This is the interview we we discussed in class of Jack Kerouac.
A little background on the Beats were that they were commonly referred to as the Beatniks. They consisted of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and Neal Cassady. They were a group of authors in the 1950s who wrote about everything mainstream society was against. Mainstream society in the 1950s thrived on family and wholesome values. The Beats however thrived on sex, drugs and travel. They made treks across the US multiple times looking for work and a good story to write about. Taylor talks about this in the Religion Today section of A Secular Age. You can draw a line between these Beats and the reason the value system of the 50s fell apart and the values system we have now eventually came into play. I also think it is interesting how they keep asking about the difference between this and the "hippy movement". The truth is, they just fed into one another. From the later Beat generation stemmed Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, who was a VERY prominent member of both the Hippy and Beat movements. This essentially started the shift from the older values to the ones we have now. I agree with Professor Langguth that Jack Kerouac in particular, would be a very interesting person to study in regard to Charles Taylor.
I lieve now we are a combination of the hippy movement and the beat movements and now we are way beyond them both. We are in a secular age the evolved beyond imagination of the 1950's.
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