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By Newsweek Editors
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In many ways the cultural revolution we call the 1960s began in the Netherlands. There, on the streets of Amsterdam, an obscure and playful anarchist group called the Provos staged a number of "happenings" in the early years of the decade to poke fun at the hypocrisies of bourgeois life and to demand that laws regulating drug consumption and sexual activity be liberalized. The group disbanded within a decade, but its influence can still be felt by any visitor to that doll-house city who sniffs the cannabis in the air and strolls past the neon-lit sex shops.
For American visitors in particular, this is all very confusing. The image we have of Europe in the '60s is of a continent in the midst of some kind of political revolution, with stenciled portraits of Che Guevara painted on ancient walls, terrorist bombings, kneecappings and the occasional assassination of political and business leaders. The upheavals on American campuses, which ceased soon after Richard Nixon's resignation and the withdrawal from Vietnam, were tame indeed when compared with the two decades of violence and political instability that lasted until the mid-'80s in Europe.
Culturally, however, it seems that Europe survived the '60s intact, without deep social divisions or the kind of culture wars that dominated American public life in recent decades. All the changes that took place in American society since the '60s--in sexual matters, family structure, drug use--also took place in Europe. Yet somehow the transformation of European life was managed with more finesse, and without recourse to street marches, legal briefs and self-help books. European women have joined the work force in large numbers (though at different rates in different countries), and generally find it easier to balance family and career, given the presence of state-supported day-care centers and generous leave policies. They have made these advances without feminist militancy, but also without provoking hysterical fears about the decline of the family. Homosexuals today find themselves in a highly tolerant environment without having to make exaggerated claims about their identity or dramatizing their "coming out." And school curricula, which in the United States today are the litmus paper of social change, have stayed pretty much the same in Europe, on the sensible assumption that what students need to learn before entering the world has not been significantly altered.
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Why these striking differences? On a recent trip to Europe I took an afternoon walk in a public park and was struck by how many young people in mod attire--pierced noses, dyed hair, combat boots--were out strolling with their grandparents after the traditional Sunday lunch. That image offers part of the answer: despite the '60s, Europe is still culturally conservative. In a strict sense, all cultures are conservative to the degree that they establish customs that grease the wheels of social life and impart those customs to new members of the society. But in a looser sense some cultures can be said to be more conservative in that they manage to decelerate changes in attitudes and behavior, moderating them in the process and weaving them into a continuous fabric with older ones by means of consensus. Modern European culture has always made room for those who rejected the consensus of the moment--bohemians, saints--because the strong centripetal force of custom has allowed the center to hold, leaving more space at the margins for those who don't fit in. The '60s posed a serious challenge to that consensus, yet it is striking today to see how successfully the new customs have been grafted onto the old.
American culture is not conservative; it is democratic. Given their strong suspicion of inherited authority and their almost infinite faith in an individual's right to shape his own destiny, Americans have trouble accepting social customs whose provenance is unclear and whose authority they never consented to. This does not mean that Americans are always comfortable with diversity, for as we know there have been periods of stifling conformity and moralism in American history. What it does mean is that Americans see cultural changes as matters of principle that need to be publicly debated, and those debates can be polarizing. Americans have a reputation abroad for being pragmatic, which in economic and technical matters might be true. But on large political issues, and almost all cultural ones, Americans tend to be dogmatic and uncompromising because they see democratic principles at stake in them. That is why the post-'60s American debates over abortion, feminism, identity politics and school curricula seem so bizarre to Europeans, who may have views on these matters but generally don't think the fate of democracy hinges on them.
There are signs that the culture wars in the United States are coming to a close, and that we will soon follow Europe in digesting the cultural revolution of the '60s and integrating it into American habits and customs. So argues American journalist David Brooks in his recent "Bobos in Paradise," an engaging study of the bourgeois bohemians ("bobos") who made the passage from '60s cultural radicalism to '80s Yuppiedom, transforming middle-class life in the process. Brooks's book has been translated into many languages and has been a big hit in Europe, where the bobos were first to appear.
Yet, strangely, there are also signs that at least some Europeans are becoming more concerned about the cultural legacy of the '60s, despite their conservative sang-froid. One of the best-selling novels in Europe in the past decade was French writer Michel Houellebecq's "The Elementary Particles" (1998), which paints a horrific picture of the emotional wasteland young Europeans inhabit today, a wasteland created, in Houellebecq's view, by the '60s. The book tells the story of two brothers who come of age in that decade and, after being abandoned by their parents, find themselves sexually and socially maladjusted; one brother descends into an inferno of drink and sexual obsession, while the other withdraws from the world into his genetic research. Below the surface calm that currently reigns in Europe, Houellebecq sees a progressive erosion of human decency and love, and its replacement by ruthless forces of economic, sexual and even genetic competition.
Whatever one makes of Houellebecq's novel as a work of art or as a portrait of contemporary life, it does offer a useful reminder about the limits of cultural conservatism. It is one thing for European societies to tolerate changes in social customs that enhance the range of human possibilities, or at least leave our basic humanity untouched; it is quite another to reach the point where societies can no longer distinguish such changes from those that demean or trivialize human life. However much one enjoys the pageant of a city like Amsterdam today, it is difficult to avoid wondering if Europeans can still make that distinction.
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