ABSTRACT
The dominant ‘consensus’ politics of the democratic advanced industrial societies does not pass without some challenges. At one level there are the critical academic analyses with reformist, occasionally radical reformist, implications, like those of C. Wright Mills, M. McLuhan, A. Toffler and J. K. Galbraith. 1 More dramatic in their impact are the challenges which are accompanied by some political mobilisation, often behind a purely negative destructive opposition which offers no immediate alternative. These, it has been argued, represent the burgeoning of the first heresies of the diffuse consensus of liberal-capitalism. Moynihan, 2 for example, identifies three clusters of heretical behaviour. There are the alienated – those who are in a chronic state of identity crisis under the strains and cross-pressures of urban society, victims of technological innovation, mobility, rootlessness, the break up of the family, of insecure, dull routine labour and an inability to comprehend the system; the ‘opt out’ or ‘Nirvana now’ cluster – people who reject and ignore the society which surrounds them, perhaps forming small communal enclaves dedicated to an alternative life style; and, finally, the New Left, as typified by the SDS in the United States. Another analyst, Zijderveld, 3 offers three somewhat different categories, which complement those of Moynihan. He suggests two kinds of withdrawal behaviour: ‘Gnosticism’ – a withdrawal from reality to a subjective Nirvana, searching for ‘utter reality’ in one’s own soul, often with the assistance of psychedelic drugs; and ‘Anarchism’ – whose adherents launch a counter-culture or life style which denies everything holy to ‘straight’ society. They return to ‘nature’ in communes which are often communistic in economics and sexuality. This is basically a cultural protest but it may develop political manifestation in alliance with the third Zijderveld category, the Activists, who are politically involved and are equatable with Moynihan’s New Left. Of the four basic categories which emerge from these analyses – the alienated, the Gnostics, the Anarchists and the Activists or New Left, only the last are regularly involved politically but they may all, including the largest of these
