Boomers

A meme-ing came across the sky. First it happened on social media used by young people. Then, it was explained to us by a New York Times article, which recaps things that happen on social media to people who try to avoid social media like the plague, but can't. Then, it was taken up by social media used by old people. Then everyone got tired of it. Then everyone got tired of the jokes about how tired we were of it. All in the course of a week. It was the "OK, Boomer" phenomenon.

Was this phrase ever actually used by young people? I have no independent verification. What did it supposedly mean? That old people's critiques of young people could be dismissed with a hand-wave and eye-roll, seeing as old people are the ones who got us into this mess to start with. Is it, therefore, an "insolent slogan" (as the Washington Post recently dubbed it - with affection)?

If it is insolent, it is insolent in the sense employed by a deliciously quotable line from Conrad's Lord Jim, read by me in the midst of the world's week-long "OK, Boomer" obsession, and therefore at a time when I was uniquely primed to receive its wisdom. Says Conrad: "Youth is insolent; it is its right—its necessity; it has got to assert itself, and all assertion in this world of doubts is a defiance, is an insolence."

The passage is particularly apt as well, seeing that "doubt" is precisely what Barack Obama was urging us to keep in mind, in the midst of this same news cycle, in the rebuke he delivered to youthful moral certainties and left-wing righteousness. "The world is messy; there are ambiguities," said Obama.“People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you."

Obama was swiftly denounced as a Boomer. By a member of Generation Z, who have supposedly launched this whole phenomenon? No, by some grown-up in the New York Times op-ed page.

Whoever is actually using the "OK, Boomer," phrase, however, they plainly are trying to assert absolutes in a world that - as Obama pointed out - is full of doubt and moral grey areas. That seems true enough. And is it wrong of them to do so?

It seems to me that "doubt" is an approach to life very few of us can apply absolutely. Like any form of philosophic Pyrrhonism, it begins to twist itself into riddles and self-contradictions if applied to everything - including its own presuppositions.

I, to be sure, do resonate with Obama's view of the matter. I think we need to find ways to respect and work alongside people who disagree profoundly with us, if we are going to vote Trump's quasi-fascism out of office and begin to restitch this nation's fabric. I think we need to abandon some of our absolutes in order to do so.

Ah - which ones though? Well, the ones that matter to other people but not to me. Those can be jettisoned.

What if we started proposing to axe some of my own most dearly-held principles and policy positions, though? Suppose someone approached me suggesting we trade the integrity of the asylum system for a comprehensive immigration reform bill; or that we should allow the CIA to launch more drone strikes, in exchange for fewer overseas wars (Obama in office, we know, tended toward both of these compromises).

I'd say, no, of course not, those are matters of fundamental human rights. Other things we can compromise on, but not those. But then, I start to think about everything else I believe in - the whole progressive agenda, in short. Wait a minute - is any of it not about things I regard as fundamental human rights, about which we cannot compromise.

And slowly it becomes clear: what I mean in saying that we should work together with Republicans, is that we should work together with people who are registered in the Republican party but who happen in fact to believe in and support all the same policy positions that progressives do.

It seems I do believe in moral absolutes after all.

Is it Obama who is wrong then? Surely not. Doubt, compromise, and ambiguity have a place in the moral life, just as absolutes do. And absolutes can be used to justify both good and terrible ideas, just as doubt can. As Hazlitt once pointed out in his critique of Edmund Burke, it is very hard to find a theoretical posture that never applies or has wisdom in the real world, in any instance. The question always comes down to whether it applies in this case, to the matter at hand.

Obama has a point. And the people saying "Ok, Boomer" also have a point. And perhaps it is Conrad who has said it best, and hit the nail most squarely: the world is full of doubt, and the phrase is therefore insolent- yet it has a right to be so.