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.