While the roots of Western decline can be traced back to nominalism in the reduction from universals to the particular, in our contemporary era this reductionism has manifested between the generations today. If those who fought in the Second World War were the greatest generation, those coming of age in the 1960s, the so-called baby boomers were manipulated by and participated in a social and sexual revolution, the harmful consequences of which are causing psychological pathologies and social ills still today amongst later generations.
The social revolution has continued to today. We saw the millennials captured by the mind disease of woke ideology and in Generation Z we see on the whole a continuation of this ideological imprisonment, but with signs of hope amongst those most active and energised in their thinking and activity. Marine le Pen’s party saw significant support amongst Gen Z and in the UK Reform was the second choice of all the parties amongst Gen Z. Gen Z seems to be more capable of thinking at least on the margins.
A generation that gets off without any real examination is that of Generation X, the children of the babyboomers. They did not rebel politically or socially, but neither did they try to turn back the harmful impact of their parents’ generation, which had put self indulgence before the Greatest Generation’s sense of duty and sacrifice. They had benefited from the stimulation to the economy of bloody war and were able to have homes and often jobs for life. True with economic recessions after the break down of the Bretton Woods arrangements and the failure of the Keynesian model there were broken dreams and the harsh reality of home repossessions and unemployment. Much of what the babyboomers suffered though was self inflicted - living on credit, breaking their marriages, not bringing up their children to have traditional values. And Generation X simply accepted the settlement and took what was normative for the sixties as the settled answer to the great social questions.
So Generation X, often lamented from the Left for not engaging in student protests or being militant enough, should also be found wanting by the Right. It did not protest because it accepted the settlement of self indulgence of 1968. There was no move to push back or retrieve the lost standards.
While it is right to be sceptical of an all-rosy 1950s, there was still a sense of duty and an importance given to traditional roles. The 1950s did see a major shift to materialism with the invention of household white goods and domestic appliances and property price inflation, the extended family was broken down for the more individualistic nuclear family. Notwithstanding this, ideas of duty and higher values, God and country remained. The fundamental paradigm shift came in the sixties then set for succeeding generations.
In comparison to previous generations, Generation X was characterised more by a certain nihilism of self indulgence, drugs and raves. While the 1920s were too glamorous to be an adequate comparison to the dreary grunginess of Gen X, it believed in nothing and valued only hedonism. It was the fruit of 1960s moral and social degeneracy. And yet, while many did not really think very politically, there was an understood lazy adherence to sixties shibboleths. The full impact of these changes had not yet played out in all their disastrous consequences for the personal selfishness combined with socialist values at a political level yet to be blatantly questionable.
With Generation X what mattered was hedonism and tokenistic gestures against traditional values. Superficial as this sounds with the development of the Marxist concept of political correctness - a sort of proto-cancel culture, the ideological commitment was real. With the fall of the West’s main geopolitical rival, there was no fashionable alternative anymore and the babyboomers and GenX turned to electing the most strategic Leftists of the Post War era - Clinton and Blair. Promoting sexual degeneracy and individualistic hedonism at home, the New Left was evangelical in spreading the contagion of their values abroad, imposed from above. In their liberal-interventionist foreign policy a brutal dismembering of former Communist states took place through fomenting ethnic grievances. The voters complacently continued to regard their liberal-Left governments as benign as the level of human death mounted. Only with Iraq did the liberal interventionists and neoconservatives overreach. This was only a temporary pause though as soon Libya and Syria were being destabilised and turned into failed states - to no one’s benefit but Israel’s. And yet there was an underlying complacency amongst the babyboomers and Generation X, for all their anti-patriotic Leftist rhetoric, that the liberal West was a benign force in the world. There was no real holding to account of governments for their foreign policy - Bush and Blair were re-elected.
A way to understand generation X in its superficial following of the babyboomers was that for all its hedonism and nihilism it was extremely self important when it came to left wing politics. The students might have been too stoned to bother, but Leftism and liberal social values were normative and woe betide anyone who questioned this unthinking and self righteous political stance.
So Generation X put up no real resistance to controlled speech as the screeching millennials entered political debate on the university campuses. Multiculturalism, the environment, feminism and gay rights were all unquestionable dogma for Generation X too and so when the millennials put some energy into these left-side causes both babyboomers and gen X just saw this as a continuation of the inevitable and justified revolution of progress. Only the obvious logic of transgenderism in the pattern of the ideology began to unnerve them.
As if to cover for their hedonism many Gen X are as earnest and uncompromising in their political correctness as millennials in their wokeness. Social media aided the millennials in their oppressiveness, but in a social situation with Generation X one will often find a reciting of shibboleths and PC talking points when not simply engaging in frivolous and meaningless nonsense. Do not expect a serious conversation about politics, but wait to hear the reciting of approved positions and horror if anyone thinks outside of those approved stances. This generation, too lazy to be politically active will nonetheless be particularly intolerant of “bigoted” positions to demonstrate that for all their hedonism and their frivolity they are really “serious” people.
Gen Z however, shows more intellectual energy and political dynamism. Backing le Pen and Farage is not all. While it is important to remember that there is a mainstream Gen Z that still unthinkingly follows the official establishment line and is far more likely to vote Labour or Democrat; there is a critical mass of motivated Gen Z that cares enough to question the values of the sixties and to stand up for higher values and a meaningful life. In part this is of course because Gen Z is bearing the brunt of the sixties social experiment more than Gen X. Generation X could rely on existing social capital still being in place to provide them with a stable home-life and relatively homogeneous society and a degree opening up to work that pays. Not the case for Gen Z. If universities churned out little ideologues obediently following the party line, Gen Z, faced with the reality of the failed liberal experiment had to question the system that was clearly so stacked against them. And while some might have turned to the radical Left, more seem to have realised amongst those who care about their country and their future that it is revolution of some form from the Right that is all that can save their futures. Similarly to politics Gen Z is returning to church, but specific churches - those with traditional theology and ritual - Eastern Orthodoxy and Latin-rite Roman Catholicism. The mainstream liberal churches telling their ageing congregations that abandoning cherished and meaningful ritual was necessary to attract the young are seeing the young do not see them as having the gravitas to help reach to the eternal.
It is emerging that much cultural vandalism was not about appealing to the young, but depriving them of their inheritance and was motivated by malicious ideology. In terms of Generation X, which was able to free ride on the remaining social-capital of conservative values not yet stamped out by the cultural revolution there is real culpability. If they had been politically active, not to continue the cultural revolution from the Left, but defend what their parents’ generation had attempted to wreck, then things might not have been so bleak for Gen Z, some of whom now see enough of what has happened to know that right-wing politics and a return to religious faith are the only answers to the problems left by the sixties cultural and social revolution.
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