Stay In Your Lane: Conformity, Hippies, and the New Age

Going “outside the box” isn’t for everyone… at least not yet.

I recently wrote an article entitled The Last Time the New Age Turned Right (link is at the bottom), describing how hippie culture morphed in two directions: the New Age on the one hand and fundamentalist Christianity on the other. More recently, a significant faction of the New Age has turned towards the right, conspirituality, and irrationalism. I’ve had some interesting responses to that story, that have prompted me to expand on the topic.

One of the points I made in the article was that folks who had moved away from the standard Western cultural norms had seen great potentials, but they had a hard time bringing those potentials into reality. Some of them took their insights and beliefs into what we now call the New Age, an amalgam of spiritual beliefs and practices. The New Age was/is a toned-down version of hippie culture. Others looked backwards, towards traditional Christianity, and while they started out as free-spirit Christians, under the pressure to find something substantial in a scary world, they became more fundamentalist.

The New Age came under pressure from a number of sources, of which the Covid pandemic is only the most recent. Yet the pandemic served as a tipping point for many, as the economic, political, and social challenges of the late 1960s and 70s had for the hippies. Once again, the need for a safe harbor and a belief system that could withstand the pressure, resulted in a turn towards the right.

The Returners

One response to my article was that there was a third stream, composed of hippies who ‘went back’ to the norms of traditional Western culture. The hippie who got a ‘straight job’, as they used to call it. On the surface of it, this appears to be a rejection of the hippie ethic, and in many ways it no doubt is. Yet I think there’s more to it than that.

While some folks may have truly abandoned ship and gone back wholeheartedly, I think it likely that many returned to ‘play the game’ with a subtle agenda, while a good many others were simply changed too much by their experiences to ever fully buy into our culture in an unreflective way. If nothing else, a stout dose of LSD seems sufficient to jar one loose from the moorings of conventionality in a way that allows only tentative and temporary returns.

I think these ‘returners’ have played an important role in the development of Western culture since the Sixties. While I can riff all day and all night about the problems of our society, there have been at least some significant improvements. I would count the openness towards sexual orientation and gender roles, the legalization of cannabis, and the move towards accepting psychedelics as therapeutic agents as some prominent examples.

Surely, many changes were inevitable anyway, as Western society had become too wound up to sustain itself for long. But I think the returners helped to catalyze and direct the changes in many ways.

Maybe It’s Not For You

This might sound awfully judgmental, but it could well be that stepping outside of the norms of society is just not for everyone. Transcending the mores and values of one’s culture isn’t an easy task. For one thing, you can’t transcend something you haven’t mastered in the first place: you need to go through in order to go above.

I can see where the youth of the 1960s felt the need to bypass the process of enculturation. The Vietnam War and the degradation of the environment were but two motivators that required fast action (the boringness of traditional work and social patterns were others). Indeed, they were perhaps ‘called’ to the work of bringing about change before they fully became part of the culture. Yet on a personal level, that meant that many counterculturists were lacking the structure they needed.

I’m sure some could provide their own structure or had had sufficient experience to guide themselves, but many were inclined to rely upon an external authority, which is a natural step in the process of personal development. That external authority could come in many forms, including fundamentalist Christianity.

Many of today’s New Agers are in a similar situation, although they have a broader smorgasbord of authorities to choose among, including QAnon. In either case, if personal authority and autonomy is not well developed, it leaves the door open to all kinds of influences that are only too willing to step in and provide structure.

It’s not just a matter of being too young to transcend the culture. At any age and stage of development, there’s a certain amount of risk that goes with leaving behind the structures of society. More folks are probably ready and able to do so now than at any point in history, but there are going to be a lot of tag-alongs who might do better sticking with more traditional structures.

In almost all cultures, there has been a recognition that some people are going to transcend the cultural norms in one way or another. Usually, there are institutions that support and contain such people, such as monasteries and, to an extent, universities (there are also institutions to support and contain folks who are merely outside of cultural norms, but that’s another story). These institutions provide a ‘structure for transcendence’.

Western society is in double jeopardy, in that we don’t really have much in the way of supportive institutions (universities have become far less tolerant of ‘outsider’ thought, and we don’t have a strong monastic culture), and we also have a relatively large number of people who are seeking transcendence. It’s a problem.

Creating Our Next Reality

So far, the only thing we’ve done as a culture to address this problem is to be more tolerant of those who step outside of our cultural norms. In fact, we’ve become generally more tolerant, and the norms themselves have become much more flexible and loose. That this has led to a backlash and attempts to tighten things up proves more than contradicts the point.

As we have ‘democratized’ mystical experiences and the process of cultural transcendence, we have created a need for a stronger support system. My tentative thought is that while we don’t have much in the way of universally accepted institutions, we have created a number of small support systems. I would count among them transpersonal psychologists, the psychedelic therapeutic movement, and the various New Age centers like Omega and Esalen (both of which would probably bristle at being called ‘New Age centers’). There are also a large number of Buddhist and other Eastern centers established in the West that attract Westerners.

Curiously, but not entirely impossible to understand, these separate entities have generally not coalesced into larger entities or even cohesive networks. The diversity of approaches and the ability to stick with one that resonates with you as an individual, or move to new approach as you see fit, is a crucial part of our alternative spirituality. More or less, there seems to be mutual respect among the various groups.

We have a desperate need for new models and cultural patterns in our society, and the folks who are attempting to go above and beyond our current culture need support. As of now, those who’ve developed the fortitude to do so — one way or another — are facing the challenge of dealing with those who have not.

Here’s the link to my previous article… https://readmedium.com/bf5a2b3ec31f