̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - James Riley

Reclaim ‘wellness’ from the rich and famous, and restore its political radicalism, new book argues

ta385 — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Today’s wellness industry generates trillions of dollars in revenue, but in a new book, Dr James Riley (Faculty of English & Girton College), shows that 1970s wellness pioneers imagined something radically different to today’s culture of celebrity endorsements and exclusive health retreats.

“Wellness was never about elite experiences and glossy, high-value products,” says Riley, noting that “When we think of wellness today, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop and other lifestyle brands might come to mind, along with the oft-cited criticism that they only really offer quackery for the rich.” By contrast, in the 1970s, “wellness was much more practical, accessible and political.”

̽��ֱ��word, as it was first proposed in the late-1950s, described a holistic approach to well-being, one that attended equally to the mind (mental health), the body (physical health) and the spirit (one’s sense of purpose in life). ̽��ֱ��aim was to be more than merely ‘not ill’. Being well, according to the likes of Halbert Dunn and later in the 1970s, John Travis and Don Ardell, meant realising your potential, living with ‘energy to burn’ and putting that energy to work for the wider social good.

Riley’s Well Beings: How the Seventies Lost Its Mind and Taught Us to Find Ourselves, published by Icon Books on 28 March, is the first book to explore the background of the wellness concept in the wider political and cultural context of the 1970s.

“Wellness in the 1970s grew out of changing attitudes to health in the post-war period – the same thinking that gave rise to the NHS,” Riley says. “When coupled with the political activism of the 1960s counterculture and the New Left, what emerged was a proactive, socially oriented approach to physical and mental well-being. This was not about buying a product off the shelf.

“ ̽��ֱ��pursuit of wellness was intended to take time, commitment and effort. It challenged you to think through every facet of your life: your diet, health, psychology, relationships, community engagement and aspirations. ̽��ֱ��aim was to change your behaviour – for the better – for the long term.”

Riley’s book also makes a case for what the 1970s wellness industry can do for us today.

“We’re often warned about an imminent return to ‘the seventies’, a threat that’s based on the stereotypical image of the decade as one of social decline, urban strife, and industrial discontent. It’s an over-worked comparison that tends to say more about our own social problems, our own contemporary culture of overlapping political, social and economic crises. Rather than fearing the seventies, there’s much we can learn to help us navigate current difficulties.”

“It was in the 1970s that serious thought was given to stress and overwork to say nothing of such frequently derided ‘events’ as the mid-life crisis and the nervous breakdown. ̽��ֱ��manifold pressures of modern life - from loneliness to information overload - increasingly came under the microscope and wellness offered the tools to deal with them.”

“Not only are these problems still with us, they’ve got much worse. To start remedying them, we need to remember what wellness used to mean. ̽��ֱ��pandemic, for all its horrors, reminded us of the importance of mutual self-care. To deal with the ongoing entanglement of physical and mental health requires more of that conviviality. Being well should be within everyone’s reach, it should not be a privilege afforded to those who have already done well.”

Mindfulness versus wellness

At the heart of Riley’s book is an analysis of the ongoing corporate and commercial tussle between ‘mindfulness’ and ‘wellness’.

In 1979 Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn founded the Stress Reduction and Relaxation Programme at the ̽��ֱ�� of Massachusetts Medical Center, where he taught ‘mindfulness-based stress reduction’. For Kabat-Zinn mindfulness meant accepting the inevitable stress that comes with the ‘full catastrophe’ of life and adopting an attitude of serene resilience in the face of it. Stress could be alleviated thanks to a regular meditation routine and small changes made to the working day such as the decision to try a different, more pleasant commute. Little was said about altering the pace of the work causing the stress in the first place.

By contrast, John Travis, a medical doctor who founded the Wellness Resource Center in California’s Marin County in 1975, talked about the health dangers of sedentary, office-based jobs while Don Ardell, author of High Level Wellness (1977), encouraged his readers to become agents of change in the workplace. Both saw work-fixated lifestyles as the problem. Work and work-related stress was thus something to fix, not to endure.

Ardell argued that because burn-out was becoming increasingly common it was incumbent upon employers to offer paid time off to improve employee well-being. Better to be too well to come to work, reasoned Ardell, than too sick. “We tend to think that flexible hours and remote working are relatively new concepts, particularly in the digital and post-COVID eras,” adds Riley, “but Ardell was calling for this half a century ago.”

Riley argues that the techniques of mindfulness, rather than those of wellness, have proved attractive to contemporary corporate culture because they ultimately help to maintain the status quo. Corporate mindfulness puts the onus on the employee to weather the storm of stress. It says, “there is nothing wrong with the firm, you are the problem, this is the pace, get with it or leave”.

According to Riley this view is a far-cry from the thinking of seventies wellness advocates like Travis and Ardell who “imagined a health-oriented citizenship, a process of development in which social well-being follows on from the widespread optimistic and goal-oriented pursuit of personal health. It’s that sense of social mission that self-care has lost.”

Riley points out that this self-care mission had a very particular meaning in the 1970s among groups like ̽��ֱ��Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which established clinics and ran an ambulance service for black communities in and around Oakland, California. “They were saying you’ve got to look after yourself so you can then look after your community. Such communal effort was vital because the system was seen to be so opposed to Oakland’s needs. One sees the deeply political potency of ‘self-care’ in this context. It meant radical, collective autonomy, not indulgent self-regard.”

̽��ֱ��bad guru

As well as suggesting positive lessons from the past, Riley is also quick to call out the problems. “ ̽��ֱ��emphasis on self-responsibility in wellness culture could easily turn into a form of patient-blame,” he argues, “the idea that if you’re ill, or rather if you fail to be well, it’s your fault, a view that neglects to consider all kinds of social and economic factors that contribute to ill-health.”

Elsewhere, Riley draws attention to the numerous claims of exploitation and abuse within the wider context of the alternative health systems, new religious movements and ‘therapy cults’ that proliferated in the 1970s.

“It was not always a utopia of free thought. ̽��ֱ��complex and often unregulated world of New Age groups and alternative health systems could often be a minefield of toxic behaviour, aggressive salesmanship and manipulative mind games. Charismatic and very persuasive human engineers were a common presence in the scene, and one can easily see these anxieties reflected in the various ‘bad gurus’ of the period’s fiction and film.

“There are plenty of voices who say they gained great insights as a result of being pushed to their limits in these situations,” says Riley, “but many others were deeply affected, if not traumatised, by the same experiences.”

Self-experimentation

In addition to exploring the literature of the period, Riley’s research for Well Beings found him trying out many of the therapeutic practices he describes. These included extended sessions in floatation tanks, guided meditation, mindfulness seminars, fire walking, primal screaming in the middle of the countryside, remote healing, yoga, meal replacement and food supplements.

References

J Riley, Well Beings: How the Seventies Lost Its Mind and Taught Us to Find Ourselves. Published by Icon Books on 28th March 2024. ISBN: 9781785787898.

A new cultural history of the 1970s wellness industry offers urgent lessons for today. It reveals that in the seventies, wellness was neither narcissistic nor self-indulgent, and nor did its practice involve buying expensive, on-trend luxury products. Instead, wellness emphasised social well-being just as much as it focused on the needs of the individual. Wellness practitioners thought of self-care as a way of empowering people to prioritise their health so that they could also enhance the well-being of those around them.

Wellness was much more practical, accessible and political

James Riley

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People doing yoga together outdoors in Richmond USA in 2015

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Did the Sixties dream die in 1969?

ta385 — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 07:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��Sixties are generally remembered as an era of freedom, innovation and visionary experience. It’s the period, after all, that gave us ̽��ֱ��Beatles, the Summer of Love, the civil rights movement, the Woodstock Festival and the Apollo 11 Moon-Landing. Scores of autobiographies, hagiographies and cultural histories have helped to further embellish this iconic status by presenting the Sixties as the crucible of the Hippie ‘dream’, a loosely defined, youth-led attempt to establish an alternative, harmonious, post-war world. It’s a glorious story, but one that tends to end in tragedy.

At ‘the end of the Sixties’, or so the story goes, the Hippie dream ‘dies’. It’s brought to a crashing halt in the latter half of 1969 thanks to the terrible murders perpetrated by Charles Manson and ‘the Family’, the deaths attributed to the so-called ‘Zodiac Killer’ and the violence at ̽��ֱ��Rolling Stones’ concert at the Altamont Speedway. These events appear to hold up a dark mirror to the positive social and cultural advances of the preceding years.

While this narrative may suit the matrix of popular culture and nostalgia that constitutes the Sixties, it bears little resemblance to the historical actuality of the 1960s. ̽��ֱ��decade did indeed usher in a wave of progressivism and it also had its shadow-side, but such negativity was not limited to its final days. If anything the darkness, so to speak, was present from the start and across the 1960s it hovered particularly close to the decade’s much-vaunted counterculture.

Assassinations, nuclear tensions, globalised conflict, civil unrest, the growth of apocalyptic religious groups: the 1960s were suffused with violence, anxiety and a sense of looming doom. A fraught and difficult decade, the 1960s left a social, cultural and economic legacy of which still exerts a powerful influence on the contemporary world.

̽��ֱ��Sixties, by contrast, continue to exist in a bubble of comforting misremembrance, regularly offering up another anniversary, exhibition or reunion tour. Altamont and the Manson murders were of course very real events with a terrible human cost, but they have both become part of a narrative of disaster that helps to shore up this exceptionalism. What else are we to expect from such a supernova of an era as the Sixties than a spectacular curtain fall?

Imagining the disastrous end of both the hippie ‘dream’ and the wider countercultural project is ultimately a tool of celebration. If only Manson and the Family, hadn't appeared, the unique work of the Sixties would have carried on and given rise to a beautiful future.

For those invested in the period’s nostalgia industry, framing the sixties as a kind of cultural Shangri-La, a lost world that we strive to return to is, surely, better than acknowledging the pedestrian reality of how the 1960s actually ended. That’s the real horror: the slow, inconsequential shift of a dynamic counterculture into adulthood, suburbia and ‘proper’ jobs (the 1970s, in other words). Although misleading, this vision of flower power ending in blood-soaked catastrophe retains its grip on the public imagination. Case in point, the recent release of Quentin Tarantino’s Manson-era epic Once Upon A Time in Hollywood (2019).

̽��ֱ��end of the 1960s did not mark the ‘death’ of the Hippie ‘dream’. As the 1970s took hold, the countercultural impetus merely recalibrated and flowed in different directions. That has not stopped contemporary culture from obsessively revisiting and repeating the events of 1969, as if they signal some kind of terminus, yet to be fully understood.

Meanwhile, the world of the early twenty-first century continues to plough headlong into its own deeply troubling period of postmodern politics, creepingly malevolent soft power and weaponised ‘fake news’. When we live in such interesting times, why dwell on the illusions and disillusions of the 1960s and its double?

Fifty years ago protests took place across reasonably well-defined battle lines against clearly identifiable targets. Now, in today’s sphere of edited reality and policies that change as fast as they can be tweeted it's difficult to pinpoint where the source of power is, let alone how to protest against it. To navigate this type of situation it's important to understand the mechanics at play – how representations are manipulated and how agendas are embedded in seemingly innocuous narratives. This is what the 1960s can teach us.

By interrogating and unpacking the link between the decade and the era, the 1960s and the Sixties, we can observe, in process, the forces that transform recent history into modern myth. It's also useful to be shocked by how much things have changed. If you are curious, look into the details of the Manson case and think about what it meant in 1969 to ‘follow’ someone. What you find might make you spend a little less time on Twitter.

̽��ֱ��year 1969 is held up as the end of an era, but fifty years on are we still buying into a dangerous myth? Counterculture expert James Riley delves into the darkness of the Sixties to sort fact from psychedelic fiction.

̽��ֱ��1960s were suffused with violence, anxiety and a sense of looming doom

James Riley

Dr James Riley

̽��ֱ��author

Dr James Riley is Fellow and College Lecturer in English at Girton College. His book, ̽��ֱ��Bad Trip: Dark Omens, New Worlds and the End of the Sixties was published by Icon Books in 2019.

James will be speaking at Heffers Bookshop in Cambridge on 6th November 2019.

This is an extended version of an article published in Horizons issue 39.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Opinion: Charles Manson: death of America's 1960s bogeyman

Anonymous — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 09:58:50 +0000

So, Charles Manson has died, aged 83, of “natural causes”. ̽��ֱ��con-man, musician and erstwhile cult leader, who came to embody mainstream American fears of the 1960s counterculture “gone wrong”, had an easier death at Kern County hospital in California than any of the seven people whose murders he orchestrated in August 1969.

Manson has been largely out of the public view since his conviction for the Tate-LaBianca killings in January 1971 alongside several members of his “family” – but there has been little diminution of his grisly fame. Earlier this year it was announced that Quentin Tarantino is making a film about the Manson murders. Big names such as Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt are among those said to be lining up for parts.

There remains something strange about the attention that Manson generated in life and now in death. It’s a level of interest which far exceeds matters of public record. As such, it’s difficult to know what to say by way of response to the news of his passing – or even what to say for the purposes of a tentative obituary. Difficult, because it’s hard to know precisely who (or what) the name Charles Manson is being used to describe.

Manson, born Charles Milles Maddox in 1934, spent most of his life behind bars. Before convening the cult-like group “ ̽��ֱ��Family” in 1967, he had convictions for car theft and robbery. But it was towards the end of 1969 that he really came to public attention. He was arrested and put on trial for his role as the mastermind of a total of nine murders, including those of the actress Sharon Tate and four friends, and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca over the course of the weekend of August 8-9 1969. In March 1971 he was given the death penalty which was later commuted to commuted to life imprisonment.

According to testimony at his trial and that of his followers, Manson was not actually directly responsible for wielding a murder weapon at either of the two crime scenes (although there’s plenty to suggest he was involved in other murders at around the same time). But the court found he had masterminded and ordered the Tate-LaBianca killings, made all the more horrific by the fact that actress Tate had been pregnant at the time of her murder.

Different kind of celebrity

Whether you like it or not, from his conviction to his death, Manson was a celebrity. He became a celebrity when he made the cover of Life magazine in December 1969 and Rolling Stone in June 1970 – and subsequent novels, films, recordings, interviews, t-shirts and comic books have sought alternately to shore up this status and to demythologise it.

This Manson culture industry (which shows no signs of slowing down) has kept his name in public circulation for nearly half a century. It’s this material which invariably forms the basis of the analysis whenever Manson’s life and “career” is considered. What becomes visible is something of a schizoid split in which the name Charles Manson gains two points of reference.

There’s “Charles Manson” which effectively describes the life of Charles Milles Maddox, criminal – and then there’s “Charles Manson”, the potent symbol of evil, the name which in the words of one of his recent biographers has become a “metaphor for unspeakable horror”.

An early example of the latter came from the writer Wayne McGuire in 1970. Writing in his column for Fusion magazine, “An Aquarian Journal”, he speculated that at “some point in the future”, Manson would “metamorphose into a major American folk hero”. ̽��ֱ��comment was later used as the epigraph for ̽��ֱ��Manson File, a collection of Manson-related writings first published by Amok Press in 1988. ̽��ֱ��prediction was fully realised in 1997 with the inclusion of Manson in James Parks’ collection, Cultural Icons. Here, nestling between Lata Mangeshkar, Mao Tse Tung and Robert Mapplethorpe, Manson was identified as an “American Murderer” who “channelled his peculiar cocktail of black magic, drugs, sex and rock n roll into homicidal mania”. It is this “peculiar cocktail” that underpins Manson’s symbolic status.

What gives his crimes – and his name – a notoriety in excess of that held by the likes of the Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo and the unknown “Zodiac Killer”, who terrorised Northern California in 1968 and 1969, is that they simultaneously interact with a matrix of other powerful symbols that carry a greater cultural resonance than the breaking of a law, however severe.

Hollywood meets the crazies

Tate’s murder brought into collision two heavily mediated zones: Hollywood and the counterculture. Manson’s interest in ̽��ֱ��Beatles and use of their song title “Helter Skelter” as a blood-drenched slogan further intensified this disturbing elision of murder and popular culture. As with ̽��ֱ��Rolling Stones’ concert at the Altamont Speedway in December 1969 – at which a member of the audience was murdered by a Hells Angel – the Manson murders, once filtered through media sensitive to their range of connections, become emblems for the “end” or even “death” of the 1960s.

Whether viewed as catalyst or symptom, they are events that stand in for explanations of economic shift, geopolitical crisis and social inequality which describe the decade’s apparent decline into death, violence and what Hunter S. Thompson called “bad craziness”.

If anything it was the Tate-LaBianca murders that carry the metaphorical currency, while the name “Manson” now probably signifies something else. It’s a name to conjure with. “Manson” brings to mind the shadow-side of the 1960s: the incipient violence that lay beneath the counterculture’s day-glo optimism and the lost potential of a decade’s calls for peace and pacifism. When viewed from the vantage point of seeing the long, strange and violent life laid out, it refers also to someone who understood and was able to exploit the potency of the popular culture around him.

There’s very little to celebrate here, but maybe there’s something to learn about what it means to be a celebrity.

James Riley, Fellow and College Lecturer in English, Girton College, Cambridge, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

Charles Manson, one of America's most notorious criminals and cult leaders, has died. In an article written for ̽��ֱ��Conversation, James Riley from Cambridge's Faculty of English discusses Manson and the nature of celebrity.

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Charles Manson 2014

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