Terry Teachout says it wasn’t 1968 that began the big cultural shift, but 1962. ’62 is a good year to zero in on indeed—Cuban Missile Crisis, early SDS days, right before Philip Larkin’s beginning date for “sexual intercourse,” Dylan’s Freewheelin’ gestating in the womb, the gathering bohemian trends Walker Percy noted in The Moviegoer (published 1960) coming to be felt , etc. I’m linking to Emily Esfahani Smith’s excerpting of the Teachout essay over at Ricochet, because it has a fine thread, featuring James Lileks especially.
Teachout’s column has two drawbacks, however, as does the Ricochet thread.
First, there’s no discussion of the big P, the pill. (P.S., anybody here read the new Mary Eberstadt book yet?)
Second, Teachout doesn’t really deal with the fact that a good deal of the cultural shift had begun earlier, particularly in the 1920s, and that the really fundamental changes began with modernity itself, going in the American case right back to Ben Franklin and the Revolution.
They’d understand that second point particularly if they read my cinema-and-song-studded posts on Three Stages of Modernity and Intermediate Modernity. The framework I provide in those essays allow one to admit the revolutionary character of the 60s, while not denying its precedents and forerunners. David Bowie said in “Changes” to the old conservative types who resist change that modern civilization itself had seemed to be about perpetual revolution, particularly from the mid 1800s to the 1960s, and so it was hypocrisy to oppose the more fulsome 60s changes: where’s your shame you’ve left us up to our necks in it.
Here’s the nuts and bolts of my framework:
“…for American society there seem to be three main stages:
1) quasi-modernity –approximately 1776 to 1918
2) intermediate modernity –approximately 1919 to 1965
3) full modernity –approximately 1966 to the present”
Teachout gets to this stuff by noticing the fact (is this right?) that Americans under 30 regard pre-1962 movies as showing an alien America, whereas I get to it more via rock. My Rock Songbook began, after all, with considering the arrival of the sexual revolution, as it looked from the vantage point of a particular song from 1968.
July 21st, 2012 | 11:03 am
Charles Murray points to the year 1963 in Coming Apart, and compares data from 1960 and 2010 to base his analysis.
James Piereson in Camelot and the Cultural Revolution likewise pinpoints 1963.
One could just as easily point to 1961 and the publication of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. This novel lends further credence to your point that these revolutionary trends had been there for some time. Here a WWII veteran writes a novel about the Allied fight against the Nazis as if it were done in terms of a rational-legal bureaucratic straightjacket, whereby the only way to survive in an insane system is to be insane.
Heller’s later novel, Something Happened (1974), provides a bleak reckoning from the point of view of that WWII generation of what has become of this change. Their children, the baby boomers, were, as Paul Goodman put it Growing Up Absurd (1960), and the narrator of Something Happened can’t quite make out how and why it happened.
Some idea of “full modernity” is depicted here. The playfully absurd jokes of Catch-22 have become outright depression in Something Happened.
July 21st, 2012 | 11:45 am
Never read Heller, but that’s an incentive. Something happened all right!
July 21st, 2012 | 1:13 pm
WELL, in this date analysis, someone should consider that all that was good about the Sixties was over by 1965–Civil Rights, voting rights, etc. AND a full analysis would have to deal with the good and bad sides of the liberation of women as economic actors. GRISWOLD was 1965–which as I keep telling you was a new and radically different phase of progressivism. In my opinion the Great Society–and its noble and crazy hopes–was already toast by very late 65, with the turn of opinion that produced the election of 66. And in my own selective and decaying memory, rock tipped in a big way with RUBBER SOUL and the electrification of Folk. Maybe I could prove later that the Catholic Church started to tip in 1965, including theological opinion on contraception.
July 21st, 2012 | 3:32 pm
in re to changes in the Catholic Church that Peter just mentioned, I highly recommend Ralph MacInerny’s “What Went Wrong With Vatican II.” In it he has a chapter titled “1968: The Year the Church Fell Apart.” That was the year that Humanae Vitae was promulgated, and numerous liberal theologians who had wagered their careers that church teaching would a change on contraception had to eat their words. Instead of backing down, theologians like Charles Curran revolted. Ralph’s argument in his book is that nothing was wrong with the document of Vatican II itself, but in the way it was recieved and used by liberal theologians. The book is well worth reading; Ralph was a damn good writer as well as philosopher who was in the trenches when alot of these debates were going on
July 21st, 2012 | 3:44 pm
Interesting historical chronology. Personally, I tend to divide modernity (at least for the US, UK, and France,) into early Modern (1500-1860), Modernity (1860-1919), and the present period as an extension of the 1920′s. Your divisions are a lot more detailed, and are certainly well suited towards the 20th century.
July 24th, 2012 | 7:06 pm
It depends on what part of society you’re asking about. The American cultural revolution began in 1956, when the Old Left underwent turbulence after the Kruschev report, and CPUSA drafted a plan to say in operation by creating a New Left, which quickly spun out of Party control by promoting personalism and libertinism, which didn’t fit into Old Left thinking. At the same time, rock and roll was becoming the official music of America, Marilyn Monroe was changing the modeling/acting industry’s concept of glamour, and the Cold War was becoming a Space Race. In a laboratory where scientists were analyzing ergot, LSD was being isolated. The rest spun out from there.
December 27th, 2012 | 12:28 pm
Thanks for a good discussion!
My important dates, ending “image”modernsim decisively on Sept. 9, 1966:
1. May 1922- March 1923: High Modernism- Radios and cars began to multiply, and Protestant churches began to openly debate belief differences
(Dr. Fosdick’s May 1922 sermon on Fundamentalism and Dr. Machen’s Feb.1923 book Christianity and Liberalism)
2. 1-11-1949:TV went live from the Eastern US by cable to the Midwest
3. 2-7-1964: The Beatles arrive in the US and define a new youth culture by publicity.
4. 9-10-1966: Network Prime time TV goes all color on the 3 major US networks, as styles change.
On 9-10-66 the Stones posed in drag in NYC.
On 9-11-66, the Stones dressed totally different than before on Ed Sullivan’s TV show- looking like the Pepper-era Beatles before the Beatles did!
On 9-12-66, the Monkees came on TV and made the sidestream “Beatle culture” of hair and mod clothes more mainstream (just look at yearbooks-Sept. ’66 seems to be a watershed of hair and clothes change).
The Beatles had just quit live concerts at the end of Aug. 1966, and began “Sgt. Pepper” in November, 1966.
To me, the changes of the “British Invasion” music acts in late 1966-67 was the very beginning of post-modernism image culture.
Couple this with Presbyterians adopting a new statement of faith in March 1967, ending the religious debate that started in 1922-23..
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