The Peter Pan establishment
Antimulticulture
http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles/archives/000567.html
Melanie Phillips
June 14, 2004
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.
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