09-22-2022, 07:33 PM
(09-20-2022, 01:35 PM)nguyenivy Wrote:(09-07-2022, 09:40 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(09-07-2022, 08:19 AM)sbarrera Wrote:(09-07-2022, 05:34 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: - pro-military intervention vs non-interventionist
- nationalistic vs critical of their country
Jason, you might be interested to learn about the anti-war movement among GIs in the 1930s. There's a great book about the movement called "When the Old Left Was Young" which I recommend.
https://www.google.com/search?q=when+the...+was+young
The pro-intervention/nationalist reputation came after Pearl Harbor, with the massive participation in the war. This suggests that a major crisis event could cause a shift in Millennials' attitude and reputation. Actually, the distance between the start of the last 4T and Pearl Harbor is the same as the distance between the start of this 4T and the COVID pandemic - 12 years. Perhaps there are ways in which the pandemic has changed Millennials?
On the whole, Millennial adults may have been in a far better state of mind than older adults in meeting the peril of COVID-19. The anti-vax crap was for X, Boomers, and the Silent. Millennial adults may have qualified last for inoculation, but once they were eligible they got it. I look at the loud-mouth deniers of the seriousness of COVID-19 and I do not see the Millennial generation. This generation trusts science more than it trusts any anti-rational rhetoric that threatens people with Hell if they fail to believe such nonsense as young-earth creationism or white supremacy.
Now that Generation X women are now almost completely out of child-bearing age, it is Millennial adults and their Homelander "little sisters" who are most vulnerable to extremist stances on abortion, those stances that hold that a fetus has some right to be carried full term even if dead or if death is a sure thing for the mother (and orphan status for her existing children). The extreme positions against abortion are really pro-death and anti-child.
It is hard to imagine the Millennial generation reverting to the idea that whatever happens in life is some Will of God. We have no shortage of examples of horrors from the Mongol horrors to the mistreatment of American First Peoples to the Atlantic slave trade to the Holocaust that if such things be the Will of God, then perhaps we would be better off without such a God. I would not worship a tyrant or gangster except under the prospect of such extreme distress as a red-hot poker directed at my rectum. I do not want either a Stalin or a mobster as an equivalent of a God, and I do not want my God to be a Stalin or a mobster.
As for Pearl Harbor -- Americans were in a Crisis mode, and the fascists mistakenly believed that America was a land of cultural and political chaos. The generational model suggests that a 4T is a time in which 3T values of mindless hedonism as a salve for extreme inequality fade while 1T values begin to entrench themselves.
pbrower2a - your 3rd para intrigues me a bit as someone who doesn't do religion and is a Millennial. I wonder if despite the toxic uses people in the past has used religion for, if there is still a necessity for some kind of spiritual belief system. We still have many unanswered questions both about the universe as well as things like how a moral/values framework should operate. These are such things different societies handle differently and have different answers to, based on culture. Maybe it's the USA's nature that we don't have a homogenous culture and so what defines 'being American / of the USA' is more of a legal thing than anything else. Interestingly I was thinking of something a few hours ago that is much less serious but might fit this pretty well about the difference between the US & elsewhere: we in the US have no equivalent of winning the World Cup. We are so large a country and soccer/football isn't very popular here, so even if we won the celebration would not be like it is elsewhere in countries where football/soccer is the dominant sport and winning is part of the national pride. Our sports have a championship every year and the teams represent cities/metro areas. Those areas do not totally shut down when they win and not everyone cares when the team wins. They have a parade a few days later and that's it. What I think I'm getting at is we in the US have no narrative (or lost whatever one we had) about our purpose of life and our goals. We just live for ourselves/families and maybe whatever causes we care about in our little corner. Does this lack of a narrative originate from lack of spiritual belief? Something else? Does it matter?
I don't do religion because Ii have yet to find the right match. I am tempted to believe that if religion helps people cope with some of the unavoidable realities of life such as sickness, death, and bereavement, then so be it. I find religion to have at best hijacked moral imperatives (don't get me wrong -- if someone must adopt a religious faith that successfully compels one to give up drugs or alcohol, then I am in no position to condemn such. I have known people who could have greatly improved the quality of their lives by becoming members of the LDS Church, the most demanding of all Christian bodies that does not mess one up. If that is what it takes to give up tobacco, booze, or perhaps adultery, then so be it.
If there is a God, then that God set forth the mathematical and physical laws and the logical dialectic that allows the Universe to make sense and allow our existence as Humanity. The best case for "God" is that the universe makes sense. Even so I recognize the huge flaws of human (really anti-human) history. As one expression I suggest the question
Why did God not convert the Germans to Judaism (which would have solved many of their problems and at most cost them pork and shellfish) instead of allowing German leadership to annihilate the Jews, who on the whole had done nothing wrong?
I ask this as someone of much German ancestry. I have argued with neo-Nazis on the Web, and in one case I told the creep that if I had to choose between being a Jew or being a Nazi like that creep I would choose Judaism because such would cause me to make no ethical compromises or abandon my culture. That would be cheap and easy in contrast to accepting the unadulterated depravity that is Nazism.
The Germans had Jesus in their Bibles, but I am satisfied that instead of crucifying Jesus they would have driven Him into a gas chamber for a dose of Zyklon-B. I recall a drama involving the prosecution of major Nazi war criminals. Some of the investigators and interrogators and guards were Jews. They got creeped out when the Nazis sang Christmas carols. The Jews accepted that their American co-workers could sing Christmas carols without creating any trouble. Nazis? How dare they consider themselves Christians!
The great rationale for religion is that it improves the Believer. For a religion that would solve problems if everyone followed it I suggest the Quakers. For them there is no room for war or slavery. Quakers were harsh about sexual deviancy*, but I could live with that. Quakers may not have been aggressive enough in proselytizing to save the world.
*Gay is OK, but it is just not my way. To those who mess with children -- damn you!
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.