Undarkened Generations and Pizza Dip

A bit from Alvin Foo, a "Venture Partner," whatever that is. But it's good summary of our times. It's been said before, but maybe needs to be heard again:

"Imagine you were born in 1900. 

When you're 14, World War I begins and ends when you're 18 with 22 million dead. Soon after a global pandemic, the Spanish Flu, appears, killing 50 million people. And you're alive and 20 years old. 

When you're 29 you survive the global economic crisis that started with the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange, causing inflation, unemployment and famine. 

When you're 33 years old the nazis come to power. When you're 39, World War II begins and ends when you're 45 years old with a 60 million dead. In the Holocaust 6 million Jews die. 

When you're 52, the Korean War begins. When you're 64, the Vietnam War begins and ends when you're 75. 

A child born in 1985 thinks his grandparents have no idea how difficult life is, but they have survived several wars and catastrophes. Today we have all the comforts in a new world, amid a new pandemic. But we complain because we need to wear masks. We complain because we must stay confined to our homes where we have food, electricity, running water, wifi, even Netflix! None of that existed back in the day. But humanity survived those circumstances and never lost their joy of living. 

A small change in our perspective can generate miracles. We should be thankful that we are alive. We should do everything we need to do to protect and help each other." 

Pain is pain and can't be compared. I get that. But I worry about my adult children's attitude towards life right now. It's great that we are all so much more aware of our feelings and to other people's experiences, but I worry we're all a little too soft for all the bad news today, for smokey days and covid and climate change and Nazis.

Everything my dad talked about when he talked about the war (WWII) is happening now. Iodine pill distribution as a precautionary measure is the most recent. It's unnerving. 

Lost Counterculture

Henry Madison, just some random dude on twitter, wrote an interesting bit on concerts and the enmeshment of generations. I disagree with several of his claims below:

Blondie

"Imagine a 77-year old favourite of the boomers’ parents, playing at Woodstock in the 1960s. The oldest performer at Woodstock was Ravi Shankar, who was 49. (He didn’t like hippies and never did it again.) There’s a serious point here. A 77-year old artist playing at Woodstock would have been born in 1892. That would be the equivalent of Louis Armstrong or Jelly Roll Morton playing there. We have artists at Glastonbury this week approaching 80 years of age. None of this is ageism, I should add. If people want to keep playing into their 80s, good luck to them. But we’re talking about headlining music festivals, festivals predominantly (like Woodstock) designed for the young. To me this means unhealthy things.

What’s said about the counterculture movement of the 1960s was that it was profoundly anti-establishment. Today the closest beliefs are labelled neoliberalism. It’s strange the bedfellows beliefs keep. And who invented neoliberalism? The same boomers. That was the same movement, as it morphed into a highly profitable middle and old age. The richest generation in all of history, by a mile. Anti-establishment beliefs were great business: the boomers dismantled many of society’s institutions, and then privatised them. Most of the corporate behemoths that now dominate our lives in our ‘neoliberal’ societies were set up by boomers, who also profited the most from them. They monetised the wreckage of their earlier anti-establishment assault. 

I don’t think people see this clearly at all. 

Modernism, Post and Meta

When I'm not ranting about Covid and climate change, I'm biking, reading, writing, and watching shows and movies. Tons of movies. Right now Monday mornings start with Yellowjackets as an appetizer, then Succession is the main course, followed by Barry for dessert (all on Crave). Next Monday will be the season finale for the latter two, and I'm on tenterhooks!! 

I also love YouTube videos about shows and films, and Thomas Flight is one of my favourites. He recently posted about the change in movies over the decades, and it's staying with me. 

He explains the difference between modernist, post-modernist, and "meta-modernist" films, and how they align with the periods. I've taught the first two concepts before in philosophy, but explaining it through film helps clarify the differences. 

Modernism (1890 to the 1940s or so, depends who you ask) 

This is the time of Levy-Bruhl who classified people and places into two categories somewhat offensively: primitive (mystical, communal, "pre-logical") and modern (objective, scientific, individual). He convinced important people that modern is best, which lent some credibility for taking over inferior areas of the world. Durkheim disagreed with him--cultures have differences but not superiority--but that didn't fit the dominant narrative as well. 

Gen Z for Zero, Net Zero

Mia Rabson reports,

"A baby born in Canada today will never know a time in which his or her health isn’t at risk from a warming planet . . . Without accelerated intervention, this new era will come to define the health of people at every stage of their lives. . . . in a country like Canada, air pollution, heat-related illnesses and exposure to toxic smoke from forest fires are bigger threats to a child’s long-term health. A warmer world means more widespread transmission of diseases, as well as the political strife that comes with mass migration as some parts of the world become uninhabitable. . . . pushing the world to do more to slow global warming is critical. . . . if we intervene now to keep warming down and find ways to adapt, the savings to the health system and economic productivity down the road will in many places more than pay for the costs of those interventions."

The Lancet article she sources doesn't pull any punches,

"A child born today will experience a world that is more than four degrees warmer than the pre-industrial average, . . . Downward trends in global yield potential for all major crops tracked since 1960 threaten food production and food security, with infants often the worst affected by the potentially permanent effects of undernutrition. . . . Trends in climate suitability for disease transmission are particularly concerning, with 9 of the 10 most suitable years for the transmission of dengue fever on record occurring since 2000. . . . . air pollution—principally driven by fossil fuels, and exacerbated by climate change—damages the heart, lungs, and every other vital organ. . . . Globally, 77% of countries experienced an increase in daily population exposure to wildfires from 2001 to 2015. . . . . A business as usual trajectory will result in a fundamentally altered world. . . . 

The Paris Agreement has set a target of “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1·5°C.” In a world that matches this ambition, a child born today would see the phase-out of all coal in the UK and Canada by their sixth and 11th birthday; they would see France ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars by their 21st birthday; and they would be 31 years old by the time the world reaches net-zero in 2050."

If we can make this happen, we all know that it will be good beyond merely allowing us to continue to survive on this planet:

"The changes seen in this alternate pathway could result in cleaner air, safer cities, and more nutritious food, coupled with renewed investment in health systems and vital infrastructure. . . . In several cases, the economic savings from a healthier and more productive workforce, with fewer health-care expenses, will cover the initial investment costs of these interventions."

We're implemented some changes, but greenhouse gasses continue to rise. This is the same story we've been hearing for years, and the main reason I question anyone's choice to bring more children into this mess, but at least it's being reported by mainstream media. Maybe that's something.

On Developing a Consistent Self

In a New York Times article, "What do teens learn online today?", Elizabeth Weil suggests that kids are on the right track when they stream every inch of their anguish and joys in countless video tutorials aimed at, perhaps a necessary clarification, other teens. Weil says,

"It’s nice if our fellow humans are predictable, and you have some idea of what you’ll be dealing with when a person shows up. There are whole branches of psychology dedicated to trying to help us keep ourselves together. . . . And yet, at the same time, we know it’s a ruse. We are, all of us, deeply, inalienably contradictory and chaotic. Arguably it is the dominant postapocalyptic vision of our digital times, the internet’s McLuhan moment, brought to us by teenagers who, as such, spend their days feeling like 10 different people at once and believe they can, and should, express them all. We all contain multitudes. The kids seem to know that’s all right."

I commented on the article with this memory,

Back in first year uni, in the 80s, my prof told us, "It doesn't matter what your philosophy of life is, so long as it's consistent and self-cohesive," and immediately, in my head, I countered with Whitman's 'multitudes' line. That's youth talking. It's the untamed stream of consciousness all things at all times why do we have to learn punctuation anyway line of reasoning. And it has it's place, for sure. The error is in thinking it makes us more authentic to show all sides of ourselves in real time. Unorganized thought merely flattens the ideas presented until nothing is more important than anything else, but then nothing is really communicated beyond all the feels, and "I am here!! Look at me!" We contain multitudes, but at some point we also develop a more integrated self, not just to be conveniently predictable for others, but to better understand how to live and how to connect and how to be. Prioritizing our ideas into an organized whole in a thoughtful attempt at elucidating who we are and what matters is not to be shrugged off because it's what the "olds" do. It's the later stage work of finding that authentic self.

(After haggling in my head over a few words, I hit 'submit' and then noticed that one glaringly inaccurate *it's*. Punctuation indeed! Whatevs.)

Weil seems to be newly introduced to this adolescent culture of everything at once, which might mean she has forgotten what it was like to be a teenager. It might seem different online, but that's just a matter of packaging. That flattening of ideas and values so everything is as important as everything else is a useful way to avoid decision and responsibility - those nasty things that come with age. (Well, one can only hope they come.) She calls it a "feature of the online world" while alluding to a 19th century poet. Curious.

I believe it's vital to remember who should be leading whom. What kids do often looks new and cool from a distance, and they can be jarringly sophisticated in the talent of expressing distain for anything that predates them, but there are consequences to the refusal to do the work of thinking and deciding. Developing a consistent self and philosophy of life within the complexity of being isn't a ruse set to tame us, but a method of focusing. If we forget that in a quest to avoid an "Ok boomer" dig, then we are negligent, and we deserve the culture we've helped to create.

On Coddling Our Kids

The Agenda has a video with Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist. I watched it with my kids, and we had a good discussion about it. Haidt published a book, The Coddling of the American Mind, with Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a few months ago to very mixed reviews. He has a few interesting ideas, but many are rehashed or questionable.

His concern with the iGen or the Gen Z group, anyone born after 1995, is that they grew up with social media, which has messed them up. It's mainly the same story we've already heard about cell phones and helicopter parents. But then he said that boys aren't doing so badly since they mainly play video games and bully physically, but girls are really affected by calls for perfection and psychological bullying that happens more online. My kids jumped on this claim with their own stories, but I cautioned that they just had anecdotal evidence from their own lives, and this guy likely did more thorough research. While it's good to consider how much an idea 'rings true,' we need to evaluate the research. I didn't read the book, but one of the citations is Pinker, which makes me a little bit dubious. Then he said the suicide rate for teen girls has gone up by 70%, but not for boys. One article says the CDC says the rate increased 70% for white youth and 77% for black. The CDC site has this graph, which clarifies how much higher the rate for males is to begin with:

The Plight of the Millennials

Further explanation here. 

First, a bit about statistical norms and the normal distribution. In social sciences, for something to be considered a statistically significant characteristic of a group, it just needs to be present in about 68% of the population, or one standard deviation from the norm. There's tons of variation in the other 32%, so all the generalizations below might not apply to the people in your life. But, according to researchers, they apply to most people in each group, so we can still look at trends. I remember studies in my day showing a clear correlation between violent movie viewing and violent teens, yet I loved slasher flicks and still lean towards more gruesome films despite the stats. And, more to the point, nobody stopped making those movies. This recent article is unlikely to change a thing, but we're still wise to consider it.

The article in question is The Atlantic article, "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?" which adds to a running list of problems with kids today caused by technology. It hits home from some of the trends I've noticed anecdotally in my classroom over the past 26 years: that phones are distracting, lead to unrealistic idealization and familial alienation, and affect sleep habits. But the writer misses any discussion that phones also drive constant change, consumerism, and cognizance of tragedies, and the significance of other factors affecting trends in this demographic. Here's a chart I sometimes use in class for an overview of demographics by year of birth. We've moved way beyond the boom, bust, and echo labels.