RUTHFULLY YOURS

What William Faulkner said about the past — it isn’t dead: it isn’t even past — seems especially true about that convulsive decade, the 1960s. For many observers, 1968 was the annus mirabilis (or perhaps “horribilis” would be more accurate) and the month of May, with its many protests, student demonstrations, acts of violence, and drug-related spectacles, was the epicenter of the year. Now that the fiftieth anniversary of May 1968 is upon us, what does the wisdom of hindsight tell us about that curious moment?

I took a crack at conjuring with the meaning of the Sixties nearly two decades ago in my book The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America. May 2018 seemed to offer an opportune moment to revisit the issue by reprising and updating some thoughts. As with previous anniversaries of the Purple Decade and the Magic Month, there have everywhere been nostalgic backward glances: Youth! Freedom! Sex! Were not the Sixties the Last Good Time, an era of hope, idealism, the promise of emancipation from — well, from everything? Some think so. “Only a few periods in American history,” the New York Times intoned in an editorial called “In Praise of the Counterculture”:

… have seen such a rich fulfillment of the informing ideals of personal freedom and creativity that lie at the heart of the American intellectual tradition. … The 60’s spawned a new morality-based politics that emphasized the individual’s responsibility to speak out against injustice and corruption.

A “new morality-based politics,” eh? It seems so long ago, shrouded in a Day-Glo glaze of grateful recollection. But when it comes to the Sixties, and especially the fulcrum year of 1968, Time magazine is right: “50 Years After 1968, We Are Still Living In Its Shadow.” Indeed, paroxysms of the 1960s, which trembled with gathering force through North America and Western Europe from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s, continue to reverberate throughout our culture. The Age of Aquarius did not end when the last electric guitar was unplugged at Woodstock. It lives on in our values and habits, in our tastes, pleasures, and aspirations. It lives on especially in our educational and cultural institutions, and in the degraded pop culture that permeates our lives like a corrosive fog.

Even now it is difficult to gauge the extent of that transformation. Looking back over his long and distinguished career in an essay called “A Life of Learning,” the philosopher Paul Oskar Kristeller sounded a melancholy note. “We have witnessed,” he wrote, “what amounts to a cultural revolution, comparable to the one in China if not worse, and whereas the Chinese have to some extent overcome their cultural revolution, I see many signs that ours is getting worse all the time, and no indication that it will be overcome in the foreseeable future.”

In democratic societies, where free elections are guaranteed, political revolution is almost unthinkable in practical terms. Consequently, utopian efforts to transform society have been channeled into cultural and moral life. In America and Western Europe, scattered if much-publicized episodes of violence have wrought far less damage than the moral and intellectual assaults that do not destroy buildings but corrupt sensibilities and blight souls. Consequently, the success of the cultural revolution of the 1960s can be measured not in toppled governments but in shattered values. If we often forget what great changes this revolution brought in its wake, that, too, is a sign of its success: having changed ourselves, we no longer perceive the extent of our transformation.

In his reflections on the life of learning, Kristeller was concerned primarily with the degradation of intellectual standards that this cultural revolution brought about. “One sign of our situation,” he noted, “is the low level of our public and even of our academic discussion. The frequent disregard for facts or evidence, or rational discourse and arguments, and even of consistency, is appalling.” Who can disagree?

As Kristeller suggests, however, the intellectual wreckage visited upon our educational institutions and traditions of scholarship is only part of the story. There are also social, political, and moral dimensions to the cultural revolution of the Sixties — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the spiritual deformations we have witnessed are global, and affect every aspect of life. Writing in The Totalitarian Temptation, Jean-François Revel noted that “a revolution is not simply a new political orientation. It works through the depths of society. It writes the play in which political leaders will act much later.”

The movement for sexual “liberation” (not to say outright debauchery) occupies a prominent place in the etiology of this revolution, as does the mainstreaming of the drug culture and its attendant pathologies. Indeed, the two are related. Both are expressions of the narcissistic hedonism that was an important ingredient of the counterculture from its development in the 1950s. The Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse was not joking when, in Eros and Civilization — one of many inspirational tracts for the movement — he extolled the salvational properties of “primary narcissism” as an effective protest against the “repressive order of procreative sexuality.”  “The images of Orpheus and Narcissus reconcile Eros and Thanatos,” Marcuse wrote. “They recall the experience of a world that is not to be mastered and controlled but to be liberated: … the redemption of pleasure, the halt of time, the absorption of death; silence, sleep, night, paradise — the Nirvana principle not as death but as life.”

The succeeding decades showed beyond cavil that the pursuit of “the redemption of pleasure, the halt of time” was narcissistic in a far more common sense than Marcuse suggested. It turned out to be a form of death-in-life, not “paradise.”