You may be wondering what all this history has to do with religion. Well, the Chinese have a saying, or at least I think they do: “If you want to know about water, don’t ask a fish.”
Because we swim in today’s cultural waters, we often have little objective sense of what defines that culture, what it stands for, and, more critically, how it came to be.
Which is to say we give little thought as to why we function the way we do. In such a climate, it’s easy to forget that our culture’s values and norms are not necessarily the same as, say, Christianity’s. And that’s the rub.
So, to review, the consolidationist impulse, which began after the Civil War, attempted to move an earlier America away from its more diffuse, localized roots by merging the nation’s various parts into a single unit or organism (which collectively represented human aspiration).
Beginning at the end of the 19th century, this consolidationist idea evolved into Modernist Progressivism (and the Social Gospel). Though this project was thought to hold great promise, it eventually came up against the hard realities of WWI and its aftermath. Progressivism’s confident optimism in the inevitability of human progress had proven naïve at best.
America, however, did not return to its formative, federalist roots. Instead, at the onset of the Great Depression, a resurgent consolidationist approach took hold (think the New Deal and the WWII war effort).
Meanwhile, another variation of consolidationist idealism was operating in the background. It involved a Neo-Freudian, Neo-Marxist analysis of history. As with Progressivism, this approach, though decidedly darker and far more pessimistic than its hopeful predecessor, also believed the world could be transformed into paradise.
But rather than early Progressivism’s trust in reasonable men and women of goodwill working together to bring about a better world, a new “Critical Theory” insisted this could only be accomplished by radically altering society.
This involved a damning critique of American society. It was the gross inequities and sadomasochistic tendencies of capitalism that were, at root, the true cause of society’s ills. The solution? Replace American society with a new socialist framework.
This follows from a post-Nietzschean strain of thought that had reinterpreted the idea of human nature and society. No longer were there fixed, hard-wired limits imposed by God and nature binding human action. Humans were now thought to be malleable, capable of being shaped and molded by outward social conditions. And the Marxists knew just what was needed.
The most common stereotype of the 50s, on the other hand, is its presumably bland, colorless conformity. It wasn’t until the 60’s, or so the argument goes, that things began to change. But, as with most generalizations, the truth is more complex.
For underneath the surface of the 50s boom-years, as I say, was this growing critique. Informed by the Frankfurt School’s fears of totalitarianism and the authoritarian personality (based on Freudian/Marxian theory), many Americans came to view society from a more jaundiced, counter-cultural perspective.
Following WWII, new fears of a tyrannical American “empire” emerged. As the Cold War heated up between the two “superpowers,” there were heightened worries of a dangerous new totalism threatening the nation’s more traditional reliance on individualism and independence.
More generally, as critics saw it, society was being reshaped by the leveling effect of “mass culture,” by its economic, technological, and bureaucratic uniformity. Once proud and independent, Americans were now succumbing to a “collectivization of mind,” at risk of being swept up by the mass appeals of advertising and the media.
Some thinkers even went so far as to suggest that Western democracies had now become “soft tyrannies,” substituting a subtle form of passive mind-control for the older “hard” tyrannies relying on secret police and concentration camps!
Not to be outdone, Betty Friedan actually described the sprawling post-war suburbs as analogous to a “camp,” with forced subjugation of the individual to the social whole.
The fear was that America was becoming, as historian Wilfred McClay characterizes it, “a flock of timid and industrious animals of which government was the shepherd.” The soulless “organizational man” (David Riesman), the sheep-like consumer, was now forced to dance to the tune of his or her business and governmental overlords.
Thus, despite the dramatic economic expansion and outward progress of the period, “a subterranean stream of doubt” was lurking beneath the surface.
Hidden, that is, was the modern “alienated” self, bereft of inner-direction. Indeed, the self had become a mere puppet, controlled by an all-encompassing, impersonal bureaucratic order. People were “homogenized commodities,” the public, “stupefied” and “other-directed.”
The Greeks had defined autonomy as moral self-governance. And in days gone by, Americans aspired to this sort of autonomy, based on the apprehension and proper application of their God-given natural rights.
But after the “acids of modernity” (Walter Lippmann) had effectively replaced these traditional rights (and obligations) with newer, transient, socially conditioned ones, all bets were off. It was a brave, new world.
In response to this real or perceived threat to autonomy, a new cry was heard across the land, albeit, at first, faintly. Americans had surrendered too much of their birthright – their liberty. A new freedom fighter emerged. The hipster was born.
50’s Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Norman Mailer plumbed the depths of the alienated, solitary self, obedient only to his or her own inner promptings – and eschewing all external authority.
This was reminiscent of Emerson, but tuned in a new key. For he, too, had railed against the consolidations and conformities of his day, seeking to reassert his own personal autonomy.
The difference, however, is that while Emerson believed there were real truths to be found in nature, this newer form of individualism was radically subjective, unencumbered by, and thus free from, any underlying objective truths or obligations. (Here again we hear strains of Nietzsche.)
This relatively obscure trickle of 50’s “nonconformity” eventually became a flood during the 60s, as baby-boomers, alienated by the Vietnam War and distrustful of all forms of authority, tried to escape the dehumanizing stranglehold of society, in pursuit of their “authentic” selves.
This approach, however, contained the seeds of a strange sort of bifurcation, eventually producing a strange sort of dualistic personality. The result was an odd symbiosis between two seeming opposites, the “realm of the organizational” and the “realm of the personal.”
While the hipster self, that is, went off on its own, pursuing the “free” expression of personal preferences, attitudes, and feelings, it simultaneously was ceding all real authority and decision-making to the very centralized state from which it was attempting to escape!
By absenting itself from civic participation, in other words, the state alone is free to call the shots, free to establish all “rights and entitlements.” This leaves the “autonomous” self “free” to choose its own idiosyncratic path and its own idiosyncratic “lifestyle,” though in a way reminiscent of impulsive adolescents only feigning independence.
The irony, then, is that this new “freedom” renders its adherents wholly subject to the powers that be, as mere passive vassals of the state! For without the protective, overweening “nanny state,” all “freedom” effectively ceases.
Since the 60s, this trend has only grown, even as the autonomous self has become increasingly directionless and atomized – morally, spiritually, communally.
At great cost, this approach has stubbornly denied Aristotle’s ancient truism that all human beings are, at their core, social creatures, who require a communal structure in which to thrive.
[The next post will conclude this series on historical conditions.]