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Culture, Education
The year 1968 does not have quite the same symbolic resonance in the
United States as it does in European countries like France and Italy. Still,
people on both sides of the Atlantic generally agree that the turmoil and
social transformation of the late sixties marked a cultural divide. To us,
what came before feels like a di erent epoch, and what came after is “our”
world—in terms of ideas, morals, lifestyles, and political passions.
It is interesting that this divide did not correspond to any real, major shock,
like a world war or a large-scale economic crisis. The Vietnam war, of
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course, was important, but it does not explain phenomena like the
explosion of the sexual revolution or the rise of the New Left. Political
assassinations in the United States and the invasion of Czechoslovakia
were traumatic, but they did not cause the student protests. Even in
Europe, 1968 did not bring about radical political change comparable to
1789 or 1917. What took place was a genuinely cultural phenomenon. It
cannot be explained merely in economic or sociological terms, but
challenges us to understand the ideas and ideals that moved its
protagonists.
This was also the judgment of Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce, who
called 1968 “the richest year in implicit philosophy since 1945” and made it
the subject of penetrating essays (see The Age of Secularization). He was
among the rst to perceive what could be called the “great paradox” of the
counter-culture: what started as a rebellion against bourgeois conformity
and oppressive technocracy ultimately ushered in an age of triumphant
individualism and economic globalization. The age of Yippies prepared the
age of yuppies. The rediscovery of Marxism by the young rebels of the
sixties started a long-term transformation of the left from advocate of the
working class to political home of the professional elites. How did that
happen?
Del Noce once stated rather cryptically that “1968 was the nal bourgeois
revolution.” Nowadays, the word “bourgeois” has fallen out of fashion, and
is mostly remembered as a Marxist term of disparagement. However, Del
Noce believes that there is such a thing as a “bourgeois spirit” at work in
modern history.
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In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the bourgeois spirit co-
existed with Christianity (which was “useful,” e.g. to strengthen the social
order). But the two worldviews are incompatible—the doctrine of original
sin contradicts the “right to happiness,” and the divine image in people
stands in the way of instrumentalization—and ultimately they had to part
ways.
Del Noce points out that these two aspects, the materialistic and the
dialectic, are contradictory. Therefore Marxism must undergo a process of
decomposition, which marked twentieth-century European culture. Marxist
dialectical materialism turned out to be a pipe dream (history did not enter
the “reign of freedom”), but Marxist historical materialism was very
in uential, and fueled the rise of a virulent form of moral relativism that
suits capitalism much better than the formally Christian (Kantian)
bourgeois morality of the nineteenth century. According to Del Noce, this is
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Now we can understand what Del Noce meant by “the nal bourgeois
revolution.” The student movement undoubtedly started as a rebellion
against bourgeois society, and, in Del Noce’s view,
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In closing, we may ask: what could the generation of 1968 have done
di erently? According to Del Noce, a successful anti-bourgeois revolution
can only be religious, not in the sense of advancing a particular set of
doctrines or a particular tradition, but in the sense of a rming the radical
in niteness of human desire, also as the only possible foundation of social
life. In that same year 1968 he described Simone Weil as the “real rebel” of
our epoch because she recognized that,
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Being present in social and political life with a full awareness of the real
scope of human desire is, I would argue, the single greatest contribution a
Christian can make to our historical moment.
CARLO LANCELLOTTI
Carlo Lancellotti is a Professor of Mathematics at the
College of Staten Island, and a Faculty in Physics at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is
originally from Milan, Italy, and has recently translated into
English two volumes of essays by 20th century ... READ
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