Making one's way through a world that's now unfamiliar to all of us

Once there may have been a way to get back homeward, but it's closed off now

Thanks for upgrading to a paid subscription. Writing is my job. Your support of that means everything to me.

I’ve mentioned before a piece I wrote for Ordinary Times in April 2022 titled “Confessions of a Rock and Roll History Teacher.” It may be time to revisit the subject as I wind up another semester as an adjunct lecturer on that topic.

In that piece, I touched on some familiar themes here at Precipice: the difficulty of imparting to people age 40 and younger the centrality of cultural norms like the American family gathering after supper on Sunday nights to watch the Ed Sullivan Show, the massive changes to American society wrought by the 1960s, and the pervasion of the rock ethos into all of Western art and entertainment.

A few things have changed since 2022.

The ubiquity of phones is a given. This semester, most of my students gave me no more than a microsecond of eye contact the entire four months, nor did they lift their eyes from their screens to see books I was recommended or content I was presenting on the projector.

Even if some students demonstrated brief fascination at holding an LP cover in their hands, examining the liner notes and photos, I could tell that was about the extent of their preferred engagement with printed matter. Albums, for them, are digital packages, and are actually less popular than individual tracks by artists. And you can find an endless supply of amusing sounds by letting your favorite delivery system know which genres you like as the backdrop to your life.

A few things I know intuitively rather than empirically. Rock and roll, like all popular music, has been, to a considerable degree lyrically preoccupied with love. At least up through about sixty years ago, that meant the early stages of love, when a young person’s hormones are ignited by the jewel-like glint of a crush’s eyes or unmistakable voice, the thrill of the first hand-hold, the arrangement of a second date at the front door. Since then, especially as the singer-songwriter genre has evolved, love-related themes are more likely to dwell on later stages of pairing up, like dealing with ennui or deep character flaws, or what’s required to survive after heartbreak, or the decision to go it alone in life.

This gets into themes I’ve explored in other contexts here at Precipice: technology’s impact on humans’ ability to foster community, how long a materialistic view has had the upper hand on a society-wide assumption of the primacy of the transcendent, our changing views on demography.

I guess what I’m saying is that another layer of challenge for conveying to the students this semester the context of the 1950s, 60s and 70s is that another level of change has imposed itself on where we are.

I’ve mentioned a couple of time recently that, with the Trumpist trampling of very basic tenets of American stability, we are experiencing a tectonic shift of the magnitude of 1968. This goes beyond the collective unhappiness and loneliness borne out by various surveys, the dearth of family formation and civic involvement, the sidelining of Christianity, and the profound differences in political perspective between males and females among the millennial and Z generations.

In a recent piece at his Substack titled “There’s No Turning Back From Pluralism in America,” Aaron Renn says that both the Left and Right, as currently constituted in our society, need to get up to speed regarding what is actually happening:

Few people have truly taken the measure of the implications of these changes.

The left, champions of growing diversity, assumed that its own leadership would form a permanent ruling class as the social and demographic base of the right was degraded or diluted.

That may happen, but it sure hasn’t yet. They failed to recognize that a deeply diverse and pluralistic country is ill-suited to the kind of top down, one size fits all policy agenda they pursue. At least not in a democracy.

Through a combination of incompetence and politicization, they also accelerated the decline in trust in the institutions that are the very source of their power.

We saw this during Covid, when, despite possibly the strongest full spectrum institutional push I’ve seen in my lifetime, they were unable to fully impose their will on the country. Many other left wing programs are also facing headwinds. They just aren’t popular.

A diverse, democratic country without a clearly demographically dominant group is not fertile soil for the kind of programs the left hopes to impose. But they seem to remain fully committed to the cause, unwilling to acknowledge that anyone, anywhere can legitimately take a different path from what they want.

The right too has its delusions. They fail to accept that the America of even just 40-50 years ago is gone. It can never be restored. They think that if we just deport enough illegals, reduce immigration, and change some policy levers, America will slowly return to itself.

That’s not going to happen. We’ve already seen this before. Some in the early 20th century bemoaned the decline of Anglo-America. The country actually did all but halt immigration. Assimilation was forced at some level. And yet, the identity of the country still fundamentally changed: from Anglo to pan-European, from Protestant to Judeo-Christian, from settlers and the frontier to a “nation of immigrants,” to a less ethnic and more creedal conception of the country. This postwar America is actually the America that the bulk of today’s conservatives identity with.

There was certainly an evolution and continuity, but the Anglo purist probably didn’t see it that way. The new America was also very successful, which the Anglo purist might have thought impossible (though not without its problems, as we’ve especially come to see as WASP values withered away).

Just as there was no preserving the old Anglo-America, there’s no preserving the postwar version either. What the America of the future will be is yet to be determined, but it won’t be a restoration of 1980s America.

Too many conservatives don’t fully understand the demographic change that has already taken place in the country. They think that they speak in the name of a 1980s level demographic supermajority representing the real America. But that’s not the case. They are perhaps still a plurality, but keep in mind that the under 18 population in the US is already majority minority. Minority status is overstated because of the application of a “one drop rule” in measuring it. But without a doubt there’s been demographic change on a scale Boomers, who came of age at the point of the lowest foreign born population in national history, cannot comprehend.

Similarly, many American evangelicals still seem to think they are a moral majority. In fact, America is only 20-30% evangelical, and a wide swath of evangelical moral prescriptions are as unpopular as some of those on the left.

In this environment, the rise of belief in things like Christian nationalism is a bit strange. That might be understandable at the American founding, with a population that was 98% Protestant. But there’s never been a less propitious time for something like it than today.

People of all stripes in America need to take the measure of our new reality and adjust accordingly.

And now we get to another subject that occasionally works its way into Precipice essays: distraction. Entire industries are devoted to it. And every form of entertainment - any kind of sporting event, musical performance, experience in a movie theater, even a lot of church services - must be presented with maximum dazzle-dazzle to keep the viewer’s attention from wandering.

What’s going on here?

I would venture that the root motivation is desperation. Having one’s socks knocked off by ever-more spectacular displays of sensory overload is effective for allowing us to avoid the question of whether the content we’re consuming means anything.

I think most people know how profound the changes in our society are, but contemplating it for any length of time is just too much to bear.

Sometimes the hunger for distraction takes simple, small-scale forms rather than razzle-dazzle. If one does have some form of community going - an exceptionally tight-knit family, a group of old friends who regularly break bread together, belonging to a club based on a common passion, bonding with pets, a cohesive church congregation - it serves as a comforting bulwark between the individual and a world untethered from humanity’s historic common assumptions.

Don’t let me leave you with the impression that my own ways of dealing with this are uniformly healthy and worthy of example. For one thing, the attendant confusion informs all decisions, big and small. As far as I can see, the only way it wouldn’t would be to sign up for one of the present moment’s tribalisms, which offer validation to those for whom other forms of community have been exhausted. We’ve seen how that plays out in social media comment threads.

All this makes it a little more challenging to pursue the Precipice project. Who are you people? What are each of you concerned, or perhaps encouraged, about? Do your forms of community feel authentic?

The task of maneuvering through an ever less familiar world is a subject that is only beginning to get the contemplation it deserves. We’ll see what we can do with it here.

I would just say that, here in mid-spring 2025, your safety - physical, mental and spiritual - is primarily your own responsibility.