Very thoughtful essay over at PJ Media on the 5-year-old cultural revolution. One graf that stands out more than most of them (and ALL of them are worth your time....)
...Like Falstaff’s dishonesty, the adolescent quality of these developments
was “gross as a mountain, open, palpable.” If America’s cultural
revolution was anything, it was an attack on maturity: more, it was a
glorification of youth, of immaturity. As the Yippie leader Jerry Rubin
put it: “We’re permanent adolescents.” The real victory of the “youth
culture” of the Sixties lay not in the fact that its demands were met
but in the fact that its values and attitudes were adopted by the
culture at large. Rubin again: “Satisfy our demands, and we’ve got
twelve more. The more demands you satisfy, the more we got.” Everywhere
one looks one sees the elevation of youth -- that is to say, of
immaturity -- over experience....
...The idealization of youth has resulted not only in the spread of
adolescent values and passions: it has also led to the eclipse of adult
virtues like circumspection, responsibility, and restraint....
Granted that I am near-superannuated, but it's striking how often I've remarked on the fatuous flabberwocky that 'the yout's' have produced--and many of those yout's pretend to be "conservative", too. They are friggin' ignorant. But worse: there's no interest in Fact or Thought. It's all "FEEEEEEEEL."
And Rubin's 'the more [demands] we've got' is certainly the case with the Professionally Oppressed/Repressed/Dis-Privileged, eh?
The conclusion is dead-on:
...It is both ironical and dispiriting to realize that the counterculture
may have won its most insidious victories not among its natural
sympathizers on the Left but, on the contrary, among those putatively
conservative opponents who can no longer distinguish between material
affluence and the moral good. In other words, it may be that what the
Sixties have wrought above all is widespread spiritual anesthesia. To a
degree frightening to contemplate, we have lost that sixth sense that
allows us to discriminate firmly between civilization and its
discontents. That this loss goes largely unlamented and even unnoticed
is a measure of how successful the long march of the cultural revolution
has been.
True dat. Sad to say, by and large, today's "conservatives" are far more concerned with material wealth than Virtue. And that, friends, is an indictment.
The great poetics of the Middle Ages were also fascinated with youth: except it was the youth of knighthood. It was the youth that strives, that attains, that seeks the deepest and truest love, and that still believes that -- once attained -- it will last forever. That youth is admirable, beautiful, lovable. Naive, of course, but that is merely what the word 'naive' means.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, it may be that this sort of youth is the best life for men. I have heard it said that Jesus died at 33 because that is the perfect age; and if so, it is because it is the end of that period, the point of attaining all those first fruits, before the long work of defending and slowly building upon it.
The youth that the counterculture represented didn't go wrong by being young, but by rejecting wisdom. The young knight of the stories always stops by the home of a wise old hermit who used to be a knight himself, or sits at the feet of some priest, or takes advice from the lord he strives to impress about what is best and most worthy. That is what the counterculture was missing. They thought everyone older than 30 was a fool.