The Sour Grapes of the Fathers

“Now, lo, if he beget a son, that seeth all his father's sins which he hath
done, and considereth, and doeth not such like…he shall not die for the
iniquity of his father, he shall surely live.” -Ezekiel 18

As a member of the recent-college-graduate club, I take personal interest in a spate of recently published articles analyzing the dire straights of today’s graduates and forecasting for them a continuation of these trends over several years to come. The catalyst for these articles is the economic recession which, devoid of all courtesy, slogs along well past its time, and the gist of these articles is that the current crop of college graduates faces the most foreboding future of any generation since WWII. The causes for this widespread hesitancy toward the future are numerous: the increasingly unavoidable suspicion that the west really is in decline, the international misadventures of an unreflectively hubristic political class, the resigned acceptance of the fact that globalization might have pernicious side-effects after all, and the inability of the federal bureaucracy to convince the moneyed class that investment in government debt is anything but throwing money into a pit are a few of them.

All of these diagnoses have one noteworthy characteristic in common: they are all beyond the control of the generation in question. This observation made by myself, a 20-something, ought not be read merely as an attempt by excuse my generation from our responsibility. On the contrary, more profound minds than my own have insisted that my generation is too serious and too focused on our careers. Rather, these diagnoses resound with the recognition of an uncomfortable truth virtually anathema in the modern west: the social order is decidedly not as individualistic as we proudly claim. As a consequence, this generation is inheriting a system that we did little to create and reaping the harvest of decisions we did not make. At the center of a culture that exalts individual merit and rejects as outdated notions of family, lineage, and heredity, the ancient maxim is beginning to resonate: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

It is a common mantra for politicians to identify the problems plaguing their administration as “inherited” problems. The problem of Al-Qaeda is inherited; the recession is inherited; the failing War on Terror is inherited. The “inherited” nature of problems is often fingered as a scapegoat for the current administration’s inability to resolve the issues as they—irrespective of party—so patronizingly promised during their campaigns. So is it at all surprising when a series of “inherited” problems eventually becomes too much for posterity to handle? This is exactly the trend observable today. For some time now, politicians have used posterity as leverage to guilt their opponents into submission (“I will not force our children to foot the bill for our wasteful expenditures”). Such vapid assertions are the anthems heralding the rise of another heirloom with which we have been gifted, namely, the most banal and frivolous political class in memory.

As the Baby Boomers and the Therapy Generation temporarily abate their flitting between impassioned allegiance to sitcoms to choose the leaders of the free world based upon the unspeakably asinine criterion of “looking presidential” (has nobody else noted that Sarah Palin’s exorbitant shopping sprees are as much an indictment of the American polity’s vapidity and materialism as it is a revelation of her need to substitute style for substance?), an unexpected reality occurred: “posterity” has come of age. We’re paying attention to our ruling class. And the titanic expenditures that are fritted away by business-suit-bedecked adolescents in elected office make our occasional jaunts to the mall with daddy’s credit card look paltry. We know that only a hallow shadow of the system of social safety nets that we are financing (if we are currently lucky enough to have a job and pay income taxes) will be in place for us when we come calling for it. It is impossible to read about the stunted progress and stalled careers of today’s graduates without realizing that it is a direct result of decisions made when those students were diligently studying the wee hours away in artificially lit libraries under the assumption that their diligence would be rewarded vocationally. We were wrong. Our fathers’ sour grapes are expensive.

Almost as if in support of the thesis that this phenomenon has a much more salient generational explanation than individualist explanation, almost all of the students interviewed for the NYT article hold degrees from prestigious universities, but their current occupations do not reflect their qualifications. These are not slackers, but they are relegated to menial positions that have precious little to do with what they had studied at their Ivy League schools. And all the talk of “fulfilling artistic goals” in lieu of real employment ought not obscure the fact that this phenomenon is symptomatic of a deeper problem. The tacit bargain that has characterized the relationship between generations for decades in America is that if you stay focused and play by the rules for the first few decades of life, you will be generously rewarded with consistent employment and financial prosperity commensurate with the effort exerted to get there. Hard work and wise choices will result in a more prosperous future than that enjoyed by your parents. Such runs the credo of meritocratic individualism. Yet for all the tugging that our bootstraps are enduring, this credo is increasingly dissonant with reality. The fabric of the tacit bargain between generations is beginning to fray. Instead of the meritocratic ethos that we had assumed would be passed down the generations, our inheritance is nothing more than the discarded refuse of a pandemic of midlife crises.

The generation whose last wills and testaments we are now reading was more surreptitiously hostile to notions of family and community than any other in recent memory. The landmark accomplishments of our fathers and forefathers are triumphal arches commemorating the sacrifice of responsibility to the sacred god of individualism; no-fault divorce eviscerated the vigor of romantic commitment, abortion on demand undermined the link to the next generation by making posterity a matter of preference, and the inconvenience of elderly parents was comfortably outsourced to nursing homes while suburbs devoid of backyards and front porches swelled with newly liberated individualists desperate to avoid even the most passing interaction with their neighbors. This is the world bequeathed to us.

And if it is not enough that the rising generation has been poorly equipped socially, a growing body of literature suggests that we are similarly unprepared to make even the most quotidian of moral choices. The Economist magazine, in a review of Lost in Translation: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood by Christian Smith, laments that “[i]n the guise, often, of teaching tolerance, we are failing to ensure that our children understand how to frame moral issues and make judgments about right conduct and what is good in life. The reason for this, Mr. Smith suggests, is that we are not so sure ourselves.” This omission represents a failure in parenting and education, both of which thoughtlessly parrot the mantras of relativism and the self-expression of the individual. These sacred cows of relativism and self-expression were to signify liberation from the strictures of hoary, antiquated moral dogmatism. Instead they represent an institutionalized agnosticism toward what is good and worthwhile in life. David Brooks is right to observe http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/opinion/if-it-feels-right.html?ref=davidbrooks “[The youth] have not been given the resources—by schools, institutions and families—to cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, to check behaviors that may be degrading. In this way, the study says more about adult America than youthful America.” For decades the institutionalization of laissez-faire parenting theories assumed that children were sufficiently capable of choosing the Good for themselves. How unexpected it was, then, when to the question of what is the Good, the virtuous, and the worthwhile, the answer came back univocally: nothing.

Yet lest the unpleasant factuality of our empty inheritance give way to bitterness or despondency, we ought to gain solace and resolve from the cyclicality of history. The parents of the boomers are still known as the Greatest Generation for good reason. Theirs was a generation that saw world wars, the reorganization of the international political landscape, and a Great Depression. All of these events awakened their vigorous virtues, the exercise of which earned that generation the title Greatest. The social and political landscape today more closely mirrors the virtue-arousing disturbances of 1930-1945 than the stultifying ease of 1965-1995. Consequently though not necessarily, to us belongs the somber honor and responsibility of steeling our virtues and challenging the Greatest Generation for their title. Wartime service, though hellish, tragic and arguably unnecessary, has exposed to a tranche of our generation the triviality of the west compared with the harsh exigencies of life in the developing world, and impressed upon them the importance of dignity and honor—both foreign, antiquated concepts to many Americans. For the rest of us, recession and austerity will highlight the importance of frugality and the insufficiency of materialism. The erosion of other social safety nets will highlight the importance of the family and local community as agents of informed and altruistic care.

Though on the whole our parents have failed to give us the moral categories required to fulfill the vision described above, I have little doubt that our generation is capable of supplying our deficiencies, albeit over time, through great difficulty, and with abundant error. Yet even if we can muster these virtues, our work will still not be done. It was the delinquency of the WWII generation that spawned the most self-centered generation of progeny in American history. We cannot repeat their mistake. After we have made Virtue our guide and Wisdom out counselor, we must introduce them to our children in order not to repeat the errors of the Greatest Generation. All of these things will be costly. But the purchase of another stock of sour grapes for ourselves and our posterity would be costlier still.