It goes a lot deeper than the 60's.

Any society that ever existed has those supporting and enforcing social and cultural norms, often as a civic function, versus those pushing at the boundaries implied and manifest. It's as basic as the energies of youth, versus the experience of age. Motor and steering.

Yet in our monolithically oriented culture, where good and bad are some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, rather than the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental, the only alternative to an idealized good is bad. Though an ideal good makes as much sense as the perfect yes.

So all the higher order complexity, nuance and subjectivity is lost, in that race to the bottom, of our side versus the devil.

Logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The light shining through the film, than the images on it.

Ideals are aspirational, while absolutes are elemental. Mix them up and you empower the close minded and confuse the open minded. The philosophers should have all over that centuries ago, but....

To the Ancients, gods were like memes, the ideas animating life, some more powerful than others.

Political monotheism was analogous to monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures, as analogous to multiculturalism. Which best functions in an equilibrium state.

The Romans adopted Christianity as the Empire/oligarchy solidified and remnants of the Republic were being erased. Which lead to about 1500 years of monarchy as the poltical default. When the West went back to less centralized political systems, it required the separation of church and state, essentially culture and civics.

So our culture continues in that long shadow of God, searching for the perfect state. Rather than accepting reality is more the tension and balance of opposing elements. Even the physical is more positive and negative charge, than it is any actual, foundational substance.

More yin and yang, than God Almighty.