An ode to the 1980s
For me, the 1980s are somewhat of a blur, because I spent them having a baby and then raising that baby and intermittently working part-time. I was exhausted much of the time, and not really part of the zeitgeist.
Which means I don’t quite relate to this Daily Mail article by Julie Burchill, although I think she might be correct:
Growing up as a working-class female in the 1970s, I was expected never to express myself. And after a few glorious decades of freedom, I suddenly find myself in that situation again. Like when I was a child, I’m being told what I can and can’t say, except now the scolders are younger than me…
It was the last great decade of fun and freedom: after people realised that racist and sexist jokes were stupid but before the echo-chamber nit-picking of today. They were simpler times. We lived fully in every moment, without the distractions of social media and entertainment-streaming.
When I first saw a ‘portable telephone’ — the size of a brick — I remember a group of us sitting around it, poking it with fascination, like the monkeys at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It was indeed the 80s when I first saw a portable telephone, which was actually a car phone and if memory serves me it was actually somewhat larger than a brick. But a very exotic thing it was, owned by an old friend of my husband’s who had become very very very wealthy. Such a phone was way out of reach for us, and the thought of possessing one hardly even occurred to me.
The 80s may have been a blur for me, but the 90s were not. By then, several things had happened. One was that my baby was now in middle school and high school. Another was that I had a chronic pain problem from serious back and arm injuries (I’ve chronicled a lot of that on this blog; see this, for example). Still another was that I was back in school to get a Master’s degree.
It was that last experience that opened my eyes to some vast cultural and cognitive changes in the world around me – especially in the academic world but hardly limited to that. But it was highlighted in that setting, where I noticed what was then known as PC thought.
I had to take an undergraduate class at one point, and that’s where I first saw it clearly. The generation coming up all agreed on some things that seemed absurd to me: for example, that no student should ever hear a single world from a professor that the student found offensive or upsetting, and if such a thing occurred, it was by definition the professor’s fault, not the student’s. Standards were no longer objective but were instead subjective and feelings-based – if the student’s feelings were hurt, that was the only fact that needed to be considered.
This seemed so obviously wrong to me that I stood up in a rather large class and explained, but no one – and I mean no one agreed with me (or if they agreed with me they were already keeping their mouths shut), and I was simply ignored as they continued on their un-merry ways.
At the time I didn’t have much of a context in which to put the experience, but it alarmed me. I did immediately realize that it was generational in nature, that something in the atmosphere around these young people as they had been growing up had shaped their beliefs in this fashion. Now, in retrospect, I believe it was the slow ascendance of the leftists of my generation into power – that Gramscian march that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and of which I was unaware.
In other words, the generation beginning to come of age in the 1990s had been trained into these modes of thought, educationally speaking (and to some extent by parents). It was in the 1990s that the same 60s generation was now firmly in power, including ascending to the presidency but hardly limited to that.
I don’t think that 60s generation – my generation – was composed predominantly of leftists. I certainly wasn’t a leftist, although I was a Democrats (Democrat and leftist were not synonymous back then). But leftists often sought out a particular kind of power, the power to shape thinking and particularly the thinking of the younger generation. Sometimes that was very explicit, as when Bill Ayers decided that education rather than terrorism would now be the best way to bring about the revolution he and his fellow leftists so desired.
In the 90s, I was seeing the first indications of that, and it was already deeply-rooted. Now we are seeing it coming to fruition and dominating. The next decade will tell us whether there will be no return from it, or whether the backlash to it will build and will triumph.
I tend to agree. I have a daughter born in 1980 who went to UCLA and got a degree in Anthropology. She was indoctrinated with Stephen Jay Gould’s concepts of conditioning being all important. That would result in “A New Soviet Man” in a sort of revival of Lysenko. I argued with her and finally suggested she read Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate,” which refutes most of Gould’s theories. She told me she would not read it unless I read “The Mismeasure of Man” Gould’s bible. When I told her I had already read it and had a copy in my library, she said she still wouldn’t read it.
There is a happy ending. She had a baby at age 40 and tells me it has changed her entire world. It helps that her daughter is gorgeous and smart. Her husband is a successful sculptor and she has been able to stay at home with her daughter.
If God granted me the blessing, I would go back to the 80s.
Neo — I suspect we’re about the same age, and like you, I went back to school in the ’90s (specifically, law school). Maybe because my classmates were older than the typical undergraduate, I didn’t then see the kind of safetyism and deplatforming that have become so common in academia (and now elsewhere). For example, William F. Buckley came on campus as a guest speaker, and there were no protests, complaints, or even impertinent questions. Almost all of my professors were careful to keep their political leanings out of the classroom, and in class discussions, students expressing conservative viewpoints were generally treated with respect. “Open” conservatives were definitely in the minority, but most people could hear and discuss conservative ideas without shutting down.
Just my two cents. I always find your thoughts interesting.
I miss the culture of the early to mid 80s. I was late getting into the swing of things having spent the entire 70s up to ’81 in undergrad, then grad school, so I finally had the money and freedom to enjoy things a bit. I love the music of the 80s, the cheesy TV shows, and mainly the fact that the races seemed to be getting along and moving forward. Comics could make jokes that could never be done today, and very few people got offended. Like Neo, I started out the decade as a Democrat, but by the end of the 80s after being out in the real world, I had switched to the GOP.
If it turns out that there is no return from the left’s treason, liberals most of all will regret it for they will find that a craven existence is all that is possible under what they have enabled.
Unless of course, they sell their souls to serve their rulers.
@John P.
I like that word “Safetyism” it is at the core of many of the problems our society faces.
While I do think that some of it is correct, the PPE for miners and other industrial workers especially respirators and such things.
But Safetyism believers feel that if you can just wear the right helmet, follow the right rules, and think the proper thoughts nothing bad will ever happen to you and you might live forever.
I agree that I would take the 80s as a first choice if I had another life.
Re: Safetyism
“Safety” acquired a new, ominous meaning when I read about the French Revolution:
______________________________
Committee of Public Safety — political body of the French Revolution that gained virtual dictatorial control over France during the Reign of Terror
(September 1793 to July 1794).
–https://www.britannica.com/topic/Committee-of-Public-Safety
_____________________________
Public Safety! But of course….
An economic geology professor at OSU in the late 70’s early 80’s had red “BULLSHIT” stamp that he used when reviewing Master’s thesis and PhD dissertations. That certainly would not be acceptable today.
The best thing about 1980 for me was the outcome of the World Series: “Tug McGraw strikes out Willie Wilson for the final out as the Phillies go on to win their first World Series in franchise history.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPcFeaLLltY&ab_channel=MLB
(The Phightin’ Phils were the last of the original National League teams to win a WS; it took them a mere 97 years to do it.)
The rest of the 1980s, I was in grad school, and I can verify what John P. said– that the academy was a lot more tolerant then. I was an out-of-the-closet Republican in a blue university in a blue city, but no one got in my face or started an argument with me about politics. (Now arguments about baseball, that was a whole ‘nuther matter . . . )
Like John P., I went to law school in the 90s, and did not experience any safetyism or fear of expression of non-pc ideas. If you were comfortable, you weren’t getting your money’s worth. There can be no such thing as a working snowflake lawyer, and it seems this was beat into us. And a good thing, too, because clients, judges, witnesses, party opponents can be very insensitive, even racist and threatening violence.
}}} I certainly wasn’t a leftist, although I was a Democrats (Democrat and leftist were not synonymous back then
Pretty close. Not exactly, I grant, but it was more the difference between Classical Liberal and PostModern Liberal, than anything else. There is some overlap in beliefs.
The only way you could be a Leftist and not a Dem was if you were more extreme than the mainstream Dems to the point where you were even more extreme than them, a Marxist or a Green (usually the same).
One of the more critical aspects of the 80s is that it was the peak of good race relations. As the late 80s came in, you got the rise of the modern notion of “systemic” racism, though they did not call it that, yet.
Jackson, Sharpton, Brawley — all of them started their BS during this timeframe. And this led to the financial collapse of the 00s, as threats of racism were repeatedly used by the Clinton JD to force lending institutions, who were race blind by that point, to make “special dispensations” for race in order to not get called “racist!”.. and get loans made to blacks which they did not qualify for.
No, that’s not saying that the loans to the blacks were the problem — but the lowering of financial standards for lending spread, necessarily, into the system as a whole, and some people took advantage, others just took stupid, and the result was a system failure bordering on that of the 30s.
The 80s were good years in many ways. Reagan became President. He and Volker tamed the inflation caused by the OPEC oil embargoes and government over spending. He revitalized the economy. The airline industry finally got out of the doldrums of the 70s and started to grow again.
Jack Swigert, an old fraternity brother and Republican, ran for Congress and won. (Unfortunately, he died shortly after being elected.) I thought all was getting better politically and kind of tuned politics out.
We lived in Boulder, CO at the time. Boulder was insanely liberal even then. They wouldn’t plow the snow on our street. I called and complained. Their answer, “You should use cross country skis to get to work. When I said I was an airline pilot and had to get to the airport in Denver, their reply was. “If you have to get to work in Denver, you shouldn’t be living in Boulder.” Elite snobs. We bought a small tractor with a snow blower, and I plowed the street myself.
I thought elite leftists were unique to a few cities in the country. Now those sorts of elite jerks are in all levels of our government. My belief that the “Reagan Revolution” had revived our nation didn’t come true. And it appears to have happened because the Commies infiltrated our schools.
We knew the K-12 schools were spending a lot of time and money on administrators rather than teachers. My wife was involved in PTA and went to school board meetings. She was constantly complaining about these administrators being a waste of money. We knew they were wasting taxpayer money, but she and I never dreamed the schools would become propaganda forums for the left. I don’t think we were alone in not seeing what was going on. In hindsight, it’s all pretty clear now.
OBloody:
Just about all leftists would vote for Democrats unless they wanted to throw their votes away on far-left third parties. So yes, leftists were Democrats in that sense.
But Democrats were certainly not all leftists. That change happened later.
And I still know Democrats who aren’t leftists – but everyone they vote for is a leftist, although some of those politicians masquerade as moderates.
Retail Lawyer; John P:
I was describing my foray into graduate school in the 90s, not law school. I was getting a degree in Marriage and Family Therapy. The stuff I describe in the post did not happen in connection with coursework, but it was a discussion that occurred in an undergraduate class we all had to take, and it was a class composed of about 80 undergrads (mostly women) and about 4 of us grad students. The discussion was about something that was happening to a professor in the school at large, when some students had complained about some very harmless stuff he’d said in class. It ended up having huge repercussions for him. I forget why it was part of the classroom discussion, but it was.
An economic geology professor at OSU in the late 70’s early 80’s had red “BULLSHIT” stamp that he used when reviewing Master’s thesis and PhD dissertations. That certainly would not be acceptable today. –om
Dave Cutler was the premier software architect who left DEC to join Microsoft in the late 80s. His mission was to create Windows NT, a modern multi-threaded operating system which would do Unix right.
Cutler largely succeeded. Today there are really only two OS families — the successors to Windows NT and the successors to Unix. (Apple failed to create its own OS, as it intended, and had to lash together a version of BSD Unix to support its Macintosh computers.)
That’s the big story. The small story which I am building down to is that after Cutler came to Microsoft he had to hire a secretary. Cutler interviewed prospective secretaries and, being a salty person, he asked each candidate what she thought of the word, “fuck.”
One said it was her favorite word.
She got the job.
The 80s were a different time.
@huxley
When my daughter was five, I found her pacing up and down in our kitchen repeatedly pronouncing the word ‘fuck.’ Each pronunciation was slightly different, as if she were trying to perfect it. I asked her what it meant, and she confessed that she didn’t know. She had learned it from her older brothers who were eleven and twelve. So I left her alone to explore it. She’s now twenty six has certainly perfected the term.
A friend was was a long-time university professor (now retired), and pretty far to the (traditional) Left, said that at some point in the late 70s or early 80s he noticed a change in how opinions were expressed by students…previously, someone would have said “I think”, but it had changed to “As a woman, I think”…in his observation, women were the drivers of the change, though now it has obviously spread to encompass every demographic and psychosexual category.
“Standards were no longer objective but were instead subjective and feelings-based – if the student’s feelings were hurt, that was the only fact that needed to be considered.”
This is considered by many who I’ve been reading as the Feminization of education. Feelings, not facts.
Almost like magic thinking.
The “As a woman” or “As a Black woman” or most ID prefixes are part of claiming special knowledge about something. Higher status for more authority.
I’m a man – I have an opinion on abortion, or on feminization. Plus there are certain facts.
“As a woman …” this person thinks their personal experience, because it is authentic, is more important than any man’s opinion (or at least mine or who they’re arguing with at the time).
Analysis, and predictions, are still mostly opinions. Facts don’t, by themselves, determine which tradeoffs are “better” between two or more “goods”.
I am fully persuaded that our civilization is on a 100 year trajectory of decline (3 generations of 33 years), starting from the 1960s and The Pill. Here’s a 20+ p summary of a 600 page comparative cultural history.
https://www.kirkdurston.com/blog/unwin
full: https://archive.org/details/b20442580/page/n9/mode/2up
Kirk’s conclusion: Both Unwin and Eberstadt provide substantial evidence that a sexual revolution has long-term, devastating consequences for culture and civilization. As Unwin states, “The history of these societies consists of a series of monotonous repetitions,” and it appears that our civilization is following the same, well-travelled road to collapse.
Here’s the ‘historical fact’ that I believe – cultures where women are expected to be virgins when married are more advanced and creative than those where out- of- marriage promiscuity is essentially accepted.
Unwin, the 1934 historian, writes that it is because the sexual energy is diverted towards other behaviors, and in the advanced civilization more towards the common good and … civilization advancement.
This is likely a big influence, and perhaps the key influence, but like many facts, the “reason” for the fact being true is, itself, not always a fact. Eberstadt relates it more to dysfunctional families.
I don’t particularly like this “fact”, because I prefer a reality where responsible, limited promiscuity is an acceptable option. And I fully enjoyed my own sexual freedom in the 80s! But today, I do believe my own behavior, as with many college friends who were promiscuous, was wrong / sub-optimal. I’d say I was a slut-cad.
It might be that our civilization is now so rich, and so productive, that it can accept a lot of sub-optimal cultural norms without degenerating – which would, in the next 40 years, falsify this idea, I’ll call it Chastity Theory.
It might be that it takes longer than the 3 generations. It might happen sooner; and will, if it happens, certainly be blamed on other proximate causes.
Feminists need to be shaming slut-cads, the men who sleep with sluts, more than the sluts. #MeToo could have been doing that. Except it was so Dem feminist led, and many of the worst slut-cads are famous, rich, and/or powerful Dems. Plus the lack of sexual spark of so many nice (girly?) men who don’t push for more sex from their dates than the dates want to give.
80s music pop hits remains the most reliably great for fun dancing.
Agree with the gist of a number of remarks here.
The gender insanity that has become endemic in, and thus emblematic of, our civilization, has precedents in morally and spiritually decadent prior civilizations. The moral nihilism of those times – exemplified by intellectual movements such as radical philisophical skepticism – has found new intellectual bedding or excuses or justifications in our own times; new banners to fly under, technological developments such as contraception, abortifacients, and antibiotics, to enable.
Marx, Freud, Evolutionary Materialism, the worship of the will as will; and you have all the pseudo philosophical ingredients necessary to give all the mutant freaks and faeries and narsissistic sociopaths who you have always with you, to pretend to a kind of subversive moral legitimacy which seemingly makes giving them the back of your hand, rather than extending tolerance, somehow wrong.
Take away the moral hazards of insanity via tech, and they will recognize no limits because they will have temporarily at least, insulated themselves from reality by subversively burrowing deep inside the moral and economic lives of those who have not quite abandoned it completely.
It is difficult to see how our actions in a pick-up bar in 1990 could possibly be all that wrong, much less related to the preconditions for a possibly emerging social decoherence. But then no one is saying that a few such occasional and restrained acts will.
Aside from the subtle effects of a spreading temporal wave of all our acts through time, there is the simple fact that a significant portion of the population never seems content to take just a couple steps over the line,nor to.keep their acts private and circumscribed.
Instead they seem giddily determined to take, lead, or expose, all of humanity to hell along with them.
And that impulse may in the last analysis be the most defining psychgoligical trait of the natural born moral nihilist.
One thing I seem to recall about the “eighties” is a general return to, as Art Deco would probably put it, “Sartorial sanity” .
Not sure just when it began, and never was a reader of Esquire, but I seem to recall some trend beginning in those precincts and about that era toward ” natural fabrics” and so-called “Classic styles”
It certainly made life easier: not having to endleslly search out the least flowered shirt or the most modestly flared slacks, or the least extravagant collars.
That might have even started in the late mid seventies, but I don’t recall.
I mean you could always find certain things – or so I assume – at Brooks Brothers – but what average 17 or 18 year old male was shopping there?
What I do remember is as a youngish adult with a job in industry in the mid eighties and 90’s, being able to just walk into a clothing store and find racks of wool slacks, pleated or not; stacks of cotton dress and casual shirts, button down or not (and with substantial tails!); jackets to be had that were cut roomy with natural shoulders, and silk and other ties that were of a reasonable width.
You see the skinny short stick suits some guys try threading themselves into nowadays, even overweight middle aged guys, and it looks like they are modeling for a cartoon in a satirical magazine.
J.J.:
That’s so cool that you knew Jack Swigert. He was a great man.
I was going to CU Boulder during the ’80’s and while many there were budding leftists, it seemed that there was a pretty good sized population of normal folk. Not so much the case today unfortunately.
Hi sparkee.
Greetings fellow Buff. Yes, the school still seemed relatively normal in the 80s – a mix of left and right.
Jack was a go-getter in college and remained so his entire life. We did as much as we could to help him in his election campaign. His untimely death was a shock. I’m grateful that I knew him and that he was my friend.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbKNICg-REA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHnJp0oyOxs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkLTwX0duY4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlucGdeT37E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IqzZuOB0FQ
Boy, that zeitgeist was exhausting.
Well, we boomers sure did a job. From protesting Kent State 50 years ago to demanding it now.
You’re welcome, America!