A Bob Dylan biopic came out last year but its meaning was elusive, at least to me. The music itself strikes me as mediocre at best and the lyrics strangely obfuscating in ways that are annoying. Then again, the whole meaning of that resurrected folk music of the period just didn’t connect with me. I was too young to get it, and it still seems alien to anything to which I aspired.
Dylan at that period in his career became something of a musical muse to the rise of a movement called the hippies, for whatever reason.
I was too young to be a hippie, but I likely would not have joined them anyway. The fashions among them I would have regarded as aesthetically forbidding, while the music was never to my taste. The rejection of social norms, drug use, and valorization of sloppiness and vagabondism I find entirely loathsome. I’m grateful to have been born too late to even consider this way of life.
That said, there is usually a reason these movements are born. If we are going to find kernels of truth in the message of this movement—beginning in about 1964 and ending a decade later—we need to throw ourselves back in time. We can observe ways in which the hippies were onto something.
Above all else, the hippie ethos rejected obedience to established authority it regarded as secretly corrupt to its core. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the subsequent cover-up of the facts concerning that case kicked off the demoralization of a generation. The stability and trust of the past was gone, the idealism of the early 1960s utterly demolished.
JFK represented a kind of hope for the future, and many of those hopes died with him. Depleted was the trust in government, the media, and the system, generally speaking. This led to a larger questioning of commercial culture, industry, and established ways of living. The new distrust was confirmed with the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.), all against the backdrop of race riots, huge demographic shifts, and political upheaval.
Above all else, there was U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam, which seemed to confirm every suspicion about the power elite, especially once conscription threatened to kidnap young men and force them to participate in a far-flung struggle in which they did not believe. That’s when rebellion became personal. They were fighting for freedom itself.
Think how the COVID-19 vaccine mandates of 2021 kicked off a national resistance movement. Imagine that feeling a thousand times as intense. That’s what the war draft did to a generation. Far from condemning this resistance, we should see this attitude as an extension of the long history of American rebellion against tyranny. There was nothing inconsistent with American tradition represented by resistance to the draft.
Goofy dress, drugs, and free love aside, there were other meritorious impulses among the hippies. The desire to reclaim what is true and real from the corruptions of industrial cartels is a major point that survived the 1960s and continues to be an animating force in U.S. politics today. The major concerns of the Make America Healthy Again movement actually find their modern genesis in the hippie movement.
The loss of trust in established systems of agriculture, medicine, and technological surveillance perfectly mirrors the hippie concern in the second half of the 1960s that something had gone very wrong and that the corruption could be traced to the top.
The Make America Healthy Again movement’s interest in regenerative farming, natural methods of discovering new paths to health and well-being, and broad tolerance for alternative approaches to medicine are entirely rational applications of distrust in “the man.”
Speaking for myself, five years ago I had very little in the way of distrust of medical elites and the food supply. I had no idea of the level of industrial ties with federal agencies, much less the reach of those ties. It was inconceivable to me that my own local pharmacy would be taking orders from Washington on what generic therapeutics would be available for sale.
Nor did I know the fullness of corruption in the food supply, much less the plight of small farmers in dealing with a rigged system designed to benefit the large corporations that control the agency regulators. Whereas I once dismissed concern for industrial chemicals in all things, I’m now mortified by this reality.
More broadly, I had not seen the way big corporations were and are the hidden hand behind much of what government does in every area of life, from food to housing to medicine to the military. Industry is indigenous to government operations, contrary to what I had previously assumed.
Discovering all of these has been enlightening, to say the least. The hippies—for all their excesses, bad taste in music, and alienation from bourgeois culture—intuited this long ago. Their successors are the ones who rediscovered naturopathy, organic food, and outdoor exercise, and who first raised suspicions of rampant use of pharmaceutical products and the government-recommended food pyramid.
It’s hard for me to admit, but even the strange attachment to folk music—as much as it fails to connect with my classical training—has a point. They had grown weary of the copyright-controlled industry that seemed to deliver inauthenticity at a profit, manufacturing pseudostars by an industrial machine. The point of folk music was to find what was real and genuinely attached to the people.
It’s probably too much to say that the hippies were the first modern populist movement, but there is a grain of truth there. What they wanted was the reassertion of the truth of real life unspoiled by industrial cartels in the military, medicine, government, and culture. They had a sense of the fakeness of what was being dished out by the establishment and wanted to find a better way.
No hippie of the time would have ever described himself as a conservative, but part of the drive was to recover what was lost in a time of war, civil upheaval, and elite capture of the commanding heights. What drove them in part was precisely the desire to recover what was lost and reclaim a pioneering spirit. They dared to stand up, say that something was wrong, and find another way to live. The resistance to the draft contributed mightily to ending the war in Vietnam and reasserting the essential wisdom of the Bill of Rights.
When Thomas Jefferson elevated the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” he certainly did not imagine that that meant the right of government to snatch teens from family and school and send them off to kill and be killed for reasons unrelated to any real American interests. Nor did he imagine that it meant permitting mass poisoning by a chemical and pharmaceutical cartel that operates in cooperation with government agencies.
Two songs that survive from Dylan’s oeuvre from that period are “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” The message of the first is that the answers to the great mysteries of our time are all around us; we only need the curiosity and courage to see what is right in front of us. The message of the second is that the future is destined to look very different from the immediate past because of the changed attitudes of a new generation.
Both are as true now as they were in the mid-1960s. As much as I’m reluctant to admit it, this style, this approach, this moral intuition can speak to us again. The fashions, drugs, and affected alienation we can do without, but the deep suspicion of established ways and desperate desire for change toward authenticity have new life in our times.
