Groups, in the human as well as the animal world, start with the family and the family continues to be the core sustaining any group. That was true at least till the Vietnam War. It is recognised that this war, which lasted 19 years and six months, and altered not only the US and Vietnam but the entire world in many profound ways, spawned the Hippie movement. The cultural breakaway, from the so-called ‘mainstream’, was not a mere deviation but a fully developed counterculture, which originated in California’s beatnik scene. The Beatles had a profound musical, personal and cultural connection with California and had a huge influence on the Hippie culture, acting as the global catalyst for this counterculture. John Lennon experimented with LSD, the mind-altering acid, creating a celebrity stamp-of-approval on drug use, which usually ends in drug abuse for the less-self-controlled. LSD trips were soon mainstream in Hollywood; Peter Fonda said of the experience, “I know what it’s like to be dead.”

The Hippie culture was born out of a death-mushroom; the Vietnam War killed more than 58,000 Americans and some three million Vietnamese, of which only about 1.3 million were combatants. Scenes of the aftermath of the petroleum jelly-filled firebombs called Napalm, showing children running as burnt skin peeled off their bodies, and of vast areas laid desolate by herbicide and defoliant aerial sprays, made pain and death an integral part of the hippie psyche. Death, not merely of an individual, not merely of the heretofore idea of society that was supposed to be designed for individual protection, but also of the entire cultural paraphernalia associated with it. The hippie culture was an ‘exit’, lock stock and barrel; the hippies quit, cutting off all bonds that had so far bound them to society and culture. The earlier society was now a stranger and Elie Wiesel’s words were foretold. The Holocaust surviving author, who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, had famously said in 1986 in an interview, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” The hippie was indifferent to self and everything around that self; neither existed, the hippie and the world were the living dead; the zombies in George A. Romeo’s contemporary movie series Night of the Dead and Living Dead. The zombies had an insatiable hunger for the flesh of the living; the hippies had the same drive for indifference.

One immediate victim of the Vietnam War and the Hippie culture was the family, the foundation of society; once the superstructure crumbled, the foundation was rendered redundant. The Vietnam war separated families for prolonged durations and sometimes forever, as news of the war-dead kept pouring in. While alive, the soldier lived in constant fear of death; in South Vietnam, which hosted the Americans against the Communist Viet Cong guerrillas, the enemy was everywhere, indistinguishable from friends. Restaurants blew up and so did military vehicles, far away from the warfront. The soldiers were in real danger of losing their mind; Thailand was officially selected by the US military as a primary Rest and Recreation destination for soldiers to unwind their tightly-wound springs. The Thai government, its King at that time was driving the traditional country towards Westernisation, collaborated and allowed the development of Pattaya village into the hub which has not lost its notoriety till today. The soldiers soon forgot about their families, divorce became rampant and the family, as the world had known it since the heavy-club-bearing-caveman MCP, was lost.

The contagion spread all over America, then to Europe and further on to the US’s new Asian allies like Japan and South Korea. Marriage and birth rates plummeted in a few decades of the counterculture and even the surviving families lived in a marriage only of convenience. Love was only outside marriage and Gay Talese’s 1981 book, Thy Neighbour’s Wife, laid it all bare. Children were born, but more of them outside marriage. Some were abandoned; some were raised by single parents. The worst was the fate of the children of a single parent who subsequently had a live-in relationship with another partner who had no bond with the child and instances of extreme cruelty and depravity continue to this day. The traumatised children of such a society had less than a fair chance of becoming happy, enlightened members of a healthy society, much less of having a happy family of their own. It all seemed so doomed.

Not everyone was a hippie or indifferent to this gradual dissolution of family and society. Western society did not comprise the bulk of human society and in the post-colonial world, had no monopoly over ideas. Asia was where the large mass of humanity lived and that continent was stirring after the painful two centuries of colonialism were finally over. Areas of US influence, Japan and South Korea, were small pockets in the large continent, The rest was still traditional ‘filial piety-universe’, where childbirth outside marriage was not acceptable, parents had an obligation to bring up their children who, in turn, had an obligation to take care of parents and grandparents in their old age. Marriage was socially compulsory and remains so to a large extent. Having children was compulsory too because of the importance assigned to post-death rituals, which may be something the children must do throughout their lives. Asia modernised at varying pace, some countries moved fast, others were slow, but their culture survived the modernisation.

There was no mass hippie movement in any Asian country; not even in external culture- influenced Thailand; leave aside the hoary ancients like India and China. Even Japan and South Korea, fully Westernised politically, retained the essential elements of their culture and while adopting external elements of the West like dress, stuck to their language and food and more importantly, to filial piety. In India, women stuck to the unstitched saree, even though it is inconvenient in the work environment, the bindi and even the health hazard of putting bright toxic chemical compounds of mercury or lead in their hair parting. The bridal attire became more revealing but the rituals became longer and payment to performing priests, much larger. Barring the limited universe of so-called progressives, children remain the necessary outcome of marriage. If fertility appears to be going down because of various ‘modern’ factors like pollution and stress, the omnipresent fertility clinic is proof of the persistence of the idea that marriage should multiply and not divide the family. When everything else fails, even adoption is resorted to, in many cases from within the extended family; blood continues to be a thicker glue and the Hindu Undivided Family continues to be a legal institution.

The West, having almost lost it, never truly did. The Chicago School of Economics always remained the point of reference for those looking to study ‘familialism,’ alternately spelled as ‘familism.’ Its founder Frank Knight, by setting up this institution, ensured that the idea of family would never be out of sight of the US. Later followers of the idea, like Louis de Bonald, have used flowery language, calling the family a miniature state; the father is the power, the mother is the minister, the child is the subject, divorce is the disorder in the state. All of this certainly raised the hackles of the progressives.

For a time, the progressives boosted the counterculture through instruments like the LGBTQ movement and Marxism that describes the two-parent-family having at its foundation, capital and private gain. Engels criticised it as an institution for the division of labour. Yet, as an eternal institution, it is getting revived even in the US without the burden of ‘power, state and minister.’ The new US family is based on egalitarianism, reciprocity, work-life balance, and even enduring live-in relationships. The churning goes on; in ancient mythologies, gods had families; humans, once again, seem to be pivoting towards the idea. / DAILY WORLD /

( R N prasher is a former IAS officer. The views expressed are his personal. )