Lost Generation

I find myself missing the '90s lately. Maybe that is just my mid-40s talking, but with the recent '90s revival in fashion and other things, it seems like my teenage years are all around me. Except not really. Context is everything.

It's not that I miss that period of time historically or that I'm nostalgic for it.  I don't think it was simpler, it was just less fractured at a cultural level. (I certainly don't miss my personal fashion sense of those years...oy.  I was not a cool teenager.  I'm not a cool adult either, but let's just leave it there, hmm?)  I am enjoying my Doc Marten combat boots a great deal these days, however.  One of the perks of being an adult is being able to afford some of the things you couldn't as a teenager. 

It's more that I miss having common cultural touchstones.  GenX is the lost generation, if you ask me.  Everyone skips over us and goes straight from Boomers to Millennials.  Particularly those of us born in the late 1970s; the Oregon Trail mini-generation if you will.  I guess I get tired of that sometimes.  I want to be able to reference Pearl Jam, Third Eye Blind, the Goo-Goo Dolls, Dave Matthews Band, Hootie and the Blowfish, Collective Soul, Lilith Faire, Reality Bites, Life Goes On, Felicity, Saved by the Bell, CK One, coffee house culture, VHS and 8-track players, mix-tapes, and the pre-internet/cell phone days and not be met with blank incomprehension. Last fall, we had my husband's clerks over for a game night and played Apples to Apples.  Admittedly, our copy is about 15 years old, but I was surprised how many of the Zoomer clerks didn't get the pop culture references.  Demi Moore, people.  Michelle Pfieffer.  Sharon Stone.  And I'm not even particularly well-versed in pop culture.  I felt very old in that moment.

We are the generation who had an analog childhood and acquired a digital adulthood; we straddle the life worlds of Boomers and Millennials.  And now in our 40s and 50s, we are raising children and taking care of our aging Boomer or Great Depression parents.  Or grieving them when they are gone.  It's a busy season of life, a necessary one, a good one, but largely invisible.

I read Andrew Rannells' two books this past week; he is exactly the same age as me and grew up in the Midwest.  So much of the culture and touch points of his coming of age are familiar to me.  (Fair warning, his stories are very funny and enjoyable to me as a creative person who likes to perform, but his books are definitely not for everyone).  I felt the same kinship to Mary Harringon while reading her excellent book.  She is also exactly the same age as me and the context of her early adulthood is familiar in the same ways.  

One of the essays toward the end of Rannells' second book asks the question of how you mark time as an adult, particularly if you don't have kids.  That is to say, how do you know you are an adult if you don't have the so-called traditional markers of it?  It's an interesting question, marking time.  Our liturgical calendar and rhythms of family life are definitely the scaffolding for me, but I'm thinking more about internal markers.  

I sometimes wish I could go back and enjoy my early 20s more.  I was in such a hurry to be settled and socially awkward and insecure.  I'm still socially awkward but I'm working on it.  I felt a lot of pressure to be a responsible adult, to be financially independent and follow a quick narrow path to maturity.  It's been 20 years this year since I moved back to the States from Russia.  I don't regret the move there and sometimes wonder what might have been if I'd just taken the dead-end job I was offered after my original job ended and stayed longer.  

It is a dangerous slippery slope to play the what-if game, particularly in your 40s.  The major decisions of life are made, the path is relatively set.  Until it isn't.  If there is one thing characteristic of our current moment it is the basic instability of absolutely everything.  Liquid modernity writ large.  

Except that actually, my 40s are pretty great.  There's a certain sort of je ne sais quoi about this period of life, a kind of settledness within myself that I lacked at earlier ages (and wish I had had!)  I'm less afraid of things, more secure in myself, and find my horizons are much broader than they were previously.  The world simply is, and people simply are.  It is the way of things.  I'm tired of the us/them binary of so much public discourse, of the constant scare-mongering and catastrophizing.  We are all people just struggling through life.  Our most important job is to love one another.

For all that I am an historian and love to think about the past, I have always been someone thinking four steps ahead, often to my own detriment.  My recent reading of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age has given me some pause about that tendency.  It is a peculiarly modern thing to do--to push ahead with no regard for the present.  I suppose it is of a piece with trying to be anything other than what we actually are.  The conclusion I keep coming to is that we cannot go back.  

Taylor observes that attempts to recreate the past in the present are doomed to failure because they take something that developed organically and creatively and mechanize it, stealing the life from it (747).  We can never go back to a unified societal vision because once you introduce choice into a system, the mere presence of an option fragilizes those choices.  We are all Cartesian Protestants now.  

At the same time, however, we can anchor our place in the world by reenacting the patterns of life passed on to our by our ancestors.  These reenactments bring both the people who have gone before us and the patterns they enacted closer to us, gathering time, as it were (719).  The idea of gathered time (a pre-modern concept) is very interesting to me, as it tracks with my theory of Orthodox time and the idea of God existing in an Eternal NOW.  To this theory I would add the image of the world's time as gathered in the way that fabric is gathered.  Dips and folds bring the pieces closer together, but also fan out below to allow movement.  The gathering can be relaxed or tightened, depending on the need.  

Taylor goes on to note that our restless search for meaning and mythos is part of the human condition and that to try to subvert that restlessness will only set us back and ultimately cause more suffering.  To live in the discomfort is actually part of human flourishing (622). We must learn to hold the ambiguity of life within ourselves and understand that the tension will never be resolved, but that we can hold it lightly.  That meaning exists in the world beyond our minds and selves and is there to be found if we care to look for it.  

I suppose the back and forth of life is part of holding that tension within oneself.  I don't *really* want to go back to my early 20s, even if I could.  There is so much that has been hard won along the way.  In the meantime, I'll be listening to The Bridge by Red Hot Chili Peppers, Crash by Dave Matthews Band, and Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls whilst stomping around in my combat boots.  I'm sure I've still got a black ribbon choker around here somewhere...if you know, you know.

_________

Cited:

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Talking Tuesday: Fear and Clothing

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Sometime in November, on the good advice of Lynn at American Age Fashion, I purchased Cintra Wilson's book, Fear and Clothing: Unbuckling American Style.  The book did not disappoint.  It was my first foray into Wilson's work, and I found her bracing tone enjoyable--hilarious at times.  (Her take-down of Washington DC style had me rolling on the floor). 

There were moments when I thought Ms. Wilson walked right up to the line of being offensive, but she often turned it around by a very insightful observation about her own shortcomings.  The book is organized roughly by regions, and she visits many different parts of the country in her quest to understand the particular sartorial leanings of an area and what it says about the people who live there. 

Where the book really shines, however, is toward the end, when she turns her lens on New York City, her home for many years.  Her observations about how fashion mirrors larger social trends (for good or ill), how human labor is increasingly devalued, and the ways in which capitalism twists our desires are razor sharp.  I found myself dog-earring pages and nodding along.  

Writes Wilson:

"I figured out what was really bothering me, finally, in a sea of $188 T-shirts.  I felt something vital to mankind was being violently ignored to death.  The commodity that is currently the most undervalued thing on earth is the attention, care, and labor of individual human beings. 

When you devalue actual labor--when you falsify and fetishize a look of artificial work and legitimate heavy use in a garment--how does this corrupt our ability to recognize and value actual work?  The dignified patina earned by objects of actual use and usefulness?" (pp. 225-226).

She also makes a few interesting observations about fashion in the culture that I had not considered. First, she notes that there has been virtually no change in fashion for the past 20 years or more, putting our culture in a sort of strange stasis.  This may seem unimportant, given the state of the world, but fashion tends to reflect the larger state of things. 

By way of example, you can date early 1940s garments against late 1940s garments because the lines are so different.  Early 1940s were war years, and the garments are utilitarian, military-inspired, and defined by rationing.  Late 1940s are post-war years, and the clothing reflects the softer civilian milieu and the desire for things to get back to "normal."  You could never look at clothing in 1970 and compare it to 1980 or 1990 and say there had been no change!

The stasis of fashion speaks to our Internet Age, which seems to produce nothing new, but rather recycles cultural nostalgia, comodifying and flattening the original meaning of it until it means nothing (pp. 242-43).  Plus, as Wilson and other culture watchers observe, all the fashion ages are happening all at the same time--there is literally a sartorial niche for everyone, and if everything has a niche, there is no place for fashion to push the boundaries (p. 276). 

Historically, fashion has pushed lines, change boundaries, making conversation about who we are. If there is no boundary, if all the rules have been transcended, there is nothing to be avant garde about. Fashion has become an endless line of cash-grab sequels in the Hollywood model, and we know nothing ontologically.

More importantly, however, is how our late capitalist system has transformed our very selves.  "We have all internalized the pervasive message that the gratification of our immediate individual desire is our highest priority.  We have been subliminally trained to buy things we merely want, as opposed to the things we need--and to indulge ourselves even to the point of self-sabotage whenever we feel weak, unlovely, or unloved....Our will toward consumerism feels irresistible--because it is intended to.  As a society, we choose to remain largely unaware that our desires have been built for us, by experts who have become so insidiously successful at planting seeds in our minds that grow into giant kudzu-sprawls of unanswerable longing that by the time we act upon these desires, we are fully convinced that they were organically grown in our own psyches.  We rationalize big, crazy purchases as being investments in our better selves" (p. 281-282, 285).

With the loss of ontology comes the loss of telos: the end goal of our lives.  If we don't know who we are, we cannot possibly know what the point of anything is.  Who are we living for, why are we living?  What is the legacy we leave for our children? 

This sort of cultural nihilism weighs heavily on me, because I'm far from immune from its darker impulses.  It's like constantly fighting against a current--sometimes you just want to float for a while, and stop swimming. 

My kids are at a stage where it feels like stuff is just sliding through my fingers constantly.  They are growing too fast for efficient hand-me-downs, and knit fabric (most of my kids' clothing) wears badly and is difficult to mend nicely.  I feel the environmental cost of my every purchasing decision very keenly, and it feels like dropping pebbles into an ocean, trying to dam the flow.  (And I'm not even doing a very good job of it).  I'm so very tired. 

I suppose the best way to fight it is to continue to use what we have, thrift well, mend or darn everything I can, purchase fabric and yarn as wisely as possible, and hold fast to the more ancient rhythms of the Church year.

Talking Tuesday: The World Beyond Your Head

At last we come to a discussion of Matthew B. Crawford's excellent book, The World Beyond Your Head.  I've talked previously about the broad strokes of the book, so I'll just dive into the nitty gritty and hope for the best.  I keep poking away at this, and I think I just need to post it and move on--I'm reading so much these days that dovetails with Crawford, that I'm never going to be able to incorporate it all.

Let us begin then, with the shape of things.  The premodern Western world thought about time and space as intertwined three-dimensional space.  I wrote my master's thesis on these ideas, and you can find an abstract of them here.  Basically, the idea is that all time is contained within a sphere, and everything that was, that is, or that will be is contained within that sphere.  We do experience time in a more or less linear (but not progressive) fashion, with one event following another, from birth to death, but the linear experience is still encapsulated in the larger sphere.  God exists outside that sphere in what best be termed the Eternal NOW.  For God, all time is happening all at once.  He is Eternally Present for all of humanity's existence.

If we start from this premise, and proceed to the idea that man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever whilst pursuing theosis (or complete communion with God by purifying oneself of passions and coming back to a Christ-like mindset and habitation), then the world is an objective, knowable truth.  It is something to be discovered outside one's self, as part of the salvation journey.  In the premodern world, everyone was a pilgrim on a journey to a concrete destination.  We learn from those who walked the Way before us, gain solace from their struggles, joy in their triumphs as we work through our own within the larger community.

In the premodern mind, the world is corporeal; Christ was resurrected bodily, not just in spirit.  The Resurrection is an historical event, anchored in a particular place in time, but is also continuing its work in the world, as part of the Eternal NOW.  The worship of the premodern Church was physical, involving prostrations, crossing oneself, smelling the incense, seeing the icons (and in the westernmost part of Europe, the statuary), all while dealing with the weaknesses and passions of the physical body.  There was a whole-hearted belief in the spiritual dimension--in the world we cannot necessarily see with our eyes or feel with our senses, but inhabits our world, and has a direct effect on it.  God made the world and everything in it, and remains actively at work in His ongoing Creation.

(If this sounds a lot like Orthodox Christianity, it is!  The Orthodox Church was largely unaffected by Enlightenment thought).

The ideal of the premodern world is sanctity through intimate knowledge of God, obtained through fasting, prayer, and the sacraments of the Church.  Sanctity is something to actively pursue because heaven and hell are real places, and one's place in the afterlife is of utmost importance.  This life is built on the foundation of centuries of lived experience, custom, and corporate wisdom (what some call Tradition)

The art of the premodern world invites one in, to discover the truth of what is out there; it is what Charles Taylor calls "memesis" (A Secular Age).  Icons in particular are called windows to the soul, as they depict reality beyond themselves, and invite the worshipper to enter into them.

Writes Crawford: "We live in a world that has already been named by our predecessors, and was saturated with meaning before we arrived.  We find ourselves "thrown" into this world midstream, and for the most part take over from others the meanings that things already have." (The World Beyond Your Head [hereafter referred to as WBYH], pg 145)

The premodern world, with its objective truth, layered reality, involved Creator, and rich historical foundation, produced robust people who created some of the most stunning architecture, discovered and developed new technology (cf. Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel, by Joseph and Frances Gies) and created art that remains unsurpassed.  Status derived from acquiring the skills and knowledge of the elders instead of from one's own "gumptions and mental capabilities" (WBYH, 162). They were able to attend to the world around them with sensitivity and purpose that was unhampered "by radical personal responsibility and instead rested secure in a knowledge and trust in the processes/wisdom that had come before.  There was no need for perform for the world" (WBYH, 162).  They were untroubled by questions of individual sovereignty or existential crisis.  Meaning and truth were all around them, waiting to be discovered.

We can now contrast the pre-modern world with the modern world--shaped by the so-called "Enlightenment."  I would rather call it The Great Flattening.  The round, multi-layered cosmos inhabited by premodern man has been made flat and one-dimensional in our modern age.

Let us move on to Decartes.  "Decartes began his inquiries by putting aside all supposed knowledge received from "example or custom" in order to "reform my own thoughts and to build upon a foundation which is completely my own." (WBYH, 130).  Basically, this is the sort of tabula rasa mentality that is so pervasive in education and modern culture today.  Rather than discovering the cosmos outside oneself, and to find the objective truth of God working in Creation, we moderns think of ourselves as existing in the vacuum of our minds, born blank and pure, with no connection to what has gone before or will come after, no sense of the fallen condition of mankind.  The ideal then becomes the proverbial brain in a jar.  As such, the modern self has no interest in learning about or from the outside world.  Indeed, the outside world becomes a threat to one's own autonomy.  We've become obsessed with "authenticity" as Charles Taylor notes in A Secular Age.  "To live authentically, Norman Mailer would write a century later, one has to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self" (WBYH, 130).

The ideal life that is presented to us by a pre-packaged medium is the solitary person, standing on a vista somewhere, existing without ties or bonds to keep him in place.  Any threat against individual autonomy ("identity" would perhaps be an appropriate stand-in for autonomy) must be rooted out and destroyed.  Anything that takes our attention outside ourselves and joins it to the physical world must be regarded with suspicion (WBYH, 131).

In short, the thinkers of the Great Flattening have given us our intellectual inheritance and cultural mandate:

• "We are enjoined to be free from authority--both the kind that is nakedly coercive and the kind that operates through claims of knowledge.  If we are to get free of the latter, we cannot rely on the testimony of others.

• The positive idea that emerges, by subtraction, is that freedom amounts to radical self-responsibility.  This is both a political principle and an epistemic one.  

• We achieve this, ultimately by relocating the standards for truth from outside to inside ourselves.  Reality is no self-revealing; we can know it only by constructing representations of it.

• Attention is thus demoted.  Attention is the faculty through which we encounter the world directly.  If such an encounter isn't possible, then attention has no role to play." (WBYH, 116)

Consider how these principles inform our sense of things: man's chief end is no longer to glorify God and to pursue theosis, which is something that naturally must occur in the embodied world, that is, in God's creation.  Man's chief end in modern terms is to glorify himself and seek knowledge and understanding only within himself, a disembodied being, apart from the corporeal world.  Worship becomes less corporeal and more of a spectator event, "mediated by representations" (WBYH, 170)

Crawford gives a  number of examples of how our attention and ability to attend to things in the embodied world has fractured and been given over to abstractions.  Modern cars are built to be incomprehensible to all but a computer expert; machines provide manufactured experiences, somethings to the point that we perceive them as "better" than the real thing.  (Taking a photograph of a magnificent sunrise, and adding a filter to "enhance" the image is a good example of this).  Images themselves become a kind of mediated reality--we're all quite familiar with the phenomenon of the social media constructed self.  (The recent Pokemon GO mania is another good example of mediated or constructed reality).  Crawford points out that we've ceded a lot of power and agency to the corporations who manufacture these experiences for us, and that the subsequent feelings of alienation and loneliness that are the hallmarks of our modern age are natural results of this loss of agency.  "For such a self-choosing from a menu of options replaces the kind of adult agency that grapples with things in an unfiltered way" (WBYH, 117).  

The irony of all this radical atomization and mediated reality is that individuality is actually in decline.  We are unable to attend to things that are less engaging than the menu of options presented to us, and "[w]hen we inhabit a highly engineered environment, the natural world begins to seem bland and tasteless,  like broccoli compared to Cheetos.  Stimulation begets a need for more stimulation; without it, one feels antsy, unsettled, hungry almost" (WBYH, 17).

Crawford notes that it takes Herculean effort to resist the cultural pressure to conform, to become the late modern consumer self, presented through layers of filters, abstract from the real world.  Who wants to eat broccoli when piles of cake are sitting there, calling your name?  "What sort of outlier would you have to be, what sort of freak of self-control, to resist those well-engineered cultural marshmallows?" (WBYH, 17)

So where does that leave us?  We can't very well shove Pandora back into her box and return to a premodern world.  Our world is thoroughly disenchanted, as Jamie K. Smith notes in How (Not) to be Secular.  In order to reclaim our attention and agency, Crawford suggests submission to authority, two words that seem antithetical to the whole Western ideal of the fully autonomous individual (WBYH, 24).  If, in our modern Western mindset, autonomy (self-rule) is good, and heteronomy (rule outside the self) is bad, because is threatens the autonomous self (WBYH, 24), then we have to consider that autonomy might be antithetical to true human flourishing.  "To emphasize this (heteronomy) is to put oneself at odds with some pervasive cultural reflexes.  Any quick perusal of this self-help section of a bookstore teaches that the central character in our contemporary drama is a being who must choose what he is to be, and bring about his transformation through an effort of will.  It is a heroic project of open-ended, ultimately groundless self-making.  If the attentive self is in a relation of fit to a world it has apprehended, the autonomous self is in a relation of a creative mastery to a world it has projected" (WBYH).  This is very much in keeping with the idea of liquid modernity.  We are no longer pilgrims on The Way, but rather tourists, flitting about from one place to another, no particular destination in mind.

How do we reclaim our ability to attend to the embodied world, to submit to authority outside ourselves, to seek God in Creation as the chief end of our lives, and seek heaven as the destination of our embodied souls?

We must first resist the temptation to mechanize human behavior--to understand people in purely mechanical or technological terms.  Humans are not machines.  People are often unpredictable and react in ways that can't be reduced to an algorithm or steam engine metaphor.  The ways we talks about ourselves and our minds must be informed by this fact.  We need to stop deferring to machines and bowing down to the anonymous masters who made them.  Yes, machines make our lives easier and more convenient in many ways, but once a machine starts constructing reality for large numbers of people, it is a problem.

Let us train our minds to attend.  This means reading real books, putting aside screens for a specific period of time--the mind will resist such mental exercise, but it is ultimately good to retrain the mind to attend to longer-form reading and to be able to ruminate on it in a quiet environment.  We will need to prepare for discomfort during this process, as we retrain ourselves away from constant stimulation and entertainment toward quiet contemplation in order to attend to the state of our souls and our journey of theosis.  This will be hard, as we live in a highly processed post modern environment that goes to great lengths to prevent silence and stillness without mediated reality.

Let us celebrate art that explores the object truth in reality--art that looks to reveal that which might not be obvious by inviting the viewer in.  Let us gravitate toward art as memesis--what Taylor describes as reflecting what is already out there rather than fetishizing art as creation: originality with whatever subjective connection the mind projects.  

Let us inhabit our bodies, with their frailties and strengths, in order to learn to tame the passions of body and mind.  Let us not be disgusted by the work of the Creator in making us, and instead embrace physical reality, from birth to death.  It will be messy, unsanitary, and real.  Let us be present at the deathbed, and relearn the ways of preparing the body for death.  Let us stop running from and fearing death.

Let us leave our atomized selves behind and become familiar with our history, the physical landscape, and our place in it.  Let us work with our hands, learning within a longer tradition of making.  Let us be humble and acknowledge the wisdom of our elders.  Let us be prepared for the general messiness of real human interaction, and be willing to walk with people through trials and triumphs, despite whatever personal discomfort or inconvenience that may bring.  

While we may not inhabit an enchanted world, we can work to re-enchant ourselves, our communities by acknowledging the ongoing work of the Creator in the world, of training the spiritual eye of our hearts to see what the eye does not see, to be sensitive to the spiritual dimension.  

Let us journey on as pilgrims, together.

References:

Juliana Bibas, "The Orthodox Clock and the Map of the World." Road to Emmaus Journal, Vol XII, No. 1 (#44).

Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2015.

Rod Dreher, "Pilgrims Vs. Tourists", American Conservative Blog, September 8, 2016

Jamie K. Smith, How (Not) to be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor.  Michigan: Eerdmans, 2014.

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.