Timothy Kreider/Medium
It happens to every generation, and not for the reasons they expect
Nothing is more arbitrary and changeable over time, or regarded as more self-evident and absolute in their moment, than social mores. In my own fleeting half-century, I’ve watched mores shift (and, long after them, with tectonic slowness and resistance, laws) until the landscape of the past has become unrecognizable.
Twenty-first century kids will never know the dreamy peace of lying on the shelf beneath the rear window of the car, looking up through the shield of glass at the stars. When I was in grade school, we sometimes played an unsanctioned game at recess called “Smear the Queer” (less offensive/more self-explanatory regional variant: “Kill the Guy with the Ball”). When a student brought what he said was a bomb to high school, Mr. Trautwein, our biochem teacher, told him to quit being an idiot and confiscated it. I grew up to see school massacres become a fad, and binary gender become passé; to see cutesy Christmas cards from boring married gay couples, and marijuana gummy bears. As Robert Stone wrote in his last novel, Death of the Black-Haired Girl: “That which was unspeakable may thrive and is blessed. That which was tolerated is an abomination.”
I’ve always been bemused by the condescension of the present toward the past: the presumption that we, by virtue of our birthdays, are more enlightened, humane, empathetic, somehow better than those incomprehensibly evil people who came before us. Today’s passionate young radicals, through no fault of their own, get to see themselves become tomorrow’s irrelevant old reactionaries. Each generation is shaped and defines itself by its struggle, and so inevitably becomes married to the thing it opposed.
For example, boomer and Gen X feminists had to be tough to survive in a man’s world, and knew that complaints would only get them banished from it; they learned to take abuse and harassment and condescension, ignore it, brazen it out, or joke their way past it. To them, millennial feminists look like whiners and tattles who revel in their victimhood. Millennial feminists, who’ve learned that their word can destroy CEOs or movie stars, wonder why the older generations put up with that bullshit for so long — to them, they just look like doormats or collaborators. We come to regard what are merely adaptive strategies, contingent on our era, as absolute values. And so each generation regards the last with contempt, and the next with incomprehension.
I can’t help but wonder: what are we doing, every day, that will look just as incomprehensibly evil in a thousand, five hundred, or even fifty years? Why will they hate us in the future?
With the caveat that anyone who purports to predict the future inevitably ends up looking stupid, there are some obvious answers:
They’ll probably be sorta mad at us for blowing through the planet’s resources in just a couple of generations, like teenagers decimating the liquor cabinet in a single unsupervised weekend binge. Or for rendering the Earth inhospitable to human life for the next hundred thousand years, not out of ignorance or stupidity — we’ve known about the warming effects of carbon in the atmosphere for a hundred years — but just because we wanted to own cool things and drive everywhere. Or for the holocaust of the Anthropocene — exterminating hundreds of thousands of species who’ve lived on this planet for aeons, including plants that might’ve been cures for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, or cancer. For these and other heedless crimes against our descendants, animals, and the planet, we may be judged no more leniently than the neighbors at Birkenau.
They may also be appalled by the elaborate fantasies to which we frantically devoted our attention while the world was burning down around us. Our uncritical addiction to the internet will probably look about as cool as those children of the 1950s drooling and stupefied by the tube. And, thinking back on cultural milestones, like Amos ’n’ Andy or The Jazz Singer, now discreetly airbrushed out of our history, I have to wonder what what seems to us like innocent fun that’ll someday be disowned. The fact that the hero of so many of our stories was always a white guy, and the black guy his wisecracking sidekick, will seem as obviously an artifact of a racist society as Leni Riefenstahl. (I confess to hoping that the battles between Inspector Clouseau and Kato will survive the purge.) And I sometimes wonder whether it’s possible to imagine a future when our countless posters of movie stars posing with guns will look about as heroic as the rampant Klansman who graced the poster for Birth of a Nation.