The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,69

was the inner governor of civilized behavior, self-control. Spontaneity, self-expression, and a defiance of inhibitions became cardinal virtues. “If it feels good, do it,” commanded a popular lapel button. Do It was the title of a book by the political agitator Jerry Rubin. “Do It ’Til You’re Satisfied (Whatever It Is)” was the refrain of a popular song by BT Express. The body was elevated over the mind: Keith Richards boasted, “Rock and roll is music from the neck downwards.” And adolescence was elevated over adulthood: “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” advised the agitator Abbie Hoffman; “Hope I die before I get old,” sang The Who in “My Generation.” Sanity was denigrated, and psychosis romanticized, in movies such as A Fine Madness, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, King of Hearts, and Outrageous. And then of course there were the drugs.

Another target of the counterculture was the ideal that individuals should be embedded in webs of dependency that obligate them to other people in stable economies and organizations. If you wanted an image that contradicted this ideal as starkly as possible, it might be a rolling stone. Originally from a song by Muddy Waters, the image resonated with the times so well that it lent itself to three icons of the culture: the rock group, the magazine, and the famous song by Bob Dylan (in which he taunts an upper-class woman who has become homeless). “Tune in, turn on, drop out,” the motto of onetime Harvard psychology instructor Timothy Leary, became a watchword of the psychedelia movement. The idea of coordinating one’s interests with others in a job was treated as selling out. As Dylan put it:Well, I try my best

To be just like I am,

But everybody wants you

To be just like them.

They say sing while you slave and I just get bored.

I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.

Elias had written that the demands of self-control and the embedding of the self into webs of interdependence were historically reflected in the development of timekeeping devices and a consciousness of time: “This is why tendencies in the individual so often rebel against social time as represented by his or her super-ego, and why so many people come into conflict with themselves when they wish to be punctual.”119 In the opening scene of the 1969 movie Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda conspicuously toss their wristwatches into the dirt before setting off on their motorcycles to find America. That same year, the first album by the band Chicago (when they were known as the Chicago Transit Authority) contained the lyrics “Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care? If so I can’t imagine why.” All this made sense to me when I was sixteen, and so I discarded my own Timex. When my grandmother saw my naked wrist, she was incredulous: “How can you be a mensch without a zager?” She ran to a drawer and pulled out a Seiko she had bought during a visit to the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka. I have it to this day.

Together with self-control and societal connectedness, a third ideal came under attack: marriage and family life, which had done so much to domesticate male violence in the preceding decades. The idea that a man and a woman should devote their energies to a monogamous relationship in which they raise their children in a safe environment became a target of howling ridicule. That life was now the soulless, conformist, consumerist, materialist, tickytacky, plastic, white-bread, Ozzie and Harriet suburban wasteland.

I don’t remember anyone in the 1960s blowing his nose into a tablecloth, but popular culture did celebrate the flouting of standards of cleanliness, propriety, and sexual continence. The hippies were popularly perceived as unwashed and malodorous, which in my experience was a calumny. But there’s no disputing that they rejected conventional standards of grooming, and an enduring image from Woodstock was of naked concertgoers frolicking in the mud. One could trace the reversal of conventions of propriety on album covers alone (figure 3–17). There was The Who Sell Out, with a sauce-dribbling Roger Daltrey immersed in a bath of baked beans; the Beatles’ Yesterday and Today, with the lovable moptops adorned with chunks of raw meat and decapitated dolls (quickly recalled); the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet, with a photo of a filthy public toilet (originally censored); and Who’s Next, in which the four musicians are shown zipping up their flies while walking away from a urinespattered wall. The flouting