Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect
A rave party also features displays, like laser shows, that captivate the drugged-up participants. Some rave parties, the article said, resulted in accidental deaths.
I was mostly struck by the concluding paragraphs of the article. Rave’s guiding principle, the reporter explained, is PLUR: peace, love, unity, and respect. The reporter then quoted a young, gay Asian male named “Vat,” who said, “I don’t find much acceptance in this world…. This scene was the first time I felt like I could be who I am.” Vat, the reporter said, couldn't walk more than a few feet without getting bearhugged by strangers. She added: “And that’s really what rave is — an escape from the cliques and rigid social rules of school and work, a place where anything goes, and everyone fits in…. For many, this is where they find community, even family.”
I read the entire article without flinching. Until that. Loud music? No big deal. Childishness? Nauseating, but harmless. Ecstasy? Shrug. Deaths? Sad, but self-induced.
But peace and love? That was too much.
The Drinking Club
I’m a member of a club in my hometown. I pay $75.00 annually for my membership. It gets me in the door of the nicest bar in town, where I drink beer, eat pretzels, and watch sports on TV. The club performs a little philanthropy, but it exists and attracts members because of its bar.
With only a little exaggeration, it can be called a drinking club, though many club members strenuously oppose this label.
I think my club, and the reluctance of some members to admit it’s a drinking club, offers a small slice of the rave mentality. If you’re doing something wrong, you don’t want to admit it, so you do something right, too, like charity work. The “right” covers the “wrong.”
In my club, there’s only a little bit of wrong (and nothing that can’t be remedied by moderation), so there’s a corresponding bit of rightness (some charity work).
Shift to the rave. There’s a lot of decadence — lots of sexuality, serious drugs, excessiveness of every kind. Then there’s PLUR and bearhugs. Extreme decadence; extreme “virtue.”
The same thing happened in the 1960s: Sex and drugs and rock-n-roll. Peace and love. All rolled into one. The greater the decadence, the greater the emphasis on virtue, no matter how wrongheaded and absurd.
Truth, St. Paul said, is written in the heart. If you’re violating truth by embracing sin, you need to eliminate your nagging heart.
The Collapse
We seem to do this by tricking it. Warp it with drugs and excessiveness, but at the same time douse it with hugs and kindness. The more it’s warped, the bigger the doses of virtue must become in order to trick it into thinking that it’s really all right.
It reminds me of a little boy who puts his hands over his ears and chants “nah nah nah” so he can’t hear his sibling’s taunts. The louder the taunts, the louder he must chant and the harder he must press his hands to his ears. With a little decadence, a little exaggeration of virtue works fine. With extreme decadence, you need to say PLUR and hug gay strangers.
Raves, plagued with a number of deaths, appear to have diminished as quickly as they arose. The Sixties also collapsed suddenly, many commentators pointing to the assault-filled and murderous Altamont rock show as its culmination.
Such twistings of virtue and vice always collapse eventually. All vice is one: Selfishness. The same kids who take Ecstasy then give bearhugs are looking for self-gratification any way they can get it, in sex, drugs, family, love, wherever, whenever, from whomever. The self-obsessiveness at some point implodes, kind of like a love affair that is based on nothing more than mutual exploitation eventually breaks down into a nasty separation.
© Copyright 2004 Catholic Exchange
Eric Scheske is a freelance writer, a Contributing Editor of Godspy, and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine. You can view his work at a www.ericscheske.com .
