Europe's rebellious 1968 generation is as dogmatic as the conservatives it once tried to topple, writes John Waters.
I WAS intrigued to read, in Lara Marlowe's recent report on the marking in France of the 40th anniversary of the May 1968 student rebellion, that polling indicates that 77 per cent of French people claim they would have been on the side of the rioting students.
On reflection this is unsurprising. The 1960s generation is now reaching retirement age and is perhaps more nostalgic than any previous generation for its own seminal moments. (It is a reasonably safe bet that its endorsement of its own glorious history would not extend to support for a latter-day repetition of the revolution.)
What a blessed relief that we in Ireland are spared these particular celebrations. For many of us, the rebellion of 1968 was an act of narcissistic petulance by a tiny minority of a generation accustomed to comfort and security, seeking to escape the boredom occasioned by prosperity and peace. Because Ireland was out of kilter with the rest of Europe at the time, the meaning of 1968 is for us somewhat ambiguous and fuzzy.
Arguably, the cultural revolution associated with the 1960s did not reach this Republic until the 1970s - although, north of the Border, the student-led civil rights marches of October 1968 were probably in some degree inspired by events on what we used to call "the Continent".
In truth, 1968 was, on the whole, a damp squib. But, as the signature of a particular cultural and historical process, its import endures to the present moment.
The conflation of a range of unconnected events - the student uprisings, the Vietcong's Tet offensive that took US forces in Vietnam by surprise, the assassinations of US presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, and the trampling by tanks sent from Moscow of Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring when local communists tried to liberalise their rule - adds up to a vague but tangible sense of moment. But nobody can quite put a finger on what it signifies.
Really what 1968 represents is the moment when societies started to look forward to the power of the young and ceased looking back to the authority of the old. This was the moment when youth first began to assert a political force, when freedom, or a particular version of it, was posited as an answer to authority and tradition. It would be ludicrous to deny that the moment was long overdue. But, like all good things, it was pushed too far.
The trouble with 1968 is that it created in European culture a rupture between youth and age, which has yet to be repaired. The moment and its symbolic assertion of individual freedom were essential, but no more so than the veneration of tradition. And, as a result of the overwhelming acceptance of the values of 1968, we are still unable even to imagine freedom and tradition being capable of happy co-existence.
The ideal conditions for healthy human progress are some kind of fluid interaction of tradition and freedom. The defenders of each need to be conscious that absolutism is the enemy of everyone.
Tradition needs to be tested constantly in the crucible of the present moment, to have its dead elements discarded and the healthy core preserved. Here, freedom is essential. But freedom is a deceptive word which, in its modern meaning, conveys a pursuit of desire without limit. Because of the structural limitations of the human mechanism, there is a point at which the pursuit of desire, in any direction, becomes destructive. One of the consequences of the disrespecting of tradition since the 1960s is that this consciousness of limits has been mislaid.
Since the 1960s also, tradition and freedom have seemed to exist in separate channels, dissociated and mutually hostile. Each has had its advocates and defenders, who tend to band into warring tribes, claiming absolute virtue for a value that, in truth, can only properly flourish in a dialectical co-existence with that which is excoriated.
Similarly, political culture has automatically divided its voices between traditionalists and progressives, conservatives and liberals, even though experience tells us that the only sustainable progress is arrived at when these opposing energies are combined. The odd thing is that, as the 1968 generation has aged it has neither sought a voice for its own growing maturity nor extended a voice to the new generations. Instead it has pretended that it is not growing old and clung to power in the pretence that it is still 1968.
As Lara Marlowe recalled, French president Nicolas Sarkozy promised during last year's election campaign to "liquidate the heritage of May '68", because it "obscured the difference between good and evil, between truth and falsehood, between beauty and ugliness", and instilled "hatred of the family, society, the state, the nation, the republic".
That such an analysis is unpopular in France does not make it less vital, but Sarkozy did himself no favours by stating the case in a way that allowed it to be dismissed as "conservative" by the culture he was seeking to critique. In truth the reintegration of tradition and freedom is, for any leader of a young European country seeking a radical guiding vision, the most urgent project of the coming time. Should you hear of such a leader, pass it on.