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 ....
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
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...
No comments:
Post a Comment