Recently a post by Chris Arnade (ar-NAHD-i) at X caught my eye.
I’ve written for the last decade about the educational divide in the US, but culturally there is now a large divide between generations — specifically those over sixty versus basically everyone else.
The sixty-plus cohort (Boomers which I’m at the very tail end of) have a lot more certainty that they’ve discovered the Truth — or the high point, and often end point, of many things. From music (rock will always be here), to fashion (why would anyone wear anything but blue jeans), to politics (liberal democracy with emancipation from all forms of obligation as a human Telos).
Younger people are much more uncertain and relativistic. They don’t accept the claim that it’s been solved, and the Boomers’ rigidity and religious-like certainty seems to them either laughably naive or arrogantly condescending.
The Boomers see everyone else as having fallen away from the path to historical perfection they paved, and are uniformly angry about that. What most of the Boomers miss is that the younger generation is living in the world they built — of hyper-individuality, of smashing of prior norms, and of moral relativism. This post-truth, post-gatekeeping, hyper-partisan world is an endpoint of their worldview, and yet they are angry about it.
As a white male born in 1960, I’m smart enough to recognize those Boomer characteristics I possess. However, having recognized long ago that I’m a slow learner and a late bloomer, my consciousness falls a bit closer to Arnade’s (1965), and butts up against Gen X. I’m 15 years removed from the first wave of Boomers, and submit that America in 1960 was a different place (of course, rural Indiana remained as somnolent as ever).
Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia protagonist Jimmy famously suffered from a four-way personality. As a side note, it’s the best rock opera ever, and I see no need to discuss it.
LOL.
For a good while, I’ve felt at war with myself, divided into thirds generationally: 40% Boomer, 35% Gen X (late bloomer), and 25% pre-glibly tagged 1930s/early 1940s.
The latter is because my father struggled mightily (and not unsuccessfully) to imbue me with his foundational milieu, and I absorbed much of it owing to the music he played (Big Bands or Swing Era, from which I branched backwards and forwards into the 20s and 50s) and the tumultuous history of the period: stock...Read more
