Thanks for the perfect opportunity to post from Theodore Roszak's 1969 "
The Making of a Counter Culture"—a book among my first recommendations to anyone interested in culture, technology, government, politics, psychology etc.
Roszak coined the term "counterculture" (later consolidated into one word). This is from the chapter, "
The Myth of Objective Concsiousness" [page 215 of this PDF:
https://monoskop.org/images/b/b4/Roszak ... ulture.pdf ]:
If there is one especially striking feature of the new radicalism we have been surveying, it is the cleavage that exists between it and the radicalism of previous generations where the subjects of science and technology are concerned. To the older collectivist ideologies, which were as given to the value of industrial expansion as the capitalist class enemy, the connection between totalitarian control and science was not apparent. Science was almost invariably seen as an undisputed social good, because it had become so intimately related in the popular mind (though not often in ways clearly understood) to the technological progress that promised security and affluence. It was not foreseen even by gifted social critics that the impersonal, large-scale social processes to which technological progress gives rise in economics, in politics, in education, in every aspect of life generate their own characteristic problems. When the general public finds itself enmeshed in a gargantuan industrial apparatus which it admires to the point of idolization and yet cannot comprehend, it must of necessity defer to those who are experts or to those who own the experts; only they appear to know how the great cornucopia can be kept brimming over with the good things of life.
Centralized bigness breeds the regime of expertise, whether the big system is based on privatized or socialized economies. Even within the democratic socialist tradition with its stubborn emphasis on workers' control, it is far from apparent how the democratically governed units of an industrial economy will automatically produce a general system which is not dominated by coordinating experts. It is both ironic and ominous to hear the French Gaullists and the Wilson Labourites in Great Britain—governments that are heavily committed to an elitist managerialism now talking seriously about increased workers' "participation" in industry. It would surely be a mistake to believe that the technocracy cannot find ways to placate and integrate the shop floor without compromising the continuation of super-scale social processes. "Participation" could easily become the god-word of our official politics within the next decade; but its reference will be to the sort of "responsible" collaboration that keeps the technocracy growing. We do well to remember that one of the great secrets of successful concentration camp administration under the Nazis was to enlist the "participation' of the inmates.
It is for this reason that the counter culture, which draws upon a profoundly personalist sense of community rather than upon technical and industrial values, comes closer to being a radical critique of the technocracy than any of the traditional ideologies. If one starts with a sense of the person that ventures to psychoanalytical depths, one may rapidly arrive at a viewpoint that rejects many of the hitherto undisputed values of industrialism itself. One soon begins talking about "standards of living" that transcend high productivity, efficiency, full employment, and the work-and-consumption ethic. Quality and not quantity becomes the touchstone of social value.
The critique is pushed even further when the counter culture begins to explore the modes of non-intellective consciousness. Along this line, questions arise which strike more deeply at technocratic assumptions. For if the technocracy is dependent on public deference to the experts, it must stand or fall by the reality of expertise. But what is expertise? What are the criteria which certify someone as an expert?
If we are foolishly willing to agree that experts are those whose role is legitimized by the fact that the technocratic system needs them in order to avoid falling apart at the seams, then of course the technocratic status quo generates its own internal justification: the technocracy is legitimized because it enjoys the approval of experts; the experts are legitimized because there could be no technocracy without them. This is the sort of circular argument student rebels meet when they challenge the necessity of administrative supremacy in the universities. They are invariably faced with the rhetorical question: but who will allocate room space, supervise registration, validate course requirements, coordinate the academic departments, police the parking lots and dormitories, discipline students, etc., if not the administration? Will the multiversity not collapse in chaos if the administrators are sent packing? The students are learning the answer: yes, the multiversity will collapse; but education will go on. Why? Because the administrators have nothing to do with the reality of education; their expertise is related to the illusory busywork that arises from administrative complexity itself. The multiversity creates the administrators and they, in turn, expand the multiversity so that it needs to make place for more administrators. One gets out of this squirrel cage only by digging deep into the root meaning of education itself.
The same radicalizing logic unfolds if, in confronting the technocracy, we begin looking for a conception of expertise which amounts to something more than the intimidating truism that tells us experts are those in the absence of whom the technocracy would collapse.
An expert, we say, is one to whom we turn because he is in control of reliable knowledge about that which concerns us. In the case of the technocracy, the experts are those who govern us because they know (reliably) about all things relevant to our survival and happiness: human needs, social engineering, economic planning, international relations, invention, education, etc. Very well, but what is "reliable knowledge"? How do we know it when we see it? The answer is: reliable knowledge is knowledge that is scientifically sound, since science is that to which modem man refers for the definitive explication of reality. And what in turn is it that characterizes scientific knowledge? The answer is: objectivity. Scientific knowledge is not just feeling or speculation or subjective ruminating. It is a verifiable description of reality that exists independent of any purely personal considerations. It is true . . . real . . . dependable. . . . It works. And that at last is how we define an expert: he is one who really knows what is what, because he cultivates an objective consciousness.
Thus, if we probe the technocracy in search of the peculiar power it holds over us, we arrive at the myth of objective consciousness. There is but one way of gaining access to reality—so the myth holds—and this is to cultivate a state of consciousness cleansed of all subjective distortion, all personal involvement. What flows from this state of consciousness qualifies as knowledge, and nothing else does. This is the bedrock on which the natural sciences have built; and under their spell all fields of knowledge strive to become scientific. The study of man in his social, political, economic, psychological, historical aspects—all this, too, must become objective: rigorously, painstakingly objective. At every level of human experience, would-be scientists come forward to endorse the myth of objective consciousness, thus certifying themselves as experts. And because they know and we do not, we yield to their guidance.1
(The ellipses are Roszak's prose style, not redactions.)
. . . skipping to page 227:
In short, as science elaborates itself into the dominant cultural influence of our age, it is the psychology and not the epistemology of science that urgently requires our critical attention; for it is primarily at this level that the most consequential deficiencies and imbalances of the technocracy are revealed.4
* * * *
We can, I think, identify three major characteristics of the psychic style which follows from an intensive cultivation of objective consciousness. I have called them: (1) the alienative dichotomy; (:2) the invidious hierarchy; (3) the mechanistic imperative.5
1. Objective consciousness begins by dividing reality into two spheres, which would seem best described as "In-Here" and "Out-There." By In-Here is meant that place within the person to which consciousness withdraws when one wants to know without becoming involved in or committed to that which is being known. . . .
Whatever the scientific method may or may not be, people think they are behaving scientifically whenever they create an In-Here within themselves which undertakes to know without an investment of the person in the act of knowing. The necessary effect of distancing, of estranging In-Here from Out-There may be achieved in any number of ways: by the intervention of various mechanical gadgets between observer and observed; by the elaboration of chilly jargons and technical terms that replace sensuous speech; by the invention of strange methodologies which reach out to the subject matter like a pair of mechanical hands; by the subordination of the particular and immediate experience to a statistical generalization; by appeal to a professional standard which excuses the observer from responsibility to anything other than a lofty abstraction--such as "the pursuit of truth," pure research," etc. All these protective strategies are especially compatible with natures that are beset by timidity and fearfulness; but also with those that are characterized by plain insensitivity and whose habitual mode of contact with the world is a cool curiosity untouched by love, tenderness, or passionate wonder.
The spectating In-Here has been called by many names: ego, intelligence, self, subject, reason. . . .What I prefer to emphasize is the act of contraction that takes place within the person, the sense of taking a step back, away from, and out of. Not only back and away from the natural world, but from the inarticulate feelings, physical urges, and wayward images that surge up from within the person. . . .
The ideal of objective consciousness is that there should be as little as possible In-Here and, conversely, as much as possible Out-There. For only what is Out-There can be studied and known. Objectivity leads to such a great emptying-out operation: the progressive alienation of more and more of In-Here's personal contents in the effort ot achieve the densest possible unit of observational concentration surrounded by the largest possible area of study. The very word "concentration" yields the interesting image of an identity contracted into a small hard ball; hence a dense, diminished identity, something which is less than one otherwise might be. . . . Curiously, this great good called knowledge, the very guarantee of our survival, is taken to be something that is forthcoming only to this lesser, shriveled-up identity.
The scientific observer who comes to feel that Out-There has begun to implicate him personally--say, in the manner of a lover spellbinding one's sympathies so that one cannot tell clearly where one's self leaves off and the other begins--has begun to lose his objectivity. Therefore, he must fight back this irrational involvement of his personal feeling. . . . But if body, feelings, emotions, moral sentiment, sensuous enchantment are all to be located Out-There, then who is this In-Here that is so stalwartly struggling against the siren song? . . .
As soon as two human beings relate in detachment as observer to observed, as soon as the observer claims to be aware of nothing more than the behavioral surface of the observed, an invidious hierarchy is established which reduces the observed to a lower status. . . . For consider the gross impertinence of the act of detached observation. Psychologist confronting his laboratory subject, anthropologist confronting tribal group, political scientist confronting voting public . . . in all such cases what the observer may very well be saying to the observed is the same: "I can perceive no more than your behavioral facade. I can grant you no more reality or psychic coherence than this perception allows. I shall observe this behavior of yours and record it. I shall not enter into your life, your task, your condition of existence. Do not turn to me or appeal to me or ask me to become involved with you. I am here only as a temporary observer whose role is to stand back and later to make my own sense of what you seem to be doing or intending. I assume that I can adequately understand what you are doing or intending without entering wholly into your life. I am not particularly interested in what you uniquely are; I am interested only in the general pattern to which you conform. I assume I have the right to use you to perform this process of classification. I assume I have the right to reduce all that you are to an integer in my science." . . .
Already legions of scientists and military men throughout the world, the products of careful training and selection, give themselves to whole lives of ultimate objectivity. They systematically detach themselves from any concern for those lives their inventions and weapons may someday do to death. They do their job as they are ordered to do it . . . objectively. For them the world at large has become a laboratory--in the same sense that when they enter upon their professional capacity, they leave their personal feelings behind. Perhaps they even take pride in their capacity to do so, for indeed it requires an act of iron will to ignore the claims that person makes upon person. . .
the whole chalupa: https://monoskop.org/images/b/b4/Roszak ... ulture.pdf