The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [494]
Over the next few years a distinct new `sub-culture' emerged among the young of the Western democracies, whereby they saw themselves as in rebellion against the older generation and all it stood for. Bonded together by their new music, their fashions in clothes and jazz-derived American slang (`cool, `crazy, `rave, `wild, `freaky, `kicks'), their collective mood exhibited all the familiar symptoms of a group-fantasy: rigidly conformist, centred on rock 'n' roll singers as its iconic dream heroes, and exhibiting a sense of aggression towards the `boring, 'repressive' values of all those outside their fantasy-community, who were dismissed as `squares'. In America the mood of this new `beat generation' found expression in Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road (1957). In Britain a middle-aged novelist Colin Maclnnes tried to capture this dream-state in Absolute Beginners (1959), as he described his young hero looking down on London from a plate-glass window:
`pressed up so close it was like I was out there in the air, suspended above the city, and I swore by Elvis and all the saints that this last teenage year of mine was going to be a real rave. Yes, man, come whatever, this last year of the teenage dream I was out for kicks and fantasy.'
By the late 1950s, however, it was not only the young who had the sense that some extraordinary new world was opening up. What was happening was that, after that revival of the values of the Self which had characterised the war years, the mood of the age was picking up where it left off in the `Roaring Twenties': and this was now generating different bubbles of expectation which overlapped and soon began to merge with each other.
Underpinning it all was the exhilarating pace of technological change, which for most people in the richer countries of the West was bringing an entirely new kind of material prosperity. 'Affluence' had arrived. As millions bought their first cars and refrigerators, the coming of the first motorways, the first neon-lit supermarkets, above all the now ubiquitous television screens were filling people's heads with a new vision of `modernity. Symbolically, the feel of city life was being transformed as massive new metal, glass and concrete towers (again picking up on ideas from the 1920s) began to rise above skylines until now dominated by the towers, spires and domes of churches.
So headily all-pervasive was the sense that society was being carried into a new, exciting future that, even more obviously than in the 1920s, this brought an urge for liberation from all that framework of social and moral structures inherited from the past. From the class structure to sex, long-established constraints and attitudes seemed suddenly restrictive, outmoded, irrelevant to the needs of the new world technology was making possible.
In 1950 an American sociologist, David Riesman, had published a prescient book, The Lonely Crowd, identifying three basic ways in which human beings formed their values and attitudes to life. The first was what Riesman described as the `tradition-directed' society, in which people in general inherited conventions and belief-systems passed on to them by their parents and by previous generations. The second was the `other-directed' society, in which people took on the fashion-based values dictated by their peer-group and by all the pressures of the contemporary world around them. A third, much rarer category included those `inner-directed' individuals who gradually discover their own autonomous inner `centre, evolving values based on their own experience and understanding.
The change coming over Western society around 1960 represented a move on an unprecedented scale away from a `tradition-directed' society to one in which people were becoming `other-directed'. Reinforced by the new power of advertising, the pace of technological change, reflected in everything from the contraceptive pill to the new architecture,