I’ve never bought into the “greatest generation” stuff. I saw it as a Jungian appeasement of the boomers towards their aging fathers whom they’d “sacrificed” in more ways than one. I’m at heart — or at back brain — very Roman. To explain why would take more uncomfortable biographical revelations than I have time for, including “because that’s what I was brought up to be.”
I get this dance very well. First comes the sacrifice, then the deification.
Did the World War II generation rise to the challenge? Yes, they did. But in a way they’d been brought up for it: a generation grown to continue Europe’s long war, because the previous generation had been eaten in the fields of WWI.
And can anyone blame the veterans, coming back from yet another European abattoir for wanting to put an end to the cycle?
Obviously something had gone wrong in Western civilization and it needed to be stopped. The next generation were going to be a brand new beginning. They were going to make it all better.
Did I mention the serpent in the garden? You can’t make the garden without the serpent.
A lot of the crazy of the sixties, and the unmaking of society was what the boomers were explicitly raised to do. A lot of the poison in our cultural waters was the rebellion of the veterans of WWII. An understandable rebellion, but one that threw the baby out with the bath water nonetheless.
However, even the boomers who weren’t raised on utopian ideals, who weren’t told the world was theirs to remake, even the ones who didn’t protest (or fought in) the war, even the ones who were and are decent human beings were raised with the idea that it was theirs to change Western Civ to be more … humane. Or at least not to self-destruct in battlefields.
This created an ur-programming, a back brain thing. Even responsible boomers who cut their hair, got jobs and raised families had the idea that they were supposed to transform everything.
Sarah Hoyt, “Business From The Wrong End”, According to Hoyt, 2018-09-27.
March 15, 2021
QotD: The “Greatest Generation”‘s expectations of the Boomers
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