Thank you. As a 60 year old baffled by my 17 year old this is really powerful. It might also explain why I keep thinking about the novel, The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker. It is a coming of age story in the context of a global disaster. I keep thinking about how the different generations responded.
I was talking to my daughter this morning about her desire to do something meaningful in her life & avoid the treadmill from her degree (PPE) into an empty corporate world. She wants to do developmental economics but with an anthropologist’s perspective, not applying the same broken models of the past. Lo & behold, your post found its way into my timeline. This is such a fantastic concept & I have immediately shared with her.
İ wonder if this is a recurrent theme in modern western history (think Raymond Williams made a similar point): the loss of and nostalgia for an older order?
İn the 1950s, for ex., Arendt was writing about the loss of transmission, 'the world' and authority. I'm sure some saw the rupture coming much earlier (the end of the banquet years and the undermining of the certainties of the bourgeoisie (Hobsbswm) etc. etc.)
İn fact, maybe the modern west has always been unstable (& thus creative (?)) like that- without a cosmos, a transcendent reference point or ancestors to guide them. İt's amazing to think Holbein's Dead Christ goes back to the 16th c.!
People born before 9/11 who are old enough to still remember that time have a different experience than younger people born afterwards. They have never experienced (psychological/cultural?) safety and have lived with terror or increasingly frantic change more or less looming over their heads. I think this is particularly true for gen Z in the US. I have such friends who are nostalgic for a time they have never known, and ask for stories and anecdotes about the before times as though I might be recounting fairy tales.
(BTW, I was 11 when the towers came down and I think that is indeed the most poignant piece of news I recall - and certainly international news. Even from my little corner of the world, we all sat and watched something incomprehensible happening live. My mother started crying. My friends thought it was a movie at first. The world did change that day. If something like that could happen in the US, what about everywhere else?)
Thanks Dahlia, I just replied to you instead of Zippy by mistake. I’ve also heard of this nostalgia for a world not known and it intrigues me. There is a word in the Welsh language called hiraeth that comes close. (And you may be right about the specific US Gen Z experience.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiraeth
Thinking about developmental trauma, particularly when certain critical experiences are absent - this can turn, and indeed often does, into a deep and pervasive sense of longing, missing something you don't know (and perhaps you don’t even know you’re missing) and how that can become a sort of echo to every other area of life. Homesickness, but you’ve never felt at home.
Not to psychologize too much, but the kind of relationship with reality underscored by nostalgia for something you've never experienced is analogous to the kind of relationship to the self and others that people with disorganized attachment can have. (Obviously that isn’t the only interpretation of this phenomenon, but I think there’s something to that).
It is kind of interesting that for a period of time late last century and early in this century there was a sort of nostalgia for the "good old days" when war was considered to be normal (as long as it was over there). Various movies more or less depicted "celebrated" this nostalgia
Re 9/11 it could be said that the US has never recovered from the shock of 9/11. On that morning most American's, particularly those living in New York went about their business assuming everything was under control. They were shocked out of their complacency.
The never-ending "war on terror" has been the governing presumption ever since. Never mind that ALL wars are exercises in applied terrorism.
Never mind that the US has been at war for nearly every year of its existence. It has bombed dozens of other countries.
Have you ever read what they did to the Filipino "resistance". Applied "manifest destiny"!
The beginning of the Monroe Doctrine.
Prior to 9/11 and ever since the first Gulf War the US has been dropping bombs on mostly Islamic countries every single day. The "shock and awe" bombing of Iraq at the beginning of Bush's "freedom" crusade was televised in full color - great entertainment! Of course noone could hear the screams of terror or see the rivers of blood or smithereened bodies
Many people in those countries live in daily fear of the next drone attack - or in the case of Palestine a 2000 pound bomb.
There is a tally of how many bombs and drones were launched by Obama, Trump and Biden.
I wasn't at all surprised,
Chalmers Johnson book Blowback is essential reading.
At another level it seems to me that that catastrophic event could have also been the dramatic playing out of many individual and collective karmas.
I agree with most of this. And for many, US support of Israel’s destruction of Gaza was the end of the illusion that liberal democracy is inherently a moral good. But I am describing a widespread perception within a certain subset of people at a particular point in time and think it’s valid on those terms. Even in a more objective multi-perspectival take, recognising America as an empire for instance, considering a range of regime changes and wars etc; I think even then a strong case can be made that the world is in a worse and more precarious state today than it was in, say, 1990.
When a system breaks, the broken begin a conversation as human beings, not human wannabes.
To end the boomer, just pop their balloons and futuristic ideologies of putting carts before even having a relationship with the horse.
Democracy is family, we vote for people we have never met, are taught by strangers who are mean, and are kept in day care, for fear of participating on a given planet that has fictionally mapped lines drawn in the sand to serve no purpose on a tiny blue dot, other than eating itself alive for domestic devolution.
Thank you. As a 60 year old baffled by my 17 year old this is really powerful. It might also explain why I keep thinking about the novel, The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker. It is a coming of age story in the context of a global disaster. I keep thinking about how the different generations responded.
I was talking to my daughter this morning about her desire to do something meaningful in her life & avoid the treadmill from her degree (PPE) into an empty corporate world. She wants to do developmental economics but with an anthropologist’s perspective, not applying the same broken models of the past. Lo & behold, your post found its way into my timeline. This is such a fantastic concept & I have immediately shared with her.
İ wonder if this is a recurrent theme in modern western history (think Raymond Williams made a similar point): the loss of and nostalgia for an older order?
İn the 1950s, for ex., Arendt was writing about the loss of transmission, 'the world' and authority. I'm sure some saw the rupture coming much earlier (the end of the banquet years and the undermining of the certainties of the bourgeoisie (Hobsbswm) etc. etc.)
İn fact, maybe the modern west has always been unstable (& thus creative (?)) like that- without a cosmos, a transcendent reference point or ancestors to guide them. İt's amazing to think Holbein's Dead Christ goes back to the 16th c.!
Nice to see this program afoot; applied, and will help to get the word oot to my moots👌
Get it oot to yer moots!
People born before 9/11 who are old enough to still remember that time have a different experience than younger people born afterwards. They have never experienced (psychological/cultural?) safety and have lived with terror or increasingly frantic change more or less looming over their heads. I think this is particularly true for gen Z in the US. I have such friends who are nostalgic for a time they have never known, and ask for stories and anecdotes about the before times as though I might be recounting fairy tales.
(BTW, I was 11 when the towers came down and I think that is indeed the most poignant piece of news I recall - and certainly international news. Even from my little corner of the world, we all sat and watched something incomprehensible happening live. My mother started crying. My friends thought it was a movie at first. The world did change that day. If something like that could happen in the US, what about everywhere else?)
Thanks Dahlia, I just replied to you instead of Zippy by mistake. I’ve also heard of this nostalgia for a world not known and it intrigues me. There is a word in the Welsh language called hiraeth that comes close. (And you may be right about the specific US Gen Z experience.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiraeth
Thinking about developmental trauma, particularly when certain critical experiences are absent - this can turn, and indeed often does, into a deep and pervasive sense of longing, missing something you don't know (and perhaps you don’t even know you’re missing) and how that can become a sort of echo to every other area of life. Homesickness, but you’ve never felt at home.
Not to psychologize too much, but the kind of relationship with reality underscored by nostalgia for something you've never experienced is analogous to the kind of relationship to the self and others that people with disorganized attachment can have. (Obviously that isn’t the only interpretation of this phenomenon, but I think there’s something to that).
It is kind of interesting that for a period of time late last century and early in this century there was a sort of nostalgia for the "good old days" when war was considered to be normal (as long as it was over there). Various movies more or less depicted "celebrated" this nostalgia
Re 9/11 it could be said that the US has never recovered from the shock of 9/11. On that morning most American's, particularly those living in New York went about their business assuming everything was under control. They were shocked out of their complacency.
The never-ending "war on terror" has been the governing presumption ever since. Never mind that ALL wars are exercises in applied terrorism.
Never mind that the US has been at war for nearly every year of its existence. It has bombed dozens of other countries.
Have you ever read what they did to the Filipino "resistance". Applied "manifest destiny"!
The beginning of the Monroe Doctrine.
Prior to 9/11 and ever since the first Gulf War the US has been dropping bombs on mostly Islamic countries every single day. The "shock and awe" bombing of Iraq at the beginning of Bush's "freedom" crusade was televised in full color - great entertainment! Of course noone could hear the screams of terror or see the rivers of blood or smithereened bodies
Many people in those countries live in daily fear of the next drone attack - or in the case of Palestine a 2000 pound bomb.
There is a tally of how many bombs and drones were launched by Obama, Trump and Biden.
I wasn't at all surprised,
Chalmers Johnson book Blowback is essential reading.
At another level it seems to me that that catastrophic event could have also been the dramatic playing out of many individual and collective karmas.
I agree with most of this. And for many, US support of Israel’s destruction of Gaza was the end of the illusion that liberal democracy is inherently a moral good. But I am describing a widespread perception within a certain subset of people at a particular point in time and think it’s valid on those terms. Even in a more objective multi-perspectival take, recognising America as an empire for instance, considering a range of regime changes and wars etc; I think even then a strong case can be made that the world is in a worse and more precarious state today than it was in, say, 1990.
When a system breaks, the broken begin a conversation as human beings, not human wannabes.
To end the boomer, just pop their balloons and futuristic ideologies of putting carts before even having a relationship with the horse.
Democracy is family, we vote for people we have never met, are taught by strangers who are mean, and are kept in day care, for fear of participating on a given planet that has fictionally mapped lines drawn in the sand to serve no purpose on a tiny blue dot, other than eating itself alive for domestic devolution.