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As I said in an earlier post, I’m reading David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture and I found his denigration of the Baby Boomers to be the usual incurious indictment that drives me mad (emphasis in original):
As my generation did not live through the Depression, World War II, and the agony of the immigrants who are our grandparents or great-grandparents; as we were raised in the greatest plenty the world has ever known and in the most just of societies, we have grown lazy and entitled (not unlike Marx, who lived as a parasite upon Engels, and never worked a day in this life). The baby boomer generation, my own, is content, if of the Left, to live out our remaining years upon the work and upon the entitlement created by our parents, and to entail the costs upon our children - to tax industry out of the country, to tax wealth away from its historical role and use as the funder of innovation. (page 43)
I had planned to write at some length about this but while Googling for something TigerHawk had said about Baby Boomers, I ran across a thread there (not the one I was looking for) where the comments lay out pretty well much of what I wanted to say. So I’ll keep this brief.
First, the Baby Boomers get blamed for a lot but who raised us? The Greatest Generation. I’m not “blaming my parents” for my shortcomings but I believe the Baby Boomers are the way they are - both the good and the bad - because of the way we were raised. The comments at TigerHawk go into some of this but I’ve always thought of it this way:
Every generation that comes along decides around the age of 16 that its parents are doing everything wrong; in fact, every generation that comes along is pretty sure all previous generations have done everything wrong. The Baby Boomers were nothing special in that regard. What was different was that we were the first generation where a fair number of our elders said, “You’re right. Tell us what we should be doing instead.”
To me, this request - insane though it was - simply looks like a continuation of the extent to which Baby Boomers were catered to by their parents. It’s understandable: our parents went through the Great Depression and World War II. I’m sure they appreciated their good fortune in surviving and prospering and wanted to lavish their children with the joy and plenty they had created. I also suspect that they looked back on what they had done at 18 and 20 - won the biggest war the world had ever seen - and let that convince them 18-year-olds knew enough about the world to run it.
Second, one of the outrages for which the Baby Boomers are most reviled is the huge amount of money we’re going to suck out of the system via Social Security and Medicare. We are, the claim goes, insufferably selfish for making it impossible for the government to cut these entitlement programs. Well, we are going to suck a lot of money out the system via Social Security and Medicare but it’s because there are so darn many of us not because we are somehow singularly selfish in insisting that government leave our entitlements alone. After all, the first reference to Social Security as the “third rail” of American politics occurred in 1982 - when the oldest Baby Boomer was 36 years old. The senior citizens who would vote out of office any politician who touched their government checks weren’t Baby Boomers back then.
That said, I personally have no problem with restructuring Social Security and Medicare so it is less generous to me and less of a burden to the generations that come after me. Gradually raising the age of eligibility, as Tiger Hawk suggests in his linked post, is one approach. Or we could cut, say, 10% from all Social Security checks - I could live with that. I can live with restructuring Medicare, also, although not via a straight decrease in the payments made to providers. I’m fine with having to ante up more for my own medical care but not fine with being unable to find a provider who will see me. Perhaps we could freeze government Medicare payments at their current rates but have everyone on Medicare pay 10%.*
The bottom line is that Baby Boomers are not more selfish about their “right” to Social Security and Medicare than previous generations. It’s just that this country desperately needs them to be less selfish. I hope we can meet that need. It would be a way of proving that the Baby Boomers at 65 can be just as self-sacrificing in service to a larger goal as their Greatest Generation parents were at 20.
*****
Notes:
* Honesty compels me to admit that I’d like to see a 10% cut in much of the rest of government spending to go along with this. If nothing else, I’d like to see the salaries, benefits, and staff of all current and former elected members of the Federal government cut 10%. This is partly just orneriness but it would also be smart politics. A wider 10% cut would make cuts in Social Security and Medicare easier to sell to the elderly, not because old people or Baby Boomers are selfish but because they are scared. The problem with being old is that one has few options: if the government cuts Social Security and Medicare, the elderly don’t find it easy to replace that income by getting a job. The idea of shared sacrifice might help allay fears that the government would be happy to balance the whole budget on the elderly and that if this causes widespread suffering among the old, well, too bad but, hey - it’s not like they’re productive members of society any longer.
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Reading:
Twenty-Somethings - An NRO post arguing that the “aimlessness” of twenty-somethings is behavior learned from their parents - the Baby Boomers. Where did the Boomers learn it?
America’s 401(k)s Are Disasters, but Are Pensions Any Better? - Megan McArdle on the delusions behind the abysmal retirement savings rate:
There's an almost delusional quality to our expectations of retirement. Somehow, we think we're supposed to set aside 5% of our after-tax income, and have enough to live comfortably for twenty to thirty years without working.
Of course, thanks to the baby boom, that delusion was true, for a while. The giant population bulge supported all the generations behind them by buying their houses and stocks, and paying the taxes, dividends, and interest payments that supported their elders in a comfortable retirement. The problem is that we now think that this is something like a natural law, rather than a very temporary aberration.
[This is an unsourced essay. That is, it is not based on research or larded with links. Rather it is written based on my (perhaps rather odd) view of what has happened in my lifetime. Not my usual style but not, I would argue, an approach wholly without merit.]
As I said in my previous post, I’m reading David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture and I have a serious quarrel with Mamet’s list of bad “Good Ideas”:
Our current societal (as opposed to cultural) development is burdened by the presence of "Good Ideas." These ideas are called Good not because their implementation has led to the betterment of life, but in homage to the supposed goodwill and and intellectual status of their instigators. Examples will come to mind based up the individual reader’s political or moral complexion, but, for the purposes of illustration in this essay, they may be said to include feminism, birth control, “diversity”, free love, and the profusion of “countercultural” innovations spawned in the 1960s.
As I said, I do not believe either feminism or birth control belong on this list (for very different reasons) and I wrote this post to explain why. After writing it, I had the bright idea to see if Mamet talks more about feminism later in his book (I’m only on page 50) and I found that he does, in fact, have an entire chapter on the topic. I decided to go ahead and post this now (I’ve waxed fairly wroth in it and I do hate to waste a shiny wroth). I’ll re-examine this issue once I’ve read his later chapter.
I’m not entirely sure what Mamet believes is a bad idea about feminism. The idea that women (and men) should be able to choose their vocation and avocation based on interest, ability, and circumstance rather than on genetic configuration? The idea that women and men should receive the same pay for the same work? The idea that a woman should be able to find work that lets her support herself if she chooses not to marry; or she marries and her husband dies - or runs off with his secretary?
Feminism didn’t spring full-blown from the mind of some crazy woman who wanted to upset the apple cart of Western civilization. Feminism was a reaction to a specific set of circumstances:
- Increasing numbers of women were becoming increasingly well-educated.
- In middle-class homes, their domestic efforts were no longer necessary to keep the family’s head above water - that is, tasks like feeding chickens and harvesting crops were not done at all and the amount of time needed to do essential home tasks like shopping, cooking, and cleaning had lessened.
- The divorce rate was climbing, resulting in more women who were left without husbands whether they wanted to be in that position or not. Jokes and movies about men impoverished by alimony aside, a woman could count on her standard of living falling precipitously when her husband left. And, since it was quite possible she would not be able to find reasonably paid employment, she was totally at his mercy financially.
- Women were surviving childbirth, having fewer children, and living longer lives. A woman who married at 22, had her first child at 23, and had three children 2 years apart would be 31 years old when her youngest child entered first grade. She could look forward to about 30 years of “free” time until her husband retired and joined her at home.*
In other words, there was a critical mass of well-educated women looking at decades of life with no essential role to play in keeping the family going. Or, to put it more positively, the desire on the part of women (like men) to be able to choose how they lived their lives intersected with a point in time when such choice appeared possible. Add to this the ideals espoused by the Black civil rights movement and you got the intersection not just of desire and possibility but also of moral imperative. The definition of “men” in “all men are created equal” was once again being rewritten.
In a charming example of unconscious irony, Mamet discusses the novel Lost Horizon as a parable for what is wrong with the Left yet finds no applicability to his dismissal of feminism. In summing up the novel, he says:
Here [on the Mountain] he discovers a perfect land - all its inhabitants are artists and philosophers, there is no disease, a parson can, indeed, live as long as he wishes to; there is no want, the people of the Valley have for millennia devoted themselves to the care, physical, material, and sexual, of the folks on the Mountain. (page 32)
The women who were talented enough to become doctors but were only allowed to become nurses and so spent their working lives supporting the men who were doctors; the women who were talented enough to become corporate executives but were only allowed to become secretaries and so spent their working lives supporting the men who were executives; the women who were talented enough to become lawyers but were only allowed to become paralegals and so spent their working lives supporting the men who were lawyers; the women who were talented enough to work outside the home but were only allowed to become wives and so spent their “working” lives supporting their husbands: how are these different from the people of the Valley?
There is nothing wrong with being a nurse or a secretary or a paralegal or a wife - so long as those positions are chosen rather than being filled by restricting other options. But the simple fact is that before the modern feminist movement, society underpaid and underutilized half of its population in order to prop up the other half. I am at a loss to understand how changing that was a bad idea.
Two very disparate writers have talked about this. Unfortunately, I don’t have either book in front of me so I’m writing from memory but here goes. In Atlas Shrugged, Dagney Taggart leaves her position at the railroad and goes off to live in a cabin. She spends some time doing little other than keeping the cabin clean and shopping for food and cooking it. Very soon, however, she realizes that all those activities are circular: you do them today and tomorrow there is no sign that you’ve done them - and you must repeat them again and again. She longs to return to linear action where what you accomplish today is done and need not be repeated and - most important - provides the foundation for what you will do tomorrow.
In one of her essays, Miss Manners writes of two women each of whom has a small child and both of whom want to work outside the home. One woman gets a job in a corporation and leaves her small child in the care of the second woman. The second woman is now taking care of two small children but she is being paid for it. The work she is doing may be largely circular but what she can do with her income is linear.**
So that’s why I think feminism doesn’t belong on Mamet’s list of “bad ‘Good Ideas’”. Why doesn’t birth control belong there? That’s pretty simple.
First, the idea of birth control is ancient so it can hardly be considered a recently instigated “Good Idea”. Second, effective birth control is not an idea; it’s a scientific fact. To oppose it either you must argue that development of effective birth control should have been strangled in its infancy - and explain who should have the power to do that - or you must argue that women (couples, really) should not be using it even though it exists. If you are going to do the latter then you need to explain why, in which case the idea you consider bad is not birth control but premarital sex, failure to have as many children as physically possible within marriage, sexual activity with no consequences, or something of that sort. It would be interesting to know which of these it is that Mamet considers a bad idea and why.
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Notes:
* I am well aware that a child does not stop needing a parent simply because he has entered first grade. The tricky thing about children in school is that they do not need a parent for most of the day on most weekdays but when they do need a parent they need one immediately. This means our mother whose youngest has entered first grade is in the same position as, say, firemen: sitting around waiting for a call. Although the call may be a matter of life and death, the waiting is insanely boring. And our mother isn’t even doing it in company with others while cooking chili, playing poker, and telling tall tales.
** I understand that raising children is a linear activity, arguably the most important linear activity there is. However, the day to day work of doing so is 99-44/100% circular.
*****
Reading:
Does the American Family Have a History? Family Images and Realities - An odd little piece from the Digital History site supported by the Department of History and the College of Education at the University of Houston. Distressingly without links for backup, it still provides an interesting look at the history of the family in the United States. I had to read parts of it twice - the events described as taking place in the 1800s sounded a lot like those that took place in the 1900s.
The Surprising Roots of Liberal Nostalgia - From The Wall Street Journal (This is behind the subscription wall. For reasons I don’t begin to understand, I find that if I do a Google search for the name of the article I am almost always presented with a link which enables me to read the whole thing - even when that same link, entered directly, gives me only partial access. Please don’t tell the WSJ about this trapdoor.)
I’m reading David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. I’m only up to page 49 and have been seized with an overwhelming desire to write about the book.
The Secret Knowledge is very dense; a lot of the sentences are too long; and there are way, way too many commas.* It’s also quite possibly a brilliant book.
Perhaps the reason I appreciate the book so much is that it expresses coherently things I knew (felt, understood) but could not state clearly enough to satisfy myself, much less communicate to others. It is, as I said, extremely dense so I could easily list a half-dozen major ideas from just the first 49 pages but there are two that stand out for me.
The first idea is this: Everything we want to do and have - as individuals and as a country - costs something. The corollary to this is that we can’t have everything: we must choose. Obviously this implies that at least one thing we must use to pay the cost - money, time, energy, focus - is limited.
... there are no solutions; there are only tradeoffs - money spent on more crossing guards cannot be spent on books. Both are necessary, a choice must be made, and ... this is the Tragic view of life. (page 3)
I imagine most of those who read this idea will think, “Everyone knows that.” Yet while everyone knows it, I’m not sure any of us have thought much about it recently. In the late 1960s the phrase “guns and butter” was used as a shorthand for the types of decisions necessary when setting national priorities; the implication was that in order to have more of one we had to accept less of the other. I have not heard the “guns and butter” phrase in years - decades, really - which leads me to suspect that somewhere along the line most of us decided to believe we could have all the guns we wanted and all the butter we wanted.
Even the recent unfortunate economic events don’t seem to have made the idea of costs really real to a lot of us. Rather than accept that we must choose (for ourselves and for future generations), we seem to still be trying to find a way to have all we want of everything. Thus we insist there must be some untapped source of money that will keep us from having to decide what to keep and what to forgo.
The second idea that stands out for me is: It is not possible for human beings to logically and reasonably and rationally decide how a culture should work and then implement those decisions. A working culture is created by centuries of experiment and experience:
The Culture, of a country, a family, a religion, a region, is a compendium of these unwritten laws worked out over time through the preconscious adaptations of its member - through trial and error. ... It is born of the necessity of humans getting along. It does not come into being because of the inspiration, nor because of the guidance, or any individual or group, but it evolves naturally: those things which work are adopted, those which do not, discarded. (page 11)
This point reminds me of a G. K. Chesterton illustration Megan McArdle uses from time to time, most notably in discussing gay marriage:
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.
Neither of these two points is new or startling and for those who are lifelong conservatives or philosophically-grounded conservatives or perhaps even just well-read conservatives, they may seem obvious to the point of triviality. For someone like me, who has become a conservative rather instinctively (for lack of a better term), those idea bring clarity to some of my rather inchoate convictions.
My primary overarching problem with the book so far is that it is an explicit attack on the Left, on liberals, on progressives. I would very much like to have a couple of my liberal friends read Mamet’s book because I think the general points he makes about the nature of reality are worth considering for anyone of any political persuasion. Unfortunately, his relentless attack on the Left means my recommending the book to liberal friends without a serious warning would be so rude as to constitute a breach of friendship. Worse, even if my liberal friends read the book despite my warnings, Mamet’s attack on them would almost certainly engender so much defensiveness that it would be unlikely any of his worthwhile points would be able to penetrate those defenses. So I would find the book more useful if Mamet’s points were presented without being so inextricably embedded in a matrix of explicit Left-bashing.**
I also find that in turning from a wishful (Left) view of the world to a tragic (realistic, Right) view of the world, Mamet has overshot the mark. In his discussion of academia rewarding students for producing the desired answer, he says:
Thomas Jefferson was an adulterer; so was every President, most likely. That’s why men get into politics; it gives them power. Power brings sex, just as it was in the cave days.
This goes beyond realism and beyond tragedy to simple cynicism. Surely the adult and realistic view of such matters is not that all Presidents are adulterers and all politicians seek power in order to commit adultery but rather than all humans are flawed and that part of understanding both history and politics is to weigh the good people do against their inevitable human failings. Here Mamet strikes me as a disappointed worshipper who, having realized there are no perfect heroes, decides to eschew the difficult task of weighing a person’s accomplishments against his failures and is instead taking the easy way out: believing that “everyone does it, so what?” Thus he gives himself permission to completely ignore failings and falls into the same trap as those who see only such failings.
In terms of specifics, I have a serious quarrel with Mamet’s list of bad “Good Ideas”:
Our current societal (as opposed to cultural) development is burdened by the presence of "Good Ideas." These ideas are called Good not because their implementation has led to the betterment of life, but in homage to the supposed goodwill and and intellectual status of their instigators. Examples will come to mind based up the individual reader’s political or moral complexion, but, for the purposes of illustration in this essay, they may be said to include feminism, birth control, “diversity”, free love, and the profusion of “countercultural” innovations spawned in the 1960s.
I do not believe either feminism or birth control belong on this list (for very different reasons) and I’ll get into a longer discussion of that in a subsequent post. (As usual, I’ve created a new category to track related posts: "Reading Mamet" for this set.)
Similarly, Mamet’s denigration of the Baby Boomers is the usual incurious indictment that drives me mad (emphasis in original):
As my generation did not live through the Depression, World War II, and the agony of the immigrants who are our grandparents or great-grandparents; as we were raised in the greatest plenty the world has ever known and in the most just of societies, we have grown lazy and entitled (not unlike Marx, who lived as a parasite upon Engels, and never worked a day in this life). The baby boomer generation, my own, is content, if of the Left, to live out our remaining years upon the work and upon the entitlement created by our parents, and to entail the costs upon our children - to tax industry out of the country, to tax wealth away from its historical role and use as the funder of innovation. (page 43)
I will also address that in a subsequent post, one I’ve been contemplating writing for quite a while.
Those issues aside, this book is more than well worth reading and I am very much looking forward to continuing to do so. If I have focused in this post on the objections I have to Mamet’s writing it is simply because those are more fruitful areas for discussion than my basic agreement with him. A post consisting only of verbal nods is hardly worth writing.
*****
* I am not trying to be funny here - I have a serious aversion to commas in general. Beyond that, I find that long sentences with many commas make it easy for the reader to get lost. They also make it easy for the writer to get lost, as witness this excerpt from page 41 (emphasis in original):
This is not to denigrate religions, merely to say that they are all based upon myth and symbol, which is to say that they proclaim at the outset their intention to approach toward the unknowable, and toward that over which we have no power. This is, however, necessary in religion, a rather unfortunate basis for a political philosophy.
Take a look at that second sentence and remove the word “however”:
This is necessary in religion, a rather unfortunate basis for a political philosophy.
Ugh. My guess is that the comma after the word “however” should not be there. Having strewn so many of them around in the previous sentence, however, it’s no surprise Mamet doesn’t notice an extra one lurking where it doesn’t belong.
** I am, as I said, not a particularly well-read conservative. It’s entirely possible that Mamet’s larger points exist in the canon without his anti-Left rhetoric. It’s still a shame they Mamet didn’t present them that way since my liberal friends would be far more likely to read something by David Mamet than something by, say, Thomas Sowell.
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