seeds wrote: ↑Sat Mar 16, 2024 5:27 amThe Vietnam war was raging at the time of Woodstock, and part of the underlying theme and spirit of Woodstock was to demonstrate (perhaps naively) that peace, love, and universal brotherhood is what humanity should be pursuing, instead of war and killing each other.
So, no, Woodstock was not an example of celebrating war victories, indeed, quite the opposite.
I have a few thoughts on this theme. My views have been influenced by a book that had a strong effect on how I see things:
The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism by James Farrell.
His view is that a good deal of that
spirit originated in Catholic Personalism. The so-called Ban the Bomb Movement that developed postwar is an example. Their opposition to the atomic bomb could only have been based on a sane anti-war and anti-mass annihilation platform. And when the roots of the movement are examined you find that people like Dorothy Day and
Peter Maurin (Liberal Catholic radicals is the only way I could describe them) were very influential. Catholic personalism calls for a re-humanization of society and culture and for this reason tends Left, if the Right is in support of the existent power-structure and also the war-machine (as they would have and did call it).
There is no way that I can see to avoid understanding the intense degree to which such Personalism, and indeed Christian value and Catholic value, influenced the Sixties Movement. To see this you only need to examine a few (out of hundreds) of the popular songs -- such as
Get Together and
I Am the Light of this World.
Within American culture, and the American Experience, and if we are going to refer to a mass neo-religious gathering like Woodstock, I think we'd have to see it as a manifestation of
The Great Awakenings:
The Great Awakening refers to a number of periods of religious revival in American Christian history. Historians and theologians identify three, or sometimes four, waves of increased religious enthusiasm between the early 18th century and the late 20th century. Each of these “Great Awakenings” was characterized by widespread revivals led by evangelical Protestant ministers, a sharp increase of interest in religion, a profound sense of conviction and redemption on the part of those affected, an increase in evangelical church membership, and the formation of new religious movements and denominations.
When you examine the fundamental philosophy of the Hippies you will not find a strict, doctrinal Christianity -- indeed you’ll find something radical and subversive to that in many ways -- but you will certainly find a sort of spirit or value-set that cannot be described as
anything but Christian.
So, no, Woodstock was not an example of celebrating war victories, indeed, quite the opposite
Now comes the hard part: understanding how it is, and why it is, that Sixties Radicalism was also, along with some glorious and moving Personalism, a wild and brazen effort by inexperienced youth to break down established categories and to defy and oppose authority and structures of authority. What turned me around (in relation kto understanding this) was Robert Bork's book
Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline:
In this New York Times bestselling book, Robert H. Bork, our country's most distinguished conservative scholar, offers a prophetic and unprecedented view of a culture in decline, a nation in such serious moral trouble that its very foundation is crumbling: a nation that slouches not towards the Bethlehem envisioned by the poet Yeats in 1919, but towards Gomorrah.
Slouching Towards Gomorrah is a penetrating, devastatingly insightful exposé of a country in crisis at the end of the millennium, where the rise of modern liberalism, which stresses the dual forces of radical egalitarianism (the equality of outcomes rather than opportunities) and radical individualism (the drastic reduction of limits to personal gratification), has undermined our culture, our intellect, and our morality.
I believe that at least on some levels the view I have could be seen as similar in some ways to that of Iwanaplato. I do not think we can, and indeed we should not, see things through forced or artificially constraining binaries -- though these are convenient. I will say that we face, and beyond all doubt, dramatic and very real moral crises and crises of value and definition of value.
There is no easy way out of this.
____________________________
For fun:
"Let's Split".
A curious fact: You always have to attract and seduce the women first. In a way this doubles back to what Pearl Davis is now
working against. She is trying to show how women, and their own best interests, are not being served by some modern processes and trends.
Finally, consider the thesis of Sexual Suicide by George Gilder (reviewed in Kirkus Review). I will only say that Gilder was prescient and the perspectives in this review seem to me short-sighted and opinionated (typical of that date and time):
SEXUAL SUICIDE
BY GEORGE GILDER NOV. 1, 1973
Sure as night follows day Women's Liberation was bound to precipitate a male counterthrust and Glider's is as provoking and maddening a polemic as any we've encountered to date. He may not know it, but he shares a good many feminist views, in particular his contention that male sexuality -- when not harnessed and subjugated to the "long-term rhythms and perspectives" of the woman -- is a wayward, transient hit-and-run phenomenon of hedonistic opportunism and impulse.
Gilder asserts categorically the sexual superiority of women ("males are the sexual outsiders and inferiors"); in fact he has very little good to say about his own sex -- left to their own devices men are asocial, predatory and dangerous to society. But the conclusions he draws from all this are not only startling but downright perverse. Using a smattering of idiosyncratic anthropology, he concludes only traditional monogamy can save the man; and marriage is the bedrock of Western Civilization. Ipso facto, Women's Lib and its goals -- abortion on demand, child-care centers, equal pay for equal work -- will be the ruination of us all.
Anything that takes the woman out of the home will add to the male sense of redundancy, impotence and rootlessness; take away his age-old role as protector and provider and he will turn to drugs, pornography, marauding, rape and killing. "The steady erosion of the key conditions of male socialization" which we are today witnessing will cause general social disintegration. As a symptom of the masculine identity crisis this is a very poignant book. As a critique (brief) of the shallow shibboleths of Open Marriage it's right on. But the remedies for male anomie which Gilder proposes (in all seriousness) would return women to abject dependence, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. Which is about as reactionary a non-solution as we can envision.
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