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Yes, innocence and naïveté. Also, ernestness and commitment and desire for improvement.
It is true that people were more adventurous than before or after, and this had many consequences, good and bad, both personally and socially. But there were many earnest people with very practical plans for improving society. They were crushed, of course.
After the Second World War, there were segments of the ruling classes which desired a more educated and cultured populace. The 60's taught them not to make that mistake again.
The caricature of the 60's which I cannot avoid seeing in the mass media is unrecognizable to me.
The music to which I was listening was Vivaldi, Bach, Gesualdo, Ravi Shankar and Balinese gamelan. The first popular music which I thought was interesting was the Beatles' Norwegian Wood. When I first heard it in '64 or '65, my immediate reaction was, "Hmm, something new and worthwhile is happening."
In movies, I was much impressed by the 1960 film, Last Year at Marienbad and, of course, the wonderful films of the Canadian National Film Board. Otherwise, I don't remember any movies until Kubrick's 2001.
In the plastic arts, I was studying Optical Art and the researches into color theory by Josef Albers. I remember going to exhibitions of original works by René Magritte, Escher and Remedios Varo.
Of course, in the mid-sixties I was studying at UC Berkeley, so my experience may have been a little different from that of most other Americans.
