TYRANNY OF YOUTHISM

It is regarded as a compliment to tell an older person how young they are.  This is to imply that to be young is better.  We have come to hold youthfulness in the same regard as we once held age - with reverence.  We serve youth.  We pursue youthful pursuits into old age.  We try to look young.  We get into the music of youth, into youthful dancing, into youthful slang and manners.  We look forward to staying young.  There is no equating age with wisdom, not that wisdom is high on our list of civilized values.  And with the emergence of those residential playgrounds for well-heeled seniors, elders would seem to have little reason to seek it.  

Of course, the great purveyor of, and generator for more, youthfulness is Television.  It decides for you what to look at, what is worth looking at.  Flashing a thing over and over again on television, subliminal or not, has the same effect as hypnotic suggestion.  What is popular is what is repeatedly broadcast to become popular.  The terrifying assault of pop music culture is virtually unavoidable. 

This is not the result of a free market.  It results from an overwhelming domination of world markets by a few huge conglomerates able to control the information network of media, and with virtual - soon to be total - control of distribution worldwide.  Though, with the  advent of the Internet, that might not be so easy to do.  

When I was a record producer on a small scale in the late 70s and early 80s, I and countless other small label producers were blocked out of the market by one of the largest record producers, CBS, on the heels of a warning given by a vice president of Warner Bros.  In a publicized speech given at a meeting of the then (1981) "Big Seven” of the recording industry, he told the assembled executives that independent record producers were cutting into the market, and unless this could be successfully challenged it would seriously affect profit for the Big Seven. 

In the Eastern regions of the United States, where the biggest inroads were being made by the Indies, CBS, by way of its marketing managers, threatened to deny its products to any retail outlet that also stocked independently produced product.  That is, CBS would refuse to provide retailers with the biggest selling items.  What small retailer could stand up against that, or any small, independent label stand the cost of taking CBS to court for an obvious violation of law concerning Restraint of Trade?  By the way, in the speech by that WB veep, jazz was specifically pointed to as making the largest rise, relative to its size, on the graph. 

Messages media and their corporate sponsors send are nearly irresistible to the vast majority of the citizenry.  Youth and the things of youth; the music, the dress, the posturing, the trends.  The only “good” old people are those who act young or are perceived as benefactors of the young - giving what the young want, not necessarily what they need.  Unfortunate of Americans in general, is that a thing not featured in primetime media is not worth their seeking out. 

Besides beaming a fairly limited view of entertainment, it teaches by example - that one gets satisfaction through action, though one sits and watches others act.  It dispenses with the contemplative - which used to come with age; and that resulting from the contemplative - wisdom.  It replaces contemplation, study, reading, conversing, reaching out and being reached socially.  It also says, “Do something for the self - be somebody.”  It stirs up dissatisfaction and engenders passion for instant attainability.  And if one did not see the flashing set itself before them, viewers might seem to be engaged in a form of Eastern meditation. 

In an extensive magazine article, how he perceives the coming world anarchy, Robert D. Kaplan writes that 

“America operates in a culture in which the international media and entertainment industry has more influence than the national political class.”¹¹⁷ 

Diversion becomes reality.  At the movie house they - the objects of our adoration - were obviously mythical and larger than life.  One had to leave home to be with them.  There was time to grow, in between those visits to the giant screen.  But now, leaving us little time apart from them, they come constantly into us at home, in tiny screens, miniaturized to be like us, but infinitely more significant.  Anybody who is anybody is projected through the air.  Every moment with them is significant.  “Hush,” we say to one another in our homes, and we wait on them.  We do not have to close our eyes to dream.  We sit and look at them, away from one another.  We invite them in, and cease talking to one another.  They are “nice” strangers who relieve us of our children, and offer things to us.  We speak of them to one another, and tell how much they mean to us.  Television has become our world and our parent.  At a barber shop I went to on occasion, I walked in one day to see three men virtually transfixed by what was on television, some information about a new product.  Careful not to interrupt, I waited a bit,  But, finally, I asked what they were watching.  “O, nothing,” said one of them as he snapped out of it, and suddenly they all “detached” from the set, and the barber got ready to serve me.  The "Prince of the power of the air" has been aptly named. 

This insidiousness begins in childhood when we set our children down before the set.  It is the altar of desire. 

“Yield in childhood to selfishness, and you will find it the most enchaining tyranny on earth.  There is no power in the human soul of itself to break the bondage of a disposition formed by yielding.  Yield for one second to anything in the nature of lust (remember what lust is: ‘I must have it at once,’ whether it be the lust of the flesh or the lust of the mind) - once yield and though you may hate yourself for having yielded, you are a bondslave to that thing.”¹¹⁸ 

And we yield our children to what we know not, what is provided for the childish mind by very clever forces.  We are not then the molders of their childhood.  What we might “say” to them cannot stand against what they have taken in, completely absorbed, with their eyes and ears - what they think they have experienced.  They know.  Science, even law, will say it is so - they have “seen.”  And we cannot resist it ourselves.  So, who are we to say?  The eye is a tyrant. 

It is television that draws immigrants from around the world to storm our shores illegally, and which sparked fatally unnecessary, premature unrest among rural blacks in the south in the 1950s.  Pictures of the good life denied to them, the material goal of a “Promised Land.”  And it continues to spark this same unrest among all the poor and disenfranchised, able to see what they cannot have; and even among the haves - they will never have enough. 

And popularity: let us not forget the comment that raised a storm of protest around the Christian globe when one Beatle said how the rock group Beatles was more popular in the world than Jesus.  Thus, from those images shown of communities burning Beatle records in bonfires (our own version of Kristalnacht), we see how some American Christians regard popularity and just how precious to them the notion of being popular is.  Popularity and democracy get to be synonymous.  Popularity is highest on the list of youthful values.  We see churches intimidated and toppling to get with the program or - gasp - risk becoming unpopular.  And let us not forget rocker Huey Lewis of The News, who said, in praise of the process:

“My generation learned how to court and to dress from the radio.”¹¹⁹ 

What were mom and dad doing?  The rock group Rolling Stones went on an American tour, scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles.  Television News programs in L.A. began featuring reports and pictures announcing their impending arrival.  News teams chattered excitedly to one another like fame groupies, in anticipation of the group’s arrival.  One reporter noted that the performers in the group were all in their fifties.  But, no one commented on fifty-year-old men cavorting like adolescents on stage.  After all, it is their culture, the news teams’ culture, fellow Boomers.  By force of the medium and legitimizing the event as “news,” teenhood throughout life is bolstered. 

So totally is the maturing generation submersed in this adolescent culture that no one born and raised in it seems able to think to offer any critical evaluation of the big picture.  Perhaps from a fear of appearing to be not with-it.  But, most likely because no one in any position to do so has ever known anything else. 

What other elements of music culture have ever been presented to them to the degree that the kid stuff has?  Despite alternatives apparent to those choosing to look, it is virtually a self-enclosed sphere that allows nothing else within it to be compared.  They may go on to college and later get jobs, but high school stays inside them.  America created the teen.  Television news reporters excitedly chatter live with each other about this rock star’s birthday, or that rock star’s impending arrival in town, or some other matter related to a pop star.  It is a culture - that is, its latest permutation to emerge - that is continuously closed to adults and adultness, and never gives childish attachment reason to grow up but to remain throughout a lifetime drawn to the things of childhood. 

Someone has noted that any emerging music in America, for it to survive, must appeal to the thirteen-year-old girl.  Not long ago, seventh-graders, two eleven-year-old boys, earned several millions of dollars for their first hit; whose genius, that of wearing their clothes backwards, influenced not only their own peer-group, but that of persons twice and more their years. 

There is a surreal sense of the capricious in American values.  An eleven-year-old, having won a trip to the Olympics in Norway and interviews on television for a childish picture, says, “It’s funny how a little picture can get you on television.”  Funny indeed.  “One child can change the world,” in anticipation of one yet to come, is a repeated phrase in the lyric of a popular Christian song.  Considering the plethora of youth oriented music (can anyone escape it?), fashion, and youth-aimed commercial products, it is a bit much to have to hear a song on current Christian radio bemoaning, “Will anybody listen to what young people have to say?” 

Unable or unwilling to guide and say no to its children, our country has allowed the direction of its music culture to fall into the hands of the very young and their entertainment attorneys.  No one thought to pay the genuine piper.  So, now a piper of a different sort leads children away, followed by the people.  We abide in a tyranny of youthfulness. 

“And I will make mere lads their princes, and capricious children will rule over them.” (Isaiah  3:4). 

According to Francis Schaeffer, liberal theology came to dominate our churches in the 1930s.  If this is so, that would have occurred during the Great Depression.  Anti-authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism, anti-ageism - the hidden face of humanism has gone directly into the establishment churches.  But also, with its face revealed by way of the secular cultural hold upon our youth, liberal humanism is going indirectly into our sprouting congregations, despite their fundamentalist rhetoric.  We are left with youth-ism, the only non-anti-ism positive left; and feminism.  The feminist, a co-belligerent with youth, challenges both the ways of the “old” and the old “ways” that seemed to slight youth and exclude women. 

Humanism, with the creature at the center of creation, must feed on youth - youthfulness - since the only resource for man, in a humanist view, is a constant flow of youth into the social marketplace.  Man, for all that is delightful on earth, is only as good as his mating potential.  And that is decided by women. 

“Their oppressors are children and women rule over them” (Isaiah 3:12). 

Past a certain age, from a youthful point of view, a man is already little or nothing heading into what for a humanist is the great unknown.  Of course, the Christianized rhetoric of youthful congregations will declare the God of Christ and heaven.  But this is belied by their almost passionate disregard for elders - they accede not and aspire to having none, in direct opposition to the apostolic church. 

Cynically predisposed to be distrustful of the older, having broken from the traditional church disdained as old and therefore corrupt, these young, breakaway congregations offer no opportunity to age.  Any single, older man is kept at a distance.  Newly arriving young men and women, on the other hand, are immediately taken in, made to feel at home as though they had reached a sanctuary.  One very attractive young women suddenly appears in church, and within two months is asked to take charge of a Sunday-school class.  The pastor comments on her obvious Christian charms.  Up to that time, length of time as a member of the church was one of the reasons given for rejecting an older man for the same position, though he had been a member for over a year at the time of his first application.  The young woman does not need to even apply. 

LIke the traditional churches, it is a feminine core that rules the societal direction of the sectarian congregation and its activities.  This is, of course, as it is in the secular world as well.  But where the young dominate, it does not readily extend horizontally across the broad make-up of community.  Age which gives rise to wisdom is not an attraction.  It is simply not sexy enough, though they will not frame it in those words.  The music and manners of passionate youth are instead the attraction.  Age - despite the possibility of wisdom attendant upon the ebbing of passion - is shunned.  All this in a church supposedly not of this world. 

The men’s meeting-group is revealing.  Having rejected the context of a community based traditional church, young men are virtually without role models and, thus, future roles for themselves.  They study Scripture, but the guidance there for social behavior is in a context that does not exist for them.  The saying that age is no guarantee of wisdom gets translated in an unsophisticated mind to mean that wisdom is not to be found with an older person.  Thus there is no curiosity of, or deference shown to, the experience of age.  Led by a youngish man, they study out of supplementary books that mean to give them some identity as men.  Peer counseling has replaced what was once the province of eldership. 

The saddest are the young men who are unemployed.  If they happen to be not appealing in some way, as well, they, unlike the women their age, are given short shrift by their peers.  No thought is given to the advantages young women now have in the job market by way of sociological law which did not exist in previous decades.  A young assistant pastor openly shamed an unemployed, homeless man, a member of the congregation, by disdainfully tossing money on the ground in front of the man, who needed it for medicine, and who had been made to ask several times before it was finally given in that manner. 

The young talk only among themselves, turning their backs upon the elder, having seen his faults.  They have seen their father’s nakedness and rejected him.  The young talk among themselves, and the even younger show their backs to them, in turn, and talk among themselves.  And so it goes.  Each generation getting further away; each to its own way; each with its own anthem music.  Until down the line there is no memory of the oldest father and the way of God.  Can we understand now why it was Ham’s son and descendants who were cursed for it, not Ham himself who committed the offense?  (Genesis 9:22, 24-25)  Ham had seen his father’s nakedness, but still he was in a position to know enough to repent.  But his descendants become increasingly unknowing, reacting more and more from imperfection as it grows.  So we have these notorious generation gaps that heed no elderly advice.¹²⁰