Why Aren't We In The '60s?
Manifesto
The entire time I was growing up there was a persistent myth, occupying roughly the place that a jubilee or a millenarian event might have had in a religious community. The myth was 1968 – the idea that, if you were so lucky, you might happen to live during one of these periods of social efflorescence, when politics were in creative upheaval and art was innovative and risk-taking, and which, by common consent of everybody who had a memory-of-it-and-wouldn’t-shut-up-about-it, was possible time to live in.
For people who were historically-minded, the notion was that this sort of cultural jubilee was basically cyclical. 1968 was a reprise of 1848, which was a reprise of 1792 – and there was a thought, or a whisper, that that sort of socially tumultuous creative energy was due to cycle back around.
I definitely subscribed to this belief and the entire time I was in school, in the 2000s, felt that the circumstances were basically right for this sort of cultural rejuvenation. The ’60, in my mind, were comprised of two synergistic modes of thought – 1.an abiding belief in social equality, which was accompanied by a deep suspicion of hierarchy and authority; and 2.a belief in individual potential, in the infinite richness of the self. These two modes of thought, which might appear contradictory, were not at all. The growth and development of the self was not in the domain of status or elitism. It was a Romantic, or Beat, sensibility that the self could be cultivated and enhanced without running through a nexus of power, without taking away from anybody else. That ideal was fairly readily achievable in art (as periods of artistic flowering thoroughly demonstrated), seemed to be attainable in flashes of communitarian well-being (particularly in buoyant revolutionary moments), and was almost entirely elusive in long-lasting political structures.
In the 2000s there were several indications – I thought – of a ’60s-ish cultural efflorescence. There was a laidback casual style combined with a desire for greater meaning than what was on offer from the pop-y mainstream that had been so ascendent in the ’90s. There was a desire for a progressive egalitarian politics, as symbolized in an issue like gay marriage and crystallized in Obama’s election. And, above all, there was the promise of the web – which seemed like it couldn’t help but generate a more anarchic, free-flowing discourse: the abundance of information, the multiplication of streams of communication leading inevitably to a surge of creativity.
The social upheaval of 2011 – Occupy and the Arab Spring – appeared to be an initial fulfillment of the spirt of ’68, and my sense is that the overly-hastily-drawn parallel confused everybody, including the Obama White House, and created a badly-misguided belief that the turbulence within the Arab world signified some kind of impending liberal jubilee. For me, the discovery around this time of the psychedelic renaissance and of New Age philosophy was similarly inspiring. In retrospect, the New Age had never really disappeared – it had just kind of gone underground or faded away from media attention – but in my life there was a feeling towards the middle part of the 2010s of everything that everybody had loved about the ‘60s suddenly rematerializing and forcing its way into mainstream culture. I was genuinely stunned at the number of conversations I had with perfectly non-hippieish-looking people who wanted to discuss their ayahuasca trips and meditation practices and who routinely used words like ‘resonate’ and ‘synchronicity.’ In this context, even the election of Trump wasn’t particularly alarming – it was understood, as part of the myth of ’68, that a cultural efflorescence would generate a right-wing backlash. That had been part of the story of 1792 and 1848 and for that matter of 1917 just as much as 1968 and it hadn’t really diminished the luster of those periods – the sense was that the kind of creative energy generated was unstable, that it wouldn’t necessarily lead to some permanent political outcome, but that it would still have an extended influence – an enduring sensibility that people could expect more from society than what was on offer the rest of the time.
But somewhere in here there was an alarming sense of disillusionment. If the spirit of the ’60s was returning, where was everything that everybody had been so nostalgic about? Where was the great music? Where was the cinematic New Wave? All the great subversive literature? The spontaneous mass events, Woodstock and the Be-Ins and the March on Washington? Where was the sexual exploration – the Summer of Love and the concerted effort to drive past inhibitions to some more loving, more harmonious way of being?
What was most disconcerting towards the late 2010s and early 2020s was the feeling that the spirit of the ’60s actually was here, that whatever planetary alignment was needed for that sort of efflorescence actually had come to pass but its social manifestations this go around were pathetic, a pale version of their former self. There was a progressive revolution – a push towards social justice and towards questioning gender roles – but there was always something deeply contrived about it, the demands within in it were never very logical and, instead of fighting vigorously for freedom, the social justice warriors seemed intent on coercion, on punishing any deviance from a progressive orthodoxy. As Bill Deresiewicz wrote in a terrific essay on the phenomenon, “The truth is that campus protests, not just in recent years but going back for decades now, bear only a cosmetic resemblance to those of the 1960s….The actions [of campus anti-apartheid protests in the ’80s] had an air of unreality, of play, as if the situation were surrounded by quotation marks. It was, in other words, a kind of reenactment.”
I have wondered, since I wasn’t there, if there has been a bit of revisionism about the late ‘60s – if the glamorous revolutionary hippies were, for those who had to live with them, just as insufferable as the woke warriors are now; if the protests were just as full of woozy thinking and as coercive of perceived backsliders. That’s completely possible. But if there are a few parallels, and if a few things that are sucky in our time are comparable to some things that were sucky in the overreach of the ’60s spirit, what’s been missing is anybody who actually seems to be happy, any public euphoria, any burst of freedom. For all their zealotry - the campus protests, the Twitter mobs - woke warriors are all strikingly joyless. Their totemic victories – and they can claim many – all some to have occurred either in cyberspace or behind the closed doors of Human Resources departments.
That’s of course the most obvious difference between the ’60s and now – the advent of the Internet. If television served as a soporific and as a blunting agent for the full force of the ‘60s as compared with precursor social revolutions, the Internet seems, in our time, to have preempted any kind of meaningful social movement. The ’60s were, above all, a tactile phenomenon – they emphasized crowds, proximity to strangers, affection, sex, a celebration of the body beautiful. All of that appears to be impossible in a digital era. The social justice rhetoric is about connectivity but in practice it feels isolating and divisive – it’s meaningful only if groups of people gather spontaneously together.
It’s hard to blame ourselves for the Internet - that seems to be a collective curse that we’re somehow all stuck with. But there are a couple of other barriers to a ‘60s mentality – and I find these to be less excusable.
One is an obsession with status, an utter absence of any kind of doctrine of radical equality. I remember a sort of horrified shock when I first saw the term ‘new gilded age’ applied to our era - and realized that it was an accurate assessment. The prevalence of heightened inequality wasn’t just an economics phenomenon; it was buoyed by a widespread mindset. On social media everybody was looking to have more likes than everybody else, everybody wanted to differentiate. The telltale sign of any kind of genuine social movement is the attempt to bring down the aristocracy, the undeservingly high status, but in our era there was barely any rejection of the authority of celebrity - and social media, rather than creating an egalitarian groundswell, seemed dedicated above all to reifying celebrity status (most egregiously, in Facebook’s XCheck program, in Twitter’s verification process). Succession turned out to be the artistic statement of our era - a vision of a society with no pretense whatsoever of equality, with status baked-in from birth, and with everybody drawing a kind of collective blank at the idea of trying to get anything more from life than, as Logan Roy puts it, “making your own pile.” Even as sly subversion, this was a long way from the loose spirit of New Wave cinema or the political fervor of ‘60s rock - the belief that social engagement had to be built on an underlying sense of human dignity and of mutual respect, the belief that nobody, no matter their status or achievement, is ever intrinsically better than anybody else.
And the other barrier is a conformity that is taken for granted as reality. Individuality comes packaged as ‘building a brand.’ A strange uniformity prevails across public expression. I found myself disproportionately moved and shaken recently by a couple of stray comments: a handyman, recently immigrated to New York, complaining that he has the same scripted conversations with everybody he encounters, that everybody is “a robot”; an older woman trying to explain a complex story from the ’60s to a reporter by saying, “You know, back then people were much more interesting.” The hippie movement and counter-culture had emphasized a certain cultivated eccentricity, a deep dive into one’s own idiosyncrasies, which meshed perfectly well with the doctrine of radical equality (the belief that everybody was equally singular in their own way), and, as far as I can tell, the brand-building ‘individuality’ we have at the moment has none of that wild eccentricity that was so famous in rock ’n’ roll musicians and counterculture icons.
In other words, in our failure to generate something like a spirit of the ’60s – in spite of our overpowering nostalgia for it, in spite of a confluence of elements pointing in that direction – we can’t just blame the advent of atomizing technology. There’s a mindset that spread widely in the ‘60s – radical equality combined with vigorous individuality. And as much as we’ve admired both from a distance, we haven’t come close to replicating either one.
Revisionism is a mighty force. Czechslovakia, Biafra, riots, RFK, MLK. Not so great as you're remembering it!
Withnail and I!! YESSSS