Reactiveness

That last post - ending as it did  on the likelihood of conservative and even fundamentalist Reactives - started me thinking about how their (our) spiritual lives are affected by the Awakening. Strauss & Howe (Prophets themselves) compare the Reactive response to showing up at the beach on the 5th of July: The fun is over, everyone who was involved is trying to recover, the place is a mess, with garbage both ugly and unsafe scattered around. When “Generations” was published in the early 1990s, that view was similar enough to mine and those around me. 

While growing up, though, kids my age couldn’t help but be influenced by culture and cultural icons that we didn’t yet see through that same cynical lens. I listened to the Beatles, tried to perceive what the Doors had to say, heard Hotel California over and over. If it wasn’t for Led Zeppelin, would Tolkien have been so ubiquitous? Every Heinlein book was promoted as “By the Author of Stranger in a Strange Land” so I was eventually going to end up reading that and being as affected by it as the average flower child. The Starfleet Medical Reference Manual  includes a whole section on psionics and chiropractics, implying - actually, I think it outright SAYS - that the galaxy would be a better place if more people did yoga. There were books on Zen in my (Roman Catholic) high school library, people reading about near-death experiences and studying Jung like he was the most significant head-shrinker out there. (Yeah, fine, so Jung is psychology and not nearly as pseudo-scientific as the rest - his work still seemed to have a strong affinity for Awakening-era mysticism and spirituality. And it may have been in part because of The Police...)

Which is to say, we didn’t - we couldn’t - reject everything about the Awakening, at least not while we were in the middle of it. We had to work our way through it like everyone else. Eventually, though, we started to realize that not everything was as deep as it had seemed. Chiropractors are unlikely to be standard personnel on 23rd century spacecraft. Reading “The Lord of the Rings” doesn’t clarify the lyrics of “Misty Mountain Hop” (or “Stairway to Heaven,” for that matter.) Jim Morrison’s lyrics could be brilliant, or might simply be the end result of too much acid. Your next-elders in the generational cycle will quite naturally end up being the source of your music and media, at least until your generation matures enough to create their own. Coincidentally, the early 1990s was about when exactly that began: There were Reactive writers like Douglas Coupland and Bret Easton Ellis; Jane’s Addiction, Guns and Roses, Nirvana on the music side; Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Jon Favreau a few years later.  That’s when it became easier - more natural and obvious - to mock the excesses of the Consciousness Revolution.