The generation of The Children of High Modernity was born after 1870 and before the death of Queen Victoria in 1901.
'Their War' was the Great War, WWI.
They had children, usually when they were between 20 and 40.
For their kids, 'their war' was WWII and they were flattered by being called "The Greatest Generation" by younger authors who wanted to sell lots of books to them.
Their grandchildren were usually born between 1940 and 1960, the (Atomic) Boom Generation : 'their war' was Vietnam.
For example, my grandfathers were born in the 1890s and served in WWI. Their kids were born in the 1920s and served in WWII.
I, like virtually all their grandkids was born in the 1950s.
While, as a Canadian, I wasn't expected to serve in Vietnam, some kids at my two high schools did volunteer to go do so.
The possibility that a right wing government might send Canadian kids off, as right wing governments did in Australia and New Zealand ,was always on the minds of kids like me who were of prime draft age at the height of the Vietnam war.
By the late 1960s, as one generation largely defended the Vietnam war and another one largely opposed it, The Children of High Modernity faded from the public discourse - through death or ill health.
I wonder if they died angry, as they saw all that their High Modernity generation had done for (and to) the world, was beginning to come under sustained attack from their own grandchildren.....
Saturday, May 26, 2012
"The Children of HIGH MODERNITY" (1870 -1970)
Labels:
high modernity,
vietnam war,
wwi,
wwii
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Why My Urgency ?

- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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