Preview
Date
1969
Creation Date
2017-08-25
Description
xiv, 303 p. ; 19 cm. Series: Anchor Books ed. A697.
Digital Collection
Irene P. Ertman Science Fiction Book Collection
Object Type
Book
Identifier
ertman_056
Image Format
Physical Object
Repository
Special Collections, Leonard H. Axe Library
Publisher Digital
Doubleday
Rights
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Transcript
The Making of a Counter Culture
Theodore Roszak
“Most of what is presently happening that is new, provocative and engaging in politics, education, the arts, social relations (love, courtship, family, community) is the creation either of youth, who are profoundly, even fanatically, alienated from the parental generation, or of those who address themselves primarily to the young.”
Starting from this premise, Theodore Roszak examines in detail some of the leading influences on the youthful counter culture—Herbert Marcuse and Norman Brown, Allen Ginsberg and Alan Watts, Timothy Leary and Paul Goodman—and shows how each has helped call into question the conventional scientific world view and in so doing has set about undermining the foundations of the technocracy.
He then turns his attention to “the myth of objective consciousness,” and suggests that a culture which subordinates or degrades visionary experience commits the sin of diminishing our existence. For the question facing us is not “How shall we know?” but “How shall we live?” And in finding the answer we must reconstitute the magical world view from which human creativity and community derive. So that, finally, “the primary project of our counter culture is to proclaim a new heaven and a new earth so vast, so marvelous that the inordinate claims of technical expertise must of necessity withdraw to a subordinate and marginal status in the lives of men.”
