Hip, cool, and woke

I got a BA in English before I got my MA in psychology, and I’ve always been fascinated by language. I learned that languages are – other than dead languages like Latin –  living things that evolve over time, to capture meaning and convey information. So,  my first point is that “hip,” “cool,” and “woke” are just words, with meanings that vary from person to person. What’s cool to you might not be cool to me.  But in my experience, many people use hip and cool interchangeably, and apply the term hip to places like coffee shops and to things that can be bought, like clothes or haircuts. This is a significant departure from the original  meaning, in which hip is a state of mind.

Cool is in the eye of the beholder, and it applies to people, places, things and actions: you can eat at a cool tavern, with cool friends, wearing cool clothes, and listening to cool jazz. Cool fads come and go, and the cachet of cool is used to move a lot of merchandise. Things can be made to seem cool by marketers and influencers. Certain things cannot be cool, like prisons.

Hip can’t be bought or rented or worn or inhabited, although marketers have used the word as an adjective, to be applied to this destination or that product. In its original meaning, hip can only be applied to persons. Dialectically speaking, you either are or are not hip – but it can also be seen as existing along a continuum. A synonym for hip is “aware,” as in “hip to what’s goin’ down.” “I’m hip” doesn’t  mean the same thing as “I’m cool”; it means “I understand.” To be hip is to be in the know, to see what un-hip people don’t see. Hip originated in Black dialect, because people of color tend to be aware of things that the majority of white people are blind to – as I once was. If you were hip, you kept your eye on what The Man was up to.

I wasn’t truly hip to American racism until, as an Army lieutenant, I attended the Defense Race Relations Institute (DRRI), to be trained as a race relations education officer. Sure, I had been aware of some aspects of racism before then. I knew that people of color were frequently discriminated against. Although I ‘d had Black classmates and teachers at the international school I’d attended in Vienna, my Georgia high school didn’t integrate racially until my Junior year. I hated racism and thought I was pretty well-informed about it.

But it wasn’t until my immersion in race relations education at the DRRI that I truly became “hip to what’s goin’ down” in America. Not only did I learn from classroom instruction, but in late night discussions in the barracks with brown- and black-skinned classmates (as well as a few Asians and Native Americans), who talked frankly about their own life experiences. We were the pilot class at the DRRI, and we felt a sense of brotherhood and trust. I became hip to the reality that white people live in a different America than people of color. I began to see things that I had been blind to.

Just as religious people can be guilty of “holier-than-thou” attitudes, it’s possible to fall into “hipper-than-thou” judgments. Hipness is perhaps best viewed as existing along a continuum, and where you place yourself on the Hipness Scale may not be where other hip people would place you. But it’s not a contest.

The concept of hipness seeped into white consciousness via the so-called Beat Generation, especially through the writings of Jack Kerouac. (He wrote that his definition of hip was someone who could score drugs in a foreign country.) The Beat Generation had a great influence on the Baby Boomer generation, and hipness was so central to the youth rebellion of the sixties that the long-haired, tie-dyed cultural rebels became known in the media as hippies. Not all of them liked the term, but the so-called hippies prided themselves in “knowin’ what’s goin’ down” and “dropping out”  of conventional society. They kept their eyes on what The Man was up to.

Playwright Lorraine Hansberry wrote, “There are no “squares” . . . Everyone is his own hipster.” What she meant by hipster was something entirely different from the contemporary meaning of the word, as I understand it. These days hipster seems to describe a style or a lifestyle and, to me, more resembles “cool” than the original meaning of hip. Perhaps the word “woke” is the contemporary analog of “hip to what’s goin’ down,” with a side of political correctness.

What the hippies got right

I didn’t attend Woodstock – I was in ROTC summer camp at Fort Bragg – and never made a pilgrimage to Haight-Ashbury, but there was a time in my life when I considered myself a citizen of the Woodstock Nation. Recently, looking over my faded and dog-eared copy of one of the Whole Earth Catalog editions that came out in the sixties and early seventies, I reflected on what the hippies got right.

Each Whole Earth cover displayed that first iconic image of Earth seen from space and bore the subtitle “access  to tools.” The series was like a Sears & Roebuck catalog (ask your grandparents) of resources for alternative lifestyles, with all you needed to know about guides to living off the land, healthy lifestyles, sustainable energy, spiritual development, affordable shelter – including geodesic domes – and anything else you might need to drop out and start a farming commune. In retrospect I see the Whole Earth Catalog as the Bible of the hippie ethos. I had never heard about ecology or the benefits of meditation until I read the catalogs, and editor Stewart Brand became one of my primary culture heroes. Steve Jobs described the catalogs as a predecessor of the World Wide Web.

I came to hippiedom long after the funeral for the movement had been held in San Francisco, and five years after Woodstock. I’d been a Citadel cadet during the Summer of Love and an Army officer until 1974. But in grad school I grew my first beard, let my hair grow out to shoulder length, and rebelled (culturally, at least) against The Establishment for a few years. But once I had my degree and was starting my career I decided, like so many of the idealistic flower children of my generation, to drop the costume and the self-indulgences of the movement and “join the System to change it from within.”

Hippies were essentially a media invention to explain a very real generational rebellion. I expect  that when most people who never identified with the movement think about it, they think about long hair , tie dyed clothes, drugs and free love. But those were only the outer trappings. Some of the hippest folks I knew in the day dressed conventionally, and didn’t do drugs or sleep around. True hipness is a state of mind, not a conformity to unconventional dress and habits. Most hippies believed that marijuana should be legalized, long before the mainstream became tolerant of its use and recognized its medicinal benefits. Free love never went mainstream, but I think the hippies’ tolerance for sexualities other than heterosexuality was influential in the gradual mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ persons. And hippies were part of the core of early feminists.

When I look at certain positive trends in the 21st century, I see their origins in the hippie counterculture. The notion that we should question authority and conformity has proliferated in my lifetime. Unconventional hairstyles are no longer “freak flags” that brand the wearer a presumed pot-smoking anarchist; they’re simply preferences in style. The hippies challenged the idea that being “normal” (conventional) was a virtue. I think that the “Rainbow Tribe” view of mankind – tolerance for people who don’t necessarily look like you or act like the majority acts – has endured and spread within our culture.

The whole Green Movement, everything from organic farming, recycling and composting, to renewable energy got its initial momentum from the Whole Earth crowd. The hippies promoted the notion of the Earth as our mother – or alternately as Spaceship Earth, on whose life support system we all ultimately depend. “You are what you eat” was a hippie mantra. Hippies were ridiculed as granola eaters and “health food nuts,” but now we have public service campaigns about healthy diets, and detailed nutritional information is printed on the packaging of most processed foods, to help us make better choices. Granola, yogurt and tofu have gone mainstream, and vegetarians/vegans are no longer regarded as weirdos.

Hippie resources like the Whole Earth Catalog introduced many of my generation to yoga and other forms of meditation. What we called living in the here-and-now is now widely known as mindfulness. Such practices have been scientifically validated as activities that promote wellness, and have become mainstays of behavioral medicine. Now yoga and meditation have gone mainstream.

The hippie ethos was a rejection of the unquestioning conventionality of the post-war era and an embrace of new possibilities. Some of its seeds have taken root in the wider culture and flowered, helping to cultivate more tolerant, free-thinking, health-minded, and environmentally conscious Americans.