a conservative counterculture could facilitate yoga growth

[Guest guest]

I share this essay to provoke thought on Yogi Bhajan's focus on the

arising Aquarian Age, and how as supposed " householder " yogis, we can

participate in society's growing innovation and consciousness.

 

Blessings,

Amar Atma

 

----------------

 

http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/print.aspx?article=31 & loc=b & type=cbbp

 

The Traditionalist Counterculture

Jesse Walker - 02/04/08

 

Review of Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative

Counterculture and Its Return to Roots (New York: Three Rivers Press,

2006), 288 pp. $13.95.

 

National Review didn't pay much attention to the Summer of Love as it

actually transpired in the middle months of 1967. The flagship journal

of the conservative movement ran a rather addled essay that August

comparing the flower children to the Adamites, an early Christian sect

that believed it had reclaimed the sinless innocence of the first man.

The magazine then stayed mostly mum until November, when an unsigned

article wrote off the hippies as a dying fad. " For many the affair

ended with the first cold wave, " the author declared. " For others, the

irredeemable ones, it goes on, a hazy romance of poverty and

degradation vainly seeking the lower depths of a society which permits

all. When the last hippie dies, he will have been loved to death. "

 

The world must need more love, because the last hippie has yet to die.

Forty years after that editorial appeared, we still have hippies and

we still have National Review. We also have Rod Dreher, the former

National Review writer best known for the cult hit Crunchy Cons. A

jeremiad against the materialism and consumerism of the modern Right,

Dreher's book is a manifesto for—to quote its original

subtitle— " Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners,

evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing

nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural

conservatives. " (Sorry, no Adamites.) In a series of profiles and

personal stories, Dreher describes a few of the places, from the Slow

Food movement to the revolt against modern architecture, where

cultural conservatism and countercultural rebellion can coalesce after

all.

 

It's not as though the original Summer of Love was devoid of

right-wingers. It's just that, at a time when the Right was usually

divided into " libertarian " and " traditionalist " tribes, it was the

libertarians who were prone to wear their hair long and don beads. You

didn't have to be a hippie to be a libertarian, of course, but if you

were a hippie, you were much more likely to be a lib than a trad. In A

Generation Divided, her 1999 study of the '60s Left and Right, the

sociologist Rebecca Klatch notes that in the conservative Young

Americans for Freedom, a " common joke " had it " that traditionalists

wore colorless ties, sat straight, and prayed while libertarians wore

necklaces and slurped their soup. " A few of the trads in Klatch's

study had some kind words for the dropouts—Alan MacKay, who would go

on to serve on the board of Howard Phillips's Conservative Caucus,

said he agreed with the hippies about the " hypocrisy in American

institutions " —but an overwhelming majority hated the love generation.

By contrast, when Ayn Rand tried to disassociate herself from the

libertarian movement, she derided them as " hippies of the right. " She

never said anything like that about Russell Kirk.

 

But it is Kirk, the traditionalist who once wrote that " the devil was

the original libertarian, " whom Dreher taps as " the pater-familias of

all crunchy cons. " The most interesting thing about Dreher's volume is

not that it combines conservatism with the counterculture. It's that

it combines traditionalism with the counterculture, marrying two

trends that seemed as they emerged in the postwar era to be opposites.

What's more, it does this in a way that makes sociological sense. His

crunchy cons might not be dropping acid or living in communes, but

those aren't the only legacies of the hippies. When Dreher writes that

" Small and Local and Old and Particular are to be preferred over Big

and Global and New and Abstract, " he could be quoting Kirk. He could

also be quoting the liner notes of a dusty Dylan LP.

 

Dreher didn't invent this social category. He put a label on something

that has been evolving for a while. American subcultures tend to bleed

into each other, influencing one another in unexpected ways, even if

they initially seem to be antagonists. And then, like other married

couples, they start to look alike: They can peer back at their

youthful selves and suddenly see resemblances that were invisible at

the time.

 

The hippies, like the conservatives, can be divided into libertarian

and traditionalist tendencies. The libertarians said things like

" follow your bliss, " " do your own thing, " and " we are as gods and

might as well get good at it. " At the same time, from the folk music

revival of the '50s and early '60s to the rural bohemia of the '70s—a

stronghold of homeschooling, homesteading, and other activities

celebrated in Dreher's book—there always was a strain in the

counterculture that wanted to preserve the past and restore lost

traditions. By 1970 or so, the paradigmatic hippies were not urban

runaways eating acid at a lightshow but a troupe of would-be farmers

heading to the countryside. On their soundtrack, instead of some

endless psychedelic jam, you could hear a series of country-rock songs

by Dylan, the Byrds, the Band. Granted, many of those farmers might

never manage to get anything to grow. But that was true of some of the

Right's traditionalists, too. Call them hi-fi agrarians.

 

Indeed, by 1975, in Up from Communism, the historian John Patrick

Diggins could casually cap off a discussion of the I'll Take My Stand

crowd by saying " it was not the Old Left but the young student New

Left, with its pastoral idyll of small self-sufficient communities

pursuing happiness through the joys of soil labor and craftsmanship,

that would raise again the questions of decentralization that had

occupied the Agrarians. Technology's children would find in rock music

and drugs what the older conservatives had claimed for

poetry—imagination, mystery, and the inviolability of consciousness

against the threat of science. " Diggins may use the phrase " New Left, "

but the picture he paints is more Whole Earth Catalog than SDS. Over

the next couple of decades, as the dilettantes moved back to the city

and the serious homesteaders learned to live off the soil, the people

in that picture would intermingle with the antimodernists of the

Right. Both found increasingly similar ways to reject industrial food,

industrial education, and industrial medicine. (I am reminded of a

conversation with a friend who was studying to be a midwife. Her study

group, she told me, included three Protestant fundamentalists, one

Catholic, one Orthodox Jew—and three pagans. They got along reasonably

well, at least until one of the goddess-worshippers casually mentioned

that she'd had three abortions.)

 

The libertarian and traditionalist wings of the hippie movement

engaged in a similar interplay. The Whole Earth Catalog, for example,

managed to reflect both sensibilities simultaneously, invoking the

archetypes of both the cowboy (mobile, individualistic, settling a new

frontier) and the Indian (rooted, communal, respectful of his

ancestors). The Catalog readers' revolt against the centralized,

bureaucratic segments of society was driven both by an individualist

interest in shaping their own fate and a desire to strengthen the

little platoons that rely on convention and cooperation rather than

compulsion. (Just to confuse matters further, the Stanford historian

Fred Turner makes a compelling case in 2006's From Counterculture to

Cyberculture that the Catalog and its ethos were heavily influenced by

the very technocratic Cold War institutions that both the libertarians

and the traditionalists were rebelling against.)

 

Dreher doesn't explore this history, but as he profiles his fellow

crunchies you can glimpse it in the background. In a chapter on

religion, an Eastern Orthodox crunchy con tells Dreher that " Orthodoxy

attracts a tremendous number of what you might call

`alternative-lifestyle' people. We see a lot of former hippies. "

Apparently, the same spiritual seeking that led young hipsters to

Westernized Buddhism, the Jesus Movement, or est sometimes brought

them to traditional faiths as well. Another figure in Dreher's book,

this one an Orthodox Jew, sums up the last path: " When you see that

the world as presented by pop culture can't add up to anything

worthwhile, the logical next step is to look into the wealth of a

religious or spiritual tradition. And you know what? It might as well

be a real one. "

 

Another recent book, the libertarian Brink Lindsey's The Age of

Abundance, suggests another connection between hippies and

conservatives. Both the counterculture and the evangelical movement,

Lindsey writes,

 

sought firsthand spiritual experience; both believed that such

experience could set them free and change their lives; both favored

emotional intensity over intellectual rigor; both saw their spiritual

lives as a refuge from a corrupt and corrupting world. That last

point, of course, was subject to radically different interpretations.

Aquarians rejected the world of the " establishment " because of its

supposedly suffocating restrictions, while the evangelicals condemned

its licentious, decadent anarchy. Even here, however, there was

similarity. Both the antinomians of the left and the dogmatists of the

right were united in their disaffection from the postwar liberal

consensus—and, by extension, from the older form of therapeutic

religiosity, the wan " faith in faith " that supported that consensus.

 

Lindsey turns Dreher on his head. The surge in spirituality, he

argues, was a product of mass affluence: Where Dreher sees materialism

crowding out religious commitment, Lindsey suggests that people whose

material needs are met are more likely to look for something deeper

and transcendent. Like Dreher, he sees a link between dynamic markets

and dynamic social change; unlike Dreher, he thinks their combined

effect is positive.

 

But if Lindsey and Dreher have opposing views, Lindsey's analysis

helps explain where Dreher's countercultural conservatives came from.

For Dreher, the culture Lindsey celebrates is too individualist, too

prone to overvalue choice and self-fulfillment. But crunchy

conservatism is obviously rooted in a set of choices. And whether

Dreher is arguing for disciplined religious orthodoxy or for fresh

local food, he keeps coming back to the idea that the crunchy path is

more fulfilling. (Interestingly, all but one of the people profiled in

his religion chapter are converts. So is Dreher himself.)

 

Indeed, there are places in Crunchy Cons where crunchiness starts to

look like a set of consumption choices for the bobos of the Right. At

other moments, it looks like a radical call to secede from mass

culture and build independent " monastic communities. " Now, as a

libertarian myself, I'm used to defending both market niches and

separatist subcultures. (I also keep expecting one to evolve into the

other, so that a couple generations from now the Trekkies all live on

self-sufficient windfarms while the Amish work office jobs and only

wear their aprons at Anabaptist conventions.) But to judge from his

comments in his book and elsewhere, Dreher isn't comfortable with

either fate, fearing cooptation on one hand, irrelevance on the other,

and in both cases a failure to engage the larger culture.

 

Yet engaging the larger culture means listening as well as speaking.

At a time when teenage drug abuse, crime, and out-of-wedlock births

have been trending downward for years, it's entirely possible that at

least some of the cultural regeneration Dreher wants is already taking

place, just not always in ways that are conventionally crunchy or

conservative. Even in small and rooted communities, tradition

constantly evolves, adapting itself to the present without losing its

connection to the past. That makes it powerful and resilient, but it

also means that any given convention could be contingent and

short-lived. If a little platoon is filled with gay men wearing

wedding rings, foul-mouthed hip hoppers, or suburbanites meeting in

ultramodern megachurches, it might not seem particularly crunchy or

conservative. But it doesn't lose its status as a little platoon, and

it might still have something to teach, and to learn from, the

crunchier, connier communities next door.

 

Every substantial social trend can expect a little cooptation, and

every radical critique can expect a little irrelevance. What allows

them to transform a culture is when unexpected allies start to absorb

them in unanticipated ways. Just ask the last hippie.

[Guest guest]

Thanks to Amar Atma for another thought-provoking post. While

noodling around the internet recently, I came across a short essay in

what struck me as an unlikely place - a conservative political

website. I offer the following column as a perfect example of this

last concept alluded to in Jesse Walker's piece:

 

" What allows[every substantial social trend and every radical

critique] to transform a culture is when unexpected allies start to

absorb them in unanticipated ways. "

 

The following was likely quite " unanticipated " by most readers of

Townhall.com:

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/JackieGingrichCushman/2008/03/02/take_a_break\

_and_meditate

 

 

Take a Break and Meditate

By Jackie Gingrich Cushman

Sunday, March 2, 2008

 

 

 

While hard work gets us ahead, there appear to be limits. It's often

the times of rest and recovery that provide us with the energy we need

to work hard. In today's ultra-connected worlds of Blackberrys,

iPhones, e-mail and Twitter (an internet service that allows people to

constantly text where they are and what they are doing to the universe

at large or a group of friends) – it is often hard to get even a few

moments to oneself.

 

The constant feeling of connectedness and activity might lead some

people to become anxious and stressed. Possibly it is the constancy

of the connectedness rather than the connectedness itself that is

making the difference.

 

A February 5 news release from the Feinberg School of Medicine at

Northwestern University in Chicago cited a study by Dante Chialvo,

Professor in the Department of Physiology, on a related topic: " People

with unrelenting pain don't only suffer from the nonstop sensation of

throbbing pain. They also have trouble sleeping, are often depressed,

anxious and even have difficulty making simple decisions. "

 

The study, Published in the Journal of Neuroscience on February 6,

indicates that in a " healthy " brain, there is a state of equilibrium

between the different regions in the brain, with regions quieting down

when others are active. However, for those in chronic pain, a front

region of the cortex mostly associated with emotion " never shuts up, "

according to Chialvo, the lead author of the study.

 

" The areas that are affected fail to deactivate when they should, "

Chialvo said. The fifteen people with chronic back pain in the study

had permanent activity in the front cortex of the brain, rather than

the equilibrium associated with " the resting state network of the

brain, " he said.

 

This constant state of being on the go could cause permanent changes

in the brain. Chialvo noted. " We know when neurons fire too much they

may change their connections with other neurons and or even die

because they can't sustain high activity for so long, " he explained.

 

Chialvo went on to note the impact that this permanent change in

wiring might have on a chronic patient's daily activity, saying it

" may make it harder for you to make a decision or be in a good mood to

get up in the morning. It could be that pain produces depression and

the other reported abnormalities because it disturbs the balance of

the brain as a whole. "

 

Chronic means never ending or always present. By definition, there is

no rest or reprieve – it goes on forever just like the Energizer

bunny. This study shows that ceaseless pain does not allow the

sufferer's brain to take a break.

 

While most of us, thankfully, are not in chronic pain, many of us are

chronically distracted. Might this too affect how our brains

function? Without the mini breaks that were once common in daily

life, our brains have become switched to a constant go provoked by

unending stimulus.

 

Indeed, we often go in several directions at once, multi-tasking in an

effort to get items off of our " to-do " lists and onto our " done "

lists. Seldom do you see people just driving, they are often also

talking on the phone and possibly even e-mailing as well – trying to

get it all done.

 

My experience with never-ending stimulus comes in the form of my two

children, whose constant chatter and verbal requests of " Mommy!

Mommy! " occasionally drives me to places I don't want to go –

especially while cooking dinner (or breakfast) or trying to get to an

after-school activity on time. Maybe the overloaded feeling in my

head is simply a response to too much noise.

 

There might be a simple way to combat this constant state of on –

turning off the mind. Though this may seem simple to accomplish, it

is not. The good news is that, according to " Train your Mind, Change

your Brain, " by Sharon Begley, (Ballantine Books, 2007) our brains

have the ability to not only grow based on mental training (i.e.,

thinking) but we can alter how our brains work and connect based on

mental training through meditation. This means that we can train our

brains and thereby affect our emotions.

 

According to Begley, mental training through meditation focusing on

love and compassion increases happiness and contentment. Rather than

reacting constantly to what happens to us based on our outer

environment, meditation literally rewires the brain, providing us with

the ability to more easily summon calming, happy thoughts and remain

in control.

 

Begley cites studies indicating the longer the training, the bigger

the impact. Signifying that, perhaps, our ability to be happy

reflects how often we have practiced having calm, happy thoughts. This

falls in line with the chronic pain study's findings. It makes sense

that, if chronic pain can impair brain operation, then chronic

meditation might have a profound healing influence.

 

After all, as Aristotle said, " Happiness depends on ourselves. " And

" we are what we repeatedly do. "

 

In meditation, a mantra is repeated. Maybe if I can repeatedly

meditate around " the reason I say your name so much is that I love

you, " wisdom imparted by my daughter Maggie, I can become a bit more

compassionate and loving, and even possibly learn to be patient around

dinnertime.

 

 

 

 

 

Kundalini-Yoga , " C. F. " <cfroh wrote:

>

> I share this essay to provoke thought on Yogi Bhajan's focus on the

> arising Aquarian Age, and how as supposed " householder " yogis, we can

> participate in society's growing innovation and consciousness.

>

> Blessings,

> Amar Atma

>

> ----------------

>

>

http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/print.aspx?article=31 & loc=b & type=cbbp

>

> The Traditionalist Counterculture

> Jesse Walker - 02/04/08

>

> Review of Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative

> Counterculture and Its Return to Roots (New York: Three Rivers Press,

> 2006), 288 pp. $13.95.

>

> National Review didn't pay much attention to the Summer of Love as it

> actually transpired in the middle months of 1967. The flagship journal

> of the conservative movement ran a rather addled essay that August

> comparing the flower children to the Adamites, an early Christian sect

> that believed it had reclaimed the sinless innocence of the first man.

> The magazine then stayed mostly mum until November, when an unsigned

> article wrote off the hippies as a dying fad. " For many the affair

> ended with the first cold wave, " the author declared. " For others, the

> irredeemable ones, it goes on, a hazy romance of poverty and

> degradation vainly seeking the lower depths of a society which permits

> all. When the last hippie dies, he will have been loved to death. "

>

> The world must need more love, because the last hippie has yet to die.

> Forty years after that editorial appeared, we still have hippies and

> we still have National Review. We also have Rod Dreher, the former

> National Review writer best known for the cult hit Crunchy Cons. A

> jeremiad against the materialism and consumerism of the modern Right,

> Dreher's book is a manifesto for—to quote its original

> subtitle— " Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners,

> evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing

> nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural

> conservatives. " (Sorry, no Adamites.) In a series of profiles and

> personal stories, Dreher describes a few of the places, from the Slow

> Food movement to the revolt against modern architecture, where

> cultural conservatism and countercultural rebellion can coalesce after

> all.

>

> It's not as though the original Summer of Love was devoid of

> right-wingers. It's just that, at a time when the Right was usually

> divided into " libertarian " and " traditionalist " tribes, it was the

> libertarians who were prone to wear their hair long and don beads. You

> didn't have to be a hippie to be a libertarian, of course, but if you

> were a hippie, you were much more likely to be a lib than a trad. In A

> Generation Divided, her 1999 study of the '60s Left and Right, the

> sociologist Rebecca Klatch notes that in the conservative Young

> Americans for Freedom, a " common joke " had it " that traditionalists

> wore colorless ties, sat straight, and prayed while libertarians wore

> necklaces and slurped their soup. " A few of the trads in Klatch's

> study had some kind words for the dropouts—Alan MacKay, who would go

> on to serve on the board of Howard Phillips's Conservative Caucus,

> said he agreed with the hippies about the " hypocrisy in American

> institutions " —but an overwhelming majority hated the love generation.

> By contrast, when Ayn Rand tried to disassociate herself from the

> libertarian movement, she derided them as " hippies of the right. " She

> never said anything like that about Russell Kirk.

>

> But it is Kirk, the traditionalist who once wrote that " the devil was

> the original libertarian, " whom Dreher taps as " the pater-familias of

> all crunchy cons. " The most interesting thing about Dreher's volume is

> not that it combines conservatism with the counterculture. It's that

> it combines traditionalism with the counterculture, marrying two

> trends that seemed as they emerged in the postwar era to be opposites.

> What's more, it does this in a way that makes sociological sense. His

> crunchy cons might not be dropping acid or living in communes, but

> those aren't the only legacies of the hippies. When Dreher writes that

> " Small and Local and Old and Particular are to be preferred over Big

> and Global and New and Abstract, " he could be quoting Kirk. He could

> also be quoting the liner notes of a dusty Dylan LP.

>

> Dreher didn't invent this social category. He put a label on something

> that has been evolving for a while. American subcultures tend to bleed

> into each other, influencing one another in unexpected ways, even if

> they initially seem to be antagonists. And then, like other married

> couples, they start to look alike: They can peer back at their

> youthful selves and suddenly see resemblances that were invisible at

> the time.

>

> The hippies, like the conservatives, can be divided into libertarian

> and traditionalist tendencies. The libertarians said things like

> " follow your bliss, " " do your own thing, " and " we are as gods and

> might as well get good at it. " At the same time, from the folk music

> revival of the '50s and early '60s to the rural bohemia of the '70s—a

> stronghold of homeschooling, homesteading, and other activities

> celebrated in Dreher's book—there always was a strain in the

> counterculture that wanted to preserve the past and restore lost

> traditions. By 1970 or so, the paradigmatic hippies were not urban

> runaways eating acid at a lightshow but a troupe of would-be farmers

> heading to the countryside. On their soundtrack, instead of some

> endless psychedelic jam, you could hear a series of country-rock songs

> by Dylan, the Byrds, the Band. Granted, many of those farmers might

> never manage to get anything to grow. But that was true of some of the

> Right's traditionalists, too. Call them hi-fi agrarians.

>

> Indeed, by 1975, in Up from Communism, the historian John Patrick

> Diggins could casually cap off a discussion of the I'll Take My Stand

> crowd by saying " it was not the Old Left but the young student New

> Left, with its pastoral idyll of small self-sufficient communities

> pursuing happiness through the joys of soil labor and craftsmanship,

> that would raise again the questions of decentralization that had

> occupied the Agrarians. Technology's children would find in rock music

> and drugs what the older conservatives had claimed for

> poetry—imagination, mystery, and the inviolability of consciousness

> against the threat of science. " Diggins may use the phrase " New Left, "

> but the picture he paints is more Whole Earth Catalog than SDS. Over

> the next couple of decades, as the dilettantes moved back to the city

> and the serious homesteaders learned to live off the soil, the people

> in that picture would intermingle with the antimodernists of the

> Right. Both found increasingly similar ways to reject industrial food,

> industrial education, and industrial medicine. (I am reminded of a

> conversation with a friend who was studying to be a midwife. Her study

> group, she told me, included three Protestant fundamentalists, one

> Catholic, one Orthodox Jew—and three pagans. They got along reasonably

> well, at least until one of the goddess-worshippers casually mentioned

> that she'd had three abortions.)

>

> The libertarian and traditionalist wings of the hippie movement

> engaged in a similar interplay. The Whole Earth Catalog, for example,

> managed to reflect both sensibilities simultaneously, invoking the

> archetypes of both the cowboy (mobile, individualistic, settling a new

> frontier) and the Indian (rooted, communal, respectful of his

> ancestors). The Catalog readers' revolt against the centralized,

> bureaucratic segments of society was driven both by an individualist

> interest in shaping their own fate and a desire to strengthen the

> little platoons that rely on convention and cooperation rather than

> compulsion. (Just to confuse matters further, the Stanford historian

> Fred Turner makes a compelling case in 2006's From Counterculture to

> Cyberculture that the Catalog and its ethos were heavily influenced by

> the very technocratic Cold War institutions that both the libertarians

> and the traditionalists were rebelling against.)

>

> Dreher doesn't explore this history, but as he profiles his fellow

> crunchies you can glimpse it in the background. In a chapter on

> religion, an Eastern Orthodox crunchy con tells Dreher that " Orthodoxy

> attracts a tremendous number of what you might call

> `alternative-lifestyle' people. We see a lot of former hippies. "

> Apparently, the same spiritual seeking that led young hipsters to

> Westernized Buddhism, the Jesus Movement, or est sometimes brought

> them to traditional faiths as well. Another figure in Dreher's book,

> this one an Orthodox Jew, sums up the last path: " When you see that

> the world as presented by pop culture can't add up to anything

> worthwhile, the logical next step is to look into the wealth of a

> religious or spiritual tradition. And you know what? It might as well

> be a real one. "

>

> Another recent book, the libertarian Brink Lindsey's The Age of

> Abundance, suggests another connection between hippies and

> conservatives. Both the counterculture and the evangelical movement,

> Lindsey writes,

>

> sought firsthand spiritual experience; both believed that such

> experience could set them free and change their lives; both favored

> emotional intensity over intellectual rigor; both saw their spiritual

> lives as a refuge from a corrupt and corrupting world. That last

> point, of course, was subject to radically different interpretations.

> Aquarians rejected the world of the " establishment " because of its

> supposedly suffocating restrictions, while the evangelicals condemned

> its licentious, decadent anarchy. Even here, however, there was

> similarity. Both the antinomians of the left and the dogmatists of the

> right were united in their disaffection from the postwar liberal

> consensus—and, by extension, from the older form of therapeutic

> religiosity, the wan " faith in faith " that supported that consensus.

>

> Lindsey turns Dreher on his head. The surge in spirituality, he

> argues, was a product of mass affluence: Where Dreher sees materialism

> crowding out religious commitment, Lindsey suggests that people whose

> material needs are met are more likely to look for something deeper

> and transcendent. Like Dreher, he sees a link between dynamic markets

> and dynamic social change; unlike Dreher, he thinks their combined

> effect is positive.

>

> But if Lindsey and Dreher have opposing views, Lindsey's analysis

> helps explain where Dreher's countercultural conservatives came from.

> For Dreher, the culture Lindsey celebrates is too individualist, too

> prone to overvalue choice and self-fulfillment. But crunchy

> conservatism is obviously rooted in a set of choices. And whether

> Dreher is arguing for disciplined religious orthodoxy or for fresh

> local food, he keeps coming back to the idea that the crunchy path is

> more fulfilling. (Interestingly, all but one of the people profiled in

> his religion chapter are converts. So is Dreher himself.)

>

> Indeed, there are places in Crunchy Cons where crunchiness starts to

> look like a set of consumption choices for the bobos of the Right. At

> other moments, it looks like a radical call to secede from mass

> culture and build independent " monastic communities. " Now, as a

> libertarian myself, I'm used to defending both market niches and

> separatist subcultures. (I also keep expecting one to evolve into the

> other, so that a couple generations from now the Trekkies all live on

> self-sufficient windfarms while the Amish work office jobs and only

> wear their aprons at Anabaptist conventions.) But to judge from his

> comments in his book and elsewhere, Dreher isn't comfortable with

> either fate, fearing cooptation on one hand, irrelevance on the other,

> and in both cases a failure to engage the larger culture.

>

> Yet engaging the larger culture means listening as well as speaking.

> At a time when teenage drug abuse, crime, and out-of-wedlock births

> have been trending downward for years, it's entirely possible that at

> least some of the cultural regeneration Dreher wants is already taking

> place, just not always in ways that are conventionally crunchy or

> conservative. Even in small and rooted communities, tradition

> constantly evolves, adapting itself to the present without losing its

> connection to the past. That makes it powerful and resilient, but it

> also means that any given convention could be contingent and

> short-lived. If a little platoon is filled with gay men wearing

> wedding rings, foul-mouthed hip hoppers, or suburbanites meeting in

> ultramodern megachurches, it might not seem particularly crunchy or

> conservative. But it doesn't lose its status as a little platoon, and

> it might still have something to teach, and to learn from, the

> crunchier, connier communities next door.

>

> Every substantial social trend can expect a little cooptation, and

> every radical critique can expect a little irrelevance. What allows

> them to transform a culture is when unexpected allies start to absorb

> them in unanticipated ways. Just ask the last hippie.

>