WHAT ROSZAK is saying, in short, is that "objective consciousness is alienated life promoted to its most homorific status as the scientific method." This explains the willingness of social scientists to pursue "truth" for anybody's money and purposes. But its implications about our culture are more telling. We all treat one another and everything else as unresponsive objects from the start. Openness is precluded; locked into our own heads, we are unable and afraid to make real contact with anyone or anything. Psychic alienation, or repression by objective consciousness, is the central fact of our lives: we are all hopelessly alienated from one another and our world.

Alienation, that cliche. But it is a far more plausible explanation for the inhumanity of technocratic capitalists than the supposed social deficiencies of technocratic capitalism. And it is the only explanation for the unconcern of all of us as science undertakes the objectification and mechanization of everything human: intelligence, moral judgment, teaching, creativity, play, even child-making. As Roszak comments, it was once thought that such things were done for the joy of the-doing. Scientific culture, however, "makes no allowance for 'joy,' since that is an experience of intensive personal involvement." Nothing stands in the way of Progress.

This is where our thermonuclear technocracy is taking us. Roszak expresses it brilliantly: under the auspices of objective consciousness.

we subordinate nature to our command only by estranging ourselves from more and more of what we experience, until the reality about which objectivity tells us so much finally becomes a universe of congealed alienation. It is totally within our intellectual and technical power... and it is... worthless...

III

Who is making a culture which rejects this suicidal way of life, and what sort of culture is it? Roszak reveals his urgency. He places all his hope for a humane future in the maturation of a counter culture-which, right now, is just beginning to grow.

Its members, except for a few adult mentors and heroes, are almost all young people under twenty-five. Obviously, they are not conservatives or liberals, for whom objective realism is nuclear deterrence and phased withdrawal from the War. Nor are they black militants or members of any faction of SDS, for whom the only real human suffering is the tangible oppression of the Third World and the working class.

They are, for the most part, youth who consider themselves "apolitical": former New Leftists, hippies, heads, cultists of Eastern philosophy, and communalists; some members of the rock scene, the underground press, the encounter movement, and the free universities. They could be many, for they draw their ranks from the children of the Great Middle Class, who are strung out in adolescence between a permissive childhood and a regimented adulthood, who have been in on American quantitative abundance and want out. So far, though, they are relatively few.

And their embryonic way of life is so fragile. They want to develop new communal ethos, new family patterns, new sexual mores, new acceptance of the natural environment for its intrinsic beauty and dignity, new everything. Their revolution is primarily psychic: they are trying to get out of their heads and to explore the forgotten, non-intellective, human powers. They want to open themselves up to the totality of human experience. But no one can shake off a life-time of indoctrination in amonth or a year. Even as they aspire to joy, love, and honesty, too often their objective minds, which know better, laugh cynically.

THEIR experiments take all forms. The worst degenerate by themselves into inanity. As for the best, the mass media, a thoroughly objective institution, is always eager to neutralize, victimize, vulgarize. Moreover, these experiments can scarcely be understood or tolerated by the middle and upper classes, who embrace exactly what they reject, or by the economically oppressed, who want in on the wealth, not out.

Yet this vulnerable phenomenon, hardly a culture is the only revolutionary movement that is undermining the technocracy today. To identify the intellectual and mystical heritage from which it must continue to draw strength, Roszak takes us on a critical tour of what he calls

the continuum of thought and experience among the young which links together the New Left sociology of Mills, the Freudian Marxism of Herbert Marcuse, the Gestalt-therapy anarchism of Paul Goodman, the apocalyptic body mysticism of Norman Brown, the Zen-based psychotherapy of Alan Watts, and finally Timothy Leary's impenetrably occult narcissism ...

In any event, this odyssey takes up nearly half the book; it is a fascinating trip which defies summary. In it Roszak also thinks out many of his own opinions on the directions the counter culture must take for the future.

IV

In the short run, there is only one effective sort of action that the counter culture (and for that matter, everybody) can take in oppositon to the ultimate acsendancy of technocratic totalitarianism: in Marcuse's words, the "Great Refusal."

In its most difficult, most meaningful experiments, the counter culture must refuse official legitimacy and easy publicity, for they will certainly lead to quick vulgarization. The free universities, for instance, have to refuse that absolute corrupter, academic credit. The communes have to decline the slick publicity which will no doubt spawn Communal Weekends at posh resorts. Horny house-wives are already flocking to places like Esalen, looking for miracles and a good lay.

On a broader scale we should all quit our masochistic flag-waving for drugs. Roszak doesn't have much faith in dope as the way to achieve the new life, and as much as I'd rather not. I have to agree with him. The hallucinogens could easily become the opiate of the counter culture.