The Pursuit of Loneliness
The Pursuit of Loneliness is a thundering critique of the unexamined North American lifestyle. It calls to us from the turbulent 60s with a message as relevant today as it was then. Written when the major US foreign war of occupation targeted Vietnam and the major domestic battle was with students, the names have changed but the battle lines are strikingly similar today.
Today there is so much cultural revisionism and retooling of the facts surrounding the clash between the predominating mainstream material culture and the youthful counterculture that one often mutters in disgust at the kind of garish, superficial nonsense being promulgated by the popular media to the effect that the sixties generation was just about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Just fun and games, folks; nothing but fun and games. There is hardly a mention of the very serious, well-thought-through criticisms of materialism, racism, and greed that were so essential to the beginning of the conflict in the sixties. While no one who was there will deny each of these elements (the media's holy trinity of sex, drugs and rock & roll) contributed to the general cultural atmosphere of openness and emotional experimentation and intoxication, it can hardly be truthfully described so simply or in such reductionist terms.
The sixties generation, and the counterculture they devised, was first and foremost an intellectual, philosophical, and even spiritual tirade against the manifestly bankrupt morals, ideas, and lifestyles of the dominant society. One of the predominating characteristics of the counterculture was its sense of moral outrage at the ethics, policies, and blatant racism in the public domain. Slater details how and why the two cultures clashed, and what the likely results would be. Unlike his younger admirers, Slater understood the power of the dominant culture, and just how perilous the position of the counterculture was growing to be. In this sense, he anticipated the kinds of events like the shootings at Kent State and in the Deep South that began the reaction and denouement of the counterculture.
To read this book is to take a step back into the maelstrom that whirled around us in the sixties, and to see the nature of contemporary society in an even clearer light than is possible without it. Remember, like Theodore Roszak's book 'The Making of a Counterculture', this book was written and published even as the struggle between the mainstream society and the rebellious college students and activists was raging. There are few books that give one so clear and realistic a look at the nature of the relationship and conflict that almost tore this society apart thirty years ago; this is one of them.
Philip Slater is a sociologist and ex-professor. His writing can sometimes require a bit of work from the reader, but he can also write in modern sound bites. The Pursuit of Loneliness is often described as groundbreaking. In 35 years, more than 500,000 copies have been sold and it has attained the status of a classic.
Slater's thesis: One function of a society is 'to make its inhabitants feel safe.' North Americans devote more resources to 'security' than anything else, yet we do not feel safe. In fact, we feel increasingly unsafe.
Who threatens us? Why are many today more obsessed with minor domestic issues, such as gay marriage and abortion than with the major crises of our times, such as global warming, global corporate domination, and rapidly shrinking global food supplies?
Slater's explanation: We over-react to domestic 'threats' because we have 'secret doubts' about the way we live. 'It is not what happens abroad that generates hysteria,' Slater writes, 'but rather what appears to be happening within ourselves.'
Or what's not happening, i.e., community, engagement, dependence. Thanks to technology, we have ever fewer reasons to meet and know our neighbors. In a cultural sense, the gadget-hungry rich kid is perhaps even more deprived than the poor. Not wanting to know or deal with this, North Americans escape, evade and avoid. Slater claims these are peculiarly US responses. I think he may be wrong about that exclusivity, but the shoe fits either way.
Out of sight, out of mind. We hide our slums, our poor, our unhealthy, our uneducated and our dying. We value property ueber Alles and have recently even given property (in the form of corporations) the legal right to buy our leaders. We pride ourselves on being a democracy but are in fact slaves.
We feel that resources are scarce, and so North Americans continually find themselves in the position of killing others to avoid sharing a meal which turns out to be too large to eat alone.
For information on Philip Slater and to view his current writings, see his section on The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-slater
