Forty years later

What’s Left of 1968
Students, power, and violence; then, the rejection of authority and idealism. Forty years after 1968, Traces explores an era that truly marked a turning point whose effects are still with us. Much of what we think today came from that era, as Benedict XVI pointed out in a talk several months ago, when he spoke of a “caesura”, a split,  and “the beginning or explosion of the great cultural crisis of the West”

by Lorenzo Albacete

Not that long ago, the term “1968 generation” would have meant nothing to most ordinary Americans. Not only are many Americans blissfully ignorant of history, including their own, but, unlike in Europe, the events of 1968 were not seen as expressions of an ideological change in American history. Indeed, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy; the Tet Offensive in Vietnam that sharply reduced the people’s support for the war; the increasing violence in the civil rights struggle; President Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run again and the fall of the Democratic Party’s power elite at the Party’s convention in Chicago; the growing influence of the feminist and gay liberation movements; and so on,–all were recognized as arbiters of coming changes in American life, but they were not recognized (except among those who think this way) as expressions of a single, increasingly more powerful current of thought that would eventually influence American life in almost all its dimensions. Instead, they were seen mostly as expressions of problems that needed to be solved, and it was thought that the political and economic system still possessed the tools to solve them.

Humanae Vitae
The only ideological struggle recognized as such was between traditional American thought (whether liberal or conservative) and Communism.
Two happenings not on the typical list of 1968 events quietly revealed what was to come in the following years up to today and showed this year to be indeed the beginning of an ideological contest.
The first was the publication of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, restating the Church’s traditional condemnation of artificial birth control. In the atmosphere of progress that most Americans associate with change, the novelty introduced by the Second Vatican Council had convinced most American Catholics that the Church would accept the use of the contraceptive “pill” being used by more and more American women as an instrument of liberation from a dependence on their bodies not suffered by men. When the encyclical was published, the unity of the Church began to fall to pieces. Parish churches became places of public protests and demonstrations. Although many dissenters from the Church’s teaching tried to convince others and themselves that this was an issue that dialogue could resolve, it became clear that what was at stake was much more than birth control. Indeed, the struggle was about different ways of understanding the meaning of freedom and the view of man upon which these different forms of considering freedom depended. In this 1968 controversy, the true nature of what was happening began to show his face.

Progress as liberation
The second event was the release of Stanley Kubric’s movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although seen by many as a science-fiction film, it was really a stunning and majestic presentation of the story of human evolution from a purely secular, scientific, and technological expression, with progress understood precisely as the liberation of man from dependence on his body and the ultimate triumph of the mind. The true nature of what was happening began to show its face.
The year 2001 was not as foreseen in the movie, but on September 11th it forced Americans to look seriously at what was at stake already back then.