Generation Reboot

We are about to enter the generation that did not know Eisenhower.

My parent’s like Ike, but my children have no memory of my World War II era grandparents. They live in a culture created by that Greatest Generation, but they have no memory, not even a borrowed one, of that time.

I grew up hearing stories about the Great Depression. My children did not. As a result, the old rules, long taken for granted, that created the post-War polity will soon change. Assumptions will be challenged by external and internal events and Americans of insufficient numbers will know the “rules.” We have patched up the 1945 vehicle, updated it, and kept it going, but the time is coming for a whole new vehicle.

Can this generation do as well as my grandparents did?

I am hopeful they will do better.

There is no surprise in this need for a cultural reboot. Lifespan means that eventually old orders must change, adapt, or be rebooted. The great-grandchildren of Mao will decide soon the fate of China as those with memories and memories of memories of the Revolution fade. I suspect there will be massive upheaval in CHina around 2020, because Chinese communism will fail as Russian communism did.

In the US, American affluence and liberty have led to problems. Will we expand liberty to the point of becoming libertine? Will our affluence create a culture of consumption that undermines republican values? Some of our leadership seems to be stumbling in this area, the middle-class is being hollowed out, and the poorest Americans suffer most from societal moral shifts. Still, there exists a bulwark of Americans, left and right, who reject consumerism and are eager to protect and rejuvenate our social institutions.

Some ideas are bad, but at least we are discussing strengthening our moral and political order. The debate is healthy. The main fear are those who simply wish to destroy the Constitution, marriage and family, and our social institutions without any replacement in mind. Moral nihilism is more to be feared than alternative social arrangements if the right to dissent from those arrangements is protected. Surely a nation that has allowed the Amish to thrive will be able to accommodate several different approaches to our cultural reboot moment.

Conservatives in a federal system should tolerate New York values in New York if conservatives triumph nationally. Liberals should accept Utah values in Utah, if they prevail in most of the nation. Compromise is possible. I see glimmers of hope in the abandonment of “culture war” language.

Traditional Christians, whether the Orthodox bishops, Catholic colleges, or Evangelical congregations, will not change their values or stop advancing them where we can. Where we are a minority, we can accept this status graciously. Where we are a majority, we can do to others as we would wish them to do to us as much as possible.

Generational reboot is coming. If we are moderate in temper, rational in our approach, and faithful to divine Revelation, Christians have little to fear. Our ancestors built well enough to weather fiercer storms in 1861/2 and 1941/2.

We can be confident that in 2012 American can be moving forward again.