Boomer Rage

Below is a guest post from Phil Anthropis

I saw these Futurists talking on TV on Australia Day.  They were making all these dire predictions about conditions by the year 2020 – fuel $20/litre, milk $10/litre, fruit and vegetable prices on par with prices in Japan and other landless countries, average national house price about $1.6 million.  Not much wages growth, if I recall correctly. And predictions of water shortages, and climate problems leading to people along the coasts to move inland. 

While making these types of extrapolations is probably very problematic, there is one thing they said that I can relate to:  Boomer Rage. They predict that younger people are going to get more and more fed up with looking after the baby boomers, a generation of squanderers. And medical technological improvements is going to help ensure this rage builds – because now the Baby Boomers just won’t die! 

Not only have the baby boomers had all the best breaks and conditions in their youthful years, but they have created a society and culture that is materially based, where the young have very little incentive to bear their own offspring.  And now the young are going to be expected to look after these masses of senior citizens in return for an income that won’t give the workers the same benefits that the boomers enjoy.  OK, I know any one of these arguments could be examined in detail and potentially found to be flawed.  However, Boomer Rage has not yet bubbled up within me – but Boomer Resentment has.

The city with no soul?

A few years ago my wife and I took our baby girl for a walk along the Bronte-Bondi path. The scenery was simply stunning, but what defined the experience for us was the people that we saw there. Almost without exception, they appeared to be people in their late 20s/early 30s, career-oriented, childless and materialist. The clothing, gadgets and general attitude just screamed to us “it’s all about me!!!” It put us off so much that we don’t plan on returning. In this context, I found an article in today’s SMH very interesting. It’s not particularly long, so I’ve reproduced it below:

Could Sydney be the saddest of cities – intellectually bereft, spiritually empty? Are its residents T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Men – heads together but whispering nothing except deadening conversations about the latest movement of the property market or fad diet?

Sydney’s culture of the relentless pursuit of property, perfect bodies and status has the British psychologist and author Oliver James worried. For his recently released book Affluenza, he travelled to seven countries to research the effect that consumerism has on happiness.

He found that the obsessive pursuit of money and possessions was not buying happiness. But the affluenza virus was worst in Sydney, where he found interviewing locals a depressing experience. It was, he said, “the most vacuous of cities. The Dolly Parton of cities in Australia”. Adelaide and Melbourne had a “different vibe” and didn’t strike James as being so materialistic.

James had not been to Sydney before and expected a “philistine nation” of “jolly, uncomplicated fun seekers”. Instead he found a city in thrall to American values and a puritan work ethic that robbed life of joy and real meaning. Middle-class Sydney, he writes, is “packed with career-obsessed workaholics”.

When they are not working the longest hours in the developed world, they pursue perfect bodies through joyless fitness regimes, or obsess about property prices. Always they are looking around anxiously, in the hope that others aren’t doing better. “[It was] full of people who place a high value on money, professional status and appearance,” he said. The result? Sydneysiders have a greater risk of suffering from depression and anxiety.

“They were like the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz. They had no idea of the point of their lives other than to get rich.” Sydney’s already weak intellectual culture has been further eroded by the pursuit of money and possessions, he writes.

While Britain has “its Posh and Becks” cultural differences including a more entrenched class system has put the brakes on the spread of consumerism in Britain. “The British compared to the US or Aussies are less easily convinced that money will get you further. The British elite have been around for an awfully long time and there is not the crassness of the Australian rich.”

This crassness was particularly virulent in the Sydney property market. He noted figures highlighting a rise in depression that coincided with a bullish property market which caused stress and anxiety, particularly among young Australians.

While he despaired about Sydney, he found the “affluenza virus” was not as prevalent outside the Western world. His advice to Sydneysiders caught on the treadmill?

“Start reading”.

Values (or lack thereof) amongst Chinese youth

Brucifer draws my attention to a survey addressing Beijing high school students’ attitudes to sexuality. There’s some pretty alarming stuff:

An overwhelming majority of high school girls in Beijing would not refuse a boyfriend’s requests for sex, and more than half of students see nothing wrong with a one-night stand.

Just six of the 1,300 girls questioned stated that they would say no to sex when asked by a boyfriend. The typical answer was: “As long as he loves me, it’s OK.” About 200 respondents of both sexes said they would have a one-night stand if the opportunity arose.

As to some reasons for these surprising attitudes:

Zhang Meimei, a professor at Capital Normal University in Beijing, who was involved in the latest survey, said: “The new generation is open-minded about sex. We can only conclude that it is a result of a fast-changing society.”

One of the most important changes is a result of China’s quarter-century-old “one-couple, one-child” family planning policy that has resulted in a generation of young people indulged by their parents and subject to little discipline and few rules at home.

In addition, the chaos of the Cultural Revolution shattered many traditional ways of thinking, while a widespread cynicism with communist ideology that followed the ultra-leftist movement has created a generation lacking a clear moral compass.

Does anyone agree with those propositions, or are there some other possible reasons?

Suicide

For some reason, I grew up with the notion that suicide was akin to murder, and thus would consign a person to the telestial kingdom. Certainly, many ‘fire-and-brimstone Christians’ believe such people are off to hell, but as I’ve grown up I’ve begun to doubt it.

The big problem I have with this notion is that someone who commits suicide suicides is clearly acting irrationally, probably because of depression or some other mental condition. As such, I don’t think we can say with any degree of certainty how accountable the person is.

I decided to search lds.org for ’suicide’ and found a fantastic Ensign article (Oct ‘87) by Elder Ballard, entitled ‘Suicide: Some Things We Know, and Some We Do Not’. It’s definitely worth a read for anyone interested in the subject. Elder Ballard quotes from a range of church leaders, and seems to conclude that suicide is a pretty serious sin (since it involves taking life), but since the mental state of the person is probably not particularly healthy, only God can really judge what will happen.

Evangelicals for Mitt

A couple of commenters have drawn my attention to a blog they enjoy – http://evangelicalsformitt.com/. My understanding of the situation is that many evangelicals don’t like Mormons much, but the ones that run this blog are trying to change that, pointing out that Mitt Romney shares many of the values that are important to evangelicals.

The blog recently had a post mentioning that a judge in Canada ruled that a boy can have two mothers and a father. There are a number of problems with this:

First, it gives credence to the argument that “if everything can be marriage, pretty soon nothing will be marriage.” Logically, it can’t be any other way. That was the point, in response to the ruling, of the Catholic Civil Rights League:Once you remove it from the realm of nature and the realm of traditional moral and religious teachings, who’s going to decide how many parents a child can have? What’s so magical about three, maybe there could be more.

Check out the blog for more.

Sex before love

I saw an old episode of Friends the other day, in which two of the characters told the others that they had begun a relationship and were in love. Another character said “I knew you guys were doing it, but I didn’t know you were in love!” Cue laughter.

But I found the notion that two people would engage in sexual relations before they were even sure of their love for one another very depressing. Sadly, it appears to be more the rule than the exception than the rule in modern society. Committed Christians can point to a range of problems that can arise from such practices, but I want to mention about just a couple : (1) the difficulty in disentangling ‘true’ feelings of affection from the feelings introduced by sexual relations; and (2) the reluctance to ditch a dead-end relationship because of the amount of oneself invested in it.

I think most people would agree that it isn’t exactly easy to accurately assess the depth of one’s feelings while in the dating stages. It can be considerably stressful, as the consequences of wrong decisions are large (ie. getting married to the wrong person, or missing out on the right person). But if you introduce sexual relations into that relationship, it gets far more complicated because sex itself throws in new feelings. (I’m no expert, but I do recall reading articles that talked about ‘cuddle hormones’ being released during sex.) The consequence of this is that people are likely to take a lot longer to determine whether their relationship is going somewhere, and this may be a contributor to the increase in average age of first-time brides and grooms.

I’ve seen this happen recently, with a good friend of mine who isn’t a practicing Christian. He was dating a girl for a while, and the relationship became sexual at some point. It was clear to all and sundry, except for the friend and his girlfriend, that the relationship had no future, but the girl was very reluctant to let go. My guess is that it took her a while to figure out that the relationship was not particularly healthy, and by that time she had invested enough of herself that she was hesitant to knock it on its head. If there was no sexual relationship, I think they would have fizzled out in a matter of weeks or months, but instead it lasted the better part of a year. That’s a lot of time wasted, and far more emotional damage done than would have been the case otherwise.

Welfare Dependency Amongst Indigenous People

Michael Duffy has an interesting column in yesterday’s SMH on the welfare trap faced by many indigenous Australians. Duffy quotes a social worker who thinks that the typical welfare approach to Aboriginal people is ”essentially about rescuing people from competition and [from] taking responsibility for their own action”. The social worker argues that the effect of this is to “patronise and infantilise Aboriginal people”.

In this same area, Noal Pearson, a prominent activist and director of the Cape York Institute, has recently been given a weekly column in The Weekend Australian. He’s well worth reading.

Prisoners

Data released today by the ABS indicate that Australia has around 25,000 prisoners. In contrast, the US has over 2 million prisoners, more than 80 times as many. Sure, the US has a larger population than Australia, but it’s not 80 times larger. It’s more like 14 times larger. That suggests that the average American is around 6 times more likely to be in prison than the average Australian.

Some other interesting points:

- 24% of prisoners are indigenous;

- 7% are women; and

- 57% had been in prison previously.

Marriage statistics

The ABS released some data on marriages today. The data indicate that 76% of couples who were married in 2005 co-habited before marriage, up from 71% in 2000. The data don’t appear to go back any further, but I’m guessing it was well less than 50% in the 1970s, and close to zero in the 1950s. Not a sign of a particularly healthy society, in my humble opinion.

Four views of God

 

This research was released a few months ago, and I found it very interesting. Here are the results:

• 31 percent believe in an Authoritarian God

• 25 percent believe in a Benevolent God

• 23 percent believe in a Distant God

• 16 percent believe in a Critical God

• Region of the country is significantly related to the four types of god. Easterners tend towards belief in a Critical God; Southerners tend towards an Authoritarian God; Midwesterners believe in a Benevolent God; and the West Coast believes in a Distant God.

• Individuals with lower educations and lower incomes tend towards more engaged images of God.

Personally, I believe in a Benevolent God, though probably on the angry side of that circle. I find the ‘popularity’ of Authoritarian God a bit surprising. The research suggests that this view is concentrated amongst active Christians. It seems to me that these guys are reading too much of the Old Testament and not enough of the New Testament.