04-28-2019, 11:42 PM
(04-28-2019, 08:00 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote:(04-28-2019, 07:34 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: If I recall correctly, the Progressive generation was 17 years long. If the Millenials are 22 years long, they would be a longer pseudo-Artist-generation than the Progressives.
Why are generations so long? It seems inaccurate to me with the way the world changes so fast.
The amazing thing is that generations turn over as quickly as they now do -- and not as they did in the Renaissance through the Enlightenment.
Today the teenagers become a marketplace for such ideas as those in comic books, popular music, television, and cinema. In earlier times kids either started toiling early and took the adult role of productivity without becoming creative people or participating in any marketplace of ideas. Long apprenticeships ensured that people did not achieve any discretionary role in society until they were in their thirties unless they became 'child kings' -- which was usually a disaster both for the king and the kingdom. Education, such as it was, was extremely stereotypical, failing to create intellectual independence. Obviously any semblance of intellectual independence was the source of much-dreaded sedition and heresy, both of which got one the same sort of treatment that a highwayman might. Burning at the stake, perhaps?
The medieval world was conformist and largely uncreative -- especially for the best and brightest who knew that those who fed them from the pot could use the fire that cooked their dinner to cook them alive.
Not until the Renaissance did the culture begin taking on modern competence in expression. Contrast medieval art (usually lacking in perspective, something that people now take for granted, and even neophyte artists do almost instinctively) and literature. It started to win over the Establishment because it was more satisfying. People then started asking questions about basic truths, like whether clerics should get away with corruption and rapaciousness that the common man could never get away with -- or whether such a question as
Quote:How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
was even worthy of a debate. Only when most of the medieval hogwash had vanished from life could people start doing meaningful creativity.
Consider music. A new musical style can spread around the world with unbelievable speed. The pace may have been slower with "Beatlemania" than whatever is the current craze, slower still with Big Band music a quarter-century earlier, slower still with what I consider the most critical work of the twentieth century, the one that shattered the dominance of Romanticism in music.
Music of the time of Haydn and Mozart could advance to new audiences at most at the speed of horse and rider or sailing ships -- and this music took a very long time to reach America. Years! The Beatles traveled by jet aircraft; musical scores contemporary to Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) could travel by by (then) swift trains and motorcars through a continental landmass or across the sea by steamer just slightly slower than word-of-mouth if the reviews were flattering or controversial. (An aside: it was the ballet and not the music that was so controversial in 1913).
OK, so it is highly unlikely that any living person is still alive who heard the premiere. For most of us the most important premiere for us of any book, musical piece, objet d'art, or video is our personal first experience. Sure, I am old enough at age 63 that I remember when Igor Stravinsky was living; I was fifteen when he died.
So we get to pick and choose what we want from the great repository of culture. I have my bias; this music is more powerful than any piece of rock music. I need no powdered wig to appreciate music written when people wore powdered wigs.
Smart kids, the ones who eventually shape the world, get to pick and choose from centuries of achievement, and that makes all the difference in the world. Even if they are slow to achieve economic independence (in this age of peonage in the form of student-loan debt which makes young adults sophisticated versions of sharecroppers) they can absorb much and establish their identities as youth could not in earlier times.
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.