Word: next
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...predict astrologers, should be a profound change in the way people think and act. Just possibly, the astrologers may be proved right. In the short run, the clash between new values and old probably will produce uncertainty, confusion, frustration and dismay. In the long run, this decade and the next may well constitute an historical era of transition like that which followed the Middle Ages and preceded the Renaissance...
...Hashbury scene has faded into history, but it is possible that the hippie may have pioneered-in spirit, at least-the way men will live and think in the next decade. Sociologists agree that more and more people probably will share the hippie's quest for new free-form, intimate social groups. The swinging-single apartment houses and the sedate, self-contained villages for the retired that flourished in the '60s may prove to be the models for other communal forms. There may be such things as occupational communes, in which groups of doctors and lawyers will live...
...late Harvard sociologist, Pitirim Sorokin. By this he meant the glorification of pleasure over Puritan duty, of leisure over work. The '60s was a time of almost frantic experiment in sexual liberation; in the next decade, thanks in part to the Pill, sex will continue to be casual. But it may also be less frenetic. Divorce will be even more common, and the law may come to recognize term marriages, unions that will dissolve automatically after a certain length of time. Marijuana most likely will be either legalized or condoned...
Even as generals are better at fighting the last war than the next one, so prophets are better at extrapolating from the past than anticipating surprises. Could all these trends that seem to lead from the '60s to the '70s be reversed? Certainly. After all, the heady air of freedom in the reigns of Elizabeth and James I was suddenly stifled by the Puritan Revolution in England, and staid Victorian laws followed the carefree boisterous spirit of the Regency. It may be that the early '70s will see a period of repressive reaction against the Dionysian tendencies...
...national consensus and obscured the tensions within the society. "Now," says Sociologist Daniel Bell, "the historic tendency of the culture is reasserting itself." Adds Susan Sontag, the radical critic and novelist: "It is a kind of false nostalgia to look upon consensus as being normative." For much of the next decade, the U.S. is likely to be an increasingly fractious, and perhaps an increasingly violent and polarized society...