The Lessons of the 1960s

Not so fast.

What was the 1965-1975 social revolution really all about? It was, first and foremost, a power play — a statement from a large cohort of young people (mostly quite well-off but disconnected from the political and economic mainstream) that the values and ways of living that were popular in 1965 were no longer acceptable, a protracted protest that “we weren’t going to take it anymore”. “It” was:

• conformity
• soulless consumerism
• war- and hate-mongering (notably the Vietnam War)
• xenophobia, racism, and sexism
• elitism and inequity, and 
• corporatism (then described as “the military-industrial complex”).

The values that we espoused to take their place were: love, peace, justice, spirituality, social experimentation, an organic, communal lifestyle, and “power to the people”. This was not that long after the McCarthy anti-communist witch hunts in the US, and these ideals were extremely threatening to those who believed fiercely in law and order, in respect for the “establishment”, in obedience to authority, in the endless struggle of “good” against “evil”, and in the ethic of hard work. When Timothy Leary advised an entire generation to “turn on, tune in and drop out” this was seen by many as heretical, dangerous, even criminal. Very few bothered to understand what he really meant.
 
This revolution had two factions: the political progressives, who wanted to overthrow corrupt corporatist regimes and replace them with true egalitarian economies and societies, and the social progressives, who thought that was a waste of time and felt it was more useful to get back to the Earth and learn to commune with each other and with nature. I tried, without real success, to reconcile the two, and so I never really belonged to either group.
 
This was the only time in my life I ever really argued with my father, a lifelong and very thoughtful progressive: When I started talking about the need to “tear down the walls”, and to organize before “the Man” began to arrest us and shoot us down, he told me, angrily, that I made no sense, that I was ignorant of the facts and lacked critical thinking skills, and that my generation’s uninformed and paranoid views threatened to undermine the credibility of a progressive movement that had been struggling for lifetimes — his and those before him, since the dawn of the industrial era — to help the poor and powerless live better lives. He told me to keep my mouth shut until I knew what I was talking about. (He was right, though of course I did not follow his advice.)

Some of the things we strove, clumsily, to espouse and create — the peace movement, the search for true justice, self-change and spirituality, egalitarianism, and living healthy, natural lifestyles — are enjoying something of a subtle, pragmatic resurgence, and have been since the 1990s. It is a motley crew advocating these things, a mix of 1960s diehards who have held onto our idealism, and two or three new generations who seek similar things but are doing so their own way, with their own cohort, using a somewhat different language to describe it: Communes are now Intentional Communities, “finding yourself’ is now self-actualization or self-improvement, and Power to the People is now equal opportunity, equity and heeding the Wisdom of Crowds. I think it is a bit sad, and illustrative of the degree of fragmentation and isolation in our modern society, that each generation is to some extent working towards these things independently, rather than together — a series of ironic new unintentional Generation Gaps. Some things never change.

What intrigues me is trying to understand why some of the goals of recent social revolution have been substantially achieved, while others, just as urgently needed and just as worthy, have not. Here’s my scorecard, 1965-2007:

Two things seem to differentiate the successful movements from the failures: How easy it is to make the change, and the number of people who perceive that they have a personal stake in the change. Communities that are ethnically and racially integrated have been able to achieve greater cultural harmony than those that are segregated because it’s easier for them (they experience diversity daily), and because they are more likely to have neighbours of different cultures and ethnicity, so they have more at stake in getting along with them. The horrific cruelty to animals in factory farms is deliberately kept invisible to us, so we have no personal stake in their suffering, and we’ve been convinced by the Big Agriculture oligopoly that small family farms are not viable and that factory farmed foods are ‘economic’, so we perceive supporting local, small-scale, humane, free-range farming as too hard.

The impact of the political lobbying and massive PR spending of the corpocracy (with full mainstream media complicity), has ensured that change that threatens established economic and political interests is seen as hard to achieve and ‘radical’, and change advocates have been deliberately ‘depersonalized’ so that peace activists, anti-globalists, pro-immigrant groups, the people of Iraq, environmentalists and ‘liberals’ are seen as ‘others’, and their labels stigmatized. We are easily brainwashed (by our aversion to change and fear of the unknown) to see them as dangerous, a bit weird, so we can’t relate to them, or their issues, personally (“what is ‘the environment’ they are talking about anyway, and how can I personally get worked up about the ozone layer and greenhouse gases — it’s just too abstract”).

Those of us who have struggled unsuccessfully for the changes in the right column above have tended to beat ourselves — and each other — up for our failures, but we shouldn’t. We can’t care for something we can’t see, and life is challenging enough without being told that we must make hard changes — we will wait until we have no other choice, whether that’s too late or not.

This is perhaps why the social revolution of the 1960s fizzled out in the early 1970s. Our causes were too hard and too abstract. Once we ended the War in Vietnam (which was hard but not abstract) we were spent.

So what do we do, those of us still fighting for these causes, and those of us who’ve just discovered them? Find a way to make it easy. And find a way to make it real, personal. If you hate factory farming, work to invent plant-based meat substitutes that are inexpensive and delicious and taste like meat. And then smuggle a camera into the factory farm your meat comes from and show the film to your neighbours. Make it easy for them to change, andmake them care. 

My Dad told me that, forty years ago. He’s still teaching me.

Happy Father’s Day, everyone.