From: Steve Davies (steve365@btinternet.com)
Date: Thu Dec 26 2002 - 05:35:06 MST
What a wonderful question! I was a bit too young to get the full '60s experience (I was 15 in 1970) so it was a case of looking in from the outside for me. However it left a big impression on me and I did catch the tailend of it (the 60s are really 1963 to about 1973). On the one side it was a time when all sorts of irrationality made an appearance, which has since gone on to flourish enormously. On the other I rmember the enormous optimism and belief that it was possible to change things in a fundamental way, which we have lost now - we are certainly living in the "Age of Funk" as I call it. In retrospect I'd make the following observations:
Here in Britain the 60s saw the "Death of Christian Britain" as a recent book calls it - a truly enormous change. I find it hard to explain to Americans just how secular Britain as become.
We can now see that those years saw the start of a whole series of cultural changes, mostly for the better as several posts have said.
However you also see the start of a loss of hope and confidence, above all a decline in confidence in the capacity of human reason to solve problems. I don't quite understand this but i think Eliezer's on the right lines and it reflects the disillusionment of the generation that came of age at that time.
The 60s were a special time because they marked a special conjuncture. For the first time you had a population that had grown up with genuine mass affluence, with antibiotics and other medical breakthroughs, with the early (mostly beneficial) effects of electronic mass communications, with effective contraception, with true mass mobility (I know this happened earlier in the U.S. but that was a unique experience), all set against the contrast of the terrible years of 1914-45. The result was a great outburst of creativity but also a lot of naivety. Inevitably there's also a feeling that things went sour afterwards, what with music going to pot completely and the malign effects of TV becoming clear. I think the time is ready now for a rebirth of optimism - optimists of the world unite!
Steve D.
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