Where The Waste Land Ends

November 10, 2013

     When I was a sophomore in college, I took two seminars on "Psychology and Religion", with a popular instructor named Alan Nelson, a PhD candidate in clinical psychology at the Harvard Divinity School.  The year was 1972-'73.  The year before I had taken a freshman seminar with Harvey Cox, the activist theologian known for his book "The Secular City", which argued that organized religion had little claim on the life of the spirit, a radical notion at the time.

      We were all learning Transcendental Meditation ("™") and studying other spiritual disciplines, be they za-Zen, Hindu meditation, Sufism or the way of the Bahá'ís.  Those who had money to burn paid to go to Arica, a commune in Chile where enlightenment was the stuff of daily life. I was a disciple of a Hindu teacher, Sri Chinmoy, whose meditation style I had been introduced to by two women in the "Psychology and Religion" seminars, Maydelle Hagenbush and Marion Lennihan.  For the semester I spent away from college and living at home with my parents, working nights at the New York Times as a file clerk in the morgue, I also practiced Hinduism, wearing a sari and eating Indian vegetarian food.  It was the spring semester of 1975,  the year Nixon resigned.  My parents thought the world would come to an end any day, and their daughter with it.  Away from the heady air of Cambridge, though, Sri Chinmoy's religious practice began to look more and more like a cult to me, and I became disillusioned with all the hoopla about "Guru-said this" and "Guru said that".  Folding a sari correctly every day was pretty tedious, too.     

     Despite the chaos in two-party politics and the clash of values, the world still seemed to me a pretty benign place.  The world of books (or what used to be called "the life of the mind") still influenced the discourse and people still talked about "ideas", rather than "rights", the trope that dominates our times.

      Harvard professors --men in tweed jackets-- still said memorable, witty things:  Donald Fleming, the philosopher, lecturing in Humanities 5, the survey of philosophy course, observed "Every age has its prevalent hypocrisy.  Ours is that everyone is having more sex than they are actually having."  And Richard Pipes, the historian of the Russian state: "It is not true that Catherine the Great was killed by a horse, as the scurrilous gossip would have had it." (A reference to the rumor the Empress died attempting to have her sexual lusts equinely satisfied.)  

      In September 1971, at Radcliffe, where I resided in North "House" (the collection of dormitories singly administered), there was a computer lab in the next House over, "South House".  Those studying computer science were an obsessive lot, and the computer lab was open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  (The libraries were only open until midnight.)  The computer wonks would work until after midnight, then watch re-runs of "Star Trek" on late night Boston television.  It was not unusual to come back from a party on a weekend and find two or three bespectacled young men cross-legged in front of the TV screen, mouthing the words to the Star Trek scripts and offering commentary for those of us no more initiated in the world of the Starship Enterprise than we were in Fortran or Basic.

     In 1972-73 I read Theodore Roszak's book, Where The Waste Land Ends, which I consider the book that most influenced me as an undergraduate.  Roszak, a cultural historian best known for coining the term "counterculture", wrote Where The Waste Land Ends to make his case against modern man's worship of technology. "Our culture has struck a Faustian bargain for power over man and nature, and it will not easily resign its wager. It still looks to its machines, its science, its big economic systems for security, prosperity, salvation" (xvii). 

    What alternative to technology's encroachment did Roszak offer?  "Romantic artists rediscovered the meaning of transcendent symbols and thereby returned western culture to the Old Gnosis, and what part the rhapsodic intellect must play in our journey to the visionary commonwealth".

     I wasn't so sure I bought the latter half of the critique.  Anyone who knows anything about the Romantic crowd knows that some of them were irresponsible libertines (Byron and Shelley) others visionaries (Blake and Keats).  Only Goethe, simultaneously a man of science and of poetry, rises above the heap of teeming egos and passions.  --And Goethe was a high-ranking civil servant, when you come right down to it.  When I think of what Roszak's plea that modern man develop his "rhapsodic intellect" might result in, all I can think of is a dinner where great talkers hold sway.  I'd love to be invited, but I wouldn't go to have my problems solved. 

     In 1972 Theodore Roszak published Where The Waste Land Ends; in 1973 Bill Gates came to Harvard as a freshman, met Steve Ballmer, and shortly after dropped out to start Microsoft. Wonks became the "avant garde" and the rest of us took notice.  I read all of Tolstoy, and signed up for a course in shorthand and typing at Harvard Summer School.  I would drop out a year later, return in the spring of 1976 and graduate with honors in 1977.  Protest was a dead letter by then, and the counterculture had withered on the vine.  From November 1973 to March 1975, the economy had been in recession and the classes of '74 and '75 had a hard time finding jobs.  The classes of '76 and '77 were well-aware of what life right after college had been for a good many upperclassmen, and modified their behavior accordingly: suddenly everyone was at the library, studying, planning to go to law school or medical school as soon as they graduated.  The private clubs (which had been rejected by the countercultural classes --1968 to 1974), became popular again, and membership in the Gilbert & Sullivan Society, once considered a redoubt of eccentrics and counterrevolutionaries, was suddenly a good thing to have on your resumé.