Beatnik Conservatism and Hippy Catholicism

We're just flipping through this book on Theological Anthropology, and will light on any passage that floats our metaphysical boat. Such as this:

In Christ, the taking up of human nature into the divine life is a double movement including both humanity's joining into God, and of God's universal offer of himself to man. 

A dynamic double movement -- like (↑↓) or something, implying that both O and man are open to each other in a living process. It is not as if there are 

two static objects becoming enjoined in a mysterious manner, but of two mysteries becoming united in a way that carries its own logic and order. 

I don't know about you, but I am a mystery to myself. For example, I have no idea where this post is coming from, nor where it's going. 

But again, a mystery is not an absurd or unintelligible nul-de-slack but an infinitely intelligible adventure; "adventure" is the form it takes -- the "logic and order" just mentioned.

Gosh. It reminds me of something I read last night in the book Puritan's Empire, which looks at American history from a Catholic perspective. 

In it he says something I've often mentioned, that the "beats" of the 1950s and hippies of the 1960s were not completely wrong about the soul-deadening aspects of our simultaneously technofascist and puritanical culture. Assholes, maybe, but not wrong. I mean, Here We Are. And I still call myself a conservative hippy.

the "Beats" rebelled against the dull, gray, conformism of the 50s -- which, after all, was only the standard American Calvinism made triumphant...

True, they were mostly a bunch of reprobates, but I still get a kick out of Alan Watts and Terence McKenna. Vanderleun (of blessed memory) definitely knows what I'm talking about. 

The Beat Generation's solutions to the dryness and deadness of American life were often bizarre to say the least, and often involved a great deal of incoherent poetry and "alternative" lifestyles, unemployment, Eastern religions, drugs, and alcohol.

Not that there's anything wrong with it. But "In a word, they offered rebellion, pure and simple."

Nevertheless, "much of the criticism of American society which they expressed was quite valid" -- a rage against the machine, to coin a phrase. Who would have guessed that the correct response to our secular Puritan killjoys is Orthodoxy? Certainly not me. In any event, they'll pry my Zyn from my cold dead hands!

If their solutions were mad, the problems they posed were not.

They're still not. 

Each day it becomes easier to know what we ought to despise: what modern man admires and journalism praises.

As for the hippy phenomenon, 

Much of this was simply nonsense, but some of it was not. Putting to one side the drugs, free love, and crazed politics, what are we left with? A realization on the part of many Hippies that there really was something deeply wrong with America.

Only deeper and wronger today.

[T]he movement at its best was an attempt to break through the arid, dry machine-age and Calvinist culture of the time.... much of what was valuable in the Counter Culture was simply a spiritual (if unguided) rejection of the technocracy.

An unguided vertical missile, as it were. Wrong telos. Or no telos at all rather. 

Coulombe cites the ironic example of an obscure book called The Lord of the Rings, which the hippies elevated to mass popularity:

in veiled form, via Tolkien, the Hippies found the elements of Catholicism compelling indeed, in the face of the materialism and drabness with which they were brought up.

Obviously, the book spoke to the desire for spiritual adventure and the "rejection of the technocracy" represented by "the evil dark lord, Sauron." 

It is indeed. Now back to our trinitarian meta-anthropology, which is the real answer to the hippy quest. 

For our struggle is not just against the nihilists, Puritans, and techno-oligarchs of the left, but is part of "a vaster and more mysterious conflict in the unseen world," and for which there can be no conscientious objectors. Like Smokey, you may not care about this conflict, but it cares about you. The outcome is assured but this doesn't mean our battle is over.