Lacewing wrote: ↑Fri Dec 01, 2023 7:06 pmI think that era (the sixties) was an immensely beneficial and transformative BURST of awareness and love in response to the rigid conventional culture, war, and stunted human evolvement.
I have thought the same thing. Or put differently I have responded to the messages as I think most do or as many do anyway. My point is that the messages in that music (especially the two I included) are Christian Universalism at a quintessential level. For this reason I point out that the messages and the emotions that empower them are essentially Christian expressions.
But when looked at from a different perspective, and because the way the messages, the ideology, and the metaphysics in them do not allow any contradiction, I also find them imperious. It is as if those who hold to those visions are saying -- and here I will include a darker message -- "every knee shall bow" (to our concept of what is right and good).
Those who sung these songs did so as *God's own righteous children* and the sentiments they worked with are connected, quite deeply, to American revivalism and the Great Awakening:
The Great Awakening was a series of religious revivals in American Christian history. Historians and theologians identify three, or sometimes four, waves of increased religious enthusiasm between the early 18th century and the late 20th century. Each of these "Great Awakenings" was characterized by widespread revivals led by evangelical Protestant ministers, a sharp increase of interest in religion, a profound sense of conviction and redemption on the part of those affected, an increase in evangelical church membership, and the formation of new religious movements and denominations.
The influence of these revivals, and the social sentiments of deep progressivism, can be traced in American culture from the Awakening and into the
Burned Over District, and from there to numerous evolutions or involutions of the felt doctrines, including into some of the stranger neo-Christian cults that sprung up in California, including Pentecostalism.
As I made an effort to point out, this movement and these movements have a
dual aspect: one that is unabashedly progressive, universalist and religious-enthusiastic in tone, attitude and action on one hand. And on the other a darker side is found in its sheer certainty, its absolute certainty, its 'metaphysical conviction' that it is the right thing and the good thing for all humanity.
If you were to respond: "But why would you oppose what is obviously good?" I would then have to explain more about the *dual* aspect, the destruction of hierarchies, and a certain turn against structures of authority which was also a large part of the Sixties Movement and the youth rebellion.
The European New Right (people like Alain de Benoist for one example) construct an oppositional stance to these manifestations of Christian Universalism as they try to construct a more particular traditionalism and conservatism. Something to oppose what they believe, and many believe, is a sort of hyper-liberalism with numerous destructive features.
I try to situate IC within a Christian nostalgia and also within revivalism of a certain flavor and ideological commitment. Though IC is not very self-aware I have noticed that nearly the entirely of his social platform and ideology is in essence
progressive.
I am not necessarily taking any particular side. What I am saying is that the emotions and the ideology connected with enthusiasm is
very persuasive and when one confronts someone deeply committed to it, and should you oppose, you are defined as backward, retrogressive bad & evil.
