We're all architects and victims of our age. Credit: David Paul Morris/Getty Images
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The literature of the future, Lytton Strachey wrote to Virginia Woolf in 1912, “Will be amazing. At last it’ll tell the truth and be indecent, and amusing, and romantic.” At last! Stachey prophecised, and his words must find a place on the list of great comical predictions. While countless wonderful books have been published since 1912, who matched Dostoevsky, or Tolstoy, or Conrad? But Strachey was a puerile man who mistook the indecent for the profound.
Puerile as he was, he was witty and audacious. Eminent Victorians, his most famous book, might have been unfair to its subjects but it was entertaining and original, and tore through staid post-Edwardian propriety. Bertrand Russell, who was in prison for his pacifist activities when he read the book, wrote to a friend that he had been laughing so merrily that a warden had had to remind him that prisons were places of punishment. Strachey’s portrayal of the Victorians as being rather foolish and hypocritical helped young Britons to believe in progress more than tradition, and not to be bound by reverence for the past. As World War One thinned their ranks, the older people who had got them into such a mess seemed especially deserving of criticism.
Boomers, the debut book of the brilliant American critic and commentator Helen Andrews, takes a similar form to Eminent Victorians. Notable representatives of the titular generation, including Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin and Camille Paglia, are dissected. Like the Victorians, boomers steered the West through a time of great technological and societal change, taking in the Space Race and the internet age, as well as rock n’ roll and the sexual revolution. The history of their time, as Strachey wrote of the Victorians, could “fill innumerable volumes.” By examining certain “characteristic specimens”, however, Andrews can illuminate important tendencies.
An editor gave Andrews the idea for the book, she writes, because, “You’re like Strachey. You’re an essayist, and you’re mean.” I don’t know if “mean” is the right word but Andrews has certainly displayed lemony wit, from her early years writing at “The Cigarette Smoking Blog” to her erudite and iconoclastic essays for journals like First Things and the American Conservative, where she is now editor. You can never guess what Andrews is going to write about — it might be the suffragettes, or Zimbabwe, or the films of Paul Schrader — but you bet that it will be challenging and entertaining. No one is better placed to fuse insights with insults.
Whereas Strachey insisted that he wrote “without ulterior intentions” — in much the same style that a liar will loudly preface a mistruth with “to be honest” — Andrews is openly critical. Unlike Strachey’s subjects, her targets are less than sacred (Jobs was, perhaps, but his reputation has taken a bit of a posthumous beating). Millennials, never mind Generation Z, have not been raised to respect their elders. “Boomers” are a running joke, the target of a million irreverential memes. What Andrews hopes to accomplish, though, is not just to puncture inflated reputations but to explain where people went wrong, and how to avoid making similar mistakes.
What Andrews finds most pitiful about her subjects is the hubris of their attempts to reshape the world. In a tightly argued, cheerfully one-sided opening chapter, she suggests that their liberatory enthusiasm birthed a world of savage economic insecurity, chronic fatherlessness, pill-popping, depression and porn. Rather than being freer, Andrews maintains, many of us are inhibited by poor education, addicted to screens and immiserated by a lack of ownership. Would anybody want to argue that there is not a significant amount of truth to this?
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Subscribe“Even Left-wing activists moved to the suburbs, Andrews writes, so their children “would no longer have their liberal opinions beaten out of them.”
Totally disagree. Left wingers move to the suburbs for the same reason non left wingers do – decent public schools and low crime, no garbage and graffiti all over the place, no panhandlers. You generally won’t find rioters in suburbs, and people really like not having rioters around them. It’s better and safer for their kids. All the New Yorkers who have moved out of the city have discovered a much better quality of life with no one urinating outside their apartment, no one stopping their cars and attempting to drag them out of them, no aggressive panhandlers accosting them. What’s not to like? Left wing activists tend not to like the lifestyle their policies and ideas lead to. They are absolutely fine with people who don’t have the resources to move to the suburbs having to live with progressive policy choices but they don’t want to live with it themselves.
But that is exactly what the writer is saying in the line you disagree with. That particular line stood out for me – it states the obvious but does so with a nice brutality.
Interestingly, one of Biden’s plans – blocked for the moment by an act of Trump legislation – was to move the poor and delinquent from the inner cities into the Democrat-voting suburbs. Perhaps Biden will get around to this and we’ll see how all those virtue-signalling Dems like it when they suddenly have to live side by side with those they affect to care about.
Biden ,Like Soros,Gates & other ‘Globalists” may kick the bouQuet before his term is UPIt will be karma if Trump’s cheap energy is shown Greenwash ,Harris,Pelosi hike Energy prices…
In general though the well off now prefer to live in inner city type areas, suitably gentrified. Which often means moving out their current residents to the less cool, and also less serviced, suburbs.
…Annette, getting opinions “beaten out of them” is not something done by the teachers in a school setting ! Its what happens in the playground !
Yes-“browbeating’ is what takes place in classrooms…I am reminded of a line in a TV drama that I always liked: “…they talk like hippies, but act like the Sicilian mob”.
I think Annette is basically well-intentioned, but ended up blocking her because of her insistence on continually getting hold of the wrong end of the stick.
Both. But at least it’s organic and authentic on the playground. The teacher part is unutterably sinister. On the surface, at least in the US, it happens more to the children of conservative homes. But the sprogs of Liberals are the more deceived, because the “orthodoxy” of the teachers unions is the orthodoxy of a protection racket. Ideology does not really drive, just serves as a tool for getting money and power.
Left wingers move to the suburbs for the same reason non left wingers do – decent public schools and low crime, no garbage and graffiti all over the place, no panhandlers.
Who runs these cities that left wingers are escaping? These people are running away from the consequences of their own votes but lack the self-awareness to realize it.
You know what they say about the left and hypocrisy don’t you? “Masters in the art”. Or whatever the equivalent of masters is these days.
‘Who runs these cities that left wingers are escaping?’ Generally speaking, the rich, just like most other political jurisdictions in the US. The present exodus of the better-off has to do with COVID-19 and maybe a residuum of 9/11, and has little to do with government policies and programs. It requires quite a bit of wherewithal to go live nicely in the burbs, and the kind of job you can practice on your computer because you have the right background and connections. It’s true you can have a yard and grass with gnomes on the lawn, but you’re in a cultural wasteland, much of it built by and for a deracinated working class. You become a citizen of the mall and the industrial park.
Incidentally the suburbs and exurbs are full of homeless people, but the people moving to them haven’t found that out yet. They’re not your grandfather’s suburbs any more.
So-called “white flight” started occurring long before Covid-19, well before 9/11 even. (And why would an attack on the Twin Towers make people flee to the suburbs anyway?) Crime, particularly by blacks, has long been a real drawback to life in a great many inner cities. And there are many different types of suburbs; they’re not all just “the mall and the industrial park”, nor are they all priced out of range for most people. They could scarcely be the dominant population in most metro areas if they were all so tony.
If the suburbs are cultural wastelands, then the majority of the US and most other countries are as well, because suburbanites outnumber big city people by themselves, never mind many more who live in towns, smaller cities, and rural areas. But just what culture is available to those in big cities that isn’t to others? Even if you say operas and stage plays, you can always drive into the city for that, assuming it’s safe. And if it’s dangerous, well, how advantageous is it for urban dwellers?
In New York, where I live, White Flight was a thing of a past age, the mid-20th century; White people fled the Blacks coming up from the rural areas of the South, having been driven off the land by changes in agriculture there. That’s really a couple of generations back. Beginning around 1980, the children of the White Flighters started coming back to the city and gentrifying things in their Land’s End garb. Curiously, not long after that, in the 1990s, crime rates began to decline. White people stopped being afraid of Black people and started kicking them out of their slums (except for the minority who wisely bought their housing when they had the opportunity. You should see Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant now.
I am not sure why so many people panicked about 9/11, but at the time I worked near the World Trade Center and Battery Park City, the surrounding neighborhood, was full of moving trucks for several months.
“Incidentally the suburbs and exurbs are full of homeless people”
Name a few of these suburbs. Btw, the reason they are full of homeless people is 1) it’s not permitted, 2) who would they panhandle and 3) you can’t use the bathroom in public in the suburbs.
I drove out to Farmingdale, on Long Island, a few years ago and came across a group of people in a disused parking lot sort of place who obviously had all their belongings in the sort of vehicle provided by supermarkets. I asked someone around there about it and he agreed that there was a large and growing population of their kind. Instead of panhandling, they tend to scavenge. The homeless have time on their hands and thus can find not only edibles but places to excrete without being bothered much. Periodically the police run them out of one area, and they turn up in another. The local politics of the places I visit out there preclude the establishment of a lot of homeless shelters, and we have not yet reached the point of simply killing them or putting them in camps, so — there they are.
Long Island isn’t really a suburb.
Farmingdale has homeless shelters all you have to do is google.
Yes, precisely. And then they sometimes try to institute the same failed policies in their new location.
Not sometimes, always. I watched it happen twice; once from Massachusetts to New Hampshire in the 1970s and again from California to Oregon and Colorado in the 1990s.
I can’t go always. But I would be willing to say mostly. California’s just beat back an effort to approve racial preferences again.
“Even Left-wing activists moved to the suburbs, Andrews writes, so their children “would no longer have their liberal opinions beaten out of them.”
Annette – you wrote…
“Totally disagree. Left wingers move to the suburbs for the same reason non left wingers do – decent public schools and low crime, no garbage and graffiti all over the place, no panhandlers. You generally won’t find rioters in suburbs, and people really like not having rioters around them. It’s better and safer for their kids.”
…but that confuses me. The argument you make surely supports the authors’ contention?
I agree, though, with your statement that “Left wing activists tend not to like the lifestyle their policies and ideas lead to.” The contemporary left have developed Marie Antoinette cluelessness and hypocrisy almost to an artform (though if it was an art form, it might have redeeming value). Such as the frothy-mouthed Labour Party socialists who have never held jobs but send with their kids to the very schools they argue should not exist. Who blather on about democracy until the voters ‘get it wrong’ and vote the wrong way.
“Even Left-wing activists moved to the suburbs, Andrews writes, so their children “would no longer have their liberal opinions beaten out of them.”
Annette – you wrote…
“Totally disagree. Left wingers move to the suburbs for the same reason non left wingers do – decent public schools and low crime, no garbage and graffiti all over the place, no panhandlers. You generally won’t find rioters in suburbs, and people really like not having rioters around them. It’s better and safer for their kids.”
…but that confuses me. The argument you make surely supports the authors’ contention?
I agree, though, with your statement that “Left wing activists tend not to like the lifestyle their policies and ideas lead to.” The contemporary left have developed Marie Antoinette cluelessness and hypocrisy almost to an artform (though if it was an art form, it might have redeeming value). Such as the frothy-mouthed Labour Party socialists who have never held jobs but send with their kids to the very schools they argue should not exist. Who blather on about democracy until the voters ‘get it wrong’ and vote the wrong way.
Same thing Democrats Moving out of Liberal Blm States &cities ie New York (800,000) and San Francisco,Portland (Oregon) etc..to a certain extent Same in London,UK SARS2 shows how much people value Gardens&green space..
“Left wing activists tend not to like the lifestyle their policies and ideas lead to.”
That’s called lack of foresight, emotion over reason, and unintended consequences. The road to hell is still paved with good intentions.
It’s also called being okay if others have to bear the consequences of your policy choices as long as you don’t have to.
The Road to Hell is indeed paved with good intentions and the most dangerous force was and is, the combination of power with good intentions. No good deed goes unpunished is another maxim.
History is littered with the carnage wrought by those who meant well, wanted to save and change the world, and thought they knew best.
Certainly some urban emigrants get the moral resolve and one-way physical strength to flee as the result of an epiphany along the lines of “I can’t take this crap anymore”, but there is another reason why so many relocate: the continuous, innate need to touch nature.
For many, even a typical housing suburb with its repetitious pattern of lawns and one per-parking strip tree can seem like Eden. For others, moving to the newest development that promises “country living” (even though their current expansive view will soon be a vista of the next construction phase) conjures visions of hiking on untrammeled land and breathing in lungfulls of clean air like olfactory dessert.
In sum: some are motivated by hatred, more are beckoned by love.
Yes Annette, I think that is the point Ben Sixsmith was actually making….
Well, no it actually wasn’t. In fact, he said nothing at all about quality of life improvements outside the city.
If you want to fault the Boomers for something, fault them for failing to instill some sense of responsibility and accountability in their kids. It wasn’t Millennials who invented the participation trophy; it was their parents. It wasn’t the young who grew up in a cocoon designed to protect their feelz and guard against any skinned knees; it was their parents.
As a result, we have a host of angry young people who have less to be genuinely angry about than any generation in American history. And it’s not every parent but it’s enough of them, and many of these same Boomers made up the teaching corps and professoriat that inculcated a mindset that is a bit toxic.
You nailed it.
As a Boomer, I agree. Many of my brethren took the nonsense and excesses of the 60’s seriously and brought that into their professions, to the misfortune of all. The biggest loss was that personal responsibility is no longer in fashion; we have become rudderless ‘victims.’
That is a very good point. Although it should be noted that a 20-year-old today is probably more likely to be the grandchild than the child of a Boomer, I guess it was the Boomers who brought in the whole “child-centered” mode of parenting, and the later generations of parents have continued to embrace this, regardless of whatever else they criticise in their elders.
On the other hand – the fact that most young people are grandchildren not children of the generation who were young adults in the Sixties and Seventies definitely helps to deepen ignorance and myths about those decades. For example, the idea that they were a consumerist idyll (the Sixties felt consumerist and rich after the post-war austerity of the Fifties – but modern young people transported back in time would be utterly horrified by the lack of creature comforts and amenities, and the degree of poverty…).
The fanciful marxist flirtations of the anti capitalist protest hippies with their failed communes and Imagine anthem seemed a trendy fashionable blip that faded and a return to more conservative values occurred returned.As they grew up and graduated, they filled the public govt unionized sectors, public education and the mass media and found those once youthful marxist yearnings echoed and concentrated in their sectors, it coalesced into the marriage of irrational neurotic self hating virtue signaling liberal guilt and the obsolete discredited Marxism of the old Soviet tyranny , into the malicious intolerant anti western civilisation and racially scapegoating progressive movement of today, substituting the class struggle revoloution with race.
It is bizzare that such a movement grew in the free democracies of the west and that so many would act with such malice towards their fellow citizens, but the promoters of the blatantly racist Critical Race Theory are verifiably guilty of everything they falsely accuse dissenters of to systemically silence and persecute them.Their unscrupulous forced political indocrination of children, students and workers in the hypocritical race dogma is the act of totalitarian tyrannies.
Humanity has every right and reason to liberate themselves from the truthless deluded corrosive left progressive tyranny ,and the focus should now be on how to effectively do that.
I must agree about the phenomenon of “Britpoppers”. Reared on the wit and wisdom of Steve Coogan they harbour the most bitter resentment toward boomers who they imagine grew up in a post WW2 world of comfort and ease (I wish!) and selfishly failed to hand that lifestyle on to the next generation.
Brimming with loathing and incapable of grasping how fatuous his career has been,
Coogan himself is the ideal example of what you speak. The likes of Walliams and Lucas occupy a similar space in the canon – how gratifying it was when they were ultimately hoisted by their own petard.
I always find it sad when comedians I like turn woke. Rowan Atkinson hasn’t succumbed yet thankfully.
Rowan Atkinson,has Dangers to ‘Free speech,’on youtube an Excellent statement oft ignored by MSM..like Gervais he is too wealthy to cancel!!
Steve Coogan despite paying his ”Workers”less than minimum wage ;is One of few Modern Comedians which make me laugh,Ricky Gervais the other..nish Kumar &his ”Live at the Apollo” Woke mates are terribly ‘Unfunny”..,
Humour has an unfortunate disarming effect. People are all too willing to take a favourable view of someone who can make them laugh. Nish Kumar doesn’t have the gift of comedy. His act fosters self-congratulation rather than mirth in his audience.
I also love Steve Coogan’s work, but is that true about paying less than the minimum wage?
I know he ‘reportedly’ took advantage of the furlough scheme, but hadn’t heard about the minimum wage thang.
Jealousy always was a bitter pill to swallow
A few privileged icons do not represent an entire generation. This article (and, presumably, the book) ignores the fact that most “boomers” came of age in the 70’s, when the economic downturn was just beginning, when the corporations that were run by older generations began outsourcing and downsizing, and when wages began stagnating. In other words, there were a significant percentage of the boomer generation who started out without access to good paying jobs, and this includes those who graduated college. (I know many boomers with college degrees who spent their working lives as clerks, cab drivers and bartenders.) It also ignores the fact that roughly half of all boomers currently have no financial holdings, or that just 20% of boomers controls 80% of the wealth acquired by members of that generation. A look at who makes up that 20% will tell you that most of them were born into affluent families; i.e., that their parents and grandparents were among those who controlled most of the wealth acquired by previous generations.
It’s past time to stop these divisions by age, race and gender. They only serve to keep us fighting among ourselves while distracting us from the crimes of those who rule us.
Of course “boomers” are to blame for the moral and social chaos of our society because the “hubris of their attempt to change the world” started the rot.
Nothing is perfect,but those of us who were children in the 50s had many advantages over earlier and later generations. We lived in peace and growing prosperity and most important of all we were part of a society which enjoyed a strong moral framework and the security and love which comes from having a father and mother committed to each other in marriage.
But like the prodigal son in Luke’s Gospel we became bored and wanted our “freedom”. So came the 60s and the demolition of the moral and social fabric of society which, aided and abetted by subsequent generations,has indeed “birthed a world of savage economic insecurity, chronic fatherlessness, pill-popping, depression and porn”, and much else.
Our society needs to learn that true freedom comes from living life within a social and moral framework which everyone accepts. One of the most telling phrases in this excellent article relates to the need for moral renewal. “What is the point of generational analysis?
Of course,not to indict each man and woman born in a specific period. Most people who complain about boomers love their grandparents after all. Instead it is to isolate styles of thinking and behaving – and where necessary to reject them”. That’s getting very close to what the Bible calls repentance.
As you advance it to your 30s which means you have been an adult for almost 12 years so it’s your fault as well!
Welcome to the blame game every generation blaming the ones before without understanding that the people in charge are the same class and the same people for ever.
It’s not a generational thing it’s a class and power thing.
Either way, it seems to be a “them and us” thing, where it is sometimes necessary to invent groupings of people to blame as long as one ensures that one does not belong in such a grouping oneself.
The people in charge are the people in charge is merely a tautology. To say they’re the same class and the same people is quite obviously untrue. Besides, nobody is really in charge; what any ruling party can do is actually extremely limited. This was obvious to Canute 10 centuries ago, but Hegel was never more right than when he talked about what men have learned from history.
Whether you divide people by income, education, ethnicity, gender or sexuality, it’s all identity politics. We need to get back to judging people on their individual attributes and behaviour rather than what social group they happen to belong to.
Of all the social groupings that exist, ‘class’ is probably the dumbest. You can’t even define it with any precision and the socialists of old proved with the lives of hundreds of millions that it doesn’t work.
Maybe you cannot define Class, But it is very easy to know it when you see it. Class is one real fact in humans, they stratify in classes, and crossing from one to another can only be done as a child, and more usually, in two generations.
How can you measure something if you can’t define it? The idea that you can divide all of humanity into two classes (Proletariat and Bourgeoisie) is ridiculous. We’ve moved on a bit since then, but not before we killed and impoverished several generations in large parts of the world.
Thank god our ancestors in the West were smart enough to fight socialism with every ounce of their existence. History proved them right.
Easy to measure something you cannot define, they know how much dark matter exists, although the dark matter its self is unknown. First there are a lot more classes than your Binary choices. But lets begin with the ‘Under Class’ hard to define maybe, but we all know them when we see them or ‘Little Britain’ would not make sense. Easy enough to measure, look for welfare uptake, family prison usage, anti-social history, and lack of marriage/two parent homes, poverty, when all are in conjunction you have underclass.
Blue Collar, or Working Class…. well one could soon write up a list of things……
‘I know it when I see it’
You need to read some basic material on the scientific method and ‘objective versus subjective evidence’ if you think that is a credible response to lack of evidence.
There are almost an infinite number of classes and the all interact with one another. That was my point.
If the best evidence you have for Marxism is ‘Little Britain’, you really are proving my point for me.
“Every generation blaming the ones before”. Although, as a member of the despised Boomer generation, I never thought of blaming the previous generation for any of the problems we experienced. Arrogance and hatred is a mark of the current younger generation. I do blame my generation for being more liberal in bringing up our children and as a college lecturer teaching years 16+ I saw that they had absolutely no powers of self criticism. I attributed this to their being told, from birth by their parents, that everything they did, said or produced was wonderful and amazing.
I see no point in blaming a generation. We are witnessing something much bigger – the end of “Empire”, or the domination of European civilisation. We have abandoned our gods, turned our backs on our history, lost our self confidence, our courage, our strength. Now we huddle in a stew of self criticism and recriminations, like bunch of needy babies. We squabble amongst ourselves about who is “to blame”, while China takes over the world. It is already far too late to do anything about it. We have sold out our institutions and our companies for the modern equivalent of a few beads and feathers, ie piles of our rapidly devaluing currencies. We are destroyed by our fear of an illness they exported, albeit probably accidentally. We even pay them for the PPE equipment we need to keep that illness supposedly at bay. I am glad I was a Boomer. I was lucky. I got the best of the post war world and I will be dead before what we have left implodes. But I’m not going to say sorry for that lucky accident of fate.
Don’t despair, the United States Navy will soon blow China to oblivion, as there is no other option.
The ‘butchers bill’ will be high, but there will be plenty of eco benefits to compensate for dramatic reduction in the world’s population.
Vae Victis!
The Chinese won’t give them an excuse. They’ll wait and wait and wait until the US carrier groups are rusting in port like the Soviet fleets that preceeded them them.
Perhaps, although I wasn’t thinking of the somewhat obsolete Carrier Force but rather of the Ohio class subs.
Historically the Chinese seem to have ricocheted from one blunder to the next. I can see no reason for them to change now.
The late President Nixon shortly before his death speculated that the West’s indulgence of China had created a ‘Frankenstein’.
It’s about time we all woke up to this ominous fact.
As, you know who said, “if you wish for Peace prepare for War”.
The Chinese have been waiting since the 14th and 15th centuries. A few more years won’t hurt them.
The Chinese themselves have always eventually succumbed to the lure of too much conquered culture, its luxuries, its exoticism, its cachet of foreignness (Chinese characters are a great clue to this, beginning with the ideograph for China)…they absorb too much and become slack and unfocused…”Dry January” comes along, and the cycle repeats. Their cycles are not precisely the same as Western Civ (Toynbee etc) and the best times are when both on the upswing. “It’s a great life — if you don’t weaken!”
“Adventuring economists like Jeffrey Sachs, for example, believed that they could teach foreign governments how to run their countries without actually having to subordinate them. Andrews argues, however, that such meddling was not less but more hubristic and presumptuous about the world than that of honest old-fashioned imperialists.”
Ironically, Sachs is almost espousing Salisbury’s “right of the strongest mind” pacific imperialism. A Victorian idea as much as a “boomer” one.
Yes, it’s good to see someone highlighting the disasters this man visited upon the world, notably the application of his economic ‘shock therapy’ in Russia. And still, shameless and rich he sits in various prominent positions and appears in leading publications.
What has replaced ‘the right of the strongest mind’ in today’s Liberal dogma when explaining differing outcomes in the world, and espically China’s amazingly fast Imperialism taking Africa and much of South America and SE Asia?
Interesting question. I would venture to guess that nothing has, that it’s still the Social Darwinist “right of the strongest mind(s)” . (In other words, “meritocracy rules” in their thinking.) But I seriously doubt that they have either the honesty or the courage to actually admit to it.
Rivalry between generations is a Western indulgence where people have too much time and too little real purpose and meaning.
Every generation rides on the back of those who came before. It is both pointless and tedious to blame past generations when what they were is a part of what we are and what we are plays a part in what we do with what they were and what future we participate in forming.
Life is not neatly divided into generations anymore than it is linear. All is cyclical and while the next generation may wish to be different to their parents, what is inevitable is that will continue and so there are swings and roundabouts where children will in turn want to be different to their parents and perhaps swing back to some of their grandparents’ values.
We circle the essence of being human and the realities of our lives, flavour us, form us and limit or free us. The children of those who made their way through Depression and World Wars reflected those experiences. The children of those who grew up expecting nuclear annhilation reflect those experiences, whether they know it or not. The children of those who are growing up with the belief that the planet is doomed, will in turn, reflect those experiences. Balance and counter-balance is the name of the survival game, whether physical, mental, spiritual.
Each new generation is brewed in the ‘soup’ of the last and the folly of blaming those who have gone before is that by necessity we must blame ourselves as well and that is foolish.
We learn when we grow up that our parents did their best, regardless of the mess they may have made. That applies to generations and the seamless connection through all of us and every generation may well be ‘written’ in cellular memory in ways we do not understand.
The Past was once a Future and then a Present, with many forces at work which were neither the fault nor the result of the actions of those who lived it. We need to remember that.
After a little thought something occurs to me. You cannot blame certain generations for the way things are now and the selfishness of people today.
In the 70s having a baby changed from an ‘accident’, which occurred when men and women got together – to a ‘decision’ to have a baby. All of a sudden people thought of the immense responsibility of bringing a baby into the world. Before then a baby was very much thought of as a mouth to feed whilst life went on as normal. Suddenly a baby became precious, something to protect and keep away from all danger.
So, going forward, babies and children will continue to be brought up as the most important things in the world and, therefore, taught to think of themselves before others.
It also needs to be remembered that Andrews has written about the United States. This reflects an American experience of the Boomer generation and that experience is not universal to the world.
The American experience is particular to the US and may have little or no relevance to Boomers in other countries and cultures.
Americans may like to think they represent and reflect the world but they do not. Indeed, there is much about the US which remains particular to the US and which other developed nations have opted not to mimic.
The book is however, no doubt interesting for Americans or those interested in the culture of the United States.
Anger at the ‘Boomers’ is an instinctive feeling of disgust and envy at a generation who spent morally what their ancestors had saved for so long. And they cashed it in for material wealth. A one way, one time transaction unfortunately. As their progeny have discovered. But I suppose you’ve got to honestly ask yourself whether you would have done any different…
And yes it’s true. Once one has become free of morality, they simply become a slave to human nature.
Reductive & simplistic and deeply misconceived.
In 1971 Lewis Powell, at the time chairman of the US Camber of Commerce, and a little later Supreme Court Justice, published his memo, “A Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy”. Shortly thereafter David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger gave birth to the Tri-Lateral Commission, the grandaddy of today’s elite global capitalist cabal; and Jimmy Carter appointed them to the strategic heights of his cabinet. This is the matrix of today’s world of Wealth & Power, none of which consisted of boomers, …was in fact the self-consciously and deliberately the antithesis of the spirit of the ’60’s. The counterrevolution won. We were utterly routed. Blame us for being defeated by the forces of Capitalism (of which there is a vast literature); but, it’s absurd to hold us responsible for what ensued from the victors.
You appear to have a point on one side of the argument, which is that the forces of financialization and banksterism have been allowed to run riot since the 1970s. As has been said countless time, this is not capitalism in any real or useful sense. But with this has arisen a parallel and equally destructive move towards a big state, SJW grievance culture. People such as yourself might argue that this is, at least in part, a response to the dominance of finance, and you might have a point, especially after the way Obama so brutally crushed the Occupy movement.
It seems to me that the dominance of finance is an almost inevitable consequence of traditional capitalism. In traditional capitalism, a better-off owning and managing class dominates and exploits a working class, but in finance capitalism, a yet better-off class arises that dominates and exploits the traditional capitalist class, Unlike the traditional capitalists, who actually produced things, finance capitalists are almost purely parasitical, with predictable consequences of decay and destruction. I don’t think this has much to do with the Boomers, however, unless you want to say that the Thatcherism/Reaganism they turned to as they grew older — the ‘Revolt against the Poor’ — facilitated the rise of finance capitalism.
Again, Boomers, in the specialized sense that is the object of Helen Andrews opprobrium, never went to Reagan or Clinton; but, Ralph Nader, Jerry Brown, Julie Stein.
I’m using the term demographically — people born between the end of World War 2 and about 1965. Otherwise it seems more or less meaningless, a kind of canvas on which people project their culture-war fables. I guess I’m just not a fan of generationism — it seems a lot like astrology.
Ok, but what, besides chronology, distinguishes them meaningfully?
I can’t think what SJW stands for ?
Anyway, it’s Capitalism in toto, not just Financial, industrial, as well as Fascistic (state godfathered), Bill Gates as much as Warren Buffet. And the Fascistic part in the person of charter member Trilateralist Zbig Brzezinski securing markets and resources (South Asia and East Europe) militarily, after Kissinger opened China and the pacific rim. That’s the framework that was put in place and Carter was the camel’s nose (I voted for Barry Commoner). At the same time in the ’60’s Bernie was radicalized at the Univ of Chicago, and Donald Trump at …? Point being, the system godfathered Trump style boomers and consistently marginalized Bernie style. And the Trump genealogy contains nothing of the “’60’s” in the “Kum ba Ya” sense that is the subject of this article.
Social Justice Warrior.
We Boomers were the largest voting constituency in the US until the last of the Millennials turned 18. We have to take some of the blame, don’t we? And “the spirit of the ’60’s” was scarcely indulged in by all of the Boomers – indeed, members of the (misnamed) Silent Generation were probably more in the forefront of it than we were. (The Berkeley Free Speech Movement occurred in the late spring of 1964, when the oldest of the Boomers – barring the occasional child prodigy – were wrapping up their high school careers.) I’m not sure that even the Woodstock Festival a few years later was populated mainly by us. And face it, we did vote largely for Ronald Reagan, when an earlier election that included few if any of us handily defeated Barry Goldwater, who had a very similar platform (programme) to Reagan’s. We’re not all helpless dupes, just fallible humans who can make mistakes.
“While countless wonderful books have been published since 1912, who matched … Tolstoy, … ?”
Vasily Grossman.
PG Wodehouse, who was reverently, also ironically, called ‘The Master’ by some writers of his day. He did write a beautiful sentence, and had all human behavior in the scope of his limited characters and settings.
I couldn’t agree more. It’s just that Grossman’s Life and Fate is very obviously modelled on War and Peace, but bears comparison as to its quality.
The Boomer label is too broad to be of any value. It covers the period 1945 to c1965, as I understand it. The author cannot even stick within this wide range for the suggested British boomers – none of the Pythons was born after 1943 and only two of Pink Floyd, from the original line-up plus Dave Gilmour.
I do not think he was so much calling them Boomers, but saying they set the tone of the Boomers to a strong degree in UK.
One cannot choose one’s parents, nor the time one is born. For good or bad, we are dealt a hand when we come into this world, to make of and use as best we can. I am thankful I was born when I was, and I am thankful that I will not be around when the current madness comes to bear full fruit. My only sadness is the impact that will have on my grandchildren, and possibly to a lesser extent my children. But there again, they will know nothing of what they have lost.
Read this article reviewing the book and thought, “Why did I waste 5 minutes of my life just now and I will definitely not read the book”.
Constant self-analysis like this is counter-productive and only for people who are bored with their existence, i.e, those overeducated people who have never actually done anything useful.
Like the Engineers who built everything we use, or the scientists who developed vaccines and antibiotics amongst many other things. OR the people who did Classics or PPE at Oxford?
If seas rise and England is threatened with inundation, who will build the barriers. Not people who are on this website because they will be arguing about who should be blamed.
Which is why I am a conservative at heart. As an academic I should be liberal, but my years in academia have made me world-weary of the ‘educated’ classes. Colleges are becoming parasitical institutions.
I am Independent because I became sick of ‘Whip” nature (of political parties))to Different opinions from Lib-Lab-Cons-Ukip etc..
Of all the institutional types I have encountered in my eight decades, including the military, big corporations, small business, NGOs, and religious organizations, the academic ones were by far the most conservative, in accordance with their primary functions of class filtering and indoctrination.
“Even Left-wing activists moved to the suburbs, Andrews writes, so their children “would no longer have their liberal opinions beaten out of them.”
Annette – you wrote…
Totally disagree. Left wingers move to the suburbs for the same reason non left wingers do – decent public schools and low crime, no garbage and graffiti all over the place, no panhandlers. You generally won’t find rioters in suburbs, and people really like not having rioters around them. It’s better and safer for their kids.
…but that confuses me. The argument you make surely supports the authors’ contention.
I agree, though, with your statement that “Left wing activists tend not to like the lifestyle their policies and ideas lead to.” The contemporary left have developed Marie Antoinette cluelessness and hypocrisy almost to an artform (though if it was an art form, it might have redeeming value). Such as the frothy-mouthed Labour Party socialists who have never held jobs but send with their kids to the very schools they argue should not exist. Who blather on about democracy until the voters ‘get it wrong’ and vote the wrong way.
Aaron Sorkin’s characters “are archetypal ‘upper normies’: endlessly scornful of the received wisdom of the masses and sycophantically devoted to the received wisdom of the liberal bourgeoisie.”
Contrast Aaron Sorkin, with his skin-deep, mass-media television mentality, with the acid skewering of “upper-normies” in the films of Todd Solandz, Joel and Ethan Coen, and Charlie Kaufman. All four film-makers (fellow-boomers all) seamlessly combine raucous absurdity with heart-rending, faint echoes of lost tradition and progressive descent into moral madness.
Also stop blaming millennials for a lot industries crashing. Millennials sure get blamed a lot for businesses that was started by the Boomers going out. These Boomers who ran these businesses pretty much ran up their own debt and then blame Millennials for not balling them out.
Uh, no
Having read the book, yes, I would. Andrews’ complaint seems to be that people are might seem freer, but, aha, now they’re addicted to freedom, and that means they’re still slaves, see? So therefore it would (by a leap of logic that is unlikely to convince anyone who isn’t a dyed-in-the-wool conservative) for them to be constrained in the good old-fashioned ways again.
Whereas I would say that if people are always going to be defined by their situation (and thus never be “free” in the strictest sense of the word), then why not be defined by a situation of comfort instead of a situation of drudgery? Being enslaved to your appetites is at least no more undignified than being enslaved to other people, and it’s generally more fun.
The most glaring example is her lament that peace has broken out between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants because they are both “fat, rich and lazy” and “if this is victory, it is a sad sort of one.” It takes a devoted sadomasochist to consider peace and plenty to be not just inherently bad, but to be so obviously so that no further explanation as to why is required.
She might have a point about education, I’ll grant you. But then, she also thinks that higher education is wasted on the rabble and that they should go to church instead.
I’ll happily live in the world the Boomers made, thanks. While God knows it isn’t perfect, it’s better than the one Andrews thinks she would have preferred.
Joe Biden promised to undo much of his predecessor’s legacy and restore what he refers to as “the soul of America” by proving that the past four years represented an aberration rather than an enduring rift in the national fabric. https://www.eonline9.com
Terry M wonderful couldn’t agree more, “lack of foresight, emotion over reason and unintended consequences”. Could all be extrapolated to describe governments’ handling of the current Covid crisis.
Another non-book to conscientiously avoid.
They should pay people NOT to write these days.
‘can’t wait to read this book, love me some sassy…That said, I hear my Millennial children moan and groan about hiring the Gen Z kids behind them, that the Gen Z’s have ‘no grit’, ‘give up easily’ and ‘quit too soon’ before solving problems (no resilience). One daughter said they have interviewed over 100 candidates to work in their finance group with nary an eligible candidate. I asked about the Ivy Leaguers and she said they were just as clueless. So we’ll see who ends up justified in criticizing the Boomers.
This article obsesses about the celebrities, and fails to celebrate the achievement of the masses: I am a ‘Boomer’ by birthdate (1953) – but I chose not to seek celebrity, as did most of us. I don’t recognise these folk as typical of my generation:
“Who would British boomers be? Pink Floyd? Monty Python? Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis? It doesn’t quite work. Hitchens actually wrote one of the earlier, funnier critiques of the boomers himself for Vanity Fair almost 25 years ago, writing: “In the therapy generation, which scripts even its own lenient satires, you are by all means allowed, if not encouraged, to feel guilty. Just as long as you don’t feel responsible.”
No, I’m just a bog standard Boomer, who had a whole lot of fun for a few years after leaving University, worked my way around the world, shagged like a rabbit, smoked like a chimney, and finally settled into a moderately conventional and semi-respectable lifestyle in a converted church in the Scottish Uplands with my extended family, totally anonymously and quite contentedly, to pursue my hobbies of raising chickens, growing veggies, and foraging wild food, whilst hiding under a succession of boring but quite useful public sector management jobs, all of course, with an index linked pension.
Bah! the number one hubris of Baby Boomers is they believe they have THE RIGHT to live forever.
Ok boomer