What is counterculture?

Can any hero tell me about this phenomenon in the United States in the 1960s?

counterculture Counter-Orthodox Culture Zhao Mei's "American Studies" mentions the word "counter-culture", and people will naturally think of the American obsessive eccentricities and pursuit of absurdity such as rock music, drug abuse, sexual abnormalities, abortion, streaking, etc. in the 1960s.

The hippie culture, as well as the hippies’ day and night carnivals in New York’s Central Park, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and New York’s suburban Woodstock, and later “political correctness” (political correctness), multiculturalism (muti-culture) and its

A challenge to dominant culture.

If understood strictly literally, the "counterculture" movement refers to a kind of values, culture, and lifestyle characterized by anti-war and counterculture that was popular among young people in the United States in the 1960s.

It was Theodore, a professor of history at California State University, Hayward, who first attributed "counterculture" to the youth protest movement that took place in the sociopolitical and cultural fields of the United States in the 1960s.

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His 1969 book The Birth of the Counterculture: Rethinking Technological Society and the Rebellion of its Youth found a convergence between the two divided groups of hippie dropouts and student radicals.

Counterculture, that is, resistance to an industrialized society dominated by technology.

In his definition, the counterculture movement refers to all protest movements that took place in American society in the 1960s, including the campus democracy movement, women's liberation movement, black civil rights movement, anti-war peace movement, environmental protection movement, gay rights movement, etc.

The political "revolution" in many aspects also includes the cultural "revolution" in rock music, sexual liberation, drug abuse, hippie culture, and the revival of mysticism and egotism.

Usually, people refer to the movement of radical young students who advocate the use of radical means to carry out social and political reforms as the "New Left Movement", while those who drop out of school in order to carry out cultural rebellion through drug abuse, indulgence, etc. are called "counterculture"

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This article does not intend to make a conceptual definition here. Let us refer to the resistance movements that occurred in the political and cultural fields in the 1960s as "counterculture movements."

This is first of all because dissatisfaction and criticism of mainstream culture and the existing system, sympathy for the situation of women and ethnic minorities, and the desire for peace are the common characteristics of these two movements, and they originate from

Same historical background.

Secondly, from the perspective of membership, it is difficult to clearly distinguish between the two.

Many participants in the counterculture movement were also members of the New Left movement.

On September 24, 1964, Mario Savio and Art Goldenberg, 22-year-old philosophy students at the University of California, Berkeley, initiated and led the campus “free speech” movement (

FreeSpeechMovement), protesting school authorities’ ban on talking about the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam War speech on campus.

From October 1st to 2nd, the California government dispatched the National Guard to stop the protests. Students and police faced off for 32 hours. Some student movement leaders were arrested. This was the beginning of the counterculture movement, which gradually spread to the United States.

Other institutions and places outside the school.

In 1968, the movement reached its climax with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and the escalating war in Vietnam.

At first glance, the counterculture movement has not yet ended. It has been continued by the multicultural movement that originated in American colleges and universities in the 1980s.

But in fact, as a resistance movement aimed at fighting for civil rights and anti-war, it ended with the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

Since then, the resistance movement has died down.

This is due, first of all, to the fact that, as far as the protest movement is concerned in the socio-political sphere, some of the goals of the movement have been achieved.

The United States withdrew its troops from Vietnam, and the anti-war movement ceased.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Equal Pay Act of 1963 were passed by Congress, as well as the proposal and implementation of the "Affirmative Action Plan" in 1965, which profoundly changed the social and political role of blacks and women in the United States.

position in life.

Although the black anti-racial struggle and the women's liberation movement continued thereafter, large-scale protests temporarily came to an end in the mid-1970s.

As far as resistance in the cultural field is concerned, as the hippies' resistance methods became increasingly radical, the movement gradually declined as it gradually lost broad support from society.

At the same time, the increasing age of participants in the counterculture movement is also one of the reasons why the resistance movement has calmed down.

By the mid-1970s, those born in the first year of the "baby boom" had reached the age of 30 and started families, and their attention began to turn to how to deal with pressure from work and family.

Wade Clark Roof noticed the role that the Cold War played in promoting the return of social thought to conservatism.

He believes that the Cold War confrontation not only inspired this large-scale resistance movement in the United States, but also prompted Americans to return to conservatism.

This is because the continuous escalation of the Cold War and a series of diplomatic failures by the United States have made many Americans feel that the democratic system on which the United States relies is being threatened. Stable family life is necessary for U.S. national security and is also

The primary condition for the United States to maintain its superiority over the Soviet Union during the Cold War.