Surviving the Sixties (Not)
http://frontpagemag.com/2010/03/31/surviving-the-sixties-not/
by David Solway
Mar 31st, 2010
In 1695, the Puritan divine Timothy Cruso, after whom Defoe may have
titled his famous novel, wrote: "The days wherein we live are
extremely evil, but we have yet a sad and doleful prospect of the
next age becoming worse…We see such crowds and swarms of young ones
continually posting down to hell, and bringing up so much of hell in
the midst of us…we cannot but use some Christian endeavors to open
the eyes of these mad prodigals, and to fetch them home."
Christian endeavors aside, such fears and imprecations are
fashionable in every age and testify as much to the unavoidable
incompatibility of the generations as to the progressive regression
of history. Nevertheless, I sometimes wonder if a time does not
eventually come in which the apocalyptic cliché manifests as
ineluctable fact, in which the fears of troubled parents are
ultimately realized in their refractory offspring.
This was certainly how it was during the student revolution of the
1960s, when university campuses were turned into raucous boot camps
for a new generation of political radicals, utopian socialists and
psychedelic epicureansan incoherent "rainbow coalition" that did
some good (the Civil Rights Movement) and much harm (rampant drug
addiction, anarchic turmoil and rioting, neo-Marxist blueprints for a
"better world.") This sense of entitlement ballooned into the
intrusive policies of the welfare state.
Some observers feel that the ideological residue of these "mad
prodigals" was on the whole beneficial. Morris Dickstein, for
instance, in a beautifully written memoir, Gates of Eden, feels that
"the culture of the sixties had a liberating effect on many of our
lives." True, he cautions that "while we need to remain free, we
don't need to be perpetually liberated," but, in the final
analysis, concludes that "Utopian hopes may be disappointed but can
rarely be forgotten." Todd Gitlin goes even further in The Sixties:
Years of Hope, Days of Rage, which is not nearly as temperate as
Dickstein's book. The late Canadian historian and broadcaster Pierre
Berton, in his 1967: A Chronicle of Canada's Centennial Year,
comments that we "were all high in 1967, like somebody who had just
won the lottery," and asks rhetorically, "Without that great
adventure, what kind of people would we be now?"
Peter Collier and David Horowitz, however, are not so sanguine. In
Destructive Generation, they meticulously chart the disruptive legacy
of the period. The generation of the Sixties are now in their
sixties. They no longer live in communes but occupy positions of
influence in the media, the universities and government, instructing
their epigones to continue the struggle to consolidate a political
religion built on the "luminous" precepts of equality, fraternity and
"social justice." This is the platform of the New Left, which has
issued in the disorder of multicultural relativity in which we are
now immersed, the malign dogma of political correctness, the
globalizing of resentment, the "unholy alliance" with Islamic
extremism, and the postmodern dismantling of the concept of discoverable truth.
It also engendered a social activism that has infiltrated the
judiciary, sponsored the uninformed and sanctimonious meddling of the
swarming NGOs and polluted the writing of history, transforming it, à
la Howard Zinn, William Blum and Noam Chomsky, into a species of
disinformation and overt propaganda. Destructive Generation reminds
us of "the ability of the Left to wage a culture war after its
international commitments [i.e., its advocacy for Communism] had been
revealed to be bankrupt. The Sixties created the victim groups that
now tear at the fabric of the American enterprise."
These strictures and insights resonate with me. I was at UC Berkeley
at around the same time as Horowitz, participated in the student
takeover of Sproul Hall, and fellow-traveled with the leaders of the
Free Speech Movement. We reveled in our self-proclaimed status as
rebels with a cause, who would remake America and the West in our own
bearded image. Of course, not everyone in the revolutionary cadres
was politically committed to the dismemberment of society as we knew
it. Many came along for the jubilant sex, the acid trips and the
music, as did the Woodstock hordes and the plankton-like,
free-floating hippies who were content to "let it all hang out."
Visiting Belgrade in the late Sixties, I recall keeping company with
a group of young Serbian drop-outs, one of whom spent hours every day
listening to British shortwave and taping Beatles and Rolling Stone
songs. When I asked him about the political situation in Yugoslavia
and his sentiments regarding Marshal Tito, he replied, "Politics is
for old men." But back in Berkeley, and especially in Paris in May
1968, this was definitely not the case.
For, apart from the hangers-on and hangers-out, we saw ourselves as
the new Fifth Monarchy Men, a New Model Army of youthful saints
marching toward the dawning millennium, chasing our quixotic dream
that conflict, hatred, inequality and injustice could be abolished
once and for all and replaced by an idyllic world in which the
economy would be regulated by an enlightened class of sages and
benefactors, poverty would cease to exist, racial prejudice and
social disparities would be a thing of the benighted past, everyone
over thirty would be put out to pasture, and we would all make love, not war.
Greil Marcus in Lipstick Traces: A Secret history of the Twentieth
Century remembers those days fondly. "In the fall of 1964, in
Berkeley," he writes, "I was, day after day, for months, part of the
crowd that made up the Free Speech Movement…It was a period of doubt,
chaos, anger, hesitation, confusion, and finally joythat's the
word…This event formed a standard against which I've judged the
present and the past ever since." Facing the disappointment of a
movement fragmenting into dead ends, into "situations without a
future" (a quote from French philosopher Guy Debord), Marcus
subsequently found an anticlimactic reminiscence and justification of
"this public life in punk," in Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols.
What a comedown! More importantly, I believe Marcus was wrong in his
premature obsequies. As Collier and Horowitz attest, the future of
the 1960s is all around us in the present of the 2000s.
The "confederacy of dunces" that we were did incalculable damage to
that future. A patchwork collection of Marxists, socialists,
Ayers-type guerillas, professional demonstrators, street warriors,
Black Panthers and Pantherettes, erotic hedonists, druggies,
neo-Rosicrucians, pseudo-Maharishis and, to make a very long story
short, utter narcissists, gave us the inchoate and largely brain-dead
Western world we now call home. The belief in the redistribution of
income and the leveling of hierarchical structures of rank and
privilege energized us in the Berkeley and Paris days. At the same
time, particularly among the politically engaged core, we embraced
the conviction that society's ills could be cured by the wise rule of
a patrician caste of far-seeing legislators and
philosopher-kingsnamely, us. That these two axioms were in blatant
contradiction with one another escaped our sagacity entirely. We
were, as the French say, mi-figue mi-raisin, half fig half raisin. In
effect, ideological blivets.
What were we reading then? Aside from the pap productions of the
Beatsmainly Jack Kerouac's On the Road and Alan Ginsberg's Howl, as
well as Henry Miller's printed wet dreams, J.D. Salinger's The
Catcher in The Rye, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Carlos Castaneda's
The Teachings of Don Juan and Timothy Leary's The Politics of
Ecstasy, all de rigueurour hallowed texts were Plato's Republic and
Laws, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Marx and Engel's The German
Ideology and The Communist Manifesto, and, of course, our beloved
guru Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man and his seminal essay
"Repressive Tolerance."
The more popular and less onerous bibliography inspired us during our
vedic moments, of which there were many. From our revered
philosophical ancestors, we drank the heady potion of social
revolution, dialectical materialism and the imperative to restructure
our world to consort with our political delusions, which, as I've
suggested, were both pyramidical and egalitarian. From Marcuse, who
taught at UC San Diego, we learned the value of epistemic subversion,
which meant imposing a moratorium on conservative thought and instead
teaching leftist and socialist doctrines to the exclusion of all
others. The current Academy with its panoply of culturally
destabilizing and intellectually frivolous "studies" programs is the
lineal heir of that ostensibly "liberating" but patently oppressive
ideology, as is the statist political establishment in most Western
countries today.
The more serious curriculum we undertook obviously demanded a certain
kind of specialized intelligence which did not prevent a certain kind
of generalized stupidity from taking hold of our minds. Though in one
sense we were all different from each other, at any rate in terms of
the maquillage we sported, in another sense we were all the same,
practicing what Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in Leftism: from de Sade
and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse called "identitarian" politics, as we
all moved massively to the Left. Tony Judt in his just-released Ill
Fares the Land gets it wrong, as he does most things, when he
dismisses the collectivist impulse of the Sixties radicals, whom he
believes were concerned only with their individual "needs and
rights." As I indicated above, one can be a narcissist and a
communitarian at the same time without registering the contradiction.
One elevates one's sense of self-importance by identifying with the
masses and speaking on their behalf while magnanimously assuming the
burden of leadership. The real problem was that we understood Hegel
and Marxor at least thought we didbut had absolutely no
comprehension of the empirical world and of how politics and
economics actually work. We were blinded by our vision.
No less distressing, it was as if we had suffered what I've elsewhere
called a chronosectomy, a temporal amputation, released from the
concrete dynamic of history and oblivious of what had come before. We
did not believe in the substance of past time, which we regarded as
an undifferentiated fantasy or macabre nightmare from which we had
suddenly awakened, but invested our faith in the flux of the present
and the halcyon future that must inevitably emerge from it. The past
was not something to pore over and profit from but to ignore or even
expunge from the record, except insofar as it conformed to the
theoretical armature of thesis-antithesis-synthesis we had imbibed
from Hegel and Marx. In short, we were the generation that sprang
from the forehead of Zeus, without parents, without an archive,
befuddled by theory and living wholly in present time. We then
proceeded to make a holy mess of things.
Some Sixtiers were lucky enough or smart enough to escape the great
dumbing-down: Morris Dickstein, for example, for all his nostalgia,
takes a measured look back, David Horowitz experienced an
intellectual metamorphosis, as he recounts in Radical Son, and others
have, early or belatedly, managed to pull themselves out of the
mental quicksand that swallowed an entire generation and its
descendants. The erstwhile "good" communist Milovan Djilas'
prerequisite book, The New Class, provided a much-needed corrective,
showing how leftist thinking had created a realm of autocratic
"managers" and powerful bureaucrats that led to the corruption and
overthrow of democratic principles. At one point considered Tito's
successor, he was in a position to know. In the light of what is
happening all around us at this very instant, Djilas' book, for which
he spent many years in prison, makes indispensable reading.
Though we are still capable of various exploitstechnological
innovation and expertise, administrative complexity, the circulation
of grievances, the planning of agendasthe lamentable fact is that we
have become a society of adroit manipulators locked inside an
obsolete world-view, "posting down to hell, and bringing up so much
of hell in the midst of us." Barring a miracle, I see no satisfactory
solution to the quandary we are in. Perhaps George Steiner is right
when he places his hope in small, monastic flares of intellectual
light dotted here and there across the cultural landscape, reviving
Max Weber's notion of frail enclaves of enlightenment as the last
resort of a civilization sinking into darkness. One thinks, too, no
doubt a tad melodramatically, of Walter M. Miller Jr.'s A Canticle
for Leibowitz with its obscure abbey in the Utah desert where
historical knowledge is kept alive in a blighted world, even if it's
only a sacred shopping list. But is this a feasible scenario? For as
Barry Lopez says in Arctic Dreams, "The good minds still do not find
each other often enough."
It may be necessary to start looking harder.
.
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