In the Friday mailbag today at Founding Questions, someone asked:
Re: The meme (for lack of a better term): “The world stopped in 1999, and this is a simulation (or whatever).” Question: In your opinion: How much of the slowdown in culture, etc, is due to the Boomers losing their juice? Be it personally, physically, socially, and so on? How much of the meme is simply trolling people wth fuzzy memories? And how much is Religion (big R) going away, and the search for meaning spilling over to any nook or cranny?
I have given this some thought, gentle reader, and I attribute it to the decline of the educational establishments in the country, whether it’s the consolidation of school districts to solve problems Horace Mann identified in 19th century (spoiler alert: they did not, in fact, solve the problems, but they sure made room for a lot of administrators) or the change in the nature of colleges (now universities). Heck, maybe it was the electrification of the country, where culture shifted to radio and later television (and, in some places, but not all, movies).
So the depth of the source material from which creators and writers decreased. Instead of imaginative books or even radio, writers and whatnot started taking their main inputs from visual media, and you can see it in their outputs.
Now, we’ve reached a point where young creators and writers have taken their inputs mostly from movies. For example, this PJ Media column alludes:
Enter the Donkey version of Loki, the deeply duplicitous trickster-villain from the Marvel Cinematic Universe….
Not the Norse god of lies. Not the comic book villain for almost 70 years now. No, the Loki from a contemporary series of movies (no, man, Thor was 2011, which is like fifteen years ago–it’s an old movie).
If you read widely, historically speaking, you’ll find that even pulp (the best of it) from the early 20th century has depth that a lot of contemporary mass culture (movies, mostly, but also television) lacks. Classical allusions, retelling of stories, maybe just hitting most of the Hero’s Journey, for crying out loud. But the new films are trying to retell the older (not necessarily old) films. Why do later Star Wars movies merely thinly retell the original Star Wars movies? Because the filmmakers’ inputs were not classical serials but the original Star Wars movies (a thinner source from which to draw). You can apply this to other “franchises” which just retread and message-swap the stories.
Now, this might apply less to writers, who tend to start out readers and who might have some depth in their inputs, but I assure you this does not necessarily apply to poets as some of my book reports suggest.
Where are we going to be in twenty years when the prime creators grew up on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok? Me, I’ll be reading old books, same as ever. As a culture: Can it really get any worse?
So what is to be done? I dunno. Read a book? Write something more than twee blog posts? Probably more advice to me than many of you.
