by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
RightNetwork.com<\/p>\n
This year the oldest Baby Boomer cohort turns 65, the first of 79 million people who promise to be the whiniest and most annoying crop of geezers in history. Not all of them, of course. Just as many in the Greatest Generation weren\u2019t so great, so too the Boomers aren\u2019t all selfish narcissists. But the sensibility dominating our public culture and politics reflects all the pathologies that a large swath of this generation has elevated into virtues.<\/p>\n
The most obvious feature of the Boomers is their refusal to grow up. The ever-extending length of adolescence, a confection of modernity, partly accounts for this. Post-war affluence made it affordable to prolong further this historically novel time of life between childhood and adulthood. Consumerism took advantage of the new market and the greater surplus wealth to elevate in social importance the whims and desires of a group flush with disposable income. The result was the most pampered, obsessed over, and indulged generation in American history. Why wouldn\u2019t they want to prolong this privileged position as long as possible?<\/p>\n
As a consequence, the Boomers developed the sense of entitlement and elevated expectations more typical of children. And the culture went right along with them and pandered to their juvenile taste, mainly because there was money in it. The traditional moral limits on getting and spending had always gotten in the way of profit, so why not indulge this new generation and acquiesce in the destruction of those limits? Starting in the 50\u2019s, the old taboos about sex, public vulgarity, and drugs \u2014 taboos predicated on the notion that just because something is pleasurable or momentarily desirable doesn\u2019t mean you should do it \u2014 were all swept away, and hedonistic antinomianism became a new human right as well as a potent source of profit.<\/p>\n
Hence the \u201ceerie vulgarity,\u201d to use Nabokov\u2019s phrase, of our popular culture, which has managed to trivialize the transgressive into the dullest of clich\u00e9s, and reduced what was once the sordid adventures of rakes and rou\u00e9s into the mass-marketed fashion accessories of pre-teens.<\/p>\n
This cultural debasement was made easier by the destruction of our educational system. The postwar university\u2019s abandonment of traditional schooling in history, language, philosophy, literature, and basic skills created a vacuum filled by leftist ideology and identity politics, both of which set utopian standards never to be met in a complicated world of flawed humans. Yet endorsing these unrealistic goals allowed callow Boomers to preen morally on the cheap, and to justify their destructive politics as earnest idealism. The intensity of feelings and passionately held opinions, not the coherence of thought or ideas, became the currency of worth and authenticity \u2014 another characteristic of children, one now reinforced and cultivated by figures of presumably adult authority.<\/p>\n
The worst effects, however, of this indulgence of a whole generation and the failure to educate it can be seen in politics.<\/p>\n
Traditional political thinking had always been predicated on a tragic view of human nature, one recognizing that the passions and interests inherent in people impose limits on what governments can accomplish. Loss, failure, disappointment, poverty, injustice, and suffering can never be eliminated from human life, only mitigated. Evil is a constant reality battling against the good, sometimes requiring destructive force and suffering for its elimination. Earthly perfection, in short, is a delusion, and utopia nowhere.<\/p>\n
This was the sensibility of the Founders, as can be seen everywhere in the Federalist essays and the assumptions underlying the Constitution.<\/p>\n
For example, Hamilton in\u00a0Federalist 6<\/em>\u00a0reminds us \u201cthat men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.\u201d In\u00a0Federalist 10<\/em>, Madison\u2019s famous discussion of \u201cfaction\u201d \u2014 the political groups \u201cactuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens\u201d \u2014 likewise reflects a realist view of human nature and the power of \u201copinions\u201d formed by a \u201cfallible\u201d reason and influenced by \u201cpassions.\u201d \u201cThe latent causes of faction,\u201d Madison summarizes, \u201care thus sown in the nature of man.\u201d That\u2019s why the Constitution codifies the separation and balance of powers.<\/p>\n Indeed, government itself is necessary precisely because, as Hamilton puts it inFederalist 15<\/em>, \u201cthe passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.\u201d So too John Adams, who dismissed the notion of human perfectibility given the permanent human passions like envious rivalry:<\/p>\n Emulation next to self-preservation will forever be the great spring of human actions, and the balance of a well-ordered government will alone be able to prevent that emulation from degenerating into dangerous ambition, irregular rivalries, destructive factions, wasting seditions, and bloody civil war.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n But it is Madison who provided in\u00a0Federalist 51<\/em>\u00a0the most famous expression of this fundamental truth:<\/p>\n It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices [the separation and balance of powers] should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n With the Boomers, though, this traditional American political wisdom was corrupted by utopianism, a childish belief that perfect justice, perfect equality, absolute freedom, and a world without losers or violence would come about just because we desired it so. Unrealistic standards of state behavior and goals alien to the tragic truths of human nature became the touchstone of political virtue. At the same time, government has to grow more and more powerful in order to accomplish lofty goals like eliminating poverty, discrimination, or war, in the process threatening political freedom and personal autonomy. This demand for absolute personal freedom and greater government power to achieve unrealistic goals reflects the incoherence typical of childish reasoning.<\/p>\n This is the world the Boomers have created. Popular and \u201cserious\u201d culture both reflect a highly polished mediocrity, its stale and questionable ideas given a patina of technical high finish and spurious innovation. Our politics embodies a juvenile utopianism expressed in bumper-sticker bromides \u2014 \u201chope and change\u201d \u2014 dangerous in a world of hard men, conflicting goods, tragic limits, and fanatical evil. Worst of all, adolescent sentimentalism rules all, one peculiarly offensive when it is hidden by \u201ctransgressive\u201d camouflage. Just think of the treacly melodrama\u00a0Angels in America<\/em>. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, you have to have a heart of stone to watch this show without bursting out laughing. These are all the expressions of an over-indulged, badly educated teen-aged mind.<\/p>\n But the ultimate blame for this generation\u2019s pathologies lies with bad ideas birthed long before 1946 and spread by grown-ups who should have known better.<\/p>\n Romanticism midwifed the cult of feeling and solipsistic individualism.<\/p>\n Positivism popularized the notion that science and technology could liberate us from suffering, want, and failure.<\/p>\n Communism, socialism, and progressivism all pursued the impossible dream of perfect equality and justice.<\/p>\n Secularism and the decline of faith empowered pseudo-scientific substitutes like psychology and sociology.<\/p>\n All these diseases of modernity slumbered in the body politic, infecting mostly the intellectual and artistic elites, until they broke out into an epidemic nurtured by post-war wealth and mass media. And here we are today, like Livy\u2019s Romans so far gone that we can stand neither the disease nor the cure.<\/p>\n \u00a92011 Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Bruce S. Thornton RightNetwork.com This year the oldest Baby Boomer cohort turns 65, the first of 79 million people who promise to be the whiniest and most annoying crop of geezers in history. 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Thornton FrontPage Like the hero of Gunter Grass\u2019 novel\u00a0The Tin Drum, America\u2019s progressive Baby Boomers chose not to grow up. Why should they? They decided that their development was complete when they graduated from college. All they needed to do was affirm their magnificent, world-historical identity. No\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":500,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/before-the-culture-fades\/","url_meta":{"origin":4096,"position":1},"title":"Before the Culture Fades","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 26, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. 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