John Locke, Original Hipster.

• Author: Goffman, Ken
• Position: Letters - Letter to the Editor

Thank you for publishing Nick Gillespie's piece on my book Counterculture Through the Ages ("John Locke, Original Hipster," March). I always felt the book's narration of sometimes admittedly flimsy connections between various cultural epochs and movements that held similar concepts and spirits hinged on the chapter about the Enlightenment, and Gillespie precisely nailed my intentions.

I would, however, like to correct one misapprehension. Gillespie says I have apparent sympathies for eco-terrorists. To my mind, eco-terrorists are the people who burn down housing developments they don't like, or threaten violence against workers at companies that do animal testing, or send mail bombs to mid-level technoserfs and college professors. I hate them. This shouldn't require any explanation.

Gillespie is referring to a segment in the final chapter about the anti-authoritarian branch of the environmentalist movement that, in my opinion, had to be acknowledged as a counterculture within the context of the book. While I have big problems with the neo-Luddite purist tendencies of this movement (and I ridicule them for their purism in the book), I do admire the way the eco-anarchists organize themselves by consensus, without authority...