Lost Generations

First posted at 1hundredsixty8.com on June 28, 2013

Feb 19, 2021

Nearly 8 years after I wrote this, it seems to me that much of these questions on the state of our society are still relevant.

Last week, Thomas B. Edsall posted an intriguing article entitled “Our Broken Social Contract” to the NY Times “Opinionator” blog. He started with a basic theme:

“Many Americans think that their country has lost its way. But when they try to make sense of what’s happening, they disagree about whether the problem is essentially economic or whether it stems from cultural and moral decay.”

He presented a sweeping survey of some of the current thinking on the topic, referencing libertarian political scientist Charles Murray, conservative columnist David Brooks, and economists Greg Mankiw and Phillip Kreuger, past and present Chairmen of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. What is common to the thinking of Murray, Brooks, and Kreuger, in particular, is the sense we are and have been, living in a period of “disintegrating social norms”.

Where they differ is in the attribution of the causes and the assessment of the effects. Murray, the author of several well-known books including Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 and The Bell Curve, is a long-time critic of the social welfare state and decries the abandonment of what might be characterized as the 1950s, white middle-class ideal of American society. Murray’s America is divided on class lines, with the lower classes suffering from the disintegration of the social order and subsequent lapse into a permissive culture. He does not look back fondly on the 1960s.

For his part, Brooks eschews a search for the cause and takes a descriptive approach. He sees a society devoid of “gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation, and world.” The danger lies, Brooks concludes, in the resulting “rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good.” The context for Brooks’ column was the actions of Edward Snowden, the contractor responsible for leaking documents on NSA domestic surveillance programs.

Kreuger’s, by Edsall’s reckoning, is the freshest approach. He chooses to forsake the standard economist’s cant about the impact of market forces, technological advances, and globalization on wages to focus instead on “the erosion of the norms, institutions, and practices that maintain fairness in the job market.” With income and wealth inequality having been well-documented- we have been hit over the head with the “1%/99%” dichotomy for several years now- Kreuger’s thesis is that the loss of the ideal of “shared prosperity” has had a devastating impact on the middle class and its once-cherished values. He sees this as avoidable, and not the inexorable result of market forces:

“Corporate profits as a share of the economy are near their all-time high,” he stated in a speech at Oberlin College in April, “so it is hard to argue that companies do not have the ability to support higher wages.”

These are all well-thought-out arguments. I would add one more, one which perhaps may be seen as an underlying cause of the societal trends Edsall summarizes in his post: The responsibility of parents of one generation to prepare the next to lead productive lives, to contribute to the social whole. As a most elementary example, my parents’ generation sacrificed much to gain the victories of World War II. This was the generation that lived through the Great Depression, an event that might have left them cynical and distrustful of the institutions of leadership. Instead, they earned the sobriquet of “the greatest generation” and helped cement America’s position as the planet’s dominant nation-state.

Only twenty years later, my generation openly questioned authority, clawed at social restrictions, and brought on a tumultuous period of social change. Much of that change was necessary, no doubt – in civil rights, certainly- but much was also destructive. The Vietnam War may be characterized as a result of a gross miscalculation by American leaders in the area of foreign affairs, but the opposition to it had as much to do it the refusal of young people to acquiesce to the idea of serving their country militarily as with any moral or realpolitik consideration. “Hell no, we won’t go” was the slogan of most anti-war marchers.

Perhaps the boomers were reacting to the excesses of the Cold War milieu, the aftermath of the Red Scare and McCarthyism, the paranoia brought on by the threat of nuclear war that insinuated itself into the culture for so long. It would be enlightening to check out some of the movies of the time, such as On the Beach or Doctor Strangelove to get a sense of this apocalyptic penetration.

Alternatively, I wonder if the “greatest generation”, having survived the Depression and the War, simply wanted to shelter us from similar depredations. Whatever the cause, the boomer generation ultimately brought to parenting a zeal for the self-aggrandizement of the individual. What is noteworthy to my mind is that the children of the boomers seem to have furthered this trend in their own parenting. In his piece, Edsall points to a paper presented to the American Psychological Associations which concludes that, in looking at a variety of data, “they all point to the same thing- narcissism is on the rise.” Anecdotally, those of us of a certain age can recall when the term “Wall Street banker” conjured up a staid image. Compare that to the rock-star persona of a Jamie Dimon.

There is a telling statistic that I have seen quoted numerous times: In this, the longest period of sustained warfare in our country’s history, less than 1% of the population has actually served in Iraq or Afghanistan.

I am reminded of a TV advertisement that ran a few years back. A reporter is questioning a football player in a post-game locker room setting. The player is refusing to take responsibility for a poor performance, which, as I recall, included fumbling the ball away a number of times.

The reporter tells him reproachingly, “There’s no ‘I’ in Team, Leon”.

“Ain’t no ‘WE” either”, was the player’s response.

Now that I think about it, Leon could just as well be the head of a Too-Big-To-Fail bank.

1hundredsixty8

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