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.”

Best Case Scenario: Agree with Decency to Disagree in Principle

Unity in the secular sense is futile and foolish. The ability to unify the diverse can only be grounded in the transcendent: “In God We Trust,” “E Pluribus Unum,” and “One Nation Under God.” Otherwise, it is not unity but only a uniformity that ultimately suppresses views.

You can try to unify a country under an ethnicity or a religion (not always such a good idea as history has shown) or you can unify a country around a great idea that allows for the free expression of ideas from people who are created equal, endowed with inalienable rights, and consent to be governed. But this form of unity needs to be grounded above, so it can be mirrored below. 

When it comes to political divisions, we are principally divided around narratives, human nature, reason, freedom, democracy, equality, and morality. You can't unify these divisions. The tensions must be inhabited under the One.

William Gairdner sums this up as follows, 

“While it may be true that many liberals are religious and many conservatives are not, the secular liberal narrative that all transcendent reality, morality, and law is to be dismissed as myth and banished from the public square remains dominant. Accordingly, the subtext is that secular humanist worship will continue to mean the worship of human progress and will. The conservative view has always been that human beings do better, and do less damage to others, by worshipping a transcendent God and living under a higher moral law they cannot change, than by worshipping themselves and living under a changeable human law that is vulnerable to the will of those who would manipulate them.”

In Gairdner's terrific book The Great Divide: Why Liberals and Conservatives Will Never, Ever Agree, he distills these principle divisions better than anything I've come across. The following tables are from his book:

Don't Fear Artificial Intelligence, Fear the Oracles

The fear over A.I. may be overblown. Certainly machines will continue to replace the menial aspects of what man can do. Machines will certainly have (and already have) an efficiency in regards to certain tasks that humans will unlikely ever be able to compete with. And yet, there will always be something humans possess that machines will never. The human will always be the machine's oracle. 

George Gilder says, “In an extension of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem—where the axioms of a system cannot be proved within that system—Turing showed the limits of computation: All computers are dependent on outside programmers that he called oracles.” 

The machines are deterministic by design, while human are creative by nature. 

“In order to have correspondence between logical systems and real world causes and effects, engineers have to interpret the symbols rigorously and control them punctiliously and continuously. Programmers have continually to enforce an interpretive scheme between symbols and objects that banishes all slippage. There can be no disproportionate “butterfly effects,” black swans, entrepreneurial surprises, radical entropy, or novelty” (Gilder).

Life is not deterministic, discreet, linear, and easily encodable. It is often analog, high-entropy, non-linear, and unpredictable. Therefore we are often forced to leap before we know. There is always an element of faith that we must take to interpret life. The machine can not do this. It is always at the beck and call of the programmer—who is the interpretant for the machine.  

There are also limitations to moving data around through silicon verses carbon. 

“The problem is that in every information system, the wires multiply by as much as the square of the number of nodes or transistors. Whether in brains as computer scientists understand them or in microprocessors as they make them, all intelligent processing is ultimately limited by connectivity” (Gilder).

As such, there is an inherent inefficiency with machines because they are always “dominated by the time required to move data between processor and memory.” Moreover, it is fascinating to note that “One human brain commands roughly as many connections as the entire internet.” While “computer networking and storage technology uses billions of times more energy than a single human brain, but is far less complex and multidimensional.”

It appears our Creator is way ahead of the game, as expected, since He created the game. While “AI assumes congruence of maps and territories”, man will always know the map is not the territory. The real problem is if man's map of reality is completely divorced from Reality. We are seeing this permeate ever more so in culture. Joel Kotkin paints a bleak picture of the neo-feudal shift we are seeing where our tech overlords are favoring identity politics, globalism, environmentalism, and transhumanism over self-determination, family, community, and traditional religion. 

Kotkin notes, “A world without traditional religion might still have people with spiritual awareness, but it would be short on the blessings of institutions that have promoted community, sacrifice, and faith for millennia.” Furthermore, 

“As Irving Kristol wrote almost two decades ago, the fundamental problem is that technological and scientific elites “have the inclination to think that the world is full of ‘problems’ to which they should seek ‘solutions.’ But the world isn’t full of problems; the world is full of other people.” Of course, he adds, ‘there is no ‘solution’ to the existence of other people. All you can do is figure out a civilized accommodation with them’ ” (Kotkin).

Sadly, these elites are the oracles of our machines. Many of them adhere to the “new urban paradigm elevates efficiency and central control above privacy local autonomy class diversity and broad-based property ownership.” In addition, they “seek to profit from manipulating our moods, influence the behavior of our children, [and] structure our living environment as well.” 

Ideas have consequences, and we cannot love what we do not know. Many of the oligarchs have been indoctrinated into a monolithic neo-liberal worldview. Their disdain for tradition exacerbates a class conflict and leads to an oppressive environment to the consumers that will increasingly be dependent of their products. While they may have intentions for fairness of democratic values, few will be able to see beyond the inherent bias in the culture. The ones that do may be shunned or ostracized.  

Miguel Nicolelis says, “You cannot code intuition; you cannot code aesthetic beauty; you cannot code love or hate.” And yet, there will be those who will try to nudge machines to do as they like. This we must fear more than the machines themselves.