I really should have watched “Mad Men” when it first came out on AMC (2007-2015). It is first and foremost an ethics show, and it covers—pretty accurately, I have decided—the two decades I believe are the most important in U.S. cultural history, the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties. But the series’ episodes on the Crazy Years, 1967 through 1971, are weirding me out, man.
I had forgotten how many friends and acquaintances I had regarded as smart, stable, well-educated and raised with strong values and common sense suddenly showed up one day with wild hair, in tie-dyed T-shirts and tinted granny glasses, flipping peace signs, getting stoned constantly, talking about “pigs” and “doing your own thing.” It was like a horror movie. On “Mad Men,” one previously sane young woman leaves her husband and child to be permanently drugged out at a commune. Another once normal wife spends too much time in California and starts sleeping around in threesomes. The responsible adult daughter of a single mother turns up one day pregnant by a wandering musician, “out of bread” and dressed like a character in “Hair.” Everyone is chain smoking one substance or another and spouting hippie lingo like an idiot. In real life, I ran into my old high school girl friend three years after graduation and she was hooked up with a pompous Amherst grad Communist, quoting Jane Fonda, and she told me she was pregnant and moving to a cabin in the woods to make rustic furniture. And she did. I hardly recognized her.
Ethics Alarms 
I might say that society is suffering a relapse, that it never truly recovered from the ills of the 60’s and 70’s. Instead, the illness went into remission for a time. But that would start an inquiry into whether the illness of the 60’s and 70’s was itself a relapse of an illness that plagued us a generation prior to that, and so on.
Translation: People are stupid. They always were and they always will be.
It never truly recovered because that culture has spent the last 60 years presented in hagiographic nostalgic terms. That was the generation that liberated women, ended the war in Vietnam and brought down a corrupt presidency. It’s a narrative that has somehow managed to survive despite the societal ills it brought upon us.
That shows the power of Progressive ideology. Once you establish that liberation is a needed objective, and once you begin, it progresses because there is nothing to stop it.
I have been pointing out recently that when the secondary defining element of American history is examined — the War Between the States — it represents and has become a “paradigm” that is repeated continuously. If you liberate the slave-class and make them your equal, then anyone with any claim to oppressed status has the right to assert their own liberation. Then women, then youth, then the oppressed Indigenous, then sexual perverts, and then it becomes an act of “justice” to liberate a child from its assigned gender …
… it just goes on and on and on. The odd thing, for me, is to observe people who fully embrace the ideology of Progressivism, even radical Progressivism, and while having served it and embodied it, complain about it.
Yes yes, and the Troubles were a great time in which patriots stood up to the Crown by whatever means necessary, never mind how badly it sucked for the ordinary people who at best ducked whenever a car backfired and jumped at every unexpected noise, at worst got caught in the crossfire or hit by shrapnel that didn’t care who or what it hit.
People are already looking at SIX years ago through hagiographic lenses, never mind sixty. 2020 was when the woke decided black lives matter, struck back against corrupt policing, and threw a dangerous demagogue out of office. Hurray for them.
Never mind the billions of dollars worth of damage done and dozens of killed and injured. Never mind also that nothing they did stuck. Six years later not much has really changed, Trump is back in office, the police are still policing and the total number of LEOs is back up, and even most of the statues are returning to their perches or new perches.
The fact is that the left’s dream of what this country should be looks great while it’s vague. A lot of IDEAS look good. When you put them into practice, however, they don’t look so good.
Communism SOUNDS good, but we’ve got 70 years of history in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to tell us otherwise. The United Nations SOUNDS good, but what the hell have they actually accomplished? A lot of what got thrown around in the 1960s SOUNDED good, but in the end what did it change other than making certain South Vietnam would be conquered by the Communist dictatorship of North Vietnam? Well, it did bring some different music which is still played now, and it did give us Jimmy Carter, but that was no benefit. 2020 gave us what? Militia crowds, bullying, the tearing apart of public art, and the transformation of 2 cities into savage bandit states. Forget it.
What about tofu?
Human civilization as a whole seems to be able to right itself in the very long run. Chock it up to divine providence or just the nature of our species. It’s kind of like how the stock market is farily stable long term.
But…
Those shocks and tremors can be brutal short term. Bad ideas take a long time to play out because many human beings operate ahistorically and have to learn things for themselves. Call it the great woke mind virus or something else.
I think much stems from a misguided sense of compassion. You can show compassion to people who are transgender and still not agree with biological men in women’s sports. You can even be pro trans while doing so. There is a position that advocates for using people’s pronouns (not by force but by politeness) while also acknowledging this giant game of pretend does have limits and deep down acknowledging a trans person is in their own weird category rather than an actual man or woman. You also definitely don’t teach this kind of stuff to kids and NEVER trans any kid. Gender drugs and surgery can be outlawed until 18 or 21.
Same with open borders. If the left really wanted to help the “good immigrant” while also caring about border security, some kind of loose amnesty program for those who haven’t been convicted of any major crimes may be an option WHILE ALSO completely shutting down the open border and only allowing people in who have followed the rules for all future immigrants. That position would show some kind of fair-mindedness to it.
There’s an old theory that civilizations tend to oscillate between hyper conservative and hyper permissiveness. The hyper conservatives can be too harsh so it leads to people wanting to loosen things up. Humans, inevitably, will usually push the rules a little past where they currently are, so loosening continues all the way down into madness. The madness then causes people to be so exhausted that they want strict order. Perhaps we are in the downward madness spiral now and strict order is coming in the future.
Like you said, we are still living with the 60’s. My generation (the millennials) are the part of the reason why all these crazy positions have been mainstreamed. We all went to college and got indoctrinated by a bunch of hippies because we were told college is full of the smartest people and we should all go.
So, the millennial indoctrination and Gen Z apathy also have to play themselves out. We’ll see where that lands us in the long run. I assume it will get worse before it gets better, but I sincerely hope I am wrong. Gen Z has some weird conservative tendencies that could help us right the ship.
So, the millennial indoctrination and Gen Z apathy also have to play themselves out. We’ll see where that lands us in the long run. I assume it will get worse before it gets better, but I sincerely hope I am wrong.
I assume (excuse the presumption) that you know you are not wrong. There is (I propose) no other option but that it ‘get worse’. Why? Because there is nothing coherent, believable and actionable social ideology that can compete with American Progressivism. In order to define an actionable position requires (as a first step) restoring or re-creating hierarchies which have already been toppled. That is essentially the thesis of Robert Bork’s book Slouching Toward Gomorrah. It is a poignant critique, very coherent and believable, but in the end merely a “lamentation”.
Even if you consider a supposed counter-movement that presents itself as Conservative or “traditional” like Charlie Kirk’s movement, it seems to be Live Action Role Playing. The business class runs America (I think this is a fair statement) and it is impossible to turn against those defined objectives which are “institutionalized”.
“The world is a business, Mr Beale!”
Thus this is what Americanism is! It is a New Ideology really that has no means to respect any particular hierarchy of value. It is deterministic to a final degree. In order to understand it, the evolution of it has to be traced back through its successive stages.
I didn’t think some of the excesses of gender ideology would be reversed until I was older, but Trump has actually done it, so I really don’t know if we go down before we go up.
You make a great point about hierarchies, and I’ve been thinking about that more and more. My background was fairly conservative followed by a weird period of hyper independence when my parents suddenly stopped being religious without really talking about it. I went deep into philosophy and tried to reconstruct my ideology from the ground up in my 20’s. Truth isn’t based on authority, so there is definitely some independence required for anyone interested in trying to find a coherent set of beliefs.
However, a society cannot function if we are all run around having our own way all the time. I suppose age brings experience. As I get older, the more I see I lacked perspective, even if my methods of arriving at truth weren’t completely wrong, but because I was in “searching mode,” I wasn’t able to see that also due to some immaturity. I also didn’t trust authority because the authorities in my own life didn’t always make the best decisions or couldn’t give me a straight answer when I had questions.
The old authority of the patriarchal father and the high respect positions like officer and clergyman are probably never going to come back the way they did before. Previously, people trusted church, dad, and law enforcement. There was a clear order and structure to that system.
The internet really has “democratized” information and debate. But humans are not the type of creatures that can exist without order. The old argument that freedom requires order seems true, as traffic laws being the best example. Society needs an order to function. We are all really arguing about what order that will be.
Indirectly, it could be bringing back a sense of shame. I don’t know if you know about the Houston rodeo and the outfits some people wore, but my grandparent’s generation would’ve never dressed like that in a kid friendly venue. Publicly decency laws could help with this.
Maybe also bring back the Mr. and Mrs. way of speaking. If you instill a certain amount of respect in people, that seems to help a bit with manners and civility.
What order now though? The order of science and reason? Without religion, we don’t have anything binding us the way we once did. What is the replacement?
“Without religion, we don’t have anything binding us the way we once did. What is the replacement?”
Global Warming!
PWS
Your account of your processes is interesting and I appreciate it. You might like the work of Richard Weaver (Ideas Have Consequences). His view is that things go off the rails when we cannot define a coherent metaphysical picture. You can get a sense of his views here.
The old authority of the patriarchal father and the high respect positions like officer and clergyman are probably never going to come back the way they did before.
I am sure that you encountered the idea that distressed and obsessed Nietzsche:
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”
It is worth pointing out that when he says “God” he means the concept of God: We have disproven God and the existence of metaphysical entity (god, angels, spiritual guides, and outlines of proper and good paths) have all collapsed. I seem to remember his pointing out that the Death of God is a slow and terrible process: it could go on for 200 years! And that ‘shadows’ of God would keep appearing, like ghosts really, but always fade away because the entire process of Modernity is about becoming grounded in matter. Using it. Transforming it. Processing it. Distributing it.
The irony in the reference to the death of Jesus is important, but incidental. We have no tangible and verifiable way to refer to God of to Divine Authority. It does not appear on any material radar. You have to self-indoctrinate back to the god-concept.
He also plays upon the notion that “The truth will set you free”. Well, science truths and material and biological truths certainly did set us free! But the freedom we enjoy is living agony: “Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?”
Why, those who were the murderers of all murderers, of course! We are willing participants.
What is curious (about this blog) is that at least 50% of the participants are ‘sturdy believers’ and are grounded in a system that recognizes Authority. And we look out around us and watch things crumble, or mobs of bizarrely deranged and enthused mobs tearing down structure (conventional hierarchies) like Zombie armies. You cannot stop them. You can only get to higher ground and barricade yourself, your family and your children.
You see, they are free to do so, and because they live in a ‘democracy’ and have as much right as anyone to apply acid to structures that took thousands of years to build. (That is sort of Robert Bork’s view.)
Thanks for the suggestion about Weaver. Looks like it is right up my alley.
Nietzsche and the transvaluation of values. This reminds me of philosophy class.
How much should we value truth? We don’t value truth absolutely in social settings. If someone wears an outfit we don’t like, we don’t look at the person and say that’s ugly. (See the Invention of Lying movie playing with this idea).
I recently watched the 1954 Animal Farm movie. Seems relevant here. The animals revolt against the farmer, but they don’t really have a good way to figure out what to do once he’s gone. The animating principle is that they don’t want to be mistreated. Some of the animals buy into the revolution, but a few others see a way to enrich themselves at the expense of others.
When we “kill God,” we are kind of like those animals on the farm. I am a moderately religious person, so I believe God exists, but for those who don’t, if they found religion oppressive or whatever, they would really be like those animals. What do we know now? Let’s make up some rules that sound good but have no morally binding force except that we all hope for the best, and there is no restraining principle for Napolean to have his way.
The movie ends with a new revolt. There’s nothing shown after whether it is successful or does anything better.
The more religious critique actually agrees with Nietzsche. God gives us an order and structure for our lives. A healthy person with a functioning conscience will live a certain way, and that way is for our own good, even if, like children, we constantly rebel, as C.S. Lewis once said.
What I’ve seen recently is that when some parts of the left use the term democracy, that’s not really what they mean. Donald Trump won an election, twice, and they still say he is in some kind of violation of democracy. What they really want is mob rule, and some even want to lower the voting age to 16, which tells me enough.
My take is that people are turning to therapy as their new religion, and many of these therapists are stooped in progressive ideology. They also have a strong financial incentive to affirm people’s emotions, regardless of how out of control they are. There was a recent article in the Free Press about some of the destructive aspects of therapy culture. That may be the next fight conservatives take on.
Do modern liberals really strike you as genuinely compassionate, albeit in a misguided way? Or, is It virtue-signaling masquerading as compassion, without real empathy, sympathy, altruism, benevolence, decency, self-reflection, or humanity? Don’t worry, I’m grading this test on a curve…
“Or, is It virtue-signaling masquerading as compassion, without real empathy, sympathy, altruism, benevolence, decency, self-reflection, or humanity?”
IMO, it’s developmentally arrested people with No True North who are hopelessly saddled with a never-ending need for a Gosh I’m Nice/I’m Dialed In/Look At Me endorphin surge.
PWS
I think some liberals are. Here’s how they think, and I say this as someone who used to be pretty far left.
Imagine you are in school and you see someone talking bad about a kid who has an intellectual disability. You want to defend that person right? The other person seems mean-spirited, and you don’t care about their free speech or anything because you want to defend the innocent kid.
That is how many on the left look at the trans issue. They see conservatives as mean-spirited people going after vulnerable people, so they want to protect the trans people from those “bullies.” That’s partially why they don’t care about free speech because they see the whole thing as a bunch of bullies with a megaphone.
However, liberal compassion also tends to excuse almost every single vice there is. They seem unable to look at someone and say that person has a disorder (trans) while also seeing them as a person worthy of compassion. Many people with more conservative leanings like me look at trans people more like someone who is anorexic. It’s clearly a disorder, and the people need help with that disorder. I have great compassion for people suffering from their own minds.
The difference is I don’t think the disorder should necessarily be affirmed. I am still working through my thoughts on this topic, so I may seem unsure at times. I do think socially there could be some middle ground somewhere, but I see many studies that show trans people actually don’t get much better long term even post surgery and in areas where they receive a lot of affirmation. There is a short term boost followed by a regression back into high anxiety and depression.
Because liberals are mostly moral relativists, they have a harder time seeing vice and virtue as real ideas, so conservatives saying something is disordered means there is a proper order, and many liberals don’t like that idea of an order outside of themselves because then that means that morals aren’t relative. Again, mean conservatives being “narrow-minded.” For liberals, they want a “comfortable” paradise where no one has to worry about housing, health care, or being judged for “personal” choices. If you don’t think about it too hard, it sounds kind of nice until you realize John Lennon’s “Imagine” doesn’t actually work in real life because the devil is always in the details.
Yeah, that brand of liberalism nearly always leads to a sense of moral superiority that allows you to do to others what you would be horrified if they did to you. Note the hypocrisy. Note the antisemitism. The antisemitism alone should give you enough information. Note the letting criminals loose as long as they don’t hurt the liberal’s family. Note the open borders letting criminals in then building walls around their properties. I could go on all day. I leaned left the first two years of college. Then I saw what I was doing. And it wasn’t as pretty as you make it sound.
Hence “misguided.”
Much of it comes down to a myopic focus on alleviating the suffering of someone, especially someone vulnerable.
I attempted to explain my previous motives and some others who are probably still left. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of virtue signaling, bad faith, or people who want to watch the world burn. I have a relative with a deep sense of misguided compassion or “toxic empathy” as some on the right are now calling it.
The anti-semitisim on the left seems to be largely driven by some kind of weird fascination with Islam and a reflexive instinct to root for the “underdog.” I have heard many times people say that American and Israeli propaganda distort things in order to justify bombing brown people. Those funny YouTube videos asking gay people if they support Hamas and then telling them Hamas would kill them effectively shows there isn’t a lot of substance there; it’s all just moral confusion.
There’s also the possibility that some of the left just doesn’t know how to think critically. If your moral instincts are a reflexive siding with the underdog, then you will inevitably advocate for some bad ideas, just like if your instinct is to always side with authority (more conservative side) then you will advocate for some bad ideas, such as innocent people being imprisoned or turning a blind eye to police brutality and inhumane prison conditions.
Careful, or Freud himself will return and tap you for a new prefrontal cortex. It’s about THEMSELVES, it’s not about the supposed object of their compassion. So “misguided” is incorrect. It’s not a slight conceptual or “aiming” problem once you’re an adult. It’s a virtue-signaling world view that serves the self. It may take years for you to understand that, or you could get it like a bolt of lightning today. I don’t think it’s your choice. Such wisdom has to happen at its own time. So, if you want, we can revive this thread in a few years. Meanwhile, an oldie, but a goodie: Celui qui n’est pas républicain à vingt ans fait douter de la générosité de son âme; mais celui qui, après trente ans, persévère, fait douter de la rectitude de son esprit…
Careful, or Freud himself will return and tap you for a new prefrontal cortex.
He may even ‘double tap’.
Hmm. Sure. That is what Freud referred to as penis envy.
This was some excellent discussion. Thanks!!
I agree with you for some people. It’s about being part of the fashionable elite, and these people would embrace cannibalism if they thought it was kitsch enough. They function more like minipoliticians than regular people. I know the type you are talking about.
Good quote as well. I do use it as a guiding principle. When I see a regular person in their 60’s or 70’s still sounding like a campus radical, I know they never grew up.
Josh wrote: The anti-semitisim on the left seems to be largely driven by some kind of weird fascination with Islam and a reflexive instinct to root for the “underdog.”
There is another factor even more fundamental (?) and also maybe bound up with Liberalism (if that is seen as an outcome of French revolutionary politics): For Liberals, more perhaps than for (traditional) Conservatives, the guiding, determining Hebrew and Christian God was dethroned. Turned into a fable. Made unreal. And as such that “appeal to authority” is understood to have fallen down into ruins.
So: No God (no Yahweh if you like) no Jew. And then how to interpret Jewish Destiny? By undermining the former the latter become ‘unreal’. It moves on from that point to undermine (invalidating?) metaphysical or super-natural promises to that Land.
If right to that land is ultimately a secular issue of Law, well we’re f****ed, because (even according to Jack, Steve of NJ, etc.) there is no such thing as “international law”.
Therefore: only Power determines anything. (As Steve of NJ puts it: Gold and Steel).
I leaned left the first two years of college. Then I saw what I was doing. And it wasn’t as pretty as you make it sound.
Then what happened?!
This post made me realize the Baby Boom oldsters currently protesting ICE and going to “No Kings” demonstrations and putting Harris and Walz stickers on their cars and goofy Ukrainian wooden flags on their front gates are the same people who were doing all sorts of stupid stuff in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies! It’s as simple as that. They never grew up; they simply got older.
A propos of absolutely nothing to this post, I have to confess that I found “Quenton” to be the most loathesome, awful character in a story I have had the misfortune of reading about in a very, very long time. I have not wanted to jump into a book’s pages and strangle a character like “Quenton” more than I even loathed the characters in “On the Road” (and I hated every one of them). If my son behaved even remotely like “Quenton” – especially toward his mother – I would grab him by the scruff of his neck and unceremoniously toss him out in the street with instructions never to darken our doors with his arrogant, self-important, narcissistism ever again.
As an author, I admire that you could create such a truly repellant character, one with no redeeeming qualities whatsoever. Nicely done.
jvb
For whatever reason, some terminally unhappy, guilt-inundated Lefties just embrace stupid ideas thinking they’ll “fill the void.”
Others take it up a notch and go the Rachel Dolezal route: Ward Churchill, Jessica Krug, Shaun King, Hilaria Baldwin, Elizabeth Warren, etc., etc., etc.
When they’re exposed, which always happens, hillarity ensues; Buffy Sainte-Marie is the latest to go down in flames.
PWS
If one looks merely at the surface, it only seems like stupidity or lunacy. But when looked at at a depth-level, it could well be just one more example of a demographic war against the “White culture” of (former) America. You are, of course, slated to become a minority in your own country. (You have to ask: What genius came up with that idea?!)
It is an act of “cultural war”, isn’t it? A minority culture has become enough powerful that they can start dictating terms. To be able to accuse White people of “cultural appropriation” is one tool of Marxist praxis. So there are (at least) two elements:
The issue of being reduced to a minority status in your own country and being harassed by POC of an intellectual class. The other is that in about a decade the demographic situation will be worse (for Whites).
The most effective way for “them” to have power over you is by picking up Marxian tools of class warfare (and in this case ethnic-demographic warfare).
They may want to rethink the cultural appropriation thing. Only people of European descent can have electricity, cars, or mass produced anything. Other groups can have rap (for instance), but they can’t put it on the internet or on a CD or use amplifiers. It will have to be live using only authentic acoustic instruments. Have fun walking to the next town. Oh, no English either if you aren’t of English descent.
Did they even think…
Now you are on to something! The “guilt trip” can be put in reverse! I will demonstrate. Those primitive Africans “robbed from their shores” and forced to labor in “the plantations of the White man’s will”, were provided with civilization, with written language, and instructed how to use the wheel. They were given a coherent religious philosophy, a coherent theology, and liberated from enthrallment to the gods of voodoo …
… they were provided with schools, housing, employment and citizenship. Many even succeeded (more or less) in dominating English.
You see? In truth they owe a DEBT. It sounds like I am )merely or only) making what could be perceived as a terrible joke in vert very bad taste … but I think there is sone truth in it.
The whole “guilt” thing is very peculiar. It is a fabulous tool for the ‘victim’ to get power over the supposed victimizer. I wonder if I should bother to get a psychology degree? Then I can offer counseling for pitiable Whites who tremble with shame before their little brown brothers & sisters! 😊
It seems pretty apparent to me that the lordship exercised by progressive pop culture, mass media, and localized cancel culture/peer pressure over the masses of people is so solidly entrenched that not one single Republican stands a chance of consideration in their eyes and so abjectly horrible democrats will be elected nonstop in defiance of their records because the masses are firmly convinced republicans are *literally satan*.
My first convert! Welcome brother Michael West!
What?
Give it some minutes. You’ll figure it out …
Re cultural protections. Elvis can sing Gospel. Gospel is merely a derivation of Christian hymns that were appropriated from European writers such as Carl Boberg a Swedish minister who wrote what was translated to How Great Thou Art.
Osei Tutu should not be allowed to teach our law that is based on English common law or if in Louisiana French law without paying compensation to the rest of us if he wants to push the issue