Sunday Night Journal — January 10, 2010
Every time I begin to write about the cultural upheaval of the late 1960s, I immediately come up against the question of what to call it. “The ‘60s” is hardly adequate—a great many things happened in the 1960s, and I am not talking about, for instance, the civil rights movement, although many of the participants and supporters of the thing I am talking about often treat the two as if they were one. And it’s true that they were connected, but the number of people actually involved in both was relatively small, and I think they’re connected mostly in that they were both aspects of a broad historical upheaval. That upheaval had its positive and negative aspects, the civil rights movement being among the positive ones, while the revolution of which I’m speaking was, I think, largely negative. I sometimes think of it simply as “the revolution” or “the cultural revolution” or “the revolution of the late ‘60s.” “The hippie movement,” “the counterculture”, “the radicalism of the late ‘60s”—all these are somewhat accurate, but not entirely complete without further explanation, and are also cumbersome to use repeatedly in an essay.
We need a new term, but in the absence of one, and with the context clearly established, I think I’ll refer to it simply as “the revolution.” And what I mean is the explosive rebellion that occurred, primarily among young people, between roughly 1965 and 1970, reaching a peak of frenzy at the end of that period, leveling off and becoming part of the mainstream in the 1970s. It was not a political rebellion, though it had a strong political component, but primarily a cultural one (which is why I sometimes refer to it as the cultural revolution, but that term is generally understood as referring to the very different Chinese catastrophe launched around the same time). It was not physically violent, but it was philosophically and culturally violent. Its essential aim and motive was the attainment of an earthly paradise by the removal of any limit, either philosophical or practical, on the freedom of the individual in pursuit of personal happiness (which, in a materialistic age, often means only the pursuit of pleasure). And this project required the destruction of existing institutions, which were believed to function mainly to warp and suppress the fundamental benevolent innocence of the individual, and to have been designed to do so.
I say essential, meaning that these aims were of its essence. But I don’t mean that it can be reduced entirely to that. Like any human phenomenon, it was propelled by a mixture of motives, including some that were healthy—for instance, a reaction against the real pathologies of modern technical-commercial civilization. But it seems to me that the drive for heaven on earth, and the requisite destruction of existing things, were at the heart of it. To see it in that way is of course a reduction and truncation of the complex reality. But I think it’s important to begin with that, and then consider the nuances, variations, and exceptions.
Because the revolution arose within the remnant of western Christian civilization, it was a revolution against that civilization, and against Christianity, though it was sometimes, and usually unconsciously, allied with it against some of the dehumanizing aspects of modernity. That conflict was the beginning of what we now call the culture war.
And even as I write this I wonder if I don’t have the cause and effect backward, if the fundamental force was not rebellion against Christianity, and the drive for personal liberation but a vehicle for that rebellion. To resolve that question requires something more than natural insight, I think; we may not really know the answer until we can see the whole scope, and the hidden springs, of history with more acute spiritual vision than all but a very, very few ever have in this world.
Like any revolution, this one had deep roots in the society that produced it. And that’s the point I want to make today: the revolution was the eruption into a mass movement of forces that had been in operation for decades in the realm of specific attitudes and practices, and for centuries in the realm of theology (using that term to mean any thinking about the ultimate questions of meaning, whether affirming or denying God as understood by Christians).
Both its supporters and its detractors often fail to recognize, or to recognize fully, this fact. The supporters tend to see history, and in particular Western history, as a decline from innocent tribal paradise into crushing oppression imposed mainly by Christianity and lasting until roughly 1960, when the system began to crumble. Detractors tend to hold something like the same view, only with a reversal of values: things were pretty wonderful until the hippies came along and ruined everything. I think secular conservatives are more likely than Christians to make this mistake, but many Christians do, too—e.g. those Catholics who idealize the Church as it was in the 1950s, and are utterly baffled as to how it produced the Church of the 1960s and ‘70s.
Both sides tend to make the mistake of focusing on the 1950s, with the revolutionaries viewing that period as something close to hell on earth, and the conservatives viewing it as a golden age. Both seem far too much influenced by the movies and television shows of the time, seeming to believe on some level that they are an accurate picture of real people living real lives. (Yes, I’m exaggerating here, but the general outline of these two views of the revolution does very often resemble my sketch.)
In fact the revolution had been well under way for some time by the 1950s, only it had not emerged fully into the mainstream. To view it as something that came out of nowhere, like an asteroid striking the earth—a sudden, more or less spontaneous and more or less unprecedented event, whether viewed as creative or destructive—is to misunderstand it and to cut off any hope of seeing its true place in the long crisis of our civilization, or even of seeing accurately what it really was in itself.
Light On Dark Water 
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