Autor: Burleigh, Michael

Buch: Sacred Causes

Titel: Sacred Causes

Stichwort: 1960; neues Lebensgefühl; Studenten

Kurzinhalt: revolution ultimately revolved around liberated sexual mores

Textausschnitt: 347c At the time, many people felt that they were experiencing a revolution of attitudes and values, and that revolution ultimately revolved around liberated sexual mores, the development whose effects have been most enduring, because of its long-term impact on women. In 'Annus Mirabilis' Larkin identified the major enthusiasms, although it is relevant that his poem was the work of a provincial librarian who had been in a sexually liberated relationship for the previous fifteen years and was at that time acquiring a supplementary long-term mistress:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

[...]


349b In various European centres, juvenile revolutionary sectarians turned forests into a flurry of leaflets, while throwing up a few toy barricades and behaving boorishly to eminent professors, viscerally reminding some of the latter of the antics of Nazi students in the 1930s. Other professors tried to curry favour with the insurgent young or in the case of some gurus incited them; junior-ranking academics often behaved with the customary amoralism of the desperate. Across Europe and the US a series of inconsequential confrontations took place, whether in protest against university overcrowding or against the tons of bombs raining down in south-east Asia. (Fs)

349c The immediate effects of these gestures, memory of which still excites tenured radicals, were as nothing compared with the subsequent march of these formerly militant students through major institutions, notably the universities themselves, which thenceforth were dominated by people with little or no experience of what is popularly (and properly) called 'the real world'. Unlike their predecessors, future generations of academics had no experience of code-breaking, being parachuted into France or Greece, or commanding a tank squadron on the Normandy beaches. Instead they inhabited a peculiarly trans-temporal space where the quest for vicarious rejuvenation often meant remaining juvenile into one's retirement, sometimes manifested through vampiric interest in female students.8 (Fs)

[...]

350b By identifying themselves as the future, whose deleterious long-term potential consequences they rarely thought through, the 'innovators' and self-styled 'revolutionaries' of the 1960s had an easy time of it with culturally conservative opponents, who readily lent themselves to caricature and satire that was rarely applied to the revolutionaries themselves. What plausible defence could one mount for the prosecution barrister Mervyn Griffith-Jones, who during the 1960 trial of Penguin Books over the alleged obscenity of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, pompously invited the jury to ponder whether it was 'a book that you would have lying around in your house ... a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?'1 (Fs)