THE SUMMER OF LOVE REVISITED (and revisited and revisited and...)

When Munz sent over this piece from The Guardian in London, I kinda groaned. Another fucking dissection of 1967? But this one seems to be fairly balanced, and attempts to place the counter-culture in a much broader social context. And the writer quotes me, so it can’t all be bad. For those unfamiliar with the history, Tom McGrath was the first editor of the UK underground paper IT. After IT’s first obscenity bust, Tom took it on the lam, and the paper was taken over by an ad hoc collective of which I was the most vocal and loaded. (I’m posting the story in full because the link has run out.)

SUMMER OF LOVE: The hippies were the most extreme example of a much broader movement transforming Britain into a relatively permissive society.

by Marcus Collins August 9, 2007

In March 1967 Tom McGrath, the editor of the leading countercultural newspaper, IT, sought to describe "the revolution [that] has taken place within the minds of the young" on the eve of the Summer of Love.
He identified its core as permissiveness: the notion that "the individual should be free from hindrances by external law or internal guilt in his pursuit of pleasure so long as he does not impinge on others". He was right, for "doing your own thing" became an articleof faith among his fellow hippies in the 1960s and beyond. Yet, for all their attempts to distance themselves from "squares" and The System, hippies were simply the most extreme example of a much broader movement transforming Britain into a relatively permissive society.
The legal restraints to which McGrath referred had been undergoing wholesale reform during the previous decade, transforming the relationship between state, society and individual. Print censorship was relaxed in 1959 and that of drama in 1968. Citizens won the right to take their own lives in 1961 and murderers got to keep theirs after 1965. Off-course betting became legal in 1960, as did abortion and male homosexuality in limited fashion in 1967. The National Health Service (Family Planning) Act of the same year extended access to contraception regardless of marital status, while the Divorce Reform Act passed two years later dissolved marriages that had undergone "irretrievable breakdown" after two years in consensual cases and five years in contested ones.
The liberalisation of the law was only one facet of permissiveness in 1960s Britain. McGrath's disavowal of "internal guilt" shows how those affected by legal change were no passive recipients of civil liberties. The radical theologian, Douglas Rhymes, duly urged his readers in 1964 to overcome both their guilt and any deference to "priest, Church, politician or parent" when making moral choices. Advocates of permissiveness equated individualism with iconoclasm, described by McGrath as a rejection of leaders and by George Melly (who died last month) as a "cool refusal to pay homage to traditiona bogeymen and shibboleths". Disdain for convention sat uneasily with the pluralistic dimensions of permissiveness. McGrath commended the "international, inter-racial, equisexual" dimensions of the "alternative society", while the anarchist hippie Mick Farren stated that "each and every individual has unique needs and desires that areentirely his own".Permissiveness encouraged people to express and satisfy these desires. McGrath urged everyone to follow their "inner voice in the most honest way possible", gays "came out" and the future politician and perjurer Jonathan Aitken incongruously applauded his generation's "remarkable frankness" in 1967. Self-expression often took creative forms such as the "wild new clothes" and "strange new music sounds" that caught McGrath's attention. The past decade or so had witnessed a cultural efflorescence that rid Britain of its frumpy image. A country producing the Beatles and the Stones, Mary Quant and VidalSassoon, Biba and Habitat soon lost its inferiority complex. Equally significant was the manner in which British culture challenged existing aesthetic standards. It was no longer self-evident that high culture was superior to popular culture or, indeed, how each termshould be defined. British icons likewise redefined female beauty (Twiggy), male beauty (Mick Jagger), artistry (Lennon and McCartney) and heroism (James Bond). Tom McGrath's championing of "the individual's right to pleasure (orgasm)" points to the bond between permissiveness and the sexual revolution. Britain overcame its reputation for prudery by conducting a carnivalesque breaking of taboos in the 1960s. The first C-word in a paperback (1960), the first F-word on air (1965), the first drug reference in a Beatles song (1965) and the first full-frontal centrefold in a soft-core magazine (1971) could be taken to signify liberation or merely titillation, but either way they indicated a weakening of controls. While this process was furthered by the relaxation of censorship, contrary attempts to restore public decency often achieved the same effect. The prosecution of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960 made it a bestseller; Christine Keeler's nude bodybecame the defining image of the Profumo Affair of 1963 and Marianne Faithfull served the same role in the 1967 Redlands drugs trial.
The primacy given to freedom, pleasure and sexuality necessitated a rethink of morality and religion, leading McGrath to write of a "new spiritual movement". Some defined the "New Morality" in terms of the abolition of prohibitions; others toyed with moral relativism. The famously liberal Bishop of Woolwich preferred to restructure Christianity around a situational ethics in which "nothing can of itself always be labelled as 'wrong'." But for humanists, permissiveness was inseparable from a process of secularisation thattook off in the 1960s and continues to this day.
McGrath's utopianism became painfully unfashionable once the 1960s gave way to the 1970s and the Summer of Love to the Winter of Discontent. But 40 years later, his vision of a Britain embracing freedom, individualism, iconoclasm, pluralism, openness, pleasure, creativity and a post-Christian morality seems almost prophetic. Britain is now a more permissive society than it has ever been, and hippies deserve their due for assisting in its creation.

The secret words are Oh Wow