A fresh take on the long shadow cast by the 1960s that is definitely worth your time

Even I sigh upon encountering yet another reflection by a cultural observer on the ongoing impact of the 1960s. Even when I decide to get into one - and I'm more selective all the time - I approach it with the thought, this better be good.

I've found one that is at least that, and perhaps an indispensable contribution to the collection. It's Roger Kimball's piece today at PJ Media. He was spurred to write it by contemplating the fact  . . .

 . . . [f]or 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. 

He sets the table for his exploration of the divergence between what has happened politically in the last 50 years and what has happened culturally with this:

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.

You'll recall that I started out a recent blog post on this subject (yes, it's a preoccupation of mine, which surely has a lot to do with my increasing selectivity about reading others' takes on it, sort of like a baker who rarely eats doughnuts) entitled "Tossing Away History's Greatest Opportunity For Tawdry Little Baubles,"  thusly:

Decades ago, when I had my head way up my tailpipe, one day I was sitting around drinking beers with a buddy (a real character, a Presbyterian minister with a gargantuan alcohol problem) and we were listening to the Grateful Dead's album Anthem of the Sun. I waxed loftily about what a noble vision the band had, how it embodied a generation's forging of a new, tribal, communal way for society to organize, based on a cosmic consciousness that was breaking like a new kind of daylight onto humanity.

"Narcissism," he tersely offered.

"Narcissism? How can you say that?" I responded. "The counterculture is all about selflessness and real community."

"Narcissism," he repeated.

I now understand that he was spot-on.

It's interesting to see that this is precisely what the architects of the counterculture were after:

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.”

Kimball spends a few paragraphs on the perpetual-adolescence aspect of the upheaval begun in the mid-twentieth century and its current manifestations: the prominence of comic books (and, I would add, comic-book-character movies), the deliberate ugliness of so much music, the mainstreaming of blue jeans as appropriate dress just about anywhere.

He also looks at the various serious attempts to put Allen Ginsberg and Shakespeare on the same plane, as well as The Beatles and Schumann. Appropriate space is given to the notion of the Long March Through The Institutions ( a fascinating subject to delve into on its various levels. I wrote my master's thesis on how radical leftism burrowed its way into mainstream Protestantism. The political level of it is admirably documented in Stanley Kurtz's Radical In Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism, which takes us back to Michael Harrington's founding of Democratic Socialists of America, Heather Booth et al founding the Midwest Academy, and the influence of Saul Alinsky and Cloward and Piven).

Kimball enlists the supporting contentions of philosophers such as Paul Oskar Kristellar, Alain Finkeilkraut, and Alan Bloom, as well as the preeminent jurist Robert Bork, who had this to say about the ideology forged by the metastasizing of the counterculture:

In “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, even our courts and the rule of law; 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.

The mention of a particular Irving Kristol essay takes Kimball on a train of thought that gets to the essential irony of the past half-century, as I see it:

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: Dostoevsky’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 down -- will discredit -- human 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 life -- when they have, in fact, come more and more to define the tastes, habits, and attitudes of the dominant culture -- unmasking 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? 

My way of putting it is this: Much as I hold the life, character, principles and accomplishments of Ronald Reagan in the utmost regard, the cultural rot plaguing America continued unabated even as the efficacy of the free market and a foreign policy that made no room for appeasement of rogue forces were made apparent. We saw lower tax rates and the end of the Soviet empire, but also the stardom of such perverted figures as Madonna, Prince and Michael Jackson.

Kimball ends on this sobering note:

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.

Just yesterday, I finished reading Ideas Have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver. It was written in 1948, but strikes essentially these same themes. As I was making my way through it, I was struck several times by how aghast Weaver, who died in 1963, would be to take a look at the scene in 2018, where the crisis he outlined has become ten-thousandfold more alarming.