A Conservative Impulse in Hippy?

also the Kinks = hippy? wtf? when everyone was doing Sgt. Pepper/SF psych-outs, the kinks did VGPS... the polar opposite of hippy... do you know what time it is?

I always liked the explanation of country rock that after you've gone as far out as you can go the only place to go is home. Of course you could use the same explanation of jazz music and the rise of the Marsalis, be-bop mafia as a response to the free jazz impulse of the 60's and 70's. But that's a bullshit excuse Can or Neu never felt the need to record traditional Beerhall schlager type songs in the late 70's.

You can argue that many aspects (like the cottage industry) of what you cite are non-conservative in that they go against the general pro-industrialisation, homogenisation, urbanisation, screw the environment, gimme my SUV agenda of the political right.

The gender role thing (which is definitely the case) I would say is not so much an intrinsically conservative impulse of hippiedom as a case of the radicals not moving forward at the same speed on all fronts. There's huge swaths of mid-60's beat and garage music that, to say the least, displays an entirely non-progressive view of women. To get even more fundamental the whole left right spectrum is an over simplification. At the very least many people measure political views on a separate economic and personal freedom spectrum. There'll be no shortage of cases where someone can be progressive on some matters and conservative on others - one obvious one being James Brown - pro-black, anti-welfare, pro-jail and loaded to the gills on Angel Dust.

That said, Ray Davies was never really considered a hippy, was he? Kinda the opposite of Zappa, who wasn't a hippy but who was still considered one.

and you're absolutely right that punk, hippy, con & lib are way too messy as labels to get very precise about anything.

anyway, just thinking things through myself.

I suppose there's also the thing that its difficult to stay radical forever - after awhile your new radical agenda becomes the new status quo.

The other points: (Back To The Land, the emphasis on rugged individualism, cottage industries, "craftsmanship" and "authenticity") are just virtues that both "liberals/progressives" AND "conservatives/liberatarians" aspire towards, and sadly, rarely ever achieve.

And your the tail end of your equation ( = birth of rockism, Jesus freaks, spiritualism & superstition.) is just meanspirited, crude, crass, unprovable nonsense.
BAH HUMBUG!

tigerclawskank: You can argue that many aspects (like the cottage industry) of what you cite are non-conservative in that they go against the general pro-industrialisation, homogenisation, urbanisation, screw the environment, gimme my SUV agenda of the political right.
I say Mod this guy up as 'Insightful!' Both 'sides' of the political 'spectrum' try their damnedest to claim they have a monopoly on all virtues and that their 'enemies' are afflicted with all vices. Just espousing 'Conservatism' or 'Liberalism' does not, by itself, make one virtuous.

don't know how any of this is mean-spirited, though. crude and unprovable, sure.

I think what we're seeing from Fritz here (and you *knew* I was going to rise to this bate, didn't you?) is the sort of assumptive thinking we get in this country from Old Labour people, the idea that ALL RURALISM IS THE SAME. The best example is the bizarre way that Scottish Central Belt and Welsh Valleys socialists refer to the SNP and Plaid Cymru as "Tartan Tories" and "Daffodil Tories" seemingly because, like the Tories in England, they win greater support in rural areas: in reality SNP and Plaid are both committed to breaking up the British union and the dominance of the UK as a sort of "Greater England", while the Tories exist to preserve this state of affairs, adhering as they do to an absurdly Anglocentric idea of "Britain").

the Kinks reference upthread would make more sense if it related to Fairport Convention, surely? I think there is an axis in *that* wing of hippiedom which might be interpreted as conservative (ie my friend who comes from that background / generation citing approvingly Prince Charles' website warnings against GM crops - I suspect that, like me, he agrees with Charles' conclusions but not the thought processes the Highgrove loon uses to reach them) but it's a fatally simplistic view. Custos' "redneck hunter / hippie agrarian" line relates perfectly to the British situation which has been shown up by the Countryside Alliance rearing their heads these past five years - I would be interested in how much influence the US rednecks have had in the agribusiness scam (their UK equivalents are up to their necks in it).

ultimately it's simply a matter of whether the hippie agrarians ever embraced theories of blood and soil and racial superiority, and only a tiny tiny minority ever did - white supremacists and racial separatists would be restricted to the hard-right in both the US and the UK. people like Nick Griffin (insert US equivalent at will) might try to create an artificial crossover, but there is *absolutely no way* that anyone with even a hint of late 60s / early 70s values would want to associate with someone like him.

I couldn't really talk about the non-ruralist wings of the hippie movement, mainly because I simply know less about them, but I don't think they used imagery (either in the UK or the US) which would have been so instantly associated with "conservatism" by the politically and culturally naive.

"I would be interested in how much influence the US rednecks have had in the agribusiness scam"

The redneck farmer in the US by and large has a longstanding and well-deserved distrust of both corporations and the federal government, and was largely excluded from the collusion that has produced the agribusiness monster. This is why there's so much grousing in the US about the decline of family farms, why there's Farm Aid, why there's guys in Arkansas who will shoot anyone who comes on their land because they're probably from the bank or the gov't. Agribusiness played a big hand in exterminating the culture and institutions that bred rednecks in the first place - family farms, tight-knit communities, local markets, etc.

I should add that there *are* people like you describe within the right-wing pro-countryside movement in Britain, it's just that the *ringleaders* are agribusiness types, which is part of the reason why they're not generally popular.

the thread is a question ("?") not a statement. I explicitly said it was just points to consider, not a thesis.

your points about the errors of mistaking ruralism for conservatism are very well made, and exactly what I was hoping to read from this thread.

as with the sister thread on punk, it was not meant as an overarching theory but rather taking time to consider what might have been a tiny tiny minority, or some contrary elements in what is often seen as a subculture with relatively homogenous values.

can't say I enjoy the accusatory "bah humbug" tone of custos or robin's posts when I was just trying to open up a conversation.

and to the you *knew* I was going to rise to this bate and but you knew that, didn't you? comments, I can only assume you're confusing me with someone else. I haven't a clue who you are or anything about any british fucking railroad threads on ILE.

To generalise (obviously) society tends to have a general belief in progress (which i alluded to earlier) and so certain conservative beliefs (e.g. back to the land) can also be radical whereas others (David Crosby's gender politics) are merely a case of hippies being less different from society as a whole than the long hair might indicate.

fritz, robin wasnt referring to you here, but to everyone on ILE, ie -many of us know that this is a strong interest of robins, and that he would certainly address the points to do with homeogenzing ruralism. which indeed he did! (IE - he wasnt having a go at you)

I think all the real back-to-the-earth ruralist hippies were supported by rich parents, and they fucked off back to West London as soon as they got bored of growing crops (as did everyone in Donovan's community before Vashti Bunyan had even got there). Maybe this is why hippies are so often hated as frauds.

I shouldn't assume that anyone is having a go at me, especially after posting such a vaguely worded threat.

I'll be 33 next birthday so its about time I got the messiah complex going and retreated to a compound full of guns and compliant women.

Was there a conservative impulse to hippie? Well, hippie was probably about altering convention, but there were elements to it that demanded a retrospective outlook - back to the land, traditional gender roles. If you want to call that conservative that's OK I suppose but in cultural terms, for the era, hippie doesn't seem conservative to me. It's probably more about inclusion and openness. That the hippie view of progressive was allied against Keynes' view does not represent conservative tendency - such an argument itself is Keynesian.

And to suggest that human-kind's evolution and progression is tied to technological advancement and the capitalist trajectory is narrow minded. Hippie was (is) an alternative which was quickly assimilated, badged and branded in the usual capitalist manner. Yeah, I like that - maybe Hippie was more of an alternative than anything else. It offered a way out, or suggested there was nothing wrong with looking for a way out. It even made looking for a way out cool and sometimes intelligent, rather than just the mindless yoof rebelling.

Where hippie fails is when you interrogate the roots of the hippie ideology and reconcile its conclusions with existence in this world that we have created. Like communism - it could never work.

This is a one way thought process which probably includes loads of shit which I will later disagree with.

surely the sort of "conservatism" which began in the 60s and came to root in the Thatcher era is the sort that can be described as Conservative (in the sense of "whatever the Tory party believes at any given time") but isn't actually small-c conservative at all, Gareth? it just seems to me that a lot of the things old-school Tories see as the death of their values actually incorporated *aspects* of those values more than Thatcherism ever did: back-to-the-land hippies maybe, but Ian MacDonald's idea that "All You Need Is Love" was the last great stand of post-war collectivism rather than the beginning of what came after, with that generation mostly ending up extreme free-market individualists, also comes strongly to mind.

Custos, you've got a good point about Guthrie & Denny, but the context I was thinking of when I wrote that is probably *very* Anglocentric. an extract from one of my recent pieces is worth posting:

"In 1968, the Pentangle, a group at the heart of the 'new ruralist' movement of the time ... got close to the heart of the issue. In their song 'Pentangling', they celebrate a land opened to all, for sheer enjoyment and relaxation ('flowers bright with people walking / drinking wine and eating fruit and laughing'). But all the time there's a sense that this might actually be a dream, a mirage, and about halfway through there's an ominous change of pace and they suddenly express doubts, as though they're fully aware that there are landowners, masters of foxhounds and the like who would take this earthly paradise away from them and keep it to themselves forever ('Oh, does this river belong to everybody I know? ... to ease my body and soul / To sit and to dream by the riverbank ...'). The eternal divide between the exclusive idea of the countryside and the inclusive one was here crystallised and rendered more obvious than ever. It's a divide that never leaves us, and is certainly showing itself at the moment as the Countryside Alliance and their shadier hangers-on shout louder and louder in their attempts to drown out those of us who believe in a countryside for everyone."

I should add at this point that I only really started positioning myself as a left-wing ruralist *per se* when the Countryside Alliance started organising themselves and conning the gullible idiot media after the Labour election victory in 1997 - it seemed both deeply necessary *and* historically intriguing to define myself as such in response. before then, I simply thought of myself as a left-winger: where I lived seemed irrelevant, and also my (now Labour) constituency was considered safe Tory pre-1997, so my politics seemed impotent in the context of UK ruralism generally. the 1997 election blew that open from both sides.

Somehow I think it'd be ***LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE*** for ***ANYONE*** like me, anyone from my generation, even anyone at all who liked certain records (let's say Eminem's "Lose Yourself") to get on with this bigoted cunt (we have never had any sort of friendly conversation - we COULDN'T), but hippie traditionalism somehow brings out something an antiquarian bigoted prick can relate to.

it is further proof of the erosion of left/right divides as a meaningful sign of where people stand. it also brings the Crispian Mills episode back to my mind: like, wasn't *he* basically just a pagan neo-hippie obsessed with India and Glastonbury as the "Isle of Avalon" etc etc who got himself mixed up with neo-Nazis? apart from the fact that Mills wasn't there the first time, this is a very similar situation to my friend finding some common ground with the Usenet B*P bigots.

were Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet more culturally and socially progressive than Fairport Convention or the Incredible String Band? they certainly tore a greater arsehole separating themselves and all they stood for from those of a traditionalist/conservative bent, on all social fronts.