What's Left of 1968

In an article entitled “What’s Left of 1968” in the December 2007 issue of Traces, Lorenzo Albacete writes:

“… Two happenings not on the typical list of 1968 events quietly revealed what was to come in the following years up to today and showed this year to be indeed the beginning of an ideological contest.

The first was the publication of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, restating the Church’s traditional condemnation of artificial birth control.  In the atmosphere of progress that most Americans associated with change, the novelty introduced by the Second Vatican Council had convinced most American Catholics that the Church would accept the use of the contraceptive ‘pill’ being used by more and more American women as an instrument of liberation from a dependence on their bodies not suffered by men.  When the encyclical was published, the unity of the Church began to fall to pieces. … Although many dissenters from the Church’s teaching tried to convince others and themselves that this was an issue that dialogue could resolve, it became clear that what was at stake was much more than birth control.  Indeed, the struggle was about different ways of understanding freedom and the view of man which these different forms of considering freedom depended.  In this 1968 controversy, the true nature of what was happening [with the whole panoply of events that year] began to show its face.

The second event was the release of Stanley Kubric’s movie, 2001:  A Space Odyssey.  Although seen by many as a science-fiction film, it was really a stunning and majestic presentation of the story of human evolution from a purely secular, scientific, and technological expression, with progress understood precisely as the liberation of man from dependence on his body and the ultimate triumph of the mind.”