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The Commodification of Love: Gandhi, King and 1960s Counterculture
by Alexander Bacha and Manu Bhagavan
[Originally from the book, War and Peace: Essays on Religion and Violence published by Anthem Press; this version is adapted from the copy on academa.edu]
Introduction
This essay explores why global revolutions ceased to utilize the politically transformative power of love after the activism of Gandhi and Martin Luther King by drawing connections between their religiously couched "ethic of love" and the secular capitalist commodification of 1960s hippie counterculture. Gandhi and King, utilizing their respective religious frameworks, practiced revolutionary techniques to make their opponents act in the interest of "selfless love," or agape in the Christian sense. By the association of hippie counterculture, however tangential, to this socially transformative power of love, corporate advertising during the 1960s effectively confused love of the agape and eros (erotic) varieties, hollowing out the term by the 1970s, and robbing love of its revolutionary potential. Our paper will be broken down into three parts: The first will discuss how Gandhi and King used the ethic of selfless love to revolutionary ends. The second will examine how the hippie counterculture of the 1960s was influenced and shaped by this ethic of love, and how, what Thomas Frank calls, "the rise of hip consumerism" (Frank 1997, iii) not only commodified hippie counterculture, but also commodified love as a political tool. Lastly, we will look at some political deployments of the ethic of love from the 1970s to the present, including the Chipko movement, or "treehuggers," an Indian environmentalist group that used Gandhian techniques to bring awareness to deforestation. Although successful in their activism, their "treehugger" moniker has become somewhat of a pejorative neologism for nature-loving environmentalists, and illuminates the ambiguity of contemporary activism based on an ethic of love.
Love and Revolutionary Power
In his famous tract Hind Swaraj, published in 1909, Mahatma Gandhi spelled out the principles of political action that would guide him, and the people of his region, for the decades to follow. While he would expand on these ideas over the years, modifying them in various ways, the ideas of Hind Swaraj remained largely intact, serving as the core of Gandhian philosophy and outlook. And this core, in turn, revolved around the key concept of love, which Gandhi asserts is the true, hidden hand guiding humanity's destiny.
Gandhi summed up his message with a four-point call to action: Indians must resist the English because it is their duty to do so, but not out of any animus towards English people; Indians must embrace "home-goods" (swadeshi) "in every sense"; and they must recognize that "real home-rule is self-rule or self-control." The way to exert this self-control is through "passive resistance," or "soul-force" or "love-force" (Gandhi 2003, 68-9).
Gandhi elaborates earlier in the work that while the force of arms represented one kind of force,
[t]he second kind of force can thus be stated; [sic] 'If you do not concede our demand, we shall be no longer your petitioners; we shall no longer have any dealings with you'. The force implied in this may be described as love-force, soul-force, or, more popularly but less accurately, passive resistance. This force is indestructible [...] The force of arms is powerless when matched against the force of love or the soul. (Gandhi 2003, 53)
Gandhi illustrates his case with a discussion of a gang of robbers, who multiply in an increasing cycle of violence when they are forcibly resisted. He contrasts this with the possibilities opened by embracing the robber with pity, which Gandhi uses synonymously with love here. The result is that the robber might repent his/her actions. While this may or may not come to pass, this second option at the very least is best for the heart and mind of the actor. But this is not, and is not meant to be, some semantic point. What Gandhi describes here is the very essence of what he would call satyagraha, a term that had been coined to represent his campaigns of change. Writing several years later, Gandhi first clarified that the "force denoted by the term 'passive resistance'[...] is not very accurately described either by the original English phrase or by its Hindi rendering [...] Its correct description is satyagraha." He continued "Satyagraha is pure soul-force [...] The soul is informed with knowledge. In it burns the flame of love. If someone gives us pain through ignorance, we shall win him through love [...] Non-violence is a dormant state. In the waking state, it is love. Ruled by love, the world goes on" (Gandhi 1917a, 9-10).
For Gandhi, famously, Love was Truth was God, so satyagraha was inherently a "religious" method. This did not mean that it was anchored to any one religion. Indeed, he always took pains to talk of the Truth and the satyagrahis in every religion, from Christ to Hussein at Karbala to various examples from Hindu traditions (Gandhi 1917a, 11-14; Gandhi 1917b, 6-9). Satyagraha was what might best be understood as pure, spiritual force. His early exposure to diverse religious traditions brought Gandhi into contact with the writings of Leo Tolstoy, whose The Kingdom of God is Within You, banned in Russia for its radical espousal of Christ's nonviolent resistance teachings as true gospel, so influenced young Gandhi that he named his South African community devoted to love, work and simple living Tolstoy Farm. Upon reading more of Tolstoy, Gandhi wrote, "I began to realize more and more the infinite possibilities of universal love" (Gandhi 1993, 160).
In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi broadens the argument to make the case that love is at the root of all that humans do. To underscore his point, Gandhi launches into a critique of Western notions of history, which, at that time, tended to focus solely on wars and the subsequent making and unmaking of rulers. Gandhi contends that "[h]istory [as an institutional inquiry as it was then understood in the West] is really a record of every interruption of the even working of the force of love or of the soul." Put another way, "[t]housands, indeed tens of thousands, depend for their existence on a very active working of this force [of love]. Little quarrels of millions of families in their daily lives disappear before the exercise of this force" (Gandhi 2003, 55).
Because all humans were bound together in love, Gandhi theorized that the political application of love involved those facing injustice enduring a form of suffering that made vivid the harm being caused by those perpetrating the injustice. The act of suffering would tug at the heartstrings of the perpetrators and turn them to better action. In the midst of the Civil Disobedience Movement and on the heels of his most famous campaign, the Salt Satyagraha, Gandhi wrote:
I know that people, who voluntarily undergo a course of suffering raise themselves and the whole of humanity, but I also know that people who become brutalized in their desperate efforts to get victory over their opponents or to exploit weaker nations or weaker men, not only drag down themselves, but mankind also [...] If we are all sons of the same God and partake of the same divine essence, we must partake of the sin of every person whether he belongs to us or to another race. You can understand how repugnant it must be to invoke the beast in any human being, how much more so in Englishmen, amongst whom I count numerous friends! (Gandhi 1931, 2-3)
Gandhi believed that all people had the potential for good, but many were caught up in systems and practices that were fundamentally unjust. Facing political injustice, groups of people practicing public disobedience would likely draw a fierce response. But in accepting that response willingly and making apparent the brutality inherent in such a relationship of inequality, Gandhi argued that the flame of love between the two opposing camps would be kindled, those doing harm regretting the acts they had committed.
Martin Luther King, Jr picked up on this philosophy and used what he called an "ethic of love" to achieve social change during the American civil rights movement. Much like his predecessor, who referred to hate as "the subtlest form of violence" (Gandhi 1934, 293), King realized that nonviolence proved inefficient and superficial if it did not stem from a deeper conviction in the power of love, writing that "[a]t the center of non-violence stands the principle of love [...] This can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives" (King 2010, 9). By identifying this subtle but troubling disconnect in the popular discourse of love and nonviolence, King continued Gandhi's legacy of not just using passive resistance, but going further to actively loving one's opponents. And much like the Mahatma, King drew centrally from the faith tradition most familiar and personal to him - in his case, Christianity - while still connecting his message to the basic underliers found in virtually all other traditions as well. In this way, King could address human difference while simultaneously preaching a sense of universalism, a combination with powerful politically motivating force. As King said himself, "Christ furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method" (Carson 1998, 67).
King notes that in the early days of the movement, the rhetoric of passive resistance and nonviolence was unheard of, replaced instead by the phrase "Christian love," and he flatly states that "[i]t was Jesus of Nazareth that stirred the Negroes to protest with the creative weapon of love" (King 2010, 67). Christ's teachings from the Sermon on the Mount, most notably his insistence on "loving thy enemies" and his indelible connection of God and love (to which, upon reading Gandhi, he would add "truth" as an equal corollary) drove King from his earliest days as a young preacher delivering sermons on the subject of love's role in all aspects of society. Here, King ran into opposition, particularly from members of the church. As Richard Lischer notes, "King's more spiritualized opponents argued that such love doesn't belong in the midst of nasty confrontations and shouldn't be used as a tool for social policy [...] In bringing love into the fray, King rejected the old law-gospel method of interpreting the Bible (and the world) and reasserted the pervasive influence of Jesus in secular society" (Lischer 1995, 214-15).
Furthermore, King's interpretation of Christ's teachings on the ethic of love stressed the connection of "words and action." Distilling Christ's messages of love, passivism and forgiveness was nothing terribly novel, but King succeeded in actualizing this philosophy on a grand scale by bonding this ethic of love with unrelenting social activism. King revered Christ's "ability to match words with actions," and lamented the fact that "men seldom bridge the gap between practice and profession, between doing and saying" (King 1963, 40). Accordingly, and of particular pertinence to this paper, it should be said that King in turn realized the danger of love coming off as saccharine and superficial: the problem of love rhetoric without a living ethic of love. King warned that "[t]he meaning of love is not to be confused with some sentimental outpouring. Love is something much deeper than emotional bosh" (1963, 52).
King first seriously encountered the philosophies of Gandhi at a lecture delivered by Dr Mordecai Johnson, the president of Howard University, in 1950, a time when King admitted to seriously doubting love's possibility for true social transformation. Evidently, hearing about Gandhi stirred him to the point where he purchased a half dozen books by or about the nonviolent revolutionary after the lecture (Carson 1998, 23). King was truly a student of Gandhi, whom he referred to as "inevitable" and "inescapable [...] if humanity is to progress," the "first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale" (King 1963, 67). In 1959, he visited India at the invitation of Prime Minister Nehru to, among other things, study nonviolence and civil disobedience. He even reputedly said to reporters at the airport, "[t]o other countries I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim" (Reddick 1959, 1), Later, in a speech he delivered on All India Radio, he added:
If this age is to survive, it must follow the way of love and nonviolence that he so nobly illustrated in his life. And Mahatma Gandhi may well be God's appeal to this generation, for in a day when sputniks and explorers dash through outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can win a war. Today, we no longer have a choice between violence and nonviolence; it is either nonviolence or nonexistence. (King 1959)
One of King's earliest experiences of using love as a weapon for social change came with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56, one of the given nominal historic starting points of the American civil rights movement. In brief, the boycott took place in response to the egregious injustice extant in the Jim Crow laws of Alabama's city bus system, and was sparked by the defiance of black women such as Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks. Days after Parks was arrested, King was elected to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association and, along with other leaders of the boycott, asked African Americans in the city of Montgomery to peacefully stop using the bus system until the discriminatory policies changed. Over a year later, on 20 December 1956, a federal court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that Alabama laws requiring buses to be segregated were unconstitutional. Amid the boycott, black activists were constantly intimidated and physically assaulted; King, as well as fellow organizer Ralph Abernathy, had their houses firebombed in the violence. Many African Americans reacted by taking up arms with the intention of retaliating against King's assailants, to which King calmly pleaded, "[w]e want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them and let them know you love them" (Carson 1988, 80). He continued a few weeks later in the New York Times: "Let no man pull you low enough to hate him. We must use the weapon of love. We must have compassion and understanding for those who hate us [...]" (Phillips, 1956). King promised his most hateful opponents that he and his allies would use this "creative force" to "match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering" (King 1963, 56). Again, he continued:
My personal trials have also taught me the value of unmerited suffering. As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways that I could respond to my situation: either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course. Recognizing the necessity for suffering I have tried to make of it a virtue [...] I have lived these last few years with the conviction that unearned suffering is redemptive. (1960, 1)
King gained much fame and notoriety with Montgomery, and further honed his philosophy and practice of reform through love with the formation and operation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957. The SCLC organized individual black churches into a collective nonviolent protest aimed at using nonviolence to overcome segregation throughout the south. One of the group's first major campaigns began when they joined other civil rights groups, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in an attempt to desegregate Albany, Georgia in 1961. King, along with many others, was arrested several times, and at one point called for a Day of Penance in the wake of reciprocated violence. After over a year of struggle, King left Albany, and the affair in and of itself is generally regarded as one of the least successful in the greater movement. The following year, King's involvement in the Birmingham Campaign fared much better, as he and fellow activists successfully brought national attention to the struggle that would play a huge role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Much of the effectiveness of the campaign came from the brutality of police under the leadership of Bull Connor, whose infamous use of dogs and fire hoses to assault peaceful black demonstrators shocked Americans when it was broadcast across the nation. When King was jailed in Alabama too, he penned the famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail," wherein he noted that while initially disappointed at being referred to as an extremist, he gladly accepted the role of acting as an "extremist for love" and encouraging as many people as possible to follow him in that extremism (King 1963, 1).
King continued to use love as a tool for social change throughout the 1960s, until his assassination in 1968. After leading the hugely famous March on Washington in 1963, and being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King saw the passage of both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965. The continued barbarism of southern whites during the Selma to Montgomery marches (the first of which came to be known as Bloody Sunday) further ossified King's goals and he appealed to the empathy of Americans in the same way he did in Birmingham. King remained equally committed to the ethic of love and nonviolent practice in Chicago, where he and protesters faced equal if not higher levels of resentment from civil rights opponents, King himself taking a brick to the face (Isserman and Kazin 2000, 200). Much of King's activism at the end of his life was also devoted to opposition to the Vietnam War, upon which issue he continued to espouse his relentless conviction in embracing an ethic of love. In his "Beyond Vietnam - Time to Break the Silence" speech in April of 1967, he remarked:
This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing - embracing and unconditional love for all mankind [...] Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate - ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love." "If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us." Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. (King 1967a)
Reinforcing how truly universal these principles were, he added: "When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of the force that which all the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life" (King 1967a). Months later, in his famous "Where Do We Go From Here" speech, he not only reinforced the inefficacy of shallow love, but also dismissed what he perceived as the mutual exclusivity of love and power:
One of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites - polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love [...] What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. (King 1967b)
Both Gandhi and King practiced agape, a type of love that can be defined as an uncompromising universal love, at once for both God and for one's fellow man. Agape assumes the solidarity of all of humanity through an active form of loving and, therefore, a responsibility to love even those that express extreme resistance towards this love. King was familiar with agape from its many associations with Christianity1, as the term first found wide usage in Christian theology as a reference to self-sacrifice, for both God and humanity. Indeed, it was not until its application in Christian texts that the term took on such divinity and universality as in the passage, "He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love" (1 John 4:8 KJV). King would articulate this best in his musings on the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Stride Toward Freedom:
Agape is not a weak, passive love. It is love in action. Agape is love seeking to preserve and create community. It is insistence on community even when one seeks to break it. Agape is a willingness to sacrifice in the interest of mutuality. Agape is a willingness to go to any length to restore community [...] He who works against community is working against the whole of creation. Therefore, if I respond to hate with a reciprocal hate I do nothing but intensify the cleavage in broken community. I can only close the gap in broken community by meeting hate with love [...] In the final analysis, agape means a recognition of the fact that all life is interrelated. All humanity is involved in a single process [...] If you harm me, you harm yourself. (King 1958, 105-6)
Let's Buy the World a Coke
In simpatico with the message of King and Gandhi was the larger counterculture of the 1960s, a disparate and fragmented nebula of actors against the postwar status quo that included everyone from hippies to political activists like the New Left and Black Panthers.2 While different groups held different priorities and methods, ranging from expanding consciousness to dismantling capitalism, all these movements were scored by an unprecedented deluge of popular music that sought wider social transformation, a spectrum that included diverse artists from Peter, Paul and Mary to MC5. Bob Dylan (somewhat unwillingly) became the poet/speaker of his generation with songs reflecting on the changing social climate and scathing protest songs like "Masters of War." Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and many others achieved massive success composing songs for young listeners that made music more social than ever; tens of thousands at a time gathered to festivals like Monterey Pop, Woodstock and a multitude of protests and "love-ins" where music played a key part. The revolutionary power of popular music peaked in the '60s in a way it had not before and has not since, as artists and songs mobilized listeners to shake the status quo, and no band got the word out more effectively than The Beatles. While the group never quite delivered the rich oeuvre of profound protest music that Bob Dylan produced, their devotion to motifs of peace and love, along with their staggering global omnipresence and popularity, hitched the socially transformative power of love to the vanguard of popular music.
An international cultural juggernaut the likes of which the world had never seen, the Fab Four launched American Beatlemania after their famous appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. From this impossibly high pedestal of popularity, The Beatles only became more famous throughout the 1960s. For the duration of the decade, The Beatles had a number one single for a total of 59 weeks and the number one LP for a total of 116 weeks. Or, more strikingly, The Beatles had a chart-topping song one out of every six weeks from 1964 to 1970, and a chart-topping album for one out of every three (Schaffner 1977, 216). Furthermore, The Beatles matched their quantifiable popularity with a truly revolutionary breadth of scope, becoming arguably the first pop band to engage on a proper world tour, visiting European countries as well as Japan, Australia and the Philippines. Their popularity also grew through infamy, particularly after a backlash against John Lennon's "more popular than Jesus" comments in 1966 erupted throughout the American south and heartland, as well as in countries like Mexico and South Africa. Though their audience only grew larger, the controversy ignited a strong opposition that greatly affected the direction in which their music would head, and the band gave their last commercial concert, often considered a key turning point in their career, later that year.
In 1967, The Beatles released their seminal album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a veritable sea change in the echelon of popular music that even exceeded their previous game-changing effort, Revolver. The two albums marked a transformation in the ways The Beatles would discuss the concept of love and their involvement with late-60s counterculture. It goes without saying that love had always been truly ubiquitous subject matter for The Beatles, but not all of this love was created equal. The Beatles began their careers playing what can be called more "sentimental love songs," centered on pleasurable, individual-oriented love, but as they matured as artists, the type of love contained within their songs matured as well. Take for example the refrain from their 1962 song "Love Me Do":
Love, love me do,
You know I love you,
I'll always be true,
So please, love me do.
Whoa, love me do.
Someone to love,
Somebody new,
Someone to love,
Someone like you.
Compare these lyrics to lyrics from Harrison's "Within You Without You" from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band:
We were talking - about the love we all could share - when we find it
To try our best to hold it there - with our love
With our love - we could save the world - if they only knew
Try to realize it's all within yourself
No one else can make you change
And to see you're really only very small
And life flows on within you and without you
Sgt. Pepper's served as a paradigm shift for The Beatles' involvement as the musical stewards of counterculture. As Jonathon Gould writes, the album "dramatically enlarged the possibilities and raised the expectations of what the experience of listening to popular music on record could be" (2007, 418). With this, The Beatles would not only become "the major tastemakers of hippiedom" (Jones 1967, 2), but would "revolutionize both the aesthetics and the economics of the record business in ways that far outstripped the carlier pop explosions triggered by the Elvis phenomenon of 1956 and the [British] Beatlemania phenomenon" (Gould 2007, 418). In addition to their music, the group itself revolutionized the concept of music celebrity, inspiring and captivating countercultural types around the world with their mounting fragmentation and publicized trip to Rishikesh in 1968. Indeed, many listeners even saw The Beatles not only as musical stewards but also as a means through which to navigate the social landscape. Adds P. David Marshall, "[b]ecause of their popularity, the Beatles were seen - and used - as beacons from which to understand the contemporary [...] [T]heir work and their lives became a journey of self-discovery through which their dispersed and massive Western audience vicariously traveled towards some inner truth about the group and contemporary existence itself" (Marshall 2000, 173).
Unfortunately, as the decade progressed, corporations caught on to the influence of The Beatles and their peers, as well as the purchasing power of the expanding countercultural market, and realized that there was money to be made "selling love." The media's homogenization of 1960s "counterculture," which by the end of the decade essentially became "a term referring to all 1960s-era political, social, or cultural dissent, encompassing any action from smoking pot at a rock concert to offing a cop" (Braunstein and Doyle 2001, 5), greatly facilitated the sale. In his excellent book What Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy, Edward P. Morgan discusses how the mass media has vilified, marginalized and, perhaps most importantly, simplified our understanding of the decade and its vital endeavors for enhanced democracy. Morgan concludes that "much of what passes for history in conventional thinking is actually the public memory preserved for us by the mass media" (2011, 7), and indeed, much of our "public memory" of the '60s passes by in the haze of generic mob militancy and pot-addled nude drum circles. Jocular sayings like "If you remember the '60s, you weren't really there" reinforce the image of the decade as a time of hedonistic revelry, wider public display of spoiled American youth refusing to grow up. Today, movies like Forrest Gump help provide this convenient spectacle by reinforcing the stereotypes of the '60s and stamping them as fact in public memory.
The media's power magnified missteps made by some musicians, hippies and other counterculturalists that blended various ideas and ideologies together in often contradictory or nonsensical ways. For instance, if The Beatles' music was seen as one body of work, the individualistic love of "Love Me Do" and the universalistic, selfless love of "Within You Without You" were easily equated.3 Put another way, such confusion compromised the potential of political love by conjoining the agape and eros types, rendering both banal and apolitical, divorcing agape from a revolutionary history articulated by the likes of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King. As explained earlier in this chapter, agape is a universal love, a self-sacrificing love that, as Erich Fromm describes it, is more "faculty" than object. Eros, on the other hand, is the love of romantic passion and sexual desire, where the object of romantic love becomes the singular focus. In fact, the "quality" of the eros type of love is directly proportionate to its very exclusivity - the love's intensity is proven when "they do not love anybody except the 'loved' person" (Fromm 1956, 42-3). Hippie counterculture, from its love-ins to its insistence on "making (sexual) love and not war," greatly muddled the separate understandings of agape and eros, forming a well-meaning but vague amalgam that was at once antiwar and hedonistic, omnipresent yet selfishly egoistic. The schizophrenic nature of the message made it pliant, and the increasing cultural popularity of the hippies made this message extremely vulnerable to manipulation.
Accordingly, the media distilled counterculture as a whole into simplified and singular images surrounding the vague ideas of peace, love and general hippiedom. As a 1967 Time Magazine cover story pronounced in a somewhat patronizing tone, "[h]ippies preach altruism and mysticism, honesty, joy and nonviolence. They find an almost childish fascination in beads, blossoms and bells, blinding strobe lights and ear-shattering music, exotic clothing and erotic slogans. Their professed aim is nothing less than the subversion of Western society by 'flower power' and force of example" (Jones 1967, 3). Consequently, the corporate world began to envision and transform the hippie counterculture, replete with peace signs, flowers and doves, into what philosopher Guy Debord referred to as "spectacle." In 1967, Debord released The Society of the Spectacle, a Marxist tract that, among other agendas, attempted to expand Marx's reification theory by expanding the idea of autonomous commodities across society to include the images produced by the mass media, wherein the "spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images" (Debord 1995 [1967], 6). Hereby, individuals could buy into being participants in this counterculture through their consumption of anything from psychedelic pop songs to cosmetics to soft drinks.
As the media established a simplified, cohesive narrative of the counterculture, corporate interests could use these simplified images and ideas to employ entirely new tactics in the world of product marketing. Beginning in the 1960s, marketing strategies transformed from appealing to the consumer's desire to run with the status quo to engaging their desires to be nonconforming individuals. By capitalizing on the rebelliousness of the counterculture, as well as the "peace and love" images that were often associated with it, corporations and advertising companies changed alongside American youth. If one wanted to purchase a car, one could buy the Dodge Rebellion or the Pontiac Secession to reinforce one's commitment to running (or driving) against the grain. Love cosmetics, clad in psychedelic flowers, hearts and birds, appealed to women as the "anticosmetics," and used the image of young, free-spirited women to sell no-nonsense makeup that enhanced natural beauty. In both cases, the consequences came not so much from impressionable youth culture buying the products as it did from corporations using these images to establish a connection between counterculture (and one of their raison d'etres, love) and commodity. As Thomas Frank described the onslaught:
Business dogged the counterculture with a fake counterculture, a commercial replica that seemed to ape its every move for the titillation of the TV-watching millions and the nation's corporate sponsors. Every rock band with substantial following was immediately honored with a host of imitators; the 1967 "summer of love" was as much a product of lascivious television specials and Life magazine stories as it was an expression of youthful satisfaction [...]. (Frank 1997, 7)
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the "Cola Wars" of the 1960s. Taking advantage of Coca-Cola's established place as an all-American (and therefore "square" and outdated) soft drink, Pepsi crafted a means to increase their market share by appealing to youth counterculture, what they deemed the Pepsi Generation, though they skillfully labeled youth "an attitude toward living - and particularly consuming - rather than a specific age group" (Frank 1997, 171). As Coca-Cola refused to use rock 'n' roll music in their ads in the early 1960s, seemingly ossifying their "square" stance, Pepsi jumped onboard the countercultural wagon, first with Monkees-esque visuals in the mid-60s and then with more psychedelic tones after "1967". After the violence of 1968, Pepsi made it a point to stick predominantly to images of long hair and flowers as opposed to anything that would suggest more serious radicalism, and toned down their youthful intensity to reflect their championing of cultural dissent but not political dissent. Slowly creeping towards the center from its place on the cultural right, Coca-Cola responded by launching the "It's the Real Thing" campaign in 1969, stressing authenticity in a world replete with plastic images.
The commodification of love crescendoed when the "It's the Real Thing" campaign birthed the "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke" ad in 1971. Coca-Cola's televised "Hilltop Ad" is a grandiose example of the marriage of consumer product allegiance and manufactured popular music used to sell the concept of an international ethic of love. The commercial, which was released in several iterations, shows a multicultural collection of "countercultural types" assembled on a bucolic hilltop, praising Coke as a means of achieving love and peace across the globe:
I'd like to buy the world a home and furnish it with love,
Grow apple trees and honey bees and snow white turtle doves.
I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony,
I'd like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company...
It's the real thing, Coke is what the world wants today.4
Coca-Cola's campaign continued to praise the product's authenticity, but also sought to assuage the climate of dissent amid the Vietnam War protest by using a folk-rock jingle to portray "multicultural harmony [...] peace and love under the aegis of the universal product" (Frank 1997, 179). The commercial became a huge hit, the song itself being rerecorded by the band The New Seekers to enable it to climb the pop charts. Bill Backer, who devised the campaign, elaborated on the commercial's message of international harmony: "[I] began to see a bottle of Coca-Cola as more than a drink [...] [I] began to see the familiar words, 'Let's have a Coke,' as [...] actually a subtle way of saying, 'Let's keep each other company for a little while.' And [I] knew they were being said all over the world [...]" (Backer n.d., 1).
The End of Imagine-ation
The idea of love was central to social justice movements prior to the 1970s. As the 1970s unfolded, however, commodification transformed the 1960s and love itself into terms of naivety in the spheres of politics. Currents of thought in the '70s began to interpret the activism of the "60s as a series of mistakes, the exigencies of a spoiled and naive generation. The Los Angeles Times expressed their disappointment in the inefficacy of the previous decade only two days into the new one, and prophesized a more pragmatic future: "Hardly anybody now shares the naïve faith in the glorious future that caused the last decade to be prebaptised the Soaring Sixties. The seventies, partially because of the misplaced confidence of what seems only yesterday, shape up as, at best, a decade of sorting out" (Kroft 1970, A7). As Todd Gitlin eloquently puts it, "it was time to go straight, from marijuana to white wine, from hip communes to summers on Cape Cod [...] Imperceptibly, the Sixties slid into the Seventies, and the zeitgeist settled down" (Gitlin 1987, 423).
Commodification pushed love out of the realm of politics and into the realm of consumption by driving a wedge between the public and private spheres. Or, as Habermas notes in his seminal work on the subject, "[i]n proportion to the increasing buying power of the broad masses, the public costs of private production were complemented by the public costs of private consumption" (Habermas 2001, 147). This certainly happened within the United States during the '70s and '80s, but that by no means limited the effect of this consumption on the rest of the world. By the '70s (though certainly earlier in many places), American military power was reinforced by the soft power of American cultural influence, extending American hegemony to the far corners of the globe, from Latin America to Europe, from the Middle East to India, giving birth to terms like "Coca-colonialism." American reach ensured that corporate messaging, commodifying the ideals of the '60s and emptying them of meaning and power, held sway in many parts of the world.
The success of such messaging is seen in a number of subsequent critiques that have observed the removal of love from the language of politics. Nick Southall notes that "[c]apitalist culture has purged political conceptions of love from language. Love has been corrupted by religious and romantic fantasies, it has been enclosed within the couple or the family, within narrow notions, as love of the same, love of those closest to you, love of a god, the race or the nation" (2010, 1). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri echo this sentiment in Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire:
People today seem to be unable to understand love as a political concept, but a concept of love is just what we need to grasp the constituent power of the multitude. The modern concept of love is almost exclusively limited to the bourgeois couple and the claustrophobic confines of the nuclear family. Love has become a strictly private affair. We need a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love. We need to recuperate the public and political conception of love common to premodern traditions [...] We need to recover today this material and political sense of love, a love as strong as death. This does not mean you cannot love your spouse, your mother, and your child. It only means that your love does not end there, that love serves as the basis for our political projects in common and the construction of a new society. Without this love, we are nothing. (Hardt and Negri 2004, 351-2)
The commodification of ideas like love was not accidental. In 1975 the Trilateral Commission, a nongovernmental political and economic group founded by David Rockerfeller that included members from the United States, Western Europe and Japan, released a report detailing what they called the "excesses of democracy" of the 1960s. The report, entitled "Crisis of Democracy," highlighted the failures and dangers of an abundance and plurality of activism in relation to the stability of individual Western governments and the stability of Western hegemony in the world. "The arenas where democratic procedures are appropriate, in short, are limited," the report concluded, noting that democracy in the '60s had spread to institutions where "it can, in the long run, only frustrate the purposes of those institutions." Consequently the report advocated that the authoritativeness of the federal government be restored through more "apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups" (Crozier, Huntington et al. 1975, 113-14).
John Lennon continued to fight for his ideals outside of the musical realm, but only bought further into the very processes of commodification that were undermining his goals. He commented in 1969 that he and Yoko Ono, in their "bed-in" at the Amsterdam Hilton, were "doing a commercial for peace on the front pages of newspapers around the world instead of a commercial for war [...] We're trying to sell peace, like a product, and sell it like people sell soap or soft drinks" (Gould 2007, 551).
By 1980, the hope and idealism of the '60s were all but dead. Weeks before his death on 8 December of that year, Lennon caught on to the jadedness and antagonism towards the movements of the '60s and futilely rallied against such cynicism:
The media are saying that the 60's were stupid and naïve [...] but look at how much of what was sniggered about in the 60's has become mainstream - health food, therapies and all the rest. And love and peace weren't invented in the 60's. What about Gandhi? What about Christ? The naivete is to buy the idea that the 60's were naive. (Palmer 1980)
Many of the obituaries for Lennon, while certainly mournful of the death of the legendary artist, exposed the degree to which the media, by 1980, viewed the aspirations of the 1960s as glib and immature. The Anchorage Daily News admitted that "the idealism of the period now seems naïve"; the New York Times added that "the nation is tired of Great Society rhetoric" (Campbell 1980, B4), The Sarasota Herald-Tribune concluded, fairly tastelessly, that "[w]e have been reaping the harvest sown from 1965 to 1975, and perhaps the violent death of a rock star who helped define that era [...] provides a particularly poignant and final epitaph" (Phillips 1981, 7A).
Like the Trilateral Commission, conservatives eschewed the "movement" (often brushed off with such quotation marks) as regretful and hopelessly ineffective, lamenting that even in the late '70s, 'people couldn't learn from their mistakes.' By 1980, they were publishing stories highlighting the impossibility of world peace, due to lack of a common framework of understanding (Kearns 1982). Meanwhile, The Beatles, the musical standard-bearers of the ethic of the '60s, experienced sluggish chart performance throughout the "80s and well into the 90s. Writing about Beatles-as-commodity, James M. Decker notes that the "Reaganite economic and social policies had been in place for nearly eleven years, and thousands of homeless poignantly reminded the nation that love is not all you need. In such a context, the Beatles' overt message of peace and love became positively naïve" (Decker 2006, 186). The polling of Americans during the 1980s also reflected more militant and "realistic" approaches to international policy and generally dismissed the love-based activism of the tumultuous era. A 1986 poll found that only 74 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of Martin Luther King, which is lower than one would expect, considering it was the same year his birthday was made into a national holiday (People, The Press, and Politics Poll 1987). Similarly, a poll asking respondents if the antiwar protests of the 1960s influenced US foreign policy revealed that only 54 percent thought that the peace movements fomented change, and another poll found that in 1983 72 percent of Americans believed that they should support their country in wartime, even if they believed that its actions were wrong (New York Times Poll 1983). In this "culture and politics of consumption," David Burner notes the inchoate goals espoused by
the Reagan-Bush administrations of, "ridiculing environmentalists [...] and supporting militarism [...]" fostered in the American public a self-satisfied detachment, one that occluded domestic sacrifice and accountability for violence abroad by persuading Americans to, "enjoy the fight, as spectators pretending to be participants" (Burner 1996, 222).
We find many examples of the marginalized efficacy of deployments of love in political movements in the 1970s and 1980s as well. One such example is the Gandhian Chipko movement, a group of activists who were using the power of love for social change, only for their nickname and mission statement to be marginalized after the fact by a society inundated with cheapened images of love. Starting in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, the Chipko movement, almost exclusively female, used a Gandhian "ethic of love" (that is, the selfless, universalistic agape variety) to bring attention to the rapid deforestation occurring in the region by staging a nonviolent protest and literally hugging the trees they sought to protect. Chipko was largely successful in their own time because, even up to 1980, there was no real omnipotent media saturation in India as a whole, and especially not much in their specific, nonurban region. Initially secluded from the media's commodifying messaging, Chipko was able to utilize the political power of love successfully. However, the increasingly pejorative slant to their moniker "tree hugger" tarnished their loving methodology and damaged the potential for future ecological groups to utilize their tactics and be taken seriously. From the early 1980s, "tree hugger" would begin appearing in Western media as a term for an individual who felt too much for the environment. In 1983 Anne Burford, chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, was asked to resign from her post, and later blamed her departure on her not being enough of a tree hugger. Burford commented, "I kept being asked, 'How do you feel about the environment?' I feel about my husband, I feel about my children, I try to think about the environment [...] The eastern press corps demands that you be emotive about the environment" (Darst 1985). Her attitude towards the environment, antithetical to that of the Chipko, demonstrated in the arena of environmentalism the extent to which the concept of love had been eradicated from political discourse in favor of a more "pragmatic" approach to successfll reform.
Likewise, the increased popularity particularly in the West of Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, has led to his cultural consumption by millions of followers and also precipitated his inefficacy in the political arena. As the incarnation of the Buddha of Compassion, and as someone greatly influenced by Gandhi, there seem fewer people more qualified to promulgate an ethic of love than the current Dalai Lama. Establishing a Tibetan government in exile in India in 1959, the Dalai Lama's political philosophies greatly mirrored those of Gandhi, encapsulating such love ethic credos as "The enemy is the evil which men do [...] not the men themselves" (Puri 2002, 3501). Like Gandhi and King, the Dalai Lama established a universal appeal to his spiritual politics by engaging other religious leaders in interfaith dialogues about peace and religious harmony.
However, as Bharati Puri has noted, the stance of the Dalai Lama in regards to Tibet began to shift around 1978, his goals changing from independence to "compromise and negotiated settlement": "In this period, the Dalai Lama has been mobilizing western public opinion through the western media, while Tibetan popular opinion has taken the backseat" (Puri 2002, 3502). Throughout the 1980s and especially after he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, the Dalai Lama's cultural popularity soared, and an acute lack of political traction followed. Worldwide celebrity through the auspices of Western culture led to bestselling books and, later, even an Apple ad challenging consumers to "Think Different." As Brendan O'Neill rebuked in the Guardian, "[d]espite the fact that he advertises Apple, guest-edits Vogue and drives a Land Rover, he is held up as evidence that living the simple eastern life is preferable to, in the words of Philip Rawson, Westerners' 'gradually more pointless pursuit of material satisfactions.' Just as earlier generations of disillusioned aristocrats fell in love with a fictional version of Tibet (Shangri-La), so contemporary un-progressives idolize a fictional image of the Dalai Lama" (O'Neill 2008),
Conclusion
While the idea of love was used in the early and mid-twentieth centuries to empower social justice campaigns and movements, exemplified by those led by Gandhi and King, it ceased to be politically effective in the 1960s. (Well intentioned) countercultural forces in the United States confused selfless and individualistic love. Some of the leading proponents of love (here the kind is unspecified and vague) were themselves mega-brands like The Beatles and, even in advocating love, linked it to the selling of music or the furthering of their own brand. Campaigns to sell other products such as Coca-Cola latched on to '60s counterculture as a marketing tool, erasing the nuance of political intent from symbols now recast as hallmarks of particular products. The commodification of love coincided with a concerted effort to push back against "60s excess," and to reassert the old political order. American cultural influence helped to ensure that this message held a hegemonic position globally. While champions of selfless, political love continued to emerge in the '70s and on into the '80s, they found a landscape resistant to their message, bereft of the power of dreams, and cynical.
And yet the anomalous case of Nelson Mandela reveals that the ethic of a selfless, universalizing love remains able to touch human hearts and transform political scenarios. After his trial and subsequent 27-year imprisonment in 1964, idealization of Mandela became a global phenomenon. Mandela described the creation of a free and democratic society, "an ideal for which I am prepared to die" (Smith 2010, 354), and when he was released from prison in 1991, his weathered face illustrated the "suffering" of love that Gandhi and King similarly endured for their respective causes. After his release, people quickly and passionately embraced Mandela's methods for social change, which he would later describe in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom: "No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite" (Mandela 1994, 622).
Notes
1. King wrote his doctoral dissertation on Christian existentialist philosopher Paul Tillich, who called the love-force of agape, "the only sure guide to ethics in a changing world" (Rossinow 1998, 67).
2. Doug Rossinow links the ecclesiastical roots of love in both the civil rights movement and sixties counterculture, noting "Love was the most distinctively Christian theme of all [...] a crucial theme of both the civil rights movement and, later on, the new left and the counterculture" (Rossinow 1998, 83).
3. For a more in-depth look at the role of musicians and society in the sixties, see Gitlin, 195-221.
4. See "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke Commercial - 1971," http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2msbfN81Gm0; "Coca-Cola '70s Christmas Hilltop Commercial" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zCsFvVg0UY (accessed 20 December 2012)
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