When We Were Young

On weekend mornings, when it's not raining, I like to go for a walk to get in some exercise. Treading the trails alone can be boring (I'm not really the meditative type) and so I usually take something to listen to. For the past few months, this has been music. (Podcasts may make a comeback in the future, if I decide to take up a more leisurely pace again.) My typical go-tos have been Prince and Janet Jackson; their music tends to have beats that drive an energetic walking pace.

This is the music of my college and twenty-something years, and I hadn't really listened to it in some time before adopting it for my morning walks. Listening to Prince's Graffiti Bridge or Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation, I was struck by how much it was the music of youth and change.

We are the New Power Generation
We're gonna change the world
The only thing that's in our way is you
Your old-fashioned music
Your old ideas
We're sick and tired you tellin' us what to do

I immediately appreciated the irony. I was 22 when Graffiti Bridge was released. But now I'm 50, and I'm the one who's in the way. And Graffiti Bridge now lives squarely in the realm of "old-fashioned music." (There's always something strange about having music you remember as the hot new track showing up on an "oldies" playlist.")

But the question that I have is: Why didn't we change the world?

Being a member of the unimaginatively-named "Generation X," I've largely been a bystander in the inter-generational (and class) warfare between the Baby Boomers and the Millennials. (By the way, did anyone actually tell the Baby Boomers that there was a war on?) Which strikes me as strange; because for all of our grooving out to songs of changing the world and raising our voices in protest, we've become the primary footsoldiers of the status quo.

Looking back on it, I think that part of it is that we never really cared. There's a reason why most of the more socially-conscious tracks from Rhythm Nation didn't make it onto Design of a Decade. We didn't want a call to arms. We wanted to tear it up on the dance floor. (I suppose that "we" should be in quotes, not only because I'm not really qualified to speak for my entire generation; I also don't dance. Rejoice in this.) I don't think that I'd ever actually listened to the music of my youth, in terms of actually attempting to hear and understand the narratives and messages of the lyrics, until a year or so ago.

When I had a somewhat short-lived semi-radical phase, during which I was convinced that "the Establishment" was corrupt and evil, I understood the effects of the policies, institutions and social mores that I disagreed with. But the causes were unknown to me. Again, I think that lack of interest was at work. All I cared to know was that the world was a bad place, and that there were bad people who were willing to stoop to any level to make sure it stayed that way. But then "real life" started to put in appearances. And I had more important things to worry about.

And the same perverse incentives that had created the world that I understood to be so broken enlisted me as an active participant in its perpetuation. Revolutions are messy. And they're expensive. And I became too busy with rent, car payments and the phone bill to set aside anything to pay for the one that my younger self had wanted. And since there was no revolution in the offing between then and now, I'm pretty sure that I can say that few, if any, of the rest of my fellow "Gen-Xers" did things any differently. Rather, we invested in securing our places in the world as we found it. Rather than ragequit and flip the table, Generation X applied itself to learning how to play the game. And some of us played better than others. Here and there, a few people dropped out. Some of us ascended to the highest levels of the corporate power structure. If your borders of age cohorts fall a certain way, there has even been a Gen-X president. But many of us are simply quietly working to maintain, rather than change, the world we live in, and the incentive structures, broken as they are, that (however badly) built it.

The man isn't telling us what to do anymore. We've taken that baton and are running with it. Maybe "we" should do something about that.

And... Liftoff!

Weigh-In

Von Abele readily and unreservedly condemned the treatment of indigenous peoples in the Americas, the slave trade, and European colonialism, characterizing them as tribalist holdovers before personalism took hold. He also argued that if all Western atrocities were put on one side of a scale, awful as they were, with Western contributions put on the other side, humanity was in the aggregate better off. Did I realize how many lives were saved by the Haber-Bosch process alone? That without it, half of today’s population would not be alive?
Conor Friedersdorf "Probing the ‘White People’ Rant That Roiled Columbia"

Ah, the "scale." The imagined weighing of the good with the bad in order to make the point that some or another group is deserving of whatever statements (good or bad) are made about it. It's an obvious way of contrasting things. It's also a pointless one. A cost-benefit analysis presupposes, more or less by definition, that the costs and the benefits come as a set; that you can't have one without the other. But in the case of Western atrocities versus Western contributions, the two are not that tightly related. The contributions that Fritz Haber, for instance, made did not necessitate the atrocities that the Nazi government of Germany carried out with his inventions. But the analogy of a scale tends to imply that it does, and in so doing makes those who suffered the atrocities into acceptable sacrifices to gain the contributions. And this is why, I suspect, it generates such anger. Because the people who belong to tribes other than the one that Julian von Abele claims as his own become worried, reasonably or not, that the next round of trading atrocities for contributions will come at their expense. For the good of the aggregate, you understand. One can't make the world an omelet without breaking someone else's eggs. Because the things that "White people" are typically dunned for, such as "the treatment of indigenous peoples in the Americas, the slave trade, and European colonialism" were costs that other people paid.

There's also another common fallacy in von Abele's reasoning; the idea that without certain great (and white) people, certain inventions, and the advantages they bring, would not have come about. But it's unlikely that there was anything special about Fritz Haber that somehow tied his method of increasing ammonia production to him. And technological advancements that become know worldwide only have to be invented once. So once Haber had perfected his process, it didn't matter if someone else came up with it. And in this sense, the advantages that White Europeans tended to monopolize snowball in arguments like this: Being both wealthier and better educated, they were in a better position to invent things than other people. Likewise, due to other people being locked out of the upper levels of academia and the sciences, they were also better positioned to build and improve upon those inventions. And this becomes a blind spot of the White identitarian; the idea that the "Western contributions" were created on an even playing field, rather than one deliberately skewed. Part of this is due to the tenuous grasp that many Americans have on history as a force, rather then just as stories; progress immediately remakes the world into its ideal state, rather than simply introducing changes into this or that factor over time.

Ironically, the cost-benefit analysis model of looking at this presumed that Western Civilization is, or at least at some point was, incapable of making contributions without committing atrocities. Which doesn't exactly show Westerners in a favorable light. Because if humanity is so much better off than the status quo due to the West managing to contribute more than it destroyed in atrocities, one can imagine that, humanity would be even better off in the aggregate if another group of people had managed to make those same contributions, yet not fallen into atrocities that blunted their impact.

I understand Julian von Abele's frustration with the idea that there's something wrong with White people. I even understand why he also seems to be unable to understand people's frustration with the idea (that he denies) that President Trump is constantly saying that there's something wrong with non-White people (and, depending on how you read him, women). After all, he's young. I don't think that I was really any more self-(or other) aware when I was in college either.

Incentives

Riding the Waves

The Puget Sound isn't much for traditional surfing. But when the wind blows, the windsurfers take to the water.