Sub
“Probably the most significant concept of the study is the term interstitial — that is, pertaining to spaces that intervene between one thing and another. In nature foreign matter tends to collect and cake in every crack, crevice, and cranny — interstices. There are also fissures and breaks in the structure of social organization. The gang may be regarded as an interstitial element in the framework of society, and gangland as an interstitial region in the layout of the city.”
In his 1927 book The Gang, Frederic Thrasher studied and catalogued the 1,313 street gangs of Chicago and the environment in which they did their ganging. Thrasher was part of the “Chicago School” of sociology that began in the 19th century - an academic response to the practical sociological experiment that was the formation of this Midwestern metropolis. A key concept that this group created was the idea of a “subculture” - typically applied to groups of adolescent delinquents teetering on the edge of criminality if not already fully submerged into it. For a subculture to exist, there must be a dominant culture, a culture of law and order. And for Thrasher the gang were not merely a phenomenon to be studied but absolutely a problem to be solved. He blamed poor parenting by immigrants, poor schooling, lack of religion and suitable leisure activities and saw the redirection of these boys into the Scouting movement as a solution. I do not know if Thrasher ever published a book recommending a certain number of rules for life.
Contra
This association of “subculture” with both youth and deviance in America continued for decades (British sociologists would take it in a different direction). Another sociologist - J Milton Yinger - was unhappy with the way the term could be used in multiple ways and, in 1960, proposed replacing it with “contraculture”
“I suggest the use of the term contraculture wherever the normative system of a group contains, as a primary element, a theme of conflict with the values of the total society, where personality variables are directly involved in the development and maintenance of the group's values, and wherever its norms can be understood only by reference to the relationships of the group to a surrounding dominant culture.”
Yinger’s focus was obviously juvenile delinquents but also included ”regional and class differences, religious sects, [and] occupational styles”. And again it required a dominant culture to contrast itself against. And whether subculture or contraculture, such groups lack institutional power. They may control local territory through force but they do not control the institutions of politics, law, business, etc.
If the sociologists of the 1950s had an obsession with juvenile delinquents and those who failed to “fit in”, they had a counterbalancing obsession with those who fitted in too well. Books such as The Lonely Crowd and White Collar delineated a middle class and conformist America and this was Not A Good Thing. As David Riesman says: “The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.”
Counter
Over the course of the 60s, this definition and focus morphed into something unrecognizable. In 1969, Theodore Roszak published The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. To be clear, the sociologists of deviance did not see subcultures or contracultures as a good thing. These academics were part of the dominant culture and were quite comfortable there thank you very much. In contrast, Roszak viewed the dominant culture with suspicion and labelled it “Technocracy”:
“By the technocracy, I mean that social form in which an industrial society reaches the peak of its organizational integration. It is the ideal men usually have in mind when they speak of modernizing, up-dating, rationalizing, planning. Drawing upon such unquestionable imperatives as the demand for efficiency, for social security, for large-scale co-ordination of men and resources, for ever higher levels of affluence and ever more impressive manifestations of collective human power, the technocracy works to knit together the anachronistic gaps and fissures of the industrial society.”
For Roszak the archetypal technocrat was Robert McNamara - former President of the Ford Motor Company and US Secretary of Defence. A man obsessed with numbers and plans and rationality to an inhuman degree. Technocracy was of a piece with consumer society. Roszak disapproved of Playboy almost as much as he disapproved of McNamara.
Set up in opposition to the Technocracy was the Counter Culture. These were young people but they weren’t proletarian urchins in street gangs, they were middle-class student radicals in universities. Apart from their youth, what they did share with the street gangs was a lack of institutional power. While early career academics like Roszak might be sympathetic, student leaders did not control the apparatus of the state or big businesses. They were not Robert McNamara.
Roszak was not uncritical about this movement. He called the use of psychedelic drugs “decadent”. But he saw in these students a reflection of his own romantic longings for a different society. His book is not a practical, programmatic call for social change. It is a social critic’s cri de coeur.
Perhaps the most visible articulation of the counter culture were those who attempted to secede from modern society altogether by forming self-sufficient communes. In 1974, Jerome Judson estimated that three-quarters of a million people lived in urban and rural communes in the United States.
This counter culture was broader than just disaffected university students. Timothy Miller’s definitive study of 60s communes notes: “Numerically, however, the hippies probably constituted a minority presence on the 1960s communal scene, as thousands of other communes sprang up as well. Rounding out the picture were new communes founded by spiritual seekers of all sorts—Jesus freaks and other less flamboyant Christians as well as followers of dozens of Asian religious teachers—and by political radicals, artists, group-marriage pioneers, self-helpers, what today would be called yuppies, and a host of others.”
While Roszak was critical of the use of faith put in computers and machines by their advocates, not everyone in the counter culture felt the same way. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, Fred Turner explores the nexus of the counter culture and emerging technology networks through a figure familiar to readers of this Substack: Stewart Brand (the biggest hippy in the world). Through environments such as the WELL, Brand and his collaborators helped to forge what we would now recognize as the internet.
The internet is a machine for breeding subcultures.
Dom
Subcultures and the counter culture can only exist under or against the mainstream culture. However mainstream cultures themselves move between periods of unity and fragmentation. America in the 1950s faced a powerful external enemy whose threat forced disparate groups to work together. It had mass media that could operate at a national scale (with plenty of local variations). It had two political parties made up of coalitions that forced a lot of ideological overlap. And it had a population very keen to forget the horrors of the previous decade and to focus on economic success.
The 2020s are very different. America is more diverse and fragmented. And this is not a criticism. I do not yearn for the 50s. In part this diversity has been accelerated by the internet but its drivers long pre-date HTML. Demographic change and geographical sorting has been going on for decades. Cable channels like Fox and MSNBC were established in the 1990s. Congressional polarization begins in the 1970s.
Despite the civil war hype, the USA is not two separate nations. But neither is it a monoculture. In this environment, subcultures teem and mutate and war and recombine. They may find themselves abruptly hauled up from the deeps and into the light of public attention. And in doing so, be subcultures no more.
Some have suggested those who leave the internet behind are the true counter culture. But such people typically maintain their links with the rest of society and the economy. Others have claimed that conservatives are the new counterculture (which is a bold claim when you control the Supreme Court).
The true counter culture warriors are those who want to create social orders completely divorced from everyone else - Peter Thiel’s Seasteading and Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State are two half-asses examples. These men do not seem fully committed to their creations. While they might whine about life inside the mainstream culture, its benefits are too sweet for a billionaire to fully reject. The counter culturalists with the courage of their conviction are libertarians like the Free State Project and Próspera. Given that libertarians hate governments and establishing a state requires, well, governing; it remains to be seen whether these novo-pilgrims will succeed in their mission for liberty. The bitcoin price has reached new heights since the results of the US Election so may be everything will be OK. But remember that “utopia” literally means “no place”.
Pushing out even further, who knows what counter cultures AIs might create given half a chance against the oppressive mainstream of Humanity?
N.B. This is a response to the following posts / notes / threads:
I don't think the current conservative right can be called a counter-culture as they are now in charge but they come from a few. The Christian Right, courted by Ronald Reagan. The 'shock jocks' on talk radio, soon followed by the likes of Alex Jones with Infowars and the rest of the online radicals. The Tea Party, and then MAGA. They've all started from a position explicitly in opposition to the mainstream, which they define as wet, liberal, elitist, coporatist and more recently, woke. The current right are an uneasy coalition of these, with the more traditional right, pulled together by Trump.
In the end, every counter culture sells out. The rebel becomes 'The Man'. Then they become yesterday's man.