Back to the Future...ish

Teenagers always rebel, at least that is what I have always been told. There is an entire genre of films where young hormone-filled teenagers upend the outmoded standards of society. Entire genres of music with lyrics celebrating the revolutionary spirit of youthful indiscretion. It is presented as a fact of life, a rule that the young will be a force of progress moving the wheels of society perpetually toward a brighter day. This has largely been true for at least the past eighty years. I am sure some reading this will point back to the French revolution, others to the Enlightenment, and still others to the Reformation, but for this article, I am only looking back to the cultural revolution of the 1960s and onward. Because since then the ever-changing cultural standards and the repudiation of the previous generation as been a given. It has been expected, almost required.

What happens when it’s not? What happens when to be revolutionary is to be reactionary. When traditional modes of being are considered novel? When you are not only more traditional than your parents but grandparents?

They don’t make movies or songs about that. Kevin Bacon just wanted to dance and destroy traditional small-town religious standards. The Beastie Boys fought for your right to party, smoke, and look at porn. The Breakfast Club said to hell with class divides. Cindy Lauper said girls just want to have fun and access abortion. The theme of the destruction of social, cultural, political, and religious standards is so commonplace that it goes unnoticed by the public at large.

So many young people today find that when they look at the world and see the moral decay that plagues modern society, they seek a way to renounce modern social norms. In a time when traditional hierarchical structures were intact, these young men and women would look to their parents for guidance. They may look to grandparents or other extended family members from a previous generation. Expecting to find sage advice that would teach them how to handle the present using the wisdom of the past.

Today they won’t find that. If a young woman goes to her mother and articulates her desire to be a mother, to stay at home, to have more than two children. Likely she will be met with scorn. Anger from the Gen-X or Boomer mother will flow in a diatribe lamenting the patriarchy, and motherhood. She will then be subject to a lecture on how women of the past were victims of a male-dominated society, how birth control liberated women and freed them to whore around, and how the blessing of abortion was there to free them of the consequences of their actions.

Likewise, if a young man goes to his father (if he has one) and explains how he finds video games, televised sports, or pornography to be vapid and soulless activities he will be laughed at. He will be told he is a loser, how un-American it is to not sit and watch football all weekend while he shovels artery-clogging garbage into his mouth. How it is actually gay for him to not watch porn; that it is only natural and no it’s not cheating on mom to watch it despite what Christ says in Matthew 5:28.

Maybe they will go to their local religious leader and ask for guidance. That seems safe. Assuming they can walk into Church and not find the lesbian pastor with a black lives matter logo on her bible, then they are off to a good start. It is highly likely that even without the outward displays of modern cultural fads the religious leader will tell them that all those silly rules about, sodomy, divorce, or mill stones are outdated. This is a new church where all that matters is a vague tolerance of others unless they are to the right of Obama, to have standards makes them mega-evil-robo-Hitler.

Grandparents may provide guidance toward traditional ideas, but rest assured decades of being brow-beaten by their new deal regime counterparts have taught them to be quiet. So they may find some help there but it will likely be limp-wristed.

So where does a young person with machinations for the return of traditionalism go? Well, the rise of online communities that attempt to rekindle these ideas has become the go-to for young people. Trad girls and raw egg merchants have risen in popularity. These spaces may seem ridiculous at times but keep in mind these young people can only conceptualize a traditional world from outside sources that are a simulacra of tradition. So they often romanticize elements of the past without considering the challenges they bring. Because for them a world rooted in traditionalism is a fantasy world. It has never existed in living memory. As far back as they look they see the seeds of liberal egalitarianism pushing society to where we are today. To be sure this can all be at times a cartoonish caricature of traditionalism it is a positive development overall. It helps people connect, to find solace in like-minded people.

For many young people today the abandonment of the secular religion of the post-WWII generation that is to say feminism, the sexual revolution, gay marriage, civil rights legislation, factory farming, globalism, public schooling, atheism, etc. is a necessity. Without older generations to turn to, they find they are adrift in a sea of others all floating without a compass. Time will tell but I believe this the creation of neo-traditionalism may be one of the great challenges for us going forward. If your GPS doesn’t work it’s time to learn to read a map, but first your going to need to find a map.

You must look to the past for guidance but you cannot go backward. You must take the ideas, concepts, and truths of a bygone era and repurpose them for the modern day. Start your own traditions, plant trees under whose shade you will never sit.

-TJ Slaughter