"Free To Be...You And Me" and History

Marlo Thomas's pathbreaking record album Free To Be You and Me turned forty last month, an anniversary that has occasioned a fair amount of reflection online and elsewhere.  Slate ran an interesting three-part series about the making of the album and its legacy.  Yesterday, NPR's Weekend Edition featured a story about Free To Be...You and Me. Comedians Rob Kutner and the Levinson Brothers have even issued a parody album in celebration of the anniversary.

But there appears to be surprisingly little scholarship on Free To Be...You and Me.  There's a good chapter on it by Leslie Paris in the Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature (2011).  And Lori Rotskof and Laura L. Lovett have edited a collection of essays on Free To Be entitled When We Were Free To Be: Looking Back on a Children's Classic and the Difference It Made, which was published by UNC Press last month (and which, I should add, I haven't had a chance to look at).

The relative lack of attention is surprising for at least two reasons, the first of which is probably obvious to those of you who were born in the Sixties or Seventies.  Free To Be...You and Me, first as an album and later as a book and tv special (both of which followed about a year-and-a-half later in early 1974), was a major part of early-to-mid 1970s children's culture. The album sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The book was a best-seller and a winner of an American Library Association Award.  The TV special won an Emmy and a Peabody.*  The songs, stories, poems, and skits associated with Free To Be in its various incarnations have since become major objects of nostalgia for many in my generation. It was one of the first CDs that my wife and I bought our kids, as much a necessary import from our childhoods as Where the Wild Things Are or Goodnight Moon.

The second reason for my surprise for the relative lack of scholarly attention given to Free To Be is of more particular interest to readers of this blog.




As the historiography of the U.S. in the  last third of the twentieth century has ballooned in recent years, one common, emerging narrative thread is the notion that the left won the "culture wars," while the right won the battle over political economy. Often, these two developments are seen as two sides of the same coin.  Indeed, in its strongest versions, there's a kind of dramatic irony to this tale: the right (or at least some major piece of it) is surprised that neoliberalism cannot serve as a bulwark for traditional values, as all that is solid melts to air before it (to steal one of Andrew's favorite phrases of Marx); but the left (or at least some major piece of it) is equally surprised to discover that racial, gender, and, most recently, sexual liberation does not undermine The System or create a world of greater economic egalitarianism.

Whether or not one accepts this as the big story of the end of the (first?) American Century (and I go back and forth as to whether or not I do), Free To Be...You and Me would seem to fit such a narrative fairly well.  It marked a moment in which the Seventies were emerging out of the Sixties and helped achieve a series of fairly significant cultural changes that still fell very much within the context of consumer capitalism.

The album, book, and tv show were the product of an extraordinary moment of second-wave feminist activism.  As Leslie Paris points out, during the first years of the 1970s, a number of feminist organizations set about studying the content of children's books. Their concerns grew out of a conviction that much sexism flows from what children are taught about gender roles. What they found was that children's books tended to feature many more boy protagonists than girl protagonists. And that the boy protagonists tended to be much more active in the world at large.  Girls sometimes started stories as "tom boys," but by the end they tended to adopt more "normal" female behavior patterns (a story type that feminist critics identified as "the cop-out").  While Marlo Thomas describes her conception of Free To Me...You and Me in much more personal terms (she was disturbed at the books that her niece was reading and unable to find better alternatives in the bookstore), in fact she was part of a larger movement. Indeed, Thomas was close friends with Gloria Steinem and Free To Be...You and Me was co-created by Letty Cottin Pogrebin, an editor at the still-young Ms. magazine, which had. by 1971, already become involved in the effort to publish "stories for free children."**   As a second-generation major television personality--her father was Make Room for Daddy star Danny Thomas and she had just had her own hit with That Girl-- Thomas was able to bring an amazing set of entertainment stars to the project, including Alan Alda, Harry Belafonte, Carol Channing, Mel Brooks, Diana Ross, Rosey Greer, Shirley Jones, and Tom Smothers.

In addition to being a quite successful intervention in children's culture, Free To Be was also part of the larger spread of feminism into the American mainstream. Two important things ought to be noted about this. First, many of the album's messages about gender roles and gender stereotypes were quite challenging in the early 1970s.  For examples, "William Wants a Doll," which appeared on the album, worried executives at ABC television because, according to Thomas, they feared that it "would turn every American boy into a homosexual." Thomas had to fight for its inclusion in the tv version of Free to Be.***

Secondly, as Leslie Paris notes, Free To Be is very much an example of liberal feminism. Its chief concern is fighting sexism and gender stereotypes. Its message is deeply individualistic; all children, boys and girls, should be whatever they want to be....and can be if they simply embrace their individuality. Though it suggests a kind of joyful racial and class egalitarianism, at its center is a traditional, heteronormative vision of the family.  "William Wants a Doll," emphasizes that William is, otherwise, "normal," and that his desire to have a doll is reasonable precisely because he may be a father someday.  Indeed, "William Wants a Doll" is  prominently mentioned, for just this reason, in the negative review that fran pollner gave the album in off our backs, arguably the single most important radical feminist journal.  "Nowhere are free and loving relations between two girls or two boys depicted," wrote pollner, who suggested that the album was aimed entirely at straight, middle-class women (and women-to-be).****

One might also note that absent from Free To Be...You and Me is any very clear sense of an antagonist, beyond sexist individuals.  One of the great goals of the Sixties' New Left had been, in Paul Potter's phrase, to "name the system;" Free To Be...You and Me doesn't even attempt to do this.  There's very little sense of what one might need to do, beyond consuming the album itself,  to achieve, in the words of its opening, title song, a land where "every boy...grows to be his own man" and "every girl grows to be her own woman."  Indeed, the song simply suggests "it ain't far to this land from where we are" and "the time's comin' near" when we'll achieve it.  Indeed, the entire album is almost relentlessly upbeat and nearly utopian in tone.*****   

We might, indeed, put Free To Be...You and Me in the broader context of the kind of hopeful, earnest liberalism regularly produced by the U.S. entertainment industry, from the social problem films of the Thirties and Forties, through the Fifties and Sixties films of Stanley Kramer, to the sitcoms of Norman Lear in the 1970s and The Cosby Show in the 1980s.  What was new, however, with Free To Be, was its feminism and its focus on very young children.

Over the course of the 1970s, the kind of anti-stereotyping message that was found in Free to Be became quite common in American children's culture. You might remember, for example, this PSA produced by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare during the Carter years:

Throughout my years in elementary school in the Seventies, I remember being taught that sexism and racism were evils, and that they were caused by "prejudice" and "ignorance."  Where prejudice and ignorance came from was never made very clear.  And the implication was that knowledge itself could cure prejudice and ignorance, which made the stubborn persistence of prejudice, ignorance, sexism, and racism somewhat mysterious.  All of my peers certainly heard NFL star Rosey Greer sing "It's Alright to Cry," but as an occasionally emotionally fragile young boy, I knew damn well from personal experience that, in fact, it was not socially alright to do so. 

It's interesting to note that, following off our back's initial negative review, Free To Be...You And Me showed up over the next several decades in its pages as an object of bitter-sweet nostalgia, a key feminist text of the early Seventies that was nonetheless inadequate.  "We knew there was more to being lesbians than playing 'Free to Be You and Me' at three a.m.," wrote Sally Sheklow in a 2003 article, "but we didn't know what to do."******

More pointedly, Marilyn Webb, one of off our back's founders, tallied up the successes and failures from the vantage point of 2005:

When my daughter was born, her generation was socialized as we never were. They were supposed to be tiny feminist soldiers in training, raised on Free to Be You and Me and expected to move right through that glass ceiling. All the while, they were also supposed to understand the treachery of American arrogance and global capitalism. But today we have George W. Bush, not socialism, Condoleeza Rice, and repeated attacks against legalized abortion, national health and childcare, and the planned destruction of Medicare, whose benefits are proportionally greater for older women since we live longer than men. Yes, we opened female doors: to Little League, to medical and law offices, and to the U.S. Senate. But most American women still have to work--as I did, by the way--and still not for equal pay. And all but the rich still also have only shaky options for childcare.*******

It's somehow fitting that, two years ago, the album's title song, shorn of any transformational political message whatsoever, was very effectively used in a back-to-school Target commercial.  Whatever else Free To Be...You and Me accomplished (and I think it accomplished a fair bit that was good), it can still very effectively be used to move product, especially to the generation that initially consumed it.

[UPDATE 12/11: I realize that I had forgotten to add a citation for the pollner review of Free To Be when I originally posted this yesterday.  I've just done so.]

_________________________________________
* Leslie Paris, "Happily Ever After: Free To Be...You and Me, Second-Wave Feminism, and 1970s Children's Culture" in The Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature (Oxford, 2011), 520.

** On "Stories for Free Children," see Margaret B. McDowell, "New Didacticism: Stories for Free Children," Language Arts, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jan. 1977), 41-47, 85.

*** Paris, 531.

**** fran pollner, "free to be...," off our backs, Vol. 3, No. 6 (February/March 1973), 19.

***** Lest you think I'm being unfair asking a children's book to be anything but relentlessly upbeat, let alone to suggest a systemic, political antagonist, compare Free To Be...You and Me to Dr. Seuss's 1971 environmental classic, The Lorax.

****** Sally Sheklow, "Blast from the Past," off our backs, Vol. 33, No. 5/6 (May-June 2003), 32.

******* Marilyn Webb, "Giving Birth and Birthing off our backs: one of the founding mothers of oob talks about motherhood then and now," off our backs, Vol. 35, No. 5/6 (May-June 2005), 23

A Brief Stray Thought on the Historiography of the Seventies

In recent months, this blog has devoted numerous posts to the historiography of the 1970s, most recently in Andrew's consideration of of two excellent books on that period, Jefferson Cowie's Stayin' Alive and Daniel K. Williams's God's Own Party.

Like other USIH bloggers, I've found the recent explosion of interesting work on the 1970s to be really exciting.  A whole cohort of historians are asking critical questions about the recent past that intersect in interesting ways with U.S. intellectual history in general and my own scholarly interests in particular.  

Rather suddenly, I think, the historiography of the 1970s has become in certain ways richer, more coherent, and more interesting than the older and more established historiography of the 1960s.

There's obviously no simple explanation for this fact. Some of it, I suspect, has to do with the fact that, from the perspective of the early 21st century, the Seventies now seem to have been a more significant watershed decade than the Sixties.*  But I suspect that there's another, more strictly historiographical factor, at work here, too.

Much of the foundation of the historiography of the Sixties consisted of books by people who were, in one way or another, active participants in the events about which they wrote.  I'm thinking of books like Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward's Poor People's Movements, Todd Gitlin's The Whole World is Watching, James Miller's Democracy is in the Streets, or Sara Evans's Personal Politics.  These were among the books I read when I studied the Sixties in graduate school at the end of the 1980s.  And I learned a ton from them. But the questions they ask and the stories they tell are very much grounded in the concerns of the historical actors themselves.  And these books in a sense created the foundational narratives to which younger historians of the Sixties like Lisa McGirr, Joe Crespino, and Doug Rossinow would find themselves responding to.  To get a historical perspective on that decade, this second generation of historians had to, in a sense, move beyond its immediate struggles.

Now there are some wonderful participant-observer books about aspects of the 1970s, too (among many half-finished books on my shelf is Max Elbaum's Revolution in the Air, a fascinating history of the New Communist Movement of the '70s, written by a participant).  But the core historiography of the Seventies, in part because it arrived fairly late to the party, has been created by historians a little more removed from the events about which they are writing than those who wrote the foundational texts of Sixties historiography.

The Seventies fascinates today precisely because of things we could only really see with the hindsight of history.  And the wonderful books about the period that have appeared in ever-increasing numbers over the last decade are distinctly historical in the questions they ask and the answers they offer.
____________________________________________
* I'd add that contemporary popular culture seems to suggest that the place of the Sixties and Seventies in American public memory is shifting, too.  For example, compare and contrast the very slowly emerging Sixties of Mad Men with the wild and woolly Seventies of Life on Mars....but this is a conversation for another post.

A Brief Stray Thought on the Historiography of the Seventies

In recent months, this blog has devoted numerous posts to the historiography of the 1970s, most recently in Andrew's consideration of of two excellent books on that period, Jefferson Cowie's Stayin' Alive and Daniel K. Williams's God's Own Party.

Like other USIH bloggers, I've found the recent explosion of interesting work on the 1970s to be really exciting.  A whole cohort of historians are asking critical questions about the recent past that intersect in interesting ways with U.S. intellectual history in general and my own scholarly interests in particular.  

Rather suddenly, I think, the historiography of the 1970s has become in certain ways richer, more coherent, and more interesting than the older and more established historiography of the 1960s.

There's obviously no simple explanation for this fact. Some of it, I suspect, has to do with the fact that, from the perspective of the early 21st century, the Seventies now seem to have been a more significant watershed decade than the Sixties.*  But I suspect that there's another, more strictly historiographical factor, at work here, too.

Much of the foundation of the historiography of the Sixties consisted of books by people who were, in one way or another, active participants in the events about which they wrote.  I'm thinking of books like Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward's Poor People's Movements, Todd Gitlin's The Whole World is Watching, James Miller's Democracy is in the Streets, or Sara Evans's Personal Politics.  These were among the books I read when I studied the Sixties in graduate school at the end of the 1980s.  And I learned a ton from them. But the questions they ask and the stories they tell are very much grounded in the concerns of the historical actors themselves.  And these books in a sense created the foundational narratives to which younger historians of the Sixties like Lisa McGirr, Joe Crespino, and Doug Rossinow would find themselves responding to.  To get a historical perspective on that decade, this second generation of historians had to, in a sense, move beyond its immediate struggles.

Now there are some wonderful participant-observer books about aspects of the 1970s, too (among many half-finished books on my shelf is Max Elbaum's Revolution in the Air, a fascinating history of the New Communist Movement of the '70s, written by a participant).  But the core historiography of the Seventies, in part because it arrived fairly late to the party, has been created by historians a little more removed from the events about which they are writing than those who wrote the foundational texts of Sixties historiography.

The Seventies fascinates today precisely because of things we could only really see with the hindsight of history.  And the wonderful books about the period that have appeared in ever-increasing numbers over the last decade are distinctly historical in the questions they ask and the answers they offer.
____________________________________________
* I'd add that contemporary popular culture seems to suggest that the place of the Sixties and Seventies in American public memory is shifting, too.  For example, compare and contrast the very slowly emerging Sixties of Mad Men with the wild and woolly Seventies of Life on Mars....but this is a conversation for another post.

The Sixties Counterculture and Intellectual History, or Something is Happening Here, But You Don't Know What It Is

We've been devoting a lot of space around here lately to the Seventies...and rightly so. That decade has recently received an enormous amount of richly deserved historiographical attention and a growing list of excellent works on it is reaching print.

The historiography of the 1960s is a good deal more developed. But there are still major gaps in the literature. And one of them that I find most frustrating involves the counterculture.

I'm currently teaching an undergraduate seminar on the U.S. in the Sixties. This is the second time I've offered this course. And while there's an embarrassment of riches when it comes to secondary works on the New Left, the Great Society, and even conservatism, I've had a terrible time finding the right thing to use to teach the counterculture.

Last year, I used Alice Echols's biography of Janis Joplin, Scars of Sweet Paradise. This is a fine book, but ultimately two weeks on Janis Joplin is really too much.

This year I'm using a combination of primary source readings, music, and film, as well as Natalya Zimmerman's Counterculture Kaleidoscope. Like Echols, Zimmerman focuses on music in San Francisco in the late '60s. Though a less good book than the Echols, in certain ways it is better in the undergraduate classroom: it is shorter, it covers more ground by focusing on a variety of musicians, and it has a stronger argument, albeit one that is a tad simplistic. But it's not very satisfying as an account of the San Francisco scene...let alone the larger counterculture.

Why is there not a stronger, general book on the intellectual and cultural history of the counterculture?*

The counterculture seems to me to have a number of historiographical strikes against it:

First, the counterculture has more enemies than friends...even on the left. Leading figures in the New Left, especially folks associated with the early New Left, often held the counterculture in contempt. And these folks--I'm thinking e.g. of Todd Gitlin--helped frame the historiography of the Sixties. Of course conservatives--and conservative liberals like Joan Didion--have treated the counterculture with an almost apocalyptic sense of horror.

Second, unlike Sixties conservatism (which led to the political successes of the right in later decades) or even the New Left, the counterculture seems to have producd a series of cultural and intellectual dead ends. It was not only quickly commodified. In retrospect it seems to have been always already commodified. Its most obvious cultural legacies--e.g. the rise of seventies New Age thought; jam bands--often make it harder for academics to take it seriously.

Third, the most obviously significant cultural achievements of the counterculture were in the area of music, a subject that most (though by no means all) US historians generally write and think poorly about.

Fourth, chemically altered states of consciousness played an obviously major role in the sixties counterculture and are another area that is difficult to write well about historically.

Of course, I may be missing something here. Perhaps the book I have in mind has, in fact, been written. And if it has, I'm sure it will be revealed (to my eternal embarrassment) in comments.

_____________________________________________________

* There are obviously many fine works of history on particular aspects of the counterculture, from Thomas Frank's Conquest of Cool to Sean Wilentz's Dylan in America.

The Sixties Counterculture and Intellectual History, or Something is Happening Here, But You Don't Know What It Is

We've been devoting a lot of space around here lately to the Seventies...and rightly so. That decade has recently received an enormous amount of richly deserved historiographical attention and a growing list of excellent works on it is reaching print.

The historiography of the 1960s is a good deal more developed. But there are still major gaps in the literature. And one of them that I find most frustrating involves the counterculture.

I'm currently teaching an undergraduate seminar on the U.S. in the Sixties. This is the second time I've offered this course. And while there's an embarrassment of riches when it comes to secondary works on the New Left, the Great Society, and even conservatism, I've had a terrible time finding the right thing to use to teach the counterculture.

Last year, I used Alice Echols's biography of Janis Joplin, Scars of Sweet Paradise. This is a fine book, but ultimately two weeks on Janis Joplin is really too much.

This year I'm using a combination of primary source readings, music, and film, as well as Natalya Zimmerman's Counterculture Kaleidoscope. Like Echols, Zimmerman focuses on music in San Francisco in the late '60s. Though a less good book than the Echols, in certain ways it is better in the undergraduate classroom: it is shorter, it covers more ground by focusing on a variety of musicians, and it has a stronger argument, albeit one that is a tad simplistic. But it's not very satisfying as an account of the San Francisco scene...let alone the larger counterculture.

Why is there not a stronger, general book on the intellectual and cultural history of the counterculture?*

The counterculture seems to me to have a number of historiographical strikes against it:

First, the counterculture has more enemies than friends...even on the left. Leading figures in the New Left, especially folks associated with the early New Left, often held the counterculture in contempt. And these folks--I'm thinking e.g. of Todd Gitlin--helped frame the historiography of the Sixties. Of course conservatives--and conservative liberals like Joan Didion--have treated the counterculture with an almost apocalyptic sense of horror.

Second, unlike Sixties conservatism (which led to the political successes of the right in later decades) or even the New Left, the counterculture seems to have producd a series of cultural and intellectual dead ends. It was not only quickly commodified. In retrospect it seems to have been always already commodified. Its most obvious cultural legacies--e.g. the rise of seventies New Age thought; jam bands--often make it harder for academics to take it seriously.

Third, the most obviously significant cultural achievements of the counterculture were in the area of music, a subject that most (though by no means all) US historians generally write and think poorly about.

Fourth, chemically altered states of consciousness played an obviously major role in the sixties counterculture and are another area that is difficult to write well about historically.

Of course, I may be missing something here. Perhaps the book I have in mind has, in fact, been written. And if it has, I'm sure it will be revealed (to my eternal embarrassment) in comments.

_____________________________________________________

* There are obviously many fine works of history on particular aspects of the counterculture, from Thomas Frank's Conquest of Cool to Sean Wilentz's Dylan in America.

Plate o' Shrimp, or Toward an Intellectual History of the New Age?

One of the many excellent papers I heard at our recent conference was (longtime friend of USIH) Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's "Philosophy out of Doors: Thinking as a Handicraft and Spiritual Practice in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)" One of the main questions Jennifer addressed was how intellectual historians should treat a work like Pirsig's novel. Is it philosophy? Pirsig certainly intended it as philosophy and many of his readers experienced it as philosophy, but few if any academic philosophers took it seriously.

Much of the lively conversation that followed Jennifer's paper concerned contexts in which one might consider Pirsig's work. Mike O'Connnor offered the thought that, from the point of view of the academic discipline, it was philosophy...just not very good philosophy. Brian Lloyd, who later gave a very interesting brown-bag presentation on the Jefferson Airplane's "We Can Be Together," suggested that the novel could best be understood as a late work of the Sixties counterculture. I thought that it might even more profitably be considered alongside such other Seventies works as Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970), Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979) and Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel Escher Bach (1979).

On Saturday after the conference, I had breakfast with a former colleague of mine, also a U.S. intellectual historian, who is no longer an academic. When I mentioned Jennifer's Pirsig paper to him, he said "oh...you mean a history of the early New Age." And, of course, he was in many ways correct...though interestingly I don't think anyone used the words "New Age" in discussing Jennifer's paper. As it turns out, my friend happens to be considering writing a book on another aspect of New Age thought.

And lately I've been thinking about the history of Western Buddhism....which can also fit into this broader category.

Are we three alone? Perhaps there's an emerging intellectual conversation here.

Just to lay a few more cards on the table:

After a lot of historical neglect, the Seventies* are finally getting the attention they deserve from historians. Indeed, it's telling that one of the first important scholarly works on the decade bore the title It Seemed Like Nothing Happened. That was certainly the way I experienced the Seventies at the time. After the Sixties, an important decade in which vast cultural, political, and social changes seemed to take place, the Seventies felt like an anticlimax. But in retrospect, they seem more and more like a watershed period, albeit one whose significance eluded many of those living through it.

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s and 1970s, so New Age spirituality was a huge part of the greater world of my childhood...though it had relatively little direct impact on myself or my family. Indeed, my attitude to things New Age was--and to a great extent is--largely skeptical/hostile.** As a result, there's a side of me that doesn't want to take this material seriously. But ultimately I think such concerns are misplaced, even in regards to the fuzziest aspects of New Age thinking. As the rationalistic Judaic scholar Saul Lieberman famously said of Gershom Scholem's work on mysticism, "nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship." New Age thought strikes me as an important part of the broader intellectual history of a crucial era of which we're only now beginning to take historical stock. Which might in turn explain why a number of us seem to be circling around these issues in our thinking.***

Of course, there might also be a more New Age explanation....



_______________________________

* When I followed Brian Lloyd's comment about a Sixties context for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by suggesting instead a Seventies context, Jennifer correctly warned against putting too much weight on decades as analytic categories. I basically agree with this. Nonetheless, it seems to me that enormously important things happened in American thought, culture and politics between, say, the election of Nixon and the election of Reagan and that this period still has not yet received the attention it deserves.

** Those who know me, however, are aware that attitudes of skepticism/hostility are often starting points for my projects.

*** I should stress that I have no plans at this point to actively work on Western Buddhism and I don't know the status of Jennifer's work on Pirsig.

Plate o' Shrimp, or Toward an Intellectual History of the New Age?

One of the many excellent papers I heard at our recent conference was (longtime friend of USIH) Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's "Philosophy out of Doors: Thinking as a Handicraft and Spiritual Practice in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)" One of the main questions Jennifer addressed was how intellectual historians should treat a work like Pirsig's novel. Is it philosophy? Pirsig certainly intended it as philosophy and many of his readers experienced it as philosophy, but few if any academic philosophers took it seriously.

Much of the lively conversation that followed Jennifer's paper concerned contexts in which one might consider Pirsig's work. Mike O'Connnor offered the thought that, from the point of view of the academic discipline, it was philosophy...just not very good philosophy. Brian Lloyd, who later gave a very interesting brown-bag presentation on the Jefferson Airplane's "We Can Be Together," suggested that the novel could best be understood as a late work of the Sixties counterculture. I thought that it might even more profitably be considered alongside such other Seventies works as Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970), Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979) and Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel Escher Bach (1979).

On Saturday after the conference, I had breakfast with a former colleague of mine, also a U.S. intellectual historian, who is no longer an academic. When I mentioned Jennifer's Pirsig paper to him, he said "oh...you mean a history of the early New Age." And, of course, he was in many ways correct...though interestingly I don't think anyone used the words "New Age" in discussing Jennifer's paper. As it turns out, my friend happens to be considering writing a book on another aspect of New Age thought.

And lately I've been thinking about the history of Western Buddhism....which can also fit into this broader category.

Are we three alone? Perhaps there's an emerging intellectual conversation here.

Just to lay a few more cards on the table:

After a lot of historical neglect, the Seventies* are finally getting the attention they deserve from historians. Indeed, it's telling that one of the first important scholarly works on the decade bore the title It Seemed Like Nothing Happened. That was certainly the way I experienced the Seventies at the time. After the Sixties, an important decade in which vast cultural, political, and social changes seemed to take place, the Seventies felt like an anticlimax. But in retrospect, they seem more and more like a watershed period, albeit one whose significance eluded many of those living through it.

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s and 1970s, so New Age spirituality was a huge part of the greater world of my childhood...though it had relatively little direct impact on myself or my family. Indeed, my attitude to things New Age was--and to a great extent is--largely skeptical/hostile.** As a result, there's a side of me that doesn't want to take this material seriously. But ultimately I think such concerns are misplaced, even in regards to the fuzziest aspects of New Age thinking. As the rationalistic Judaic scholar Saul Lieberman famously said of Gershom Scholem's work on mysticism, "nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship." New Age thought strikes me as an important part of the broader intellectual history of a crucial era of which we're only now beginning to take historical stock. Which might in turn explain why a number of us seem to be circling around these issues in our thinking.***

Of course, there might also be a more New Age explanation....



_______________________________

* When I followed Brian Lloyd's comment about a Sixties context for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by suggesting instead a Seventies context, Jennifer correctly warned against putting too much weight on decades as analytic categories. I basically agree with this. Nonetheless, it seems to me that enormously important things happened in American thought, culture and politics between, say, the election of Nixon and the election of Reagan and that this period still has not yet received the attention it deserves.

** Those who know me, however, are aware that attitudes of skepticism/hostility are often starting points for my projects.

*** I should stress that I have no plans at this point to actively work on Western Buddhism and I don't know the status of Jennifer's work on Pirsig.