Those Were the Days

 

 

“I have to admit it’s getting better

A little better all the time.”

 

That chorus to the song “Getting Better” by The Beatles is one that most of us can probably relate to, if we consider how the circumstances of our lives have changed, at least in general.  The standard of living has risen, and the poverty rate has fallen.  People are eating more (admittedly many are eating too much) and traveling more.  The at-home entertainments available to us have improved dramatically, with wide screen television sets and improved sound systems.  We have the internet, and smart phones, and any information that is needed, regarding just about anything, is just an arm’s length away.  We don’t even have to have maps in our cars anymore or – Heaven forbid! – ask anyone for directions.  And we no longer have to endure the regular experience of waiting in line, at the bank, or to buy tickets for sporting and entertainment events.  Shopping for and buying things is infinitely more convenient.  A person can shop for just about anything on Amazon.com, no matter how uncommon it is, and instantly find several brands to choose from, and then of course can have it delivered right to their house in a matter of days.  I still remember a time when even shopping for relatively common items might require me to drive to several stores, at each of which I would have to wander among the aisles, hoping that I would find what I’m looking for.  Our society is now more tolerant of alternative lifestyles, and one where racism and bigotry, if not eradicated, at least is less blatant and ubiquitous.

The world, in general, really is a much better place to live.  And yet, there are other ways in which things have seemed to have gone into decline.  In a city not far from my hometown, there was a restaurant, situated across the street from the shore of Lake Michigan, which had what was, in the opinion of myself, my family, and friends, the best pizza of any we had ever tasted.  We had discovered this place when I was in my teens, and although in the decades that followed I lived and traveled all over the country, I never tasted a pizza as good as those that were served in that restaurant.  Whenever I would visit home, I would have to go to that restaurant at least once (with one or more of my relatives happily in tow) for a pizza – it was almost like a religious pilgrimage.  Of course none of us expected this to last forever.  We knew that the restaurant could close at any time, and when the original owner died, we were afraid it was the signal event that would begin the restaurant’s decline.  But his widow and his children continued to maintain the high standards of the restaurant, and our fears were alleviated.  There was the occasional time when the pizza was substandard, but whenever this occurred we were very forgiving since, after all, perfection is a hard thing for ordinary human beings to maintain consistently.  Such occurrences were the exception rather than the rule.  So it was with great sadness when I realized, last year, that something had finally changed about that place.  I had encountered the “exception” – the substandard pizza – for three consecutive visits.  The restaurant had finally lost its mojo, and that pizza that I had always treasured and enjoyed as the best I had ever had – anywhere – was gone. 

It's not hard to figure out what happened.  After decades of sitting on their laurels, the owners got complacent, and became less rigorous in maintaining the standards of quality that had been the hallmark of the restaurant.  Maybe there was a lapse in training or oversight, and maybe some cost-cutting in the ingredients used.  The kitchen might have fallen into disrepair, and cleanliness standards relaxed.  Such things are not uncommon for places that began with great reputations, only to eventually sink into a shadow of their former greatness.  And this was not the only time I’ve seen a formerly great establishment fall into decline.  I remember visiting a famous steakhouse in Chicago for the first time, and being overwhelmed: I couldn’t believe that one could experience so much ecstasy just in eating a dinner.  But when I returned to it years later, I sadly discovered that it was just a shadow of what it had been during my earlier visits.  It is stories like these that have contributed to the popularity of television programs like Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares, Hotel Hell, and Secret Service, and Jon Taffer’s Bar Rescue.  Of course, it’s always possible for a business that has fallen into decline to have a renaissance, if the owner sees or is shown the error of his or her ways, and that is the underlying promise of those television programs.  But I have never personally seen it happen, and I was shocked one day, when checking the internet to follow up on what happened to those restaurants and bars that were “rescued”, to find that the vast majority of them eventually closed, sometimes before the programs featuring them had even aired.

There are other things that seemed to have fallen into a permanent decline, although the change has been more subtle, and often happened over a longer period of time.  I used to love Kentucky Fried Chicken, and it was always a special treat to go there, but I’ve recently noticed during visits to various restaurants in the chain that the quality of chicken has conspicuously declined: it seems drier and less flavorful than what it used to be.  I might have attributed this to aging tastebuds or a trick of the memory, had I not seen on the internet that other people feel the same way.  As a teenager I worked at McDonald’s, and remember how the milkshakes used to be made one at a time with tall metal cups and a blender, until the process was replaced with a milkshake machine.  The French fries, too, had once been made with a more elaborate process, which involved pre-frying (“blanching”) the fries, and then completing the frying process shortly before they were sold.  Both the milk shakes and the French fries were much more delicious when they were prepared in these earlier ways, but the process changes were made so many years ago that many customers today don’t remember the difference, and since the change in taste was not drastic enough to drive customers away at the time (or at least not enough customers so that the loss in sales more than offset the process cost savings), the changes were retained.  And I must admit that, unlike my experience with Kentucky Fried Chicken, which I may never visit again, I still enjoy McDonald’s.

Even in the supermarket, I’ve noticed a decline.  There is still an abundance and wide variety of basic groceries, and this was even true during the Covid epidemic.  There were shortages of certain things at the time, like toilet paper and eggs, and while this was partly due to supply chain issues, much of it was simply the result of panic buying.  Things returned to normal soon after the epidemic (and the associated panic) had subsided.  But in the midst of all of this abundance, I have noticed a marked decline in quality in certain products.  Here, too, the fried chicken TV dinners are not at all like they used to be: they tend to be dry in texture, and less tasteful.  And ironically, there seems to be much less variety in TV dinners than there used to be: most of them now seem to be chicken, prepared under different guises.  In the 1980s, Coca Cola changed its formula, dubbing it “New Coke” and the angry consumer backlash forced it to revert to its original formula, which it called “Coke Classic”.  I strongly suspect that the Coke we are drinking today is still different from its original, “classic” formula, because it just doesn’t seem as delicious as it once was.  For years, I was a devoted drinker of Folgers coffee, and used to particularly love the aroma of a freshly-opened can of Folgers.  But only recently I realized that the aroma is gone: when I opened a new can, all that I encountered was a vague, chemical sort of smell, and the formerly great taste of the coffee is gone, too.  (Fortunately, in this case I have managed to find other brands to take its place.)  Again, these may simply be personal perceptions, due to idealized memories and/or aging tastebuds, but I strongly suspect that these are other examples of gradual declines that were so subtle, they went unnoticed by consumers.  And not only are many foods less tastier, many have also become more dangerous: Nutritionists and other medical professionals have begun to raise the alarm about “ultraprocessed foods”: which are industrial-manufactured foods with chemicals and other additives that would not ordinarily be found in them if they were prepared the old-fashioned way.  These foods present significant health risks, and they are ubiquitous in the supermarket, and hard to avoid.

And don’t even get me started about American cars.  There were some magnificent models in the 1960s and earlier, but during the energy crisis of the 1970s and amid rising concerns about consumer safety, American car manufacturers just seemed incapable of producing decent cars that were safer and more fuel efficient.  After enduring horrible experiences with a string of unreliable American cars beginning in the late 1970s all the way through the beginning of this millennium, I gave up on them completely, and for the past twenty years I have only owned Japanese-made cars.

Ford Pinto

These are just some of the more tangible examples of things that don’t seem to be as good as they once were (and I’m sure that the reader can come up with many interesting examples of their own).  The product declines usually came about because of a series of small sacrifices or shortcuts that were made to save time or money, causing noticeable declines in quality, and in the most extreme cases, epic fails.  But I’ve increasingly heard it claimed that there is something about ourselves, too, that has gone into a sort of decline: we’ve become less sociable, and have less well-rounded personalities.  Recently, for example, I encountered a remark that the bar scene has become rather pathetic, with people just sitting at stools, staring into their smart phones.  I wonder, though, how much that particular scene has really changed.  I think that the image portrayed in the television series Cheers, of many patrons happily engaged in banter around the bar, was always something of a myth.  I even wrote an editorial about it around 1990, when I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa (and when Cheers was still on the air).  In the editorial, I began with an imaginary exchange between two students in which one of them described to the other what a great time he had just had in a bar that he had visited, breaking the ice with strangers and even finding a potential romantic prospect.  But after finishing this colorful tale, he reported what actually happened: After an unfriendly encounter with the bartender who served him, he simply stared at his glass, in silence.  He explained to this friend that that’s all he could really do, since, “Nobody else who was sitting at the bar was talking to anybody – they were all staring off into space with sad looks on their faces."  The editorial reflected how I was finding the actual bar scene on campus at the time.  But it was even worse than that.  I don’t know if it was because these were college bars, or because of the general social climate in Iowa City, but when any social interactions did occur, they were at least as likely to be negative ones as positive ones.  The campus newspaper never did publish my editorial, and while my bar experiences at other times and places in my life have been less toxic, that general experience of seeing many people just sitting at them silently has been universal.  I strongly suspect that this is why bars started putting up overhead televisions, so that their patrons could at least pretend that they were doing more than just staring into their drink glasses.  And of course now they have their phones to stare at, as they read – or pretend to read – messages and any news of interest.  The bar phenomenon reminds me of a short story by Ernest Hemingway that I had once read in college, called “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”.  It is about an old man who visits a crowded Spanish café every night, and sits there, alone.  He does it just so that he can have the experience of being among many people, even if he isn’t actually interacting with them.

So when people claim that we have become more crippled, socially, than at some time in the past, I have at least some reservations about agreeing with them.  I found myself disagreeing strongly with the author of a book that came out last year titled The Extinction of Experience, in which she contends that the mediated experiences that we have – through reading, television, and the internet – are muted to the point that we are no longer capable of relating to life and to each other in any meaningful way.  Her extended lamentation often descends into absurdity, as when she talks nostalgically about an earlier time, when we had to wait for things, rather than have everything available to us instantly, with little effort.  I suspect that anyone who ever lived in the Soviet Union, where it was not uncommon to wait in long lines to purchase things like shoes, would not share her nostalgia, and my own memories of having to wait in lines, like at the bank before ATMs were invented, was that they were universally soul-killing experiences.  She also mourns the fact that the advances of civilization have made so many experiences less risky than they used to be, because it was the risks, she argues, that had given these experiences (mountain climbing, for example) much of their raw intensity.  But taking that logic to its extreme, it could be argued that in order to feel the full exhilarating intensity of living with an animal, one should pick a dangerous one, like a pit bull, a poisonous snake, or a lion, rather than some boring, conventional pet, like a poodle or a cat.  And to get the full experience of living in a big city, one should walk in the middle of the busy streets rather than on the sidewalks, and wander around in high-risk areas after dark.  What the author completely fails to understand, in my opinion, is that the advance of human civilization, which began with the ability to speak, followed by, in turn, the invention of writing, the printing press, radio, television, and the internet, has enabled us to broaden our experiences by more fully sharing the knowledge, the memories, and even the fantasies of our fellow human beings.  Yes, each advance has brought heightened risks of exposure to misinformation and the temptation to indulge in profligate diversions, but our individual lives have been much enriched, because what they are enable to encounter has been vastly expanded.  The author argues that our younger generations have been particularly hard hit, having been exposed to smart phones and other electronic diversions at a very early age, which has crippled their social lives, and even their ability to socialize at all.  They are even losing the ability to do cursive writing, and sign their own names.  My own encounters with youth – particularly the students in my college classrooms where I teach – contradict this.  They seem just as gregarious and curious as students were in my own college days, and, I would add, much better behaved.  And while it might be concerning that they are losing certain abilities that members of my generation had, like doing cursive writing, there are many things that my own generation can’t do that our ancestors, living in simpler times, had to know how to do, in order to survive.  It is often said that one of the great milestones in the advance of human civilization is the invention of fire.  But I must confess that if I didn’t have a lighter or a book of matches, and got lost out in the bitter cold wilderness, I would almost certainly die of exposure before I could figure out how to start a fire.  While civilization, collectively, is able to do infinitely more things to make our lives comfortable, we, in turn, have developed individual specialized skills to support it (and ourselves), while continually shedding some of those general skills that made our survival as a species, and its eventual advancement, possible.  But I would still contend that any person today has had so much exposure to many different ideas, diversions, and events that they would be much, much more interesting to talk to than one of our ancestors who lived before the onset of civilization and its discontents.

There was an interesting editorial that came out in the New York Times last month that suggested it is men in particular who have become social casualties of the modern age.  Titled “Men, Where Have You Gone?  Please Come Back,” the author, Rachel Drucker, began it with an account of how she and a friend were visiting a restaurant and she noticed the near complete absence of men.  In trying to make sense of this experience, she recollected her days of working for a men’s magazine years earlier, and learning what drew them in and kept their readership.  “It wasn’t intimacy,” she explained.  “It wasn’t mutuality.  It was access to stimulation – clean, fast, and frictionless.”  She continued:

In that world, there’s no need for conversation. No effort. No curiosity. No reciprocity. No one’s feelings to consider, no vulnerability to navigate. Just a closed loop of consumption.

What struck me most wasn’t the extremity of the content; it was the emotional vacancy behind it. The drift. The way many men had quietly withdrawn from intimacy and vulnerability. Not with violence or resistance, but with indifference.

They weren’t sitting across from someone on a Saturday night, trying to connect. They were scrolling. Dabbling. Disappearing behind firewalls, filters and curated personas. And while they disappeared, women continued to gather. To tend. To notice who wasn’t arriving — and to show up anyway.

And she finally concludes, sadly:

You’ve retreated — not into malice, but into something softer and harder all at once: Avoidance. Exhaustion. Disrepair.

Her lamentation about the state of modern manhood is actually one of the more milder ones that I have seen.  Other writers have contended that men – particularly younger men, like those in “Gen Z” – have descended into a complete state of bitter misogyny. 

Have the latest innovations of civilization turned men into social cripples, and if so, how and why did this happen?  Again, I have to counsel caution against looking at the past in rose-colored glasses.  I think that there has always been a difference in the way that men and women form social networks.  Men tend to have one or a very few really close friends, with a wider network of fellows who fall into that gray zone between “friend” and “acquaintance”, and a very wide network beyond that of mainly pragmatic contacts.  This last one is really what led to the verb “networking”, which in its original form meant exchanging business cards at conference receptions and other social functions.  This kind of social bonding has, in recent years, been upended by internet services such as LinkedIn, and female professionals have become just as heavily involved in them as males, perhaps even more so.  Feminists in earlier times had decried the existence of “male bonding”, which they contended was what allowed men to maintain their social dominance, but to the extent that it existed at all, it wasn’t due to the capacity of men to form a broad network of close friendships.  Men can certainly be “tribal” in the workplace, forming cliques and alliances for mutual advancement, and I’ve seen examples of that in every corporation that I’ve ever worked for, and even see “tribalism” in the university where I am now employed.  But I’ve seen multiple examples of female tribalism during my career as well, and often these have a distinctly feminist cast.

I do remember, as a child growing up in the 1960s, that extended family gatherings seemed much different than they do to me now.  Back then, while we kids played throughout the house or in the yard, the women would tend to congregate together – usually around the kitchen table – and engage in friendly conversation while their husbands would hold court in the living room, talking loudly, making jokes and laughing heartily.  But at the family gatherings I’ve been to lately, while children still play, the women are now the dominant presence – orchestrating conversations and admittedly doing most of the work in preparing dinner and refreshments – while the men sit scattered throughout the house, generally in uncomfortable silence, and maybe occasionally trying to strike up an awkward conversation with one of the other men.  They almost behave like children themselves, as they only seem comfortable when they are in the close company of their wives or girlfriends.  Gone too – or at least greatly diminished – are the social gatherings of men in various associations: the Kiwanis and Lions Clubs, the Knights of Columbus, and the bowling leagues. 

Why the change?  The 1960s was probably – at least in America – the last decade of the truly patriarchal family, when men were the “breadwinners” and women, if they worked outside of the home at all, did so only to bring in some extra income.  The mass migration of women into the workforce happened in the decades that followed, and the family with a husband/father as the sole or primary breadwinner slowly faded away.  I remarked in a previous blog entry (“Oz the Great and Powerful” https://johnsemeraldtablet.blogspot.com/2018/09/oz-great-and-powerful.html) that men seem to have a primal need to feel “necessary”: to feel that they have a unique and vital role in the family, and society in general.  I suspected that this is a relic of prehistoric times, when males observed that not only did females do the most important thing of making other human beings, but also, at least in many primitive societies, they did much if not most of the work of sustaining the families as well.  Patriarchy, by giving men a more prominent role in the drama of human civilization, was a compensatory mechanism, which often brought out the best in many of them, but also admittedly could bring out the worst in them as well.  In either case, it could be a suffocating institution for women.  The end of patriarchy seemed to leave many men feeling unmoored, and unmotivated.  It seems to have left many with an impaired ability to positively interact not just with women, but with each other.  The poet Robert Bly, in his book Iron John: A Book About Men (1990) argued that the decline of traditional male roles, including the role of the father, had actually resulted in a sort of arrested development, in which boys no longer fully matured, and were less prepared to assume responsible positions in society.  He famously tried to orchestrate “gatherings of men” which were tribal in orientation, and meant to resurrect positive rituals and practices that would remedy this social malaise.  While well-intentioned, these activities look rather silly in retrospect.  But Bly did call attention, and tried to analyze and fully describe, what seemed to be a disturbing social phenomenon.  And in the years since the publication of his book, there has been a steady stream of books and articles about the “boy crisis”, with the most recent describing a growing rift between males and females, as evidenced by an increasing divergence in their political views (males toward ultraconservatism, females toward liberalism), and even outright mutual hostility.  The suggestion is that the decline of patriarchy has merely substituted one toxic form of relationship between the sexes with another.

Robert Bly

But I am tempted to treat this growing alarmism with at least some skepticism.  All of my male friends and acquaintances are either married or in relationships, and if they’re suffering from some sort of identity crisis, they are doing a very good job of masking it, since they all appear happy and content with the roles and circumstances of their lives.  And so I wonder: is this all a tempest in a teapot?  Is this just another example of an overreaction to the observation of certain unpleasant side effects accompanying modernization, as seemed to be the case in that book The Extinction of Experience: a tendency to resort too quickly to alarmism?  After all, if human beings – both male and female – have demonstrated one thing over the course of our long history, it’s that they have an unlimited capacity to adapt to and even thrive in different environments, including social ones.  But I have to remind myself that all of my male friends are in their thirties or older, and all are living middle-class lives: either working at interesting and well-compensated jobs, or comfortably retired.  The social malaise that has been called “the boy crisis” seems to be endemic among the younger generations, and those living in working class or impoverished households.  A version of it has plagued the black underclass for generations, in the form of fatherless households, with angry young men prone to violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and misogyny, supporting themselves, if at all, in an underground economy.  White liberals have traditionally attributed their plight to racism and related socioeconomic factors, but many whites – in their quiet, private moments at least, if not openly – have attributed it to a more fundamental cause: racial differences, concluding that it’s just the way that blacks are.  But then, in recent decades, the exact same phenomenon began to appear among white working class males, as the blue collar jobs that had supported their fathers went away.  This growing crisis was graphically portrayed in J.D. Vance’s autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy.  And it is a crisis that couldn’t be as easily contained the way that the black crisis was: through quarantine – by social segregation into ghettos, or at least into separate neighborhoods.  This new underclass, after all, had once been part of the mainstream, living in large factory towns, which couldn’t just be shuffled out of sight and ignored by those who were not part of it.  And as artificial intelligence continues to make inroads into replacing jobs that had once sustained the middle and upper classes, their members, too, will begin to experience the toxic effects of displacement.  (Sadly, J.D. Vance, who was so insightful of the problems that plagued his community, has foolishly endorsed Trumpism as a means of their solution.)

Civilization continues to advance at an accelerating rate, and the negative consequences of this have been written about for decades.  In “Apocalypse Then” (https://johnsemeraldtablet.blogspot.com/2013/04/apocalypse-then.html), I wrote about the philosopher Rick Roderick, who lectured on the perils of “post-modernism”.  One if his best-known recorded lecture series was titled “The Self Under Siege” and was given back in 1993, more than thirty years ago.  The “boy crisis”, too, has been written about for decades.  While the decline of patriarchy seems to have left many men unmoored and unmotivated, their further marginalization as more and more traditional jobs have become casualties of modernity has only exacerbated their estrangement from society, and their increasingly bitter and hostile attitude toward women in particular, and the world in general.  But young men and young women both seem to be more conspicuously suffering from the social isolation arising from a world increasingly dominated by smart phones and other electronic media, as evidenced by increasing suicide rates, among other things.  It seems that we may finally be reaching a tipping point, where the accumulation of small sacrifices that we’ve made in order to reap the immense benefits of a more advanced civilization have finally reached a genuinely crippling level.  The solution to this problem is not to return to the “good old days” of patriarchy, or to somehow reverse the course of modernization (if such a thing is even possible).  Something more profound will be required: something that will probably test the limits of our once seemingly unlimited capabilities to adapt to a changing environment.  What that something is, however, has yet to be discovered.