When I bought a book on the culture wars last weekend, I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting. I clearly didn’t think through the very real possibility that many of the battles in this modern-day “noisepool” of “one-note outrage” play out on social media and college campuses.

In other words, two places where I’m not exactly an expert.

I was not an early adapter on social media. I had a wife, two children, a job, a guitar and mandolin sitting in the corner, and other interests to fill my days. But I did finally take the plunge into Facebook and initially found it to be intoxicating in its reach. But that initial enthusiasm lasted less than three years and I told MORE TO COME readers in January of 2013 that I was leaving the platform to get a life.

A modicum of self-awareness helped me make the choice to never go on X/Twitter.* And let’s just say that it has been a very long time since I have spent more than a parents’ weekend in a college or academic setting.

Add in the fact that the GenX author is writing primarily about identity politics and feminism—so a generation where I don’t get the cultural references and yet another topic where I’m not exactly a scholar—and we have the potential of a post based on limited or incorrect knowledge and generational bias.

But that’s never stopped me before!**

The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars (2019 with a new 2022 Foreword) by Meghan Daum could be summarized as a work about “feeling old, spending too much time online, and getting ornery about the politics of young people.” That quick, somewhat snarky characterization from the New Yorker review could be seen as both accurate and yet somehow incomplete. Yes, there are plenty of times when Daum comes across as that person yelling “get off my lawn” at the kids. And there are very good reasons why you may not want to invest the time it takes to read what one commentator compared to a 222-page Twitter rant. There are also more nuanced reviews that capture what this work is trying to do.

It is complicated.

I read the entire book in one setting (seven-hour train rides are good for that type of immersion) and here are a few hot takes for your consumption.

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Three times where I found myself nodding in agreement

• Having conversations in short, online bursts of outrage misses all the nuance that makes life real for those who have lived in a world that isn’t consumed with technology. Life is seldom so neat as one-word hashtags and expletives would have us believe. “We need fewer sensitivity readers and more empathy . . . to deny people their complications and contradictions is to deny them their humanity.”

• There are enough real challenges to life; we don’t need to manufacture problems. “The collective hunger for honest engagement with objective reality is something close to ravenous.”

• We should not dismiss elders simply because they are old or because they frame issues in a way that seems culturally insensitive in today’s world. History is messy, but it also matters.

Three times where I thought Daum went off the rails

• You simply cannot write a book-length work on culture wars—even a work about the hypocrisy of liberals—and wait until page 188 to note that conservatives on the right have a great deal to answer for in the coarsening of our civic life and the creation of manufactured problems that dwarf many of the outrages on the left. “Bashing the right, especially in the age of Trumpism, was easy and boring, the conversational equivalent of banging out ‘Chopsticks’ on the piano,” Daum writes. Well, it may be boring, but the age of misinformation and the weaponization of media has a parent who goes totally AWOL in Daum’s analysis.

• Never write a book that bashes online outrage while admitting that you spend an inordinate time online reading and listening to contrarian conservative voices. Alone.

• Daum’s personal journey (she was going through a divorce and a cross-country relocation) is touted throughout as something of singular importance to her coming to terms with the failings of feminism. To my mind, it simply set the stage for her falling in love with new internet friends who challenged the status quo. That’s not terribly original or insightful.

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Write what you know

A friend suggests Daum “write about feminism, because as a straight, cisgendered, able-bodied (mostly) heteronormative white chick, it’s the only thing available to you anyway.” That’s good advice. I can only respond to this book as a straight, white male Baby Boomer who has spent a lifetime working in the rich stew of our messy, often misunderstood, increasingly weaponized, yet always fascinating history. When she calls up the Freedom Riders of the early Civil Rights movement—dressed in their coats, ties, and Sunday best—as excellent representatives of respectability politics that worked as a strategy, I am on board. However, too often Daum writes as someone who is challenged by change and seems to be certain about the “right way” to approach a problem.

“Trumpism has made us feel that the world is out of control. In turn, we’ve forgotten how to control ourselves,” Daum suggests. I don’t disagree. I want to hear her voice, but I also want to hear those of older and younger activists with backgrounds that aren’t so close to mine.

Those who find outrage over what may be overblown problems, and those who quickly criticize because that approach is different than their generation’s perspective may still need to move further down the path to discover that life is hard because mystery is hard. Age—with all its problems—does help us undertake that move from certainty to mystery.

More to come . . .

DJB

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*For MORE TO COME posts on digital clutter, check out:

• Another look at boundaries (February 9, 2022)
• Digital declutter (April 26, 2021)
• Reflect. Reconsider. Reset. (March 23, 2020)
• The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter. (October 23, 2017)

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**These paragraphs could be shared as an example of why I never went into marketing.

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Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay