This is to be an unreasonable diatribe. I am so through with fair play and broadmindedness – these pansy New Testament stumbling blocks only prevent us from expressing what we feel. Let us emancipate ourselves; let us be unpleasant. And in this spirit of anti-Buddhist invective I shall align my prey: hippies. Fucking hippies.
The saving grace of this dwindling tribe – India is one of its last remaining habitats, despite my own sincere efforts towards cultural genocide – is that they are easily recognizable. Bangle-crap, bead-things, ‘ethnic’ shawls, circus-like pyjama bottoms, dreadlocks or some other form of hair torture, strong whiffs of hash and a refined stench of month-long, hard-won body odor – all this and more differentiates the hippy from the more reasonable traveller. It is a uniform, a code, a shorthand whereby they can broadcast their vocation in life (if you can call it that) and attract others of their kind toward them for cheap drugs and inane conversation.
Do they wear this sort of thing at home? Most of them not – unless, of course, they live in California. As soon as they arrive back home in London or New York or Paris or Tel Aviv, they put their jeans back on, take a shower, bin their bangles and start writing up job applications. I can’t help but find this inconsistency and the attitude behind it arrogant, insulting even – that at home you must dress and maintain yourself according to some standard or norm, but that in the ‘third world’ you can smell all you like and dress however the hell you want; because, hey, you’re only going to be judged by little natives and their opinion doesn’t actually matter. That this isn’t much appreciated by said ‘natives’ is hinted at by the name used by Tibetans here to refer to hippies, which translates as ‘street dogs’.
So, for most hippies, the neat and absolute separation between home and ‘there’ is spelt out sartorially. ‘There’ has a liminal, carnivalesque function; it is a suspension from mundane, normal life, felt as a state of frenzy from which one wakes with a dull headache and a curious sense of stolen dignity. In this bardo (the Tibetan Buddhist notion of the finite stage through which souls must travel before reincarnation) the soul is purged of its workaday impurities and life appears clearer: seen from a distance, with the jigsaw pieces snugly snapping together. Only life isn’t seen more clearly: it is seen through a kaleidoscope, a mess of fat splinters you dread having to sweep up when you get back home. It is a postponement of life’s problems, not a quick-fix, do-it-yourself, ten-step-plan solution as many dream it be when they say, ‘if only I could go to India for six months I could really get my shit together’. These people are not going to get their ‘shit’ together. And their ‘shit’ probably isn’t worth gathering into one pile anyhow.
But I do not intend to be discouraging in all this; far from it. Go, travel, see the world, now. It is an exciting, formative and (although I use the word cautiously) enlightening experience. Above all travel is a learning process, about the world and your ability to handle it. It is about meeting people and seeing places that exist fully outside yourself. I only regret that the culture of therapy, imported from America and quickly pervading Britain, has reduced travel to a masturbatory self-help exercise, akin to yoga or a carrot juice diet. This demeans travel, turns into another facet of our self-gratifying, me-centric worship of ‘potential’ (such a ghastly word), which reifies the self above its surroundings, when the hierarchy should be inverted: the conscientious traveller learns to exercise a religious sense of humility before foreign landscapes. Because if travel teaches you anything, it is that you are very, very small and so, so insignificant. And this should be felt as a gain rather than a loss; your ‘shit’ really doesn’t matter shit after all.
Anyhow, back to hippies. In this critique so far I have left out a sub-species separate from the charas-toking reprobate: the White Messiah, who travels long distances to do Good on the behalf of helpless brown people the world over. Some might argue that the White Messiah is not a true hippy, as he or she tends to have a rather well-scrubbed, private school demeanour and takes seriously the prospect of a future career. A fair few of these can be seen wandering around here in McLeod Ganj – in many respects another Asian backpacker Mecca where earnest, privileged young white people can play at real life. (Perhaps I’m being unkind; I myself am a privileged young white person playing at real life, although I like to think I’m beyond earnestness.)
This breed of untermensch youth – and they tend to be of immediately post-school or student age – was lampooned expertly by the ‘Gap Yah’ sketch, that YouTube phenomenon which was funny in the week before it went viral and every last idiot started quoting it. Are these types honest-to-god hippies? I would argue that they are, in that they share a view of the ‘third world’ as a postcolonial playground – in this case more of a finishing school – for them to stomp around in before they start ‘serious’ life in the ‘real’ world. The ‘East’ is once again that liminal space, only this time it has a more limited shelf-life of a year or so. For the White Messiah, impermanence is key.
Both this and the more conventional (oh the irony) hippy tend to stay in one ‘third world’ locale for an extended period, the former engaged in some worthy project – building loos, saving whales, enriching ex-military volunteer agency operators – the latter doing nothing zealously. As a result both manage to cultivate a familiarity with their surroundings, and evince an easy confidence in their day-to-day doings in an alien culture. They can be seen chatting casually with the locals – and sometimes dating them, particularly here with the ubiquitous Tibetan male/ white female relationships – while casually dispensing sentences in the native language. They often appear to have crossed that misty divide that separates the casual tourist from the places he or she tours. But on questioning them on matters of, say, Indian politics or history, they turn out the most trite generalisations and platitudes. India, the land of religious transcendence; Tibet, the lost land of Arcadian peace; their native country, a spiritual vacuum from which they have escaped by the hem of their patterned pyjamas. In all this their thought is little more sophisticated than that of the average Eastbourne pensioner.
But of course I’m generalising, and being rather rude. They’re sometimes quite nice, these people I’m rubbishing, and they probably wouldn’t do the same to me. Nevertheless I’m trying to make a serious point. Indulgence is all very well – and a staple of the free, liberal lifestyle we all prize (though sometimes secretly) in the West – but when dressed up as virtue it becomes obnoxious. This attempt to ‘escape’ Western consumerism and ‘embrace’ the East isn’t really an escape at all, but an extension of Western consumerism – that mode of life which upholds choice as the highest moral imperative. Benjamin Disraeli once said, referring to colonial endeavour, that ‘the East is a career’. Nowadays, in our nominally post-colonial age, the East has become a lifestyle choice, an option among many such as born-again Christianity and environmentalism (ironically the ultimate example of consumer lifestyle fetishism). The ‘East’, that artificial yet tangible crucible of transcendental religions and colourful festivals, is a commodity of difference ready to be consumed by the Western traveller, provided he or she has suitable resources of time and money.
Once again, I don’t mean to be a spoilsport. I’m not suggesting for a moment that these friendly (if credulous) types pack off back home and stop having their fun – or that you shouldn’t go and follow them; by all means, do. My modest proposal is that they drop the pretension and accept that what they’re doing is a pleasurable, indulgent but for the most part harmless and healthy diversion from normal life, not a heroic act of defiance against spiritual vacuity nor a break-out from the chains of late global capitalism. Relax, enjoy yourselves, but leave off with the worthiness. Then I’ll stop writing sardonic things about you. Promise.
If I have offended anyone in writing this, it is only because I am another tiresomely prevalent traveller type: the know-it-all, scholar-backpacker cynic, who looks on the passing landscape beneath an arched eyebrow. This I could also blog about – in the future, maybe, possibly, if I care sufficiently. Bye for now.
The saving grace of this dwindling tribe – India is one of its last remaining habitats, despite my own sincere efforts towards cultural genocide – is that they are easily recognizable. Bangle-crap, bead-things, ‘ethnic’ shawls, circus-like pyjama bottoms, dreadlocks or some other form of hair torture, strong whiffs of hash and a refined stench of month-long, hard-won body odor – all this and more differentiates the hippy from the more reasonable traveller. It is a uniform, a code, a shorthand whereby they can broadcast their vocation in life (if you can call it that) and attract others of their kind toward them for cheap drugs and inane conversation.
Do they wear this sort of thing at home? Most of them not – unless, of course, they live in California. As soon as they arrive back home in London or New York or Paris or Tel Aviv, they put their jeans back on, take a shower, bin their bangles and start writing up job applications. I can’t help but find this inconsistency and the attitude behind it arrogant, insulting even – that at home you must dress and maintain yourself according to some standard or norm, but that in the ‘third world’ you can smell all you like and dress however the hell you want; because, hey, you’re only going to be judged by little natives and their opinion doesn’t actually matter. That this isn’t much appreciated by said ‘natives’ is hinted at by the name used by Tibetans here to refer to hippies, which translates as ‘street dogs’.
So, for most hippies, the neat and absolute separation between home and ‘there’ is spelt out sartorially. ‘There’ has a liminal, carnivalesque function; it is a suspension from mundane, normal life, felt as a state of frenzy from which one wakes with a dull headache and a curious sense of stolen dignity. In this bardo (the Tibetan Buddhist notion of the finite stage through which souls must travel before reincarnation) the soul is purged of its workaday impurities and life appears clearer: seen from a distance, with the jigsaw pieces snugly snapping together. Only life isn’t seen more clearly: it is seen through a kaleidoscope, a mess of fat splinters you dread having to sweep up when you get back home. It is a postponement of life’s problems, not a quick-fix, do-it-yourself, ten-step-plan solution as many dream it be when they say, ‘if only I could go to India for six months I could really get my shit together’. These people are not going to get their ‘shit’ together. And their ‘shit’ probably isn’t worth gathering into one pile anyhow.
But I do not intend to be discouraging in all this; far from it. Go, travel, see the world, now. It is an exciting, formative and (although I use the word cautiously) enlightening experience. Above all travel is a learning process, about the world and your ability to handle it. It is about meeting people and seeing places that exist fully outside yourself. I only regret that the culture of therapy, imported from America and quickly pervading Britain, has reduced travel to a masturbatory self-help exercise, akin to yoga or a carrot juice diet. This demeans travel, turns into another facet of our self-gratifying, me-centric worship of ‘potential’ (such a ghastly word), which reifies the self above its surroundings, when the hierarchy should be inverted: the conscientious traveller learns to exercise a religious sense of humility before foreign landscapes. Because if travel teaches you anything, it is that you are very, very small and so, so insignificant. And this should be felt as a gain rather than a loss; your ‘shit’ really doesn’t matter shit after all.
Anyhow, back to hippies. In this critique so far I have left out a sub-species separate from the charas-toking reprobate: the White Messiah, who travels long distances to do Good on the behalf of helpless brown people the world over. Some might argue that the White Messiah is not a true hippy, as he or she tends to have a rather well-scrubbed, private school demeanour and takes seriously the prospect of a future career. A fair few of these can be seen wandering around here in McLeod Ganj – in many respects another Asian backpacker Mecca where earnest, privileged young white people can play at real life. (Perhaps I’m being unkind; I myself am a privileged young white person playing at real life, although I like to think I’m beyond earnestness.)
This breed of untermensch youth – and they tend to be of immediately post-school or student age – was lampooned expertly by the ‘Gap Yah’ sketch, that YouTube phenomenon which was funny in the week before it went viral and every last idiot started quoting it. Are these types honest-to-god hippies? I would argue that they are, in that they share a view of the ‘third world’ as a postcolonial playground – in this case more of a finishing school – for them to stomp around in before they start ‘serious’ life in the ‘real’ world. The ‘East’ is once again that liminal space, only this time it has a more limited shelf-life of a year or so. For the White Messiah, impermanence is key.
Both this and the more conventional (oh the irony) hippy tend to stay in one ‘third world’ locale for an extended period, the former engaged in some worthy project – building loos, saving whales, enriching ex-military volunteer agency operators – the latter doing nothing zealously. As a result both manage to cultivate a familiarity with their surroundings, and evince an easy confidence in their day-to-day doings in an alien culture. They can be seen chatting casually with the locals – and sometimes dating them, particularly here with the ubiquitous Tibetan male/ white female relationships – while casually dispensing sentences in the native language. They often appear to have crossed that misty divide that separates the casual tourist from the places he or she tours. But on questioning them on matters of, say, Indian politics or history, they turn out the most trite generalisations and platitudes. India, the land of religious transcendence; Tibet, the lost land of Arcadian peace; their native country, a spiritual vacuum from which they have escaped by the hem of their patterned pyjamas. In all this their thought is little more sophisticated than that of the average Eastbourne pensioner.
But of course I’m generalising, and being rather rude. They’re sometimes quite nice, these people I’m rubbishing, and they probably wouldn’t do the same to me. Nevertheless I’m trying to make a serious point. Indulgence is all very well – and a staple of the free, liberal lifestyle we all prize (though sometimes secretly) in the West – but when dressed up as virtue it becomes obnoxious. This attempt to ‘escape’ Western consumerism and ‘embrace’ the East isn’t really an escape at all, but an extension of Western consumerism – that mode of life which upholds choice as the highest moral imperative. Benjamin Disraeli once said, referring to colonial endeavour, that ‘the East is a career’. Nowadays, in our nominally post-colonial age, the East has become a lifestyle choice, an option among many such as born-again Christianity and environmentalism (ironically the ultimate example of consumer lifestyle fetishism). The ‘East’, that artificial yet tangible crucible of transcendental religions and colourful festivals, is a commodity of difference ready to be consumed by the Western traveller, provided he or she has suitable resources of time and money.
Once again, I don’t mean to be a spoilsport. I’m not suggesting for a moment that these friendly (if credulous) types pack off back home and stop having their fun – or that you shouldn’t go and follow them; by all means, do. My modest proposal is that they drop the pretension and accept that what they’re doing is a pleasurable, indulgent but for the most part harmless and healthy diversion from normal life, not a heroic act of defiance against spiritual vacuity nor a break-out from the chains of late global capitalism. Relax, enjoy yourselves, but leave off with the worthiness. Then I’ll stop writing sardonic things about you. Promise.
If I have offended anyone in writing this, it is only because I am another tiresomely prevalent traveller type: the know-it-all, scholar-backpacker cynic, who looks on the passing landscape beneath an arched eyebrow. This I could also blog about – in the future, maybe, possibly, if I care sufficiently. Bye for now.
Obvious troll is obvious.
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