In his latest substack piece (12th Feb), Ed West expressed his intuition that previous decades were a better time to grow up, and that smartphones have a lot to do with it.
"Even in London, the 90s felt a lot more violent and edgy in many ways, but — to sound like some boring old fart — I’m very happy I grew up before smartphones were invented."
He is not wrong. However, the boring old fart trope has to go.
It’s not that boring old fart is untruthful. It’s that contempt for maturity isn’t doing us any favours. Youth is presented as the only worthwhile way of being; people with negligible experience know better, supposedly, than the people that raised them. In previous decades - from, say, the 1960’s to the 1990s - deferring to the young seemed harmless, even beneficial. This has been pushed for generations, with coercion and repetition, to become socially true and politically true. Contempt for maturity is one of the don’t reject me signs to say you still want to sit with the cool kids. The idea is to separate the young from any existing reservoir of wisdom and sentiment that might guide them. But by now, even the most conformist person should be able to see that our society is not thriving, and that year-zero youths don’t have the answers.
Without convincing examples of maturity - also known as parenting - the road to adulthood is stony and long. If your parents aren’t any good, you can pick it up from living in a healthy society. Without either parents or a sustaining social world, the best outcomes are unlikely : a young person will come upon the benefits of maturity only accidently, like stumbling upon a secret garden. The worst outcome is more likely: they remain lost; there is no end to the search for a place in life, and a self they can be comfortable with. They stay searching, with inner tensions they cannot express, trying to game adulthood with a youngster’s solutions.
People like that are of little use to anyone apart from machiavellian mass movements. This why such movements put a lot of effort into separating the young from their families. Eric Hoffer's The True Believer is an unsparing account of why rootless, immature people are so useful in this way; roughly, that their frustrations can be weaponised, with an unreachable goal and someone to blame, to destroy whatever the movement is targeted at:
"The frustrations of misfits can vary in intensity. There are first the temporary misfits: people who have not yet found their place in life but hope to find it. Adolescent youth, unemployed college graduates, veterans, new immigrants and the like are of this category. They are restless, dissatisfied and haunted by the fear that their best years will be wasted before they reach their goal. They are receptive to the preachings of a proselytising movement, but do not make staunch converts. For they are not irrevocably estranged from the self: they do not see it as irremediably spoiled...."
Of course, an unreachable goal will never arrive. They will get nothing but the memory of all the effort they invested. Their lives and their life-chances will be used up in the endless fight for the perfect society: that’s what putting the collective above the individual means. But who cares if their lives are wasted? To whom do their lives matter?
You have to look for it, but there clearly is a Burkean reservoir of useful knowledge and sustaining traditions. It’s not in the Politics-Philosophy-Economics dept or the English Lit dept, though, or the National Trust or the BBC. It is hard to say how strong it is, compared to the forces against it; but if it is anywhere, it is in middle-aged and old people. They are not necessarily wiser as individuals; they are less confident with the current foaming social conditions, as they are intended to be; and there are many valid criticisms of the boomer mindset. But they do have experience of living in different societies, and can make morally convincing comparisons with our crappy present. There are also mature people who are educated and articulate, and have faced up to the challenges that make life meaningful. They are the best hope of articulating what social conditions should be held onto, rather than universalist, technocratic year-zero futurism.
It is not easy: even in the best of times, there is more chance of the dead contacting the living than the young hearing the old; and intersectionals make capital from presenting maturity as oppressive, unearned authority. Similarly, it’s not promoting the “agist” victim narrative to "empower mature voices." It’s that mature people are the best hope of articulating why maturity is better than the chimera of eternal youth. The benefits of maturity are, roughly, the slow achievements of responsibility, self-reliance, sympathy, fortitude, principle, judgement, meaning, love, and so on, and so on. All these virtues are deliberately absent from the intersectional armoury; and a strong articulation of them is necessary to say why all the horrible things currently being done are wrong.