the parents of the 1950s yielded the children of the 1960s

This truth also holds philosophically and culturally-- as well as familially.

Here's a little more on that-- in a brief review of Fred Kaplan's 1959: The Year Everything Changed from Marvin Olasky in World...

He doesn't stick to events of 1959 but shows us how before, during, and after that year so many creative Americans abandoned traditions and plunged us into the brave new 1960s....

For me, though, the shock came in Kaplan's descriptions of the hot new books of that era, because those were the books assigned to me as great works in college classes 10 years later...the Marxism mainlined by C. Wright Mills and William Appleman Williams....Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth, and Advertisements for Myself by Norman Mailer.

It's not helpful for any of us to look back at the 1950s as a golden age just because it had a religious veneer and a certain Cold War unity based in opposition to Communism. It was a saner decade than the one to come, but the propaganda of leftist professors in the late 1960s had plausibility because millions were searching for meaning....

The bricks of the 1950s gave way to the sand castles of the 1960s, so we look back on solidity lost, but solidity by itself was insufficient....