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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 agree. Have you read Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age? I would not call this the thesis of that book, exactly, but it is certainly hinted at very strongly. A couple of quotes:
And:
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