Kumar notes that the 1960s counter-culture set itself against everything in modernism: “Pop art and pop music, the ‘new wave’ in cinema and the ‘new novel’ in literature, thne elision of the boundaries between ‘art’ and ‘life,’ the cultivation of sensibility through sex and drugs rather than aesthetic contemplation of intellectual study, the elevation of the claims of the ‘pleasure principle’ over those of the ‘reality principle’: in all these ways the counter-culture assailed what it saw as the elitist, esoteric and autocratic world of modernism.”
Postmodernism today is the product of what Thomas Frank called the “conquest of cool,” the cooptation of counter-culture by capitalists (which, Frank shows, was the story of the counter-culture from the beginning).
Peter Leithart
Peter J. Leithart is President of Theopolis Institute. He is the author of numerous books on theology, literature, and culture, including Theopolitan, Defending Constantine, and Baptized Body.
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