The generation that led the surge towards freedom from the 1960s to a soundtrack that began with Elvis's Sun records, is now about to retire. This brings us to a key moment in recent cultural history.

In present-day culture it is almost impossible to offer a critique of certain aspects of modern living without it being assumed that you are utterly and comprehensively opposed to the phenomenon under discussion. For example, anyone who criticises the abuse of alcohol is immediately assumed to be a teetotaler, and if it emerges that he enjoys a tipple at the weekends, he is instantly deemed a ''hypocrite''.

This is not, in fact, accidental, but is rather a symptom of an ideological view of freedom. What is being talked about in these discussions is not really alcohol per se, but the idea that certain behaviours fall within a particular definition of ''freedom'' and could come to be questioned only by someone seeking to reduce or attack this. A choice must be made between freedom and something else.

Totality

To understand what the ''something else'' might be, we have to step back from our culture and study it in a wider perspective. In fact, we need to step back far enough to take in a period of approximately 55 years, enabling us to see the totality of the development of modern culture in many of its key dimensions.

Perhaps the central element of this narrative is the emergence in Western society of rock 'n' roll, an event generally agreed to have occurred in the mid-1950s.

It began, really, with Elvis. From the very first notes of his very first songs, Elvis Presley urged the world to awake to freedom, desire, change, revolution, life. Elvis said ''Awake'', and thus called an end to the post-war period of uncertainty and weariness.

Sam Phillips, the man who recorded those first songs of Presley's in Sun Studios five-and-a-half decades ago, said that, until Elvis walked in the door, he hadn't known what he was looking for. But he did know that it would be something not just good but unique and uniquely new, something that didn't fit, that didn't make any sense of or reflect life in America as it then was. It would be something that made everything a little bit irrelevant, something that created confusion, that didn't allow people to feel totally safe in the way they'd grown used to.

Those early Sun records were, and remain, annunciations of what sounded like the endless possibilities of personal freedom - the manifesto of a new sensibility that refused to conform to the strictures of existing authority, the refusal of the young of the infallibility of the old. When you heard or hear them, you could or cannot fail to be alerted to the idea that everything could be completely different to the way you have been told it should be. That was, and remains, the rock 'n' roll message.

This message dropped into a grey, monochrome reality, defined by caution and conservatism, and was therefore, in its time, an irrefutable witness to something in the human spirit that had been suppressed and subdued. Culturally speaking, it defined a generation in a way no generation had ever been defined: a generation that would take the affirmation of youth as the guiding force of its actions and perspectives.

The energy of those early moments later came to energise a whole decade, the Sixties, and particular moments within it, especially 1968 and its connotations of youth rebellion and repudiation of the political values of the time. Fundamentally, this revolution was existential rather than political: it repudiated all forms of authority, from the parental to the divine, and asserted the vindication of human desire in its most immediate form as the defining ethic of the age.

Human nature

But it also seemed to believe that something new had been discovered about human nature: that only the distorted will-to-power of the old and disappointed stood between humanity and perfection.

Because youthful idealism had been placed at the centre of this revolutionary endeavour, it was impossible to dissent from it from any perspective that did not immediately seem to have arisen from the agenda of the old guard. To question any aspect of this freedom project was immediately to reveal oneself as a ''reactionary'', a counter-revolutionary who wished to restore the fallen authorities and their strictures. Thus, as with all revolutions, this one became blind to its own limits and contradictions.

'Old guard'

Thus, when it lurched forward into excess, or failed to perceive the limits of its own expressed idealism, there was no voice from within capable of suggesting a rethink or a change of direction. In fact, as with other revolutions, one of its key achievements has been the preservation of the idea of the ''old guard'' as a salutary reminder in the event that anyone might try to insinuate that the revolution had limits or was capable of mistakes.

The influence of this revolution has carried on right unto this very moment, defining the consensual ideology of mainstream Western society. It has redefined virtue and progress in ways that have yet to be analysed - because they appear to be neutral and naturalistic elements of reality, and because the commentary is almost exclusively provided by adherents of the revolution.

And here resides a remarkable irony: the cultural power of rock 'n' roll and its magpie ragbag of unpolished sentiments has been appropriated by a generation in power that once exalted youth beyond all other values, but has itself clung to power more tenaciously than any of the generations that preceded it. This has led to freedom, certainly, but only of a certain, limited kind. And it has also, just as surely, shut the world off from more fundamental understandings of what real freedom means.

Human freedom

Many of the problems bequeathed by the past five-decades of a singular approach to human freedom are of a political or social nature. But there has been a tendency to overlook the fact that these problems have their roots in a deeper and fundamental distortion of human reality. In particular, the inherent antipathy in Sixties ideology towards authority has meant that many of today's citizens of Western society have grown up in a culture that actively shuts them off from key elements of their own natures: their createdness, their dependency and their mortality.

But now there is a moment of opportunity. Within a decade, the last of those who manned the barricades of 1968 will have reached the age of retirement. This will open up in Western culture both a power vacuum and an opportunity to propose a new direction. In a future article, I will outline the nature of this opportunity.