From Freak to Super-freak

Two cheers for the work of Theodore Roszak, a Californian academic who died 10 years ago, and who is one of the more intelligent chroniclers of New Age spirituality. I’ve read four of his books now, and find much to admire in his prose. Encountering his work in New Age culture is like coming across a dapper gentleman in the heart of a steaming jungle.

And yet even here, in this most literate of New Age authors, one sees the cultural flaws that brought spirituality to its present sorry state. He exhibits two of the biggest New Age errors — a tendency to anti-scientific primitivism, and a bizarre belief that spiritual seekers are a higher species or master-race.

Roszak was a historian at California State University, who in the late 60s and 70s became the unofficial apologist for the counter-culture (a word he coined) and the Age of Aquarius. Here he is on a 1977 BBC series called The Long Search, in which Ronald Eyre chronicled homo sapiens’ search for the divine. Episode 12 explores ‘alternative lifestyles in California’, and presenter Ronald Eyre is more than a little bemused by what he finds. And yet (2 minutes 50 seconds in) Roszak is able to explain and justify what is going on. He says:

What I see around me and most prominently in this area, where we’re supersaturated with experiments, is a great religious appetite. A great deal of this goes under the heading of therapy, parapsychology, consciousness experiments. What they’re trying to do is salvage something of the religions of the past as a living daily reality. And so they search, they grope, in ways that are sometimes awkward and unbecoming, there are a lot of false starts and follies along the way. And very often that’s what people focus on for the purpose of criticism. And its legitimate enough to criticise things that are superficial or foolish. But it’s just as foolish to treat with contempt the need that is involved with this. It’s one thing to mock the many inadequate ways people seek to meet that need, it’s quite another thing to mock the need.

In 1969 he coined the term ‘counter-culture’ to describe the hippy mystical revolt that he saw sweeping through Californian campuses. Counter to what? To the scientific-industrial technocracy which Roszak believed was destroying the planet and crushing the soul of humanity. He blamed the rise of materialist science for marginalizing and pathologizing mystical states of consciousness:

As the spell of scientific or quasi-scientific thought has spread in our culture from the physical to the so-called behavioural sciences, and finally to scholarship in the arts and letters, the marked tendency has been to consign whatever is not fully and articulately available in the waking consciousness for empirical or mathematical manipulation, to a purely negative catch-all category (in effect, the cultural garbage can) called the ‘unconscious’…or the ‘irrational’…or the ‘mystical’…or the ‘purely subjective’. To behave on the basis of such blurred states of consciousness is at best to be some species of amusing eccentric, at worst to be plain mad. [The Making of a Counter-Culture]

In other works he traces this war on mysticism back to Francis Bacon, and further, to Thomas Cromwell and the dissolution of the monasteries — the subject of his PhD.

The triumph of scientific technocracy is disastrous, idolatrous, suicidal, he felt, because it not only severed humans from their inner depths, it also cuts them off from non-human beings and the ecosystem, leading to an instrumentalized and extractive relationship to the natural world.

Theodore Roszak

Against this technocratic empire, Roszak senses a scrappy mystical revolt rising in the most unlikely of places — among the freaks and hippies of Haight-Ashbury. Yes, there is something indiscriminate and ridiculous in New Age spirituality, but what do you expect, after 500 years of spiritual starvation?

How do any of us, children of a culture so long estranged from the visionary talents of the human animal, pick our way through this turgid era of psychic adventurism with any confidence that we will choose wisely from the proliferating options? …For all the urgency of our need there is too much too suddenly before us, and in these shadowy areas of human experience we are perhaps the most amateurish people in the history of the world.[The Unfinished Animal]

The hippies have embarked, he declared, on ‘the greatest introspective binge in history’. The spiritual wasteland of western society is being redeemed, not by Christianity, but by the Age of Aquarius. Roszak annoints Aldous Huxley as the mystical revival’s prophet:

in the 1950s, as Huxley detected the rising spirit of a new generation, his utopian image brightened to the forecast he offers us in Island, where a non-violent culture elaborated out of Buddhism and psychedelic drugs prevails. It was as if he had suddenly seen the possibility emerge: what lay beyond the Christian era and the ‘wasteland’ that was its immediate successor might be a new, eclectic religious revival.[The Making of the Counter-Culture]

Beyond Aldous, Roszak traces this mystical revival to the New Age pioneers of the 1880s-1920s — Madame Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, Gurdjieff, Yeats — and before them the Romantics, and especially his hero William Blake. For these earlier writers, spiritual wisdom was mainly for the initiated elite. But in modern America, he sees a great democratization of occult wisdom.

Roszak’s criticisms of the New Age

Unlike 99% of New Age writers, Roszak is well-read, he has a grasp of history, and he is capable of criticizing the New Age from a place of sympathy. He criticizes the scene’s gullibility and lack of discrimination, how it lumps all ideas together into a ‘psycho-spiritual free for all, where anything goes and no holds are barred’. He writes:

At the level of our youth, we begin to resemble nothing so much as the cultic hothouse of the Hellenistic period, where every manner of mystery and fakery, ritual and rite, intermingled with marvellous indiscrimination…No, the young do not by and large understand what these traditions are all about. One does not unearth the wisdom of the ages by shuffling about a few exotic catch phrases — nor does one learn anything about anybody’s lore or religion by donning a few talismans and dosing on LSD. The most that comes of such superficial muddling is something like Timothy Leary’s brand of easy-do syncretism: ‘somehow’ all is one — but never mind precisely how. [The Making of the Counter-Culture]

He also skewers the counter-culture’s tendency to fetishize peak experiences and seek them over and over again, especially through drugs. He complains:

There is nothing whatever in common between a man of Huxley’s experience and intellectual discipline sampling mescaline, and a fifteen-year-old tripper whiffing airplane glue until his brain turns to oatmeal. In the one case, we have a gifted mind moving sophisticatedly towards cultural synthesis; in the other, we have a giddy child out to ‘blow his mind’ and bemused to see all the pretty balloons go up. But when all the balloons have gone up and gone pop, what is there left behind but the yearning to see more pretty balloons? [Making of the Counter-Culture]

He calls for ‘spiritual intelligence’ and warns about the risk of ‘spiritual fascism’, in lines that prophesy the spread of the Q-anon apocalyptic conspiracy through the New Age in recent years:

It is spiritual intelligence the moment demands of us — without it the consciousness circuit will surely become a lethal swamp of paranormal entertainments, facile therapeutic tricks, authoritarian guru trips, demonic subversions…people filled with enough self-loathing and desperation are apt to seize upon anything that offers them an explosive catharsis and a decisive break with the past — and to love the hand that drives them to their ordeal. Every totalitarian movement of modern times has borrowed and perverted the psychology of rebirth for its own purposes. [The Unfinished Animal]

Roszak’s primitivism and elitism

Yet even in this most intelligent of New Age apologists, one still finds some of the serious critical issues that have undermined New Age culture.

The first is his demonisation of Science as the great tyrant of our time. We must replace the empirical method with mystical inspiration, he says. In this he follows the lead of William Blake, who urged his readers

To cast off Bacon, Locke, & Newton from Albion’s covering,

To take off his filthy garments & clothe him with Imagination.

I share Roszak’s dislike of how scientific materialism in general, and psychiatry in particular, has pathologized mystical experiences. But Roszak broadens this into an Old Testament polemic against science and technology in general. He writes:

Technology…becomes a compulsive and self-defeating pursuit of total dominance over society and nature…A global wasteland where only an ensconced, bandit elite of corporate profiteers, commissars, and technocrats…[Where the Wasteland Ends]

Like a New Age Trumpist or Brexiter, he shakes his fist at the ‘citadel of expertise’:

the technocracy [is an] extraordinarily potent means of subverting democracy from within its own ideals and institutions. It is a citadel of expertise dominating the high ground of urban-industrial society, exercising control over a social system that is utterly beholden to technician and scientist for its survival and prosperity. It is, within modern society, what the control of the sacramental powers was to the medieval church — the monopoly of all that people value and revere: material plenty, physical power, a reliable and expanding body of knowledge.[Where the Wasteland Ends]

He sees Science as a deranged Dr Frankenstein, drunk with power, abusing nature with its experiments. His main gripe is that science is so complex that ordinary people can’t possibly understand it:

It is my own conviction that as the baffling subtleties of contemporary science drift further away from the understanding of the lay citizen, the resulting spiritual strain will be much greater than most people can live with gracefully…One cannot go on indefinitely acknowledging that that which makes one’s world go round and mediates all reliable knowledge of reality is hopelessly beyond one’s comprehension, and therefore one’s control. Or rather one cannot go on indefinitely this way without being eaten alive by self-loathing [Where the Wasteland Ends]

Against this bewildering and unholy technocracy, he preaches ‘voluntary primitivism’, ‘reversionism’, a new stone age, a dropping-out from the scientific mainstream:

We are in for an interlude during which an increasing number of people in urban-industrial society will take their bearings in life from the I Ching and the signs of the zodiac, from yoga…If this weaning away from the dominant culture becomes sufficiently widespread, the result is bound to be a highly unstable social order, because the commanding mystique of the technocracy will be dissipated. There will simply be too many people about living by alternative realities.[Where the Wasteland Ends]

This, again, seems like a prescient prophecy of what has happened during the Trump era and the Pandemic, when a large proportion of the New Age / wellness world rejected the liberal consensus and plugged into a virtual reality of alternative media, alternative health and alternative facts. There seems a direct line from William Blake to Roszak to the Dark Ages primitivism of Glastonbury shamans beating their drums against the vaccine.

There is the pungent whiff of ‘spiritual fascism’ about his apocalyptic ‘visionary commonwealth’, with its programme for the total transformation of the self , its state-sponsored therapy, its humiliation of scientific and technocratic experts in favour of shamans and energy healers.

From Freak to Super-Freak

The other obvious issue in Roszak’s writing is its elitism, evident in his belief that hippies are a new master-race, an entirely new species of superbeing. This is an old trope in New Age culture, going back to Richard Bucke’s 1901 book Cosmic Consciousness. You can find variations of it in Theosophy, in Crowley’s Thelema, in HG Wells, in the Huxleys, and in the human potential movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Roszak devotes much of his 1975 book The Unfinished Animal to this far-out idea:

we can discern, through all these starry-eyed images of an Aquarian age filled with wonders and wellbeing, a transformation of human personality in progress of evolutionary proportions, a shift of consciousness fully as epoch making as the appearance of speech or of the tool making talents in our cultural repertory

Notice how readily these days members of the dropped out and dissenting minority speak of themselves as ‘freaks’ — and how proudly they take the name, hoping perhaps that they are among the first of the mutants, the new humanity that holds the promise of the new age. Do they think of themselves as a super-race? If so then they are a super-race that stands apart from every existing race, nation, class, culture, having no territorial imperatives, needing no political scapegoats, proclaiming themselves nobody’s master.

As freaks, they feel themselves swept up in a cultural disjuncture so challenging that only a new species may be able to negotiate the transition. Had they possessed our gift of self-awareness, would our amphibian cousins as they first emerged from the sea, or our Neanderthal ancestors as they wrestled with the first rough approximations of speech, have reflected upon their situation in the same way?

I imagine that among the earliest humans or near-humans, still struggling with the anxious tensions of intelligence, there were a few in whom the seed of our full and destined identity found a special fertility. Feeling the thrust and stirring of this strange growth within them, these few (let us simply call them The Few) withdrew into solitude…

The task of our generation is to be pathfinders of an evolutionary transition.

[All quotes from The Unfinished Animal]

What can you say to such self-regarding grandiosity but ‘OK boomer!’

It says something about the delusional bubble of Californian hippies that even this Guggenheim fellow, twice nominated for the National Book Award, gets caught up in the enthusiasm.

There is also a remarkable historical forgetting, in this academic historian, about how fatal such ideas of a spiritual master-race proved to be in the 1880s-1940s, when the New Age dream of the coming super-race often fused with eugenics and far-right politics. Roszak shows some awareness that Blavatsky could be a bit racist, but he evinces no awareness that many of his other occult heroes — Steiner, Yeats, Jung, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, Aldous Huxley, the Traditionalists — were often reactionary, eugenicist, racist, and at times far-right in their politics.

Well, things turned out differently to how Roszak imagined. The freaks did not evolve into super-freaks. The visionary commonwealth did not dawn. The technocracy of industrial capitalism was not overthrown. Instead, the boomers voted for Reagan, and then, to Roszak’s amazement, some of the Stone Age hippies went to work in Silicon Valley, and invented the internet and the smart-phone, thereby making our culture even more technocratic and artificial. In From Satori to Silicon Valley, his 1986 book, he tries to make sense of this, and delineates two trends in hippy culture — primitivist reversionism and sci-fi technophilia. He identified much more with the former trend, and described himself as a ‘neo-Luddite’.

His last invention was the field of ‘ecopsychology’, another term he coined, and a field he helped to develop in the 1990s. He writes: ‘repression of the ecological unconscious is the deepest root of the collusive madness in industrial society; open access to the ecological unconscious is the path to sanity.’

Yes, to a point. It’s certainly the case that weekly extreme weather events are wearing away at our mental health and leading in some cases to ‘eco-anxiety’ and a sense of hopelessness and nihilism. But if we’re going to tackle climate change we need scientific experts. We need the ‘citadel of expertise’. I always enjoy reading Roszak’s writing, but I would not go lightly into his dark forest of primitivist neo-druidism.