So much to talk about 

And thrill to 

In those summer days...

It was the Sixties!

Even in Garrett (sort of)

If you are not in your 60’s today, you might not fully grasp what the Sixties were all about, and if you ask your elders, they will most likely all disagree with each other!

So here are a couple pages from a book review I just happened to run across – you need read only the first two pages (copied below) for the best summary I have ever seen. The conservative and liberal views are both expressed, and while each camp FEELS differently about what it believes happened, these the two sides together have nailed it.

The language might seem a little academic, but the panorama is wide and very much on target.

So check it out if you are interested, you will likely learn a lot in just a few minutes... And then click on any of the graphics in the right-hand column for a little more lighthearted fun.

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Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958-c.1974

By ARTHUR MARWICK

Oxford University Press

 Read the entire Review

Was There a Cultural Revolution c.1958-c.1974?

Nostalgia, Prejudice, and Debate

Nostalgia, Prejudice, and Debate Mention of `the sixties' rouses strong emotions even in those who were already old when the sixties began and those who were not even born when the sixties ended. For some it is a golden age, for others a time when the old secure framework of morality, authority, and discipline disintegrated. In the eyes of the far left, it is the era when revolution was at hand, only to be betrayed by the feebleness of the faithful and the trickery of the enemy; to the radical right, an era of subversion and moral turpitude. What happened between the late fifties and the early seventies has been subject to political polemic, nostalgic mythologizing, and downright misrepresentations. If asked to explain the fuss, both survivors of the decade and observers of the repeated attempts subsequently to conjure it up again could probably manage to put together a list of its most striking features, which might look something like this: black civil rights; youth culture and trend-setting by young people; idealism, protest, and rebellion; the triumph of popular music based on Afro-American models and the emergence of this music as a universal language, with the Beatles as the heroes of the age; the search for inspiration in the religions of the Orient; massive changes in personal relationships and sexual behaviour; a general audacity and frankness in books and in the media, and in ordinary behaviour; relaxation in censorship; the new feminism; gay liberation; the emergence of `the underground' and `the counter-culture'; optimism and genuine faith in the dawning of a better world. They might, in addition, be able to contrast this with a list of key features of the fifties, including: rigid social hierarchy; subordination of women to men and children to parents; repressed attitudes to sex; racism; unquestioning respect for authority in the family, education, government, the law, and religion, and for the nation-state, the national flag, the national anthem; Cold War hysteria; a strict formalism in language, etiquette, and dress codes; a dull and cliche-ridden popular culture, most obviously in popular music, with its boring big bands and banal ballads.

    A conservative, of course, would see the fifties as a last age of morality, patriotism, law and order, respect for the family, tuneful music, and a popular culture which was pleasing, not shocking. A conservative would point out that the gross abuse of drugs began in the sixties (fashions in hard drugs have changed, but it was in the sixties that society's defences were decisively breached), aided by self-serving claptrap about the mind-expanding and enlightening qualities of psychedelic experiences; that hippie communes were often as notable for violent squabbles and lamentable hygiene as for peace and spirituality, reminding us also that after the long student occupation of the Sorbonne, that august centre of learning was found to be in a disgusting condition; that dubious theories about language and knowledge as instruments of bourgeois and patriarchal oppression were propagated, leading to the paralysing miasma of political correctness which has affected the academic world ever since. Conservatives would also argue that because of the propagation of `progressive' ideas, crime statistics swung upwards while educational standards dived downwards. Let us listen to a couple of conservatives. Who better to lead off than Margaret Thatcher, radical right prime minister of Britain from 1979 to 1991? `We are reaping', she declared in March 1982, `what was sown in the sixties ... fashionable theories and permissive claptrap set the scene for a society in which old values of discipline and restraint were denigrated.' Defining the sixties as `the period of dogmatic answers and trivial tracts', the American Professor Allan Bloom declared in 1986 that, intellectually, sixties theorists were as destructive as the Nazis.

The American University in the sixties was experiencing the same dismantling of the structure of rational inquiry as had the German university in the thirties. As Hegel was said to have died in Germany in 1933, Enlightenment in America came close to breathing its last during the sixties. The fact that the universities are no longer in convulsions does not mean they have regained their health ...

Most recently, a strongly hostile view of the radicals of the sixties was put forward by Professor Paul Bearman. And while, in his own introduction to Reassessing the Sixties, Stephen Macedo presents a very balanced account, several of his contributors take up very hostile views of radicalism, feminism, and black liberation.

So, left-centre and right do seem to agree that, for good or ill, something significant happened in the sixties. But the disillusioned revolutionaries, the extreme left, declare that nothing very much happened in the sixties. It was all just froth and empty spectacle, in which so-called counter-cultural practices were manipulated by the usual commercial interests; the distribution of economic and political power was exactly the same in the seventies as it had been in the fifties. There is a kind of `soft left' variation of this negative view, propagated by many of those who were active in the cultural innovations of the time: `The sixties were great--i.e, we were great--but of absolutely no enduring significance. Tough youweren't there.' That is the approach of Jim Haynes, of Traverse Theatre and Arts Lab fame, and of musician George Melly.

Pop culture and the sixties are long gone, and all I can hope is that my resurrected book may offer those too young to remember those heady days and nights some idea of what they were about.