The Breaking Time

Is generational identity dead?

Forget this crap. (Also, if someone knows the photographer for this one, tell me)

Something interesting emerged in this discussion over at NSFWCorp about millenials' generational identity (it's locked for subscribers, but it's also $3 a month, so you should totally remedy that). 

Simply put, with a few notable exceptions — socially liberal, used to the internet, economically precarious — I feel largely removed from the popular story about millenials that's developed. No one in my social circle lives with their parents. They all have a ridiculous work ethic and pull long hours at whatever jobs they can find. Rather than delusionally entitled, they're realistic to the point of bleak cynicism.

All generational identities are massive generalizations to begin with, riddled with exceptions. But something has shifted, perhaps to the point where a Baby Boomer-style common culture is impossible.

Previous sweeping "generations" — the Lost, the Greatest, the Silent, the Boomers — came of age in eras of less inequality, broader social institutions, and a more cohesive mass media. Today, generational identity as we know it is probably dead.

This isn't to say that almost everyone 18-30 isn't shaped by some similar experiences, but it's easier to have a common perspective when there are three television channels, a tycoon's son still has to go for a draft physical, or when the entire country goes to war. That world is gone.

Hell, in 1930 12 percent of American men were part of the Freemasons; it's impossible to imagine any single organization today commanding that kind of influence.

Instead, the media environment keeps fragmenting, meaning parts of the same age group are exposed to widely varying cultures depending on their own interests. The increasing class divide further segregates the scions of the better-off into their own universes. The wealthy have always led different lives, of course, but the chasm has widened to the point their young are divorced from the experiences of others.

I've hoped for a strong millenial identity, partly as a counter to the get-thee-to-a-fracking field scoldings we often receive. But maybe the landscape is far too fragmented now for that to ever occur. The cultures that emerge won't have a common identity in any but the broadest sense.

Instead, they will be different shards, adapting to the world facing them in a thousand ways, or heading to hell purely by their own compass.

RIP Jacques Barzun

“Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.” -Jacques Barzun

Last night Jacques Barzun died. He was 104, and remained active past the century mark as an incredible public thinker. Six years old when the lights went out across Europe, he endured the shelling of Paris and began his academic career when Calvin Coolidge was in office. In the years of upheaval that followed, he taught Allen Ginsberg and a score of other thinkers, wrote 30 books along with countless essays, and wrapped it all up with his masterwork, Dawn to Decadence, still one of the best sweeping histories I've ever read.

He ended his life as the last living link with the intellectual ferment of the Belle Epoque and the Roaring '20s. I wrote in more depth about his contributions a few years ago on Coilhouse.

Personally, Barzun's work was among the inspirations for the Breaking Time. His relentless embrace of pluralism — of history and culture with all the mess intact — is one of the best approaches I've seen to understanding a time of upheaval.

Above all, in my mind Barzun represented the balance between discipline and passion that makes civilization beautiful. He thought a lot, and made all the mistakes that come with over eight decades of mental engagement with the world. Still, he was frequently prescient, and never lost his faith in humanity's ability to define itself, noting in Dawn that "finding oneself was misnomer; a self is not found but made."

Barzun diagnosed "decadence" not as a loosening of mores but a loss of motion, a refusal to face the future. But renaissance is always waiting to break out, this day or the next.

“Reading history, one finds that there have been periods, say toward the end of the Middle Ages, the late fifteenth century, when everything looked very much as it looks now. And even though we may say their difficulties were lesser, their powers were less too. The interesting question is whether our greater powers and our greater knowledge — and by that I don’t mean our deeper knowledge, I mean our more extensive awareness of what’s going on everywhere at once — are going to be helpful or harmful."

The old gold cross: The mutation of the American political convention

William Jennings Bryan, carried victorious through the 1896 Democratic convention

If I walk out the door from where I live, away from downtown and into the rich, quiet part of town, I will encounter an old house where William Jennings Bryan spent his summers. According to local legend, he had a soundproof room where he could practice his oratory.

In the summer of 1896, Bryan — then a young, populist Nebraska congressman — took his famous booming voice to the Chicago Coliseum, where the Democratic Party was holding its convention.

The Democrats at the time were deeply divided on a number of topics, most immediately whether to issue coinage in gold or silver as well. It sounds dry, but the issue was one of those political icebergs, striking at deeper problems of class and power. With no certain nominee for President, Bryan took the stage, broadening his condemnation of gold into a fiery attack on the power of the wealthy:

We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!

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There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

Forget the currency issue; Bryant's genius was to capture common outrage so perfectly that it's still energizing to read.

Thundering to the assembled delegates, he declared "you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." He finished, arms outstretched, and the crowd went wild.

The results were a populist wet dream: "the Great Commoner" Bryan won the nomination over fat cat incumbent Grover Cleveland and became the first liberal to head the Democratic Party. The convention was one for the books: a genuinely suspenseful battle for control of the country's politics.

Now, I'm leaving for Charlotte, just down the mountain, where the Democratic Party — 116 years later — will again have its convention. To say "they don't make 'em like they used to" is an understatement. The nature of the event is the mirror opposite from Bryan's day, and how the American political convention stumbled from popular decision point to stage-managed spectacle is a revealing story.

The Breaking Time on the (internet) radio

On Aug. 19, Epiphany Ayla Paris was kind enough to invite me on her online show, The Space Between, for an in-depth interview about the Breaking Time.

It ended up a great conversation that hit a huge variety of topics, from the political system and "There is no They" to generational optimism and public reaction to tragedy. I ramble plenty (as I do when I get on a tear), but I think it's some interesting ground and she kept the questions sharp.

The whole interview is below. Thoughts and comments welcome.

Adjuncts and the collapse of the university

Photo from opacity

Here's a devastating piece from anthropologist Sarah Kendzior about the links between the increasing use of poorly paid, badly treated adjunct faculty and the crumbling of the American university:

It is 2011 and I'm sitting in the Palais des Congres in Montreal, watching anthropologists talk about structural inequality.

The American Anthropological Association meeting is held annually to showcase research from around the world, and like thousands of other anthropologists, I am paying to play: $650 for airfare, $400 for three nights in a "student" hotel, $70 for membership, and $94 for admission. The latter two fees are student rates. If I were an unemployed or underemployed scholar, the rates would double.

The theme of this year's meeting is "Traces, Tidemarks and Legacies." According to the explanation on the American Anthropological Association website, we live in a time when "the meaning and location of differences, both intellectually and morally, have been rearranged".  As the conference progresses, I begin to see what they mean. I am listening to the speaker bemoan the exploitative practices of the neoliberal model when a friend of mine taps me on the shoulder.
"I spent almost my entire salary to be here," she says.

And it only gets worse from there:

According to the Adjunct Project, a crowdsourced website revealing adjunct wages - data which universities have long kept under wraps - her salary is about average. If she taught five classes a year, a typical full-time faculty course load, she would make $10,500, well below the poverty line. Some adjuncts make more. I have one friend who was offered $5000 per course, but he turned it down and requested less so that his children would still qualify for food stamps.

Needless to say, adjuncts also have no benefits and slim prospects. Even while they're teaching an increasing share of the classes, they're largely locked out of the extremely expensive world of academic publishing, cutting off another route forward. I've known this was a problem for awhile, but this piece hits the nail on the head like no other I've seen.

Kendzior also points to the absolute hypocrisy of more entrenched academia in this regard ("I spent almost my entire salary to be here"). Among the most ostensibly leftist subcultures in the country, this is a group that has allowed the practice of paying their own younger colleagues slave wages to go largely unchallenged. This same subculture — despite concentrating on the ability to analyze damn near anything down to the most minute details — also seems unaware that it's gutting its own existence in the process. Many of tomorrow's thinkers aren't getting the chance to thrive because they're too damn worried about starving.

In my own stint in college (2001-05), I noticed this absolute cluelessness all too often. The same graying professors who would protest war in Iraq would turn right around and push for the end of the book rental system or another tuition hike. I remember one full professor, when asked how cash-strapped students were supposed to afford the latest tome, remarking "ask your parents for more money." Mine didn't have any, and I was far from alone. 

Later, I would hear some of the same people wonder why academia had lost its cultural relevance. Few of them looked in the mirror.

To be fair, there were exceptions — teachers I still greatly respect — but they were in the minority. 

The title of Kendzior's piece is "the closing of American academia," and she's right. Increasingly expensive education taught by impoverished faculty overseen by aging dons is recipe for eventual collapse. 

So how can the university be saved? If it can't, what can replace it?

Curiosity and Millennial optimism

Longtime readers will know that I'm kind of big on the potential of space travel, and regard its ongoing abandonment as a societal failure of the first order

So I've been as ecstatic as one might imagine at the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars (yes. Mars), especially because good space travel news is hard to find these days.

But while lowering a robot onto Mars by skycrane is an f'ing amazing feat in its own right, what's even more interesting is the fact that this is the first time in awhile I can remember a space travel achievement hitting a cultural chord like this. Thousands gathered in Times Square, the NASA websites overloaded, and Mohawk Guy was born.

What struck me most about the crowd in Times Square is that it's young. This is largely my generation, the oft-yelled-at, put-upon, and scolded Millenials, who are coming out to cheer the achievement of a program their forebears have been gutting for years.

In addition to tugging at my heartstrings, I think it's interesting that this kind of optimism endures. Despite the threat of nuclear annihilation, the Baby Boomers came of age during a massive economic boom after their parents had won the largest conflict in human history. It's easier to be optimistic then than when you're facing starkly uncertain times and accumulated crap the people before you put off far too long.

But there they are, cheering on the space program in the thousands.

It's that kind of spirit — an optimism borne out of facing steep odds rather than the expectation of miracles — that gives me hope. We might just pull this off yet.