In olden times (the Sixties), Herbert Marcuse—whose ghost to this day haunts the minds of scholars at Hillsdale College, distinguished Fellows at the Claremont Institute, and contributors to Christopher Rufo’s City Journal— used the phrase ‘the Great Refusal,’ by which was meant a general strike against everything, a refusal to play society’s con(ventional) game(s), and a nationwide epidemic (or orgy) of tuning in, turning on (legally and responsibly, of course), and dropping the fuck out. Which leads to the obvious question: how did that work out for you, Boomer?
Let us begin the New Year, then, with Herbert Marcuse, whose blend of neo-Marxism and neo-Freudianism was denounced by Marxists and Freudians alike, and who would have been, in the Sixties, on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted Intellectuals” list if such a thing had existed. 1
Arnold Farr, at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, explains (sort of) Herbert Marcuse’s call for a Great Refusal: “This Great Refusal demands a new/liberated society. This new society requires what Marcuse calls the ‘new sensibility’ which is an ascension of the life instincts over the aggressive instincts.”
Life over death, Eros over Thanatos: that is what Marcuse, a lifelong Marxist turned Freudian turned darling of the Sixties’ New Left, was promoting. Of course, everyone else was also promoting it at that time, from hustlers like Jerry Rubin to anarchist clowns like Abbie Hoffman to academics like Theodore Roszak and even to decent human beings like, I don’t know—Wavy Gravy? The thing was, as crowded as the Eros-peddlers’ tent was, Marcuse had the pedigree (Frankfurt School, refugee from Nazi Germany) and the academic chops to be taken seriously, even (or especially) by people who never read his books.
Arnold Farr elaborates:
This idea of a new sensibility is yet another move beyond Marxism insofar as it requires much more than new power relations. It requires the cultivation of new forms of subjectivity. Human subjectivity in its present form is the product of systems of domination. We rid society of its systems of domination by ridding it of the forms of subjectivity formed by those systems and replacing them with new forms of subjectivity.
The cultivation of a new sensibility would transform the relationship between human beings and nature as well as the relationships among human beings. The new sensibility is the medium of social change that mediates between the political practice of changing the world and one’s own drive for personal liberation.
“Change the world by liberating yourself” was a perfect way to appeal to Americans spoon-fed on individualism, and thus did the personal become the political, as the Beatles announced: “You say you’ll change the constitution / well, you know, / we’d all love to change your head. / You tell me it’s the institution / well, you know / you better free your mind instead.” Herbert Marcuse, who began as a follower of Lenin, ended up echoing (or being echoed by) Lennon. History doesn’t repeat, it rhymes, and sometimes you can dance to it.
The Great Refusal was so counterintuitive as to seem like genius. The timing for revolution could not have been worse, i.e., better. Whereas revolutions throughout history were typically (and logically) a product of poverty, social misery, and political tyranny, Marcuse instead issued a call to arms “against the totality of a well-functioning, prosperous society, the general inhumanity, dehumanization, waste, and excess of the so-called consumer society; resisting the temptations of prosperity, insisting on an experience of the world no longer mediated by ‘things,’ giving expression to humanitarian values and objectives.” Astonishingly, countless numbers of privileged young people (including me) responded to the call—in theory, at least, or to the limited extent of subscribing to Ramparts.
Had there been a poster child for the Great Refusal, it would have been Benjamin Braddock, as played by Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. “I’m a little worried about my future,” Benjamin confided to one of his parents’ friends, only to be taken aside and given a single word of advice: “Plastics”. Later, Benjamin floats idly in the family swimming pool, a cold drink in his hand; his father confronts him about his lack of ambition. “Would you mind telling me what those four years of college were for? What was the point of all that hard work?” To which Benjamin replies, “You got me.”
In a society that had more to offer than any society in history, an entire generation (well, not entirely “entire,” but enough to panic the older folks) wanted none of it: plastics, college degrees, swimming pools, homes in the suburbs, job security, the Protestant work ethic, expense accounts, pensions, two-car garages, manicured lawns, country club memberships, etc. All of that was linked, in the minds of Marcuse and his followers, to bigger issues; in their view, American consumerism underwrote the military-industrial complex, and to participate in ‘straight’ society was to be an accomplice.
Douglas Kellner summarized the Great Refusal as “a fierce opposition to war, colonization, totalitarianism, consumerism, and patriarchy, plus an emphasis on sexual liberation.” Add “racism” and “suburbia” to the list of things that were targeted for Refusal, and you’ve got the Sixties’ zeitgeist: we displayed solidarity with the people of Vietnam by getting stoned and playing our music loud (The Man can’t bust our music!). As for sexual liberation, Bob Dylan put it this way: “Old lady judges / watch people in pairs / Limited in sex they dare / To push fake morals, insult and stare…” 2
Rest assured that I do not plan on relitigating, much less reliving, the Sixties; that would be one long strange trip. The Great Refusal, however, antedated the Sixties by a considerable stretch of time; it didn’t start with Marcuse, and it hasn’t ended with him, either. People have been Refusing pretty much since Eden, in all sorts of ways and with all sorts of results: from Desert Fathers to Old Believers, from Christian martyrs to conscientious objectors, from Thoreau to Gandhi, from Martin Luther King to today’s “sovereign citizens,” and from “I would prefer not to” to “Hell, no, we won’t go!”
Someone should write a history of the Great Refusal.
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1 Maybe it did—who knows? If so, I guarantee that Philip K. Dick and Hunter S. Thompson were also on it.
2 “While money doesn’t talk, it swears / obscenity, who really cares? / All is phony.”
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