http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/richard_morrison/article6722114.ece
The students who heeded the call to 'turn on, tune in, drop out' are
now the executives telling us all to work harder
Richard Morrison
July 22, 2009
I can only just remember watching Neil Armstrong step on the Moon. I
don't mean, sadly, that I'm only just old enough to remember. I mean
that, on that famous night, I'd fallen asleep in front of my parents'
ancient black-and-white telly (as older readers will recall, it was
at about 4am, our time, that Armstrong finally stepped out of The
Eagle, after what seemed like hours of faffing around inside).
But something, perhaps an excited rise in the commentators' voices,
perhaps an intuition in my slumbering subconscious, woke me at the
very moment when his boot touched the lunar dust. Then, out of the
electric snowstorm that was the live Moon transmission, once it had
been bounced 230,000 miles to Earth, then another 4,000 miles across
the Atlantic, then the ten miles from the BBC to our semi in Hendon,
came Armstrong's immortal words. I can remember them vividly even
now: "Shweewor kerrurgphlff step for psshwhsplod, wheesh ssshhhwop
mankind." Worth staying up for!
Actually, it was worth staying up for, because for weeks afterwards
the radio, TV and papers were full of people talking about how, after
this single event, nothing would be the same again. We humans were
now truly masters of the Universe! Earthlings no more, we had the
Milky Way in our grasp. Star Trek was no longer a TV series, it was
an expectation. Our kids would holiday on Mars as easily as our
parents Bank-Holidayed in Margate.
But the Sixties were like that. They were full of events from
Kennedy's Camelot years to Sgt Pepper, from the World Cup to
Woodstock, from the civil rights marches to Stonewall, from the
student uprisings to the Summer of Love, from the miniskirt to the
Pill that were going to change everything for ever. And they were
driven by a generation, by a musical style, by a counterculture, that
wanted as little as possible to do with the past. Miranda's ingenuous
speech in The Tempest "How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world that has such people
in't!" perfectly sums up the baby-boomer generation's view of
itself and its self-appointed mission to liberate mankind from
repressive hierarchies and outdated modes of behaviour.
You may think, particularly if you didn't live through the Sixties,
that you've heard enough about that self-important decade already.
Well, you'd better grit your teeth. If the media brouhaha over the
40th anniversary of the Moon landings struck you as effusive, just
wait until 2010 when, for ten unrelenting years, the 50th
anniversaries of all the "momentous" happenings of the Sixties start
to roll by in a vast, hagiographic carnival of books, documentaries
and newspaper pullouts.
"If you can remember the Sixties you weren't there," the rock
musician and supreme counterculturalist Paul Kantner said (or
allegedly said, although nobody can really remember). If only that
were true! But I fear that those 50th anniversaries will prompt an
army of raddled radical-dude pensioners to recall, in mind-numbing
detail, exactly what it was like to drop acid with Jimi Hendrix or
march with Martin Luther King. So perhaps it's a good moment to ask
not only whether the Sixties had quite the impact on behaviour and
society that its leading lights thought it did; but also (and more
importantly) whether that impact has added greatly to the sum of
human happiness. It's always a dangerous game to compare the world
that you observed as a relatively carefree child with the one in
which you are embroiled as a frazzled adult, but my gut instinct is
that the answer is a qualified no in both cases.
I would argue, for instance, that women's liberation made much
greater strides through the doughty derring-do of the Edwardian
suffragettes and then through the indomitable fortitude that
millions of women demonstrated by keeping industries and farms going
during the two world wars than it did through the campaigning of
Germaine Greer and the other strident feminists of the Sixties. I
would contend that some of the most glamorous technological "leaps"
of that decade from the Apollo Moon missions to Concorde proved
to be monstrously expensive cul-de-sacs.
I believe that although the Sixties rock revolution (which actually
began in the 1950s) produced thousands of memorable songs, the
mythological status accorded to the pop idols of that decade trapped
popular music in a chronically restricted range of genres, harmonies,
rhythms, instruments and marketing practices that have inhibited true
creativity ever since. I believe that "recreational" drugs have been
a catastrophe for civilisation, both in producing and consuming
countries. And it was the Sixties generation that proudly boasted
(and still boasts) that it opened that can of lethal worms.
Then there's the workplace. The idealists of the Sixties imagined
that, as technology took over more and more basic tasks, we humans
would enjoy increasing amounts of leisure time. The first part of
that vision has proved to be spot on; the second part hopelessly
awry. Technology has not stopped what Philip Larkin called "the toad
work" from squatting on our lives. It has merely given the toad a
kind of supercharged battery so that it can bash our lives more and
more relentlessly. The supreme irony is that it is those Sixties
baby-boomers the very people who, as students, heeded the
siren-call of the hippy guru Timothy Leary to "turn on, tune in, drop
out" who have transmogrified into the corporate executives
demanding that everybody work harder and harder.
Perhaps the one area that the Sixties radicals got right was sex. The
hypocrisy that prevailed in the Fifties forced hundreds of thousands
of homosexuals to live in fear and subterfuge, and pregnant girls to
resort to squalid back-street abortionists. The Pill, and a new
tolerance of what consenting adults did in private, produced vast
social benefits. And to blame Sixties "permissiveness" for the sexual
irresponsibility prevalent today, particularly among teenage boys, is
disingenuous. Each generation must deal with its own problems.
On the whole, however, I can't help thinking that the Sixties were
much overrated. The 1960s, that is. But the 1860s now that was a
decade bursting with geniuses who changed the world. Lincoln,
Bismarck, Tolstoy, Bazalgette, Darwin, Wagner, Gladstone, Nietzsche,
David Livingstone, Florence Nightingale, Manet, William Booth, Louis
Pasteur ... I'm afraid that Jim Morrison, Harold Wilson and Andy
Warhol pale a bit by comparison. But that's another column.
.
0 comments:
Post a Comment