The ability to recognize those things depends on our sense of the transcendent element within experience. That sense is elusive—it has to do with something that can’t be measured or photographed—but it is real and supremely important. To become reliably present and usable, so it can orient and sustain us, it must be made concrete through forms and limits. To that end it needs the symbols, stories, rituals, and traditions that constitute the religion and culture of a people. Without those things we are at best “spiritual but not religious,” inhabitants of a world that wants to rise beyond the mundane but never goes anywhere.

The 1960s were intended as a rebellion against the materialism, mindless conformity, soullessness, and general inhumanity and immorality of commercial and bureaucratic (“corporate and militaristic”) America. The answer, it was thought, could be found in freeing ourselves from a society gone wrong by rejection of social forms, pursuit of intense experience, and “doing your own thing”—making individual choice the supreme standard.

The solution made the problem worse. The ’60s turned society much more than before into a mass of contending wills with no higher standard to order them. Rebels and activists debunked what was left of traditional culture without offering anything to replace it. In the absence of a definite higher standard, or any way to determine one, people fell back on the most mundane, content-free, and soulless standards possible: money, bureaucracy, and social position, who gets hold of what and who’s in a position to do what to whom.

So the effect of the ’60s was radicalization of the soulless modernity they attacked. The resulting damage fell notably on those thought to be beneficiaries. In the period’s aftermath poor black people stopped progressing economically as crime raged and their families and communities fell apart. Non-elite women abandoned housewifery only to fall into unwed motherhood, low-paying jobs bringing neither stability nor respect, and demonstrably greater unhappiness. Homosexuals celebrated their liberation by pursuing their inclinations, resulting in shortened lives without evident benefits to other aspects of their well-being. Creative people saw the intellectual and aesthetic interest of their productions decline as their professional world became absorbed by commercialism and grant-making bureaucracies. And “the people”—those not well-positioned in the social order—found their situation becoming ever poorer, less stable, and less rewarding.

And where was the Church in the midst of this disaster? Unfortunately, her decision toopen herself to the secular public world and follow its lead in hopes of transforming it from within came just as the ’60s were getting underway and sealing that world off ever more totally from any higher influence. To join the world, it turned out, was to abandon Catholic identity and with it any possibility of influencing events in a better direction.

To use the language now spoken, it’s evident that the ’60s were rushed to market based on an unproven concept that didn’t work. With that in mind, they need to be rebooted with different parameters, or more likely undergo a total rewrite.

The ’60s were right about some things. Life is not an industrial process, material advantage is not its center, and people should not be expected to give fundamental loyalty and devote their best efforts to social institutions wholly oriented toward rational pursuit of money and power. The things of everyday life, simply as they are from the standpoint of a commercial and bureaucratic society, are not enough for a life worthy of man. We need to break on through to the other side, if not in the ’60s manner.

The means chosen then, abolishing forms in favor of unconstrained choice and extreme experience, made sense to young people who knew only what they saw on TV, learned in school, and picked up from other young people. Trends like the postwar return to normalcy and the growth of TV, advertising, suburbia, large corporate employers, and universal college education for the middle class were making the American Way of Life ever more uniformly organized on wholly mundane principles. Young people were left to contemplate the value of a strictly secular middle-class existence.

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