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1000th Comment: On The Value of Conflict or if we want to Make America Great Again we need to start raising kids with values we don’t intend them to keep
As I narcissistically checked my profile page to look up old comments, I realized that I was at 999. Being exceedingly sentimental, I thought I should make number 1000 a fun stoned goofball post. So I wanted to return to a vague thesis of mine, something that can bring a lot of disparate trains of thought together for me. For those of you who want to skip straight to telling me why I’m wrong without reading the whole thing, TLDR:
Certain beliefs and practices should only be formed as a result of rebellion against society, and never be taught directly by authority figures. Others make sense only as part of a living communal tradition, and lose their meaning as rebellion. Any belief or movement is inherently understood within social context, and cannot be understood separated from the whole of the political world including its opposition. One is not woke, one is woke to something that exists, the bad dream that is wrong in the world. One is not conservative, one conserves something from someone else. The morass of the current Culture War is the result of the parties trying to replay Theses from prior culture wars, while ignoring the context in which those wars were fought. The solution is for parents and authority figures to assume values with the young that they do not necessarily hold, so those youth can experience the societal coming of age rebellion we want for them, without transgressing the bounds of good taste.
((NB: I’m going to use the Hegelian triadic structure of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis. I’m aware that Hegel himself did not use these terms in his work, but I think it’s the best way to represent the concept of the triadic and the dialectic in Hegel’s work, and it is how it’s been taught in every Phil101 course for decades so we’re sticking with it.))
I’ve never had a problem with atheists who became atheists, who were raised in a faith and ultimately turned against it, but I’ve rarely liked atheists who were born into their faith (or lack thereof). I find them so often to be missing some essential mode of human experience, totally incapable of comprehending the idea of religion. They lack the experience of even trying to believe.
Similarly, I’m a bit of a sexual libertine in my own life, but I find the spectacle of kids being taught libertinism disgusting. The idea of “sex positive” parenting strikes me as neither, kids should discover these things on their own. I value my own youth, when at 12 my friends and I sneakily “discovered” DVDs that had brief nudity in them but that our parents didn’t pick up on, and pushing boundaries resulted in experiencing our sexual lives on our own, without too much direction or interference. That kind of freedom should be found for oneself, in a struggle against the putative powers that be, not given as gospel by a middle school teacher.
At the same time, I’ve never had a problem with traditionalists who were born traditionalists. Those who embrace a living tradition from their fathers and their fathers’ fathers. They wish to live their lives in accordance with what they were taught growing up; but I’m frightened by those who wish to restrict themselves further, by those who imagine themselves in communion with a distant fantasy of medieval Chistendom or further back to a pagan past, the reactionaries.
I’m at heart, a conservative, in the pejorative sense of conservatives as the coalition of the comfortable. I like the world the way it is, more or less, and I want it to stay that way for my descendants. Both my biological descendants, my children and grandchildren and nephews and nieces; and my ideological descendants, the students at my alma mater, at my high school and my college, future Americans whose parents might not even be in the country yet. The problem for me and mine, is that the tradition I want to conserve is one of struggle. My father and his cohort, their golden age was the 1950s-1970s, it was a struggle against repressive social norms towards teenage freedom and self expression. The great music, movies, books of his era are all about striking out against social norms. How do I return when the very dynamic of the era militates against itself? One side of the culture war wishes a full return to the 1950s, to Make America Great Again by adopting its values wholesale, the other wishes to institute a paradoxical permanent revolution, a forever struggle towards an unclear goal. Neither will succeed.
I’ve argued the definition extensively on the motte in the past, and I’ll just quote myself rather than reinvent the wheel, regarding Chesterton’s Fence.
The problem is that the fences I’ve outlined above are all themselves struggles, and the idea is that we must preserve the struggle. The greatest moments are those of struggle for freedom and autonomy, actually having the freedom and autonomy isn’t nearly as good as struggling for it. How do we understand this psychology? We return to an ignored root of most modern philosophy, we return to Hegel.
Hegel taught two concepts that were relevant here: that the part is incoherent without the whole, that everything must be in place for anything to happen; and the triadic structure of thesis-anithesis-synthesis that produces growth and change. Hegel, of course, taught enlightenment, taught a futurism that seems almost too optimistic for our world today. I propose not necessarily that Hegel is correct in that history must march onward to thought knowing itself, but instead that Hegel’s thought is descriptive of how to produce a world that might be called the Enlightenment World. We can’t produce Enlightenment Man by enacting the policies Enlightenment Man advocates for, rather to recreate Enlightenment Man we must create a whole world that is similar to what Enlightenment Man experienced and the oppositional dialectics that he grew on. From his Encyclopedia:
We have to consider not just one side or the other of American midcentury greatness, but both sides working together and against each other, forcing each other to adapt. We need the political “other” to define and refine the “self.” The great mainstream philosophical filmography on the topic of “relitigating the 50s/60s” between the 1980s and 2001, think Grease American Graffiti Field of Dreams and Forrest Gump (which I may return to in more detail later), the Boomer generation thinking about itself, all operated on this Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis system. The great era of America was built on struggle between opposites. Grease gives us Danny the rebellious greaser, who wants to love Sandy the moralistic prep, but they are driven apart by their values dissonance; each changes to charm the other, Danny letters in varsity sports while Sandy shows up in sewn on leather pants he “shapes up, because [she] need[s] a man”, they come together and the resulting synthesis is better than either was to begin with. American Graffiti is the story of two 18 year olds about to fly off to college, small town thesis college antithesis, who explore the good and the bad sides of their small American town that they loved and hated, and reach synthesis: one chooses to go to college, the other to stay home with his high school sweetheart, they have switched positions. Field of Dreams, for those paying attention, isn’t about Baseball, it’s about the 1960s, and a generation reconciling with their fathers, Kevin Costner’s character doesn’t just love Baseball, he finds peace after rejecting his father when he was younger, returning to the land while also retaining a sense of freedom and whimsy that was the positive byproduct of 1960s rebellion.
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Forrest Gump is the most extensive and obvious on the topic, giving us Forrest as Thesis, Jenny as Antithesis, and Forrest Jr. as literal Synthesis. Forrest is basically ok throughout American history (it’s telling that the avatar of the Boomer generation is a savant-retard too stupid to know what’s going on but too talented to be prevented from succeeding). Jenny is the failure of Thesis-society, molested as a child and seeking freedom through various ultimately unsatisfactory rebellions (the abusive SDS boyf at the Black Panther Party). Ultimately, they finally come together, Jenny dies representing the passing of the 1960s Antithesis, while Forrest takes Forrest Jr. to raise him to preserve the spirit of the 1960s in a way that will lead to a better world.
That synthesis is what we aim for if we wish to preserve mid-century American culture. A world where the young move against a repressive world order. But the synthesis is always itself unsatisfactory, and we cannot raise kids with the value of rebellion as a basic aspect of coming of age, raise them on the Stones and Minor Threat, and expect them not to push further than we want them to. Permanent revolution means every generation is of necessity wrong, and at some point the system must fall under the endless pressure.
The solution I see is that parents and teachers need to assume a morality they do not necessarily agree with. Kids should all be raised religious, even if the parents themselves have doubts, if the kids wish to be atheists they should come by it honestly not default to it for lack of any religious background. Kids should experiment with sexuality away from the prescriptions of “sex positive” parents and teachers, they should come by their horniness naturally not be informed that they should be horny by annoying parents. That is how we produce a generation that looks like the great eras of American history, by producing the full conditions, the complete circle of circles, that produced those men.
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I like your argument, but to put a different spin on it I'd say we've lost the Sythesis piece. Or in other words, 'adults' nowadays are engaging in Extended Adolescence, basically refusing to grow up and continuing to act like children well into their later years.
This type of behavior is exemplified by shows in the 2000s like Gilmore Girls, where you have a single mother who is consistently acting like a teenage girl, while literally getting emotional support and advice from her teenage daughter. You can have your cake and eat it too folks - have a kid while also having a fun teenage buddy to chat about boys with!
I'm curious what exactly caused the shift from rebellion to 'growing-up' - was it a certain amount of outside pressure to conform or become a productive member of society that we lack? Was it religion pushing people to get right with God? Or was it something to do with women's liberation and the female love of youth?
Realistically, a mix of all three. I'm curious to see how we can salvage a social technology that will force people to actually grow up in a reasonable time frame.
Another way to put this is that it's narcissism all the way down.
Oh man I have thoughts on Gilmore Girls. ((Weirdly this is "Chick flick analysis on themotte" day for me)) My wife watches it all the time, it's her anxiety blanket of a show. Which is weird because she kind of hates it too.
The whole series is fascinating when you consider it in light of the reboot. To summarize for the vast majority of straight men who have no idea what I'm talking about: Gilmore Girls tells the story of Lorelai and Rory Gilmore, a mother and daughter living in Connecticut, and then to a lesser extent Rory's wealthy grandmother Emily. Lorelai got pregnant as a teenager and ran away from home, despite coming from a wealthy family she worked her way up through service industry jobs at hotels because she cut contact with her rich parents after getting pregnant, raising Rory as a single mother with virtually no contact with the father and no long term partners (iirc); Rory is a brilliant child and always presented as destined for great things, going to a fancy private high school before going to Yale. As Dag said, the core of the show is the mother-daughter relationship, and to bring it back to my original diagram it fits right in! Emily is the thesis, staid, stubborn and traditional, a controlling DAR matron; who uses her money to control the lives of her subordinates and family. Lorelai is the antithesis, she chooses to cut all contact with her wealthy parents and work low-class jobs rather than put up with her mother's controls. Rory is the synthesis, the star-baby, contrasted with every other character that must choose a side she is all things to all people, she is able to bring peace between the prior generations, she is comfortable with the commoners and with the aristos, she can walk with Kings [but not] lose the common touch. Her graduation from Yale with plans for a sparkling journalism career is the culmination of the first run of the show, all is solved and all is golden, Rory will avoid Emily and Lorelai's mistakes while hanging on to their positive qualities.
Then Netflix came along with a truckload of money to run a brief reboot Gilmore Girls: A Year in The Life which ran four episodes, and revisited everyone's favorite characters. (Except Melissa McCarthy, who they could only afford for a cameo after she was a side character for the original) A bunch of irrelevant shit happens, but the main points are (spoilers ahead) Rory is unemployed and broke and moves back in with her mother, having failed to have a sterling journalistic career or to succeed in any other field, has no long term romantic partner while having a series of flings, and in the climactic final scene reveals to her mother that she is pregnant. Which sets the entire prior point of the show on its head: Rory isn't the starchild after all, she is instead trapped in a cycle of failure and single motherhood. Rendered incapable of forming real romantic commitments by the lack of a father figure or a strong male presence in her early life, she allows herself to be used as a side piece, convincing herself that her refusal to commit is her freedom, when in reality it traps her and those around her in an endless cycle of slavery. The first seasons of the show are tragic in light of this conclusion, knowing that Rory won't make good makes her journey through Chilton and Yale Sisyphean rather than Herculean, the ultimate destination is right back where her mother started: single, jobless, and pregnant in small town Connecticut.
At a meta level, this is the difference between late Washington Consensus/End-Of-History plots (Gilmore Girls debuted in 2000), and post-Obama plots. The first seven seasons hope to reconcile the family, to bring everything together in a hopeful conclusion. The Netflix reboot tells us all of that was nonsense, we're all trapped in a cycle of failure, nothing matters or will ever get better. The characters that come out of the reboot looking smarter are those who didn't try: Lane and Zack "tend their garden;" they have kids together, they still play music, and they're happier than the Faustian characters like Rory and Paris who were supposed to be their natural betters. The best Rory can hope for is that her mother's journey will bring understanding to her journey with her own child...but how much fucking understanding do we need before one of these girls can father a baby in wedlock for a change?
I'm coming from a place of complete ignorance here; before reading this summary, my best guess at Gilmore Girls would have been that it was some dramedy about a friend group of female senior citizens. Do you know how longtime fans of the original series tended to react to the Netflix sequel? The way you describe it would make me guess that it got a mostly negative reception, similar to many sequels/reboots/reimaginings/etc. that have come out in the past decade, and I'm curious what the actual reception was.
I can only really tell you that my wife hated it. It was probably something that everyone watched but no one was really satisfied by.
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I agree with your summary, although I'd argue Rory and Lorelei's fall from grace started in the last two seasons (I had to check the Wikipedia summary to remind myself of when stuff happened exactly) where it seemed like the writers had them just starting to act much dumber than usual in attempt to create dramatic tension. It felt like the writers were actively avoiding letting them be happy. And the reboot just turned that up to 11.
To be fair, although the show focuses on their point of view so it's not obvious at a glance, Rory and Lorelei are pretty terrible self-centered people, so it's hard to feel too bad for them.
Man, I could put up a whole new effortpost about how bad Rom-Com TV shows are at writing happy marriages. Having written themselves towards a marriage that should be happy, the writers typically either need to throw up strange obstacles to create tension, toss one of the characters the idiot ball so they fuck it up, or they just draw out the process of getting together/marriage for so long that the audience gets restless.
GG suffers from the latter in the late seasons, Rory has met Logan and Lorelei is with Luke openly, but they can't just have happy marriages so they keep drawing it out with increasingly strange obstacles and weird reticence to commit. HIMYM did the idiot ball thing, from what I recall of friends complaining about it, with the couples creating drama by going off the deep end completely at random. SATC would have no idea how to write Charlotte's first marriage, so they just gave him terminal ED. The Office, I never watched in detail but people generally say it peaked at the Wedding and declined thereafter.
Even the Big Bang Theory, I will go to the mat arguing that the first season was brilliant (to me as a nerdy 16 year old with a group of friends fairly well described as a mix of Indians, Jews, and autists). But they had no idea how to write it once they coupled the characters up. The first season is a classic Rom-Com, and ends with the leads kissing, as a self contained story it works. After that the show went into terminal decline, they had no idea how to deal with the unrealistic aftermath.
Hooray for the /comments page. It's a shame there's no "/comments, but just the ones replying to two-week-old threads, since everything else is easier to read threaded" page.
I'd love to see this in Friday Fun some time.
... especially if you've got any thoughts about "Mad About You". I barely remember it now (though now I find out there was recently an 8th season, produced decades after season 7!?!), and what I remember does include a few "idiot ball" episodes, but I remember thinking decades ago that it really stood out from the crowd of implausibly-drawn-out "Sam and Diane" "will they wont they" romantic melodrama subplots. The main characters were a happily married couple from episode 1, the show A plots were about their interpersonal issues with each other and family and friends, and yet IIRC they managed to get several seasons out of that without most of the spousal issues being ridiculously foolish or melodramatic. IMDB says there wasn't much quality decline until halfway through season 6.
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I haven't watched the show, but doesn't this go back to the basic rule of Story that the OG happy ending is a wedding, always was and always will be and the audience know this, and don't want to change it.
If you run Rory's story forward, either she needs to get married (which from the perspective of the people making the show defeats the point), or she needs to end up in a relationship such that the future wedding can be implied, or you need to deal with the fact that she is going to end up with a life the vast majority of the audience don't want.
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