House of Eratosthenes

I have a tendency to view these things as trends, patterns, sets. Let’s see, in this one week there is: Ban the Stars ‘n Bars, make fun of Bristol Palin for being pregnant again, legitimize gay marriage, pretend “state run” is somehow ambiguous…To those, we can add: Persecute “climate change deniers,” since that’s always just sort of hanging around, doesn’t need any kind of actuating event…

That’s five things. Five policy positions that don’t actually make anything better, for the present or for the future, that famous or powerful people can take make themselves look cool, fresh & hip. By “don’t actually make anything better” I do not mean to say they are poorly-conceived ideas or that I disagree with them; the people who do agree with them don’t seem to honestly regard them as ways to make anything better. Only the gay-marriage and ObamaCare positions even bother to go through the motions of such a thing. But those don’t seem sincere. The global-warming people used to at least try to go through these motions. Their position seems lately to have deteriorated into something truly insane: It’s far too late, everyone should have listened to us, we’re all doomed, but let’s move all this money around anyway…in our final moments of existence or something.

I compare those to something like: We need to pass a tax on cigarettes to raise money for schools, versus, no that’s stupid because people will stop smoking and then you’ll be right on the news clamoring about a school funding crisis wanting to raise more taxes. There is an issue on [which] each of the two sides genuinely thinks it is advocating for something that will make things better. The pattern suggests rather strongly to me that, for one reason or another, too much concern about the long-term consequences of an idea, is something that has gone out of style. Supreme Court decisions used to arouse a lot of criticism from all sides over the “awful/horrible precedent” they were setting. Even a revolutionary zealot like Thomas Jefferson, would be motivated entirely by what sort of world he was leaving for future generations, by way of the [policy] changes he was pushing. Now it looks like that’s just an afterthought, if it’s anything at all. People in power want to look cool. Also, like high schoolers, they want to look cool by echoing old ideas brought up already by someone else. On the gay marriage thing, if anybody has a right to claim authorship of the Hot New Idea, it would be Joe Biden wouldn’t it? Obama didn’t have the stones to hit the stump and make this into some kind of “thing,” it was His VP who did that. Now, how come it’s up to me to recall that? The people who think this is some sort of great spiffy idea, don’t value this sort of “courage” very much. So I think of this as a peer-pressure kind of thing, like what I saw in middle and high school.

Theory: What is happening is that our baby-boomers have gotten wrinkly. The revolutionary-minded generation has reached the age where its members are expected to be society’s wise, respected elders, to run things, to become our latest voices of institutionalized knowledge. But they lack the capacity to institutionalize knowledge, to preserve wisdom from previous generations, “old school” horse sense that younger kids can’t bring because this is the sort of thing that has to be…what’s the word. Evolved. Irony is, although the boomers are big on the idea of evolution, they can’t bring this because they’ve never believed in it. They’ve dedicated their lives to the premise that wisdom comes from the young, and the older generation is just a bunch of doddering old geriatrics standing in the way of progress. Now that’s them, and they don’t know how to react to it. And so they react by proffering a bunch of silly ideas, forgetting to ask themselves obvious, elementary questions that drew frenzied, obsessive contemplation by the older generations of years gone by: How does this make things better? What’s the precedent? What does this do to freedom for those who are not yet born?

And so even when they say freedom is what motivates them, the idea they end up pushing has to do with more rules. It looks like they don’t even know what it is.

After I hit “Send” I had a thought: “Evolution” is still highly prized, as it was generations ago, what’s changed is the emphasis within that. From Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, or even before then, up until the 1960’s sometime it was: Listen to the old people, because they are keepers of the ideas that are kept. They bear the fruits of eons of painful trial & error, good ideas that are formed by way of process-of-elimination, ideas that we know are right but cannot be formed any other way. The stuff that had to be learned. If you value what is good about evolution, look to the old people because they’re the ones who have it.

Now we still value what is good about evolution, but it is the young people who have it. The only role the old people can play is to try to act like the young people; that, and show us how this “survival of the fittest” thing works, and that’s during their final exit. Clean out the gene pool by eradicating themselves from it. The young people have something of a perceived monopoly on knowledge, theirs is the only knowledge that is worth anything at all.

We’ve lost trust. It used to be, the old people would trust the young people, to renew & carry along the value system that civilization should endure and remain strong. The young people would trust the old people, to intermix a bit of valuable personal experience with the equally valuable legacy-wisdom, to do something besides just repeat mindlessly what they’d been told back when they were the same age. So there would have been this sense of intergenerational trust, going in both directions, and it’s no longer there. We’ve also lost respect. This would start with the obvious realization of “Hooray, I’m all grown-up now, but I’m not the first human being who ever reached adulthood — lots of other ideas have been tried, some of actually worked, and other people have had problems before I had any, so let’s see what came of all that.” That, too, is gone. The loud-crowd, today, always seems to think history began at nine o’clock this morning, and the only purpose for any previously-existing idea is to be dismantled. So some hot new “Beverly Hills 90210” generation can show how cool it is, and of course they do that by carrying out this dismantling.

A civilization that values its older people will always have to value life. Even if it somehow doesn’t want to do this, it will have no other choice once it makes the decision to honor and respect old people, because we’re all headed in that direction. Conversely, a civilization that reserves all of its respect for the young, will have to place a premium value on death, because that’s the only way anybody is going to stay that way for very long. And of course if nothing is valuable besides whatever is cool, and nothing is cool besides what is new, that makes for an awful lot of wreckage and destruction that’s going to have to be done. And it’s going to have to be done by everyone who wants to matter, and all of the time.

I read somewhere that the Sixties manifesto was first articulated in a late-50s movie, a not-very-good motorcycle picture called The Wild One. A chick asks Marlon Brando, “What are you rebelling against?” He replies: “What have you got?”

That’s the postmodern world in a phrase. Sixties kids, Boomers, Our Betters, whatever you want to call them… they have no identity of their own. They have to be against stuff. Now, back when the world was young and made sense, we called this phase “youth” and it was just that — a phase. We all used to realize that becoming a stodgy old fuddy-duddy was part of the circle of life, so that the next generation of teenage nihilists could safely rebel against us (before voluntarily becoming old fuddy-duddies themselves, world without end amen).

I used to think that simple biology took care of a lot of this. One of the reasons I can’t be a liberal anymore, frankly, is: That shit’s exhausting. I don’t have time to chase trends, to make sure I’m eating the right vegan food and drinking the right bottled water (BPA free!) and chasing skirts at open mic poetry slams. I’ve got a fucking job, man.

Alas, modern medicine and the “social safety net” has allowed too many people to continue fucking off like teenagers well into their fifties and sixties (that awful picture of John Kerry windsurfing comes to mind). Why respect your elders, when they’re just slower, duller, balder, fatter, more wrinkled versions of yourself?
- Severian | 06/27/2015 @ 07:17
My experience with my 24 year old stepson is that he comes up with delusional ideas. And he totally discounts real experience that we have.

We wanted to replace a mobile on our property. The bureaucrats have jacked us around before and this was no exception. The city told us that we had to keep the same footprint, 20 ft wide. And the law says you can’t put in a trailer less than 24 ft wide. Stepson’s solution was to tell the city we are seceding. He was serious. I sometimes run into young people with some sense, but they tend to be the kids with some mechanical skills. I think this was caused by all those movies and tv shows that show young people with the answers and old folks as clueless.
- teripittman | 06/28/2015 @ 08:46
Huh. That’s… that’s actually really brilliant!

It also explains something else noticeable on the internet: feelz before realz!

After all, what do the elders have in abundance but the youth lack? Knowledge, wisdom, experience. What is something which the youth do have as much as their elders? (indeed it could be argued they have more of) Feelings, emotions.

Thus feelings become what is valued in the society because it is that way the youth can be “just as good as” the elders and contribute just as much to the national conversation.

It explains everything!
- Nate Winchester | 06/29/2015 @ 06:17
[…] of us, as we’ve gotten older, are a tad less sharp and a good deal more Shar […]
- dustbury.com » A costume they dare not shed | 07/01/2015 @ 11:45

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