Part of the problem is that people, and especially Americans, are inclined
to believe that the way things were when they grew up was A) the way
things always were until Moral Decline set in and B) the way they were
ordained to be. Unfortunately, one of the effects of the US Baby Boom is
that a vast number of Americans have grown up to believe that the economic
and social conditions and norms of the 20 years immediately following WWII
represented, as the Speaker of our House so succinctly put it, 300 years
of American culture. In reality, the social and economic conditions of
the 1950's were quite atypical for American history; much of what the
"counterculture" was rebelling against was overly-strict social norms that
had only recently been imposed (as some sociologists have pointed out, the
Sexual Revolution of the 1960's simply brought sexual mores to the same
place that trends from early in the century would have brought them to if
they hadn't been interrupted by the Depression, the war, and the atypical
50's). But the cognitive distortion that I mentioned has led many
Americans to embue the norms of the 1950's with the Virtues of
Timelessness and Transcendency (people who argue this sort of thing seem
to think that an Abstraction is more Valuable if it's Capitalized), and to
assume that any change from them is at best a movement downhill and at
worst a rebellion against God (Who, of Course, in his Word, used the term
"family" to mean a corporate breadwinner male, a full-time homemaker
females, two children getting above-average grades in school, all living
in a middle-class suburb connected to the city by limited-access
highways).
This ties in with a uniquely American tendency to view social problems (or
social benefits) in terms of individual character rather than the effects
of systems. For example, in the mid-1980's it came as a surprise to quite
a few social researchers that the majority of Baby Boomers did not fall
into the Young Upscale Professional demographic (this also came as an
unpleasant surprise to a lot of retailers who had geared their marketing
toward Yuppies on the assumption that there were as many of them as the
media hype suggested). There were quite a few discussions of why this was
so, and all of them sought explanations of why so many Baby Boomers were
personally incapable of holding down high-paying, high status jobs (poor
parenting? poor education? (Charles Murray would nowadays chime in with
"poor genes")). Conspicuously absent from consideration was the
possibility that the number of Yuppie jobs the market had to offer was
limited, and that the demand for certain skills didn't automatically
increase with the supply (during the Depression, a few highly qualified
scientists advanced the notion of "delayed-onset mental retardation" to
explain why so many people who had previously been working had lost their
jobs. Presumably these people's brains experienced some sort of
miraculous recovery once the war production effort started).
The upshot of all of this is that, at least in the near future, the
appropriate metaphor for America's response to the changes occurring in
the nature of work will be a bus moving forward while all the passengers
and the driver are facing backwards. Reactionaries pride themselves in
the "fact" that America's culture hasn't changed (except for some
unfortunate incidents in the 1960's) since the country was founded
(anthropologists have a term for a society that can maintain a static
culture for 350 years: "primitive"), while progressives pride ourselves in
the fact that America's culture has been one of continuous change, some
bad but much good, ever since its founding. This gives us faith that
America will be able to survive the changes, even though the shrill cries
of millions of Chicken Littles are going to get a bit annoying. We're
going to have to play catchup in the new economy, for longer than we'd
have had to if we didn't view taking off our blinders as a sin, but I
think we'll get there. Those of us who don't try to conduct our lives as
1950's wannabees will be more likely to make it there intact.
From: ebohlman@netcom.com (Eric Bohlman)