In Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue, a DVD that documents Miles Davis' performance at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, which was promoted as being the English equivalent of Woodstock, and ended up closer to the English equivalent of Altamont, Carlos Santana was videotaped in 2004 uttering this defense of the 1960s:

Isle of Wight was a pure result of consciousness-revolution music. “Hell no, we won’t go to Vietnam” and “we shall overcome”. The sixties—the late ‘60s, early ‘70s—was the most important decade of the 20th century.

Why?

Because it gave birth to questioning authority, particularly if it’s not enlightened by God. Are you listening, George Bush?

Virtually all modern ideologies, movements and philosophies are somehow aimed at addressing this problem of alienation, of recapturing the broken unity of the world. Communism, nazism, European fascism, the beat movement, the hippie movement, the free love movement, the enviornmental movement, the new age movement--all are futile attempts to turn back the clock and return to a mystical union with the "volk," with nature, with the proletariat, with the instincts. Even psychoanalysis did not escape these trends in the 1960's. Psychoanalytic gurus such as N.O. Brown (who thoroughly misunderstood Freud) taught that we could achieve a sort of sexual nirvana by eliminating repression and freely expressing our primitive instincts, with the implicit message that our primitive aspects are more "real" than the civilized parts. You can see this phenomena in today's leftists, who clearly long for the "magical" 1960's, which represented a high water mark for a resurgence of romantic merger with the group, free expression of the primitive, and idealized notions of recreating heaven on earth: "All you Need is Love," "Give Peace a Chance," "Sing a Simple Song of Freedom," etc. As the scientist E.O. Wilson put it in another context: Beautiful theory. Wrong species.