When people think of the crucial decades that have shaped American history after 1776, they automatically think of the Civil War, the two World Wars, the Depression era, and so on. But in my estimate, the decade of the Sixties and the so-called “counterculture” ranks with the most important of these, and is even more consequential than the Depression era. It stands as a deep and savage sword thrust through American history and culture.

Os Guinness is one of the most insightful Christian thinkers on the scene today. Great-great grandson of Arthur Guinness, the Dublin brewer, he was born in China in World War II where both his parents and grandparents were medical missionaries – his grandfather having had the privilege of treating the Empress Dowager, the Last Emperor, and the Imperial family.

A survivor of the terrible Henan famine of 1943, in which five million died in three months, including his two brothers, Os was a witness to the climax of the Chinese revolution in 1949 and the beginning of the reign of terror under Mao Tse Tung. He was expelled with many other foreigners in 1951 and returned to Europe where he was educated in England.

Os has written or edited thirty books on a wide range of themes. Today, we’re looking at one of his older books, The Dust of Death: The Sixties Counterculture and How It Changed America Forever, first published in 1971 and revised in 1994.

Fifty years have passed since the start of the Sixties. I asked Os to join me on the blog for a conversation about this pivotal decade in American history, and what it means for us today.

Trevin Wax: You’ve described the Sixties as bringing about a “seismic shift” in American history. Why are the 1960s crucial for understanding American culture in the 21st century?

Os Guinness: When people think of the crucial decades that have shaped American history after 1776, they automatically think of the Civil War, the two World Wars, the Depression era, and so on.

But in my estimate, the decade of the Sixties and the so-called “counterculture” ranks with the most important of these, and is even more consequential than the Depression era. It stands as a deep and savage sword thrust through American history and culture.

Too often the Sixties are dismissed in terms of “hippies, drugs, sex, rock and roll, war protests,” and so on, as if that was all there was to it. But in fact much of the best and worst of where we are today can be traced back to the Sixties.

On the “for better” side of the ledger, we owe to the Sixties the great achievements of the Civil Rights movement and such stunning successes as the Apollo moon landing.

On the “for worse” side of the ledger, there was the utopianism, the violence and the humiliations of the Vietnam War, and of course the excesses of the sexual revolution, the stupidities of the new entitlement era, the rise of the culture wars, and the nihilism of postmodernism, all of which are producing such a dark harvest today.

Trevin Wax: When did the seismic shifts begin? Would you pinpoint the changes to 1960 or another time – before or after?

Os Guinness: Talk of “baselines” is often a contentious area!

Many people used to date the Sixties from JFK’s election in 1960, and it is true that the launch of “Camelot” was like a gale of fresh air after the stuffy conventionalism of the 1950s and the Eisenhower era. Others have put the starting date at the city riots in 1963, the Free Speech movement at Berkeley in 1964, and even the arrival of the Beatles in the U.S. in February 1964, and their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show that was watched by forty percent of the population.

Needless to say, no sooner does someone pick such a date than a host of others immediately find trends that precede it by far. Today, we still use terms such as the Sixties, but there is a far richer understanding of the many threads that were woven together to make the tapestry as a whole.

Trevin Wax: What caused the 1960s to become such a tumultuous decade in American history?

Os Guinness: Where should I begin?

As I see it, the Sixties was above all a grand and damaging blow to the easy complacency of the post-War world and to the illusions of Henry Luce’s “American century.” This was evident at the time as the U.S. became more and more bogged down in the jungles and paddy fields of Vietnam and in the labyrinthine peace negotiations in Paris.

But it slowly became equally evident too in the way that Sixties ideas openly assaulted many of the ideals and ideas that had shaped traditional America.

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