Writin' 'bout my generation - This is my generation baby !

Janus Manhattan's Children : writin' 'bout my generation baby !

Truth be told, I don't actually know when my generation , the postwar's first (transitional) generation of children, really ended.

But I am certain it all began in 1941.

That is because I define this key transitional generation as those too young to remember WWII as WWII but old enough to remember the rebellious 'turn to postmodernity' of the late sixties first hand - so around 1961 should marks its ending.

( I really should love this definition - it places me, born in 1951, conveniently plunk (Janus-like) in the middle of this generation !)

But, as a writer, my difficulty revolves around this question : is some vague personal memory of 1950s (modernity-oriented) public schooling also required as well ?

Many people think it so.

If so, my generation runs from 1941 to around 1956.

Now in Canada, for example, the Baby Boom began in 1941 and ended in 1966 .

However, I feel we must re-define this transitional generation away from the question of whether its members were baby boom members or not .

We should focus instead on a worldwide set of kids who grew up within my original definition --- even in countries that experienced no visible baby boom.

That is those kids who were old enough to feel the postwar glow of WWII scientism second hand, but also young enough to share the 'rock 'n' roll' rebellion of the mid to late 1960s.

Even if that only meant wildly dancing, as elementary school kids, to a noisy Rolling Stone record because they knew their parents clearly disapproved ....

The Worldwide "Turbulent Decade" (1964 -1974) not dependent on size of local baby boom

Those academics and journalists who persist in relating the intensity of the events of the Turbulent Decade (1964-1974) to the size of a particular nation's baby boom must have a heck of a time contrasting English-speaking Canada with France.

English-speaking Canada had the world's greatest uptick in teenagers and young people over those turbulent ten years while France's long gentle baby boom was still 'making babies' when that decade ended.

And those babies were certainly not out on the streets protesting - certainly not during the famous events of May 1968.

And where was youth-filled English-speaking Canada's equivalent of May 1968 ?

There wasn't any.

Instead the youth of English-speaking Canada enjoyed, with their parents, Expo 67's pride of nationhood.

It was a mood aided and abetted by the fact that tens of thousands of Americans draft dodgers were suddenly fleeing their land of milk and honey for hitherto boring old Canada (!)

It is not that Canada didn't eventually experience a good deal of social turbulence led by its youth - it is just that there is no point in relating its intensity to the "boom" in Canadian babies decades earlier.

More productive, in my mind, is for us all to relate the turbulent decade to the coming of an cohort marked by their place in time, not by their size.

Because 1964 marked the coming of age of the first group in our world who did not (and in fact could not) personally share in 1945's collective mood of modernist triumphalism ...

"Transitional Generation" : too young to remember WWII, old enough to remember the Sixties - but above all, a child of the Fifties

In most of the world that had a baby boom, it began after 1941 and it began tailing off after 1959.

My postwar "Transitional Generation" - by sheer coincidence - shares that time period with the actual baby boomers - because we find the Transitional Generation effect even in countries where there was in fact no noticeable baby boom.

But consider this : all these boomers and transitionalists share at least one thing - maybe even only one thing - in common.

For even someone born in early 1941 is still "a child of the Fifties" (age 9) in 1950, just as a baby at the other end, born in late 1959,  is at least technically still "a child of the Fifties".

Someone born in 1937 (a teenage in 1950), or someone born in 1960, can't ever share that fact with this cohort.

A shared Fifties childhood - rather than experiencing the very occasionally turbulent Sixties and Seventies with many other age groups - might be the key bond and glue for this large body of current humanity...

Post WWII generations would have changed our world even if they hadn't been a boomlet of kids

True, some of my primary school classrooms may have held close to thirty kids in them when the same classrooms in the decades before and after me might have held only around 15 , but that alone did nothing to make me and my fellow pupils fierce rebels against the values of the 500 years of generations before us.

What is the evidence, or the even the old fashioned appeal to timeless common sense, to support the absurd claim that bigger clumps of kids are more liberal/left wing than smaller clumps ?

No, what makes the pre WWII generations and post WWII generations so fundamentally different is one word : WWII .

My book is not going to focus on the physical cataclysm that was WWII : one or two (million) writers have already done so.

I wish to prove up, instead, just how truly great an intellectual cataclysm it was.

So much so, that pre WWII reads as 500 unbroken years of modernity and the enlightenment project & hegemony while post WWII was reads as postmodernity, hetro hegemony, commensality, plentitude, diversity et al.

We're probably stuck with this misleading 'boomer' moniker forever - but I will still try to make a case for re-naming it and its children's children 'the post WWII generations'.

I suspect a very good place to start is to compare the social values of the post WWII kids and their parents in nations that had almost no post WWII baby boom.

Even more interesting, would be to look at nations with almost no baby boom and who also remained Neutral during WWII ....

THE GREATER GENERATION and its internal critics : if only

Contrasting the Boomer Generation (1941-1966*) to their parents' generation (The Greatest Generation), Leonard Steinhorn feels boomer efforts to bring the reputed Allied aims of WWII to actual fruition at home makes them fully worthy of being called The GREATER GENERATION.

It is a claim he carefully lays out and in my mind, proves up , in his 2006 book of that title.

If you are a boomer and fear for this planet's climate, I strongly urge you to read and re-read Steinhorn's book.

But, not unexpectedly, I wish Professor Steinhorn had written another book on this subject.

Basically, I want to see him answer this question :

Was the baby boom (the unexpected blip upwards in births from 1941-1966 against a century and a half of decline) caused by postmodernity, or did it itself cause postmodernity, or were the two simultaneous events (the coming of age of boomers and of postmodernity) mere coincidences in time?

My own personal view is that a combination of scientific successes in 1945 , both modern and postmodern (though not called that then), gave young would-be parents reason to hope for the future and to want to bring lots of kids into that bright future.

For a time these two contrary ways of viewing and dealing with physical reality fused as one in peoples' minds.

Gradually, though, they became separated and became soon were seen as so opposite that boomers, their parents and their own children had to choose definitely between one or the other.

Let me give one specific example : in 1960, Time Magazine's Person of the Year was "The American Scientist" and at that point in time, no one would ask, with deep dark suspicion , 'Hang on a minute, exactly what sort of scientist are they praising ?'

In 1960, on the left and on the right, all scientists were seen as being fused together in one big tribe.

But by the time of the rise of science-based environmental movements in the early 1970s, they stopped being so - separating out instead into modern and postmodern scientists, as I see it. But few others see it exactly as I do.

Instead, in 1980, Canadian sociologist Allan Schnaiberg usefully divided scientists into those involved in production (new ways to dig up deep deposited coal) versus those involved in studying the impact of all that new coal on the climate.

It is his terminology that has become the accepted way to describe this growing divide between scientists since the 1970s.

The boomers kids , in parallel, only seemed to be fused together as they moved from childhood to adulthood.

 But as the twin icons of their childhood (nuclear energy too cheap to meter, and Nature-made medicine) moved apart, so did they : forced to choose one or the other but no longer both.

This can produce some very odd results among we boomers with inherent weaknesses in logic and consistent reasoning.

We boomers are free to do much on this earth : change our nationality, our class, our ideology, our spouse, to some extent even our gender.

But we can't change our birthdate ---- and it seems to be in the DNA of all true conservatives to deny that simple fact.

Our birthdate - contrary to FOX NEWS - is not a lifestyle choice

Being a boomer simply isn't a lifestyle choice - it is simply an accident of life why you were born between 1941 and 1966 and so many others weren't.

So in Chapter Three of Steinhorn's book , entitled "The Revenge of the Luddites", he makes great sport of all those conservative who pour scorn on the boomers.

Now I have no kick against these particular conservative constantly pouring scorn on liberals , or 'left wing boomers', or 'other boomers', or 'we boomers'.

But upon "the boomers" - from the outside- when you yourself are a boomer ?

Because virtually all the conservatives** Dr Steinhorn cites in this chapter are themselves boomers-in-good-standing, by birth and from birth.

So conservative boomers : please criticize 'the boomers' all you want - but from the inside,  for God's sake , as you yourself were born in the boomer years too.

But why pretend you are not a boomer when a Google Search of your birthdate so quickly proves you dead wrong.

Is this bizarre behavior self-hatred/illogical or what ?

What is what it is, I think.

The conservative boomers still share something with left wing boomers I am afraid.

Both exhibit an unwillingness to accept boomers as being a group of individuals who experienced two conflicting ways of viewing reality as just one -- as children .

And that as adults, they came to understand that that can't possibly be so --- and in the process began dividing into two warring boomer camps....

_________________

** Andrew Sullivan born 1963, Sean Hannity 1961, Christopher Hitchens 1949, Doug Coupland 1961, George F Will 1941, Dinesh D'Souza 1961, Ann Coulter 1961, Bill O'Reilly 1949, David Brooks 1961, Peggy Noonan 1950, Roger Kimball 1953.

(Similarly,worldwide, the vast majority of the best known conservative writers are boomers.)

* Time Magazine in its January 1967 issue declaring the boomers "People of the Year" for 1966, but did not call them 'the under twenty year olds', as it should have done according to the supposed baby-boom experts of the day.

These experts all saw the baby boom as beginning in 1946, after the men returned home from overseas.

Instead Time consulted the facts, not the wannabe experts, and correctly saw the boom beginning in 1941 - hence the cover lauded 'the under 25 year olds'.

This cover article really did its homework and still reads well a half century later.

I have here in my hand a list of names : rogue Boomers who deny climate change

I don't - yet - have 205 or 81 or 57 names or whatever alcohol-induced fantasy number Senator Joe came up with in the end.

But I'm working on it.

First, definitions.

The Baby Boom wasn't really a boom in babies conceived , taking the long view.

Rather it was a 25 year long interregnum (a blip upwards) in the one hundred and fifty year long slow slide downwards in the number of live births among families in the westernized world.

Starting generally around 1941 and continuing generally till 1966, the number of live births in the West edged upwards from its nadir of the Great Depression decade, before settling down once again to Great Depression levels or less.

In social science terms, harmful human climate change deniers/skeptics/hubrists aren't exactly hard to define (or to find) : they come right out and freely admit to their disbelief.

Traditionally, we denier watchers have tended to focus on the most strident ones and I now believe this to be wrong.

They are the most strident because (a) they are either very old, know they are dying and out of office or (b) they are very young and not yet in office.

But the ones with all the actual power to do things and not just to complain about things are the Boomer deniers.

They will be running our world - in terms of both formal politics and informal wealth and cultural influence - right up to the global melt down tipping point.

Just for example : Mitt Romney and prime ministers Harper, Abbott, Key and Cameron.

All leaders of the Anglo Saxon cum free world,  all Boomers and all very weak on stopping harmful climate change.

I'm making a list of powerful Boomers, checking it twice trying to find out ,on the issue of the climate, who has been naughty and who has been nice.

And I will post the names of naughty little boomer kids permanently on the side column of this blog ....

Nothing links new Baby Boomers to the old : its always about content , not container

A new , relatively little known , baby boom is underway - in terms of babies produced per family of baby-makers , one that is far far bigger than the better known and older Baby Boom.

By the conventional measure of 'Baby Boomer' impact, this then should be big news.

But the conventional explanation for the importance of the post WWII Baby Boom is wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

It was not our sheer massive size that made Noir's Children, (those of us born between 1940 and 1956) so important in historical terms.

But size does matter for today's baby boom, despite it being smaller in absolute size than the post war boom.

Confused ?

The post war baby boom was a society wide event : so it only produced differential consequences when set against the generations before and after it - not within its current generation.

But today's baby boom is limited mostly to religious fundamentalists : Christian evangelicals and the Orthodox sections of the Jewish and Moslem faiths.

Eventually, by sheer weight of numbers, these children of the religiously orthodox could dominate the religiously moderate or unchurched - at the ballot box, in the job market, as consumers.

Today's baby boomers are important because of their relative growth , as set against the growth of the child population as a whole.

I am far from denying the importance of the size of the post war Baby Boom as set against the previous generation and all later generations to date.

But note well my qualification: I now limit its impact, looking backwards, to only the previous generation.

Because if we are looking for truly massive baby booms within western culture , the mid Victorian era is a very good place to start.

The post WWII baby boom was really small potatoes in terms of total numbers of kids per couple.

More a tendency for more couples to marry and for far more to marry early, then to have 2.5 kids in a few short years right after marriage.

Set this against the immediately earlier generation, with fewer couples ever marrying, and most marrying later in life , and then having only 2.0 kids - spread over many more years.

(For the sake of my argument, don't take my various numbers of children per couple as gospel - they clearly varied between various countries - its the time compression trend that I regard as more universal and more crucial.)

But in mid Victorian times, better weather, better food supplies, better public health had all led to a rising chance that any child born would actually live to adulthood.

But parents hadn't sensed this change fully and they went on trying to have the traditional ten pregnancies.

That led to a truly massive baby boom that is still echoing on.

But it never got a name because its impact doesn't seem to have been that apparent to contemporaries - despite its much bigger size than the post WWII baby boom.

I suggest the key difference is that the post war Boomers felt and acted differently enough from all their elders (elders all the way back to the beginnings of the Enlightenment Project) to represent a real rupture in History.

Yes, every generation reacts against its parents and grandparents --- but fundamentally rejecting the key tenets of 500 years of continuing western culture is, by any definition , a truly rare event.

When my generation failed to reproduce the ongoing Enlightenment Project , it was doomed to die out with the last surviving pre-Boomer.

My age cohort - by its mild but firm total disinterest in and rejection of the Enlightenment Project killed it stone dead.

My proposed title for my age cohort - dismissing the term "Baby Boomer" as near empty of explanation - "Noir's Children" - hints as to why my generation fundamentally rejected Modernity.

As well as to the true reason why History cares - and should care - about us postwar Baby Boomers cum Noir's Children ...

post Modern age ushered in by baby's whimper, not Bomb's bang

Two 'Booms' occurred in 1945 : which was more important ?

It was the year 1945, all historians seem to agree , that ushered out the Modern age and ushered in the post Modern age : and ushered it in with some sort of a bang.

But what sort of bang : was it the secretive Manhattan Project's Atom Bomb big Boom !!! ?

Or was it the smallest Manhattan Project's inclusive vision of penicillin priced and available for all , a vision that encouraged women all over the world to see a brighter future ahead and gave them reason to want to get pregnant ?

Was it then the penicillin-and-good-health fueled Baby Boom that really ushered in our current age ?

Was an old age ushered out by a newborn baby's contented whimper ?

That's sort of my take : yes, revulsion against yesterday's exclusionary values that gave us Auschwitz.

But also gratitude for today's inclusionary values that gave us  'cheap and abundant penicillin for all' , with its promise of a healthy childhood ahead for most newborn children.....

Modernity dies in an Adorno Moment : 1939-1945

Between  April 30th 1939 (when the New York's World Fair opened) and the November 20th 1945 (when the Nuremberg Trials opened) a lot of water (together with a lot of blood and brains) flowed under one of Modern civilization's few remaining un-bombed bridges :  call it WWII.

If  to the bemused Theodor Adorno, New York's fair was Modernity's bizarre apogee , he also saw Nuremberg's trials as Modernity's appalling nadir.

But I doubt that even Adorno and his co-conspirator Max Horkheimer had really expected Modernity to soar , burn and crash just that quickly.

Yet it clearly happened. Few people doubt that our new Age of post-Modernity can not be precisely dated to very late in the year of 1945.

Just as very few people deny that the opening of New York's World Fair of 1939 captured the absolute peak of Modernist optimism and hubris.

Now WWI also resulted in dramatic change all around the world.

But I would argue that while the surface of Modernity in 1919 was readily and intensely cracked all over, the deep superstructure actually held stronger than ever.

People often see WWI's dramatic results as the results of long standing tensions, buried below the surface, suddenly precipitating in a crisis situation.

Perhaps : tensions buried under the surface, but not that deeply buried.

By contrast, the surface of immediately post WWII Modernity didn't crack at all but actually burnished all the brighter ("Better Science won the War"), but deep down inside , the moral core of Modernity had lost its appeal to the young.

Modernist elders simply didn't seen their own self-inflicted wounds and so did nothing to reduce its shock upon their young.

As a result, the assault on their children's and grandchildren's moral certitudes was all the more stunning due to their elders' failure to genuinely reflect upon the meaning of the events of 1945.

But demographically, the rot had truly set in and it was now only a matter of time ------ and of baby booms ----  and of funerals....

Penicillin : from Modern to ante-Modern in six bloody years

The biggest battle of WWII was NOT Stalingrad ( physically huge but intellectually a mere bun fight between History's worst dictators) but rather the battle over wartime penicillin : who makes it and who receives it.

For WWII definitely had a 'war within a war' aspect to it .


The billions of individuals who made up the modern global civilization of 1939 had six long - bloody  - years to re-evaluate whether the core values of their culture were really worth dying for, or were they only good for starting aggressive wars  - but not the sort of values for ending aggressive wars and securing permanent peace.

The New York World's Fair of 1939 promised a total world of man-made-ness but in the case of penicillin, man-made-ness ended in abject failure and it was Mother Nature that brought us this wonder drug when Man proved to be 'not up for the job'.

The world of 1939 eugenically exalted the Big and the Mighty and denigrated the weak and the small : penicillin (once it was a perfectly pure crystal shining brighter than a thousand suns) would be distributed on strictly Darwinian lines.

It would not be made in such quantities that would require the Allies to make one less bomber or battleship : so it would have to be rationed and so would go only to the eugenically 1A people .

(Be they fighting in foreign combat lines or winning the war behind some important desk in London or Washington.)

But by 1945, those same bombers were being pulled off their jobs of riding shotgun over the NRA nation and converted into butterflies to deliver life-saving grams of Nature-made penicillin to the dying all over the world : regardless of age, color, gender and economic status.

1945 was indeed the year that baby "Baby Boomers" started entering a very new , ante-Modern world......