home | opinion index

COMMENTARY: METHODOLOGY

Glenn Beck, courtesy of Wikimedia

September 12, 2010

Glenn Beck is getting a lot of attention these days while presenting himself as having insights into history. On September 10 on Bill O'Reilly's The Factor at Fox News, Beck said,

I believe we may be in the third great awakening of this country. The first was right before the Revolution and the second freed the slaves. There are periods where people wake up.

Mr. Beck's claim leaves me wondering regarding events before the American Revolution. Rather than a great awakening, the American Revolution came into being with people goaded to action by conflict that spanned decades. And the ideas involved were part of a cultural heritage that spanned a greater length of time. I'm waiting for Beck to explain his position with a little more detail.

Beck's Second Awakening -- the freeing of slaves, in the United States alone, I presume -- also needs explaining. What was this sudden revelation of such power that towered over the events and ideas that were prevalent in the first half of the 1800s?

Beck's Third Awakening, he suggests, is now upon us. Is it embodied in the Tea Party movement? Mr. Beck describes it as a national transformation. That's big enough to merit support in explanation from sociologists, political scientists and pollsters.

Other "Great Awakenings" have occurred in America: one was in the early 1800s and apparently not good enough because there was another between 1890 and 1910. And look where they got us.

In my view, a Great Awakening will have arrived when people discard junk history and are better able to recognize farce.