The Generations ... until the Baby Boomers?

See below: "History Getting Colder"(August 15)

August 9, 2004

Baby Boom Backlash

"The baby-boomer generation is an extraordinarily dull, stolid, selfish, materialistic and dumbly liberal administrative cadre, blessed with a purblind ideology and bereft of any notion of public or societal duty..." John Leonard, Modernity.

Randy Udall, writes in "When Will the Joy Ride End?" that "More than half the nations's oil -- and 70% of the world's oil -- will be consumed during a single human lifetime. That span happens to coincide with the Baby Boomer generation . . . conceived as auto culture kicked into overdrive. As newborns, they were driven home from the hospital in a car... Getting a driver's license was their rite of passage... During their lives, many Baby Boomers will drive and fly a million miles, equal to 40 trips around the globe..." .

And not only a rite of passage. Getting a driver's license revoked is like being deprived of citizenship. Keith Emerich ought to know. He's the local man whose picture was on the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday. During a routine office visit, when his doctor asked him if he used alcohol, Keith answered honestly and said he drank a sixpack of Budweisers a day. The doctor reported this to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, which revoked his license

This is the society the Baby Boomers did so much to create -- the Nanny State, it's called. But it's a State that intrudes, on the Federal and local levels, to the tune of 43% in the economy. Lately the government bureaucrats have gotten worried, because the economy is not churning out the number of jobs it promised. So what's the solution? Start eating your citizens!

August 13, 2004

More on "The Generation"

There must be something in the air about the Baby Boomers, because Richard Heinberg's latest "Museletter" is entitled "Boomers Last Chance?" and is devoted to reflections about the Baby Boom generation. (Museletter 148, July 2004) He begins by discussing Tom Brokaw's 1998 book, The Greatest Generation -- about the generation that fought World War II.

Brokaw spoke in hyperbole when he rhapsodized that the World War II generation "was the greatest ... any society ever produced" (ever heard of the generations of classical Athens, Renaissance Florence, Shakespeare's England, German philosophy or even early 20th century physics, Tom?) and thus drew an "implicit contrast" (pace Heinberg) to the generation that came after it -- our generation. But quite rightly, concerning our generation, Heinberg remarks that "an oil tanker's worth of ink has been spilled in self-adulation, self-criticism, self-analysis, and general self-observation."

Heinberg makes something of two events that occurred in 1970: the peak in U.S. oil production and the first Earth Day. He notes all of the environmental legislative initiatives that followed the Earth Day. "Perhaps even more important than this legislation was the symbolic value of the occasion in giving voice and identify to a growing minority who viewed the fossil fuelled industrial project as having dire consequences for humanity and nature, and who advocated a dramatic change of direction for society as a whole away from consumerism and toward conservation, away from militarism and toward nurturance of life."

Unfortunately we all know what happened. These initiatives, representing realism in an idealistic garb, died virtually stillborn. The federalization of abortion was another event which followed closely on the two Heinberg noted, although he did not mention Roe v. Wade of 1973. It was also a symbolic event for the spiritual impulses of the Baby Boom generation.

But Heinberg does get back on track at the conclusion of his piece, when he says that when we Baby Boomers become elders -- it will be our last chance to redeem ourselves. How will we use the benefits of our experience? "If we use it for any purpose other than to help awaken all and sundry to our collective plight, and to lead a change of course toward a peaceful, local, slow, and self-limiting fossil-fuel way of life, it will all have been wasted."

Perhaps in our old age we will hear from those among the Baby Boom generation who carried a different and more demanding vision -- a vision perhaps so difficult that we have been the silent ones. For our generation was so loud! --- but in that loudness, how many fell by the wayside! They fell in the mud 'n drugs at Woodstock. And they fell again, many of them to be raised up into position of academic tenure. The tenured radicals used their campus privileges to harangue the nation with political correctness, feminism, homosexual politics. Standards went out, bad art was good, and nobody said a thing about the highways and gas stations and the ugly suburbs, unless it was to make fun of it. In many respects, it's true: the Baby Boom generation is a generation fallen by the wayside.

But there were a few of us, here and there, who didn't fall for it. Somehow, things didn't seem right to us down in car country, even if we didn't have the words -- oil depletion! -back then to name it. The country seemed to have become a land of screaming fanatics, where everything that used to be considered instinctive -- being a man or a woman, or a parent, having a baby, raising children, being a member of one race or another, manners, standards, arts -- well nothing, in fact, was just instinctive, just the "way things are" anymore. The sciences and the laws and the regulations and the highways just kept getting more and more complicated, and yet (or because of this?) people were fighting over the things of life itself -- the things that used to belong to, well, just the way things are. Long before I learned the phrase oil depletion I experienced the spiritual depletion of the life-forces of civilization in America -- and I must apologize for this awkward and rather ominous-sounding phrase. But so it seemed to me.

I could hardly speak. Muteness -- when not writing a kind of poetry than no one in the U.S. seemed to want to read -- was my lot, and I was as alienated from consumerist car-obsessed America as I was from those members of my generation who went chasing the golden rainbow of multicultural feminist-corrected you-can-have-it-all entitlement to Paradise, and I loathed both sets of people about equally.

So I have set the stage, and I will let it rest for now. The silent Baby Boomers. The ones who chose a different and difficult path. Will we be the ones, as Richard Heinberg hopes, to rise up to speak in the end?

What is "a generation"?

Ortega y Gasset [1883-1955] is a philosopher whose books I often re-read -- when I can find them. There is a great consolation to be found in reading the works of a truly lucid mind, as his was. Somehow in that mind there was a wonderful combination of Germanic philosophic study with the Spanish soul and disposition. I often think that the best minds have at least two, and possibly three, vital sources, each of which acts to limit, cross-check, and highlight the others. The studies in Germany took Ortega beyond Spanish insularity, but his Spanish soul kept him from falling into the seemingly bottomless pits of German idealism. He always remained with his feet in the world and in history.

One of Ortega's central notions was the concept of the generation. He wrote in 1921 that "the generation is the fundamental concept of history." In Man and Crisis he wrote that "It is the generation which provides the fundamental method for historic investigation" But why is this so? To answer this question demands a close reading in Ortega's chapter, "Again the Generation," from the work cited above. He does not dwell on the point -- at least not in this work -- although it is of astonishing and far-reaching significance.

He is talking about the great historical change which occurred in 1600, "in which a new form of life emerged, a new man, a modern man." This new man was Cartesian -- although Descartes by 1600 had only just succeeded in being born. Nevertheless, "Toward the end of the fourteenth century and throughout the fifteenth, man began to talk about 'modernism..'" Something new was in the air, the presentiment of which should not surprise us, Ortega continues, because such presentiments "...always [precede] the great historical mutations." And then he comes to the important point: that these presentiments exist, he says, are "proof that such transformations are not imposed on humanity from without by the mere chance of external happenings, but emanate from interior modifications generated in the hidden recesses of man's soul."

O-la! Here is the point, so simply, so gracefully understated, so slidingly alluded to in passing as it were, that it would be possible to just read the words and not register their meaning. And indeed, Ortega does not linger here, but hurries on to make another point. Perhaps he was not even aware of the depths of what he was saying. And yet it is just this point that is the difference between history and mere generational succession.

Let us meditate further on this. If historical conditions are a manifestation of what lies latent within the soul of a generation, we have thrown open the gates to the incalculable.For he is saying that there is more to this generation business than what exists in the world in the form of historical circumstances. The study of circumstances by themselves are not sufficient for understanding what is comprised in the generation. Is he not then saying, in essence, that human beings do not just "reproduce" -- but that they are conceived? And that it is owing to the conceptual and the procreative nature of human birth that there is history? -- the story of the continuities and transformations wrought by the differing generations who bring distinctive impulses?

If this is what Ortega is getting at, or I should say, hinting at, it is one big body blow to the "modern project."

For it has been modern man's project -- ever since the 1600's, ever since Descartes, in fact -- to imagine that the conditions of the world can be calculated, manipulated, and in some measure brought under control. One could talk about the stages of this manipulation and control as "stages of rationalization" -- of religion, medicine, and law; economy, production, politics, and government; and finally -- since there is hardly anything left to rationalize, and as noted in the section above -- society itself, especially marriage, family, and birth.

However this movement to rationalize everything may have originally existed in the past as a justifiable impulse to distinguish reason from magic, it has culminated with the situation we have today: rationalization assists the smooth flow of money.

The siren-song of rationalization and money have now infected the female part of the population with a vengeance. In the Philadelphia Inquirer last week, there was an article about "Egg freezing for fertility offers hope -- and hype" [Aug. 1, 2004]. Apparently there are now clinics to which a woman may resort to take her eggs and freeze them "so that she can look forward to making babies with Mr. Right even if he doesn't show up until she's halfway to retirement."

Remarkably enough, no one cited in this article raised questions of an ethical nature, though several observers questioned whether the procedures were safe. The article gave extensive coverage and picture to the CEO of a chain of egg-freezing clinics called Extend -- one Christy Jones, an elegant raven-haired beauty who looks like a college freshman. But she is 34 and describes herself as a "serial entrepreneur," a profession, or series of professions, from which she has already become a millionaire.. Her idea of egg-freezing clinics won her the the "coolest idea" award (no pun intended, I am sure) from the Harvard Business School. Accolades from Glamour, Elle, Newsweek, and ABC's Good Morning America have followed.

And what does this new breed of woman have to say? "The last thing we would ever want to do is let emotions overcome the facts." Rationalization! And more rationalization!

On the contrary, I say that that we should pay extraordinary attention when our emotions tell us that something is rotten, misguided, and wrong. Or do we have any such emotions any longer? When human conception becomes mere reproduction, to be manipulated by human beings at will, have we entered a domain of "forced birth"? (How does that compare with "forcible rape"?) Are we committing a sin against the generations? For certainly, egg-freezing and forced manipulation of conception means that we are leaving the field of the generations -- and therefore of history as Ortega defines it.

The Dutch embryologist Jaap van der Waal put it, in his essay on "Human Conception" ---"... the dynamics of a true conception takes place in the literal meaning of the word, not in the sense of making or building but in the sense of receiving and accepting. [Some of Dr. van der Waal's essays can be read on his website, http://home.uni-one.nl/walembryo --highly recommended]

I hope the reader has been able to follow this somewhat philosophical idiscussion. It has seemed to me necessary to talk of these things, if anything we say concerning the real significance of the Baby Boom generation is to be something new and not just what has already been said before. .This discussion has brought us down, in the end, to the ultimate and smallest beginning -- the egg and the sperm cells. But unless we confront the issue of reproduction vs. conception the real meaning of the generations will remain forever an enigma to us. And if this is so, we will have no knowledge -- and no emotion -- to resist some of the darkest and most heinous impulses of our time.

For the uncomfortable truth is that forced reproduction, manipulated birth, is possible. It has happened. It works. We are, after all, animals. But do we realize what we are saying? The decision to follow the path of animal reproduction instead of appreciating the open-ended vulnerability of human conception is the decision to cast off the burdens of history and to be rid of the burdens of humanity forever.

History Getting Colder

Is the earth getting hotter? Feels like it, but I don't know. But it sure feels like history is getting colder.

Who are the Baby Boomers? Many in my generation have spent a considerable time and money with therapies, support groups, and self-development seminars, the purpose of which was to "get in touch with feelings." It's as if the more feelings and emotions were leached away, the more intellectual energy and analysis was devoted to trying to locate them. In many cases the results of these intellectual exercises seemed to lead only to more self-absorption -- with millions of people trying to get in touch with getting in touch.

For all the self-absorption of the Baby Boomers --- "getting in touch with feelings" was a way of trying to get in touch with the world. The world in its immediacy comes in feelings, and this was the world we somehow dimly felt in common. Feelings -- their absence, the desperate search for them -- may have been indeed our last feeling of a common world. Feelings are commonality. And history, in the end, is built upon this commonality. History is made ultimately of feelings.

Remember the statement quoted above by the CEO of the egg-freezing clinic?-- "The last thing we would ever want to do is let emotions overcome the facts " I pity the child she becomes the mother of. The woman CEO has become the parody of the technocrat.

Readers may disagree with me. After all, isn't freezing one's eggs on the same spectrum with the Pill, test-tube babies, and now cloning human embryos to extract the stem cells, as the U.K. has now said is O.K.? (As for Bush, the anti-stem-cell research position is the single ray of light he has cast upon the dark and treacherous seas of his presidency.)

No, I don't think it's on the same spectrum. Or if it is on the same spectrum, maybe we need to look again at this whole issue of how feeling and perception interact with each other. We could not have perceptions without boundaries. It is the interplay of light and dark that makes the colors. To put one's foot upon the road does not mean that one has to walk all the way to the end of it. There are paths that turn away. There are decisions to be taken with every step.

The fault of the Baby-Boomers was not their, our, quest for feelings. Our fault was in failing to realize that all feelings represent judgments -- moments of decision. The fault of the Boomer generation was not the preoccupation with feeling but the repudiation of judgment.