Romanticism, Bohemianism, and the Dandy; and social movements advocating lesbian, gay, and transgender rights and women's liberation. Countercultures play an important role in society, challenging and influencing mainstream societal values while representing an integral element of human nature. This article discusses a brief history of prominent American countercultures—the beats, hippies, diggers, back-to-the-landers, and cyberculture. Each of these countercultures contributed to the development of various principles and practices of the current environmental movement.

The radical questioning of social mores in the United States began most notably in the late 1940s with the Beat Generation: a group of American writers who celebrated nonconformity and spontaneous creativity, later to inspire the Beatnik culture, the yippies, and the hippies of the 1960s. Key Beat Generation writers included Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William Burroughs. During this era, countercultural resistance emerged as a result of a combination of youthful rejection of cultural and social norms, the political segregation of the South, the threat of technological bureaucracy, and the event of the [Page 89]Vietnam War. Couched in discourses of antiwar and nuclear protests, race relations, sexual liberation, women's rights, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and anticonsumerist themes, the subsequent 1960s encompassed a mass splintering and regrouping of social values and practices. Represented mainly by students, individuals felt that the Corporate State was an oppressive society in which a powerful few monopolized many, controlling the economy, politics, environment, and society. Individuals were taught to be competitive and superficial, with their anonymous, conformist identities easily replaced in a corporate-dominated society. These countercultures retaliated against such a top-down decision-making structure that endorsed economic and material values over all others.

The 1960s are divided into two factions: the New Left, represented by individuals fighting for civil rights with a background in the Free Speech Movement (a student movement at the University of California–Berkeley against technological bureaucracy); and the New Communalists, who were more influenced by the beats, Zen Buddhism, and by psychedelic drugs. Whereas the New Left turned outward toward political action, the New Communalists turned inward toward questions of consciousness. The diggers represented yet another counterculture group from this era, existing from 1966 to 1968 in the district of Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. The diggers performed free street theater to encourage people to contemplate a new frame of social, political, economic, and cultural mind. They had no apparent organizational structure or leaders and had a strong belief in freedom for the self from societal and legal norms, rules, or expectations and from economic and structural limitations. This freedom was expressed by establishing alternative cashless economies encapsulated by Free Food (scavenging food to give away), the Free Store (providing free essential goods), Free Shelter (an underground network of places to stay), and Free Education (providing survival skills training through socialization).

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