The Peter Pan Establishment by Melanie Phillips

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June 12, 2004 — In 1969, I attended an entrance interview at Warwick university. The don who interviewed me was an Amazonian, hippyish figure with wild hair and strings of beads, in a study draped with animal skins and exotic hangings.

Why, she asked, did I want to come to university? I gave a toe-curlingly boring reply which had something to do with education. “Absolute rubbish,” she roundly declared. “You will come to university to subvert society, smoke pot, and sleep around.”

I was, to put it mildly, astounded (and, I have to confess, impressed; well, I was only 17). She told me her name, but it meant nothing to me. For it was only the following year that her book, The Female Eunuch, would erupt into the lives of British women, put the great sexual revolution on full throttle and turn its author, Germaine Greer, into the high priestess of the feminist counter-culture.

Her words to me that day surely encapsulated the tenets of that extraordinary and truly revolutionary decade. For the sixties set in train changes in British society which can be said to have transformed it into a different country altogether, and one which has not altogether advanced the cause of civilization.

There is no doubt, however, that the progressives of that time thought this was precisely what they were doing. The great social reforms of the decade “legalizing abortion and homosexuality, liberalizing divorce, enabling the distribution of contraceptives and abolishing capital punishment and theatre censorship” were said to embody what their chief architect, the then Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, described as the “civilized society.”

The sixties were the decade of liberation, full stop. Intolerance, repression and bigotry were consigned to the dustbin of history. Those who warned that freedom was being confused with antisocial licence were laughed out of court.

But tonight, a programme on BBC Four challenges that particular piece of received wisdom. Called I Hate the Sixties, it claims that the decade's moral permissiveness, collapse of respect for institutions, and failed experiments in “progressive” education led directly to the difficulties we face today.

Far from “liberation” it often left its purported beneficiaries high and dry. As one of the programme's contributors says, feminism didn't free women so much as make them sexually available. By preaching independence from men, it often left women abandoned and lonely.

Divorce didn't free trapped spouses from the shell of an empty marriage so much as reduce marriage to an empty shell. And far from delivering equality of opportunity, the abolition of the grammar schools kicked away the ladder of opportunity from the poor.

Moreover, few of us who were around in the sixties could have foreseen the development, not of toleration of those who depart from society's moral norms, but instead the wholesale destruction of those norms altogether.

Who would have predicted, when the novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was cleared of obscenity, that high-minded support for literary freedom would end up giving us a depiction of gang rape, torture and bestiality in a play to be staged this summer at the Edinburgh Festival? Who would have foretold, when abortion was made lawful, that a 14 year-old girl would be secretly given an abortion without her mother knowing anything about it?

Who would have thought, when homosexuality was legalized between consenting adults as an act of compassion, that “cruising” in public toilets would be made lawful, primary school children would be taught the techniques of gay sex and that people would be vilified as “homophobic” if they objected?

And above all, who would have imagined that in 2004, Britain would have a ruling class heavily influenced by people who have never grown out of their sixties' morality-busting radicalism and are even now, in their respectable middle age, busy translating it into official policy?

The sixties gave us something much darker than a highly commercialized youth culture and some great rock bands. It was a cultural revolution which, far from producing Roy Jenkins's “civilized society,” struck blow after lethal blow at the very core of what has given this country its civilization.

To understand its truly revolutionary impact, you have to realize that “the sixties” didn't start in 1960.

Following World War Two, the revulsion against Nazism turned into hostility towards all forms of repression. This fuelled the rise of the therapy culture, on the basis that suppressing any desire was harmful for the individual. The fact that this happened to be essential for civilization was unfortunately overlooked. No, what became sacrosanct was how we felt about ourselves.

A hugely influential book by the Marxist sociologist Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality, proposed in 1950 that any kind of authority “sexual restraint, the traditional family and conventional morality” was a kind of fascism. Only attacks on these values were legitimate.

But the real power behind the sixties revolution was the Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci. For Gramsci grasped that the most effective means of overturning western society was to subvert its culture and morality. Instead of mobilizing the working class to take over the world, the revolution would be achieved through a culture war, in which the moral beliefs of the majority would replaced by the values of those on the margins of society.

And this would be brought about by capturing all society's institutions “schools, universities, churches, the media, the legal profession, the police, voluntary groups” and making sure that this intellectual elite all sang from the same subversive hymn-sheet.

Gramsci's revolutionary aims have been accomplished to the letter. The intellectual class was overwhelmingly captured. The moral codes of society were profoundly subverted and weakened as all the barriers fell. Previously marginalized groups, such as never-married mothers or gay people, now became the arbiters of morality which was defined in their “non-judgmental” image in order to spare their feelings.

Under the banner of individual freedom, morality became privatized. Every individual became his or her moral authority, and no-one had the right to say anyone else's lifestyle was wrong or inferior. With personal choice trumping everything, no-one could be in authority over anyone else. So relations between parents and children, teachers and pupils, and men and women were utterly transformed.

Selfishness became a virtue; looking after number one became a duty. Real duty to others thus got junked as a heresy that could not be allowed to challenge the religion of the self.

And what started out as an eminently decent impulse for tolerance turned into something quite different. Because there was now an absolute taboo against hurting people's feelings, the very idea of normal behaviour had to be abolished so that no-one would feel abnormal.

So abnormal behaviour, such as sexual promiscuity or abandonment of children, became regarded as normal. On the other hand, those who were advocating mainstream values such as fidelity, chastity, or duty now found themselves accused of promoting something illegitimate because it made people who did not uphold these values feel bad about themselves, the ultimate sin. So alternative lifestyles became mainstream. The counter-culture had become the norm.

The family, the crucible of morality and social order, was where the most lethal damage was done, as the sexual revolution reshaped family life. Whereas single motherhood and divorce had once been stigmatized, after ending a marriage was made easier it became wrong to object to lone motherhood and the damage to children was denied or ignored.

As the props of marriage were kicked away, it became progressively emptied of meaning and families broke up more frequently. Feminism told women they could do without men and exiled fathers from the family.

The outcome has been the creation of social and moral deserts in communities where there are no committed fathers, relationships are transient, and children's lives are devastated. Try telling these children that the sixties produced a less repressed, more civilized and tolerant Britain.

Abandoned by the destruction of the family, children were further betrayed by equally radical sixties views about education in a multi-pronged assault. The obsession with social equality meant the imposition of mediocrity and outright educational failure which trapped the poor firmly in their disadvantaged backgrounds.

The obsession with personal freedom created “child-centred” education, where children were regarded as having equal if not superior talents to their teachers and thus effectively abandoned to develop their own ignorance. And the obsessional hostility to authority meant pupils were not taught not to do sex or drugs but left to make their own “informed' choices” to the consternation of the adult world when they tried these very things.

Beyond education, the insistence on equality eroded respect for all in authority: parents, police officers, doctors, judges. Faced with this revolt, those in authority did not hold the line but allowed themselves to be toppled like skittles.

In particular, the church lost the plot, vainly attempting to hold onto its vanishing flock by going with the flow of moral and cultural collapse. So the final and most important line of defence in the culture war unleashed by the sixties revolution simply disintegrated.

This culture war was essentially a revolt by the young with money in their pockets against their elders, an adolescent fantasy of irresponsibility. But the odd thing was that these revolutionaries never grew up. As this generation of post-war baby boomers grew older, they still clung to the infantilism of their youth.

But now they have become the country's establishment. Across the professions, the universities, police, civil service, judiciary, the people at the top come from that generation. So now we have the bizarre situation where the establishment is in a state of arrested adolescence. Hence the preposterous support of certain senior police officers, for example, for the legalization of drugs, or of the senior judiciary for redefining the family out of existence.

As for government ministers, it is as if their sixties radicalism had been preserved in a cryogenic tank during Labour's 18 years out of office and then thawed out and imposed upon the country without their thinking having matured by one iota in the interim.

Thus it has enacted an agenda of extreme feminism, penalizing men, marriage, and the traditional family. It has given incentives to unmarried women, loaded the financial dice against married couples, particularly where the wife stays at home, and skewed rape proceedings against men on the presumption that all accused males are guilty.

It has promoted the destruction of the very concept of moral norms by driving forward a gay rights agenda whose fundamental purpose is to set up gay lifestyles as morally equivalent to heterosexual behaviour. And it has set in train the liberalization of drug use, despite the untold harm this causes to individuals and society in general.

It is an agenda of radical self-centredness, which will simply destroy the values that have made this society orderly and civilized. And those who will lose out most are the poor, who don't have the resources to cope without clear moral structures that underpin behaviour.

The astounding thing about the sixties cultural revolution is that, although its casualties are all around us in lonely, depressed adults and abandoned children, it is still running its destructive course. Those who were in its vanguard are still driving it on. They appear to have learned nothing.

The young, who are among its principal casualties, are notably impatient with it. It is the older generation which appears to be suffering from a collective Peter Pan complex, a persistent infantile disorder. And the main casualty is likely to be nothing less than western civilization itself.

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