1968 looms large in the history of modern times, and in our sense of what it means to be modern. And small wonder. This was the year that saw the Tet offensive and My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the murders of Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy, Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech and the legalisation of abortion in Britain, the signing of the first nuclear non-proliferation treaty and Soviet tanks rolling into Prague, “Hey Jude” at number one worldwide and Nixon elected US president, the killing of dozens of protestors before the opening of the Mexico Olympics and rioting at the Democratic convention in Chicago… not to mention the deaths of Enid Blyton and Tony Hancock, and the births of Dad’s Army and the Victoria tube line.
40 years on, the modern world is more ambivalent than ever about the significance of this year and that near-mythological decade, the Sixties. In a special symposium this month—an extended version of which appears online, featuring more than 50 leading thinkers—we invited contributors to debate everything from feminism to fascism to fashion. Were the early stirrings of postmodern thought, as Roger Scruton suggests, an appalling outburst of self-indulgence and a parody of true education; or did the anarchic energy of that decade inspire much that has been best about the years since, as Joe Boyd argues? Were the protests of May 1968 symptoms of self-indulgent bourgeois pride, as Paul Ormerod says; or a very heaven of revolt against blimpish conservatism, as Denis MacShane sees them? Is the fetishism of 1968 itself a wishful illusion, as Dominic Sandbrook argues, and the cult of the Sixties an evasion of the far more important events of a decade later: the Islamic revolution, the rise of Pope John Paul II, the birth of Thatcherism and Reaganism?
All our contributors are indexed alphabetically at the head of the symposium to aid your browsing, and every entry can be read for free. Dip into and out of our compendium this month—and do let us know your own views below.
However much the rebellious spirit of the 1960’s Beat movement rippled outward, it was the hippie movement that lit up societies dead win-dows for a time. In fact, the hippie movement began as a way of life. Art was Life; Life was Art. Unfortunately, the idea Life was Art developed problems in ways that were not so obvious at first. Conformist society had, in the past, been an audience for underground culture, as it was with the Beat movement. Not so for the hippies. By the mid-sixties the conformist masses began to take up the counterculture as a life style. People adopted the look, the superficial and exterior manifestations of the hippie’s artistic life, often without any understanding of what drove the movement. Soon artistic creation and the original love ethic were replaced by little more than a life style statement.
To some it must have appeared that the 1960’s counterculture was about dancing, music, hippie fashion, going off to Katmandu or forming a commune, but it was much more than a life style and drugs, even if some of the more dubious movers of the sixties underground liked to joke, “If you remembered the sixties, you weren’t there.” In fact, the early, occasional hash-smoking years were not about drugs. In the end, they were about little else.
I thought it unfortunate that many hippies did not taken advantage of the open, enterprising spirit of the sixties. It was a moment like no other. Few hippies followed the example of Barry Miles the inno¬vator of Better Books, IT, and Indica. Miles was an icon of the period and an outstanding example of hippie nonconformity, being both creative and successful. Like Miles, I thought we should have fought the antiquated and stifling capitalist system with a new kind of hippie capitalism. Money was power, and hippies should have gone for both on their own terms.
Many good changes came about in that period and by 1967, Britain had made more social changes that affected women than any other advanced country. It had legal abortion and freely-available contraceptives, with new laws on divorce and equal pay about to be enacted. The general easing of restrictions gave women more control over their lives, yet compulsory promiscuity was endemic and the cries of “don’t hassle me, don’t bring me down” were prevalent at the least sign of “women being possessive and selfishly monogamous.”
By 1969 the kids that flocked to London and Haight Ashbury dressed as hippies had few of the moral convictions and reformist beliefs of the earlier generation. The indiscriminate psychedelic drug-taking degraded the hippie mores already in decline. Now the sharks and charlatans were gathering on the fringes of the movement and about to pounce. No one was more of a charlatan than the psychopath Charles Manson, who got his young, dim-witted groupies to go out on a rampage and kill for him. When the press called him a hippie, I thought the world had gone completely out of whack. Manson was not a hippie; he was a racist who hated women and cold-blooded murderer. Manson managed to blow apart the hippie dream by turning every bearded, longhaired, pot-smoking person, in the eyes of the public, into a potential killer.If the Establishment had been worried about the disaffected young people getting out of control before, real panic now set in. Previously they had gone out of their way to close down underground publications and alter¬native cultural activities. Tony Benn (whose puritanical socialism recoiled at the idea of ge-nuinely popular entertainment) had already managed to eliminate the Pirate Radio stations. News of the World and thugs had done their best to destroy our UFO club. Our newspaper IT, which had survived the most brutal raids by the Porn Squad, was destroyed from the inside by the Loony-Left. Indica bookstore and gallery, which functioned more from the owners’ love of books and art than profit, was slowly ruined by massive book stealing. When the thieves claimed, “Books should be free,” I thought the counterculture was shooting itself in the foot.When the Arts lab was closed down by the Greater London Council in October 1969, felt like the end of an era.
In spite of the undercurrent within the counterculture that valued being over doing, expressing over accomplishing the hippie movement had been instrumental in bringing about the slow onset of social democratization. Much of the amalgam of reforms that we now take for granted, civil rights, women’s rights, and general reforms of local and central government were in part or wholly accepted into daily life. Nevertheless, the sixties proved to be poor training ground for future politicians. Few of the members of government echoed the liberal spirit of Home Secretary Roy Jenkins and no immediate successor with his far-sighted vision followed in his footsteps.
The hippie revolution may still in part be waiting to happen. But then, nothing guarantees that noble purposes will produce a better world much less bring about the demise of greed and intolerance.
Nevertheless, if I had to sum up that epoch, I would say it was a beautiful time of open and carefree days of unashamed utopianism. We created, we fought for just causes, we made love and made merry while we lived on dreams of being innocent revolutionaries.
Technicolor Dreamin’ - th 1960’s Rainbow