Hildegarde

No, I’m not about to go on a rant about global warming, for or against.  I’ll get to the reason for the title in a minute.

Before then, it seems to me that we’re getting things a little confused, and since I was the one who started the confusion, I’d better be the one to clear it up.

First, I never said that hippies and protohippies are leaders, and I really never said that they were/are morally better than other people.

Nor did I say they were sincere, or authentic.

On the morality front, I actually think they tend to be morally worse than other people on most measures of morality.  At its very best, their moral thinking is fuzzy, insubstantial and largely illogical.  The cluster of positions on that agenda I outlined a few posts ago are not logically connected in any obvious way. 

In some cases, the positions on that agenda are actually contradictory.  To answer John’s question, most of the NETs and the people around them in the abolitionist movement supported the Union side in the Civil War, and didn’t flinch at the ida that war might be necessary to fix the problem.  Hippie pacifism tends to be highly selective even now.

As for the attraction to violent people–some months ago I wrote a post about writers who had ended up getting a thrill out of championing murderers and getting them out of jail.  Those writers included William F. Buckley, who was nobody’s hippie. 

I think the attraction to violent people may have something to do with bookishness and be largely unrelated to left-wing or right-wing, hippie or otherwise, politics.  What’s interesting to me about that particular phenomenon is that I have only ever found one writer who knew what he was doing plain when he got himself into these situations, and that was Truman Capote.  

Whatever else Capote was, he didn’t lie to himself either about the nature of his protoges–he knew Dick and Perry were guilty, and dangerous as hell–or the nature of his attraction to them.  But crime and violence have always attracted the intellectual class. 

As to Mrs. Hiss, I can give you the Cliveden set–who did much the same kind of treasonous work on behalf of the Nazis.   That’s an offshoot of absolute moral certainty, of the conviction that the Good, the Right, and the True lie with X, and therefore anything is justified in bringing about X.

Hippies can certainly fall into that sort of moral mess, but so can people who are not hippies, or anything like them. 

The college speech codes, though, and the rape codes, and all the rest of it, are the work not of hippies but of  Ratchetts, and Ratchetts will attach themselves to any movement where they think they can get enough power to operate as they like.

Te problem with the hippies when they’re confronted by speech codes is that they have no way to resist them, even if they feel–and their morality seems to me to be mostly emotional–that what they’re seeing is wrong.  Heck, even people who are not hippies sometimes have a problem seeing their way through this kind of thing.  I seem to remember having a long and involved arguement with Mique–no hippie, and no leftist, either–who felt that a right to free speech that protected calling somebody a nigger had something wrong with it.

Okay, that was several years ago.  And he changed his mind.  But to people who are not free speech absolutists, the reason for such a protection for such speech is not usually clear, and that resistance to extending protections to “wrong” ideas exists across the political spectrum.   Consider the fuss even ardent opponents of college speech codes–say, Bill  O’Reilly–can make over the NAMBLA website.

If you want to look at a revolutionary war era man who made a principled decision about slavery, you should look not to Washington, but to a man named Robert Carter, who freed his slaves not when he died but immediately and on the spot, knowing it would subject him to penury for the rest of his life and doing it anyway.  There was a god book about him a few years ago that’s worth reading.

But Carter and  Washington, like the contemporaries and near-contemporaries of Rousseau who made him an important figure in the French revolution, where products of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment.  Hippies are the products of and Romantic backlash. 

And that’s where we get to the title–climate matters.  A world where slavery exists and is largely considered to be inevitable, right and proper is fundamentally different from a world in which slavery exists but is considered to be inexcusably wrong.

Real and necessary social change–and, yes, moral progress–happen not when Leader X arises to point the way, but when the moral and political climate experiences a sea change.  

What the hippies do is to provide mass in bulk for some ideas–bad ones as well as good ones–that attract the less thoughtful and less committed sort of vaguely in their direction, and the existence of that mass, especially when it’s growing, changes the rules of engagement on the ground.

Consider the recent social sea-change about the spanking of children–opposition to which began almost entirely among the hippies.  Most people in the US still support a parent’s right to spank, but that support gets weaker by the day, and it’s already heavily on the defensive.  

Climate matters. And no significant social change ever happens unless the climate changes first.  

The correleation here exists whether we like it or not, and the reason for that correlation is not entirely clear.   That doesn’t make the hippies some sort of moral beacons to the rest of us–as I said about, they seem to me to be largely less morally good the the rest of us–but it does mean that we can’t entirely rule out some reason for that correlation that we haven’t been able to isolate yet.

In the meantime, there is moral progress that does need to be made, and climate matters, and as fas as I can see, these are the people who largely provide the climate.

And that wouldn’t be negligible, even if one of them hadn’t written “Slavery in Massachusetts.”