One of my current obsessions is that this "Resistance" from the left is the Sixties all over again, really another Awakening of secular religious enthusiasm on the left. And my hope is that ordinary Americans will hate it just as much as they did in the Sixties.
But now I make a new departure in my theory. I now announce that the traditional Great Awakening of religious enthusiasm arises when a large cohort in society goes through the subordinate-to-responsible transition. Thus the Puritan Awakening in 1600ish, the Great Awakening in New England in 1745ish, the Second Great Awakening in upstate New York from 1790 to 1820. These people were all becoming responsible middle-class and needed a religious faith and community to make sense of it all and help them make the transition.
But obviously the same applies to the responsible-to-creative transition. The transition here is from a life in which you try to adapt responsibly to a world laid down by a Divine Artificer to a life you create for yourself. So while the folks in upstate New York were going through the transition from subordinate helplessness to individual responsibility the Romantics were experiencing their uniqueness and developing a culture of what Charles Taylor called expressive individualism.
Let us call this responsible-to-creative transition a Creative Awakening.
I reckon that you could call the 1840s one of these Creative Awakenings, with Marx and all, and also the 1920s youth culture after World War I. And also the Sixties with the Port Huron lefties talking about "finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic... [and] one's own."
Of course one of the problems with these Awakenings, whether subordinate-to-responsible or responsible-to-creative, is that its enthusiasts are enthusiasts. They are not content just to experience the epiphany themselves; they want to share it with the whole world. Indeed, the impulse to share very easily becomes an instinct to compel.
When the Great Awakenings of the subordinate-to-responsible transition get a little over-enthusiastic our lefty friends start to rage about "theocracy," where the churches of the enthusiasts start to "legislate morality" on the likes of liberals. When the Creative Awakenings start to get over-enthusiastic we racist sexist homophobes start to talk about totalitarianism. The point is that in each case the enthusiasts are trying to combine the political with the moral/cultural, and you are a heretic or a class enemy if you don't go with the flow.
The wise men of the modern era decided many moons ago that a separation of church and state was a requirement of a modern society, a protection so that one dominant sect would not get exclusive control of the levers of power.
Because all power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely.
You can see the problem with the current Creative Awakening, which I think has a uniquely feminine flavor on account of the fact that universities are now dominated by women. It is not just that there will be diversity, but that anyone disagreeing with the diversity mantra gets fired from Google. It is not acceptable for a few extreme white right-wingers to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate generalissimo Robert E. Lee. The protesters must be smashed. No disagreement is allowed because we Resisters are easily triggered and require our safe-spaces free from hate.
The problem for all enthusiasts is that their glorious vision of heaven scares the hell out of everyone else. Oh, your average liberal that reads her New York Times cover-to-cover judges that the BLM and Antifa extremists are overenthusiastic, but at least their hearts are in the right place. But everyone else wonders when the street thugs are going to come for them.
Thus in the Sixties, the liberal media put an avuncular arm around the "kids" while the rest of us curled up in disgust at these privileged youngsters daring to lecture the rest of us on freedom and love. (OK, I was one of the youngsters, but you get the point.)
Today we seem to be getting a repeat performance, with Gilbert T. Sewall writing about a "quasi-religious caste and its diversity catechism now directing the nation's institutions."
Actually nobody regards their view of "life, the universe, and everything" as a religion. They think of it as "the way things are." Other people have religions, and they are wrong to impose their religion on the rest of us.
Will the Teens turn out to be a rerun of the Sixties, with the ordinary normals rebelling against a new Creative Awakening that is turning into a secular Inquisition: "are you now, or have you ever been, a racist?"
Nobody knows. But obviously President Trump with his call to nation and patriotism, is consciously trying to lead America away from the secular religious state of the liberals, and protect it from the crusading Creative Awakening of the progressives.
Today there's a thumb-sucker from Charles R. Kesler at the Claremont Review of Books that fully rehearses the Sixties Left and tries to make sense of the Teens Left.
On Kesler´s telling the Sixties Awakening correlated with the switch at elite colleges from "legacy" admissions of WASP scions to SAT-based admissions of bright youngsters of every background.
So by the early Sixties these young heads full of mush were writing the Port Huron Statement that featured enthusiasms like this
We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love, [where freedom meant] finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic. [The object was not] to have one's own way so much as it is to have a way that is one's own.Now this is very interesting to me because it fits my reductive Three Peoples theory, that there are three kinds of people: the People of the Creative Self (artists and writers); People of the Responsible Self (bourgeois middle class); and People of the Subordinate Self (marginalized victims).
But now I make a new departure in my theory. I now announce that the traditional Great Awakening of religious enthusiasm arises when a large cohort in society goes through the subordinate-to-responsible transition. Thus the Puritan Awakening in 1600ish, the Great Awakening in New England in 1745ish, the Second Great Awakening in upstate New York from 1790 to 1820. These people were all becoming responsible middle-class and needed a religious faith and community to make sense of it all and help them make the transition.
But obviously the same applies to the responsible-to-creative transition. The transition here is from a life in which you try to adapt responsibly to a world laid down by a Divine Artificer to a life you create for yourself. So while the folks in upstate New York were going through the transition from subordinate helplessness to individual responsibility the Romantics were experiencing their uniqueness and developing a culture of what Charles Taylor called expressive individualism.
Let us call this responsible-to-creative transition a Creative Awakening.
I reckon that you could call the 1840s one of these Creative Awakenings, with Marx and all, and also the 1920s youth culture after World War I. And also the Sixties with the Port Huron lefties talking about "finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic... [and] one's own."
Of course one of the problems with these Awakenings, whether subordinate-to-responsible or responsible-to-creative, is that its enthusiasts are enthusiasts. They are not content just to experience the epiphany themselves; they want to share it with the whole world. Indeed, the impulse to share very easily becomes an instinct to compel.
When the Great Awakenings of the subordinate-to-responsible transition get a little over-enthusiastic our lefty friends start to rage about "theocracy," where the churches of the enthusiasts start to "legislate morality" on the likes of liberals. When the Creative Awakenings start to get over-enthusiastic we racist sexist homophobes start to talk about totalitarianism. The point is that in each case the enthusiasts are trying to combine the political with the moral/cultural, and you are a heretic or a class enemy if you don't go with the flow.
The wise men of the modern era decided many moons ago that a separation of church and state was a requirement of a modern society, a protection so that one dominant sect would not get exclusive control of the levers of power.
Because all power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely.
You can see the problem with the current Creative Awakening, which I think has a uniquely feminine flavor on account of the fact that universities are now dominated by women. It is not just that there will be diversity, but that anyone disagreeing with the diversity mantra gets fired from Google. It is not acceptable for a few extreme white right-wingers to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate generalissimo Robert E. Lee. The protesters must be smashed. No disagreement is allowed because we Resisters are easily triggered and require our safe-spaces free from hate.
The problem for all enthusiasts is that their glorious vision of heaven scares the hell out of everyone else. Oh, your average liberal that reads her New York Times cover-to-cover judges that the BLM and Antifa extremists are overenthusiastic, but at least their hearts are in the right place. But everyone else wonders when the street thugs are going to come for them.
Thus in the Sixties, the liberal media put an avuncular arm around the "kids" while the rest of us curled up in disgust at these privileged youngsters daring to lecture the rest of us on freedom and love. (OK, I was one of the youngsters, but you get the point.)
Today we seem to be getting a repeat performance, with Gilbert T. Sewall writing about a "quasi-religious caste and its diversity catechism now directing the nation's institutions."
Not only in media, academe, advertising, and entertainment but also in corporations, government, and the military, chaplains of diversity enforce the new canon law.But if you ask a liberal about what amounts to a "secular religion" they will look at you in blind disbelief. The last thing in their minds is that their belief system -- their "values," their "ethics," -- amounts to a religion in everything but name.
Actually nobody regards their view of "life, the universe, and everything" as a religion. They think of it as "the way things are." Other people have religions, and they are wrong to impose their religion on the rest of us.
Will the Teens turn out to be a rerun of the Sixties, with the ordinary normals rebelling against a new Creative Awakening that is turning into a secular Inquisition: "are you now, or have you ever been, a racist?"
Nobody knows. But obviously President Trump with his call to nation and patriotism, is consciously trying to lead America away from the secular religious state of the liberals, and protect it from the crusading Creative Awakening of the progressives.
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