California: The Experimental Society | Wallace Stegner (1967)
'California is a state in which it is at times almost intolerable to live. I know people who are moving out rather than rear their children there. Yet other places, by comparison, seem lesser, smaller, duller, less promising, less exciting. For this is indeed where the future will be made—is already being made, with all the noise, smog, greed, energy, frequent wrong-headedness, and occasional greatness of spirit that are so American and so quintessentially Californian.'
body
"A PUTTY CULTURE," as Neil Morgan calls it in this California issue of SR, is Innovationville, not Traditionburg. Its motto, "Why not?"—a question that one of Arthur Koestler's heroines asks herself while wearily submitting to rape—a^jplies even in her sense; hut in California the question is more often hopeful or exhilarated than weary. Why not? It might work.
In this experimental society nothing, as William Wilson remarks in his perceptive essay on California art, is forbidden; by the same token, nothing is formed. If the history of America is the history of an established culture painfully adapting itself to a new environment, and being constantly checked, confused, challenged, or overcome by new immigrations, then the history of California is American history in extremis. Like the rest of America, California is unformed, innovative, ahistorical, hedonistic, acquisitive, and energetic—only more so. Its version of the Good Life, its sports, pleasures, and comforts, are increasingly copied by the envious elsewhere. It creates an art and literature as nervous, permissive, and superficial as itself. It has its own intensified version of the Brain Drain, borrowing both ideas and the men who generate them.
It borrows from everywhere—in nothing is it so American. And in one of its more recent borrowings it fulfills a continental promise. It is the last leg of the journey of Europe toward Asia.
A hundred years ago the geopolitical Manifest Destinarian William Gilpin cried exultantly, "Asia is found and become our neighbor!" Neighbor indeed. It has been our enemy three times within a single generation, and it is also our guru, under the California bo tree. Asian influence is no longer confined to an occasional swami such as Sri Pravananda or Krishna Murthi. Now whole blocks of Hippieville devoutly read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Alan Watts interprets Zen to the willing, the poets Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder walk each his version of the Left Hand Path, there is a Zen house of contemplation in the Santa Lucia Mountains near Tassajara Hot Springs. One of my recent students is a monk there—an immigrant Californian from Ithaca, New York.
Distaste for Puritan and industrial society is nearly universal among American youth. In California it is closer to hatred—and it does not matter much whether the extremists are Activist or Hippie, New Left or Far Out. The important fact is that California was an early hotbed for both, and remains so. The thousands of teen-aged runaways flocking to San Francisco in the summer of 1967 are a testimonial to that continued attraction, as well as a demonstration of how sadly social the ills of an antisociety can become. Haight-Ashbury has every ghetto ill—poverty, malnutrition, illegitimacy, drug addiction, suicide, mental disorder, and venereal disease, which youth has made into California's No. I public health problem.
The hippie aberration, which anyone with a sense of history has to see as a newer, younger variety of romantic bohemianism, is only one response — an overpublicized one—to California's extreme permissiveness. It is common for immigrants to try to mold themselves to the new conditions, with a desperate yearning to be in, to belong. But when the new condition is as unstable as a dust devil or a strobe-light happening, then many immigrants are going to be thrown back on the conventional and the known. The more experimental and permissive the moral, artistic, political, and social Left, the more the Right backs up in its ruts, high-centering itself on attitudes hallowed by the example of Ulysses S. Grant and Mrs. Grundy.
The man in the middle may be tempted to cry a curse on both their houses, for both extremes hinder the growth of a tradition that might stabilize the society and foster a sense of community in its swollen cities and its creeping slurbs. (William Wilson thinks of them as crabgrass; I have always thought of them as a sort of impetigo.) Having welcomed unlimited growth, the state has the most acute growth problems anywhere. Some Californians have begun to look on growth not as a good but as an active evil, ruinous for people and land. Like other civilizations that have set out to build a future, California will eventually discover that it has created a past. When it does become aware of its past, which it will not do until its growth is drastically slowed, then it will also find that it has at least a rudimentary tradition, linking it to much that in its brash youth it rejected. Awareness of a tradition is an automatic brake on permissiveness—and restriction and limitation are as basic to civilization as energy and daring.
It will be tragic if social order and stability are imposed by the Raffertys, the Beagans, and the lockjaw Right of Orange County. It could be equally unfortunate if the Gary Snyders succeed in their aim of leaving not one value of the old order standing. In the experimental society everything is permitted, but not everything works. When that is made, the society has tempered innovationism with tradition, even convention.
Meantime, California is a state in which it is at times almost intolerable to live. I know people who are moving out rather than rear their children there. Yet other places, by comparison, seem lesser, smaller, duller, less promising, less exciting. For this is indeed where the future will be made—is already being made, with all the noise, smog, greed, energy, frequent wrong-headedness, and occasional greatness of spirit that are so American and so quintessentially Californian.