It was Marx who argued that, rather than man shaping economic realities, it was the economic realities that shape man. Despite his manifold and manifest follies, he had something of a point here. Wouldn’t hard times give rise to strong willed and stiff backed men? Wouldn’t economic blessing tempt us to softness? Might this be why Agur cries out in Proverbs 30 “Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, ‘Who is the Lord? Or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God” (verses 8-9).
The greatest generation, who made so many sacrifices during World War II, was raised in the Great Depression. And the post-war prosperity of the next generation would give rise to whining hippies.
The nature of colonization and westward expansion in our early history would naturally create, or attract, a peculiar mindset. Those content to collect a paycheck pushing papers or stamping out widgets need not apply. American individualism didn’t arrive out of the American experience de nova. Rather it sprang from the hard scrabble of the frontier and the prairie. It was forged in the cold of tundra winters. Uncharted territory never opens wide before the effete, but challenges the hearts of men.
That economic reality in turn shaped the artistic reality, America as a nation of lone wolves. James Fennimore Cooper brought us the Leatherstocking Tales, a collection of novels about a frontier hero. Natty Bumpo was Daniel Boone before Daniel Boone. He lived off the land, did right by his neighbors, but aspired mostly to be left alone. Mark Twain continued the same pattern as Huck Finn’s adventures begin as he heads west to make his mark. That Holden Caufield inhabits the city and spends his sophomoric days there whining doesn’t change that he too is the lone wolf, alone, with no body to catch the body falling through the rye.
Of course, truth be told, we have by now virtually run out of frontiers. In turn we aren’t exactly overrun with opportunities for vision quest, for soul-shaping heroism. But that doesn’t mean we have run out of rebels. Marlon Brando at one point virtually owned the franchise. Stanley Kowalski, of the torn t-shirt, may have been torn between two women in A Streetcar Named Desire, but he was yet a man on his own. He defied convention, in the pursuit of all that his heart longed for.
In The Wild Ones Brando played the leader of a motorcycle gang. They blow into a small town, and while at a bar Brando’s character is asked, “Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” With his trademark sneer Brando replies, “Whaddya got?” James Dean would later be but a pale imitation.
The pattern is only now beginning to fade, but for all the wrong reasons. The modern world is regimented, a well-oiled machine. Naturally the hero longs to escape such a prison, to rebel not against nothing, but against everything. But in the postmodern world, the only answer we can give Johnny is, “Nothing.” The only prison the would-be rebel must escape is the inescapable reality that there are no prisons. There are no laws to break in a lawless culture, no taboos to transcend when the only taboo is to hold onto taboos.
Now all we have left is the aching desire to be seen, to get on camera. We no longer are a nation of rebels, but a nation of exhibitionists and voyeurs, whether we appear on TikTok or some hot-for-the-moment reality TV show.
In the Matrix movies, Neo, the new man, had to discover that he wasn’t in a postmodern world, but still just a cog in a machine, so that he could in turn set himself, and others free. He had to discover that there actually was a reality before he could break free of it. And once free, they would be right back where we’re starting from.
Which is why we must be careful. How easy it is to feed ourselves on these images from the world, as an inspiration to rebel against the world around us. We’re rebels with a cause. Sadly we are more excited about being rebels than about the cause. We are Jesus Freaks more interested in being freaks than in Jesus. How worldly we are when we boldly, like any hero from Bumpo to Neo, stand against the world’s tide, so that we can be heroes.
When we do such we are not only not swimming upstream, but are being tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine. When we boldly bring forth a new paradigm, or boldly fight for the old paradigm, I’m afraid we too often are looking at ourselves in the mirror to see how bold we look.
To be counter-cultural it isn’t enough to fight the culture with the culture’s tools. We must instead fight the culture as Jesus would have us do. We are called, though one can hardly expect to receive garlands and have folk songs written about those who do such, to live in peace and quietness with all men, as much as is possible. To be counter-cultural is to stop worrying about how we look, and to start worrying about how we obey. Our hero must be He who obeyed His Father, even to death on the cross.