Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 92

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The Popular Culture Review

Many radical voices of the sixties claimed that technological
society no longer just threatened nature, it had irretrivably defiled
and corrupted it. They were stirred by a critical, disapproving, and
hostile view of the effect of the technological on the organic. The
sixties saw the publication of a number of books, analytical as well as
creative, that were deeply hostile to the spirit of pastoralism. A
number of them became canonical works that rationalized discontent
and gave it structure. I wish to single on Murray Bookchin, Herbert
Marcuse, Ken Kesey, Richard Brautigan, and Norman Mailer as
writers whose work had an important impact on the cultural
sensibility of the sixties.
In industrial society, Murray Bookchin argued, hierarchic
organization replaced a simplified organic environment with a
complex inorganic environment. Industrial civilization became
increasingly incomprehensible and lent itself to bureaucratic
manipulation and ecological destruction. It had filled the
atmosphere with destructive pollutants, eroded the soil, and upset
the balance of nature. This growing centralization altered the nature
of the "social question.” If man had to acquire the conditions of
survival in order to live, as Marx emphasized, Bookchin (1971, p. 349)
contended that prevailing technological society had threatened the
environment~"disassembling the biotic pyramid that supported
humanity for countless millennia"~so that man must acquire the
conditions of life in order to survive. Bookchin found this to be an
impossible task in industrial civilization.
Herbert Marcuse is notable for his efforts to balance contrary
impulses toward optimism and pessimism. This is particularly
evident in his discussion of nature. Marcuse maintained that
quantitative changes in industrial society made possible a reality
that had heretofore been invoked only in fantasy. Marcuse's
Freudian radicalism stressed the repressive character of society, but
without Freud's tragic and stoical belief that these repressions could
never be transcended, that the realm of necessity could never give
away to the realm of freedom. One of the most significant
transformations, Marcuse (1962, p. 197) felt, would come in "the basic
attitude toward man and nature which has been characteristic of
Western civilization." Quoting a passage by Margaret Mead
describing Arapesh culture as a vision of the world as a garden,
Marcuse (1962, pp. 197-198) affirmed their edenic perception of the