Part II
For many of us, the late 1960s and 1970s coincided with our student years. It is natural to idealize them. But were they really a time of “peace and love”? Last month’s column dealt with peace. What about love?
The summer of 1967 was the “Summer of Love.” A barge in Richardson Bay, north of San Francisco, bore the painted legend “Love Is.” Was it an existential statement, or an unfinished definition? In the city’s Haight-Ashbury district, pacifist, communitarian “flower children” smoked marijuana and explored Eastern spirituality to the music of the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. Free clinics treated sexually transmitted diseases as well as lice, while Dr. Timothy Leary sought enlightenment in LSD. Two years later, across the country at Woodstock, N.Y., hordes of hippies frolicked in a blissful bacchanal. Love was reduced to physiological function. The “sexual revolution” – Wilhelm Reich’s coarse conjunction of the intimate with the political – separated sex from the tiresome burdens of childbearing, marriage and family.
Purely recreational sex was facilitated by “the pill,” developed in the 1950s and approved by the FDA in the early 1960s. The significance of oral contraceptives was that they transferred the power to prevent pregnancy to women, thus enabling them, equally with men, to avoid the natural consequences of their sexual conduct. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down state prohibition of contraceptive use in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), thus facilitating the separation of sex from procreation.
It would be unfair to ascribe the sexual revolution solely to the baby-boomers, who were then in their teens and 20s. Sharing the credit (or the blame, depending on your point of view) are the adults of the “greatest generation”: the businessmen who encouraged it for profit; the academics who found rationalizations for it; and the lawyers and judges who enshrined it in law. Some would include – unfairly, perhaps – the theologians who opposed Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical “Humanae Vitae.”
“Humanae Vitae” explained the Catholic Church’s long-standing teaching that artificial contraception violated the divine natural order. The encyclical predicted that it would lead to a loosening of morals and induce more men to treat women as mere sex objects. In its call for a social atmosphere conducive to chastity, it challenged the ethos of solipsism and self-indulgence. But what is often overlooked is that, in rejecting artificial methods of reducing births in favor of working with natural biological cycles, it mirrored contemporary trends advocating “working with nature” through, for example, natural healing and biological farming techniques.
Nevertheless, the pill was seen as empowering women. In the companion cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton (1973), the Supreme Court in effect asserted a “fundamental” and almost unrestricted individual constitutional right to abortion – a categorical approach contrasting with the more nuanced and family-oriented approach of European law (see Mary Ann Glendon, “Rights Talk,” 1991, Chapter 3). Dissenting, Justice Byron White questioned how the court could fashion a new right not even mentioned in the Constitution and impose it on the states. In 1986, dissenting in the Thornburgh decision, he criticized the Roe holding that whether a fetus is entitled to life depends on its “viability” – that is, the rather Nietzschean notion that only the strong deserve to live. Even a Roe supporter like Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe was troubled by the court’s hardline approach, ignoring the interests of the fetus and, indeed, its very humanity (ibid.).
It is extremely difficult to separate out the causes and effects of social history, and the supposed consequences of the “sexual revolution” are no exception. Statistics, moreover, are notoriously tricky. But one can safely say that a society where, between 2006 and 2010, the probability that a first marriage would last 20 years was 52 percent for women and 56 percent for men (Sarah Jacoby, “Here’s What the Divorce Rate Actually Means,” Refinery 29, February 2, 2017); where the number of babies each woman is expected to have during her childbearing years has dropped to a new low of 1.76, well below the replacement rate of 2.1; and where 40 percent of children are born to unmarried parents (Robert Ver Bruggen, “How We Ended Up with 40% of Children Born out of Wedlock,” Institute for Family Studies, December 18, 2017) – is a society in trouble. Hardest hit by the social malaise since the 1960s have been poor African-Americans. Affluent whites, after all, can shield their families from the effects of their own laws, policies and judicial decisions.
Have women benefited from the sexual revolution? The physical and emotional harms of abortion and contraception are well known. The commodification of sex and the proliferation of pornography continue. Many “liberated” women still follow male models of work and conduct. While few enthusiasts of the sexual revolution would admit any connection with the scandals surfacing today among politicians, entertainers, corporate executives and clergymen, it seems undeniable.
Meanwhile, back in the USSR, Ukrainians avidly imitated Western trends. Did East and West share a rebellion against the philosophical materialism at the base of both Marxism and capitalism? If so, both have capitulated. At the same time, Ukraine has more than matched the West’s demographic decline: its population, falling since 1991, was estimated in 2017 at 42.4 million, close to the 1960 figure of 42.8 million. Fertility in 2015 was 1.51 births per woman.
If the generation of 1968 has done little for peace and love, it can boast considerable success in environmental protection, information technology, and overcoming discrimination against women and minorities. But minority progress cannot mask stagnant working-class wages and growing disparity in wealth and health. The rich are fitter, the poor are fatter. Meanwhile, the 1960s ethos has become the orthodoxy of a dominant managerial elite.
Like the children of over-achieving parents, Ukrainian American baby boomers grew up in the shadow of two contemporaneous “greatest generations” – American and (as Myron Kuropas once pointed out) Ukrainian. Did we measure up? Hardly.