Third Great Awakening, First Published

¶ … Third Great Awakening," first published in 1976 is both hilarious and thought provoking. The author expresses concern over the trend of individualism exhibited by American youth and suggested rather cheekily that the Third awakening in the country was instigated by the various drug-related or drug-like cults of the 1960s and 1970s. He is one of the few to discredit the so-called awakenings as nothing but destructive movements.

The main crux of his argument is against the pattern of individualism that could be witnessed in American in 1960s and 1970s that gave birth to various cults and also proved rather dangerous to the core values of this country. I agree with Wolfe completely because from what we know of the 60s and 70s, we can safely conclude that it was a rough era for the value system of Americans. People opted to become hippies, drug use was rampant and all this was being done in the name of freedom and individualism. Sad as it may sound, the Me Decade was indeed a dangerous decade in the history of America.

Today, Me Decade and Me generation are terms that are used very widely and this attests to the popularity of Wolfe's ideas expressed in this essay. In this highly astute article Wolfe not only expressed his worries but also tried to study this dangerous trend in the light of Alexis de Tocqueville commentary on American culture that came out in the early part of the nineteenth century.

Interesting while individualism may have been relatively new terms or trends for Wolfe and is contemporaries, the same trend was noticed by Tocqueville (1835/1969) in 1830s when he did not even have the right word to identify the behavior and mindset that he had noticed in America. According to him individualism was "a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself." In his highly acclaimed book, American democracy, Tocqueville identified what he felt was an isolated lifestyle in America. He found that more and more people in the U.S. were not wealthy but still had enough to "look after their own needs." They "owe no man anything and hardly expect anything from anybody." They "form the habit of thinking of themselves in isolation and imagine that their whole destiny is in their hands. Unfortunately, such a way of life not only makes "each man forget his ancestors, it hides his descendants from him, and divides him from his contemporaries; it continually turns him back on himself alone, and threatens, at last, to enclose him entirely in the solitude of his own heart" (p. 506).

Wolfe used Tocqueville's ideas to further strengthen his own views on dangerous trends developed under the guise of individualism or that sprang up because of this desire to look out for "me" and me alone. This is why he did not believe in the awakenings and made a mockery of the so-called awakenings that he feels were simply destructive in nature. But while he still wants to give some credit to these awakening because they were religious in nature, he completely disregards the third awakening and offers a hilarious true comment on the so called awakening in the Me Decade:

We are now -- in the Me Decade -- 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 "psi phenomena" and Flying Saucerites as well as charismatic Christians. But other than that, what will historians say about it?" (p. 17)

Wolfe was certain historians could not possibly find anything positive to say about this trend. He cited some studies that had described the first two awakenings in positive terms but became even more certain that the third awakening is nothing but a seriously damaging movement.

The description of third awakening given by the author is seriously though provoking as well. It mockingly refers to the birth of a new quasi-religious worship of the self in the Me Decade of the 1960s that parallels in intensity Jonathan Edwards's era in the 1740s and what historians call the Second Great Awakening of religious enthusiasm in many sectors of American life from about 1825 to 1850.

Wolfe hilariously explains how the third awakening broke out. He feels that this was the result of focusing enormous energy on "the most fascinating subject on earth: Me.... Just imagine... my life becoming a drama with universal significance... analyzed, like Hamlet's, for what it signifies for the rest of mankind." He argues that this movement was not only vulgar egoism but actually sprang from the need to be somebody. Wolfe writes: "[Tocqueville's idea of the modern individual] lost 'in the solitude of his own heart' has been brought forward into our time in such terminology as alienation (Marx), anomie (Durkheim), the mass man (Ortega y Gasset), and the lonely crowd (Riesman). The picture is always of a creature uprooted by industrialism, packed together in cities with people he doesn't know, helpless against massive economic and political shifts -- in short, a creature like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, a helpless, bewildered, and dispirited slave of the machinery."

This "victim of modern times," as Wolfe calls it had always been "a most appealing figure to intellectuals, artists, and architects." However there came a time when these victims "started getting money in the 1940s, they did an astonishing thing -- they took their money and ran! They did something only aristocrats (and intellectuals and artists) were supposed to do -- they discovered and started doting on Me! They've created the greatest age of individualism in American history!" (p. 18).