Theology That Bites Back
‘They identify consumerism with conformity. As a result, they fail to notice that it is rebellion, not conformity, that has for decades been the driving force of the marketplace . . . what if countercultural rebellion, rather than being a consequence of intensified consumerism, were actually a contributing factor?”
Nation of Rebels, p. 99
“In fact, the critique of mass society has been one of the most powerful forces driving consumerism for the past forty years”
Nation of Rebels, p. 98.
“How many times can the masses be shocked out of their conformist stupor before we begin to wonder whether they were ever in a conformist stupor to start with?”
Nation of Rebels, p. 95
“One way of articulating the central idea of the counterculture is simply to say that it collapsed the distinction between deviance and dissent (or, more accurately, that it began treating all deviance as dissent).”
Nation of Rebels, p. 80
“For example, during the 60’s, many of the social norms that governed relationships between the sexes came under sustained criticism. Traditional male ‘gallantry’ involved showing a somewhat exaggerated concern for the health and well-being of women: opening doors for them, offering them one’s coat during inclement weather, paying for their meals, and so forth. Feminism argued that these norms, far from helping women, served only to reinforce the conviction that they were helpless and unable to care for themselves . . . Men took the criticism of the older male obligations as a license to do whatever they wanted. This gave rise to the widely noted epidemic of boorishness (or, as the English like to say, ‘yobbishness’) in the male population. Rather than finding alternative ways of expressing concern and respect for women, a lot of men have simply stopped paying any attention to the needs of women at all. For these men, equality means ‘I look after myself, she looks after herself’”
Nation of Rebels, p. 80
“We must distinguish, in other words, because dissent and deviance. Dissent is like civil disobedience. It occurs when people are willing in principles to play by the rules but have a genuine, good-faith objection to the specific content of the prevailing set of rules. They disobey despite the consequences that these actions may incur. Deviance, on the other hand, occurs when people disobey the rules for self-interested reasons”
Nation of Rebels, pp. 79-80
“They were romantic individualists who valued self-reliance and were possessed of a grand contempt for mass society. As Thoreau, who is best known for spending two years ‘roughing it’ in a cabin on Walden Pond (his mother actually brought him regular meals and did his washing), famously wrote, ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’”
Nation of Rebels, p. 69
“The idea of a counterculture is ultimately based on a mistake. At best, countercultural rebellion: a set of dramatic gestures that are devoid of any progressive political or economic consequences and that detract from the urgent task of building a more just society. In other words, it is rebellion that provides entertainment for the rebels, and nothing much else”
Nation of Rebels, p. 65
“The idea that marijuana liberates the mind is something that only someone who is stoned could believe.”
Nation of Rebels, p. 61
“With this theory of co-optation in place, the counterculture itself becomes a ‘total ideology,’ a completely closed system of thought immune to falsification, in which every apparent exception simply confirms the rule. For generations now, countercultural rebels have been pumping out ‘subversive’ music, ‘subversive’ art, ‘subversive’ literature, ‘subversive’ clothing, while universities have been packed full of professors disseminating ‘subversive’ ideas to their students. So much subversion, and yet the system seems to tolerate it quite well. Does this suggest that the system is perhaps not so repressive after all? ‘On the contrary,’ says the countercultural rebel. ‘It shows that the system is even more repressive than we thought—look at how skillfully it co-opts all of this subversion!’ Back in 1965, Herbert Marcuse coined a term to describe this peculiar sort of repression. He called it ‘repressive tolerance.’ It’s an idea that makes about as much sense now as it did then”
Nation of Rebels, p. 35
