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...
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