The Peter Pan establishment (exposing the 60's)

In 1969, I attended an entrance interview at Warwick university. The don who interviewed me was an Amazonian, hippyish figure with wild hair and strings of beads, in a study draped with animal skins and exotic hangings.

Why, she asked, did I want to come to university? I gave a toe-curlingly boring reply which had something to do with education. ‘Absolute rubbish’, she roundly declared. ‘You will come to university to subvert society, smoke pot and sleep around’.

I was, to put it mildly, astounded (and, I have to confess, impressed; well, I was only 17). She told me her name, but it meant nothing to me. For it was only the following year that her book, The Female Eunuch, would erupt into the lives of British women, put the great sexual revolution on full throttle and turn its author, Germaine Greer, into the high priestess of the feminist counter-culture.

Her words to me that day surely encapsulated the tenets of that extraordinary and truly revolutionary decade. For the sixties set in train changes in British society which can be said to have transformed it into a different country altogether— and one which has not altogether advanced the cause of civilisation.

There is no doubt, however, that the progressives of that time thought this was precisely what they were doing. The great social reforms of the decade — legalising abortion and homosexuality, liberalising divorce, enabling the distribution of contraceptives and abolishing capital punishment and theatre censorship — were said to embody what their chief architect, the then Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, described as the ‘civilised society’.

The sixties were the decade of liberation, full stop. Intolerance, repression and bigotry were consigned to the dustbin of history. Those who warned that freedom was being confused with antisocial licence were laughed out of court.

But tonight, a programme on BBC Four challenges that particular piece of received wisdom. Called ‘I Hate the Sixties’, it claims that the decade’s moral permissiveness, collapse of respect for institutions and failed experiments in 'progressive' education led directly to the difficulties we face today.

Far from ‘liberation’ it often left its purported beneficiaries high and dry. As one of the programme’s contributors says, feminism didn’t free women so much as make them sexually available. By preaching independence from men, it often left women abandoned and lonely.

Divorce didn’t free trapped spouses from the shell of an empty marriage so much as reduce marriage to an empty shell. And far from delivering equality of opportunity, the abolition of the grammar schools kicked away the ladder of opportunity from the poor.

Moreover, few of us who were around in the sixties could have foreseen the development, not of toleration of those who depart from society’s moral norms, but instead the wholesale destruction of those norms altogether.

Who would have predicted, when the novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was cleared of obscenity, that high-minded support for literary freedom would end up giving us a depiction of gang rape, torture and bestiality in a play to be staged this summer at the Edinburgh Festival? Who would have foretold, when abortion was made lawful, that a 14 year-old girl would be secretly given an abortion without her mother knowing anything about it?

Who would have thought, when homosexuality was legalised between consenting adults as an act of compassion, that ‘cruising’ in public toilets would be made lawful, primary school children would be taught the techniques of gay sex — and that people would be vilified as ‘homophobic’ if they objected?

And above all, who would have imagined that in 2004, Britain would have a ruling class heavily influenced by people who have never grown out of their sixties’ morality-busting radicalism and are even now, in their respectable middle age, busy translating it into official policy?

The sixties gave us something much darker than a highly commercialised youth culture and some great rock bands. It was a cultural revolution which — far from producing Roy Jenkins’s ‘civilised society’ — struck blow after lethal blow at the very core of what has given this country its civilisation.

To understand its truly revolutionary impact, you have to realise that ‘the sixties’ didn’t start in 1960.

Following World War two, the revulsion against Nazism turned into hostility towards all forms of repression. This fuelled the rise of the therapy culture, on the basis that suppressing any desire was harmful for the individual. The fact that this happened to be essential for civilisation was unfortunately overlooked. No, what became sacrosanct was how we felt about ourselves.

A hugely influential book by the Marxist sociologist Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality, proposed in 1950 that any kind of authority —sexual restraint, the traditional family and conventional morality — was a kind of fascism. Only attacks on these values were legitimate.

But the real power behind the sixties revolution was the Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci. For Gramsci grasped that the most effective means of overturning western society was to subvert its culture and morality. Instead of mobilising the working class to take over the world, the revolution would be achieved through a culture war, in which the moral beliefs of the majority would replaced by the values of those on the margins of society.

And this would be brought about by capturing all society’s institutions — schools, universities, churches, the media, the legal profession, the police, voluntary groups —and making sure that this intellectual élite all sang from the same subversive hymn-sheet.

Gramsci’s revolutionary aims have been accomplished to the letter. The intellectual class was overwhelmingly captured. The moral codes of society were profoundly subverted and weakened as all the barriers fell. Previously marginalised groups, such as never-married mothers or gay people, now became the arbiters of morality which was defined in their ‘non-judgmental’ image in order to spare their feelings.

Under the banner of individual freedom, morality became privatised. Every individual became his or her moral authority, and no-one had the right to say anyone else’s lifestyle was wrong or inferior. With personal choice trumping everything, no-one could be in authority over anyone else. So relations between parents and children, teachers and pupils, and men and women were utterly transformed.

Selfishness became a virtue; looking after number one became a duty. Real duty to others thus got junked as a heresy that could not be allowed to challenge the religion of the self.

And what started out as an eminently decent impulse for tolerance turned into something quite different. Because there was now an absolute taboo against hurting people’s feelings, the very idea of normal behaviour had to be abolished so that no-one would feel abnormal.

So abnormal behaviour — such as sexual promiscuity or abandonment of children—became regarded as normal. On the other hand, those who were advocating mainstream values such as fidelity, chastity or duty now found themselves accused of promoting something illegitimate because it made people who did not uphold these values feel bad about themselves — the ultimate sin. So alternative lifestyles became mainstream. The counter-culture had become the norm.

The family — the crucible of morality and social order — was where the most lethal damage was done, as the sexual revolution reshaped family life. Whereas single motherhood and divorce had once been stigmatised, after ending a marriage was made easier it became wrong to object to lone motherhood and the damage to children was denied or ignored.

As the props of marriage were kicked away, it became progressively emptied of meaning and families broke up more frequently. Feminism told women they could do without men and exiled fathers from the family.

The outcome has been the creation of social and moral deserts in communities where there are no committed fathers, relationships are transient and children’s lives are devastated. Try telling these children that the sixties produced a less repressed, more civilised and tolerant Britain.

Abandoned by the destruction of the family, children were further betrayed by equally radical sixties views about education in a multi-pronged assault. The obsession with social equality meant the imposition of mediocrity and outright educational failure which trapped the poor firmly in their disadvantaged backgrounds.

The obsession with personal freedom created ‘child-centred’ education, where children were regarded as having equal if not superior talents to their teachers and thus effectively abandoned to develop their own ignorance. And the obsessional hostility to authority meant pupils were not taught not to do sex or drugs but left to make their own ‘informed’ choices — to the consternation of the adult world when they tried these very things.

Beyond education, the insistence on equality eroded respect for all in authority: parents, police officers, doctors, judges. Faced with this revolt, those in authority did not hold the line but allowed themselves to be toppled like skittles.

In particular, the church lost the plot, vainly attempting to hold onto its vanishing flock by going with the flow of moral and cultural collapse. So the final and most important line of defence in the culture war unleashed by the sixties revolution simply disintegrated.

This culture war was essentially a revolt by the young with money in their pockets against their elders — an adolescent fantasy of irresponsibility. But the odd thing was that these revolutionaries never grew up. As this generation of post-war baby boomers grew older, they still clung to the infantilism of their youth.

But now they have become the country’s establishment. Across the professions – the universities, police, civil service, judiciary — the people at the top come from that generation. So now we have the bizarre situation where the establishment is in a state of arrested adolescence. Hence the preposterous support of certain senior police officers, for example, for the legalisation of drugs, or of the senior judiciary for redefining the family out of existence.

As for government ministers, it is as if their sixties radicalism had been preserved in a cryogenic tank during Labour’s 18 years out of office and then thawed out and imposed upon the country without their thinking having matured by one iota in the interim.

Thus it has enacted an agenda of extreme feminism, penalising men, marriage and the traditional family. It has given incentives to unmarried women, loaded the financial dice against married couples — particularly where the wife stays at home — and skewed rape proceedings against men on the presumption that all accused males are guilty.

It has promoted the destruction of the very concept of moral norms by driving forward a gay rights agenda whose fundamental purpose is to set up gay lifestyles as morally equivalent to heterosexual behaviour. And it has set in train the liberalisation of drug use, despite the untold harm this causes to individuals and society in general.

It is an agenda of radical self-centredness, which will simply destroy the values that have made this society orderly and civilised. And those who will lose out most are the poor, who don’t have the resources to cope without clear moral structures that underpin behaviour.

The astounding thing about the sixties cultural revolution is that, although its casualties are all around us in lonely, depressed adults and abandoned children, it is still running its destructive course. Those who were in its vanguard are still driving it on. They appear to have learned nothing.

The young, who are among its principal casualties, are notably impatient with it. It is the older generation which appears to be suffering from a collective Peter Pan complex, a persistent infantile disorder. And the main casualty is likely to be nothing less than western civilisation itself.

THE HUNCHBACK - Some possible factors behind his impact

Some Gramsci excerpts for your enjoyment and perusal. Google is wonderful.... wonder how long it will be uncensored like this...

1891 – (January 22nd.) Born at Ales in Cagliary, Italy. Antonio was the fourth son of Francesco Gramsci, a clerk (not another one!!) in the local registrar's office. (So, he's neglected by Dad at the outset - and his letters of anger at his father's inadequacies survive .... being a near last born is a bummer - the question is, did he paint, too?).

1897-1898 – His father is sentenced to serve five years in prison on charges of maladministration. On his release he has no job, so his seven children grow up in difficult circumstances and deep financial insecurity. Antonio G. suffered ill health throughout his life, and from a deformity which left him a hunchback.

(Sometime during these years of trial and near poverty, he fell from the arms of a servant (oh, he was dropped ...now that explains it), to which his family attributed his hunched back and stunted growth: he was an inch or two short of five feet in height. (ALERT - J. P. Sartre was also an extremely short man ... connections, connections ... does being short lead to Marxism? Hmmmmm.... )

1916 – Starts working as a journalist for the Socialist Party paper. (Shock, gasp, surprise!!)

1922 – (from May to November 1923) Gramsci goes to Moscow as a member of the Communist International and spends more than a year in this country. In a local clinic (an insane asylum, actually) he meets his future wife, Giulia Schucht, and later he returns to his country as a leader of the Communist Party.

Julija ("Giulia") Schucht was the fifth of five daughters (beside a son, Vittorio) of a Russian family of revolutionaries, forced to flee Tzarism and to wander through Europe. They were to arrive in Rome, in the summer of 1908, and were to remain for several years, before returning to their homeland, where in September 1922 Gramsci—on a trip there to participate in the work of the Communist International--met the woman who would become his companion and who would give him two sons, Giuliano and Delio. (Another kid way down in the birth order ... I bet she was neglected too by Dad .... wait a sec, look further and note it just wasn't dad who neglected her!)

"I have always waited for you, and you have always been one of the essential elements of my life, even when I have had no precise news or received rare letters without vital substance" one reads in one of the last letters, of December 1935, when Gramsci had been in prison for a decade. He was confined in Rome, in the "Quisisana" clinic, getting steadily worse (he was to die in April of '37), and even though Giulia's sister, Tatiana, continued to be close with a mixture of assistance and tenderness, the thought of his distant "Iulca" did not abandon his long dramatic days made up of isolation and suffering.

The relationship, human, emotional and psychological, between Gramsci and Giulia must have been complex, and until now there were insufficient documents to gather in its entirety the context in which the weight of Giulia's early nervous illness was not indifferent to the torment of the Communist leader, forced into silence in his cell.

They lived together for a very short time, because already in the summer of '26, Giulia was to leave for Moscow, taking with her their first son and expecting the second. If for Gramsci, as he wrote to her perhaps with an exclamation, "life is always a cold steppe, a dead stump," even for Giulia the years of forced separation from her "man," in and out of Soviet clinics for nervous illnesses, must have contributed to "mark" a hyper-sensitive temperament, like that of the young musician.

On the evening of November 8, 1926, Gramsci was arrested in Rome and, in accordance with a series of "Exceptional Laws" enacted by the fascist-dominated Italian legislature, committed to solitary confinement at the Regina Coeli prison. This began a ten-year odyssey, marked by almost constant physical and psychic pain as a result of a prison experience that culminated, on April 27, 1937, in his death from a cerebral hemorrhage. No doubt the stroke that killed him was but the final outcome of years and years of illnesses that were never properly treated in prison.

Yet as everyone familiar with the trajectory of Gramsci's life knows, these prison years were also rich with intellectual achievement, as recorded in the Notebooks he kept in his various cells that eventually saw the light after World War II, and as recorded also in the extraordinary letters he wrote from prison to friends and especially to family members, the most important of whom was not his wife Julka but rather a sister-in-law, Tania Schucht. She was the person most intimately and unceasingly involved in his prison life, since she had resided in Rome for many years and was in a position to provide him not only with a regular exchange of thoughts and feelings in letter form but with articles of clothing and with numerous foods and medicines he sorely needed to survive the grinding daily routine of prison life. (Ahhh ... like Hitler, Gramsci's ideas are percolated in a prison cell ... hmmmm).

... every important letter that Gramsci wrote (especially those telling about his feelings and political ideas) was addressed to Tatiana, the sister of his wife Giulia. Finally, she was the person who recovered his papers to posterity. You have to draw your own conclusions.

And, oh yes bonus material!!, what the a leftist at a university will write about Freepers who attribute cultural rot to Gramsci. Its illuminating!

Now, everyone, repeat slowly "Gramsicans are not cultists" "Gramscians are not cultists".....

All this should be laughable ... too bad it isn't.

well the link doesn't work directly to the university ... surprise ... here's what the good Gramscian Leftist has to say:

"Steve Myers, of the Christian Patriot web site Exegesis, reports that followers of Antonio Gramsci -- the Italian political theorist and communist activist who died after a decade of imprisonment in Mussolini's jails -- have stealthily succeeded in taking control of the culture, economy, and political system of the United States.

According to Steve:

both research and empirical evidence suggest that the undermining of America's national culture is no accident. Indeed, this effort seems to have been strategically planned, primarily by the demonic disciples of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), whose communist teachings are at the core of much that has been taking place in America over the past forty years or so.

Put simply, Gramsci believed in what he called a "long march through the culture." He suggested that a relatively small number of people could achieve the Marxist goal of national and world domination if they infiltrated, undermined and hijacked cultural institutions like high schools, universities, churches and the media, while simultaneously anesthetizing the people. Of course, the process operates much more smoothly if it is done so covertly that average citizens will barely notice the changes. To that end, the Gramscian Marxists ensure that citizens remain preoccupied with entertainment, sport, battles fought in false dialectics, and other distractions.

This goal has been achieved with ease in America, given the geniality of her people. The Gramscians have actually managed to brainwash large numbers of people into ridiculing anyone who resists their advance.

Gramscians are now running America's political parties, banking system, movies, television and other media. Moreover, as they possess enormous financial and political strength, they are also able to oversee the appropriate distribution of subtle anti-Christian, anti-American, Marxist propaganda in political institutions, high schools, universities and even churches.

As a result of such efforts over the past forty years, America, blissfully brainwashed into ignorance, now stands perilously close to a Marxist, totalitarian state.

The structure of America was formed by the pillars of liberty, patriotism, faith in God, and limited constitutional government. And it is no coincidence that all those pillars are currently being subverted by the Gramscian Marxists and their demons popping out of every cultural nook and cranny in America, monotonously droning their constant anti-Christian, anti-American message.

We must no longer delude ourselves. America can be redeemed from the Gramscian Marxists only if we are bold, swift and decisive, and act with God's blessing and guidance. [end quote]

I admit with some embarassment that this came as a surprise to me. I am myself a follower ("demonic disciple" sounds a bit harsh, I think) of Gramscian political ideas, and failed to notice our total political triumph.

Further, I was recently at a conference attended by some of the leading scholars of Gramsci in the English-speaking world, and there was no mention of this remarkable achievement, which would have provided a splendid occasion for revelry and merriment. I guess that this kind of knowledge is held on a need-to-know basis. But that does make me wonder:

HOW IS IT THAT STEVE HAS APPARENT INSIDE KNOWLEDGE OF A GRAMSCIAN CONSPIRACY SO SECRET THAT EVEN THE GRAMSCIANS DON'T KNOW ABOUT IT?

Surely that is "no accident". What else does Steve know that we don't know? Who's been whispering in Steve's ear, and what is their hidden agenda? Is Steve being manipulated by a sinister conspiracy within a conspiracy -- appearing as a simple Christian Patriot but in fact a diabolically clever conduit for the propagation of the conspiracy's most treacherous propaganda directly into the Christian Patriot community??? Inquiring minds want to know, Steve.

A word of explanation for the perplexed (thanks Mark ... we're too stupid here at FR to figure this out!!):

The "demonic disciples of Antonio Gramsci" screed is another product of the "Christian Patriot" sub-culture that persists on US far-right, just this side of the white supremacists (although they may overlap somewhat). Belief that the US constitution is divinely inspired forms the basis for their fusion of Christian fundamentalism and nationalism.

They think the US is under siege by the forces of Satan ("demonic disciples", etc) -- internationalist, socialistic (by which they understand powerful, intrusive government regardless of ideology) -- seeking to undermine God-given rights and liberties as enshrined in the US constitution (but somehow mysteriously absent from other liberal republics) and the "family values" which inhere in the conservative, patriarchal, nuclear heterosexual unit (nice imagery in that last bit, eh?).

They believe that the Fordist-Keynesian state was the product of a conspiracy involving "international bankers" and marxist revolutionaries.

In a nutshell, the conspiracy robs hard-working American taxpayers in order to support welfare cheats, run up large government deficits (tax and spend, and spend some more), enrich the mega-bankers (by paying interest on the mounting national debt) and advance the anti-Christ (by undermining America's moral and/or dietary fiber). So in the context of that kind of narrative they are able to conflate Gramscians (as the cultural arm of the marxist arm of the imagined tentacular conspiracy) with the dominant class & with the state apparatus (not to mention Satan; did I mention Satan?). It's kind of like staring into an Escher print until you no longer know which way is up.

At one level, right-wing conspiracy-mongering is amusing; but at another, it's repulsive and scary -- especially in those variants where the main categories of the conspiracy narrative are racialized: (white) hard-working Americans; (non-white) welfare cheats; (Jewish) international bankers, and so on. This is where conspiracism shades into the overt racism and scapegoating characteristic of white supremacists. For background on and critical analysis of right-wing conspiracism, visit the web page of Political Research Associates.

It's tempting to dismiss conspiracists as pinheads, but of course that's too easy. Cultural theorist Mark Fenster has argued that it is a mistake -- both analytical and political -- to trivialize conspiracist thinking by framing it in terms of metaphors of pathology, especially paranoia; for framing it in this way draws attention away from the real social circumstances to which conspiracism might otherwise be seen to respond.

Pathologizing conspiracism not only produces inadequate explanations of it but is also politically self-limiting, since the appropriate response to pathology is treatment of the individual(s) suffering symptoms. Rather than being symptomatic of pathology, Fenster argues that contemporary conspiracism articulates, in distorted and self-limiting ways, a populist critique of contemporary social conditions and a desire for a meaningful political space which can be inhabited by ordinary “citizens.” Fenster writes, “just because overarching conspiracy theories are wrong does not mean that they are not on to something”:

Although conspiracy as a totalizing, instrumental entity might not exist, …relatively secretive, and at times quite open, concentrations of power, built through economic and social connections among elite groups, do. Conspiracy theory is thus ideological in that it substitutes the populist discourse of an antagonism between the people and powerful elites for the analysis of specific structures of power and the processes of struggle, particularly, though not exclusively, concerning class.

…Conspiracy theory as a theory of power, then, is an ideological misrecognition of power relations, articulated to but neither defining nor defined by populism, interpellating believers as “the people” opposed to a relatively secret, elite “power bloc.” Specifically, [conspiracy theories] ideologically address real structural inequities, and constitute a response to a withering civil society and the concentration of the ownership of the means of production, which together leave the political subject without the ability to be recognized or to signify in the public realm.

On this view, conspiracy theory ought not to be pathologized and treated, but rather understood as a distorted populism, framed in response to real social conditions but contradictory and deeply ambiguous in its political implications. Pinheads or not, conspiracists are able to appeal to elements of popular common sense in this country, and it's that which explains their persistence. Ironically, a Gramscian conceptual vocabulary can help us to understand this."

The above is helpfully supplied, via Google ... Thanks Mark Rupert, Professor of Politcal Science at Syracuse U.!!

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