The author of Slate Star Codex is perhaps the exact opposite of Jack Kerouac, so it’s not particularly surprising he didn’t like the novel.
“I’m betting that Scott went to university straight after school and then went straight into medicine after that. He might have benefited from a year off experiencing promiscuity, drug use and even petty crime. It worked for me.”
I think you’re joking, but in case not – between my junior year of college and the time I started medical school I took two years off and several different trips, during which I (for example) crossed Great Britain entirely on foot, travelled to about thirty different countries, hiked the Himalayas and got lost and had to be rescued by Sherpas, learned to scuba dive amidst poorly explored weird undersea ruins, starred in a Mongolian-language music video, taught elementary school English in Japan, got arrested twice and spent a night in a foreign jail, biked across Italy, and did various other ill-advised things.
When I say there’s nothing wrong with taking some time off in your early twenties to be a bit crazy and see the world, I’m speaking from experience. I swear I wasn’t always as boring as I am now, and if I ever decide to write my own version of “On The Road” it will be at least as interesting as Kerouac’s – as it is, my old blog is about fifty times more worth reading than this place.
But it doesn’t include any carjackings. My point isn’t that you shouldn’t explore, it’s that you should do it without being a jerk and without fetishizing exploration as the be-all-and-end-all of life.
The fact that the author lists his early-twenties experiences as some sort of “checklist before becoming a real adult©” illustrates exactly that he just doesn't get it - the Beats in general represent a sort of life that is alien to your average person today. It’s about a mindset and a different approach to life than the fundamentally consumeristic one that is taken for granted in 2019, where counterculture has more-or-less been entirely destroyed or co-opted by people selling stuff.
Most of Kerouac's other works deal with this pretty extensively (see The Dharma Bums), but since the Slate Star Codex guy (and most middle-class technocratic people like him) often have a real aversion to anything that isn't strictly scientistic, they end up missing the forest for the trees.
Finally, I should add that reading literature from the past and dismissing it because it doesn't fit your contemporary moral worldview is both deeply ignorant and just plain unfulfilling. You don't need to think Kerouac was a good person to think he had something important to say.
Acting like an a-hole just for the sake of 'fuck it' mentality ain't something to admire for many, doesn't matter if 70 years ago or tomorrow.
To wrap everybody who doesn't blindly admire his discussed actions as 'middle-class technocratic people' doesn't add much to the discussion apart from certain snobbishness of 'I am better than you are if you don't agree with me'.
We did / are doing some pretty crazy shit in our lives that Kerouac never even dreamed about, we just don't need to be a-holes while doing it. A bit of respect goes much longer way.
Have y’all even tried reading the wiki, at least?
That also seems terribly misinformed...Kerouac if nothing else was a self-loathing member of the consumer bourgeois middle class.
He was a college educated author who "got his kicks" hanging out with people the middle class traditionally looked down on, and he went on road trips by bumming money from his aunt. Yet, Kerouac is shown to have no conviction in his own beliefs as he continually abandons these very people at the first sign of threatening his good times.
There's very little production at all on the book. "People talking shit fruitlessly on drugs to each other" is the closest it gets to it. Oh yeah sorry, there's the production of a few babies, treated mostly as nuisances to get rid of.
If your counterculture consists of spending money on the hospitality sector and petty crime, well, good luck.
I think it works pretty well as a warning, though. Maybe I'm just old?
The point of the beat movement, if it's reducible to a single idea, was to escape the prison of an expected life - to be and to experience the possibilities inherent in the final gasp of [white imperialist patriarchal] freedom in colonial America, and then to create art that successfully articulated and perhaps even evangelised that experience.
I don't think anyones denying the misogynistic, sociopathic elements of their behaviour (or indeed of artists throughout history from Carravagio to Cosby). To advocate for the importance of art as cartography of experience is radically different to suggesting the lifestyle of the artist should be one to emulate.
Part of the seductiveness of art is as escapism, as confrontation with darkness, as elegiac vision. There is little space in our contemporary culture for exploring the contradictions inherent in our shadow selves - let alone how they are necessary for light to thrive. It's exactly this resonance: with irresponsibility, with self destruction, with the truth of the moment (irregardless of consequences) that makes the work of the beats still so seductive.
If it was transgressive then, it ain’t now. It’s the opposite.
I think you greatly overrate the trembling tendencies, or maybe the sincerity of the trembling among the consumer bourgeois middle class. I am about as bourgeois (well, petit-bourgeois, as a Marxist acquaintance once told me) middle class as you can get. I wear the flannel shirts, jeans, and work shoes, once the transgressive costume of the Beats, to Starbucks, and guess who surrounds me there? Middle class folk in flannel shirts, jeans, and work shoes.
The revolution will not be televised? Sorry, it will be televised, but it will only look revolutionary.