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Introduction: Dreams and Illusions
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13719 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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8 / 1988 |
671 Words |
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The 1960s represent a watershed in the history of postwar America. From the spreading student protest against political and academic administrations to the breakdown of Cold War consensus politics, the sixties were a period of escalating turmoil. They were also a time of cultural protest that saw the rise of the counterculture. In quest of personal authenticity and in conscious revolt against the "tyranny" of Western ethical and intellectual standards, counterculture spokesmen embraced alternative models of living and thinking. Such models embodied various views of how communist societies should operate (as opposed to the way they actually functioned). Other models that appealed to the counterculture were selective adaptations of Oriental mysticism that emphasized individual liberation from the pressures of social life. The use of mind-altering drugs fit easily into the creation of an antibourgeois life-style that called for absorption into an interior life rather than preoccupation with one's family and country.
Implicit in the counterculture were intellectual and other contradictions that later generations would try to sort out. The worship of monolithic communist regimes, particularly Mao's China and Castro's Cuba, coexisted in the worldview of the sixties with the rejection of established authority and a proclivity toward individual self-absorption. Ironically, those who rebelled against established convention looked for paradigms in totally closed societies. The sixties brought forth cogent attacks on impersonal bureaucracy and the managerial elite, particularly in the work of C. Wright Mills, but their only significant long-term political effect has been to increase the power of the bureaucratic state as an instrument of opposing social and sexual discrimination. Even the discrediting of an anticommunist foreign policy by the spokesmen of the new politics of the sixties has not had so lasting an effect, if one judges the political scene at the end of the Reagan years. The protest of the sixties against vast, impersonal administration ended in strengthening some of the same bureaucratic forces it claimed to oppose.
Both the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement were catalysts for the then emerging New Left and the related counterculture. And certainly the effect of a polarizing war and a socially disruptive movement was to contribute to the ferment of which the New Left was symptomatic and from which it fed. The divisions of the sixties called into question the soundness and viability of American political institutions, and the New Left tried to benefit from the ensuing crisis of authority. Yet all the contributors to our series believe that the forces that generated the protest
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