{"id":36054,"date":"2018-07-29T01:00:47","date_gmt":"2018-07-29T05:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=36054"},"modified":"2018-07-09T10:17:06","modified_gmt":"2018-07-09T14:17:06","slug":"qotd-the-third-great-awakening","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/07\/29\/qotd-the-third-great-awakening\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The third Great Awakening"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are now \u2014 in the Me Decade \u2014 seeing the upward roll (and not yet the crest, by any means) of the third great religious wave in American history, one that historians will very likely term the Third Great Awakening. Like the others it has begun in a flood of ecstasy, achieved through LSD and other psychedelics, orgy, dancing (the New Sufi and the Hare Krishna), meditation, and psychic frenzy (the marathon encounter). This third wave has built up from more diverse and exotic sources than the first two, from therapeutic movements as well as overtly religious movements, from hippies and students of \u201cpsi phenomena\u201d and Flying Saucerites as well as charismatic Christians. But other than that, what will historians say about it?<\/p>\n

The historian Perry Miller credited the First Great Awakening with helping to pave the way for the American Revolution through its assault on the colonies\u2019 religious establishment and, thereby, on British colonial authority generally. The sociologist Thomas O\u2019Dea credited the Second Great Awakening with creating the atmosphere of Christian asceticism (known as \u201cbleak\u201d on the East Coast) that swept through the Midwest and the West during the nineteenth century and helped make it possible to build communities in the face of great hardship. And the Third Great Awakening? Journalists (historians have not yet tackled the subject) have shown a morbid tendency to regard the various movements in this wave as \u201cfascist.\u201d The hippie movement was often attacked as \u201cfascist\u201d in the late 1960s. Over the past several years a barrage of articles has attacked Scientology, the est movement, and \u201cthe Moonies\u201d (followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon) along the same lines.<\/p>\n

Frankly, this tells us nothing except that journalists bring the same conventional Grim Slide concepts to every subject. The word fascism<\/em> derives from the old Roman symbol of power and authority, the fasces<\/em>, a bundle of sticks bound together by thongs (with an ax head protruding from one end). One by one the sticks would be easy to break. Bound together they are invincible Fascist ideology called for binding all classes, all levels, all elements of an entire nation together into a single organization with a single will.<\/p>\n

The various movements of the current religious wave attempt very nearly the opposite. They begin with … \u201cLet\u2019s talk about Me.\u201d They begin with the most delicious look inward; with considerable narcissism, in short. When the believers bind together into religions, it is always with a sense of splitting off from the rest of society. We, the enlightened (lit by the sparks at the apexes of our souls), hereby separate ourselves from the lost souls around us. Like all religions before them, they proselytize \u2014 but always on promising the opposite of nationalism: a City of Light that is above it all. There is no ecumenical spirit within this Third Great Awakening. If anything, there is a spirit of schism. The contempt the various seers have for one another is breathtaking. One has only to ask, say, Oscar Ichazo of Arica about Carlos Castaneda or Werner Erhard of est to learn that Castaneda is a fake and Erhard is a shallow sloganeer. It\u2019s exhilarating! \u2014 to watch the faithful split off from one another to seek ever more perfect and refined crucibles in which to fan the Divine spark … and to talk about Me.<\/p>\n

Whatever the Third Great Awakening amounts to, for better or for worse, will have to do with this unprecedented post-World War II American development: the luxury, enjoyed by so many millions of middling folk, of dwelling upon the self. At first glance, Shirley Polykoff\u2019s slogan \u2014 \u201cIf I\u2019ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!\u201d \u2014 seems like merely another example of a superficial and irritating rhetorical trope (antanaclasis<\/em>) that now happens to be fashionable among advertising copywriters. But in fact the notion of \u201cIf I\u2019ve only one life\u201d challenges one of those assumptions of society that are so deep-rooted and ancient, they have no name \u2014 they are simply lived by. In this case: man\u2019s age-old belief in serial immortality.<\/p>\n

Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening”, New York Magazine<\/em><\/a>, 1976-08-23.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are now \u2014 in the Me Decade \u2014 seeing the upward roll (and not yet the crest, by any means) of the third great religious wave in American history, one that historians will very likely term the Third Great Awakening. Like the others it has begun in a flood of ecstasy, achieved through LSD […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,41,11,13],"tags":[263,262,457,1020],"class_list":["post-36054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-quotations","category-religion","category-usa","tag-1970s","tag-culture","tag-fascism","tag-progressives"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9nw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36054"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36054\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36055,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36054\/revisions\/36055"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}