A Theology for Hipsters (Part 3): What’s Hip? Defining Hipsters

See Parts 1 and 2

It was probably one of the weirdest conversations to be had in our local Brew Pub…ever. There I sat on a Saturday night enjoying a nice summer wheat beer and chatting with my two pals about the plausibility of Calvinism and theistic evolution. Most likely an a-typical conversation for our area and our pub. After a few beers and some shared laughs I decided I needed to call it a night, after all I had to preach in the morning and it was getting late. Where I was preaching was itself fairly a-typical for Southern Ohio. The small community I drove an hour to reach was very rural, and yet the church I was serving was full of young men and women covered in tattoos and piercings. There was no dress code (I preached in a t-shirt and jeans), and we met in an old granite shop. The folks there love the gospel, but also enjoy their fair share of cultural artifacts (the guys are known to talk UFC for the half hour prior to church as they gather around the coffee pot). Being a-typical, culturally relevant, and Christian is one thing, but does all of this together make someone a Christian hipster? The “guidelines” and “parameters” aren’t always so clear and for everyone who analyzes the subject there seems to be a different set of determiners. A short, brief survey of the history of “hip” might help us, however, to gain some more concrete definition of what exactly a “hipster” is.

Defining “Cool”

It is quite probably impossible to definitively identify the point of origin for “cool.” Brett McCracken says its roots start with the emergence of individualism and the downfall of the feudal system in Western Europe, and particularly with the influence of the 18^th Century Enlightenment. Perhaps he’s right. Certainly with the breakdown of the feudal system it became the goal of the common populace to be independent, free, self-reliant, all key features of “cool”. With the launch of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy of man, most notably his work The Social Contract[1], the French Revolution was instigated. Through these so-called bourgeois revolutions, which happened all over Europe, cool was born. Cool became anything, then, that ran contrary to the aristocracy of the day. So McCracken writes:

The history of hip is the history of an ever-changing, always symbiotic relationship between rich and poor, high and low, convention and rebellion. Whatever the well-bred aristocrat elevates as fashionable or desirable, the lowly hipster sets out to deny, deconstruct, and destroy. And – especially in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – whatever the hipster elevates as fashionable or desirable, the upper class tends to co-opt and appropriate for themselves.[2]

This puts the concept of cool, however, as very young. Yet, even if we grant that individuality is central to the concept, as McCracken does, then we have to acknowledge that Plato was pushing cool centuries before the French Revolution. I am not sure McCracken gives enough credit to the concept and the history of cool.

It appears to me that cool is a concept much harder to define and yet as old as civilization itself. Art History professor Robert Farris Thompson suggests that cool can be traced all the way back to the 15^th century among West African civilizations.[3] Among the Gola people of Liberia during this time he says cool was defined as “mentally calm or detached, in an other-worldly fashion, from one’s circumstances, to be nonchalant in situations where emotionalism or eagerness would be natural and expected.”[4] Nick Southgate has dated cool back to Aristotle, particularly in his work Nicomachean Ethics.[5] It seems then that cool has been around for most of, if not all of, the existence of human civilization. In fact if cool is about individuality then Adam and Eve were attempting it from the dawn of civilization!

This history of the ever present “cool” makes sense when we consider that the cool is, itself, “mutable.” Cool has as many definitions, understandings, and appearances as there are cultures and subcultures, regions and peoples. Cool changes from one place to the next and from one period to the next. What was cool yesterday is not cool today (for example I don’t know any American dudes still sporting the powdered wig look). Cool as a concept is, then, hard to define. If after all there were rules that determined what was “cool” it would itself no longer be cool. It is a bit self-refuting to define cool. But there are a few concepts that have attached themselves to the word in nearly every culture and especially here in the 20^th and 21^stcentury west. A look at those concepts will be helpful in analyzing our so-called “hipsters.”