Post #83: Generation Air (J’Accuse…!)

14 Dec. 2023

“We seem to run mostly on air…”

—My friend Yangki on those around thirty, with a sigh

The first thing one notices are the tattoos, seemingly everywhere these days: how unsightly they often are, how poorly chosen the motifs, and how incongruous the connections between them, if there are any to be found at all. An otherwise attractive girl in her twenties gets giant cobwebs tattooed all over her legs, or maybe they are meant to represent lightning; but in effect they resemble nothing so much as oversized varicose veins. About the well-established demonic themes I’ve said my bit (Post #56); ill-considered as they are, there is at least a discernible logic to them, if only that of signing one’s soul over, for all to see, to the wrong side. But moka pots (!), hangmen and grim reapers childishly executed, down to doodles that would make a sixth-grader blush, not because of the obscenity but on account of the transparent incompetence and utter failure of discernment. Bad jokes, at best, to be worn and borne for life. The mind boggles and the heart breaks.*

One might dismiss such notes of alarm as mere histrionics (on my part), and nothing worse than bad individual choices (on that of the self-disfiguring set). Such unfortunate expressions of freedom there must always be, as a liberty-minded fellow like I should be able to admit without difficulty. Sure I admit it, if that were all there is to it. But we are not talking about isolated instances among a confused few, but about a trend that has become so mainstream that one almost expects to see its scars on people of a certain age and background—and not just among the “latent criminals and degenerate aristocrats” to whom Adolf Loos, the early modernist cult-architect, could still confidently confine the habit (in his 1908 classic, “Ornament and Crime”), but among the sons and daughters of the educated Occidental bourgeoisie.**

Since there are, or at any rate were, formidable barriers in the way of defacing one’s body in this way, we cannot be talking about minor cultural adjustments here, but a tectonic shift of some kind. Tradition militates with all its accumulated forces against “body art” that is nothing of the sort; good taste and common sense recoil in horror. (I am not talking about culturally sanctioned, matured customs such as that of the Maori, or Japanese body suits, or Thai yantra tattoos. Whatever needs to be said about the demerits of war paint, the yakuza connection, and Khmer magic, mere marks of decay these are not.)

Even apart from the glaring unwisdom of committing all one’s future selves to inscriptions that will prove time-bound before long, this spreading miasma is symptomatic, I fear, of a breakdown in something more fundamental still: namely a sure sense that images and texts have meanings which need to be brought into some kind of intelligent relationship with one another, especially if one wishes to engrave them upon one’s very flesh for life. It is this appreciation for the demands of order and coherence, for some structuring principle, that seems to be receding at such a pace that its shameful retreats are no longer hidden from view, but proudly paraded on every corner of our millennial world these days. Behind the spilled ink lurk the dragons of chaos that we have encountered several times before (Posts #20 and #80), dangerous beasts that need to be tamed, not fed and encouraged to breathe fire wherever they wish.

It is much the same with the wretched stickmen that have been appearing even in the Economist of late, though they have been around for a decade or so (see Post #71). Pause and think for a moment what is implied in depictions of man in which the feet predominate so noticeably (for getting ahead in a rush, presumably), in which the biceps bulge but the brains are so diminutive that a bird might take offense at it. And what do you find inside these minds, more often than not: nothing but ploys for prevailing at internet poker or playing the market in much the same spirit; veritable galaxies of get-rich-quick schemes, never substantial enterprise, let alone sustained labor towards a distant and difficult goal; YouTube substituted for book-learning, and conspiracy theories lifted off the internet in place of university studies. If you saw any of these specimen with a book, you would be amazed; in the company of anything resembling credible literature, well-nigh incredulous.*** The stickmen are not, in other words, an innocent trifle; they are the bitter truth—once again not hidden at all, but announced to the world, though with what degree of self-awareness, I know not.

Look next at how it is all put together: the muscles of a construction worker (or a prize bull), the tattoos of a jailbird (or a sailor-sodomite), the haircut of a dandy (or a marine), the beard of a Victorian poohbah (or a cave-dwelling hermit), the moustache of Groucho Marx (or Freddy Mercury), all thrown together in a mad jumble, as if the elements signified nothing at all—and this not on the lunatic fringe, but once again, as a mass phenomenon. The waists are too high, the hems too short, everything is either too lose or too tight, and more often than not it is all rounded off, by the supposed intelligentsia of the day, with grotesque t-shirts in garish hues, littered with bits and pieces of disjointed symbolism, invariably part irony, part kindergarten, part Asperger’s syndrome. Cry, cry the beloved country.

What I hear is not a determinate message, bothersome perhaps and disagreeable, but at least intelligible. No, what is getting proclaimed here is a principle of dissolution: making sense apparently does not matter anymore, and it is not rejected so much as shrugged off (see Post #60 on why this looks like the void itself to me). I see not even a gesture so much as an posture of lassitude and indifference in the face of cultural fraying and corrosion on all sides—a creeping but rapid disintegration of the ties that bind, or used to do so, even at the conceptual level. “What does it matter that I don’t make any sense?” this pseudo-aesthetic is chirping, and perhaps what is implied is the peevish plaint that after all the world makes no sense either, as if such sense were a given and not something one needs to work for.

How long can this go well? How can these pitiable ciphers (and we with them, civilizationally speaking) not one day wake up, look in the mirror, and realize that their premature varicose veins and their moka pots are aging very badly? Only then it will be too late for anything but tears and regrets. If it were only a matter of individual misery, it would be bad enough; but behind it there lurks a collective malaise, a blatant cultural malfunction that has made such aberrant idiocies seem acceptable to wide circles of an otherwise reasonably intelligent public—not only to the choosers own great detriment, and with a baneful element of what amounts to aesthetic pollution, but also as a most pernicious example given to the impressionable, or rather, aesthetically insensitive, imitators.

Disciplines to which the serious used to devote their lives now get checked off in a season. Instead of doctors and psychologists studying for decades, diet-quacks and 25-year-old experts in life—authorities on everything under the sun who, at half your age and having never set foot inside a lecture hall or seminar room, feel entitled to instruct you on questions whose answers have been eluding you for thirty years. What need for higher education, for any arduous spiritual path, or for a laborious meditation practice, when there are online crash-courses for everything work-related, and mushrooms or ayahuasca or whatever else catches your fancy to put you on the fast-track to enlightenment? (No disrespect to plant teachers and entheogens, see Post #49: it is the motives and methods I accuse, not the means.)

Muscles can be made to swell to the most grotesque dimensions with enough of a push from proteins and steroids. Outrageous amounts of money can be brought in by internet gambling, trading on market noise, and “monetizing” celebrity for nothing in particular, one flatulent wind chasing another. For foreign languages there is Google Translate, for writing ChatGPT (Post #40). That one might study a “dead” language for the benefit of the soul must be well-nigh inconceivable to these living vacuums of the spirit. Only the remaining people of the book, academic or religious, remain something of an exception for the time being, anchored as they are to earlier times by their respective scriptures. For how much longer remains to be seen.

They travel the world unlike any generation before them, these full-grown infants, but they are everywhere the same. Place has been reduced to no more than a colorful backdrop, a stage for the next selfie, a cost factor to be balanced against expected show-off value. The phone is always there as the lifeline to the real, that is, the online world, and the decisive question to ask of any destination is whether the network coverage there would be good enough. Herds of superficial acquaintances are made, no doubt, but these so-called friendships are as transient as the day, largely indistinguishable from one another, and hence quite interchangeable anywhere in the world. Black or white, straight or gay, religious or not; these things may still agitate their elders at the level of principle, but for the current crop they are an opportunity for signaling virtue to their peers, one way or the other, and that is about it. Even being German (alas, I know whereof I speak) appears to be no longer much of a burden, not because we have at last been forgiven our hideous history, but because it has been largely forgotten, or more precisely, because history in general has become irrelevant when it cannot be either turned into a joke or harnessed to some rocking horse that happens to be in ideological favor for a moment or two. (What hope is there for an age that has made Numa, the great Roman sage and peacemaker, synonymous with public imbecilism, and this not just by an isolated retinue of morons for a season, but by hundreds of millions for going on twenty years, lately with a particularly degraded WW2 theme?)

The horror (overdrawn as it must be in a diatribe such as this) is not even that it all looks so very pitiful; that much might at least arouse compassion. But no, the rot runs much deeper: through these lemmings and lightweights (Y or Z, it’s all the same to me: I see only pre-millennial and post, before the great digital sound barrier and after, the rest is details for my purposes) all human civilization as we know it must pass to reach the generations beyond. Once the chain is broken, restoration may still be possible; but it will be partial at best, and most likely token (Post #23).

I am by no means saying, or implying, that Generation Air might not be nice enough, as if I were accusing them of being somehow more unpleasant or disagreeable than other humans before them. Not at all; they seem unusually good-natured to me by historical standards. I don’t slight that quality in them, but as it was frequently said around me in my undergraduate days, nice doesn’t cut it; not by itself anyway. Wit and learning, character and conviction are not everything either, and can be quite injurious; but they give one legitimate things not to be nice about.

So far as our technological prospects go, we are fine, of course, and more than that; materially, too, I am confident that we will find our way even in the face of grave challenges, as we have done throughout history, despite all the terrible, if temporary, setbacks along the way. When we get knocked down, we bounce back; that is what we do as humans, and it is our glory as a species. Longevity and health, indeed raw performance by every superficial measure will surely keep improving, and we will get ever richer and more spoiled for opportunity—only to what end?

It may be doubtful, I admit, how much progress the mass of mankind has ever been able to make towards the good, the true, and the beautiful. All noble paths, whether the Buddha’s or any other, can speak only to those who at least acknowledge their own inadequacy before such higher standards. And they are few and far between at all times. Hence deliberate (though unconscious) descents down to the bottom of Plato’s Cave are nothing very new or unexpected—I do not mean by those who have seen the Sun and make the sacrifices necessary for bringing its fruits to others, but by those in a rush to undo whatever tentative steps may have been taken in an upward direction. Relapses into outright barbarism, too, are nothing new under the sun, or degenerations into well-fed decadence and mental vacuousness.

What is new is prosthetic gods, as Freud called us, acting the part of airheads at the same time. It is a sorry show, and one can only be glad that however long it may keep playing, at least one’s own term as a spectator remains, as yet, limited by more or less the natural four-score-and-a-bit, even as we are becoming more and more unmoored from biology in other respects.

Given these formidable powers forcing the pace, be they technological or economic or cultural, or all three in tandem, it is not easy to say what should, what could, be done to stop, or at least limit, the corrosion. But there is, nonetheless, one set of institutions that ought, one would think, to feel a sacred obligation to ensure that something of the intellectual patrimony of the West (and not the West only) gets through to the other side. But where, in this hour of crying need, where are they, our vaunted big-name universities? Are they doing whatever can be done to sustain our intellectual traditions, the canons of good taste, the common sense and sound judgment whose rapid erosion I am bemoaning?

Are they doing their part to pass on something lasting to a confused generation (so confused as no longer even to be aware of its confusion); something that stands out against the hubbub of the hour; something to hold on to in the vertiginous swirl, “the perennial gale of creative destruction” that rages all around us?† I don’t mean any great Truth in one piece—that would be too much to ask, from universities at any rate. But a set of possibilities, at least, the keys to the treasures of the past, a sense of direction, and above all, the conviction that struggling for sense, for coherence, for some kind of ordered meaning matters. Something, anything, to help distinguish, at least approximately, Zola from Zorro, and art from ink stains. But no, they are too busy, our supposed academic lights, with deconstructing, discrediting, and demolishing what remains of the old road marks, and instead of robust orientation, they offer division into ethnic and ideological camps and further dissolution, not just of this or that strand in our classical, patrimonial, or canonical traditions, but of the very idea that such things have value and deserve to be upheld and protected.‡

I will keep doing what I can with my little Garden of Candide and the Diocletian cabbages in my care, but with no great hopes anymore for the future. Beam me up Scotty, any day you like. It’s not that there is no intelligent life down here; if that were the case, much could be forgiven, on grounds of evident incapacity. But no, we’ve got plenty of brains all right, only we don’t seem to know how to use them anymore, if ever we did. Smart phones deserve their name: they are marvels, nay miracles of human ingenuity. But as smart as they are, they also induce stupidity on a scale hitherto unimaginable. Even “social” media (itself an idiotic misnomer, since all media are social by definition: I propose “scrofal,” my own derivation from scrofula), falling like the blight on our fertile fields of the mind, are by no means unintelligent themselves, but indisputably creative (if vulgar) conceptions worked out with amazing sophistication to disastrous effect. It is not their failures that doom us, but their successes.

The aptly-named Mark Sugar Mountain’s “dumbfuck” clientele are not the ones to blame (Post #77), for they know not what they do, today, yesterday, or ever. It is the moving spirits behind it all who stand accused, for knowing exactly what they were doing when they bred and unleashed their monsters on the world. They should be haunted by them in their dreams, but I fear that they all sleep quite soundly, or if not, then only because they are chasing after the next nail in the coffin of civilization as we know it. Move fast and break things. Oh please. Where things get broken in a rush, skulls invariably get cracked, if not deliberately then by tripping and falling on one’s head.

If we were doing all that we are capable of, yet coming short despite our best efforts and intentions, it would be tragic but no grounds for complaint. It is not our limitations I accuse, but what we are doing with our powers. They are very real and formidable; but so are our slides into the morass of inanity, unforgivable precisely because we do, or at least should, still have the wherewithal to see them for what they are. How much longer it will be before they come to seem as if they were no more than the natural state of things, hence quite irreversible by any means, remains to be seen. Very possibly it is already too late.

*Not enough with the moka pot, the fellow in question (otherwise quite handsome) sported a nose-ring for good measure—and not in the traditional Indian manner to which, confusion between the sexes apart, I do no object, but straight through the middle in the bovine style, perhaps in keeping with the prize-bull theme, or maybe because it enhances the pleasures of a connoisseur’s cocaine habit, what do I know.

Nothing to get worked up about, you may say, by the standards of youth culture these past seventy years. Fine, I know, I grew up in Berlin in the 1980s and I am well aware. But first of all the guy in question was not so young anymore, and second I don’t think he meant to make a statement at all. Say what you may against the beatniks or the hippies, they were not aesthetically oblivious; they had their own style and were, in their way, very keen on looking good. In the seventies and eighties things slipped, admittedly, but the punks or the Goths were still asserting a counter-aesthetic of sorts—that of the razor blade and the morgue, granted, and of pathological narcissism. But they too were not just oblivious, but in fact acutely, even overly aware of what they were reacting against, and what stares they provoked. That was the point.

These were rebellions, with or without a cause, and if I saw the same among Asian youngsters today, I would not be too concerned either. But no, the ring-and-moka-man was not Asian, not an obvious narcissist, and not a rebel either, by all appearances. He represented not the forces of anarchy or subversion, but of decomposition: he either did not realize that he looked like a cow, or he did not care. I take that to be much more worrisome than any rebel yell, because it implies a total loss of direction, not just the desire to go against the stream that is to be expected from the young.

**The argument I make here applies (if there is anything to it at all) most fully to Western societies not currently at war. Ukraine and Israel present a very different picture, obviously, owing to who bears the brunt of the fighting. There may or may not be atheists in foxholes; but war does not breed air-types the way prolonged periods of peace and prosperity do. Asian societies may have generational dynamics that are even more extreme (Japan and Bhutan jump to mind), but the fault-lines are quite different and I am not qualified to speak to them.

***I am thinking mostly of guys here, granted, not because women matter less to me, but because the absence of thinking men alone is quite enough to make the world unrecognizable to me. Not that I can blame them for abandoning the humanities and social sciences in droves considering what an unwelcoming turn they have taken in recent years, nay decades.

†The votaries of Marx will be itching to throw the red book at me and intone solemnly the famous passage from chapter 1 of the Communist Manifesto, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, etc.” (I’ve used a variation on this theme before, in Post #5, but with no Marxist intent.) The German original is more prosaic and specific—all that is traditional and established will evaporate—and like all articles of the creed the phrase comes with a set of presuppositions, predictions, and prescriptions that I am not at all countenancing.

Marx thought that the destruction would “at last compel man to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind,” and he therefore welcomed it; those who acted in his name ravaged what was traditional and established in their societies as no market forces had ever done before (think the bloody birth-pangs of the “new Soviet man” and the fires of Mao’s “cultural revolution,” to say nothing of the horrendous man-made famines and other dire depredations that were unleashed in the name of liberation as the existing economic structures were destroyed without mercy). I am not willing to go along with any of that for a minute; it is very nearly the opposite of what I am trying to get at here.

I am prepared to make some concessions to the evocative phrase only if it is understood in a Schumpeterian sense, as a warning that free markets are not only the most powerful generators of wealth and innovation we know, but also, by the same token, inherently destabilizing. Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” is meant not only to emphasize how much the pace of change gets forced by free enterprise, but to remind us of the urgent need to think carefully about the “protecting strata” that are endangered by this dynamic, such that the system might end up undermining itself (Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, especially chapters 7 and 12). I am not charmed or convinced by the intellectual fetish of capitalist self-destruction, but very worried about the protecting strata—of which Schumpeter identified the entrepreneurial class, traditional elites, and the family, but to which one could also add moral systems, religious traditions, and universities, along with much else.

What I am concerned with (and about) is the stabilizers, individual and institutional, cultural and spiritual as well as more specifically therapeutic, that we all need, in one form or another, to stay sane as we are buffeted on all sides by the storm-gales. It is a vast topic far beyond my powers; but what I can say, from my limited vantage point, is that universities seem to be losing sight of the ballast and anchors we still require as much as ever (perhaps more than ever), and instead are getting far too preoccupied with the latest pair of showy sails. They should help preserve more of what is under assault, it seems to me, not chase the winds of change along with everyone else. That may be an interested perspective, granted, because I have a direct personal stake in the matter; but in a sense I also have less to gain or lose than the upcoming cohorts, because my acculturation to the old ways is done and therefore safe from current trends. Nor is it only a matter of interests, but of convictions that have led me to make my choices along the way and build up such an investment in “antiquities” in the first place. Whether I was, or am, right to do so is not for me to say.

(Ships do not put down anchors in storms, you may think with glee, they sail them out! Well, they do and they don’t; it all depends, I am told, on the kind of vessel, the type and severity of the storm, the location, the anchors available, and a myriad other factors besides. I am indeed no sailor, and no ideologue either; I don’t believe that we have yet discovered any one educational model that could solve all our problems, and I am not insisting blindly on anchoring strategies as against running with or before the wind, or whatever seasoned seamen do. I am not so much arguing against the sails, though I have strong reservations, as for the anchors and the ballast.)

‡Gross generalizations, the sophisticates will scoff. Yes, indeed, and I would not deny that just as there is much ruin in a country, in Adam Smith’s felicitous words, so there is much ruin in the universities, and in the world. What I am describing here is not Truth, but a personal impression, overdrawn to make a point, and leaving much room for shining exceptions. We none of us see the full picture, or even a fully representative corner. So caveat emptor: let the reader beware and come to his own conclusions. All I will claim is my birthright as a writer, the freedom to issue my cri de coeur, even if it be dismissed by others as no more than a howl in the wilderness.

PS: If you’ve been able to get this far without too much griping (yes, yes, I admit that 4400 words is a stretch), and you need no reminding that reading is not the same as quickly passing your eyes over the lines of a text, then I am happy to concede that the diagnosis I present here probably doesn’t apply to you, irrespective of your year of birth. What level of membership in the timeless Republic of Letters you might be eligible for is not for me to say; that is something you will need to take up with the Muses directly. I can only report the rumor that full citizenship, in line with Platonic strictures, is customarily reserved for those over fifty who can furnish adequate twenty-year reading lists.