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From the Shelf The Making of a Counter Culture

Most important, we should all stop abiding the inconveniences and hassles with which the technocracy keeps us under control. Although Roszak does not go into it, it is clear that people in the universities are the ones who can take really effective action: they are in a position to ruin the technocracy's system of self-preservation and fairly secure of the necessities of life if they try. It is time to stop tolerating such important strictures as selective admissions, examinations, grades, depart-mentalization, and degrees. This will require action by great numbers of people, but it simply must be done.

TRANSLATED into political terms, the Great Refusal means the refusal to be co-opted. The social revolutionaries already have been. Frustrated by the technocracy's relentless inhumanity, they have come to hold some ideas more important than some human beings, and to place more value on some human beings than on other human beings. Just like the technocracy.

If Roszak had his way, our social action would be essentially apolitical. it would closely resemble that of the civil-rights campaigns and the old New Left, with their emphases on the value of all human life, on non-violence, on what Keniston called "an open, personalistic, unmanipulative, and extremely trusting style." Social action is certainly necessary, and it must go on simultaneously with the development of the counter culture. But warfare terminology and terrorism have no meaning for a humane future. Besides, more humane violence at this late stage of the game is a waste of effort.

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Roszak poses new and very difficult questions for his counter culture. Many theorists have enyisaged a time of technological case and abundance, and most people in the counter culture have gone right along with them. Now Roszak comes and levels a damning attack not only at technology, but at science as well I have the feeling that even while he was writing about pure science, he was reacting to the perversions of technocratic science. But he has nevertheless opened the debate. The counter culture now has to decide: Should it learn to live without technology? And, should it learn to live without scientific expertise and scientific knowledge?

Roszak is undeniably right on one point, though. The vital question is not "how shall we know?", but "how shall we live?"

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What is of supreme importance is that each of us should become a person, a whole and integrated person in whom there is manifested a sense of the human variety genuinely experienced, a sense of having come to terms with a reality that is awesomely vast.

Roszak especially treasures the visionary experience of great artists and poets. But he means even more than that. Taking the counter culture's naturalistic impulses to their extreme, he calls for a new adoption of what Buber called "pansacramentalism," a deep, mystical appreciation for all beings, animate and inanimate.

SUCH IDEAS seem ridiculous to objective radicals. They don't understand that reality is catching up with them. Roszak quotes an old Indian woman who asks, "How can the spirit of the earth like the white man?" Now, we all know there is no "spirit of the earth." Nevertheless, the answer to the woman's question is that it doesn't like the white man at all.

It has already begun to repay him for the violence that he has done it with his industry and technology. We have heard it all before, and it is a measure of our alienation that we ignore it: in the coming years, cities will suffocate; populations will starve; great forests will die, as will great rivers. The oceans may quit photosynthesizing. The plague will start again without the help of Fort Detrick. Mankind will riot. If the technocratic "knowledge explosion" is not ultimately radioactive, perhaps the end of the world will not come. But it will certainly come close.

Roszak doesn't consider all of this; he worries that the technocracy will succeed in reducing all men to automatons, forevermore. No chance. It is too late now. Even the technocracy cannot save itself from its own end.

The counter culture must proceed, then, with the understanding that it may not be a counter culture forever. In the long run, it could conceivably found the culture of post-technocratic, post-Western man. This consideration should not make people in the counter-culture self-righteous and oracular; but it should make them less flippant about what they are doing. Their experiments and explorations have barely begun. They cannot be allowed to stagnate or degenerate. The people in the counter have to assume a new intentness in their quest for human happiness, and a new earnestness in their vision of what will be.

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