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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (191946)	6/18/2012 11:16:32 AM
From: koan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543731

Don't need research about the 60's and existentialism. The event is right in front of people's face. It is simple logic. Find me a time in history when large numbers of people rejected their culture, effectily overnight, and went on an intellectual search for a more profound way of thinking and living. The hippies were rejecting conventional culture and inventing a new modern culture which is with us today.

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (191946)	6/18/2012 12:34:44 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 543731

On koan's argument about the role of existentialism in the student movements of the 60s, I can say a bit. I had some good friends involved and played on the margins. A former girlfriend of mine, Casey Hayden ( here and here), became a serious player by virtue of her own passion and her short term marriage to Tom Hayden as well as her role as a founder of SNCC and involvement until SNCC kicked white participants out sometime, I think, in 65 or 66. She was at UT Austin with me in the late 50s, at a time in which existentialism was the dominant philosophical flavor on campus. Campus leaders either read Kierkegaard, Tillich, Sartre, Camus, and so on and discussed them seriously or knew they should. Influential faculty members taught courses in it. And so on. So it was very much part of our language, our way of looking at questions of meaning, and our way to deal with our religious heritages. But existentialism, at least the parts that fascinated us, had no social ethics. The philosophical ethics that led to the student movements, at least this is my impression, came through the YMCAs and YWCAS, and through campus religious groups (one can read some of this in Motive Magazine, published by the Methodists ( here's a bit on one of its editors). That was bits and pieces of the old social gossip movement and can be linked almost directly to liberation theology which becomes more prominent in the latter part of the 60s. There is a large literature on the movements which I've never read with precisely these questions in mind. But it would be interesting to do so. koan could well be right in so far as existentialism had more to do with the movement members willingness to take absurd risks (Casey argues that in one of the pieces above), but the sense of "rightness" she and others talk about I suspect came more from these other sources.