You Can’t Lose A Generation You Never Had
I woke up today with this happy thought. Born in April 1945, I am a 8 months too old to be a Boomer. That means I enjoy the rare privilege of not belonging to some stereotyped identity created by sociologists and exploited by marketing geniuses to enslave the minds of anyone dumb enough to call himself a Boomer, Gen Xer, Millennial, etc. Don't Trust Anyone Under 78!
The 1950s--those halcyon years when American civilization surpassed all the accomplishments and glories of earlier civilizations--was the heyday of pop sociology and the dangerous and destructive pop psychology of advice columnists and headline writers. I dimly recall that people of the postwar generation--in which I mistakenly included myself--were skeptical of the eternal verities, prone to question their elders, seeking fulfillment, blah blah blah.
Not too long before he died, Dennis Hopper did a wonderful parody of a boomer walking down the beach--I believe it was for some retirement or medical scam--saying, "You've always been a rebel," etc etc, now get this product andkeep it up. Sure. That's what it always was, brand identity, buying and wearing the right clothes--whether your tribal totem was Brooks Brothers or stonewashed Levis and tie-dyed shirts, It is significant that dope-smoking acid-head hippies were the first generation brought up on TV, a drug whose neurological impact can only be measured today by the incredible increase in senile dementia.
Those were the boomers, and every so-called generation since then has become more dependent on PR/Marketing/Media?Hollywood. Small wonder that there was a rash of movies like Dark City and the Matrix, where the premise is that the world we live in is a manufactured illusion. Guess what: It is.
A FB friend advised me of an elaborate generational system drawn up by a pair of social theorists, who want to begin the Baby Boom in 1943. It is an interesting effort, rather like a manual of phrenology, but even if there were any merit in the analysis, it would not be relevant to my argument, since very few of their groups, even when they could find an older term for a label, were popular at the time of the generations they are applied to.
I never heard Greatest Generation till some newsreader--Tom Brokaw?-- wrote a lousy book. "The Lost Generation" was borrowed by Gertrude Stein from a gas station attendant who applied it to the French veterans of the First War. I never heard my parents talk about their generation as lost or anything else. People born in the 1940s may have been referred to as "war babies," but I never heard the term, and it would have meant nothing to me.
These days, on FB etc, all these kids do is talk endlessly about " my g-g-g-generation." The generational speculations of Strauss and Howe (published in the 1990s) is all too typical of that generation of social theorists who entertained the illiterate masses with "big ideas." It would be amusing to draw up a list of these ridiculous social hermaneutes starting with Thorstein Veblen and reaching a new low with Jordan Peterson.
Sociology began, as my old friend Bob Nisbet showed in The Sociological Tradition, in a philosophical attempt to understand the dissolution of society after the waves of Revolution and, possibly, to find a way back to sanity. By the time I was born it had degenerated into numerological voodoo on par with Freudian psychology and the bogus anthropology of Franz Boaz and his disciples.
As a thought experiment we might try to imagine Sophocles talking about the Periclean Generation or the Golden Age generation (he seems not to have liked Pericles very much!) or Octavian looking back to the Civil War generation. Of course every age has its challenges and marks its people, but the effects would vary from person to person, town to town. I do suspect that with the birth of sociology, what also entered the picture was nostalgia for the ancien regime--every knows what the cynical Talleyrand has said about it--but it was mostly a nostalgia for a world that had disappeared before they were conscious. I meet people who was nostalgic about the 1950s. I lived through the 50's, and believe me, they only look good in comparison with what has come since.
Addendum on an odious psycbologist
n a twisted reverse of Gresham’s law, bad books drive out good. Let us suppose that the average person between the age of 20 and 75 years spends five hours a week reading what he thinks are serious books–not genre novels but books from which he expects to learn something. That figure is probably much toohigh. A more realistic figure might be more like 1 hour. So in an average year, he might spend 50 to 250 hours on serious reading. Every hour he spends on pop psychology, pop history, pop social analysis is an hour he does not spend on, oh–at random, Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and St Thomas, Gibbon, Hume, Grote, and Shelby Foote, John’s Gospel, St Augustine, TS Eliot, CS Lewis…. Peterson is an uneducated and irrational popularizer whose stunts bring into disrepute any serious Christian thought. Friends are forever telling me to watch a movie, tv show, or documentary, because it is serious or I might learn something. In graduate school a fellow student waxed eloquent on the significance of “Hey Jude.” I told him that if I felt the need of religion, I should not turn to Paul McCartney. If Peterson wrote brilliantly, it would be a different story because then one might be entertained, but he doesn’t. A friend recently gave me a copy of a Christian magazine produced (for the most part) by English professors. They had nothing new to tell me and had not taken the trouble to learn how to write, Like Gilbert’s House of Peers who “throughout the war/ did nothing in particular” except they did not do it very well. What sort of a person would eat at McDonald’s when he could eat decent food?
I don’t mean to be harsh on people who have never known what it is to study or learn a real discipline. They may even intend to do some good to someone, but the worst villains in history have been ignorant do-gooders who thought they could make gods out of mortal creatures. The ancient gnostics and occultists, the French Jacobins, Lenin and Hitler. They probably all meant well.
To the argument that, “well, you can learn something from popularizers,” I answer: A friend of mine in graduate school told me that when she was a student at Smith, she made an observation in class. The witty Latin professor told, “True as milk, Miss R., and just as interesting.” Here is the mark of the imposter: They always cultivate celebrity. I sometimes recall the great cynic who was visited by Alexander the Great, as the cynic was sitting in the street. The king asked him if he could do something for him, and the cynic replied, “Quit blocking the sun.”
Peterson is praised for reminding us of basic truths, Fine. I believe I could make a list of about 1000 books, philosophy, poetry, fiction that have made this point far more effectively and with much greater impact. A few years ago, a somewhat dotty friend tried to get me to read and popularize Peterson. So I looked into him a bit and told her what I have been telling you all. Her answer was that he was a force for good today, even if he was neither brilliant nor especially gifted as a writer. I reminded her that a year earlier she had been pushing the author of “Three Cups a Day etc,” who turned out to be a grifter. Sure, I a Happy Meal can probably sustain life, if that is all there is and you haven’t eaten for several days, but it is not a sensible investment of time, money, and your digestive system, if you have a kitchen full of good food and an array of restaurants to choose from. Why settle for books and food and soft drinks that may not kill you, at least not at first.
At least the 50s did not have the novus ordo.
Yes, but it was the period in which the conspiracy was hatched. Roberto de Mattei has traced it back at least as far as to the papal curia of Pius XII.
Indeed. In my undergraduate days, my university, bless them, had neither a sociology or a psychology department. Sometime in the 70s or 80s I asked a Smith College philosopher why Smith had brought in a Black Studies department. Said she: “We let the sociologists in thirty years ago, and we haven’t had a leg to stand on since.” Anyway, having had what was virtually a Victorian upbringing, I grew up thoroughly inoculated against intellectual garbage, especially in my own branch of the humanities, e.g., Freudian criticism, New Criticism, New historicism, &c., all of them equally stupid. Unfortunately, the Victorian inheritance included all the varieties of liberalism, a disease against which a “conservative” background provided little protection.
Steve Chaplin, writer of villanelles, tried to post this comment but ran into difficulties:
It is difficult to wrap one’s head around the deterioration of humankind (why/how it is happening). James Corbett has posted an interesting piece called the “Media Matrix” which essentially traces much of it back to Gutenberg’s press. Each time mankind improves communication, elites/governments eventually co-opt the latest methods in order to enhance their power and, inevitably, “lead” people down unhealthy and even destructive paths. TV was just “catching on” in the 1950s.
As to Jordan Peterson, he is a lost soul. But IMO he gets it right in his (long ago) “12 Rules for Life” (stand up straight, clean up your room, etc., i.e., take charge of yourself, take personal responsibility; you do have the power). Sorry, but I did want to defend Jordan Peterson to this extent.
I’ll post the answer I have already given on Mr. Peterson, but for the moment I’ll just say this: My mother, my sister, all my elementary teachers, friends of my parents all said the same thing, but they did not have to write a book or pose as a scientist.
In a twisted reverse of Gresham’s law, bad books drive out good. Let us suppose that the average person between the age of 20 and 75 years spends five hours a week reading what he thinks are serious books–not genre novels but books from which he expects to learn something. That figure is probably much toohigh. A more realistic figure might be more like 1 hour. So in an average year, he might spend 50 to 250 hours on serious reading. Every hour he spends on pop psychology, pop history, pop social analysis is an hour he does not spend on, oh–at random, Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and St Thomas, Gibbon, Hume, Grote, and Shelby Foote, John’s Gospel, St Augustine, TS Eliot, CS Lewis…. Peterson is an uneducated and irrational popularizer whose stunts bring into disrepute any serious Christian thought. Friends are forever telling me to watch a movie, tv show, or documentary, because it is serious or I might learn something. In graduate school a fellow student waxed eloquent on the significance of “Hey Jude.” I told him that if I felt the need of religion, I should not turn to Paul McCartney. If Peterson wrote brilliantly, it would be a different story because then one might be entertained, but he doesn’t. A friend recently gave me a copy of a Christian magazine produced (for the most part) by English professors. They had nothing new to tell me and had not taken the trouble to learn how to write, Like Gilbert’s House of Peers who “throughout the war/ did nothing in particular” except they did not do it very well. What sort of a person would eat at McDonald’s when he could eat decent food?
I don’t mean to be harsh on people who have never known what it is to study or learn a real discipline. They may even intend to do some good to someone, but the worst villains in history have been ignorant do-gooders who thought they could make gods out of mortal creatures. The ancient gnostics and occultists, the French Jacobins, Lenin and Hitler. They probably all meant well.
To the argument that, “well, you can learn something from popularizers,” I answer: A friend of mine in graduate school told me that when she was a student at Smith, she made an observation in class. The witty Latin professor told, “True as milk, Miss R., and just as interesting.” Here is the mark of the imposter: They always cultivate celebrity. I sometimes recall the great cynic who was visited by Alexander the Great, as the cynic was sitting in the street. The king asked him if he could do something for him, and the cynic replied, “Quit blocking the sun.”
Peterson is praised for reminding us of basic truths, Fine. I believe I could make a list of about 1000 books, philosophy, poetry, fiction that have made this point far more effectively and with much greater impact. A few years ago, a somewhat dotty friend tried to get me to read and popularize Peterson. So I looked into him a bit and told her what I have been telling you all. Her answer was that he was a force for good today, even if he was neither brilliant nor especially gifted as a writer. I reminded her that a year earlier she had been pushing the author of “Three Cups a Day etc,” who turned out to be a grifter. Sure, I a Happy Meal can probably sustain life, if that is all there is and you haven’t eaten for several days, but it is not a sensible investment of time, money, and your digestive system, if you have a kitchen full of good food and an array of restaurants to choose from. Why settle for books and food and soft drinks that may not kill you, at least not at first.
For convenience, I am adding these somewhat random observations to the end of the original post.
Does anyone remember the Canadian wit McCluhan these days? “The medium is the message,” and all the rest of it? He’d be delighted to hear us agreeing to blame poor old Gutenberg for our troubles instead of the fact that, to quote Beckett’s tramp, “People are bloody ignorant apes.” By the way, to judge by the number of websites devoted to McCluhan quotations, quite a lot of people consider him the Rochfoucauld of our times.
War-baby Tom Fleming has touched on a few things that have irked me, although I know next to nothing about Jordan Peterson so I can’t yet add him to my list of things-that-irk-me. The phrase “the greatest generation” is on my list. Greater than the generation that settled Jamestown, Plymouth Plantations, and Boston Bay colony or greater than the generation that won the War for Independence or the several generations of pioneers who trekked westward in the 18th and 19 centuries or the generation that fought the Civil War or . . . . Also, on my list is dividing history into decades, although occasionally such a division does work, e.g. The Roaring Twenties. Everything today in popular jargon is by the decade as if we pass through some kind of portal into a new era with each new decade. Many here on Tom’s site grew up in “the 50s.” However, what we affectionately, with some serious reservations, call the 50s was not a decade but an era that began circa 1946 and continued right through the early 60s, fading and ending during 1964. The start and end dates can be argued but 1961, e.g., was much more like 1957 than 1967. When people say “the 60s,” they certainly don’t mean the early 1960s but rather the mid-late 1960s and early 1970s.
Right on, Roger! As I am sure you never said in the 1960s. The artificial division into decades and centuries is at the heart of this mental disease I have been trying to describe.
When I was trying to teach and write a bit about the period between the end of the Empire in the West (476) and the rise of Charlemagne, I asked people if they thought someone born about 445 woke up 31 years later and said, “Well, that’s that. We have entered the Dark Age!” My response to the big generalities is to look at particularities, for example, places like Ravenna, where some vestiges of ancient civilization remained almost to the time of Charlemagne, or to study early Pisa, where I hope to spend part of the coming Winter. Despite being located some miles of the sea, Pisa was near enough to the mouth of the Arno to become a great maritime power with connections to the more civilized East end of the Mediterranean. Despite all the big histories that concentrate on despotism and servility, the best I can figure out is that in some towns at least some bit of local control survived in church parishes and neighborhoods.
As the competition between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire heated up and produced the Guelf/Ghibelline factional fighting, some central Italian cities were able to find a space for liberty in between. For the Pisans, it was the open sea, where merchant admirals made agreements–a maritime social contract–that were in effect a government, while in Florence it was the major guilds.
My object in studying this period was to to learn something about how people manage to survive, preserve some of the things they love, and in the absence of functioning government learn to govern themselves. At some point I realized that Tuscany and Lombardia in the period between 500 and 1000 were a bit like the American frontier. Lumping everything together as a Dark Age or even a Middle Age distorts the understanding, especially when we come to grips with the Venetians.
Thank you gentlemen —-Pastor Gross and Messers. Fleming, Brownlow and McGrath. (Where is professor Clyde Wilson when we need him? ) It’s good and always delightful to read your comments but not the same as listening to your conversations.
An old professor I once knew, born in 1928, once said
“It is an error to think of the humanists as only re-discoverers. Their major discovery, or perhaps invention, was the fulfillment of a medieval scribe’s dream, made easy by moveable type: knowledge could be reduced to words and put in print.
The older notion of knowledge existing in the great dialogue of minds in articulation was greatly lost in their restless and acquisitive enthusiasm; …..libraries first came to be regarded, as they are now, the repositories of wisdom”
Listening to knowledgeable men converse about a subject they know is the real delight for a student and why teaching has traditionally been defined as a species of friendship. I have no idea how to describe what has replaced it today buts it’s something far, far below a species of friendship, or scholarship, or even sportsmanship. Probably something closer to extortion or the organized crime rackets. I never could fully understand why St Benedict so adamantly refused to enter the University of his time until it recently occurred to me that probably not one of you would be welcomed on a campus today.
I can’t really add anything of value to this discussion, but I’ll just say this: The silliness of dividing the past up into neat little chunks once led me to dream about making a movie in which Romans, after the “fall” of the empire, are told that antiquity is now over, so now they must get busy becoming medieval. Centurions become knights who are having trouble adjusting to the new armor, all the townspeople are learning to dress in medieval clothes and eat medieval food and how to die from the black death, etc. Some leaf-headed toga-clad senator begins to dress up as if he just stepped out of a deck of cards and declares himself king, and so on. Roman temples are torn down and replaced with high Gothic cathedrals as everyone converts to Christianity en mass and monasteries spring up everywhere, overnight. Just as they get used to all of this, suddenly it’s now the renaissance! Why not? It would be no more silly or a-historical than most of what passes for history today.
I’ve said before that someone should write a necessarily cursory history of the Roman empire which would begin with the founding of the city, (Troy, that is) and continue past the fall of Constantinople right up to the abdication for Franz I, and finally end with the fall of the last “successor states”, with the murder of Tsar Nicholas and the abdication of Wilhelm and Otto. Why not stretch continuity to the utmost limit?
As for generations defined by decades, that would make sense if all the women in the world gave birth during, say, a three or four month period once every ten years, all at the same time, and then didn’t give birth for another ten years.