This year marks the 50th Anniversary of Woodstock. What was originally billed as three days of “Peace, Love, and Music” has become the primary symbol of a watershed moment in modern American cultural life. When people think of the sixties they think of Woodstock. Little did the organizers of this haphazardly planned outdoor music festival know just how influential it was to become. The music and images recorded from those three days have been seared on all of our collective psyches.

Woodstock has come to mean many different things to many different people. For some, celebrating peace and love was like opening a window in a musty old house, “Ah finally, fresh air!”. For others, Woodstock and the pulsating mass of jeans and halter-top wearing teenagers offered fodder for the starched collared morality police who believed that America was now rotten to the core. Some saw Woodstock as the highpoint of rock music where artistic freedom was allowed to flourish; untainted by the commercialization that is now ruining the music industry. Others can barely get past the suffocating green haze created by platoons of pot smoking flower children.

Woodstock occurred when I was a two-year-old boy. But for my oldest sister, she remembered it all – – and hearing about the hundreds of thousands of young people camping out at a farmer’s field listening to the most popular musicians and poets of the time made quite an impression on her. She soon adopted the hippie fashions of bell bottom pants and tie-dye t-shirts. I also remember her “keep on trucking” patch, and now whenever I see pictures of yellow and blue Volkswagon vans painted with peace signs on the side it reminds me of her. The Woodstock culture makes me smile. So on a personal level, I find the whole topic of Woodstock incredibly fascinating.

But it is the sociological questions that interest me the most, why was Woodstock so captivating? There have been scores of outdoor music festivals, hippie love-ins, and pot smoking parties, but Woodstock stands out above them all. Why? Why is everyone still wanting to re-enact the nostalgia of Woodstock in festivals like Burning Man and Coachella? And it has to be more than the pictures of naked people rolling in mud and Jimi Hendrix playing the electric guitar while his mile-high afro is shining brightly in the hot August sun.

I think the answer lies in the fact that more than anything else, Woodstock exposed very clearly to the watching world the generational clash of ideas. Like the massive waves off of Cape Horn, where the winds of the Andes mountains beat down upon the colliding edges of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans; Woodstock was a war of two worldviews. The new ideas of the young clashed and hurled themselves against the seemingly rock hard immovable ideals of the old guard. While one worldview was dying, Modern pragmatism (legalism), a new thought pattern was emerging, Post-modern utopianism (antinomianism).

Os Guinness describes the mindset of Woodstock and the sixties like this in his book The Dust of Death, “The United States reached the climax of a generation-long crisis of cultural authority – the beliefs, ideals, and traditions that once shaped Americans lost their compelling power.” Woodstock was the defining cultural moment when the post-WW2 children were growing up and no longer wanted the world their parents created. They wanted to break the constricting chains of authoritarian conformity and celebrate the freedom to create new norms and modes of self-expression as they saw fit.

The only problem, as we will see, is that both views have their origins in arbitrary man-made values and aspirations which has no way to offer real long term meaning and hope.

When it comes to the dying generational mindset that led to Woodstock, one writer named Jules Henry in his 1962 book Culture against Man, called it “the Indo-European, Islamic, Hebraic Impulse-control system.” This impulse-control system was all about placing limits and constraints on people in order to achieve order and desired outcome. It was behaviorism plain and simple. Shared uniformity of values was the goal. Robert Bly in the book The Sibling Society says this about it, “The impulse-control system smelled of limitation; schools stank of it. It reeked of the bald, the severe, the cabined, the icebound, the squat, the cramped, the dinky, the narrow, the scanty, the roped-in, the meager, the bad, the tame. Above everything sat the parental or institutional tyrant, the one with the thin nose, a black coat, and steel-rimmed glasses, the one who had told them in grade school to sit down, to behave, to hold their bodies stiffly, to salute the flag and stand up when a teacher enters the room.”

One English observer who visited the United States in the late 50’s said, “there was an extraordinary desire of American grown-ups to be respected and loved by thier children. But they didn’t seem to feel it necessary to love in return; rather, to be the object of love was all that was required.”

This old way of life tried to hide the general dissatisfaction with the sterile order under plastered smiles and little pink houses snuggled together in pristine subdivisions. A perfect storm was brewing, Beaver Cleaver could no longer contain his rage. Rules without a loving relationship stir up deep anger and bitterness in the heart, and when the new winds of the ’60s came, Woodstock offered a visual picture of “what could be” , and it unleashed a whirlwind.

So what has replaced the “impulse-control system?” And is the new system any better? The young generation was hoping that “Peace, Love and Music” would foster in the brotherhood of man, and what they got in return was rule by pop-culture. Parents and teachers no longer set the rules, Hendrix, Baez and Jagger did. There will always be a need for a hero to fill the vacuum that the tyrant left, and the hero is now the celebrity.

Robert Bly writes, “Unjust severity had been overcome or bypassed. Fundementalist harshness, Marxist rigidity, the stiff ethic of high school superintendents, had passed away. People greeted each other, clothed or naked, in delight, feeling that a victory of humaness was won. With the help of rock music, young men and women felt freed from a parental or institutional tyrant…”

Woodstock demanded unrestrained freedom. The pendulum had swung, but in its path, the new generation had no mercy for the important values that were beneficial in the old system. If the Rolling Stones thumbed their nose at the importance of ‘delayed gratification’ and ‘parental respect’ because they “couldn’t get no satisfaction”, it was also a call for all young people to “stick it to the man”, as Jack Black would say. So what did the new generation want?

Doing what was right, or doing what feels right?

What feels right won the day, and is still on the throne, “…lighthearted, open to impulses rising from below his belt, playful, and yet grounded in sexuality, heavier than Peter Pan…it felt as if human beings were able for the first time in history to choose their own roads, choose what to dow with their own bodies, choose the visionary possibilities formerly shut off by the ‘control system.'”

That sounds all well and good, but what possibilities did they choose? What did the pop-culture offer them? We’ve spent the last 50 years trying to figure that out, and the results are not simply “Peace, Love, and Music”; a new task master has arrived, popularity! As one writer has said, “It is hard to be as popular as we are suppossed to be.” And who decided if I am as popular as I should be? I do, of course.

And I am never satisfied.

The psychologist Giles Lipovetsy says, “We demand of ourselves fame and success which, it not achieved, unleashes an implacable storm of critcism against the self.” This is why we chant the useless mantra, “In order to forgive others, we must first forgive ourselves.” But forgiveness is hard to achieve when I dont get as many likes on my selfie, or I see on facebook how my strawberry salad does not look as nice as my besties does that she just posted. Robert Bly makes the case that our inward drive for fame and success is a worse tyrant than the high school superintendent ever was, “If a teenager is not invited to the dance, she may try suicide. A high school boy, scoffed at, may retreat behind his computer for ten years.”

He finishes with this sad statement, “In the past, the authoritarian Judge demanded obedience to parents, and insisted on sexual “purity,” and, one could say, advocated for high morals. But now, the one who fails to become successful and well loved, punishment is swift and thorough. Self recieves a battering from the inside, everyone feels insignificant and unseen, until, in desperation, we finally agree to go on a talk show and tell it all.”

So what is the answer? In the book The Whole Christ, Sinclair Ferguson argues that both “legalism” (rule under arbitrary manmade laws) and “antinomianism” (rule by self) come from the same place when he says, “Legalism and antinomianism are, in fact, nonidentical twins that emerge from the same womb…Both of them are a restricted heart disposition of God.” I would take it a step further and say that both fail because they leave out the one who gives life any significance, Jesus Christ.

Scripture says in 2 Corinthians 4:4, “The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” In other words, Satan, a real being who hates God, wants all people to see God as forbidding and restrictive, kind of like an “institutional tyrant, the one with the thin nose, a black coat, and steel-rimmed glasses.” And like the Woodstock generation, he wants us to declare complete freedom and independence from him hoping to rule ourselves.

But true “Peace, Love and Music” can only found in the one who is love. Don’t let daisy chains of flowers and a peace sign fool you, without God, unrestrained freedom leads to a worse tyranny than the man wearing the steel-rimmed glasses could ever bring about.