And what alternative do you propose - making it socially unacceptable for people to be single?
Most of them ( probably all of them) are choosing to be single at some level - even if it’s only a matter of choosing to be single because they are uninterested in the people who are interested in them. Take your example of
She might prefer no sex if an emotionally damaged man who wants sex only is her only choice since she won’t have a relationship either way. And he on some level has chosen not to be open to a relationship.
And if he’d stayed married because divorce wasn’t permissible, that doesn’t mean it would have been a happy marriage. Both he and his wife would probably still have been miserable.
I think the undercurrent here is pretty simple. The happiness of the emotionally damaged man matters. “She” needs to lower her expectations. Then both of them can be happy, apparently. This pickiness in women is what’s causing all this incel misery.
This is pretty much what much of my parents’ generation looked like. People in bad, even abusive marriages, afraid to get out. Wives being beaten by their husbands and the Church (and sometimes the police) helping the husbands to terrorize the wives if they tried to leave.
We had one neighbor murdered in front of a police officer who was supposed to be protecting her (like 10-15 feet away while she was stabbed dozens of times). I had a co-worker whose abusive ex-husband was getting the location of the church she was attending from the Archdiocese when she was hiding from him, so that he could terrorize her into the Church “mediation” process.
This is what the good old days looked like. Because according to some people the men mattered and the women are just there to make them happy. And if the women say they aren’t happy, they get slapped around until their attitude improves.
I have a cousin who is deep, deep into misogyny and male chauvinism, who thinks the Catholic Church has gone too far in “liberating” women. Of course he has a hard time in the dating pool. At age 45 he went to India and found a teenage wife in a village. Brought her to Canada. For some years he was blissfully happy, she was popping out the gifts from God every year. Then she got Canadianized, and he is pissed. Of course most of my male cousins (ages 55-70) are on his side. Even her family in India is pleading with her not to leave this bastard. I don’t know how much money they have riding on it.
A quote from Windle Poons in Reaper Man:
" . . . fires. Yes, it had been a lot warmer in the old days, too. The kind of fires they had these days didn’t warm you up unless you were nearly on top of them. It was something in the wood . . . it was the wrong sort of wood."
I’m pretty impressed by this board’s general embrace of cultural change and reluctance to bash the younger generations. My anecdotal experience tells me that this is not the societal norm.
Our friend Jay_Z appears to be reading Rod Dreher at The American Conservative.
I’m pretty impressed by the younger generations’ general lack of bigotry and racism. That was pretty prevalent in my younger years spent in rural white America.
I remember someone more or less complaining about that dynamic, angrily complaining about his son “He says I’m a bigot, he says his mother’s a bigot…these kids today don’t know shit!”
I think this is a pretty mistaken understanding of the idea of a technological Singularity.
The idea is that, sure, we’ve had exponential growth in the past, but it was at relatively low (single digit) annual rates, mediated by human intelligence and physical processes. The world of today is not “completely unrecognizable” to someone from 30 years ago. It’s different, sure, but it’s different in semi-predictable ways. There are lots of trendlines that could be extrapolated 30 years ago to give you a not-totally absurd idea of what life would be like today. Some of them would be wrong, but probably not off by several orders of magnitude.
The idea of a singularity is that if generalized AI is really a thing, then you will have advanced intelligences building more-advanced intelligences at the speed of computers. At that point, all bets and trendlines are off. Maybe you get single-digit daily growth rates, at which point a year later things are as different from t=0 as today is from the dawn of the industrial revolution. In the absence of a technological singularity, 30 years in the future will indeed be different, but recognizable and semi-predictable. In the presence of one, all predictions are off.
It is a distillation process, over the years, that yields the REALLY GOOD STUFF being remembered as the norm while the mediocre is left behind and forgotten.
So, the “Beatles were great”, eventually leads to “all the music was great”.
No, it wasn’t…Tommy Roe/“Oh, Sweet Pea” was crap.
Crabby Appleton was crap.
Eventually, you get to a point were all the old stuff that was good is remembered and used as a measuring device to compare ALL THE CURRENT stuff against.
Beethoven & Mozart to Mitchell & McCartney
Capra & Ford to (pick one or two)
Leonardo & Rodin to (pick) all have survived the filtering process.
I am sure they had a LOT of cotemporaries that produced crap…that crap has not survived the distillation process.
Glen Miller languished as a mediocre band leader…then found “IT”.
The Platters vs. “Sitting is La La waiting for my Ya Ya”
I think the point was that you’re whitewashing the younger generations. But a look at voting records makes it clear that they are trying to do more good than we did. They’re also less racist/homophobic/misogynistic. And as you pointed out, more open-minded about things like music.
For the record, I’m collecting social security, and I started my life career of loathing modern culture when I was fifteen years of age.
More up-to-date loathing includes virtually all popular music, which to me either sounds like overproduced unintelligible emotional pap or abrasive unintelligible poke you in the chest with a fork, over and over (people used to call this rap but I guess now it has more names). However I also have zero nostalgia for the creative and intelligible rock and roll of the late sixties to early seventies (it took a real dive after that), because I associate it with being bewildered and alarmed, my main coming of age emotions.
While I acknowledge the few but very important improvements in the current day – pushback against racism, sexism, and homophobia, mainly – I note that a huge number of racist sexist gay haters are adamantly opposed to such improvements and in my opinion it is as yet undecided whether we are imminently about to be covered by a second darkness.
To me, modern culture is the whole post WWII era, from before I was born to now. In most ways it has done nothing but destroy at an ever-accelerating pace, all the things that matter to me.