Here’s a very thoughtful brief essay that features both Tom Wolfe and ME. It’s fairly pessimistic–but still postmodern conservative–because its nostalgia is not for porches and goats but for pilots and astronauts–the members of the Greatest Generation. Those men fought, drank, smoked, reproduced, and generally lived with a nobility, reckless abandon, and love of life that our bourgeois bohemians today find almost insanely irresponsible (see MAD MEN and REVOLUTIONARY ROAD). All the studies show that things have gotten more healthy and just, but at the expense of being men or women in full.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009, 9:52 AM
Peter Lawler
July 15th, 2009 | 10:35 am
It’s true that the guys and gals that came of age in the 40s make better poster adults for CHOOSE LIFE than any of the lads from Trainspotting. In a bout of great pessimism and yuppity hubris, I do have to say that in my experience the amount of responsibility the Greatest Generation bears for the way their kids turned out as a generation is an oft-avoided topic of discussion.
July 15th, 2009 | 11:08 am
Nobody enjoys a good shot of nostalgia more than I do. The problem is that sometimes our memories get a little weird. For example Peter points out that the generation of our parents/grandparents “…the members of the Greatest Generation. Those men fought, drank, smoked, reproduced, and generally lived with a nobility, reckless abandon, and love of life that our bourgeois bohemians today find almost insanely irresponsible…”
Indeed, they did, they also gave us FDR and his remarkably virulent and pernicious statism.
July 15th, 2009 | 12:04 pm
[...] brings me to this essay, which Peter Lawler recommends and I am puzzled by. So far as I can tell, its central argument is that America is aging and [...]
July 15th, 2009 | 12:08 pm
Thanks for the kind comments, Peter.
With respect to James and Bob, I think there’s a bit of fast-and-loose generational work going on here. It would be a mistake, I believe, to assign those born between 1901 and 1924 with the entire political responsibility for FDR and the New Deal. And my chief concern in this essay is that we have failed to notice a technology-driven fluctuation in fertility, union, and mortality that may hold widespread ramifications and represent a fundamental shift from the past. From 1950-1970, the average man got married by 23, and the average woman by 20; from 1979-1994, the echo boom had 60 million children, the second largest generation in American history. So while there is plenty to criticize about the Baby Boomers, allow me to defend them on this point: at least they got married and reproduced.
July 15th, 2009 | 12:08 pm
I’m not convinced. The difference between a nostalgia piece like Mad Men and a contemporary reflection like Revolutionary Road is how absent nobility is from the latter. In fact, the point of the book is that Frank and April don’t “choose life” (literally, in April’s case) and are anything but reckless. They do exactly what others like them do. Which happens to be drinking and smoking, but might as well be yoga for all the spiritual difference it makes. Wolfe’s test pilots are another story. But again, the book is about their obsolescence in the prosperous, safe post-war world. Remember, Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947. By the time of the space program, the engineers didn’t even want to put a window in the Mercury capsule, into which a human pilot was squeezed solely for public relations.
Of course I wasn’t around fifty years ago, so it’s hard to say. But what I find interesting about about documents of the period is the fundamental continuity of mores with the bobo world that I know first hand. As David Brooks is fond of pointing out, white, university-educated people still marry and raise their children almost as if it were 1960. It’s the lives of the poor and lower-middle classes that have been revolutionized.
July 15th, 2009 | 12:21 pm
Sam, Good comment. MY interpretation of REVOLUTIONARY ROAD (the book more than the bad movie, admittedly) is that Frank and April, in their vanity, are blind to the real lives around them. To Bob, my comparatively unconservative thought is that the statism of the FIFTIES wasn’t particularly virulent or pernicious, and it’s easier to hate what FDR intended to do domestically than what actually happened. To the new dad, it’s true that the kids of the 50s and early 60s weren’t that well raised (look at ME, for instance.).
July 15th, 2009 | 12:39 pm
People live with reckless abandon and love of life way more today than they did 60 years ago. I bet there are more people doing extreme sports today (mountain climbing, rock climbing, kite surfing, etc.) than 60 years ago. There are a LOT more climbers on the Pacific Northwest mountains today than there ever was 60 years ago and the Columbia gorge is full of wind and kite surfers whenever the wing blows. Also, the lonely planet adventure travel life style is way more popular today than it was 50 years ago.
Anyone who say we do not live with as much gusto and love of life today as we did in the past must have a hole on their head.
July 15th, 2009 | 3:36 pm
There may have been a problem with the capacity of the Greatest Generation (my parents’) to transmit what made them great, or at least pretty good. The courage and public-spiritedness of the war years didn’t seem to translate into much in the fifties (when I was born). Maybe my western suburban experience was idiosyncratic, but I am struck in retrospect by how distant 1945 seemed already when I was a youth, how little it was a reference point. Just tell me if I am idiosyncratic. Manliness had nowhere to go. See James Dean asking Jim Backus (sp?) to stand up for something in Rebel Without a Cause (“You gott give me something here…”). That rings true (though my dad was much better). We restless ones of the 60s-70s were right about one thing (only): liberalism’s empty center was becoming a palpable fact.
July 15th, 2009 | 4:47 pm
Dr. Lawler,
In relationship to this particular idea, I am shocked that you choose pilots and astronauts as your case study. From a more Allen Bloom perspective, except, even more so, from your own empirical study of students today, the pessimism illustrated in this article is incorrectly being dwarfed by you nostalgic postmodern conservatism (not to say postmodern conservatism has no good idea, but rather its perspective on this issue is particularly weak). I personally believe that your assertions are more correct than you even let on. Some things are more worth fighting than other, we must all pick our battles, and this is one that might be worth fighting fully. I cannot see how your understanding that we are indeed less man and less woman (irony) then earlier (see deneen?) and yet you end in the positive. I hope that you tackle this issue with more ferocity and less postmodern conservatism.
July 15th, 2009 | 5:14 pm
Kurt9, It seems to me that more people than ever are searching for they lack in their real lives. Now if you tell me you belong to a Fight Club (which, of course, you can’t if you really do), then we’ll talk. And my personal experience roughly corresponds to Ralph’s, although an actual personal testimony will have to come later.
July 15th, 2009 | 6:58 pm
What i’m hinting at is the super-paleo argument that WWII actually produced a generation that didn’t need or want to do anything After The War but bowl, smoke, and put however many years under their belt at the big mega-factory were necessary for that gold watch. All the aspirations and roles were set and met — wife, kids, house, car, driveway, appliances, and, of course, TV. It’s possible at this point to be off to the races with Lasch & Co., to a full-dress condemnation of Our Capitalist System, etc., or with MacIntyre to a full-blown case of polis envy. But if pomocons are right that Lasch and MacIntyre, good as they are at highlighting the ways in which our bad ways are bad, are way too Marxist, it’s also important to point out that the longings of the early ’60s — to de-corporatize national politics and to live lives of less bureaucratic conformity — seem to point to ways of living that aren’t terribly congenial to Lasch or MacIntyre either.
July 15th, 2009 | 9:53 pm
I was born in 1952 and don’t recall ever hearing the ridiculous term ‘Greatest Generation’, even when I was watching ‘Combat’ and reading WWII comics in the 60s. According to Wikipedia, the term was coined in the 90s (!) by the noted ultraconservative intellectual Tom Brokaw.
In fact, the ‘greatest generation’ was slow to enter the war against Hitler, was quite willing to practise aerial murder of civilians in large numbers over and over, and only lost about 550,000 American lives (compared to the 20,000,000 lives lost in godless Russia).
The problem with post-Reagan America is We Are Only ‘Great’ Because We Say We Are (and continue Saying We Are Ad Nauseam). When was the last important American novel written? I’d say it was Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973. We think pure Moxie is enough for anything (the Bruce Willis school of virtue). We forget about all those highly educated Europeans fleeing Hitler who contributed so much to our post-WWII culture for several decades (Einstein, Goedel, your pet mage Strauss, Stravinsky, together with many others less famous). We forget about the fact that American science didn’t even get off the ground in a meaningful way till the Thirties — Oppenheimer, a Jew, had to go to Germany to study quantum mechanics (a European invention). We forget that the most remarkable from-scratch technology developments in America in the 20th century were GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS (the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project). The technical ‘achievements’ of the Bill Gateses of the world are nugatory by comparison. We forget that 3 centuries of European physics and mathematics were necessary for Wolfe’s noble flyboys to have anything to fly.
But we’re Great Americans because We Say So. We’re really, really sure about it. Krugman has a serious point: not only do we obviously not know how to make capitalism work for the average person anymore (viz. stagnant real wages for decades, sluggish or negative job growth, an economy based solely on asset bubbles – what the Right calls Wealth Creation, outsourcing, etc.), but we don’t have the societal wherewithal to face any serious problem with a timespan longer than the next business quarter.
July 16th, 2009 | 6:00 am
Of course Tom Browkaw’s “greatest generation” was not the ‘greatest,’ not by a long shot. For them to have been judged as ‘great’ they’d have marched on Washington, hung the gov’t, and restored the founding principles in much the manner Jefferson envisioned. They didn’t.
July 16th, 2009 | 12:22 pm
A few years ago I heard a young comedian say, “Suddenly it was okay to hate the Greatest Generation.” I wasn’t paying attention to the TV so I don’t know the context of the comment but the moment I heard it I laughed out loud. Obviously, it goes too far–I wouldn’t want to hate them–and there are many reasons to praise that generation, but it did my spirit good to hear someone else acknowledge discomfort with this group. My personal discomfort is the pervasive lack of imagination and general somberness that I’ve found over and over with individuals from this group in general. I wonder if this is frivolous but I really did have several moments of reflection and acknowledgement where I realized it was okay for me, personally, to throw off some of the influences of this generation that I felt were holding me back spiritually and emotionally.
July 16th, 2009 | 12:32 pm
Peter, I’m certainly not into any fight club (I do not like to abuse my body, its the only one I got). However, I do like outdoor sports as well as international travel. I lived as expat in Asia for 10 years. When I try to define manliness, the definition I keep coming up with is the ability to pursue and remain committed to a long-term dream or goal. I define it in terms of future time orientation and the ability to chase off all of the idiots that stand in my way. A real man has a dream or vision and does whatever it takes to make it reality.
The Wright brothers believed that heavier than air flight was possible by a man-made machine, even though all of the leading scientists at the time (like Lord Kelvin) said it was impossible. Likewise, we believe that aging can be cured and indefinitely long youthful life spans are possible, even though many people try to tell us this is impossible.
A real man makes his vision into a reality.
July 16th, 2009 | 1:28 pm
[...] Peter Lawler at PomoCon: Here’s a very thoughtful brief essay that features both Tom Wolfe and ME. It’s fairly pessimistic–but still postmodern conservative–because its nostalgia is not for porches and goats but for pilots and astronauts–the members of the Greatest Generation. Those men fought, drank, smoked, reproduced, and generally lived with a nobility, reckless abandon, and love of life that our bourgeois bohemians today find almost insanely irresponsible (see MAD MEN and REVOLUTIONARY ROAD). All the studies show that things have gotten more healthy and just, but at the expense of being men or women in full. [...]
July 16th, 2009 | 3:36 pm
Kurt9: Lenin and his brothers believed that prosperity/liberty without property was possible by a man-made system, even though all the leading economists and political scientists at the time said it was impossible, that it would come crashing to the ground with much blood and suffering. Likewise, Hitler thought he could conquer the continent and exterminate most of Europe’s Jews, but almost everyone thought that those were impossible dreams. Nothing you’ve said has in and of itself distinguished your (a bit self-oriented) visionary drive from their (society-oriented) visionary drive.
And to all, James is right. Somewhere in Percy there’s a remark that in zeitgeist terms, many of that WWII generation were in the very worst spot, since they couldn’t see the ineradicable “post” of human nature lurking around in the modern…rather it still all looked possible…every bloody dream of indefinite perfection under the sun. For them, it was all atom bombs and socialism is possible, and with sexual revolution (still sexy because only being toyed with prior to early 60s) around the corner that would change everything. One might read Kojeve, or Marcuse when he came on the scene, for example, and believe. The manly men in the Right Stuff could resist a number of bad trends, but against others, they were powerless.
Cary Grant (of Right Stuff semi-prototype Angels Have Wings fame) got into acid in the late 60s. Big-time. Doesn’t that lil’ symbolic tidbit, besides the fact that his generation raised the boomers, say quite a bit about what the saner adults of that long era were up against?
July 16th, 2009 | 4:15 pm
Kurt9: Lenin and his brothers believed that prosperity/liberty without property was possible by a man-made system, even though all the leading economists and political scientists at the time said it was impossible, that it would come crashing to the ground with much blood and suffering. Likewise, Hitler thought he could conquer the continent and exterminate most of Europe’s Jews, but almost everyone thought that those were impossible dreams. Nothing you’ve said has in and of itself distinguished your (largely self-oriented) visionary drive from their (primarily society-oriented) visionary drive.
And to all, somewhere in Walker Percy there’s a remark that in zeitgeist terms, many of that WWII generation were in the very worst spot, since so few of them could see the ineradicable “postmodern(rightly understood)” aspect of human nature lurking amid in the modern…rather, to most, it still all looked possible…every bloody dream of indefinite perfection under the sun. For them, it was all atom bombs and socialism is possible(prior to 1942, so was fascism), and with a gathering sexual revolution around the corner that would change everything. One might read Kojeve, Skinner, or Marcuse when he came on the scene, for example, and believe. Yeah, most Americans got the full-monty on such ideas late in the game and in watered down form, but what did they have to resist them with? The manly men in the Right Stuff could resist a number of bad trends, but against others, they were powerless. And maybe, they really needed wars, horrific and cold, to smack reality into them, and to provide them with Duties more deadlier serious than any X-treme pursuits can be.
Cary Grant (of Right Stuff semi-prototype Angels Have Wings fame) got into acid in the late 60s. Big-time. Doesn’t that lil’ symbolic tidbit, besides the fact that his generation raised the boomers, say quite a bit about what the saner adults of that long era were up against?
Put it this way: in their day, things like Freud, Picasso, Mailer, Mingus, Warhol, Albee, method acting, New Wave films, Sex and the Single Girl, Malcom X, Death-of-God theologians, etc., etc., could seem profound, powerful…everything seems to serve the coming…explosion, with very few of the bad (and by now predictable aftertastes) that would come, that would eventually…instruct. By the late 70s things are somehow…clearer, and by our time, well, who’s all so shaken in their soul by Viriginia Woolf? Living in the Sex in The City society, we know the score.
July 16th, 2009 | 6:16 pm
Kurt9, Thanks for sharing your hyper-Boboism with us. And obviously it wasn’t “the greatest generation” ever, but I would still say that, all in all, the American performance in the 20th century towers over all the other countries.
July 17th, 2009 | 12:13 pm
Peter,
Which decade do you think had more entrepreneurial start-ups? The 50′s or the 80′s? I measure the accomplishments of a society by the number of business start-ups and the rate of technological innovation. What other metrics would you use? It is true that aeronautics and space was big in the 50′s and 60′s, and this was the work of the WWII generation. However, much of the pioneering breakthroughs in aeronautics occurred prior to WWII (including the invention of the turbojet engine). The space program was largely the result of a small group of german rocket scientists lead by Werner Von Braun (this is no hype, there would never have been any space program without Von Braun).
Many modern outdoorsmen who do the extreme sports have the same right stuff as your astronauts and pilots. They just don’t have access to the multi-million dollar, tax-payer funded budgets.
There is outdoor sports, scientific and technological innovation, and entrepreneurship. What other metric is there to define a dynamic society and great accomplishment? Do you think present-day society is more or less dynamic than that of the 1950′s. Explain your reasoning for either answer.
July 17th, 2009 | 3:35 pm
KURT, Your last paragraph reads like mid-term question. So I’ll pass. Decade analysis, as Mr. Poulos pointed out above, is supposed to be playful. And it’s not wise, as Jimmy says in THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO, to go around trashing decades, because all of our lives–no matter how hard people work at keeping themselves going–are marked by a quite curious decade scarcity. Because it’s fashionable for intellectuals to trash the conformity of the 50s and the greed of the 80s, I’m for them both. Being a “stuck with virtue” man, I’m not sure some index of dynamism is the way to rank them. Hitler was certainly a very dynamic leader. My reservation about the 80s has something to do with the emergence of the bourgeois bohemian–or some strange combination of the 50s and 60s that lacks the integrity of either.
July 18th, 2009 | 2:18 pm
Peter,
What is a bourgeois bohemian? I assume this is another name for limousine liberal. I can assure you that I am not liberal-left and I’m certainly no limousine liberal. I’m libertarian more than anything else.
I stand by my point that there are people today who have as much of the “right stuff” as people did 50 years ago.
Did you know that there are at least 7 space launch start-ups founded by people who made money in the dot-com bubble of the 90′s? One of these start-ups, Space X, just launched its first satellite for a paying customer this week. We are talking about real commercial space industry, not government funded boondoggle.
I will also tell you that there are at least 5 privately funded start-ups working to develop commercial fusion power as I write this. Al though Bussard’s polywell is the most publicized one, there are others, one of them financed to the tune of $40 million.
Lastly, serious money is starting to flow into the SENS research for the purpose of curing aging by 2030. Biotech and nanotech research steadily progresses as well.
There are plenty of people with the right stuff today. The mainstream media does not talk about them much, but they do exist and are all around us. You are way off base in claiming that people with the right stuff do not exist today.
Carl Scott,
To equate my vision of curing aging and creating lots of opportunity to Hitler’s and Stalin’s obsession with killing lots of people is so loopy that I can only assume your comments are facetious. If not, I seriously question your ability to tell right from wrong (the legal term insanity).
The rest of you,
You get upset with people being hedonists. Yet, when I point out that there are plenty of people who do commit themselves to long term goals and accomplishments, you get upset with this as well. I don’t get it. The whole purpose of hedonism being bad (at least the way I was taught as a kid) is because it prevents you from focusing on long term goals and accomplishments. You can live for the present (sometimes called hedonism), you can live for the future (sometimes called entrepreneurship or transhumanism), or you can live a balanced mix of the two, which is what I do.
You guys seem upset with people being hedonists as well as focusing on long term accomplishment. I don’t get you at all.
July 18th, 2009 | 2:28 pm
One more point. I live in the Pacific Northwest. We have lots of mountain climbers. Other than Lou and Jim Whittaker and Fred Becky, hardly anyone climbed Mt. Rainer in the 1950′s. Today, there are so many people climbing it during the summer that you have to make a reservation in advance.
I rest my point. More people have the right stuff today than in the 1950′s.
Carl Scott,
You are a collectivist. I am an individualist (a libertarian). This means that your morality is closer to that of Hitler and Stalin than mine is.
July 23rd, 2009 | 10:38 am
[...] of The City Ben Domenech on marriage, population, and social change inspired a few responses at First Things, The Atlantic, and Mere Orthodoxy. A followup piece that gets deeper into the statistics is [...]
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