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Sunday, July 31, 2022

Modern Life and its Discontents

 The other day, preparing for an on-line movie group I belong to, I watched Francois Truffaut's first and probably his greatest movie, The 400 Blows.  It may be the best movie ever about childhood, and it has more specific meanings for me as well.  Just two years after the film was released I began two years of my own in a French lycée myself, in newly independent Senegal, when I was exactly the age of Antoine Doinel in the movie,  and I recognize the classroom atmosphere.  I also recognized the Paris of the film, which I experienced in brief visits in 1961 and 1962, when I was struck by how dirty much of it was, with used tickets strewn all over metro stations and bathrooms well below American standards. (All that has changed now.)  And the school scenes set me thinking about broader trends in western civilization.

France was the first thoroughly bureaucratic modern state.  That trend began, as Tocqueville argued in his classic The Old Regime and the French Revolution, in the 17th century, but the revolution and Napoleon's empire accelerated it.  The Emperor's education minister boasted that he knew what every child in the country was studying at every hour of the day.  And to succeed in life, a young man or woman had to conform to the rules of the schools.  I did not realize until 20 years later, thanks to a colleague who had studied  French public education, how the system was sorting out winners and losers from a very early age.  Students had to repeat grades much more frequently than in US public education, and anyone who had was not going to advance beyond the minimum school requirements.  That explains the intense alienation of Antoine Doinel and some of his schoolmates, and of some of mine in Senegal as well.  And the regimented style of French education may also explain the alienation of so many French intellectuals from "the system" during the twentieth century, led by those like Jean-Paul Sartre who had actually performed brilliantly all the way through it.  Meanwhile, however, the country is still run by those who made it to the very top of the pyramid, the "grandes écoles" that train various kinds of French professionals.  Its public services are still outstanding today, but more than 40 percent of the electorate is now alienated from the system and votes for the extreme right.

Something similar has happened in American history, of course.  American life became far more bureaucratized in the twentieth century, including its educational system.  The mid-century crisis created a remarkably uniform population that dressed alike, ate the same food, and watched the same three television networks.  And like generations of French intellectuals, the first American generation to grow up in this world--the Boom--immediately rebelled.  No achievement was more impressive, in retrospect, than the creation of the university of California system, which in the early 1960s was offering every state resident a superb education at virtually no cost.  Yet in the fall of 1964, before the escalation of the Vietnam war, when a political controversy broke out at Berkeley, Mario Savio drew applause from his fellow students when he explicitly compared the oppression of the university bureaucracy to the oppression of white supremacy in Mississippi.  Fueled by the war, that revolt spread around the nation during the next six years, and neither universities nor American life have ever been the same.  The revolt became intellectual as well as political, fueled in part by women, minorities and gays who insisted that traditional western civilization had ignored them.  At the same time, economic interests who resented the share of the resources that the government had taken were beginning to mobilize against the New Deal legacy, and by 1981 they were in charge.  Meanwhile, organized religion emerged once again as an alternative source of values and a counterweight to utilitarianism.

Millennials and Gen Z have carried the revolt against bureaucracy to a new level that exalts the "disruption" of existing institutions.  I cannot predict how far all of this will go  It's a very different kind of challenge than predicting the future of the world in 1938, say, when at least three different kinds of well-organized and bureaucratic states were embarking on a struggle for world domination.  I do think that the world in which I grew up came from particular historical circumstances, and valued certain aspects of human nature far more than others.  Perhaps it is generational change, more than anything else, that ensures that the neglected parts of human nature will always emerge once again.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for sharing David. I do think we are in for a return or change pushed by younger people who see a loss in the society around them - fueled by a real frustration that current institutions and norms can't solve problems they see as a huge crisis to their(young folks) future.

Jude Hammerle said...

Dear Dr. Kaiser,

It is tempting to view the rebellions of the sixties and early seventies as generational movements, but I think it's important to remember that many members of the boom generation went proudly to Vietnam and then followed bureaucratic orders that would cost their lives. Also, as I commented during your zoom seminar on Getting Straight, some of the National Guard troops who opposed, beat and even shot student protesters were exactly the same age as the protesters.

So, the challenge with generational theory is that there are exceptions to it, and there can be no exceptions to a scientific truth.

I believe it's better to view human nature as a challenging but ultimately orderly game of strategy, characterized by competition among cultures and even within cultures. The appeal of this viewpoint is that it can describe any culture or society, without exception.

All the best,
Jude Hammerle

Energyflow said...

My son reminds me much of my father and born nearly 80 years latter but very rational, logical. I as an Xer have become mystical, cynical politically. Obviously these trends balance out. I recall a program about a nudist colony. The kids of the boomers who started it were ashamed. Schooling of my mother included Greek and Latin, mine modern languages more. Most of my children's lit in school was woke hypermodern and we had to fill in gaps.. I think future kids will be curious about the past realities hidden from them. Many rediscover ancient languages, relive medieval life. A canon of excepted knowledge is good but !imiting. Creativity is good for the soul, not just repetition. Your portrayal explains background of French existentialism while American jazz, British and prerevolutionary Russian art and lit flouruished. France of course was the more mature culture. Now finding true creativity in culture is difficult and suppressed by wokeness as Cleese and others state. Likely a crisis is upon us as we speak which will liberate us from so many strictures but bring great suffering. Raising chickens and growing strawberries is a great classroom for children as well as fixing, repairing, making of objects for daily use. Academic learning occupies the smallest part of life. The lower class soldier needed not rebel in the 60s but only the upper class academic as they were confined in their head.

Rupert Chapman said...

I tend to agree with Jude Hemmerle that generational theory involves a careful selection of evidence to support the argument, rather than an attempt to take a broadly representative sample of the evidence and test whether that actually supports the argument or not. And I have actually read Strauss and Howe - doing so was what led to my disillusion with the hypothesis (which I concede is widely popular at present). To take the National Guard troops who, as Jude Hemmerle points out, were used against the anti-war demonstrators of the Vietnam era, not only were many of them the same age as the demonstrators, as am I, but I knew a number of people who managed to join the National Guard - and even the regular Army - as a means of escaping service in Vietnam. Strauss and Howe's argument rests primarily on the study of literary and intellectual trends to identify the cycles, and takes those trends as causal. Without denying that there are repeating trends of that sort in history (I have seen it demonstrated with both skirt lengths in women's dresses and hairstyles in both men and women - not to mention facial hair or the removal of same - in men. The question is not whether cycles exist, but rather where the causal factors for those cycles are to be found. Intellectual and literary fashions come primarily from a particular portion of society, and the vast majority of any given society will be unaware of much of this, or, if aware, dismissive (as is only too obvious at present). Again, I have personal experience of this, from my time in the 1970s, as a factory hand, when I discovered that most of my workmates knew nothing of the ongoing national political scene. I doubt that this has changed much in the ensuing decades, especially given the ignorance being shown by so many in the current national crisis and my own extended Southern family. Indeed, I think that a significant hint as to the locus of much of the causative driving force can be found in that old political maxim propounded by James Carville, 'It's the economy, stupid'.

David Kaiser said...

That's an interesting comment, Rupert Chapman. I don't think S & H were arguing that literary and intellectual trends made the difference--I think they believed literature and intellectual life reflected broader social and personality changes. As for the Boomers who joined the Army (I joined the reserves myself--to avoid being drafted, of course), Bill Strauss liked to point out that many of the cops who beat up protesters were Boomers as well. What bound them together was how seriously they took what they were doing, even though they were on opposite sides. In the last 10-15 years several observers have noted that both left- and right-wing Boomers are dedicated above all to personal liberty and oppose authority --they just focus on different issues. I argued that in one of the first posts here back in the fall of 2004.