Time Frame – 1965 – present
Politics/Economics
– Power shifts from mere heavy industry to entities that can expedite and control all levels of production, from raw material to final consumption, with minimal restraints from geographic boundaries. Of the three descendants of the free market form – communism, fascism, and corporate capitalism, only the last proves to be a successful economic model. Global technologies allow for multinational corporations, entities which no longer are restricted to sharing in the successes or failures of an individual “home” country, but can move resources and production facilities quickly from one country to another as best befits the immediate need.
What emerges from these conditions is not merely a new generation, but a culture organized around youth itself: a society that privileges immediacy over endurance, performance over character, comfort over ritual, and consumption over continuity.
The availability of leisure time and the affordability of the tools of entertainment increase exponentially. The widespread use of air conditioning and central heating allows people to remain largely isolated from the effects of the natural world whether at home or at work, or for that matter even when commuting between the two.
The trend of commerce to emulate production line techniques leads to the creation first of supermarkets and then multiplex theatres, the “big box” warehouse stores and finally the “mega-stores”. Large volume sales are aided by the introduction of prepackaged units of food and clothing, man-made materials including “disposable” plastic items. Nearly every type of vendor moves to incorporating self-service, in whole or in part, in order to expedite the movement of customers with minimal staff. This parallels the trend of consumers to limit the amount of “face time” they need to endure as they go through their daily schedule.
Fashion/Manners – With an unprecedented rise in living standards and the explosion of mass media, entertainment becomes not merely a diversion but the goal of living. Almost every home worldwide turns on a radio, a computer, or a television set – every day. The contemplative life, formality, articulate speech, intense scientific inquiry are all viewed with suspicion. A new concept – retirement – develops, and in western society becomes an assumed entitlement. By mid-century, business attire resembles the new architecture; big, bland and boxlike. By the end of the century, even business attire is no longer considered necessary in order to run a business.
In daily life, the increase in commercial consumerism allows two trends – perpetual infantilization and performance identity – to play out to every sector of the population. The backlash in American society to the Vietnam War accelerated the post WWII trends that were already in play. The male ideal slowly continues its devolution in age, from that of a successful 40 year old man-of-the-world, at ease in any social situation, to the archetypal wired 16 year old, in-your-face and disdainful of social manners. Body posture is, as we shall see, by contrast apologetic and fearful. The concept of the inherent nobility of the common man becomes twisted into the emulation of traits that are common. This combination of youth worship and disdain of formality has led to an elevation of the acceptability of childish behavior well beyond what had always been the loose cut-off point of adolescence. Notice the increase in crudity used in popular media. Although scatological humor has existed uninterrupted since ancient Greece, it was always used for its shock value, and those characters who demonstrated it were themselves objects of ridicule. The current trend uses it in order to sell products to the general population. Crudity is the status quo, the great equalizer, proof that you and I are equal because we can all sink to the lowest common denominator. In what other society would you sell fast food by showing people who are unable to put the food in their mouths or cannot eat with their mouths closed? Advertisers know that we will relate to hands and faces smeared with undigested food but not to someone who eats small portions neatly and without the need of a napkin.
The current adult has kept the same food stuffs with which he was familiar as a child. Instead of a simple cup of coffee or tea, highly sweetened lattes, mochas and chais soothe the child/adult palate. The candy bar has been repackaged as an energy bar, milkshakes become smoothies, but these are mere changes in nomenclature so as to please the buying public. We still want our highly sugared pacifiers that we got as treats when we were four.
In clothing, leisure wear is accepted as standard wear for nearly all daily activities, and, with oversized pants, loose shirts and sneakers worn for nearly every occasion, young and old alike emulate the attire of toddlers, for the societal norm is to look in the mirror and see youth. With prices of clothing having dropped to unprecedented lows (relative to income), people can choose their “look” according to their mood. Yet it is interesting to point out that while a man’s complete business suit can be purchased for $50, most adults see no need to own a suit. [Most will spend that much or more on running shoes and will never run a mile in their adult lives.] For different occasions, people no longer simply dress in their best apparel, but instead costume themselves as the character they wish to portray. In some ways we are a performance society, going so far as to the wearing of slogans on T-shirts as a way of subtitling our lives for the benefit of the viewing audience. Lost in an impossibly complex and isolating world, we wear these articles not only to express ourselves to others, but more importantly to define ourselves to ourselves. Like good method actors, we then strive to take on the characteristics of the characters we have created. At the same time, by the end of the century rare is the person not branded by a corporate logo on at least one article of clothing every day. It’s as though the character we create defines his meaning by the corporation he represents.
There is a continuing conflict being played out between our nineteenth century cultural heritage and our twentieth century desires (it’ll take several decades before a new 21st century style develops). Most of our current forms were structured around a semi-agricultural life-style. We take summer vacations, our holidays set long ago by the down time between ripening and harvest. We put away our cars in a garage exactly as our forefathers put away their horses in barns. We bypass an unused dining room where at one time a large farm family would have sat down twice a day to eat. We sit in a family/living room laid out for genteel conversation, but have to turn the chairs and sofas to face the real central feature of the room – the television set.
It is easy to dwell on the changes to our society since the invention of television, beginning with reminding you that whereas all prior peoples would look for entertainment by either going out to see live performances or by enjoying the fellowship of neighbors and friends, we moderns relax in front of a box. Live performances, movie houses, neighborhood pubs, even informal activities such as the bridge party or sitting on a front porch and talking to neighbors are all losing their appeal. As the television became less expensive and a single family could afford more than one set, entertainment became personalized. No longer would the entire family sit and watch the Ed Sullivan Show. The universal spread of information and ideals that was the hope of television has mushroomed into a flood of fragmented and tightly focused programming to targeted market segments.
When the automobile was invented, it was treated as the natural successor to the horse, so we built garages that look like barns in which to house them, and the style we wanted to see for the vehicle itself was that of the elegant carriage. The automobile was the public representation of a family’s position and aspiration, even built so as to parade the entire (nuclear) family in its journey to town and church. In the current period, the car has become another of the entertainment devices which we purchase not to fill a need but to more tellingly enhance our childlike pleasure. Notice the shape and color of vehicles of the past twenty years: it is not an accident that Detroit has given them the unmistakable look of the old Matchbox cars and Tonka trucks of our childhood. Purchase for practicality here again has given way to fitting the products to a film in which we cast ourselves as the central star. Reality need not interfere with fantasy. Notice how car ads on TV show the driver doing 70 mph on winding country roads, even though we all know that the actual driver is going to be going about 7 mph in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
In the vehicle or out, at work or at play, we also keep a running soundtrack to fit the self-image we create. Stereos and mobile music players allow us to change the mood of our surroundings just as we costume ourselves to fit the scene we are living out at the moment. Especially in the United States, this dovetails with a rejection of communal ritual. Weddings, funerals, really all of the rites of passage, are individualized rather than conforming to tradition. Traditional elements may still be included, but the focus is on making every event a reflection of the individual rather than a recreation from an ancient template. The elements are picked buffet style, so that no two weddings should ever look alike. Even as we value our anonymity, we strive to be different, just like everybody else.
A youth culture chooses to ignore the reality of aging and death, so even as retirees use plastic surgery in order to look twenty-nine, we move our cemeteries far away from neighborhood churchyards and isolate them into park-like “death-ghettos”, away from view and away from our thoughts.
For a moment, think of how different we moderns are from any other people in history (then consider the subset which is the vast majority of actors; usually under thirty and middle class), and how that affects our world view. Whether born in city or country we have in reality been raised in a suburban life-style, not connected to the land in any real sense, have not seen a dead body outside of a hospital or funeral home (even there we often never see the body). We have access to information from around the world but cannot look at the night sky and tell what week of the year it is. We do not know what it’s like to walk down a street and have most people recognize us by name and know most of our family history. Our supermarkets offer us every type of produce known without a thought as to seasonal availability. We have always assumed an unlimited and immediate supply of electricity and water and access to instant communication. Cut off those things from a modern person and you have the set up for a horror movie. And all of what is considered meaningful information either arrives or is confirmed by television and the internet.
Originally, this increase in the availability of resources and information was supposed to usher in a feeling of empowerment, but oddly, the opposite has occurred. Paranoia is the societal norm. Compared to other generations, we live in a nearly constant state of fear and anxiety. All public discourse centers on defining what we should fear most. Commercial products are sold to us based on eliminating what we should deem as constant threats. We live with the assumption that our streets are not safe, that our children are not safe, that our water, food, air, strangers, homes, germs, wildlife, odors, books, movies, insects, philosophies … all of these and just about anything else with which we come in contact are sources of grave and immediate danger to us.
We stand and walk in such a way as to hide from the public eye, with slumped shoulders and arched back, eyes cast to the ground. As we walk, this feeling of collapse continues with each step, so much so that the torso drops into the hip. This, combined with the slumped shoulders, restricts our lung capacity and reduces our speed and placement of our body center. As a result, we tend to lead with the feet or with the forehead.
Of course, youths have been told from time immemorial to stand up straight and not slouch. But as they reach adolescence, they naturally look to the adult ideal of the time and begin to shape their mannerisms and postures to fit that model. It just happens that the current adult ideal comes from entertainment and sports, themselves eschewing the image of sober adulthood and taking on the persona of irresponsible children. Indeed, anything associated with the traditional image of responsible adult, sober in demeanor, is ridiculed as being uptight and repressed. This causes a great problem in business situations. For men, this often translates into a strange double life – dressing for the boardroom, but maintaining the frat-boy persona. Some newer industries eschew formality completely.
Our natural default facial expression is one of veiled hostility, the better to hide the latent fear. Except in business situations, the handshake greeting has been reduced to a very limited hand clasp or touch, with countless variations to establish social placement. Sitting in a chair involves a full collapse into the contours of the seat and back, one step away from reclining, as though attempting to disappear from the room.
Warfare
As potential battlefields expand into the air, and even above the atmosphere, soldiers become either operators of war technology or guerrilla fighters. The days of large numbers of individual infantry fighters taking a field en masse is over. The set-piece battles of WWII with clear battle lines have given way to rapid assaults by combined forces using primarily aircraft in both the light cavalry and heavy cavalry roles, with infantry being highly mechanized and shifting from being either light or heavy, or both, as situations warrant. Direct infantry fighting is now handled by small units of specialized regular forces trained in guerilla techniques, and the bulk of the army either providing logistic support or operating explosive weapons from a distance. The model used in the Vietnam War of using large numbers of lightly armed ground troops to do the bulk of the fighting is no longer seen as effective, although, as is common throughout history, generals are the last to learn those lessons.
Fully automatic firepower and high energy explosives are available now to even the poorest faction. Bladed weapons have no place in battle strategy, although combat knives and bayonets survive as weapons of last resort for ground forces. However, these close in weapons serve more to bolster a feeling a warrior invincibility rather than as a realistic tool of battle. It is interesting to note that in 2010 the US Army finally discontinued fixed bayonet training in boot camp. Generals finally acknowledged what frontline soldiers have known since the 1950’s: Spear and quarterstaff techniques have no place in battles using fragile and short automatic firearms. The oldest form of the sword, however, is still in use, although no longer for soldier vs. soldier fights. Machetes are used by combatants to massacre unarmed civilians in many parts of the world.
A worrisome trend has been the use among many insurgent armies to use children as soldiers. Although children have been used as drummers, tenders, and deck-hands for centuries, their numbers were limited and their application was in minor support positions and not in combat roles. What we are seeing now is something else entirely – entire armies in which only children are recruited [or stolen] as combatants. The reason for using children is obvious – they are far more susceptible to the brainwashing and character break-down during indoctrination and training that helps turn decent civilized people into killing machines. [That’s why regular military forces don’t like to take in recruits that are older than twenty-five.]
What is most troubling about this isn’t that it is some diabolical aberration, but a horrifying realization that the historic barrier to using children has disappeared. Unfortunately, there has never existed a societal taboo by itself on using children to keep it from happening. The barrier was ultimately practical, not emotional. Young children simply don’t have the endurance to be able to march nor the strength to handle the fighting. That is no longer the case now that soldiers can be trucked in to even the most remote areas. As far as the actual fighting, modern weapons such as the AK-47 variations are light enough for a child to carry and simple enough for a child of twelve to disassemble, clean, reassemble, load and fire 50 rounds into a village with only one hour’s worth of instruction.
Civilian Conflict
– Continuing the trend of the beginning of the century, most men are not armed when outside of the home, gang and drug-related tit-for-tat killings notwithstanding. Most weapons used in anger are pistols using high powered ammunition, and confrontations are usually one armed belligerent facing an unarmed one. The youth gangs of the last two decades of the late twentieth century differ from those in mid-century in that the drug trade provides a baseline income that can easily allow for the purchase of even high-priced modern weaponry. That, and the flood of cheap assault rifles coming in from former Soviet Union client nations, has made assault rifles such as the AK-47 available to even low-income teenagers in urban areas.
Also new, and especially seen in the United States, is the development of anonymous violence, made possible by the ubiquity of the automobile. And as is common in youth cultures throughout history, lack of self-control leads to a much faster resort to lethal violence.