A new book has come out about the rock and roll scene in the Sixties.  It's about the groupies, the women who made themselves known, in every way, to the rock stars of that pivotal era in contemporary music.  While many of us may wonder why these women would ever have been willing to engage with musicians in such fashion, we should also recognize that what they did is nothing new.  Women swooned over Ludwig van Beethoven, and women fell hopelessly for Franz Liszt.  Throughout the many ages that men have been making music, any number of women have chosen to give themselves sexually to them, usually with very few boundaries or restrictions.  Indeed, judging from a backstage situation which I witnessed prior to a Rod Stewart concert in Berkeley many decades ago, it's not only people who have been born as women who contribute; it was a group of transgender men who led the rush when Rod emerged from his limousine and walked into the nightclub to perform.
     Although some women have criticized these women for their activities, the groupies insist that they are just doing "what I want to do."  In this, they express one of the most sacrosanct ideals of the West:  individualism.  Although individualism emerged, oddly enough, as a by-product of the Reformation's focus on the one-on-one relationship which every human can enjoy with God, it has taken on vastly different forms since then.  Using the groupies as an example, many of us like to point to the Sixties as being responsible for creating individualism's most perverted historical expressions.  Not so.  Again, rampant individualism is nothing new.  What is new, however, is that today we in the West subscribe to it in the shadows of postmodernity, the idea that truth is no longer absolute and is, at best, relative to the individual human being.  While this is in part true, it ignores its logical outcome:  how do we ever determine what is really true?  The short answer is that we can't.  Ironically, however, all of us earnestly want for some things to be always right.  None of us can live without placing our trust in the unchanging physical laws of the universe, and none of us can live without believing that the world is a good place.  We cannot do without absolutes of truth.
     Though we may wish to wonder about the groupies's motivations, we perhaps should look more carefully at ourselves.  Unless we step beyond unbridled individualism, we have no better response to postmodernity's assertion of the meaninglessness of the universe than they do.  
     As Yeats said long ago, "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction,while the worst are full of passionate intensity . . . "
     There will be nowhere for us to go.