Victor David Hanson lets dismay get the better of him today.
Like Harry Truman from a still earlier generation, Hanson probably was raised to say, "Fine, thank you," whenever someone inquired how he was. Until today, it was regarded as impolite, after all, to burden others with one's own troubles. But, once in a while a person has to let the truth out, if only to make a larger point, and what Hanson sees in America today is genuinely and significantly depressing.
When you read about the fairy tale economy we have created you have only touched the broad surface of cultural decline. Hanson has opened a subject that invites many other examples.
This is a twilight age when people are out of work and pinching pennies, yet you have trouble finding a high school student to mow the lawn. The reason is that so many teens get whatever money they need from their parents. Is there a moment when that turns around?
The saddest thing for me is the coarsening of manners that Hanson describes, the way that spontaneity and candor have been elevated over reserve and consideration. What Hanson says about air travel and stores is simply obvious to anyone who grew up before the late 60s or had relatively strict parents.
He might have added that honest disagreements, which Americans never minded acknowledging, are now touted as justifications for shutting down contrasting opinions. The coercive atmosphere of universities, for example, seems to grow in proportion to the growth in doubt about old intellectual standard bearers like Marx and Freud and Darwin. Meanwhile, there is less civilized discussion about public issues on our 100 plus television channels and endless internet and iPod chat than was found on TV when it was live, black and white and arrived over only three stations.
Hanson might have written about the way the supposedly concerned, less formal society has ushered in presumptuous, slightly imperious impersonality, just as C. S. Lewis predicted. Think of the false familiarity that now poses as respect in dealing with strangers. In a clinic waiting room, for example, bored nursing assistants call out octegenarians by their first names--"Annie!", "Peter!" Doctors who think they are still entitled to be called "Doctor" apparently regard that kind of thing as a way to establish--what? "Intimacy?" "Friendliness!" Going to the doctor (some doctors, anyhow) is about as truly "friendly" as being hailed at a restaurant chain where a bumptious voice over a microphone announces, "Chapman, Party of Four!"
Former Senator Slade Gorton says that such eras of unapologetic rudeness eventually encounter backlash and the re-establishment of social sobriety. I am wondering when that will come about, and how.
