Are Baby Boomers Our Misfortune?

There is a great deal of pop cultural analysis that blames the Baby Boomer generation for the ills that plague American society. I believe that this analysis is as faulty as the perception that Jews were the cause of Communism. Rather, the culture wars that started in the 1960s are the outward manifestation of intellectual movements that began over 200 years before the Berkeley "Free Speech" movement or Woodstock.

With regard to the sexual revolution, it was the 1960s and 1970s when promiscuity, no fault divorce, abortion on demand, etc., became widespread in American society. However, that revolution did not occur in a vacuum. Since the Enlightenment of the 18th Century, a substantial portion of Western intellectuals rejected the concept of divinely ordained and immutable standards of right and wrong. In the 19th Century, the rise of the higher criticism movement caused many theologians to doubt the inspiration of Scripture. Higher criticism helped to spawn liberal Protestantism, which by 1960 had dominated most of the largest mainstream denominations in America. If "thou shalt not commit adultery" was the invention of man and not the command of a transcendent God, then a new basis had to be found for a social order. Humanists found this basis in what Rousseau called the General Will, that is to say, the the separate wills, rights and desires of each member of a society brought together as a single unit, which is to be governed by representatives of the people to achieve the common good.

However, the question arose as to whether Judeo-Christian sexual morality was truly for the common good. The rise of Sigmund Freud, with his emphasis on sexuality and repression, as the dominant figure in the then-new field of psychiatry, was an important factor in toppling taboos regarding sexuality. Feminists such as Margaret Sanger promoted birth control and abortion, as well as liberalized divorce laws, to "free" women from the "bondage" of housework and child care. The former entymologist turned sex researcher Alfred Kinsey promoted both the belief that non-monogamous sex, especially homosexuality, was far more widespread than it actually was. His sexuality studies, released in 1948 and 1954, were widely read and powerful arguments in favor of looser moral standards.

All of these advocates of the loosening of the Biblically based codes of morality needed both popular outlets to disseminate their position. Popular novels became increasingly lurid. Hugh Hefner and Helen Gurley Brown arose for their respective sexes as advocates of sexual freedom, through their respective magazines, Playboy and Cosmopolitan. By 1966, both Catholic and Protestant watchdogs of Hollywood movie production were disbanded. Emboldened by their disappearance and loosening moral standards, the film media promoted sexual amorality and freedom without consequences. Popular music was not exempt. Even in the Big Band era of the 1940s, sexual innuendo was rife, as it was in the jazz from which Big Band music derived. The rise of rock music, derived in part from the blues, performed by black underworld figures who mimicked Gospel music and in part from Anglo-American "honky tonk," glorified blatant sexuality.

Political support was needed for overturning older laws usually based on common law precedents drawn at least partially from Biblical precedents. The rise of positive law, that is, law based on the changing needs of society rather than immutable principles, was championed by the influential American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and his philosophical heirs such as Felix Frankfurter and Earl Warren.

The political left, both Marxists and democratic socialists, had had a symbiotic relationship with those who favored sexual liberation. The Greenwich Village district of New York City was America's foremost center of "avant garde" ideas in the early 1900s, where Communists like John Reed rubbed shoulders with playwrights like Eugene O'Neill and novelists like F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as feminists like Margaret Sanger. While Soviet Communism developed a puritan-like strain relative to sexuality, other Marxists belived that sexual freedom was a means to overturn bourgeois society and that restraint in sexual matters was a tool of repression by the ruling class. This was an aspect of the cultural Marxism espoused by the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci.

Marxist intellectuals such as Theodore Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Herbert Marcuse came to America in the 1930s one step ahead of the Nazis. They found their way into prestigious academic positions, whence they preached this Gramscian version of Communism. In particular, Marcuse was the godfather of the New Left, which encouraged the growth of the hippie movement and created the anti-Vietnam war movement, which helped subvert American will in that war, leading to the first war this nation lost. This New Left movement is where Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry first became involved in politics.

Until the last sentence, I have listed no person who could be considered a Baby Boomer. I did list two members of the G.I. Generation (Hugh Hefner and Helen Gurley Brown). Virtually all the others discussed were born in the 19th Century or earlier. Some, like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Antonio Gramsci, were dead well before V-J Day. The sexual revolution did not spring one day in 1961 from the dirty jokes of Lenny Bruce, the permissive child rearing books of Benjamin Spock, or the swiveling hips of Elvis Presley. Rather, it was the result of intellectual movements dating to the 18th Century and earlier that attempted to "liberate" society from the bondage of "superstitions" based on the Bible and Western tradition.

The culture wars that have been ongoing since the 1960s will not be won until the conservative opposition recognizes that merely repealing bad Supreme Court decisions or ensuring continued GOP control of the Presidency and Congress are not enough. The long march of secular humanism and statism must be ended by defeating the Left in the intellectual arena. The "ivory tower" sneered at by some conservatives is the control tower for society. The ivory towers, such as the prestigous universities, most of the think tanks, most of the tax free foundations, and even a large portion of the Fortune 500 board rooms, are in the hands of the enemies of traditional, Biblically based values and limited government. The battle for America will not be won until those ivory towers are no longer in the hands of liberals and secular humanists, irrespective of their age.

...should I then assume you are an anti-Semite and a conspiracy theorist to boot?

I suppose you should, if you have no other rebuttal to offer. Calling someone an anti-Semite, or a Nazi, is the last refuge of the speechless.

But if you goose step to the "Horst Wessel Lied," that would be very relevant!

No, but I can play Beethoven's, "Ode to Joy", in march time, on the bagpipes. Oh wait, He was Austrian. My mistake.

As for the "Red Diaper Baby" issue, I believe it was your article that first raised that ugly specter on this thread. If their mention makes me an anti-Semite, what does it make you?

There is a long gap of over two centuries between the French philosophers and the leftists of the 1960s antiwar movement who later cut their hair,

That's not fair, using the French in any kind of argument. From Rousseau to Sartre, the French have little, if any real concept of what Liberty means to the soul. The Continental philosophers, as opposed to those of the Scottish Enlightenment, have little to offer the Republic of the United States. You should have separated the two. The US, at its founding, had much more in common with English Common Law and the Scottish enlightenment than it does the Napoleonic Law and European Continental philosophies.

They may have had many drinking songs, but little encouraging sex outside of marriage.

Geez. You re a bigger moron than I thought. And you've got a dirty little mind, as well.

Calling someone an anti-Semite, or a Nazi, is the last refuge of the speechless.

Are you saying that the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith and other debunkers of conspiracy theories are speechless? Their long experience with the writings of conspiracy theorists lends to their seeing patterns in those who unduly emphasize the collective role of Jews in leftist movements. You may not be an anti-Semite, but you did demonstrate a characteristic of anti-Semites. It may be a false inference, but so are several statements you have made.

Ad hominem attacks are the refuge of the speechless. They are characteristic of liberals and leftists, whose SOP is, when attacked and unable to defend their position, scream "racist, fascist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, yada yada yada" at the top of their lungs ad nauseum. Your penchant for ad hominems does not necessarily mean that you are a liberal or leftist. In an earlier post, you accused me of a lack of charity toward others. It would be well for you to consider the virtue of charity.

Additionally, Beethoven was German, not Austrian. He was a native of Bonn (in later times the capital of West Germany), far closer to the French than to the Austrian border.

As for the French, they have fallen on hard times intellectually for the last three centuries, in part due to the exile or execution of the Huguenots, who comprised the majority of France's middle class and business owners. However, John Calvin, the most profound theologian of the Reformation, was French. Calvin's theology was the principal source of English Puritanism and Scottish Presbyterianism. The influence of Calvin on England, Scotland, and America was profound. King George III called the American Revolution a Presbyterian rebellion. One well-known historian called the French theologian the earliest Founding Father of America. While Calvinist political philosophy was a mixed bag of classical liberalism and authoritarianism, we can clearly see the beginnings of the thought processes that led to the principles embodied in the Constitution. As an example, Samuel Rutherford, the 17th Century Puritan divine, authored Lex Rex, which stated that the duty of the Christian to adhere to higher law, derived from the Bible or from "good and necessary" consequences of Biblical principles, outweighed the obligation of allegiance to kings or other civil rulers. "The law is king," not "the king is the law."

I do not deny the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment in the shaping of the American republic, certainly in the "common sense" philosophy that was characteristic of the generation of the Founders and many of the most influential Americans of the first century of our national history. However, the Scottish philosophers were certainly a mixed bag with respect to their economic and political philosophies. While Adam Smith was the father of free market economists, other scholars associated with the Scottish Enlightenment were advocates of mercantilism. Additionally, many historians note that the authors most cited by the Founding Fathers (excluding the Bible) were Locke, Montesquieu, and Blackstone, none of whom would be considered a part of the Scottish Enlightenment.

As a final note, can you name a 19th Century Appalachian folk song that advocated or glorified marital infidelity or sexual promiscuity?

The principal difference between the Baby Boomers and the preceding generations (Lost, G.I., and Silent) is that they were the first generation in American history where the philosophical and moral ideas of secular humanism and hedonism were widely accepted by the masses and not just the elite or a small group of Bohemians.

However, secular humanism had "won the day" in the Ivy League universities, the tax free foundations, and the mainstream media at a time when today's Boomers were in the playgrounds and school ballfields. Walter Cronkite, the World War II era journalist turned news anchor who was once called the "most trusted man in America," was/is as liberal as anyone behind a microphone today. The colleges the Boomers attended, even many of the private and church-affiliated ones, taught economics from the Keynesian perspective of John Kenneth Galbraith and Robert Samuelson, political philosophy from authors like John Rawls, and ethics and morality from Walter Fletcher, of Situation Ethics fame. Many colleges ceased acting in loco parentis, removing the previous restraints of curfews and same sex dorms.

Keep in mind that none of the persons I have mentioned were Baby Boomers, nor were the deans and professors, who in the 1970s were drawn from the three prior generations.

I have discussed, in a prior post, the fact that most of the musical Pied Pipers of the Boomers were born prior to V-J Day. Even in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the top men in the entertainment business, who determine the course of their multifaceted enterprises, are pre-Baby Boom. As examples, there are Michael Eisner (Disney, born 1942); Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg; born 1942); Rupert Murdoch (Fox, born 1931); Ted Turner (CNN, born 1938); Sumner Redstone (Viacom and MTV, born 1923 (and a World War II veteran!)); Nobuyushi Idei (Sony, born 1937); Barry Diller (ABC/Paramount, born 1942).

A large percentage of Boomers made bad choices, as you rightly point out. Their often ruined lives bear testimony as to the failure of the moral vacuum in which many of them live. However, it must be understood that they were born into a world where, in the words of the libertarian author Garet Garrett, "the revolution was." That is to say, the advocates of secular humanism, statism, and moral relativism had long before won the battle for the hearts and minds of the American intellectual and political elite.

You may not be an anti-Semite, but you did demonstrate a characteristic of anti-Semites. It may be a false inference, but so are several statements you have made.

Oh really? None of my Jewish friends think so. Your welcome to your opinion, but it was your initial introduction of "Red Diaper Babies" at your post No. 7, that opened up the subject up to discussion on this thread. To wit:

(Post # 7)"Indeed, many, if not most, of the leaders of the New Left of the 1960s were "red diaper babies," sons or daughters of Communist or other leftist families who were immersed in Marxist and materialist dogma from childhood."

You certainly are intellectually honest, you introduce a definitely Semitic subject and then turn around and call those who comment on it, "anti-Semite".

Ad hominem attacks are the refuge of the speechless. They are characteristic of liberals and leftists, whose SOP is, when attacked and unable to defend their position, scream "racist, fascist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, yada yada yada" at the top of their lungs ad nauseam.

I never called you any of those names. It was you who resorted to "anti-Semite". I did however, refer to you as a "moron". And in the lingo of FR, a "bloviated moron". Someone who demonstrates how little they know by attempting to impress the Forum with how much they think they know. A really good example of that is your ignorant slander of Hank Williams Sr. Could a man who wrote the words to the following ballad deserve the hell to which you would like to condemn him?

A Home in Heaven, by Hank Williams -

Around me many are building,
Homes of beauty and wealth,
But what of a home in Heaven,
Where will you live after death,

(chorus)
Are you building a Home in Heaven,
To live in when this life is over,
Will you move to that beautiful city,
And live with Christ evermore,

To that beautiful home up there,
Is work on your home completed,
Death may be lingering near,

(chorus)
Are you ready for his coming,
Have you been true all along,
Have you finished your building in glory,
Will you move to this Heavenly Home,

Could a man who wrote those words be beyond redemption? Moreover, could a man like you, willing to condemn his fellow man with superficial knowledge of his life, be worthy of mercy? You're a hypocrite, Wallace T. A person that, I believe, Christ would shun.

. He was a native of Bonn (in later times the capital of West Germany), far closer to the French than to the Austrian border.

Oh that's right. It's been so long since I was stationed in the then W. German Republic, while in the US Army, that I forgot. Hitler was the Austrian. Thank you so much for taking the time to enlighten an ignorant anti-Semite such as myself. Is there any thing else that you know that I don't care about?

As for the French, they have fallen on hard times intellectually for the last three centuries,....

That presupposes that the French had some intellect prior to the three centuries that you reference. French history, from "Pepin the Short" onward does not give any indication of an indigenous French intellect.

However, John Calvin, the most profound theologian of the Reformation, was French.

Yes, John Calvin. The central theme of Calvin's beliefs was that of predestination - everything that happens is the will of God. Calvin believed in the concept of eternal salvation and with it eternal damnation,

You're a Calvinist for sure. I'll get the rope! Who are we going to hang for heresy, being a witch, or being able to talk through wires? I can play long and sorrowful laments on the pipes, just the thing for sending a sinful soul to the infernal regions. BTW, isn't Calvin considered in the context of "The Enlightenment" as well? I thought your thesis was centered on the beginning of 60's sin with the "Age of Enlightenment".

As a final note, can you name a 19th Century Appalachian folk song that advocated or glorified marital infidelity or sexual promiscuity?,

Not offhand, but songs like those tend to be passed on by memory, rather than written down, as many of the peoples of Appalachia were illiterate. But I do recall that Robert Burns had some rather ribald lyrics imparted in some of his songs and Appalachian Folk Music is considered to be of Scots-Irish, Irish, Scottish and English origins. That makes them the origin of the Folk Songs that the communists used in the college movement during the 50's and 60's by such "Red" musicians as the "Weavers" and Pete Seger.

So which is the source of communism by music professor? From the folk music of Appalachia to the Rock n' Roll of "Surf City", which is it that rattles your Calvinist bones?

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