I was listening to Tucker Carlson interview Tim Dillon, a comedian I’d never heard of. He’s a funny guy, not surprising, but when he and Tucker went on a twelve-and-a-half-minute rant completely trashing boomers it was hilarious. I shared it on Twitter, and someone replied with this:
This is so true (broadly speaking). It’s been a bizarre observation to me how much wisdom people in their 80s and 50s have compared to those in their 60s and 70s. I don’t understand what happened with that generation, but the stereotype is so real. So many are like old children.
Given my handle on Twitter is The Based Boomer and I have a podcast of the same name, I suppose I’m the ideal person to speak to the phenomenon of the horribleness of the baby boomer generation. And from what I can gather, my woeful generation is responsible for every horrible thing that’s happened in the modern world, even, it seems, the stuff that happened before we were born!
There’s the rub at which I have a bit of a problem with the boomer blamers. No generation is born in a vacuum, and each generation is in some sense determined by what came before; they are the recipients of all the historical forces coming before and into which they were born. In fact, I would contend that boomers could no more help who they’ve become than any other generation. This process, a kind of historical determinism, is just baked into the generational cake.
The significance of the baby boom generation is not only their timing in history, but their size. They are a huge generation. Millions of men fought in the war and came home ready to procreate, and they did, thus the boom. As this generation, this demographic wave moved through society and years, they affected everything. It’s the law of big numbers. As consumers what they were interested in, the world became interested in, like it or not. Think of the Beatles and the popular music of the 60s and 70s (the best there has ever been, says this boomer), to fashion, to sex and changing moral standards, the boomers led the way. In the 80s and 90s as they were growing up, careers, raising the perfect children, and real estate became the thing, and as they neared retirement and health challenges increased, the medical industrial complex took over the world. Why do you think Big Pharma is the biggest advertiser on television? Boomers!
Culturally, we boomers have been bad enough, but politically we’ve been an unmitigated disaster. I’ll talk more about that below, but I think the worst part of this disaster has been the Civil Rights revolution that started in 1964. If you haven’t read Christopher Caldwell’s book, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, I highly recommend it, especially if you want to know why America is in the sorry state she is in. I wrote about it last year, and called it “the most important book of the 21st century,” no hyperbole. When the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, Caldwell called it a new Constitution, something that fundamentally changed the nature of the American experiment. It wasn’t intended as that, and wasn’t at the beginning, but it became that. The power of the demographic boomer wave made sure of it. Civil rights soon came to mean not just race, but as Caldwell says, “Racial integration turned into the all-embracing ideology of diversity.” And that, literally, changed everything. But let’s do a brief look back and see where boomers came from.
What Created the Modern World, And Boomers?
One of my passions is studying intellectual and cultural currents in history to see how they’ve flowed down to us in the present, and then how they’ve influenced who we are and what we think as a people and as individuals. Nothing happens in a vacuum, nor does anyone exist in one. We are the product, the result, of innumerable forces coming before we existed, and encompassing us at every level of our existence. This does not mean, in case you’re wondering, that I’m saying we are determined and have no choice about who we are or who we become. A fundamental Christian assumption is that we have agency, that we can change things, and that our choices matter and have consequences; we are accountable beings. Thus, as creatures made in God’s image we are not slaves to these forces, which is why we study them, so we don’t have to be.
We can go all the way back to the fall. Man, male and female God created them, rebelled against God, and introduced sin into the world. You might think it silly to even mention, but in the 18th century a French philosopher came up with the brilliant idea that man is born pure, and it is civilization that corrupts him. His name was Jean Jaques Rousseau, and he introduced the concept of the “noble savage” into the bloodstream of Western intellectual culture. If man is indeed born noble and corrupted by his environment, then all you have to do is change his environment and you will change the man. On the other hand, if man is born a sinner, corrupt from birth, you have to change the man before you can change the circumstances.
Historically, side by side God in his providence gave us these two views of man in juxtaposition so we can compare how they work in practice. Rousseau’s influence gave us the French Revolution, the triumph of reason, which gave the world a Reign of Terror. From September 5, 1793, to July 27, 1794, upwards of 1,400 people were summarily executed, having their heads mercifully lopped off by Madame Guillotine, and tens of thousands were executed over the course of the Revolution. By contrast the American Revolution, steeped in Protestant, specifically Calvinistic, Christianity, gave us the American Revolution. Two diametrically opposite views of man, two diametrically opposite results.
What, you ask, has this to do with baby boomers? My fellow boomers are children of Rousseau, but coming through Kant and Hegel, Marx and Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud, and innumerable influences in between and since. Starting with French Philosopher Renes Descartes in the 17th century, and through all of these influences, as Marx said, the object of life became for man “so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun.” This had implications, as you can imagine, for both individuals and the societies they developed. Marx was just parroting Satan in the garden, that man could “be like God, knowing good and evil.” The boomers exploded onto the world scene in the dreaded “60s” at the apex of the hubris of man thinking he could “be like God.” On a personal level, this coincided with the triumph of the therapeutic, in the title of an important 1966 book by Philip Rieff. Even as a secular Jew, Rieff lamented the loss of religion by modern man. His religion had now become the therapeutic, his highest good a manipulatable sense of his own well-being. He explains it in the introduction:
In compensation, and in place of where faith once was, men are offered Art and/or Science. It is true that new religions are constantly being born. But modern culture is unique in having given birth to such elaborately argued anti-religions, all aiming to confirm us in our devastating illusions of individuality and freedom.
I’m not sure anything could better explain boomers, except as Rieff fills out the picture a few pages later:
Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased. The difference was established long ago, when “I believe,” the cry of the ascetic lost precedence to “one feels,” the caveat of the therapeutic. And if the therapeutic is to win out, then surely the psychotherapist will be his secular spiritual guide.
And while boomers didn’t create psychotherapy, as with many other things they popularized, therapy became the religious replacement of our age. And when Rieff uses the word religion in his book, he’s speaking primarily of Christianity because his concern is the Western Christianized world. It was the development and dominance of Christianity that gave us the blessings of the modern world, and Rieff is lamenting its demise with the rise of secularism.
Being a boomer, albeit on the younger side, I grew up witnessing this societal convulsion in real time. Having been born in 1960, I could only experience the wild 1960s as a child, but as teenager in the 70s, I could participate in some of the more enjoyable aspects of the era, not having to think too much about the politics, or be worried about being drafted into the Vietnam War. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll were our past time, but thankfully I wasn’t too successful on the sex part, and I was too much of a scaredy cat to do more than a few brief experiments with the heavier drugs. I mostly indulged in beer and the weak pot of the time, and loved it!. Rock n’ roll was my passion. Say what you will about boomers, but we gave the world the greatest era in popular music ever. I was going to be a rock star, but thankfully God had different plans.
It wasn’t until I became a born-again Christian in 1978 and then embraced conservative politics in 1980 that I began to look back critically at this era. I started learning about these forces that would create possibly the most consequential generation of the modern world, and it wasn’t just the implications for the personal and relational, but how my generation saw America and the world.
Boomers and the Progressive American Dream
As a generation, the boomers would be well-prepared to build a modern tower of Babel, and inherit the hubris to try. We are fortunate the Lord revealed any Babel like aspirations are not good (Gen. 11):
6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.
Nothing will be impossible for them was pretty much the vibe of the post-World War II period. People in the 1950s and early 1960s pre-Vietnam believed anything was possible, and they prepared the way for the boomer generation. Kennedy’s administration was staffed with the “best and the brightest,” young guns who never doubted their ability to do great things with their power. Unlike the generations before them who went through a global conflagration that developed in them a certain kind of modesty, there was nothing modest about the boomers who believed they could use technology to create anything. This wouldn’t last.
Just as the sinking of Titanic was a blow to the spirit of optimism of the early 20th century, so too was Kennedy’s assassination a blow to the optimism of the early 1960s. This “we can do anything” dynamic combined with shattered dreams of greatness, would create a generation of schizophrenics, delusions of grandeur on the one hand, psychosis on the other. Looking back on the 60s and 70s, Christopher Lasch wrote a surprising best-selling book whose title explains this dynamic well: The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations. Because of sin all human beings are self-centered, curved in on themselves, but the boomers especially so. The generation giving them birth were determined to give them a better life than they had, which when I was growing up was a common refrain. Of course you try to give your kids a better life than you had, but that created a rather self-absorbed generation, one of the common criticisms of my generation.
It turns out all of these many forces made the boomers the perfect generation to inherit the progressive American dream. I blame the Enlightenment for pretty much everything wrong with the modern world, but once reason was exalted as the ultimate means to knowledge, called rationalism, Babel builders were inevitable. Secularism was the unavoidable result of rationalism, which meant God was persona non grata, unwelcome at the societal table, and eventually unwelcome at the personal one as well. The boomers became the generation living out fully agnostic lives, God only an occasional player if at all. God, however, would not be completely ignored. So, he had to be taken out.
As secularism spread its tentacles throughout the Western world in the 19th century, German biblical scholars declared war on the credibility of the Bible with higher criticism. There are two forms of biblical criticism. Lower is an attempt to find the original wording of the text since we no longer have the original writings, and higher studies of the historic origins, dates, and authorship of the various books of the Bible. Biased German scholars approached the Bible with the anti-supernatural assumptions of the Enlightenment, so were looking for ways to explain away any such references with natural or scientific explanations. Because secularism had not completely engulfed Europe yet, the Germans wanted to keep their non-supernatural Christianity, out of which flowed what came to be called liberal Christianity. Americans were enamored of all things European, especially all things German, and higher criticism made its way to America and blew up the mainline denominations.
The progressive movement of the late 19th century was also in many ways inspired by the Germans. Prussia, a state in northern Germany, was known for their commitment to efficient bureaucracy, and American progressives loved it. It is from the Prussians we get the idea of the rule by “experts.” For progressives, government was instrumental in creating the just society of America’s founding promise. Without government intervention the problems of the modern world would remain insoluble, and anarchy and suffering would reign. The government of America’s founding built for an agrarian society of primarily farmers and ranchers with a relatively small homogeneous population was no match for a modern industrial society. Holding the firm conviction that with science and technology no problem seemed too big to overcome, progressives were determined to apply this mindset to government. “Scientific” management or planning by “experts” would become the rallying cry of the 20th century.
Woodrow Wilson is the founding father of the American administrative state. As an academic, Wilson wrote a paper in 1887 arguing for “the science of administration,” which speaks to the rule by “experts.” This started with Wilson’s administration, and with Roosevelt’s New Deal, government became dominant in American society. But it wasn’t until the presidency of Lyndon Johnson in the 60s, and his Great Society and “War on Poverty,” that the progressive vision was fully realized. The greatest generation fought in World War II and saved the world from tyranny, but they also gave us the dreaded “post war consensus” of the modern liberal welfare state. You can’t blame that on the boomers. It was something they inherited, and they ran with it, liberals and conservatives alike. Government in some way was always their answer. Since the 1980s Con Inc. has been filled with boomer conservatives who I eventually came to see as just liberals in skirts. The conservative movement was adept at losing, going along with progressive gains all the while pretending they were against them. Then Trump, himself a boomer of a very different kind, came along and messed everything up.
Looking back, we can see the Covid disaster was the beginning of the end for the Babel building boomers. The “experts” didn’t come out looking so good, and it so happens people the world over prefer being governed more locally than by an unaccountable globalist elite. We’re just beginning to see what comes after the post World War II “consensus.”
The Boomers and the end of Secular History
The Greatest Generation grew up in the Depression and fought a world war, and as I said, they were determined to give their children a better life; they did, materially. The changes and economic growth in post war America meant boomers were the first generation to live with the illusion they could “have it all,” and it seems many parents didn’t disabuse them of this notion. With the explosion of feminism and the invention of the pill in the early 60s, the sexual revolution was off and running. Unfortunately, the boomers’ parents didn’t prepare them for the radical moral changes, and we got “the 60s.” Francis Schaeffer’s ministry was to these boomer kids whose parents in the 50s had a faith that was a mile wide and an inch deep. In the 1950s Christianity was dominant in America, but lacked substance. Schaeffer published The God Who is There in 1968 as a result of his ministry to these disaffected boomer children. He starts the book with his assessment of the problem:
The present chasm between the generations has been brought about almost entirely by a change in the concept of Truth. . . . Young people from Christian homes are brought up in the old framework of truth. Then they are subjected to the modern framework. In time they become confused because they do not understand the alternatives which they are being presented. Confusion becomes bewilderment, and before long they are overwhelmed.
That pretty much describes an entire generation who turned into relativists—what’s true for you is true for you and not for me. We’ve seen where that leads. Boomer kids saw hypocrisy in their parents and a faith that had no substance, so they rejected the faith of their fathers, and embraced a new faith of self-fulfillment.
Having said all this, I make the point I started with. Boomers are easy to hate, but they are a products of societal forces into which they were born and were in some sense determined by them. I see the boomer generation as the fulcrum generation. They were the final generation in Western history putting the finishing touches on the secular Berlin Wall. Like the physical one in Germany, it appeared impenetrable, but all along was made out of paper mâché. The cracks started appearing a while ago, but Covid revealed just how weak it was as people started pushing on it, and lo and behold, it fell! Younger generations are more conservative than older generations, which has never happened before in the modern world. This is because secularism has proved as hollow as the old East Germany and the Soviet Union that propped it up. As Dylan, not a boomer but of that generation, sang, the times they are achangin’.
If you’ve made it this far listening, I want you to listen to these lyrics by the late great Kevin Gilbert in his song Goodness Gracious from his album Thud. The album was released in 1995, so the boomer lament, as you’ll hear, is nothing new.
Goodness Gracious my generation’s lost
They’ve burned down all our bridges before we had a chance to cross
Is it the winter of our discontent or just an early frost?
Just an early frost
Goodness Gracious of apathy I sing
The baby boomers had it all and wasted everything
Now recess is almost over and they won’t get off the swing
Won’t get off the swing
Goodness Gracious we came in at the end
No sex that isn’t dangerous, no money left to spend
We’re the cleanup crew for parties we were too young to attend
Goodness Gracious me
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