When I was a young man my grandfather would tease us about how soft we were compared to his generation. His line was, “In my day it was wooden ships and iron men. Now it is iron ships and wooden men.” Of course, he did not live in the age of sail so it was not to be taken literally. He was always joking about it so it was just the good natured ribbing old men give to young men as a part of their admission into manhood. On job sites as a teenager, the men would give the young guys crap about being soft and stupid. As I got older I realized they were right, particularly about the stupid part.
In my grandfather’s day, Americans still died from the flu and bad food. Infant mortality was a major part of life. Most men worked in jobs that required brute strength and a fair degree of risk. Men getting killed on the job was not unusual in many fields like construction. Working in a factory in the first half of the 20th century was not clean rooms and robots. It was dirty, hot and dangerous. Both men and women had to be tough to make a go of life. Today most people call in sick with the sniffles. My grandfather never missed a day of work in his life, even when his kids were born.
My first blush with the other side of this experience was a few years back. I had an intern for the summer and he was as soft as a sneaker. I was amazed at his cluelessness and this was a kid studying to be an attorney. He was not stupid, but he was shockingly naïve about the world. He also lacked any sense of curiosity. Having had my eyes opened to it, I started noticing it with other young people. This is a generalization, but the generation coming along seems to wait for life to come to them. When it does, they are easily vexed by it.
My inclination was to assume it would fade with time. The period from the early 90’s through the late 2000’s was a wild run on the credit card. America charged a five star lifestyle and that meant the kids lived uncommonly soft lives in those years. The crash and the stagnant economy were probably going to beat those nutty ideas out of them. Thirty percent unemployment for college grads seems like a good way to pound some sense into them. That was my view for while, but I’m starting to reconsider it. Maybe my grandfather was right and we are getting softer.
Back in the summer, I was with some friends and a couple of them brought their teenage sons. We were having beers and shooting the breeze when one of us said something off-color. I want to say it was a crack about the gays, but it is not important. One of the boys gasped. He did not faint or throw his dress over his head, but he was clearly shocked to hear it. The look on his face was of someone hearing something for the first time.
This happened a few times as we got drunk and it occurred to me that these kids were probably quite typical. They spend half their awake time in Massachusetts public schools. Throw in organized activities and they have little time not marinating in the PC culture. Popular culture has banned just about anything anyone can possibly find upsetting. When kids are not in school, they are plugged into pop culture so the colleges fretting over micro-aggressions may not be fringe. They may be mainstream in youth culture.
I bumped into another example tonight. Tonight is a lift and run night. Once it gets cold I put away the bike, hit the weights and switch to running for my cardio. I’ve gotten into the habit of listening to the British History podcast while I workout or run. It’s a great podcast if you like history told in an offbeat sort of way. The guy who does it mixes in a lot of pop culture stuff to spice it up. I’m guessing he is in his 20’s, maybe early 30’s. He sounds young and talks like a young person.
Anyway, I downloaded some episodes on the Vikings – the series – he did for members. When the issue of rape came up in one episode, I thought he was going to faint. He was terribly upset that the writers put a rape scene in the show. It was a very strange reaction, given the amount of sex and violence on TV these days. The weird thing is it felt a little contrived, like a public act of piety, rather than true feelings.
Later in the episode, he and his co-host for the segment spent a lot of time complaining about the “gender roles” in the show. They were upset that the writers had the female characters acting like females. I thought it was a joke at first, but they were really upset that the writers had the women acting womanly and the men acting manly, at least as far as the Viking age.
I’m an old man and I’ll be dead soon so no one gives a crap about my opinions. The people who will shape the culture, are shaping the culture, are the 20 and 30 year olds. The men of this generation are not soft in the conventional sense. It appears they detest and reject the traditional concept of masculinity and femininity. The reaction by the host of the podcast is the same sort of visceral response Americans have when offered dog as an entree. They are revolted.
The future, at least it seems, will belong to a class of eloi nothing like those who came before them. We’ve reached some sort of inflexion point where the gradual change takes a sudden turn in another direction. Each generation of Americans got softer and more comfortable through the last century. Then all of a sudden, one generation has taken a big leap into the head winds of biology and declared 50,000 years of human evolution over. They are going in a new direction.
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I haven’t seen the Viking series, but I might actually check it out now that I’ve read the gender roles are depicted accurately. My husband and I often remark about how it seems the women in TV shows seem to have all the answers and kick the butts of everyone in their paths, while the men just watch and rely on the woman with all the answers. I’m a female, and this upsets me. Being feminine isn’t wrong if you’re a woman, and men need to keep on being men, not being wimps.
I’m not exactly an action hero and this bugs me as well. Vikings does a good job sticking close to reality with this. The history part is bungled, but the show itself is great entertainment. Not terribly violent by the standards of TV and the violence actually moves the story along so it is not gratuitous. I enjoyed it.
This happened a few times as we got drunk and it occurred to me that these kids were probably quite typical. They spend half their awake time in Massachusetts public schools. Throw in organized activities and they have little time not marinating in the PC culture.
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Sounds like a Massachusetts thing to me. Kids I interact with here in Colorado don’t seem much like that
Junior, that is a theory that a friend of mine holds as well: the Eloi are simply the unfit who in any reasonably Darwinian scenario, would never have made it past childhood. They won’t fight because they are unfit. They won’t work hard because they are unfit. They don’t have babies because they lack the drive to reproduce.
If true, the next die off will be a very big die off.
Didn’t wars and disease sort these things out in the batabaric times? We haven’t had a good Spanish flu or bloodletting in a long time. That should sort out the Eloi in short order.
France still runs a low cost Empire in Black Africa, the negros know who are the betters in the Dark Continent.
The puff trend is certainly present but not everywhere. I live in the south and men are doing manly jobs and women still do hair and nails and want to raise babies. Let us not judge an entire culture by the wimping of a law student or the tripe of NPR type media fags (no insult) intended. In real America there still are boys and girls, men and women, they just don’t get notice.
The immigrants from Mexico, Central America, Asia and Muslim Africa do not share the Eloi culture. They are a threat to that culture, and to native blacks, and how the US will evolve because of them is unpredictable. The Eloi were eaten by the Morlocks “The Time Machine.”
The winners of the culture wars are creating a post American, Euro weenie society via their piety charts. What I fear is that what you describe is the youth culture of the educated and ambitious, while the uneducated and ambitious are growing increasingly savage, with none of the societal anchors or leadership that used to come from the elites.
We are heading for a national version of what Paris has become, an island of enforced calm surrounded by a sea of hatred and doom. It will hold this way until those men who have the legal right to violence are forced to decide which side they want to win, and given that for many the mob is their kin, it’s not at all certain they’ll choose the way of civilization.
Interesting article, and thanks for the link to the British History podcast which might have some populist overtones (and an obsession on the show with calling life-or-death power struggles ‘politics’ as if it is a debate hoping for good media coverage, but then my home is in the Elmet tribal area of England and I never could trust those Mercians…)
As for the fact that the young of today are not interested in finding out about the world is typical of what I have found. Their interest levels in life are hemmed in by the limits of social media (imagining it is all inclusive when in fact it it is a manipulative and narrow zone) and what they can get cheaply within their own bubble. Someone else will provide for them they are sure, and they haven’t a clue how things come about or for that matter what they can do to preserve them.
The danger is that like the Eloi the future generations that spring from the current lot will be cut off from a lot of life, but even more curious is how the young of today believe in tacitly supporting those who would be the Morlocks nipping at their ankles, the ones using brutality to shape the world in order to gain control.
The hope of the wimpy liberals is in avoiding being eaten by the monsters they allow by sacrificing others first to the increasing Morlock hunger. The vague hope that the coming Morlocks will be subtly influenced by ‘hope and change’ in social media chatter may not be enough to save the new Eloi when their turn comes.
Rome in the 4th Century was totally different in culture and genetics from Rome of 3th Century BC.
It sounds less a change of direction than it is the end of the line.