There is another explanation. When you are old you’ve built up a repertoire of music that you spend time listening to, and so have less time listening to new stuff. (Unless you’re a music critic or something.) When you’re young you have no such backlog. Also, friends are likely to listen to whatever was popular when you were young, so if you talk about hip hop to friends your own age, say, you’ll get a huh.
When I was a kid I heard older stuff, from the '40s, from the radio station my mom listened to but I’d never listen to it myself.
I’m not at all offended by newer music, just not that interested. I’ve decided to break out of listening to the stuff I listened to in college and went back 200 years or so instead.
Chesterton’s fence does not not treat the case when nobody at all is able to determine why the fence existed. It’s simply an aphorism to demonstrate a point, not a how-to manual.
If someone had pressed Chesterton to elaborate, I’m sure he’d have said that the principle can be satisfied by doing the due diligence and concluding “nobody knows why this exists.”
The point of the aphorism is simply that you must make an effort to understand a thing before you blow it up. Perhaps a full understanding is impossible, but the point is that you must at least perform due diligence. That’s eminently reasonable. Using the principle to generate endless objections and hypotheticals would be a misapplication, and you’re the only one I’ve ever seen to suggest this is how it works.
You’ve heard of “The Singularity”, the notion that in 30 years, the world will be so fundamentally changed that it’ll be completely unrecognizable to someone from today? Well, it’s true. But what most people miss is that it’s not a singular event; it’s a continual process. If you take any point in history at all, it would have been completely unrecognizable to someone from 30 years previous, and someone from that point in time would find the world 30 years after that to be just as unrecognizable. Sure, from our vantage point it looks like this sort of rapid change is a new thing, but it looked that way a century or a millennium or a dozen millennia ago, too: That’s the nature of exponential growth.
And boomers are now of the age where that level of change has happened, not once, but twice in their lifetimes. No wonder they have difficulty with the modern world.
I don’t know that I agree with this. If you took your average person from 2300 BC, they would likely not see much of a change to 2270BC. Same as 1100AD to 1130AD. There are some periods that underwent noticeable technological and political changes over the course of a generation, but they are few, far between, and didn’t affect the vast majority of the population.
Since the industrial revolution, this has changed, and the life of an average person is different from the life their children will have. This change has been accelerating over the last century or so.
Now, as is the nature of singularities, you can never actually reach them, just approach them. Unless we get superintelligent AI that starts remaking the world on its timescales, we aren’t going to reach a point where we are unable to adapt to the new world as it comes along.
People will always complain about the younger generation, but that’s because young people are stupid and lazy. People complained about my generation as I was growing up, and so did I, I looked around and saw in my age group a bunch of malingerers. But as our generation grew up, most of us learned and gained work ethic, and the rest became irrelevant in one way or another.
And how many changes have younger generations seen? I thought an Atari was the most advanced piece of electronics possible when we got one when I was around 7. If I wanted to learn something, I went to the library and rooted around in the card catalogue. If I wanted to buy something, I went to a store to get it, or I waited 6-8 weeks to buy it from a catalogue. If I wanted to communicate with someone, I had to know their phone number, and if they were not there, then I would just have to try back later.
And that’s just the technological change. When I was growing up, homosexuals or transgendered individuals were free for mocking, not just accepted but encouraged. Blatant open racism was somewhat frowned upon, but acting with intentional bias was perfectly acceptable. Misogyny was a way of life, where harassment and denigration of women was a regular thing in the media, even being played for laughs in many a comedy.
We don’t even know what is in store for the next generation, and what changes, both good and bad, that they will live through, but they will probably see even more change, and have to be even more adaptable, than we did.
One possible interpretation would be along the lines of “Don’t knock down a wall before determining whether it’s load-bearing.” But I’m not at all sure it’s the best interpretation.
One thing I know about Chesterton is that, in his writing, he was very fond of paradox and epigram and turning common wisdom on its head. For example, one of his famous quotes is “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” That’s what he’s doing in his principle of the fence (“a principle which will probably be called a paradox”): You might think that the things that have no obvious purpose or reason for being there are the things worth getting rid of. But actually, it is those things that have no obvious purpose that you should be cautious about getting rid of, because they may well have some non-obvious yet important purpose.
The other thing about Chesterton is that he was, in many ways, conservative, and critical of change and (his times’) modernity. I love GKC, but I don’t always agree with him, and there are some things in his writings that I find hopelessly out of date—sometimes quaint, sometimes offensive, sometimes just “well, those were different times.” Although Chesterton himself would probably resist being labeled as a Conservative (at least with a capital C):
“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”
Still a lively market for keyboards and mice; including ones that can be used with devices that also have a touchscreen. Looks to me like what’s winning is “both of these techniques have their uses”.
Have you looked at the amount of change, both technological and societal, that we’ve had in the last fifty years, or the last hundred, or even the last twenty?
And there is a larger and larger growing contingent of the population that wants it to stop or even reverse.
I’m happy that these people have it easier. But the Liberal Project has difficulty addressing the needs of those who don’t fall in one of these increasingly tiny demographics.
All statistical reports seem to indicate there are more and more people living alone each year, that frequency of sexual activity is declining. Somehow, simply hopping on Tinder isn’t working for the majority.
It’s like the child raised in a permissive household that leaves home and joins a cult. Because the cult provides rules and clarity. Too many choices are a bad thing. Again, something that is provable by market research. Too many product choices, fewer sales.
So 60, 70 years ago there was a cost to a Catholic marrying a non-Catholic, or vice versa. On the other hand, some people could work well within those restrictions because it clarified their world. Now the Liberal Project is busily stripping away all such restrictions in favor of its next victimized group. Many people are left at sea in this society. These people are invisible to the Liberal Project.
Wow!!!
“Tiny demographics”? Gay people, Black, Asian, and other “non-white” people, and women?
Straight white men are a minority. That’s not a problem; it’s just a fact. The problem is that some of them (of various ages) are used to being treated, and/or want to be treated, as if they were the only actual humans around.
When choices are limited so that all the available choices are bad ones, that’s a worse thing.
There’s certainly a noisy contingent of the population that wants one change or another to stop or reverse. Not everyone wants the same changes to stop or reverse, though. And for every baker wanting to limit who they’ll make wedding cakes for, if that’s the kind of change you’re thinking of, there seem to be quite a few thinking “great! my potential market has increased!”
How will the drunken layabout find sex if women aren’t forced to marry, work in drudgery or sell their bodies?
Outside of the fact that “Liberal Project” sounds like quite the snarl term, I’m am sure that the “Regressive Scheme” will continue to find ways of othering people. There will be plenty of work for those who want to combat this discriminatory and bullying behavior.
Or maybe they find ways of being fulfilled that do not involve traditional “family values.”
And people who grow up in authoritarian households join cults too. Difference is, they were raised to need those rules and clarity. They not only need them for themselves, they demand them in others as well.
Except a Catholic that wanted to marry a non-catholic. Or a White man who wanted to marry a Black woman, or a man who wanted to marry a man, or a woman who wanted to marry a woman. Nor a man who was born into the body of a woman, or a woman born into the body of a man. Those “some people” you speak of wanted other people restricted because it clarified their world.
Only the people who need others in their society to be victimized in order for them to feel fulfilled.
Not invisible, not by any means at all. Those are the most vocal opponents to any form of progress. Just because the demands of the Regressive Schemers to maintain the status quo are not capitulated to in every circumstance doesn’t mean by any means that their voices are not heard loud and clear.
Oddly, the Singularity concept has been around for more than 30 years. Marooned in Real Time" is from 1986. Still waiting.
Not to mention that I’ve never seen your definition of the Singularity. And I agree with k9bfriender - things did not change much in 30 years for most of history, not counting disasters like the Black Plague and the Fall of Rome.
I run Zoom meetings and the Web for a club whose mean age is over 70. They picked up Zoom and video conferencing very rapidly, given the need. They are not on Tik Tok but that’s an age related fad, not a significant change in anything. Not following fads is different from having difficulty with the modern world.
I think that most of them can be summed up by voicing the complaint, “If this keeps up, soon I won’t have anyone I’m allowed to hate!”
I take comfort in the fact that there will always be plenty of people to hate based on what they do, I don’t need to hate them for who they are.
I agree, and what I hope will defeat discrimination is not necessarily people changing their moral points of view, but that discrimination is really not all that profitable a business model.
But this freedom isn’t working for people in toto. We might theorize that more choice would result in more happy couples as everyone can find their perfect match. In fact, that is not happening, and more people are single than ever. Now I suppose you can come back that everyone’s choosing to be single, they’re all blissful. I really don’t think that’s the case, but you do you.
I’m divorced. Freed from the bonds of marriage. Except for child support, and my responsibilities as a father. Neither of those enhance my dating prospects. Now if I were rich, I suppose I’d have more “freedom” because I’d have more women willing to “buy in” to my lifestyle. This is not the case for me. Furthermore, the many women I might date are generally scarred by their own failed relationships and marriages, and less equipped to bond with me, or I them, for that matter. Divorce rates of second and third marriages are indeed dismal, and I’m sure LTRs short of marriage fare no better if not worse. But yeah, freedom.
Telling people that they all had to get married, and heterosexually married to somebody of the same race, and that once married they mustn’t get divorced, sure did result in a lot of married couples. That doesn’t mean it resulted in a lot more bliss. A lot of those people were miserable in their marriages.
I don’t think the attitude that the problem with dating prospects has to do with being unable to buy partners is likely to help anybody’s dating prospects, either.
Real freedom is your wife just doing her duty, no questions asked. Giving her more choices just makes everyone miserable. Paradox of Choice only applies to the classes of people we need to protect from themselves.
“There is a strong undercurrent of expectation that change should always be embraced, and that the new is always better.”
But there is also a very strong undercurrent of ‘change is bad’. For some/many people, any change is considered ‘bad’. In my own town, where the average age is going up, anything new is dismissed. Open a club? “No, that would be awful, think of the noise”, open a cinema? “no, that would be terrible, there’s nowhere to park”, Open a new bar? “what’s wrong with the old pub?” and so on.
Again, this assumes that all of the “extra” sex past generations were having was coerced. A big leap I am unwilling to make.
Consider the case of a woman who wants sex, but only within a loving relationship. The only acceptable candidates are emotionally damaged divorced men who want sex only. There’s no coercion. Also no sex, and no relationship either.
I have no idea what point you are trying to make.