In 1963 I left a good job in Guinness’s Brewery and joined the Jesuits, so I suppose that qualifies me as one of the idealists of the Sixties. There was a remarkable ‘outbreak’ of vocations in that period (perhaps the Holy Spirit was being idealistic too!). In the three years from 1961 to 1963 seventy-eight young men joined the Irish Jesuits. In the early Sixties there was a lot of optimism in the air, on political, economic and religious fronts. The election of John F. Kennedy, young, idealist, Irish-American, Catholic, had an extraordinary impact here and elsewhere. In Ireland the fruits of the ‘First Programme for Economic Expansion’ were propelling Ireland into its own economic perestroika.

The Church was moving too, prodded from the very top by the charismatic John XXIII. Hans Küng was writing radical stuff about ecumenism and salvation, and he seemed in no danger of being silenced. Strange new noises were emanating from the Second Vatican Council. Teilhard de Chardin’s influence could be detected in the Council’s statement that “the human race has passed from a rather static concept of reality to a more dynamic, evolutionary one”.

Changes in popular culture
The mood of the times was picked up in popular music, nowhere better exemplified than in Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A’Changin’’ and Pete Seeger’s ‘We Shall Overcome’.

To some extent the Sixties was defined by its popular music, perhaps more so than any decade since the Twenties. It is almost impossible to describe the decade without talking about the music of Cohen, Dylan, Lennon & McCartney, Seeger, Simon and others. With new technology increasing accessibility to music, people sang their way through the Sixties.

Not all the sentiments of Dylan’s and Seeger’s songs were mere aspiration. There were a lot of exciting advances in the Sixties, such as the signing of the test-ban treaties, the success of the space progamme, the advent of television, the advance of civil rights movements everywhere, especially in North America. But there was also a hollowness to the Sixties. People who had begun to believe that human nature was changing for the better were to face disillusion as ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ showed no sign of abating.

Rude awakening
There was always a shadow side to the Sixties. Right at the start of the decade the world came to the very brink of disaster as Khruschev and Kennedy played roulette over Cuba. At the time there was an extraordinary belief among ordinary people that everything was going to turn out all right. The events of the time were seen in a glow of optimism, which often turned out to be false.

In another sense too the Sixties were over almost before they began, because by the end of 1963 John Kennedy had been assassinated, and John XXIII had died of cancer. Their passing led to an extraordinary degree of sadness. Vocations to religious life plummeted dramatically in 1964. The older Jesuits said it was just a phase, but most of us newer recruits knew that the idealism of religious life was dimming, if not going out.

In Ireland, rising expectations created what Charles McCarthy wrote of as ‘The Decade of Upheaval’. It brought Ireland to the top of the international strike league. Bus drivers, building workers, E.S.B. workers, maintenance workers, bank clerks and teachers, all went on protracted strikes during the Sixties. And in Northern Ireland the attack by B-Specials on nationalist marchers at Burntollet in 1969 was the preamble to thirty years of savage conflict.

Split personality of the Sixties
In many respects the decade had a split personality. While the U.S. Air Force was trying to napalm North Vietnam into submission in 1967, half the world was humming ‘If You’re Going to San Francisco’ (“there’s a whole generation with a new explanation”). The murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King cast a shadow over the advance of civil rights in the U.S. The decade of sexual liberation was also the decade of Humanae Vitae. The ‘liberation of the mind’ through LSD and marijuana was the beginning for many of a nightmare descent into heroin and cocaine addiction.

While pressure for greater democracy intensified, the Marxism which twenty years later was to be discarded as anti-democratic was rampant in the universities. Militant university students gained substantial improvements in their conditions only at the price of near-anarchy in many countries, particularly France. The shooting of white students by the National Guard in Kent State in 1970 marked the end of liberal confidence in the U.S. and graphically underlined the dark side of the decade.

The most enduring legacy of the Sixties is not in fact its idealism, but its challenge to authority. Dylan wrote, ‘Come mothers and fathers throughout the land... Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command’. Respect for authority, as a concept, took an enormous battering in the Sixties. This questioning of authority is still having a profound impact in our own day. Whereas in the Fifties, adults could reprimand children (their own or other people’s) with some hope of compliance, today they are likely to be met by abuse.

A more open society
Many people regret this, as they also regret the decline in the acceptance of authority of churches and other institutions. But the challenge to authority has also lifted the lid off many dark corners that people would have been too polite to question in the past. Respect for authority can no longer be used to cloak or legitimize child abuse, parental tyranny, planning scandals, payments to politicians, police brutality, tax fraud, or many of the social sins that characterize our society. There is little doubt that the origins of the relatively ‘open society’ that we enjoy today can be found in the rebelliousness of the Sixties.

This article first appeared in AMDG, a publication of the Irish Jesuits