Taught to hate America?

There's an idea afoot—I've seen it on Twitter but I assume it is common elsewhere as well—that blames the state of America on college professors. The specific claim is that our society is laboring under a number of dysfunctional principles—principles that are summarized as "woke" and that relate to such topics as sex, gender, race, and the correct uses of police authority. The suggestion is, further, that these principles have been smuggled into modern consciousness by college professors teaching "Critical Theory." While only a small percentage of students come anywhere near a class that might be flavored by even a hint of Critical Theory itself, the idea seems to be that it serves as some kind of leavening agent, so that a tiny bit can transform the whole of higher education.

However things may stand with Critical Theory narrowly-construed, it is undeniable that overall the attitudes on campus have changed in the last 75 years with respect to patriotism, government, and the American Founding, to say nothing of sex, gender, race, and the police. And so it is natural to wonder Why? What has caused this change?

The accusation from the modern Right appears to be that it all started with a cabal of radical professors (perhaps European émigrés fleeing World War Two) who hated and resented America's foundational principles and who therefore taught their students to do likewise. The students, in turn, were too simple and naïf to suspect their professors of perfidy, and therefore passively accepted the hatred of America that they were taught in class. And so, over the course of about a generation, everything that Americans used to believe about themselves was brought into disrepute. And here we are.

It's a clear picture, and it has the virtue of simplicity. But I don't think it's true. Of course something like it might have happened here or there once or twice in an incidental way, but I think it can't be the whole or main explanation.

In the first place, the explanation is too clear and simple: whenever you hear someone blame a broad social change on a handful of deliberate bad actors you should be suspicious, because bad actors rarely have that kind of power by themselves.

In the second place, it's nothing like what I remember. I went to college in the late 1970's and early 1980's, exactly the time period in which this project (if it ever existed) should have been getting well under way. The overall ethos of the college I attended was aggressively left-wing. And yet I would not say that any of my professors hated America.

It is true that there was a strain of the left-wing sentiment which bordered on disloyalty. And if you had asked me to explain it back then, I could only have pointed to isolated bits of the larger picture. Not many years before, Richard Nixon had left the White House in disgrace and everyone knew he been caught lying to the American public. His record destroyed the trust in our government that many Americans had felt beforehand. Inside the academic world, scholars like Charles A. Beard had argued years before that the Constitution was written to protect the property of rich men, an explanation which was rather different from what most of us had learned in high school. These bits and bobs contributed to an air that felt edgy and exciting; and, as I say, in extreme cases it may have bordered on disloyalty. But it wasn't that any of my professors ever hated America.

To get to the true explanation, I think we have to look at that edginess, and how exciting it felt. And it is critical to remember that America is, in its fundamental character, violent and aggressive. Therefore we honor courage. We honor those who stand up to powers stronger than they are … especially those who stand up and win. Even among the "woke," we give the greatest honor to those who fight against the greatest odds: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., or Che Guevara. In fact, I think these figures are honored far more for their courage than for the causes that they supported. Even people who are unclear what exactly these figures stood for admire their courage.

Young students want to make names for themselves. They desperately want and need to be brave. In the 1860's young men proved themselves by enlisting to fight in the Civil War; in the 1940's young men dropped out of school and enlisted to fight in World War Two. As long as our country faced foreign enemies that could credibly threaten us, young men (at any rate) proved their courage by joining the armed forces to fight in defense of our country.

But by the 1960's and 1970's, we had run out of such enemies. Notionally there was still a threat that we could be annihilated by nuclear war with the Soviet Union; but nobody lived their lives in that fear. We all figured that if it happened, it happened; but there was no room for courage when one was threatened by an atomic bomb. And other than the Soviet Union, our enemies were … who exactly? Vietnam? Grenada? It's true that we lost the Vietnam War in any meaningful sense, but nobody ever pretended that Vietnam could seriously threaten the United States. And Grenada? Oh please.

For all practical purposes, that left the ambitious young of this country only one meaningful enemy that they could feel brave by opposing: the United States itself. To the extent that we were seduced into disloyalty or something like it, it was because we wanted to be brave and daring; and our own government was the only available enemy strong enough that it required courage to oppose them. So my classmates opposed the government in order to show that they were brave and independent. My classmates opposed the government because only in such opposition could they display the martial courage that they needed so desperately to maintain their self-esteem. 

Maybe in another country this would have worked out differently. But we are Americans. We are a country made by war, a country marked by violent self-assertion. We are happiest fighting the good fight against terrible odds. So when we won—when we ran out of credible enemies to fight—how could it have been any surprise when our best and most talented youth began fighting against our own institutions?

Who needs professors to teach us to hate America, when the students will pick up the fight on their own initiative?      

          

The tragedy of Israel and Palestine

This is a post that I have been slow to write. I figured out a while ago what I wanted to say—a year? Two years? I forget. But actually putting my fingers on the keyboard is work; so for some time now I've told myself, "There'll be a time to do that later."

But maybe that time is now.

Yesterday, October 7, 2023, the Palestinian militant and nationalist organization Hamas launched an attack on the State of Israel out of the Gaza Strip. Today, October 8, Israel retaliated against the Palestinian population in Gaza, and formally declared war against Hamas. [As a pedantic aside, I didn't know it was possible to declare war against anything but a sovereign state, which Hamas is not. But my thinking is probably out of date.] 

The news is horrifying. Whichever side you support, there is enough news about the atrocities committed by the other side to enrage you. Twitter is a complete mess.

But which side should we support? If we take a step back and look at the situation through a philosophic lens, which side is right and which is wrong? I started this blog with a commitment to the idea that philosophy can be naïve and practical, and to the related idea that the things in our world have a nature and a purpose. That should mean that we can ask questions about right and wrong. So let's ask. Who is right, and who is wrong?

Why blame gets us nowhere

I'll give my answer first, and then I'll give my reasons for it. Yes, it is fair to ask about right and wrong, but in this particular case the question gets us nowhere. The conflict between Israel and Palestine is not a morality play, with heroes and villains. No, the conflict between Israel and Palestine is a tragedy in all the most classical senses of the word: it has been and continues to be very destructive; it was inevitable; and there is no way out. I do not see any chance for a happy ending.

I'm sorry. I wish it were different.

Partisans on each side will be furious with me for refusing to denounce the Other Side as the malicious Bad Guys who started the whole mess. But when I make this refusal, I am not indulging in easy or unthinking both-sides-ism. Let me try to explain.

In the first place, the history of the conflict is very crowded with incident and circumstance. Whatever date you pick as a starting point (the founding of Israel in 1948 is a popular choice), a lot has happened between then and now to cause rancor, grief, and rage. Any attempt to parse through this history to find the true Guilty Parties will take a very long time (because there is so much of it), but in the end the analysis is guaranteed to terminate in the following hard facts (among others).

There have been incidents when particular Israelis have treated particular Palestinians with cruelty and violence and injustice. A complete history will include many such incidents.

There have been incidents when particular Palestinians have treated particular Israelis with cruelty and violence and injustice. A complete history will include many such incidents.

When the particular Israelis that I just mentioned above mistreated particular Palestinians, they were certain that they were morally justified in what they did, because of some earlier mistreatment that had been inflicted on them personally or on someone they cared for.

When the particular Palestinians that I just mentioned above mistreated particular Israelis, they were certain that they were morally justified in what they did, because of some earlier mistreatment that had been inflicted on them personally or on someone they cared for.

A truly complete history—the kind of history that only Divine Omniscience could compile or understand—would include a long-enough train of such actions followed by such reactions that any human who tried to analyze it would lose the thread or fall asleep before he got even halfway through.

In other words, there is simply too much history here—and entirely too much righteousness—for any philosophic understanding of the recurrent claims and counterclaims to be possible. The only way anyone can extract a moral from this history is by deliberately ignoring half of it. There was probably one person responsible for starting the Hatfield-McCoy feud as well, but after enough years the identity of the varmint who started it all just didn't matter any more.*

Therefore, the Moral Framework implied by the question "Who is to blame?" gets us nowhere. Is there another framework we can use instead?

Israel as a colonial power

Indeed there is. We could use a Historical Framework, to see Israel as the very last of the European colonial powers that dominated the world in the nineteenth century. The proposal to see Zionism as a form of settler colonialism is controversial; Wikipedia states that the idea "is rejected by most Israeli Jews and perceived either as an attack on the legitimacy of Israel or a form of antisemitism."** But if you consider the question at a purely factual level, and not as an attack or a piece of propaganda, this framework does have a few points in its favor.

Wikipedia defines "settler colonialism" (in part) as follows:

Settler colonialism is a form of colonization where foreign citizens move into a region and create permanent … settlements …. The creation of settler colonies often resulted in the forced migration of indigenous peoples to less desirable territories …. Many settler colonies sought to establish European-like institutions and practices that granted certain personal freedoms and allowed settlers to become wealthy by engaging in trade. Thus, jury trials, freedom from arbitrary arrest, and electoral representation were implemented to allow settlers rights similar to those enjoyed in Europe, ….***

And can anyone deny that this exactly describes the establishment of the State of Israel inside the territory of the British Mandate for Palestine?

• Foreign citizens (mostly from Europe) moved into the area. (Indeed, even today 50% of the Jewish population of Israel traces their origins to Europe or Russia.)****
• The settlement of these Europeans in the Levant forced the migration of indigenous peoples (the Palestinians) to somewhere else.
• And the State of Israel established political institutions that look remarkably like the institutions of the European countries that they left.

Of course there are differences too—there are always differences whenever you consider any historical analogy. I dare say that even if you look at two instances of undeniable "settler colonialism" you will find important differences between them. But the similarities are suggestive enough that the analogy is intriguing.

But stick with me for a minute.

If you take the framework of settler colonialism seriously, the first thing that strikes you unavoidably is how much gentler has been the Israeli occupation of Palestine than any other instance you care to name. I'm an American, so the easiest example for me to think of is how the British settlers who colonized North America treated the American Indians. Spoiler alert: it wasn't good! Earlier in this essay I alluded to the many cases of mistreatment of (particular) Palestinians at the hands of (particular) Israelis: now having said that (and I stand by it), I also insist that this mistreatment—bad as it has been!—does not even remotely rise to the level of callous brutality that marked the long wars between the fledgling United States and the tribes who were here first.

Because this is a contentious issue and it is easy to misunderstand what anybody says about it, let me be very clear about two things:

• To my mind, calling the Israelis "colonialists" does not indict them!
• And also, to my mind, saying that the Israelis haven't been as brutal as the Americans does not exonerate them! 

All I'm trying to do is to get a view of what has been going on for the last 75 years. It's not easy, and I hope that this framework can help. And the answer is, well sure … maybe. But now that I've painted this picture, what comes next?

The fundamental question

It almost looks like I have stacked the argument against the State of Israel at this point. Colonialism is out of fashion these days. The polite, accepted opinion of the educated and comfortable classes around the world is that colonialism is bad. So if I describe Israel as a colonial power, somebody might think that I mean to condemn her. More pointedly, if we all politely agree that colonialism is bad … well, presumably that means we all think the colonization shouldn't have happened. The State of Israel was declared only 75 years ago, which is pretty recent in historical terms. In fact that was right about the time that European colonies the world over were getting their freedom. If the world had come to agree that colonialism was bad, why did the world allow the creation of one more European colony at that exact time, a colony which by necessity of its nature would end up mistreating the indigenous people it displaced?

Of course we all know, historically, why the State of Israel was established just then. So let me turn the question around and ask: If colonization is always so bad, what exactly was the alternative?

More pointedly: Where exactly were the Jews of Europe supposed to go after 1945, if not to Palestine? 

• Their recent treatment by Hitler's Reich had made it pretty clear that they couldn't trust Europe any more, since the most civilized and cultivated country in Europe had just come close to exterminating the European Jewish population.
• And every other piece of dry ground on the planet already had other people living there! 

When the Great Powers deliberated after World War Two and looked for a place that the Jews could safely resettle, suppose they picked somewhere else: Arizona, or Madagascar, or Tibet.***** Name a place. Wherever you choose, there would have been somebody else already living there. And that means that the very same dynamic which has defined the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would have played out in the other place instead.

As soon as it became clear that the world's Jews could not feel safe among the goyyim, as soon as anyone decided that a Jewish State was the best security against the annihilation of the Jewish people—from that moment, it became certain that the new Jewish State would have to be a colonial one. From that moment, the current conflict in Palestine became inevitable. Of course it might have taken place somewhere else: Arizona, or Madagascar, or Tibet. But it was always sure to happen. 

That's why I call this conflict a tragedy. It's destructive; it's inevitable; and I don't see any way out.

I'd love to be wrong, though.   

__________

* You are entitled to ask, "But isn't that just both-sides-ism after all?" Maybe. Call it that if you like. But it is categorically not easy or unthinking. If this is both-sides-ism, it is nonetheless reasoned.   

** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism_as_settler_colonialism#Reception. Link copied 2023-10-08.  

*** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_Western_European_colonialism_and_colonization#Settler_colonialism. Link copied 2023-10-08. 

**** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel#Demographics. Link copied 2023-10-08. 

***** So far as I know, nobody suggested any of these specific places in real life. They are just crazy examples that I made up. But the point is that it doesn't matter where you picked, because the same thing would have happened regardless.         

          

Where have all the grownups gone? Part 3, Children

And what were the children doing, all the while? That's the most important question, isn't it?

To recap, the larger question I am exploring in this series is how to explain the massive cultural shift in America that became visible during the 1960's. I have taken, as one particular thread in that tapestry, the changing expectations and representations of adulthood. My answer is that our social and cultural expectations stopped short, because a generation of parents neglected to explain them to their children; and that the reason they failed to pass on these inherited values is that they were shocked into silence by the Second World War. In Part One I posed the question, and explained why the War is the only explanation that fits the timeline. In Part Two, I used two classic movies (The Best Years of Our Lives and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit) to show how the War affected the men who fought in it, and how their reintegration into civilian society suffered accordingly. The remaining question is, What was it like to be raised as a child of such men? Let's look at that now.

Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

Rebel Without a Cause is a movie about fatherlessness, or about the damage done by failed or absent fathers. The three main characters—Jim Stark, Judy (no surname given), and "Plato" Crawford—all suffer in that respect. 

• Jim's father (Frank) is weak, and is chronically pushed around by his wife (Carol, Jim's mother) and his own mother (just called Mrs. Stark).
• Judy's father is cold and stern, and pushes away any affection from his daughter while still lavishing affection on her younger brother. (It is strongly implied that his coldness is a defense to keep his daughter at arm's length now that she is sexually attractive.)
• Plato's father abandoned the family when Plato was a toddler, and Plato's mother is frequently absent. Plato is raised by the housekeeper.
• There is exactly one character who acts the way a good father ought to act: Police Inspector Ray Fremick, who focuses on juvenile crime and who tries to steer these three in the right direction when he meets them. But of course for him it's a job; and at one point when Jim desperately needs him, he's tied up with another case.

Comparing this context briefly with the two movies we considered in Part Two, there are certain basic consistencies. Nobody mentions the War. But Jim, Judy, and Plato are all teenagers; if the movie is set in present time (1955) then it's possible that these characters should have been born somewhere in the years between, let's say 1938-1942. Their fathers—at any rate, Jim's and Judy's—might have been young men* before the War, who shipped out leaving wives and infants behind.** We are explicitly told that Plato's father abandoned the family, so perhaps he was in business and already beyond draft age; it hardly matters, because he is simply not there. One interesting touch is that Tom Rath (in Grey Flannel Suit) is offered an impressive promotion that would require him to work and travel all the time, at the cost of never coming home. He turns it down so that he can spend time with his family. If he had accepted it, his children might have grown up something like Plato.

What do these children do, in the absence of any parental attention or direction? They get into all manner of trouble. But what's heartbreaking is to realize what they want, which is a simple and ordered family life: the kind of family lives they might have had in reality if Jim's father had been strong, if Judy's father had been loving, and if Plato's father had been there. The three of them spend a lot of time wandering around together, or staying out late at night—again, because no one is supervising them. And they end up creating a kind of replacement family unit of their own: Jim as father, Judy as mother, and Plato as child. 

It doesn't last. It all goes badly wrong. And it was never a terribly detailed "family" anyway—more a hint, or a gesture, or a wish than anything solid. But the game they play with each other is, in its evanescent and vestigial way, just what Joan Didion said a decade later about the games at Haight-Ashbury: "the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum."*** 

As I said, nobody in Rebel ever mentions the War. But the fathers in this movie are shut off from their children—inaccessible in any meaningful way even when they are physically present. If their inaccessibility wasn't caused by the War, it could have been. I bet dollars to donuts that Al and Homer and Fred from The Best Years, and Tom from Gray Flannel Suit, end up just as inaccessible to their own children.

And, as we can see, it's a hell of a way to grow up.

The Graduate (1967)

And so we come to The Graduate, these days possibly the most famous film of the four. It was released in December, 1967. Only a few months before was the Summer of Love, the exact time that Joan Didion wrote about in the passage I quoted in Part One (or immediately above). In terms of the question I have been pursuing, this is Ground Zero, The Thing To Be Explained. Everything else builds up to this.  

I'm not going to summarize the plot. Odds are high that everyone reading this knows the story of Benjamin Braddock and Mrs. Robinson and her daughter Elaine. But I want to look at the fathers in this story, and at what they taught their children.

Ben is a little younger than the main characters of Rebel. If he is a college graduate in 1967, then he was likely born in the first couple of years after the War ended. Could his father, Mr. Braddock—and Braddock's business partner, Mr. Robinson—have fought in the War, and then built a thriving law practice in the twenty years after, while Ben was growing up? Sure, maybe. It's entirely possible. And it would be consistent with the story I am telling, because all we ever hear from these men is superficial.

Mr. Braddock is proud of Ben's successes in college because … success is good, and Ben's successes reflect well on him. He buys Ben a deep sea diving outfit that Ben will obviously never use or want because … it shows off that he can afford it, I guess. He wants Ben to "take stock of himself" and go get a good job because … well, that's what you do after college. Isn't it? Nowhere in all this is there any kind of explanation that reaches beyond the action itself. 

• He might have said that Ben's successes in a particular activity in college (pre-med, pre-law, journalism, debate, even football) were good because they would prepare him to take on that activity as an adult. 
• He might have bought Ben a graduation present that Ben would have liked, or that he could have used pragmatically in his young adulthood.
• He might have said that Ben needs to get a job because the world is a hard and dangerous place, and the possibility is ever-present for poverty and ruin. 
• Or he might have acknowledged that he has been fortunate enough to provide Ben and his mother a comfortable living, but Ben now has a duty to the family (and his own family-to-be!) to go out and do likewise. 

But he doesn't. He probably doesn't even know why he finds important the things he finds important. He has obviously never reflected on them, and he doesn't remember what he was taught back when he was a boy. He remembers that certain things are important, but not why. He has forgotten the melody that ties the words together.

Mr. Robinson is just as shallow. He urges Ben to "sow a few wild oats" without ever thinking what that might mean in reality. Then when he discovers Ben's affair with his wife, he divorces her. Why? That's what you do, I guess. It's not that Mrs. Robinson is wracked with lovesickness over losing Ben, and it's not that he thinks Ben will try to steal Mrs. Robinson. Ben says as much. There is certainly no risk that Mrs. Robinson will bear a child to Ben. Nor is it that Mr. Robinson thinks of sex as a high and sacred thing that has to be restricted to marriage, or he wouldn't have encouraged Ben to sow some wild oats. (More pointedly, he and his then-girlfriend wouldn't have conceived Elaine in the back seat of a Ford, so that they then had to get married.) Again, all the reasons that might drive his actions are missing. But he remembers that "this is what you are supposed to do."

What does this mean for how Ben and Elaine were raised? They were taught isolated things, with no context. They were taught "this is what you do" but with no reasons. They learned the words, but not the music. Or, to quote Didion again, their parents "had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game [they] happened to be playing."**** Their parents were inaccessible to them in all but the most superficial ways while they grew up, and so all they learned—all they were taught—were superficialities.

And Ben says as much. When he takes Elaine out for a hamburger, he tries to explain to her how confused he feels. And he expresses it perfectly. “It's like I was playing some kind of game, but the rules don't make any sense to me. They're being made up by all the wrong people. I mean no one makes them up. They seem to make themselves up.” 

That's it. That's it exactly. A few of the rules are still remembered, as a kind of cargo-cult left over from the pre-war period. But they hang in the air. None of the social or cultural infrastructure that supported them remained. And without that infrastructure, without the thousands of implicit assumptions that supported the whole pre-war way of life, none of the rules made any sense. 

When the rules make no sense, they are easy to ignore and to sweep away. And something else takes their place. Grownups are replaced by old dudes.

And so the Sixties left us with a brand new world.

__________

* Or at any rate not old men.  

** In fairness, Frank Stark (Jim's father) wouldn't have been young when the War broke out. The part was played by Jim Backus, who was born in 1913 and therefore was 42 when he made Rebel. But by that same math he was only 28 when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and there must have been soldiers as old as 28. So it is not impossible that Jim's dad could have been a veteran, even though nothing is said about it.  

*** Joan Didion, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968, 1981), p.127.  

**** Ibid.           

           

Where have all the grownups gone? Part 2, Parents

In Part One, I argued that the sharp cultural discontinuity which became visible during the Sixties was caused by a generation of parents not talking to their children, and in particular not teaching them all the behaviors and expectations that had formerly made up the fabric of society. And I further suggested that the reason a whole generation of parents fell silent is that they were traumatized by the Second World War. But how did that really happen in practice? I hear you ask. Sure, it's a clever idea. But anyone can come up with a clever idea, and this one sounds almost too clever by half. Are you trying to say that one morning in 1946 all the adults in the country became Trappists?

No, of course not. But it's a fair question, and one that I think it is easier to answer by showing than by telling. Fortunately, there are movies which do exactly that.

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

The Best Years of Our Lives follows three recently-discharged servicemen as they try to reintegrate into civilian life in the fictional Midwestern town of Boone City. Al Stephenson is a bank executive who served in the infantry, rising to the rank of sergeant. Homer Parrish is a high-school athlete who served in the Navy and lost his hands; the Navy replaced them with hooks. Fred Derry is a drugstore soda jerk who proved to be a talented bombardier in the Army Air Corps; consequently he was commissioned as an officer with an officer's pay.

All three have trouble re-entering civilian society. The war has changed them, and they no longer fit where they fit before. What is more, no one in civilian society understands them at all: nether what they went through during the war, nor who they are now. 

• Al, the banker, approves a loan to a man with no collateral, and is chastised by his superior at the bank. Al explains that he was used to putting his life and those of his men in the hands of others, and so developed a pretty keen sense of who deserves trust and who doesn't. He assures his superior that this man is good for the loan, and the matter is settled … but not really, of course.
• Homer left a sweetheart back home when he shipped out, and now he can't believe that she still wants to marry him when he no longer has hands.
• Fred suffers from PTSD flashbacks at night, and the only job he can find is his old job at the drugstore. But that pays less than a third what he made as a bombardier. Also his wife (whom he married on a fling just before shipping out) is disappointed in him and wants the freedom she had during the war, while she could spend his pay without having him underfoot. 

The movie is masterfully made. The characters are real and believable; the situations are honest. If you haven't seen it yet, do. But what is important in this context is to see the massive gulf between the servicemen and civilian society. On the one hand, the civilians flatly cannot understand the minds of the servicemen. For their part, the servicemen understand civilian life in a manner of speaking, because they used to live there too; but they have no respect for it. They can't take it seriously. After what they have been through, the things that civilian society finds important look petty and artificial and childish. 

But they can't say this openly, of course. They might not even articulate to themselves that this is why they are so ill at ease. But ill at ease they certainly are, all of them. And while the movie gives us hope that they will each find a way forward, it gives us no reason to think that anyone will understand them any better in the future. 

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956)

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was made ten years after The Best Years of Our Lives. The protagonist is Tom Rath, but he might as well be Al or Homer or Fred. His experience of the War was at least as bad as theirs.

Tom Rath lives in suburban Connecticut. He has a house, a wife, and three children. His income isn't large enough, and he is trying to advance in his career. He never talks about the War unless asked directly, and sometimes not even then. It's as if he has put that whole experience in a box in the attic, where he never has to look at it.

Except that he, too, suffers from PTSD flashbacks, and not just at night. We see him one morning taking the train into work, when some loud noise on the tracks startles him and suddenly he is in the middle of a memory of battle. He remembers the 17 men he killed. He remembers the death of his best friend. In fact, we see clearly in the scene that Tom himself was (by accident) responsible for his friend's death; and yet in his conscious mind Tom never seems to recognize this.

In one sense we don't see the same overt incomprehension from the civilian world that we see in The Best Years, because Tom Rath never tries to be understood. He never opens the box. Except once. While he was fighting in Italy, when he never knew whether the next day might be his last, he had an affair with an Italian girl. Through a remarkable series of coincidences, he discovers that she is still alive, that she had a son by him, and that she badly needs money. He tells his wife about the affair, because he wants to send the girl some money to get by. And his wife is furious. She cannot understand how he could do such a thing. She judges him entirely by the standards of respectable peacetime behavior. And she runs off into the night. 

In the end Tom and his wife are reconciled. And there are many more subplots. This is a long movie, and a lot happens. But the key for my purposes is to look at the character of Tom Rath himself. The classic pose from the movie, as in the picture here, shows him standing stock still at parade rest: suit immaculate, hat on, jacket buttoned. It is easy to imagine that this is what Al and Homer and Fred from The Best Years will look like in ten years' time. They and Tom will take care of business; they will do what has to be done. When confronted with the myriad subtle rules that form the fabric of civilian society, they will comply with the ones that aren't too much trouble; they might quietly ignore the ones they find particularly stupid. But they won't accept any of it uncritically, nor are they likely to reflect critically—on their experience or on society itself. They will do their duty and keep the rest of it tightly buttoned up. Closed in a box in the attic.

That's how the War trained a generation of men to live silently. In Part 3, I'll talk about how this silence affected their growing children.    

         

Where have all the grownups gone? Part 1, The End of the World

Where have all the flowers gone?

Long time passing.

Where have all the flowers gone?

Long time ago.

Where have all the flowers gone?

The girls have picked them every one.

Oh, When will you ever learn?

Oh, When will you ever learn?

—"Where have all the flowers gone?" by Pete Seeger

For the last forty years, at least, I have heard people grumble that "we"—our culture, our society, our country, or some other large group too big for any single one of us to be personally responsible for them—just don't have grownups any more, the way we used to. I can't tell you for sure where I first heard the complaint: the first source that I remember was an essay by Joseph Epstein, writing as "Aristides" in The American Scholar, in the autumn of 1986:

"Act your age," mothers would say to their children when I was a boy. [Epstein was born in 1937.] "Be a man," fathers would exhort their sons. "Aw, grow up," older sisters and teenage girlfriends would exclaim. In fact, growing up didn't seem like a bad idea. A goodly number of grown-ups walked the streets in those days. Think only of the movies. Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, James Cagney—these were men who appeared on screen in suits and ties, hats, black shoes. Grown-ups. Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Harrison Ford—these are men who, at the same age as Robinson, Bogart & Co., one thinks of as characteristically in jeans, sneakers or boots, loose collars. Graduate students. One could make a similar comparison of actresses. Compare Bette Davis and Jane Fonda, Ingrid Bergman and Meryl Streep. All are fine actresses, but the former are women, the latter girls who continue to grow older. Nowadays there aren't so many grown-ups—just a lot of older dudes. It is, apparently, what the culture calls for just now. I happen to be writing this in a short-sleeve rugby shirt, chino pants, and tasseled loafers. I'm an older dude myself.* 

Now, 1986 was a long time ago but the point has not faded away. I have read it again and again, over time, most recently this January in an article by Katherine Boyle for The Free Press.** She used more recent examples than Epstein did, instancing Sam Bankman-Fried*** instead of Harrison Ford, and contrasting "the tens of millions of Americans that are, like me, millennials or members of the generation just younger, Gen Z, [who] have been treated as hapless children our entire lives," with a putative Boomer gerontocracy that refuses to relinquish the reins of adulthood to anyone else. But it's the same basic complaint. People who should be old enough to act like adults (when you count out their ages on a calendar) nonetheless act like children, present themselves as children, and are treated as children. 

(Here's yet another piece making the exact same point, this time incidentally in support of a larger discussion of the war in Ukraine.)

It's important to recognize that this is not just traditional generational griping. This is not just one more time that the Old Folks start grumbling about how "kids nowadays" don't show the proper respect. Boyle identifies herself as a millennial; her profile on LinkedIn does not list a single job experience earlier than 2010. From the other side of the divide Epstein, after explaining that he was raised with a clear ethic of adulthood, concedes that at the time of writing he was dressed down just like the actors he pegged as "graduate students." The point is, rather, that people in their twenties or thirties or forties carry themselves differently—act and are acted upon differently—than people of those ages used to do, and that the change has been abrupt enough to catch our attention.

Another way to visualize this shift is to reflect that Abraham Lincoln entered the White House when he was 52; Franklin Roosevelt, when he was 51. Notwithstanding all the changes in our country between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both men entered upon their responsibilities with a certain, simple adult gravitas. When Bill Clinton was 52, he was impeached by the House of Representatives; and while opinions may differ about the political or moral merits of the impeachment, I don't remember anyone accusing Clinton of much gravitas at the time.

Or perhaps it's enough to watch grown adults singing "I don't want to grow up; I'm a Toys-R-Us kid!" in a commercial from the 1990's. Thirty seconds on YouTube can summarize many pages of social commentary.

So what changed?

That's really the question I want to address here. That something did change, I take as given: my examples are meant not to prove anything, but just to show or indicate what kind of change I am talking about. But the cause? That's more elusive.

Usually when people write about this change they blame the Sixties. But what does that mean? Yes, this country experienced a Kulturkampf during the 1960's; and yes, many of the changes that I am describing became visible then. But when we blame "the Sixties" for these changes, what specific elements do we identify as causes?

• Music?
• Drugs?
• Television?
• Birth control?
• Political protest?
• An unpopular war?
• The Civil Rights movement?
• Or shall we join Allan Bloom in blaming imported German philosophy?

You can make an argument for any of these, I suppose. Probably, as you go down the list, for each point in turn you can find someone who has argued that it is The Real Cause That Made Everything Change. But to me they all look like symptoms. 

• Yes, Sixties youth listened to a certain kind of music that their parents didn't care for; but there had been musical fads before (jazz and big band in the twentieth century, or Romantic music in the nineteenth) and they never turned grownups into children.
• Yes, some people took drugs. But honestly, there weren't that many people who took a lot of them. And why should pot or acid change social expectations more profoundly than bourbon or corn silk?
• America has had a long history of political protests, including opposition to unpopular wars. (Remember that in 1812, New England was a hotbed of opposition to "Mr. Madison's War.") Whatever other effects they had, and sometimes those effects were sweeping, none of them were like this.
• We have even experienced waves of new philosophies that leapt out of the ivory towers to spark the popular imagination: Transcendentalism, New Thought, and Pragmatism to name only three. Again, the results were nothing like this. 

In fact, the longer I look at it the more I think that the social change which became visible in the Sixties was sui generis. We have had social changes before, but none like this. Somewhere along the line, an old world ended and a new world was born.

How does a world end? In many ways. But the simplest way for a world to end is through silence. Social attitudes are passed on from parents to children, after all, largely through speech. Parents and other adults talk to children, communicating directly and indirectly what is acceptable and what is not. But this means that if adults ever stop talking to their children, the continuity of cultural transmission is broken. All it takes is one generation of silence to break the chain. What's more, the break need not take place in all families. As long as it happens in enough families to generate a critical mass, a new world can be born and the others will be carried along by the tide.

This is exactly Joan Didion's diagnosis of what lay behind the Haight-Ashbury scene in the summer of 1967.

We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.****

Fine, so for two decades parents somehow forgot to tell their children how to live their lives. That still doesn't answer Why? What trauma could have been so bad that it stunned an entire generation of parents into silence? What event could have been so destructive that it constituted The End of the World?

There is only one possible answer in that time frame, only one gash across our history so destructive and so traumatic that it could have had anything like this effect. The End of the World has to have been the Second World War.

In Parts Two and Three, I will sketch out the concrete steps by which this change took place, by paying close attention to four classic movies that tell the story. 

__________

* Joseph Epstein (credited as Aristides), "An Older Dude," The American Scholar, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Autumn 1986), pp.439.    

** Katherine Boyle, "It’s Time to Get Serious," The Free Press, January 17, 2023, https://www.thefp.com/p/its-time-to-get-serious. (URL captured on Sunday, August 6, 2023.) 

*** In fairness, Bankman-Fried would not even be born until six years after Epstein published his article.      

**** Joan Didion, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968, 1981), p.127.               

          

Pure social Quality?

In his book Lila, Robert Pirsig talks at length about Static and Dynamic Quality. Dynamic Quality always tugs on us, pulling us forwards. Static Quality freezes and consolidates the gains made by Dynamic Quality. And Pirsig argues that Static Quality exists on four different levels. (He confuses his picture by introducing the term "evolution" throughout, but his theory has nothing to do with any kind of evolution.) These levels are: inorganic, biological, social, and intellectual. The inorganic level is the level of raw matter and energy, "stuff". Better than this (i.e., higher in Quality) are living organisms. Then living organisms group together into social structures (bee hives, chimpanzee troops, human societies). And finally at the highest level there are intellectual entities like thoughts and ideas. All of these levels are in some sense "made of" Quality, but they all express Quality in different ways.

They also experience Quality in different ways. This leads to conflict between the levels. Social structures inevitably try to curtail or repress the biological impulses of their members; but then intellectual structures critique and reform social institutions. It also means that something can be perceived as good at one level, but bad at another.

One example that Pirsig discusses at great length is the Victorian attitudes towards sex. Pirsig classifies the Victorian perspective as one of pure social Quality, which was horrified by the thought of unrestrained sexuality. But at the biological level, of course, sex is both necessary and valuable. He goes so far as to say that, "from [our] cells' point of view sex is pure Dynamic Quality, the highest Good of all."*

This got me to wondering: where do we find "pure Dynamic Quality, the highest Good of all," at a social level? Pirsig himself thinks it is Celebrity, or Fame. He writes:

Celebrity is to social patterns as sex is to biological patterns.... This celebrity is Dynamic Quality within a static social level of evolution. It looks and feels like pure Dynamic Quality for a while, but it isn't. Sexual desire is the Dynamic Quality that primitive biological patterns once used to organize themselves. Celebrity is the Dynamic Quality that primitive social patterns once used to organize themselves ….

When you look back into the very first writings in the history of the Western world, the cuneiform writings on the mud tablets of Babylon, what are they about? Why, they're about celebrity: I, Hammurabi, am the big wheel here. I have this many horses and this many concubines and this many slaves and this many oxen, and I am one of the greatest of the greatest kings there ever was, and you better believe it.**

It's an intriguing idea, but I think there is a more basic phenomenon that he has missed. Think about sex for a minute. Lust is all-consuming. When you are in the grips of lust it orients your thought, your speech, and your action. It has its own logic: there are things that look personally reasonable through the lens of lust, that you look back at the next day in mystification: "What was I thinking?" But also it can be a way of life. This is the story of Don Juan, the fictional libertine who devotes his whole life to seducing women. I hope I don't need to add that there are people in real life who try to live this way too, with greater or less success.

In other words, to be a credible stand-in for Dynamic Quality at some static level, a phenomenon has to be broad enough to generate a whole world of experience. It has to be able to orient you totally. It has to have its own logic, and it has to be able to inspire a way of life. I think this is more than we can ask of Celebrity. What is more, consider that sex (Quality from the biological level) opens the door to the next level up, to the social level, at least for us. Sex not only creates new life, but sexual attachment binds us to each other in a way that contains the germ of society. So whatever it is that stands in for pure Dynamic Quality at the social level should open up doors to abstract thought and intellection, to the intellectual level. I'm not sure I believe that Celebrity forces a lot of hard thinking, either.

However, most crucially, social Quality does not have to be any respecter of the biological level. Pirsig is clear that higher levels curtail or discipline lower levels as often as they enhance them. Probably a lot more often.

There is a phenomenon that meets all these requirements. It is WAR.

War binds and unifies and organizes social patterns. War takes over thought and speech.*** War has its own logic. War inspires a way of life: there have been many over the years who have found their callings as warriors. And war certainly demands of us the ability to think at the highest level: first to develop tactics, then strategy, and finally diplomacy and politics and law.

But war is destructive of life! So it is. I have noted above that this fact does not stand in the way of my thesis.

But war is destructive of everything! General William T. Sherman famously said, "War is hell." True, all true. But plenty of participants have also found it inspiring like nothing else in their lives. Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel is clear about both the horror and the thrill of trench warfare on the Western Front in World War I.   

Of course, any metaphysics is just a way of seeing things. There will always be another metaphysical system, and another way of seeing the same phenomena anew. But I think there is a lot to be said for understanding that Mars is as powerful a god as Venus. And for those who want to avoid wars, it would be prudent to understand how embedded they are in human experience.   

__________

* Robert Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (New York: Bantam Books, 1991), p. 202.

** Ibid., p. 256.  

*** See Thucydides, on how the revolution in Corcyra corrupted everyday speech; or George Orwell's essay, "Politics and the English Language."      

  

Election interference

A couple days ago I was talking with a friend, and mentioned that I didn't understand why American attitudes towards the Ukraine War seem to divide along partisan lines. What is it about (for example) supporting abortion rights or Black Lives Matter that automatically translates into supporting military aid for Ukraine? I remember back during my adolescence that many Democrats argued for peace or even isolationism, while the Republicans were saber-rattlers; why should the parties have (seemingly) changed positions now?

My friend was a little incredulous at my incomprehension. She reminded me that Russian hackers had taken steps in 2016 to sway our election; as a result, she said, she and many other Democrats still blame Russian interference today for the election of Donald Trump. I admit I hadn't thought of that, maybe partly because I always thought the accusation sounded a little weak. Even given that Russian hackers posted inflammatory material on social media, still the voters themselves were the ones who cast ballots. Nobody has ever claimed that the Russians hacked voting machines so that a vote for Mrs. Clinton was recorded for Mr. Trump. As for the influence that social media might have had, I figure everyone knows that the Internet is full of crazy people, so you have to take anything you read with a grain of salt. Presumably the voters who read material posted by these Russian trolls know that too.

Just now I did a search and found a recent article from Vox which argues that while Russian agents did indeed post stuff on American social media, it probably didn't determine the outcome of the election.

But I also started thinking: is this really the first time our country has had any experience with election interference? Or is it just the first time the influence has gone this direction?

      

What counts as "hate speech"?

Yesterday someone at work was talking about recent developments in the Ukraine War. I haven't been following the news, so mostly I just listened while he and our boss discussed things. Anyway, somewhere along the line he began speculating about what might happen in Russia once Vladimir Putin dies. He referenced a couple of events I wasn't familiar with (so I don't remember what they were) and then said, "Do you think they'll learn from such obvious failures? Of course they're Russians, so they might not learn anything."

This man is a left-wing Democrat with impeccable liberal credentials. He would never dream of beginning a disparaging remark by saying, "Of course they're Black, so …" or "Of course they're Jewish, so …" or "Of course they're gay, so …." And if he heard someone else say that, he would immediately mark it down as hate speech. He would immediately condemn that kind of blatant prejudice.

So what is it about Russians, that makes it different this time? Does it somehow not count as hate speech as long as the group you are disparaging are Russians? Or perhaps (to generalize) as long as the group is politically unpopular? But hate speech is almost never deployed against popular groups; so to allow it against unpopular groups is almost the same thing as eliminating the concept as any kind of meaningful distinction.

Am I confused here?