Three Cheers for 1967: The Summer of Love
The summer of 1967 marks the coming of age–sexually, politically, and socially–of a generation. Perhaps, more than any year in that turbulent decade, the summer of love suggested a novel, more authentic, way of interacting with others. Sexuality became a common–some say promiscuous–form of interaction, sans marriage, sans love, sans commitment. Of course, sexuality could be included in these practices, but, according to “the new explanation,” none of them are required for sexual relations to be appropriate. The first blow at calcified social traditions was to identify sexual repression. Once doing so, peculiar, Victorian “hang-ups” about sexuality could then be abandoned. A freer, more open, view toward sexuality served as a paradigm for dealing with other calcified traditions having little to do with sexuality. If sexuality can be re-evaluated rationally, so could everything else. And this rationality included, but was not exhausted by, deductive reasoning. It was more the rationality of reflective and pragmatic commonsense.
During the sixties a much greater imperative lay beyond the freedom of sexual gratification. In addition to its primary commitment to end the war in Vietnam, the sixties’ nation shown the light of revelation on the ubiquitous darkness of excluded and marginalized people living and suffering among us. How can the richest nation in the world–ostensibly dedicated to freedom and equality–ignore the well-being of so many of its own citizens? (”Whatever you did to the least of my brethren, you did it to me.”) Focusing on these people became, for the sixties’ nation, both personal and a
political imperatives. As Edward P. Morgan put it, “Sixties movements, were grounded in a democratic vision that is as compelling today as it was then: a belief that all people should be included as full members of society, that individuals become empowered through meaningful social participation, and that politics ought to be grounded on respect and compassion for the individual person.” In short, the sixties’ imperative was the expansion of the moral and political community in order to include those deliberately and subliminally excluded. After the drudgery of the 1950s, 1967 was the time when the sixties reached its most hopeful pinnacle and an explosion of colorful possibilities in social and personal development burst on to the American landscape. Underlying Haight-Asbury and the hippie-yippie generation lay the imperative to take others–African-Americans, women, gays–seriously, playfully seriously, but seriously nonetheless. Freedom too was embraced as both a personal and political goal. It was something to be to be practiced daily. It was, as they say, “the age of great dreams,” though some of these great dreams, as might have been expected, for some people became nightmares.
Reactionary commentators, chief among them Robert Bork, tar the sixties as a time when permissively raised, rich and middle class kids engaged in greedy hedonism and nothing more. More insidiously, these commentators delight in tarring the period as filled with violent weather-underground radicals, the Port Huron statement, and Chicago Seven, in an attempt to hide from sight the essence of an ennobling process. Sure there was excess, but often in cultural revolution excess plays mid-wife to 
creativity and nobility that harkens back to our constitutional founding. Blaming “liberalism” for America’s decline is right on the money, but only if you select the right liberalism. Trying to expand the actual moral community to include the excluded is not the culprit. Rather, it is the materialist, radically individualistic culture that deadens American values. Moreover, blame lies equally with such critics as Bork who believe in dedicated social structures, ones that should resist change. This “dedicatedness” flies in the faith of the Jeffersonian commitment to deliberation, reflection, and change. Jeffersonian, and even Madisonian, constitutionalism is as antithetical to Bork’s cartoon depiction of American constitutionalism as simple majoritarianism. Yet, dedicated constitutionalism would prevent from taking seriously the question Hamilton puts to his contemporaries in Federalist No. 1 and to all succeeding generations of American about the possibility of self government: “It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, to decide by their conduct and example, the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” Hamilton might have add to “accident and force” a third element in dedicated cultures “unreflective customs or traditions.” Judge Bork is thus out of step with Madison, Jefferson, and Hamilton. It’s difficult to identify which founder, if any, reflects Judge Bork’s conception of constitutionalism. Majoritarianism was never even considered at the constitutional convention. So Judge Bork’s conception of original meaning seems to preclude the theory of democracy he so willingly embraces.
Indeed, the sixties represent a social and political revolution virtually synchronized with the most progressive period of constitutional change in the nation’s history. In brief, what’s typically lost about the sixties was the underlying deliberative attitude which finds its source in the Founding. To locate this attitude one should steer clear of hippidom or yippidom. Look instead into the lives of young intellectuals and reflective people who, in the sixties, sought to be the source of change, a new “founding,” if you
will. An old approach to practical reasoning–forgotten after War II–was revivified. Deliberation captured the imagination of the young. This underlying attitude embraced the tradition of providing reasoned arguments, not merely an appeal to unreflective customs no matter how entrenched, for personal, political, and social policy. Moreover, the reasons given in these arguments could not ultimately be idiosyncratic. For my reasons to convince you, they must touch you and affect and influence your ratiocinative powers. When I insist that you abide by my reasons whether you’re convinced or not, I impose my reasons on you and I violate one of the basic conditions of rationality. I consider my reason to be beyond deliberation; its truth is absolute and uncompromising. I’m duped to thinking that imposing my reasoning upon you is not only justified, but required. If you cannot apprehend absolute truth for yourself, concern for you, if not respect, requires making sure that absolute truth controls you life whether you want it to or not. Moreover, you violate one of the basic conditions of deliberative rationality when you acknowledge that my reasons have some merit but ultimately should be rejected even when you have nothing better with which to replace it. Accordingly, deliberative rationality includes reciprocity or mutuality. We must seek reasons together–all the while arguing respectfully with one another–until we find a reflective consensus or realize that such a consensus, at least at this time, is not possible.
On a personal note, the summer of love, 1967, is responsible, at least in part, for forging intellectually, the person, for good or ill, I later became. My one regret is that I believed, at that time, that although progress toward a more rational and reasonable society might come temporarily to a halt, the gains made would be permanent. That is, there would be no political or social backsliding. In that conviction I was probably mistaken. The sixties’ nation made promises it couldn’t be kept. What prevented the sixties’ nation from keeping these promises is a critically important 
question. Perhaps, social and economic circumstances prevented their fulfillment. Subsequent and especially current, developments prove that political and social back sliding is inevitable. We just can’t seem retain political and social advances without cultural changes that support these advances. But perhaps our culture has changed significantly and permanently. We no longer think it permissible to harbor racial prejudice. Our views about sexuality have changed permanently perhaps. Even political conservatives, in committed relationships, opposed to most of the promises made by the sixties’ generation, think nothing of cohabiting without marriage. (They have the sixties’ nation to thank for that.) Women no longer are excluded from entering the professions, academia, and just about whatever avocation they desire. Gays and lesbians, for decades made invisible by mainstream society, now publicly seek to enter mainstream society through the institution of marriage. Each one of these cultural changes finds its source in the sixties. So perhaps the gains made during that fecund, if turbulent, era have become part of America’s cultural heritage.
However, in contrast to these achievements, we have become a more cynical society where our domestic opponents are viewed not merely as respected adversaries, but rather as hateful enemies. Unfortunately, the past seven years have provided a pellucid demonstration that republican democracy does in fact have domestic enemies, usually just those public
officials and pundits who are busiest trying to demonize their opponents. Not since Watergate have we seen an administration so clearly opposed to American constitutional values. It’s difficult to appreciate just what the antidote to our impoverished politics might be. Perhaps, the current cynicism will cause an even greater fragmentation in the body politic. Or maybe, a new wave of realistic optimism will wash the slate clean. As with many other elements in the evolution of the American republic and the culture that supports it, only an intelligent, determined, tough, and idealistic new generation of young people can begin this cleansing. Only when such a generation arises will social hope of the intoxicating sort experienced during the summer of love be a possibility.
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