In the spring of 1969, I sat on the quad in Columbia with my friends, listening to the rant of the radical remnant in the building they had seized, blasting mind-numbing Marxist rhetoric about imperialism and South Africa over their outsized sound system, the residue of the previous year's collective confrontations. And I said to my friends, 'The problem is not in South Africa or in Columbia's investments in South Africa. The problem is here, in the school and in what's happening in the school.' I'm not sure that the phrase 'publish or perish' was current yet. But I already recognized the peculiar narrowing of the scholarly community, a narrowing that, contrary to Allan Bloom, had been going on since the end of World War II and was already invading the classroom long before the sixties generation got any purchase on the system. In fact, it was members of Allan Bloom's generation that first put the systematizing grip into the technologization and professionalization of the teaching profession, a result, no doubt, of the management skills that they learned precisely in World War II, where American ability to build system on an on-the-fly ad hoc basis was an essential element in victory. But the bureaucratization of the intellect was far older than that generation, extending back into the middle of the 19th century. I have discussed here the programmatic disassembly of philosophy, in any reasonable sense, that extends at least as far back as J. S. Mill and extends forward through movements in America, England and on the continent that now merit a vaunted place and an increasingly solitary place in the teaching of the history of philosophy. What I have not discussed here is how this is culturally and socially the exact intellectual equivalent of the bureaucratization and systematization of the culture as a whole that has taken place in the last sixty some years.

            Two nights ago, I heard five people, all involved in academe at the college and university level, discuss the sixties. And while the topic involved the forty-year parallel between 1968 and 2008, and while the latter date brought the focus to bear, to some degree, on the civil rights movement, the real topic involved a generic focus on the sixties, both personal and impersonal.
            I am absolutely torn when I talk about academe. I grew up in academe. My first memories involve my father in graduate school. From the age of 13, one of my refuges has been an open stacks university research library, which, even then, had more than a million volumes. The library itself, at that point, was a century old. And it had many donated volumes, in the stacks, that extended back to the early 19th century. I understand the value of the research currently being done by academics, and the history of academic research. My own limited library contains individual volumes that represent the equivalent of centuries of the niggling, narrowly focused validating research that is absolutely essential to our present understanding of the world.
            But the absolutely insistent systematization, bureaucratization, technologization and professionalization of academe has currently destroyed its essential purpose, namely, encouraging students not only to tackle the 'big problems', but to insist that in fact there are possible solutions to the big problems, solutions that have not yet been proposed.
            I hear talk in academe about the big problems. I hear teachers or their admirers boast that they address the big problems. But it's like landscape artists talking about painting en plein air: as if, of course, they painted directly from nature. But what I see in all but one hundred percent of the cases are studio artists who take their specific artificial rendering techniques for given objects out into the countryside or cityscape. They might as well be painting in the studio from bad photographs. At their best they are barely better than the television teachers of 'art', who say, 'Now this is how we paint a tree'.
            But, of course, the sophisticated line now is, 'I teach my students to address the big problems, because it teaches them not only to analyze, but to recognize that analysis itself is the key.'
            In other words, we all know there are no solutions to the big problems. There is only analysis. But when you start with naively optimistic fools, you have to mislead them with the possibility of a solution in order to convince them that anything other than the process of enquiry is pointless - which, of course, is where philosophy itself stands today.

            What the sixties were was the last stand against precisely this kind of thinking.

            Again, with all due respect to the academics who spoke the other night on the sixties - three of whom I consider my friends - the only real issues they discussed were political, as if the sixties had been strictly a function of some kind of momentary political insurgency, which, oh, yes, happened to produce some bizarre behavior on the side. Perhaps the topic relating 1968 to 2008 dictated the result. But I doubt it. The topic evoked personal stories that were not only sincere, but apparently inclusive. And while they included indications, in some cases, of searches that were not necessarily political, the outcome seemed to have been or been perceived in political terms.
            But this is not simply the result of one night's topic, or the particularly pre-selected sample of speakers. Even in the larger culture, we seem to have this point of view. Almost all serious, if popular, presentations of the sixties are either resumés of the political developments or picture books about the hippies. While the 'conservatives' continue to rail about 'liberal' academics, academics, almost to a person, have become conservative enough not only not to reference drug experience, but to largely ignore, in any general context, the extraordinary range of experimentation that accompanied this 'bizarre behavior', experimentation involving communal living and social arrangements, radical religious and theological theorizing as well as experiential forays into alternative religious systems - alternative, that is, with respect to the usual suburban choices that most of the 'hippies' had confronted - and a range of legitimately intellectual possibilities that, fortunately or unfortunately, in part emerged from and clearly paralleled the drug experiences evoked by psychedelics.
            One speaker mentioned, as an aside and in passing, 'with the aid of a few mushrooms'. But he was speaking primarily, if I remember correctly, of the developing emotional basis of his political orientation, an orientation largely grounded in and developed through his analytical and theoretical understanding of the political situation. But what the psychedelics did was not only expose our basic, naked humanity in a way that suggested and endorsed democracy at a new level of understanding, they also gave us a direct and immediate understanding of psychology, philosophy and religious possibilities the likes of which we had never seen or heard described in the classroom, or anywhere else in our experience, for that matter. The problem, of course, from our side was that this 'revelation' had come to us through a pill, a sugar cube, a piece of blotter paper or dried or fresh mushrooms or cactus. While the experience seemed real enough, in its way, it was also necessarily something extraneous - something we certainly could not validate through any analytical mode, at least not so long as it remained simply 'an experience' we had had while on 'a drug'.

            But shunting the history of the sixties onto a siding, as if it were an isolated event, provoked either by a spontaneous political insurgency or the collective mindset prompted by a self-generating community of drug users, precludes us from the actual history of such cyclical movements, apparently related, that perhaps recur throughout human history, but clearly extend, in this traditional sequence, back as far as the Middle Ages. We can draw a direct line from the millennial communalistic movements of medieval Europe to the 1960s. But the line involves moments of qualitative change. While all were insurgent, the nature of the understanding shifted radically. At the same time, the transmutations still seem to reflect the peculiar dialectic disparity between the teachings of Jesus and the institutions which attempted to embody them. Granted, by the 19th century, these movements had, for the most part, drifted far enough from the religious base so that 'Christianity' was only peripherally invoked, if at all. But the communalism of the minority movements in the Reformation not only transition toward the Romantic or post-Idealist versions of such communities as appeared in the 19th century, they also established some of the linguistic and intellectual strategies by which such communities defined themselves and justified themselves to the world at large. But, by the 19th century, the relatively anarchic ideals of such communities were clearly identified as such, socially, culturally and politically, as against the larger and 'heavier' institutional structures of the standing societies in which they appeared.
            Naturally, the relatively enforced communalism of the first colonizing efforts in what is now the United States is a matter of cliché. The fact that the only regional colony that paid for itself, in terms of reimbursing its investors, was the Puritan colony at Plymouth, has its significance in this context. But communalism by choice was largely a 19th century development in this country. The most famous, of course, was the Concord inspired gathering at Brook Farm. But clearly, the early 19th century constituted a time not altogether different from the sixties, in terms of cultural, religious and social experimentation. Apart from European social, economic and political theories of 'socialism' and 'communism' or 'communalism', the indigenous movements arose out of Transcendentalism and the religious 'ecstasies' of the 'burned over district' in upstate New York - 'burned over' precisely because of the plethora of extraordinary religious phenomena it produced.
            We have largely lost this part of our history. John Humphrey Noyes, who had spent time as a Congregational seminarian, converted an apparently quasi-prophetic religious experience into the Oneida community, whose industrial success is still with us in the names of a number of manufactured goods. But the community itself practiced 'open marriage', not exactly 'free love', since it was relatively structured in its approach, but certainly free love in terms of any reasonable understanding of mid-19th century America. But what is perhaps even more fascinating is that the accredited Congregational journal of the day followed the experiment with some empathy, publishing some of Noyes writings in the process. This parallels the fact of the extraordinary welcome given by the New England elite to the revolutionary anarchists Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin - and this at a time when New England was still the chief cultural center of the country. In other words, the insurgent movement toward communalism in the early and mid-19th century New England not only influenced the general culture, but also acquired mainstream acceptance.
            If we look closely, we can trace a lesser communalistic movement within the established U. S. culture, hidden behind the 'gilded age' of the nineties - movements paralleling the stronger communal insurgencies among the urban immigrant communities of the same period. The present 'conservative ideology' begins in the late 19th century reaction against these developments, a reaction relatively savage but disparate until it finds its federal foothold in the World War I propaganda machine developed by Woodrow Wilson. But even within a dozen miles of where I sit today, in the 1920s, a man who had given away a million dollars he had inherited, set up a rural commune. As an adolescent and young man , I was acquainted, without knowing it, with some of the people of various idealistic and socialistic persuasions, who had been attracted to the area by the force of the local commune. There are historical records of Hasidic Jews, in their usual attire, walking out from the nearest railhead in the summer heat through dusty country roads to discuss communalism with the communards. The twenties were not dissimilar from the sixties, involving a relatively unstructured social and cultural experimentation, both in the expatriate community and here at home.

            But the real question, of course, is whether there is some validity to the insurgent ideas and attitudes that these most recent communalistic cycles of history have espoused and expressed. The fact that they seem to arise spontaneously offers a certain level of endorsement. And this, of course, is one of the peculiarities of the sixties. There were threads in the arts and in politics. But the formalistic connection with previous cycles of social and intellectual, as well as political, communal insurgencies were largely broken.
            The history of the sixties is the history of personal self-discovery suddenly becoming collective self-discovery. After WW II, the war generation comes up in an era of 'the organization man' and 'the man in the gray flannel suit', specific titles adumbrating the postwar convergence into corporate sameness. But these texts targeted our parents. They set a tone, but they were peripheral. Life magazine followed the latest 'craziness' in the arts. Counterculture already had cachet. But it was still not ours. But, in the early sixties, Dylan started singing:

                                    Advertising signs they con
                                    you into thinking you're the one . . .

                                    ['It's allright, ma . . .': check it out]

and suddenly it was ours. One day we sat down in our livingroom, too stoned to move. And our friends came in and said: O, you smoke too. Or you come home from school in the south and somebody claps the headphones on your head; and it's 'Sergeant Pepper's', and truly 'blows your mind'.
            We had followed the beatniks. And the transitional beatniks were there when we went into the East Village or the Haight. But it was ours. And the fact that it was ours was conviction enough for us at the time.

            But now we stand outside it. It happened to us; and it's still ours. But now, if we want to express it, we have to find out whether it had a basic validity outside the given 'vision' of the culture as it stands today; because today's vision is the inverse of what we knew and understood then.
            The argument here, of course, is that there was and is a 'missing history'. We have touched on the formal continuity in this piece. But if we lie down in the domain of 'just another cultural visionary', it is because we have already awakened again into the validating realm of that history: what this blog is all about.