Excerpts from Victor Davis Hanson, "Let Down at the Top: Our Baby Boomers elites, mired in excess and safe in their enclaves, have overseen the decay of our core cultural institutions," National Review, November 14, 2017 (abridged, emphasis added).
[THE] SO-CALLED BABY BOOMERS have a lot to account for — given the sorry state of . . .
. . . entertainment, sports, the media, and universities.
. . . .
The problem with a dying media is not just new social media, the Internet, or 24-hour cable news. Those are just accelerants. The culprit is mostly politically driven ignorance. Today’s journalists graduate with majors that confer thinly disguised degrees in different sorts of activism.
But -isms and -ologies come at a cost of shorting literature, history, or fact-based knowledge of any sort, so today’s journalistic doyens have few referents either of the past or in the abstract in general. The result is that every passing psychodrama becomes the most important in history. . . .
In the 1950s, the university had evolved beyond being a bastion of eccentricity, nonconformity, and free expression, as tweedy scholars and old-style elbow-patched liberal academics were displaced by hip voices railing against supposedly clueless straight culture.
America thought it could live with that — even at the price of watering down the curricula with -studies activist courses — because free speech was for everyone, at least in theory. But tenured radical professors eventually became sixty-something administrative bureaucrats and are now being devoured by the very radical offspring they have sired. We lament political correctness and Stalinism on campuses, but the real crime is the ignorance that empowers it.
The unspoken fuel that drives so many protests on campus is the self-awareness that so many students simply cannot do traditional college work and desire weaker courses, personal exemptions, and time off. A sense of student inferiority naturally leads to demands for everything but a more comprehensive education. The result of politicizing mediocrity is the classic toxicity of youthful ignorance and arrogance. Twenty-somethings brag about tearing down the statue of Robert E. Lee without a clue what Gettysburg was. Disrupting a conservative lecturer on campus is the current generation’s version of cramming phone booths and swallowing goldfish.
Orwellian administrative language, sanctioned from those who should have known better, masks an anti-democratic reality of which even its adherents are ashamed. “Safe spaces” mean segregation. “Affirmative action” is synonymous with implicit racial quotas. “Theme houses” are race-based apartheid living quarters. “Trigger warnings” are censorship. “Student loans” are paramount to indentured servitude for over a decade. And “diversity” ensures monotony and orthodoxy in thought and expression.
University overseers managed to ensure that the B.A. degree is no longer necessarily proof of education in science, math, language, history, or philosophy. Private employers see elite colleges, at best, not necessarily as places where job applicants were educated or trained, but rather where they were once prescreened by colleges, on the basis of high-school test scores and GPAs. So they hire college graduates by brand names, because earlier, as incoming students, they were once admitted to, rather than graduated from, a good college on some sort of objective basis. Employers write off what followed later as either a wasted four years or irrelevant.
What caused this societal meltdown among our Boomer custodians?
It was not material want. Our inheritance ensured we were the most affluent and leisured generation in history. Rather, excess led to hubris. We masked incompetence with snazzy technology and the elite’s ability to travel and acquire at will — and to sound hip and “with it” in speech and diction.
Our generation also, inevitably, became divorced from both nature and the muscularity of the physical, desperate ordeal of surviving. The result was a vicarious romance about the wild and an ignorance of and disdain for those who must fight the wild to produce our food, wood, steel, concrete, and fuel. The result, again, is a vicarious life. Silicon Valley grandees pontificate about open borders, “undocumented migrants,” and “sanctuary cities,” but beneath their noses are streets lined with tightly parked Winnebagoes in which thousands of poor Mexican nationals sleep, live, eat, and prep for another day servicing the masters of the universe. . . .
Our culture and financial elite are primarily a coastal tribe, cut off from both the poor and the material conditions that face the poor. They find penance and exemption for their privilege in loud but empty virtue-signaling and in easy contempt for the supposedly grasping middle class. But what we wanted from them was excellence, competence, and leadership; yet they had neither the education nor character for any of that.
It is hard to destroy the NFL or to discredit a liberal-arts degree from Yale, or to turn NBC or CNN into a bastard of Pravda or to make the Hollywood of John Ford, Frank Capra, and Alfred Hitchcock into that of George Clooney. But we managed it — and more still to come before we are through.
"Still more to come?"
Mr. Hanson wrote this essay almost three years ago. It has aged well.
As the left grows ever more hysterical, mainstream journalists surrender all pretense of fairness, and cities burn, we are seeing what "more to come" looks like.
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