The New Dark Age

The latest OZ bills itself as the 'End of an Era' edition. This isn't merely because the magazine is faced with annihilation by the present court case. In a leading article, Richard Neville describes various recent developments which he believes indicate that the new revolutionary movement is being dissipated and, in some ways, perverted. What he says strikes me as very accurate and ties up with what I said in a couple of articles in Freedom last summer. This being the case, it is relevant to ask why things have gone wrong, and what is coming next.

We know the pattern of things. Life proceeds in cycles of birth, preservation and death. The period between death and rebirth, however, is the most painful and confusing. People crave the faith and love have been strained beyond endurance. What often happens is that they recede into themselves and tool themselves up to survive in an alien and stultifying world by reinvoking self interest and self-assertive willpower. Everything in fact reverts to a narrowly individualistic struggle with all the erosion of caring, sensitivity and outgoingness that that involves. It's a kind of adjustment to 'reality', to Things As They Are', with ideals rejected, or shelves. We're back at Stage One.

This seems to me to be very much what's happened. It's very much my experience of people at the moment. And a very painful experience as I discover so many old friends 'changed', having become realistic, adapted. Whole areas of former contact are eroded, sympathies turned to antipathies, and a kind of inexorable deadness the prevailing mood of things.

Probably the most influential British thinker of recent years was R.D. Laing. The theories he propounded in his books were not strikingly original, being rather a synthesis of a whole gamut of existing positions. What unified them, however, was his passionate belief in humanity, in human beings in their own terms — in terms of their own experience. This lent his work a dynamic and genuine human warmth and clear insight which, it was then apparent, were what were conspicuously lacking in all those other works purporting to be about us and our life.

Laing was an extremist. He held no brief for concepts of relative sanity or adjustment. For him, the basic axiom was that we are all hopelessly alienated: estranged from our true selves and from others, marooned in an insane society whose concrete and institutional structures are dedicated to the perpetuation of this devastation, even to an enlargement of it to embrace new and more terrible forms of violence and madness — although always masquerading under the vestments of positive virtue. Thus, when two people stand before each other, the only thing they can honestly assert is the lack of a real relationship. A nullity, a void. The cosmological nothing.

In a twisted world of false values, the recognition of this nothing is the repository of our greatest hope. For once it is fully experienced and embraced the possibility of creating a new and more positive world becomes apparent, a world in which full discharge of pour energies and the realisation of all our deepest desires becomes possible. A world without physical or mental pain and frustration. However, this nothing is also terrifying. It involves a painful process of personal breakdown and unlearning, a tearing away of all the skins of folly and falsehood — those very things whereby we sustain ourselves in a sick society. Most people shy away from such agony, even if they are capable of comprehending its possibilities.

The new revolution was certainly about creating a new world. All its major theorists rejected the existing one wholly. Concomitantly, a great burst of creative energy was unleashed: the music, the poster art, the poetry, the jargon, the communes, the drug culture, etc., etc. All that's, however, mostly on the grander scale. What happened down among the people? Well, I think, most people who were disposed to pay attention were affected. The high pitch of optimism and the rebellious, questioning attitude to things, all linked to a profound sense that things were really beginning to happen, probably did cause many people to re-evaluate themselves and their relationships, with others and with society, if only to a limited extent.

Why then does Richard Neville pronounce the end of an era? Why did things go wrong?

Laing would probably put it down to the fact that thy process did not go far enough: that people did not totally destructure and remake themselves and their world. There were too many copouts and compromises, too many problems that couldn't be resolved as easily as growing a new head of hair or learning Blues guitar. There were a lot of hits too, that were, perhaps, too much for untempered youngsters to take (for a time, 'paranoid' was the foremost In-word).

Also a great many people were happy just to parasite a collection of superficial gimmicks for their own personal enrichment without being concerned or capable of finding out what it was all really about. What should have been a return to the egg and a regrowth became just the sprouting of a set of new feathers. What ultimately evolved in the sphere of human relationships was not a new authenticity but a new set of games, games perhaps more imaginative and sophisticated than the old games, but games nevertheless, with all the invalidation of real experience that they involve, and the concomitant loneliness and despair.

Of course, the great difficulty with staging any mass movement of regeneration is that it has to take place within the existing social structure, there being no no-man's-land available in an area where the forces of authority have monopolised all resources. Thus the System was able to absorb so much that was new and revolutionary into itself, and emasculate it. The case of the music is particularly obvious. As a result, the musicians were cut off from their roots — the people, the kids. Of course it was okay for them as they could play out their own dreams in their own dreamworld: the sublime Xanadus of youthful, long-haired Citizen Kanes. But for the kids, staring star-stricken across that inexorable gap that divides slow, mundane reality from the transcendental sphere of medical super humanity there was just a pain of severance and failure. Thus the girls who gueued outside stage doors to fuck with lead guitarists, the boys who told their friends how a friend of a friend had been to school with Mick Jagger. In other words, they felt that there was no really regenerative life available to them outside the honeyed arena of the media and so were not caused to re-examine themselves in the context of their local ambit, in relation to one another.

Thus the rock revolution failed because it was split into two separate worlds, and both went dead for want of the necessary fertilizing influence of the other. The kids wither between the factory and the council estate; the superstars fly off into the void and go into cernal orbit.

To be with hip people today is to experience strange things. There are many who seem thoroughly devitalised, bereft of all energy and drive, who just sit waiting for something to happen, some bolt from the blue. It's rather like those primitive tribes who espouse cargo cults and, giving up word just sit in silence waiting for a galleon from the skies to bring them all they need. Others still practice the mandatory activities — take dope, put on cool, talk in a John Peel mumble about beautiful things and mystical experiences, burn joss-sticks, play records endlessly. It gets strained and barely credible but goes on day in, day out, and if anyone were to question it they'd gel hounded as a heretic. Others are moving into more ruthless scenes: becoming preoccupied with money ('bread' is more acceptable), power and, in extreme cases, with violence.

The truth is that hipness has now itself become a process of mystification. It is a false explanation of what is happening, a veil drawn over the true facts, an evasion. The reality of experience and then imperative to come to grips with it in its own terms, both within ourselves and in others, remains the greatest call upon us. Only through this can we be regenerated and move out like an expanding crystalline growth to regenerate the world. Hipness is not now about this. It has become, like the ethos of the straight world it purports to oppose, yet another false system: a way of standing still, existing in a distorted way in a wrongheaded world.

There are alternatives. One can get violent. Dr. Leary apparently now believes that killing cops is a sacred act. Maybe in South Africa but what about in South Shields? If people are going to go over to bloodshed and hatred, how are the real ideals of kindliness, love, creativity, spontaneity, and a genuine concern to relate to others as they really are to be preserved?

That they must be preserved seems to me to be incontrovertible. Yet, as I said earlier, this is going to be difficult. We are into a fallow, wintry period between death and rebirth. More and more people are copping out, adjusting, hardening up, adopting negativistic positions to keep alive in the bitter weather. When they come together socially for a little warmth they are going to play false games among their false selves; and even though that may generate a little temporary warmth, they're going to be twice as cold afterwards. Bereft of genuine human contact, how are people going to stay alive yet alone keep their ideals alive?

The probability is that the forthcoming period will be a time of slow, quiet, but profound renewal. A period rather like the Dark Ages, which superficially seems a spiritually dead period until more deeply examined, when it transpired to have been in reality a time of consolidation—during which the wisdom of the Ancient World was thoroughly absorbed in readiness for the great upsurge of the Renaissance. It is necessary that people now reflect upon the whole wealth of ideas thrown up by the recent past, and come to more thoroughly understand them, undistracted as they will be by frenetic and sensational peripheral happenings. This is nowhere more true that in the case of Laing's ideas. But it also applied in, say, the case of Oriental mysticism and, closer to home, in the case of anarchist belief. But reflection must also be married to emotional renewal — to a process of psychological liberation which will bring people into contact with the basic void. Then, when they are properly prepared, they will be ready to being to create something new again. It will certainly come and it will undoubtedly be better than the last, although it will equally certainly not be the end of the story, if indeed the story can ever have an end.

John Snelling