What the Sixties Brought
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Von Roger Kimball
Aus Ausgabe 04/08
Roger Kimball is co-editor and publisher of The New Criterion
(www.newcriterion.com) and Publisher of Encounter Books
(www.encounterbooks.com).
--
The fortieth anniversary of 1968 is upon us. What, with the wisdom of
hindsight, should we think of that convulsive moment? Everywhere
there are nostalgic backward glances: Youth! Freedom! Sex! Were not
the Sixties the Last Good Time, an era of hope, idealism, the promise
of emancipation fromwell, from everything? Some think so. "Only a
few periods in American history," The New York Times intoned in an
editorial, 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.
It seems so long ago, shrouded in a Day-Glo glaze of grateful
recollection. But when it comes to the Sixties, Thomas Mann was
right: "The past isn't dead," he wrote, "it isn't event past."
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 Sixitiesor 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
Civilizationone of many inspirational tracts for the movementhe
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, paradisethe 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."
One of the most conspicuous, and conspicuously jejune, features of
the cultural revolution of the 1960s has been the union of such
hedonism with a species of radical (or radical-chic) politics. This
union fostered a situation in which, as the famous slogan put it,
"the personal is the political." The politics in question was seldom
more than a congeries of radical clich‚s, serious only in that it
helped to disrupt society and blight a good many lives. In that
sense, to be sure, it proved to be very serious indeed. Apocalyptic
rhetoric notwithstanding, the behavior of the "revolutionaries" of
the counterculture consistently exhibited that most common of
bourgeois passions, anti-bourgeois animusexpressed, as always,
safely within the swaddling clothes of bourgeois security. As Allan
Bloom, recalling Nietzsche, put it in The Closing of the American
Mind, the cultural revolution proved to be so successful on college
campuses partly because of "the bourgeois' need to feel that he is
not bourgeois, to have dangerous experiments with the unlimited. . .
. Anti-bourgeois ire is the opiate of the Last Man." It almost goes
without saying that, like all narcotics, the opiate of anti-bourgeois
ire was both addictive and debilitating.
Like Falstaff's dishonesty, the adolescent quality of these
developments was "gross as a mountain, open, palpable." If America's
cultural revolution was anything, it was an attack on maturity: more,
it was a glorification of youth, of immaturity. As the Yippie leader
Jerry Rubin put it, "We're permanent adolescents." The real victory
of the "youth culture" of the Sixties lay not in the fact that its
demands were met but in the fact that its values and attitudes were
adopted by the culture at large. Rubin again: "Satisfy our demands,
and we've got twelve more. The more demands you satisfy, the more we
got." Everywhere one looks one sees the elevation of youththat is to
say, of immaturityover experience. It may seem like a small thing
that nearly everyone of whatever age dresses in blue jeans now; but
the universalization of that sartorial badge of the counterculture
speaks volumes. At the end of The Revolt of the Masses, his prescient
1930 essay on the direction of culture, José Ortega y Gasset noted
that "Though it may appear incredible, 'youth' has become a chantage
[blackmail]; we are in truth living in a time when this adopts two
complementary attitudes, violence and caricature."
The idealization of youth has resulted not only in the spread of
adolescent values and passions: it has also led to the eclipse of
adult virtues like circumspection, responsibility, and restraint.
Writing about the cultural revolution in his book The Undoing of
Thought, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut described this
eclipse as "the triumph of babydom over thought."
Today youth is the categorical imperative of all the generations. . .
. People in their forties are teenagers who have not grown up. . . .
It is no longer the case that adolescents take refuge in their
collective identity, in order to get away from the world; rather it
is an infatuated world which pursues adolescence. . . . The long
process of the conversion to hedonism and consumerism of Western
societies has culminated today in the worship of juvenile values. The
bourgeois is dead, long live the adolescent.
The effect of these developments on cultural life in the West has
been immense. One of the most far-reaching and destructive effects
has been the simultaneous glorification and degradation of popular
culture. Even as the most ephemeral and intellectually vacuous
products of pop culturerock videos, comic books, television
sit-comsare enlisted as fit subjects for the college curriculum, so,
too, has the character of popular culture itself become ever more
vulgar, vicious, and degrading.
A watershed moment came with the apotheosis of The Beatles in the
mid-1960s. There is no denying that John Lennon and Paul McCartney
were talented song writers, or that The Beatles (and their
technicians) brought a new sophistication and inventiveness to rock
music. It is also worth noting that in their proclamations of peace
and love (blissed-out on drugs, but still) The Beatles stood in stark
contrast to the more diabolical pronouncements of many other rock
stars preaching a nihilistic gospel of (as the The Rolling Stones put
it) "Let it Bleed" or "Sympathy for the Devil." Nevertheless, The
Beatles, like other rock musicians, were unmistakably prophets of
Dionysian excess; and they were all the more effective on account of
their occasional tunefulness and their cuddly image. The dangerous
Dionysianism, however, was overlooked in the rush to acclaim them
geniuses. Even today, some of the claims made for The Beatles are
breathtaking. The literary critic Richard Poirier was hardly the only
academic to make a fool of himself slobbering over the Fab Four. But
his observation that "sometimes they are like Monteverdi and
sometimes their songs are even better than Schumann's" in Partisan
Review in 1967 did establish a standard of fatuity that has rarely
been surpassed.
Unfortunately, the more popular culture has been raised upthe more
vigorously it has been championed by the cultural elitethe lower
popular culture has sunk. At the same time, thoughand this is one of
the most insidious effects of the whole processthe integrity of high
culture itself has been severely compromised by the mindless
elevation of pop culture. The academic enfranchisement of popular
culture has meant not only that trash has been mistaken for great
art, but also that great art has been treated as if it were trash.
When Allen Ginsberg (for example) is upheld in the classroom as a
"great poet" comparable to Shakespeare, the very idea of greatness is
rendered unintelligible and high art ceases to function as an ideal.
To quote Alain Finkielkraut again: It is not just that high culture
must be demystified, brought remorselessly down to the level of the
sort of everyday gestures which ordinary people perform in obscurity;
sport, fashion, and leisure now lay claim to high cultural status. .
. . [I]f you cannot accept that the author of the Essais [i.e.,
Montaigne] and a television personality, or a meditation designed to
uplift the spirit and a spectacle calculated to brutalize, belong in
the same cultural bracket; if you refuse, even though one is white
and the other black, to equate Beethoven and Bob Marleythen you
belong, quite irredeemably, to the party of the bastards (salauds)
and the kill-joys.
In addition to its general coarsening effect on cultural life, this
triumph of vulgarity has helped to pave the way for the success of
the twin banes of political correctness and radical multiculturalism.
The abandonment of intrinsic standards of achievement creates (in
Hermann Broch's phrase) a "value vacuum" in which everything is
sucked through the sieve of politics and the ideology of victimhood.
Thus it is that vanguard opinion champions the idea of "art" as a
realm of morally unassailable privilege even as it undermines the
realities that make artistic achievement possible: technique, a
commitment to beauty, a grounding in tradition. Art retains its
status as a source of spiritual uplift, however dubious, yet it also
functions as an exercise of politics by other means.
Most of today's college students were barely born when the Berlin
Wall was dismantled; they had not yet been born when Saigon fell. To
the present generation, the Sixties and all it represented seem like
nostalgic snapshots from a bygone era. Yet despite the placidity of
our own prosperous times, the radical, emancipationist assaults of
the Sixties are not confined to the past. Robert Bork's description
of our situation as a "slouching towards Gomorrah" is melodramatic
but not, I think, inaccurate. "The Sixties," Judge Bork wrote, may be
seen in the universities as a mini-French Revolution that seemed to
fail but did not. The radicals were not defeated by a conservative or
traditionally liberal opposition but by their own graduation from the
universities. And theirs was merely a temporary defeat. They and
their ideology are all around us now.
That ideology has insinuated itself, disastrously, into the curricula
of our schools and colleges; it has significantly altered the texture
of sexual relations and family life; it has played havoc with the
authority of churches and other repositories of moral wisdom; it has
undermined the claims of civic virtue and our national
self-understanding; it has degraded the media, the entertainment
industry, and popular culture; it has helped to subvert museums and
other institutions entrusted with preserving and transmitting high
culture. It has even, most poignantly, addled our hearts and
innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life: it has
perverted our dreams as much as it has prevented us from attaining them.
By the late 1970s, after fantasies of overt political revolution
faded, many student radicals urged their followers to undertake the
"long march through the institutions." The phrase, popularized by the
German New Leftist Rudi Dutschke, is often attributed to the Italian
Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramscian unimpeachable authority for
countercultural standard-bearers. But of course the phrase also
carries the aura of an even higher authority: that of Mao Tse-tung
and his long march and cultural revolution.
In the context of Western societies, "the long march through the
institutions" signifiedin the words of Herbert Marcuse"working
against the established institutions while working in them." It was
primarily by this meansby insinuation and infiltration rather than
confrontationthat the countercultural dreams of radicals like
Marcuse have triumphed. Bellbottoms, long hair, and incense were
dispensable props; crucial was the hedonistic antinomianism they
symbolized. In this sense, countercultural radicalism has come more
and more to define the dominant culture even as the memory of student
strikes and demonstrations fades under the distorting glaze of
nostalgia. For examples, you need look no further than the curriculum
of your local school or college, at what is on offer at the nearest
museum or radio station: indeed, you need look no further than your
workplace, your church (if you still go to church), or your family to
see evidence of the damage wrought by the long march of the
counterculture. The radical ethos of the Sixties can be felt
throughout public and private life, from the most ordinary domestic
situations all the way up the political ladder: consider, for
example, the career of Joschka Fischer Sixties radical turned German
Foreign Minister.
The grisly political history of the recent past also reminds us of
the extent to which the totalitarian impulse appeals to liberation in
its effort to expunge genuine liberty. Again and again we have seen
the promise of liberation dissolve into outright tyranny. The
totalitarian impulse occupies a prominent place in most revolutionary
movements, cultural as well as political. Think, for example, of the
Marxist-inspired tyranny visited upon Russia in 1917 or the
megalomaniacal Rousseauvian variety that tore France apart in 1789.
Indeed, the political fantasies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau have a great
deal to answer for. For two centuries, his sentimentalizing utopian
rhetoric has provided despots of all description with a means of
pursuing conformity while praising freedom.
It is a neat trick. Words like "freedom" and "virtue" were ever on
Rousseau's lips. But freedom for him was a chilly abstraction; it
applied to mankind as an idea, not to individual men. "I think I know
man," Rousseau sadly observed near the end of his life, "but as for
men, I know them not." In the Confessions, he claimed to be "drunk on
virtue." And indeed, it turned out that "virtue" for Rousseau had
nothing to do with acting or behaving in a certain way toward others.
On the contrary, the criterion of virtue was his subjective feeling
of goodness. For Rousseau, as for the countercultural radicals who
followed him, "feeling good about yourself" was synonymous with moral
rectitude. Actually behaving well was irrelevant if not, indeed, a
sign of "inauthenticity" because it suggested a concern for
conventional approval. Virtue in this Rousseauvian sense is scarcely
distinguishable from moral intoxication.
Establishing the reign of virtue is no easy task, as Rousseau's avid
disciple Maximilien Robespierre discovered to his chagrin. All those
"particular wills"i.e., individual men and women with their diverse
aims and desiresare so recalcitrant and so ungrateful for one's
efforts to make them virtuous. Still, one does what one can to
convince them to conform. And the guillotine, of course, is a great
expedient. Robespierre was no political philosopher. But he
understood the nature of Rousseau's idea of virtue with startling
clarity, as he showed when he spoke of "virtue and its emanation,
terror." It is a remark worthy of Lenin, and a grim foreshadowing of
the Marxist-Leninist rhetoric that informed a great deal of Sixties radicalism.
I mention Rousseau here because, acknowledged or not, he is an
important intellectual and moral grandfather of so much that happened
in the cultural revolution of the 1960s. (Important "fathers" include
Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud.) Rousseau's narcissism and megalomania,
his paranoia, his fantastic political ideas and sense of absolute
entitlement, his sentimentalizing nature-worship, even his twisted,
hypertrophied eroticism: all reappeared updated in the tumult of the
1960s. And so did the underlying totalitarian impulse that informs
Rousseau's notion of freedom.
The glorification of such spurious freedom is closely connected with
another misuse of languageone of the most destructive: the
description of irresponsible political na&lsqauo;vet‚ as a form of
"idealism." Nor is it only naïveté that gets the extenuating
absolution of "idealism." So do all manner of crimes, blunders, and
instances of brutality: all can be morally sanitized by the simple
expedient of being rebaptized as examples of (perhaps misguided)
"idealism." The one essential qualification is that the perpetrator
be identified with the political Left. In On Revolution, Hannah
Arendtwho was certainly no enemy of the Left herselfcannily
observed that one has often been struck by the peculiar selflessness
of the revolutionists, which should not be confused with "idealism"
or heroism. Virtue has indeed been equated with selflessness ever
since Robespierre preached a virtue that was borrowed from Rousseau,
and it is the equation which has put, as it were, its indelible stamp
upon the revolutionary man and his innermost conviction that the
value of a policy may be gauged by the extent to which it will
contradict all particular interests, and that the value of a man may
be judged by the extent to which he acts against his own interest and
against his own will.
In fact, the "peculiar selflessness" that Arendt describes often
turns out to be little more than an abdication of individual
responsibility abetted by utter self-absorption. It is a phenomenon
that, among other things, helps to explain the queasy-making
spectacle of left-wing Western intellectuals falling over themselves
in a vain effort to excuse, mitigate, or sometimes simply deny the
crimes of the Soviet Union and other murderous left-wing regimes
throughout the Cold War and beyond. Perhaps we can admit that Stalin
(or Mao or Pol Pot or Fidel or whoever) was repressive (or maybe that
is just an ugly rumor propagated by the United States); perhaps he
"went too far"; maybe some measures were "extreme"; this or that
policy was "misjudged"; . . . but omelettes require breaking a few
eggs, . . . and besides what glorious ideas are equality, community,
the brotherhood of man . . . going beyond capitalistic greed, mere
selfish individualism, repressive patriarchal society based on
inequitable division of labor, etc., etc. The odor of piety that
attends these rituals of exculpation is almost as disagreeable as the
aura of grotesque unreality that emanates from them.
One sees the same thing in another key in the left-liberal response
to cultural revolution of the 1960s. Whatever criticisms might be
made of the counterculture, they are quickly neutralized by invoking
the totem of "idealism." For example, one is regularly told that
youth in the 1960s and 1970s, whatever its extravagances and
sillinesses, had a "passionate belief" (the beliefs of radicals are
never less than "passionate") in a "better world," in a "more humane
society," in "equality." The guiding assumption is that "passion"
redeems moral vacuity, rendering it noble or at least exempting it
from censure. This assumption, which is part of the Romantic
background of the counterculture, is profoundly mistaken and
destructive. As T. S. Eliot observed , the belief that there is
"something admirable in violent emotion for its own sake, whatever
the emotion or whatever the object," is "a cardinal point of faith in
a romantic age." It is also, he noted, "a symptom of decadence." For
it is "by no means self-evident," Eliot wrote, that human beings are
most real when they are most violently excited; violent physical
passions do not in themselves differentiate men from each other, but
rather tend to reduce them to the same state; and the passion has
significance only in relation to the character and behavior of the
man at other moments of his life and in other contexts. Furthermore,
strong passion is only interesting or significant in strong men,
those who abandon themselves without resistance to excitements which
tend to deprive them of reason, become merely instruments of feeling
and lose their humanity; and unless there is moral resistance and
conflict there is no meaning.
"Passion," like "idealism," is a nostrum that the Left prescribes in
order to relieve itself from the burdens of moral accountability.
In a subtle essay called "Countercultures," the political commentator
Irving Kristol noted that the counterculture of the 1960s was in part
a reaction against a society that had become increasingly secular,
routinized, and crassly materialistic. In this respect, too, the
counterculture can be understood as part of our Romantic inheritance,
a plea for freedom and transcendence in a society increasingly
dominated by the secular forces of Enlightenment rationality. Indeed,
revolts of this tenor have been a staple of Romanticism since the
nineteenth century: Dostoevski's "underground man," who seeks refuge
from the imperatives of reason in willful arbitrariness, is only one
example (a rather grim one) among countless others.
The danger, Kristol notes, is that the counterculture, in its attack
on secular materialism, "will bring downwill discredithuman things
that are of permanent importance. A spiritual rebellion against the
constrictions of secular humanism could end up . . . in a celebration
of irrationalism and a derogation of reason itself." At a time when
the radical tenets of the counterculture have become so thoroughly
established and institutionalized in cultural lifewhen they have, in
fact, come more and more to define the tastes, habits, and attitudes
of the dominant cultureunmasking illegitimate claims to "liberation"
and bogus feats of idealism emerges as a prime critical task.
To an extent scarcely imaginable thirty years ago, we now live in
that "moral and cultural universe shaped by the Sixties." The long
march of the cultural revolution of the 1960s has succeeded beyond
the wildest dreams of all but the most starry-eyed utopians. The
great irony is that this victory took place in the midst of a
significant drift to the center-Right in electoral politics. The
startling and depressing fact is that supposedly conservative
victories at the polls have done almost nothing to challenge the
dominance of left-wing, emancipationist attitudes and ideas in our
culture. On the contrary, in the so-called "culture wars,"
conservatives have been conspicuous losers.
One sign of that defeat has been the fate of the culture wars
themselves. One hears considerably less about those battles today
than a decade ago. That is partly because, as Robert Novak notes in
his book Completing the Revolution, "moral issues tend to exhaust
people over time." Controversies that only yesterday sparked urgent
debate today seem, for many, strangely beside the point. There is
also the issue of material abundance. For if the Sixties were an
assault on the moral substance of traditional culture, they
nonetheless abetted the capitalist culture of accumulation. Yes,
there are exceptions, but they are unimportant to the overall
picture. Indeed, it happened that the cultural revolution was most
damaging precisely where, in material terms, it was most successful.
This put many conservatives in an awkward position. For conservatives
have long understood that free markets and political liberty go
together. What if it turned out that free markets plus the cultural
revolution of the Sixties added up to moral and intellectual poverty?
It is both ironical and dispiriting to realize that the
counterculture may have won its most insidious victories not among
its natural sympathizers on the Left but, on the contrary, among
those putatively conservative opponents who can no longer distinguish
between material affluence and the moral good. In other words, it may
be that what the Sixties have wrought above all is widespread
spiritual anesthesia. To a degree frightening to contemplate, we have
lost that sixth sense that allows us to discriminate firmly between
civilization and its discontents. That this loss goes largely
unlamented and even unnoticed is a measure of how successful the long
march of the cultural revolution has been.
.
