Much of our pop culture is made by and for folks who rate high on openness, the sort attracted to novelty — world travels, new drugs, and so forth — but not country music:
Emotional highlights of the low-openness life are going to be the type celebrated in “One Boy, One Girl”: the moment of falling in love with “the one,” the wedding day, the birth one’s children (though I guess the song is about a surprising ultrasound). More generally, country music comes again and again to the marvel of advancing through life’s stations, and finds delight in experiencing traditional familial and social relationships from both sides. Once I was a girl with a mother, now I’m a mother with a girl. My parents took care of me, and now I take care of them. I was once a teenage boy threatened by a girl’s gun-loving father, now I’m a gun-loving father threatening my girl’s teenage boy. Etc. And country is full of assurances that the pleasures of simple, rooted, small-town, lives of faith are deeper and more abiding than the alternatives.
(Hat tip to T. Greer.)
It’s nice when anthropologically minded major media study this sort of thing, and it is a useful way of framing the differences up to a point.
But this sort of thing sometimes also leaves me cold. I don’t really belong to the core population by whom and for whom Country is created, though many forms of it have appealed to me over the years.
The more interesting aspect for me is the degree to which the “openness” meme has taken over. It’s not just openness to experience as a personality trait among others, it’s openness over all other traits and as a primary means of self-identification, and only really considered valid if taken to fairly high levels and practiced for all categories of possible experience.
We have reached the point at which the confluence of openness, extroversion, ambition, and personal gratification are society-defining traits and anyone insufficient in these ways is increasingly outside the official norm. With one caveat — introversion of selected types is also now valorized, but you have to check a select list of alternative boxes to get this particular bonus score.
I suppose it was heading this way for some time. Combine a political and social tradition on the progressive side that still draws inspiration from Seeger’s “Little Boxes” or Marlo Thomas’ “Free to Be You and Me”, with a cadre of upper/middle class educated people who valorize travel, food, sensation, varied experience, enabling technology above all other qualities, and soon the life of the old middle and working classes will look alien and weird.
Eventually one reaches the point that some fringes of society had reached decades ago — traditional modes of life of small towns or suburban houses come to seem alien and hateful.
There remains a certain illusory quality to it all, as for me there does to a lot of postmodern culture, in this case that all these people striving for such varied experiences all want to do them in near-perfect safety all the time. So, tourism, not travel. Or, for the snooty, “travel” over mere tourism but with all the real inconveniences of travel under careful control and with many escape valves. “Adventure” travel in controlled groups.
Basically, fake versions of ancient human experiences that still allow one to look down on the rubes in their little houses and tame tourist holidays.
I wonder how the set of people who pride themselves on their ‘openness’ intersects with the set of people who are stressed because they have Too Much Freedom of Choice, as described in this link:
http://stuartschneiderman.blogspot.com/2019/07/millennials-in-therapy.html
I often cite the strangely haunting Emma Watson film “The Circle”. It is not great cinema, and no doubt its perspectives are those of the writers more than anyone else, but it strikes me as evocative of some set of ideals of life that attract a lot of millennials and a lot of progressives, enough to be emblematic of both for me without necessarily including all of either group.
Desperation for connectedness. Desperation not to lose touch with anyone. The search for ever more intense experience in ever greater safety, facilitated by those permanent connections. Intrusive technology. Failure to grasp privacy or to prioritize it, especially as it weakens connection.
Other recent youth oriented romances tend to celebrate science-fictiony metaphors for nonstandard relationships. A personality that hops from person to person daily, IIRC of both sexes and all genders…, and falls in love with one girl, and she with it. I forget if it has permanent sex characteristics or identity. From this experience, the being learns “how we are all different, and how we are all the same”. Or romances mediated by technology. Or romances with Martian colonial boys who can’t survive in Earth gravity, or alien beings. And so on.
Our ideals of society increasingly revolve around superheroes. This one goes back farther, with Stan Lee the main culprit from the 60s onward. though there were obvious antecedents. Outsiders, aliens, mutations,… teenagers. Or all those things acting as metaphors for one another. And this sort of thing has gained vastly more cultural traction in the last 15 years. For me it stands for increased love and valorization of the outsider, and the cult of youth, presumed to be superior in various ways, more dynamic, more inspirational, exotic. Perhaps for increased sense of dependence on change and the new. What that means I’m not sure. Perhaps it has something to do with our overwhelming desire for the imitation of experience while being protected by others. It also has political resonance — the tv series Supergirl occasionally runs ads suggesting the character’s status as an alien who “loves this planet” like a native human. So shouldn’t we follow that example? [I usually joke that Supergirl can get a visa because she performs military service for the US.]
There were roots for all this of course. SF has explored most of this sort of thing for generations. Although it too has evolved from a confidence in human future and a definite resemblance to modern humanity, to various traditions that are less confident and/or concede the future or some kind of superiority to other lifeforms or technology.
I don’t know what to make of all that, but it is a cultural shift that goes beyond just young modish twits who can’t handle the grocery stores, or for that matter middle aged men who those hip young millennials in turn seem to assume have never met a gay person before and are terrified by flamboyance. Each of us groups presumed to be terrified by the easy diversity of the other’s ordinary life experiences.
I still think that 90s comedy action film Demolition Man foreshadowed a lot, far more than one could possibly have expected.
This is a personal conceit, though not intended to be pure absurdism.
It retains relevance by casting the two sides of its future in what by 90s standards were bipartisan terms. The wussified future tyranny struck me as a progressive fantasy, but the single data point of abortion being illegal [so was pregnancy] convinced people I knew it was a Christian conservative fantasy [though there was literally no religion in the society, pregnancy also required a permit, there were no guns, booze or tobacco and one was fined for swearing even indoors and surveillance was omnipresent]. It was incapable of conceiving of let alone applying or managing violence. Its opponents were underground anarcho-libertarians who kept gas guzzling equipment, guns, smoked and drank, and ate meat. The third and fourth elements were an unfrozen criminal from a far more dystopian and violent 90s than the real era, and a cop of the same time.
To a young millennial progressive of today, our real world let alone that of the 90s, must look like some combination of the corruption of Edgar Friendly’s underground and the violent nightmare of Simon Phoenix and John Spartan. To me, the progressive dream already starts to look too much like the Cocteau Plan.
For any of you tempted to see it having not before done so, a caution. It won’t ever get a Criterion Collection release or critical respect and deserves neither. Still, I can’t recall any action/comedy film that touched on so much that seems relevant now.
Or to sum up, I like that our society is by any world or historical standards, astonishingly “easy”. It’s rougher edges are few by those standards. I would not mind them being made considerably easier yet in all sorts of areas [medical science, looking at you].
But millennial values seem to me more like a war on the human condition and on existence as a human being as we have known it. Not the easing of that condition to the point of maximum comfort, but the cutting of the thread altogether.
To take only one example, hearkening back to The Circle. Who among us has not felt the sense of loss of losing someone, even just to losing touch with old friends. For that matter, plenty of us are capable of feeling that pre-emptively in all sorts of social contexts. It’s a grief of being human, if often a minor one. It makes us selective in our associations and work at the important ones. I’m not sure I want technology to enable a world in which one neither risks losing anyone nor can ever get away from them.
I remember being surprised, even in my less-cynical younger years, that Hollywood would make Demolition Man.
I found some interesting tidbits on Wikipedia:
I am shocked and appalled that the movie business would shamelessly pirate someone else’s content without permission or paying royalties. Are they not our moral compass?