Friday, February 19, 2021

Sorry, You're Not Cool Anymore (A Rant to Leftist Boomers)

I recall a time when I felt sorry for being born too late and not living through the sixties as a young adult. I would fantasize in my reverie about the coolness of that decade, and the countercultural forces at play during that time. Not to mention all the libertine hedonic arrangements that would appeal to young man's zeal.  

But what in particular made the left cool in the sixties was an idealism that meant to break up the sclerosis in culture through rebellion and non-conformity. The revolutionaries at the time were aiming for truth, transparency, and integration.

Victor Davis Hanson says,

“The First Amendment was said by them to be sacred, even as the “free speech movement” transitioned to the “filthy speech movement.” Leftists sued to mainstream nudity in film. They wanted easy access to pornography. They mainstreamed crude profanity. The supposed right-wingers were repressed. They were the “control freaks” who sought to stop the further “liberation” of the common culture. 

In those days, the ACLU still defined the right of free expression as protecting the odious, whether the unhinged Nazis, the pathetic old-Left Communists, or nihilistic Weather Underground terrorists. 

“Censorship” was a dirty word. It purportedly involved the religious bigots and medieval minds that in vain had tried to cancel ideological and cultural mavericks and geniuses from Lenny Bruce to Dalton Trumbo. “Banned in Boston” was a sign of cretinism. Only drunken “paranoids” like Joe McCarthy resorted to “blacklists.” We were reminded that the inferior nuts tried to cancel the brilliant careers of their betters whom they disliked, or feared.”

Hanson continues,

“Civil and women’s rights were the twin pillars of the 1960s radicals. From Martin Luther King, Jr. to Malcolm X, the themes were for “white America” to live up to the ideals of their Constitution, to finally realize the “promises of the Declaration of Independence” and to treat people on the basis of the “content of their character” and not on “the color of their skin.” The problem was never 1776 or 1787, but those who had not yet fully met the Founders’ exceptional ideals.
A “color-blind society” was a ’60s sobriquet. Women strove to ensure girls had the same rights as boys, from leadership roles to sports. 
The point of the 1960s, again we were taught, was to tear down the rules, the traditions, and customs, the hierarchies of the old guys. The targets were supposedly the uptight, short-hair, square-tie, adult generation who grew up in the Depression, won World War II, and were fighting to defeat Cold War Soviet Union. 
The good guys, the students, and the activists, if they only had power, were going to break up corporations, shame (or “eat”) the rich, and bring in young, hip politicians.” 

In just a half-century, the boomers have become their parents (in the worst possible way) and have assimilated the generations below them—who in turn have decided to turn things up a notch by applying their insipid theories. While postmodern theory (now applied critical theory) may have seemed cool in the sixties as a form of mental masturbation, it has now wrought a heavy load on the academy, human resource departments, governmental institutions and media/entertainment. While there was a time when Derrida and Lacan may have seemed out of grasp for the average intellect, it now appears they never really had any intellectual grounding to begin with.

Today, truth, transparency, and integration have taken a back seat. The intellectual dishonesty of the left has overtaken many of the cultural institutions in order to protect their status. The media and high tech oligarchs have begun to shut down opposing views that don't fit the neo-liberal woke narrative, and integration has been limited to race, gender, and sex at the expense of ideas. 

In their wake, the leftist boomers of the sixties have given us: censorship of conservative ideas, electronic surveillance, high-tech oligarchs, cancel-culture, identity politics, book banning, white supremacy, micro-aggressions, safe-spaces, climate-change hysteria, breakdown of Tradition and religion, delegitimization of the working class, revisionist history, transhumanism, fears of domestic “terrorism”, and anti-patriotic globalism. 

Is this cool? Let's consider more deeply what it means to be “cool.”

James Kalb notes, 

“Coolness started with jazz musicians and still has something of the spirit of the night, of escape from everyday reality, of unconditioned freedom, of improvisation without a goal. It is the liberal equivalent of the divine grace that bloweth where it listeth and none can define. It has something in common with sanctity, inasmuch as the cool are in the world but not of it. They possess a certain disengagement, so that they are independent of their surroundings and not easily flustered or excited. They are not conventional and have a sort of perfect pitch in matters of perception, expression, and practical decision. Of course, coolness is also very different from sanctity. Sanctity is about eternity, coolness about now. It has religious aspirations, but its hedonism and individualism mean they go nowhere. The lives of the saints have enduring interest, because they point to something beyond themselves. The lives of the hipsters do not. This lack of substantive content allows coolness a place in the spiritual world of liberalism, but is otherwise a radical defect. Coolness makes things a matter of style, which is why a clumsy attempt to be a saint is admirable, while a clumsy attempt to be cool is ridiculous. This also means that coolness cannot maintain standards. Miles Davis is dead, hipsters have gone mass-market, and grade-school children now have as much right to be cool as anyone. At bottom, coolness is as silly as people think. It is notoriously unsustaining. Those who live by it either crash and burn, fall into gross hypocrisy (“sell out”), or grow out of it. Within the liberal order, though, growing out of it means growing out of the only thing, other than sex, drugs, celebrity, or lots and lots of money, that redeems life from quotidian dullness. It means turning into a boring, conventional, older person, just like Mom and Dad.”

Yup. Except Mom and Dad probably did believe in the eternal. Without institutional faith, and now being the sclerotic monolith of culture, the leftist boomers are no longer cool and have nothing enduring that will be redeemed by their fruits. Since the left often don't feel they need to belong to something, then there's really nothing to defend, and that makes it easier to feel superior. 

As Hanson quips: “They won. They are now one with—but also far, far worse than—what they rebelled against.”