The center wasnt holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public auction announcements and common-place reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled the four-letter words they scrawled.
-Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion (1964)
Cycles of History: Post World War I, the 1960s and now
Joan Didion, wrote her essay Slouching Towards Bethlehem in 1964 from Haight-Ashbury, ground zero for the cultural shockwave unleashed when the oldest Baby Boomers became eligible for the draft, found their parents lifestyle stifling and discovered the pleasuresand painsof drugs, sex and rock and roll.
Writer Joan Didion and novelist John Gregory Dunne sitting in the library of their Malibu, ... [+] California, home. (Photo by Henry Clarke/Conde Nast via Getty Images)
Her reference to the center wasnt holding directly connects the 1960s in America to the instability after the end of World War I in 1918, which inspired W. B. Yeats to write his famous poem, The Second Coming:
Turning and turning in the wideninggyre.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Widening gyre refers to his theory of history as a series of cycles of order and disorder from the birth of Christ to his Second Coming.If Irish mysticism isnt your thing, think of Mark Twains (maybe) words, History doesnt repeat itself, it rhymes. Or,Kondratievs long wave theory of cycles of 40-60 years.
The idea of history as a "gyre" is drawn from Irish mysticism and Hinduism.
In 1918, the war to end all wars led instead to a period of extended political and economic instability that laid the foundation for Yeats torment. And the violent Easter Rising of 1916, leading to the independence of the Irish Republic in 1919,brought it home. The Pandemic of 1918 infected 500 million people and killed 50 million, and brought Yeats young wife near death.
We Baby Boomers Pass Through Yeats Widening Gyre
From Joan Didions hippies to our ongoing pandemic, it feels like we Baby Boomers are moving through Yeatswidening gyre.Perhaps it is as simple as when many of our parents were born (mine 1911, 1914); when we were becoming adults in the 1960s and 1970s; and now we see the Great White Light in the lessening distance about 50 years later.
Or maybe we Baby Boomers are finally coming to terms with our lost innocence. Watch the movie documentary, Woodstock. What you will see and hear...almost smell, touch and taste...is beautiful, dirty, dizzy late adolescents who are smiling, high, frothy with the ooze of young sensuality, misinterpreted as some kind of new utopian societal order. We believed we were going to bring peace and love to the world. Great rock and roll though.
At our confident midlife, we thought the world was yielding to our generational intelligence, insight and will. Our working life witnessed an unprecedented period of economic expansion, riding the powers of globalization and innovation in technology and health care. If the alchemy of technical smarts and money could achieve something, mostly we have.
Then, what initially seemed like an era of the spreading of our values of democracy and human rights shifted towards autocracy, the increasing economic hegemony of China and America shifting towards President Trumps populism and America First. We can take claim, though, for major progress in womens and gay rights.
Assessing Our 7 Legacies Past, Present, Future
We Baby Boomers are beginning to reflect about our legacies might be. Its too early to know, of course. But its not too early to speculate, to outline the first draft of possibilities. We will take our guidance from Yeats and Didion whenever we can.
War: The Vietnam war wasnt our idea. We can take claim to ending it and the military draft. America didnt initiate significant aggressive military action for 25 years after.But, after Al Qaedas attacks on U.S. soil on 9/11/2001, we decided not only to retaliate against Afghanistan but to forget the sins of colonialism and imperialism and engage in nation-building in the graveyard of empires.Our unilateral attack against Iraq only proved that we had forgotten the lessons of Vietnam. Maybe if we had a military draft in 2003, we might have hesitated long enough to realize that we were invigorating a new power with WMD (weapons of mass destruction) in Iran by destroying its worst enemy.
JFK and Mrs. Kennedy, in a pink outfit prepared for motorcade into city from airport, Nov. 22. After ... [+] a few speaking stops, the President was assassinated in the same car.
Violence:The assassinations of John F. Kennedy (November 22, 1963), Malcolm X (February21, 1965), Martin Luther King (April 4, 1968), Robert F. Kennedy(June 6, 1968) left us stunned and wounded and with a leadership vacuum we can sense even today.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
The violence of the 1960s also deepened a deep cultural rift between those Americans favoring various forms of gun control and those who hold that the Second Amendment provides expansive rights for individual citizens to own and carry guns. The National Rifle Associations turn to lobbying for gun rights in the late 1970s has thwarted many Congressional attempts for stronger gun control. Despite the Second Amendments ambiguity in wording and intent- A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.in 2008, the Supreme Court affirmed an individuals right to guns.
Today, we remain the most heavily armed citizenry in the world, by a huge margin. We account for 393 million (about 46 percent) of the worldwide total of civilian held firearms, on average over 1 gun per person, about 10 times most other countries.
Racism: We Baby-Boomers inherited a long, mean history of racism, often enabled by violence,which has been part of America from our very beginning. Born in Revolution, we expanded with genocidal fervor against Native Americans who occupied land we coveted, and built the economy of our largely agricultural South with African slaves.
Even after we fought the Civil War, certainly because of slavery whatever other causes one might posit,racial segregation continued, most prominently due to Jim Crow laws. Until 1965, Jim Crow laws notoriously constrained any political and economic gainsby black people, enabled bythe Supreme-Court-mandated separate but equal doctrine in 1896.
We Baby Boomers were born and growing up just as the Civil Rights Movement emerged in the late 1950s, enabled by multiple rulings by the Warren Court finding segregation unconstitutional. Some of may remember dramatic events ranging from Emmett Tills murder and Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott in the mid 1950s to the Freedom Riders, voter registration drives and the March on Washington in the first half of the 1960s.
The Civil Rights Act became law in 1964, the Voting Rights Act in 1965. But the progress made was not enough to stop the Long, Hot Summer of race riots in over 100 cities throughout our country in 1967. The federally sponsored Kerner Commission later determined the causes of the riots included police brutality, white racism, and socioeconomic discrimination in multiple forms.
But as our gyre winds around again, the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down an essential clause of the Voting Rights Act because it bears no logical relationship to the present day.And we live today in the sad wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin and the killings of George Floyd, Trayvon Martin and so many other Black men.
Participants in the March on Washington conclude their march from the Lincoln Memorial to the Martin ... [+] Luther King Jr. Memorial August 28, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Will Black Lives Matter be our platform to end our countries 400 year history racism against Blacks?
Wealth:Despite great prosperity, we Baby Boomers have presided over dramatic growth in the socioeconomic gap that is now threatening our American social contract. Our wealthiest 0.1% take in almost 200 times the income of the bottom 90%, reflecting levels unseen since the Gilded Age before World War I.S&P 500 firm CEOs were paid 287 times as much as average U.S. workers in 2018, compared to 42 times as much as the average U.S. worker in 1980.
Through our new monetary policy of flooding the world with cash at zero interest rates and a fiscal policy spending unprecedented numbers of trillions of dollars, we are now spending our childrens and grandchildrens money. But its okay because, after all, The Giving Pledge still lets billionaires leave their kids 50%!
Drugs: We Baby Boomers have had a drug to enhance every period of our lives. Sex? Birth control pills approved by the FDA in 1960.When we grew anxious and depressed with our adult responsibilities, we had Prozac and its progeny, anti-depressants too numerous to list. Our sex life dragging in midlife?ED drugs, starting with Viagra in 1998.
To get high? Pot and LSD for our college years; cocaine when we had money and gotbusy in our 20s and 30s.Remember how fun college was? Lets legalize pot as medicine as we age.
And, as our forebears in the gyre, from the Roaring Twenties and the Lost Generation after World War (read Hemingways Moveable Feastits life as punctuated by alcohol), we loved to party and alcohol for most is remains our chosen drug.
Tragically,many of our poor, some returning soldiers and now even members of our working class have sought heroin in the 1960s and later, crack cocaine in the 1970s and 1980s, and now pain-killing legal opioids leading back to illegal heroin, fentanyl.We passed Just Say No years ago.
Climate Change:
Like Scrooge in Dickens The Christmas Carol, we have been given a view of our future. In our case, its looking warm. We know, and have known for a long time, that a global temperature change of more than 1.5C would be catastrophic for human civilization. Its effects will range from the destabilization of agricultural systems to drastic sea-level rise, to tragic losses in biodiversity. In 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that limiting global warming to 1.5C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching net zero around 2050. Statements like these are fairly banal to read these days, but even so, it has become abundantly clear that a world without emissions is beyond the reach of the Boomer imagination.
A gas flare from the Shell Chemical LP petroleum refinery illuminates the sky on August 21, 2019 in ... [+] Norco, Louisiana. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Artificial Intelligence:
Artificial intelligence is, in simplest terms, computer technology that emulates human intelligence. What we have now is called specialized artificial intelligence or machine learning.We have not yet achieved the much more human-like AI that would be needed to achieve the Singularity, defined as when technology develops beyond human control; or, when human and machine are fully integrated; or, when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence.
We need to return now to Joan Didionsessay, Slouching Towards Bethlehem,whose title leads us to the second stanza of Yeats Second Coming, which we will need to help us decide about where we stand onAI and the Singularity.
Surely somerevelationis at hand;
Surely theSecond Comingis at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out ofSpiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape withlion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towardsBethlehemto be born?
The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats, (1919)
Yeats rough beast refers to the Anti-Christ in the last book of the New Testament, Revelations, who isset for the final showdown andthe Second Coming of Christ. You can think of the rough beast as Evil or your worst nightmare come to life right before your eyes.
Is the Singularity the work of the Anti-Christ?
Ray Kurzweil speaks onstage at 'Ray and Amy Kurzweil on Collaboration and the Future ' during 2017 ... [+] SXSW Conference and Festivals (Photo by Katrina Barber/Getty Images for SXSW)
Ray Kurzweil, one of the Singularitys leading theorists, tells us we shouldnt fear its arrival around 2045. The late Steven Hawkings thought AI posed a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.Elon Musk worries that AI might overtake human intelligence by 2025.
Who do you think is the Anti-Christ?
The Antichrist, miniature from the Latin manuscript III 177 folio 44, 12th Century. (Photo by ... [+] DeAgostini/Getty Images)
Wall Street? Well, its our gyres Whore of Babylon (Revelation: 17:1-8), whose infinite appetite for cashits profits have risen from 10% to close to half in the United States while we Boomers watchedwill certainly seek it to charge tolls on the road to the Singularity.
Biomedicine? A Chinese scientist cloned a human embryo in recent years Wont the Singularity need a post-modern Dr. Frankenstein to plant the circuit in our brains?
Perhaps, the FAANGsFacebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Alphabet, i.e., well-positioned with technology, expertise, cash, self-interest and brands, although their Chinese competitors are strong and determined to win.The social media segment gives loud voice to the worst of us but seems quite blind to that bare truth. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg views concerns about AI as irresponsible. People who dont trust Facebook, he says, dont understand it.
In the moments just before the Singularity, a Wall Street mergers bankercant miss the biggest deal ever! - approaches you with a digital device and asks, Please press the Accept button. You are only agreeing to give us your mind. You get to keep your soul.
Press Disagree Boomers. If we save humanity twice,We will be the Greatest Generation!
Read the rest here:
Baby Boomers 7 Possible Legacies, Guided by W.B. Yeats, Joan Didion and the Book of Revelations - Forbes
