Thought I have written complaints about the Baby Boomers before, you might be surprised to hear me say that I think the 60s really sent pop culture back for a while because I am one of the least conservative people in many ways. I don’t fantasize about living on Leave It to Beaver. There were indeed lots of accomplishments during the 60s… but they were all a flash in the pan. The last Moon landing was in 1972. All the people who accomplished things in the 60s didn’t grow up then. The people who grew up then I think, as a group and not individually, ruined everything. Furthermore, I think there may be a biological basis to this, hence why it seems that biology appears to be set back compared to what it was in the past, though ironically, setting back biology also appears to have happened first.
Yesterday I got into a debate about post-Tolkien fantasy writers where I was defending George R. R. Martin and implicitly Michael Moorcock from being called “coomers.” Post-Tolkien fantasy is mostly garbage, but those two authors are two of the examples of how it’s not garbage, the stuff that is garbage mostly sprang directly from Dragonlance. However, not all of it did. People look frantically for things wrong with Tolkien and usually are completely off-base, for example, Alan Moore calling it imperialist, racist, sexist, and homophobic, which is not entirely accurate in addition to being extremely shallow and politicized. Meanwhile Martin and Moorcock basically just criticized Tolkien for not being what they would personally write while giving allowances to Tolkien for wanting to write something different, it was just obviously something they didn’t think very highly of which is the cause of the conflicts.
The fundamental disagreement there is one I think I would agree with, that Tolkien wants to live in Middle Earth but Martin and Moorcock are quite happy not to live in a quasi-medieval fantasy land and recognize that the real Middle Ages were quite brutal in addition to magic clearly not solving everything in Middle Earth, the standard of living would still be low and the world would still not be enjoyable despite all the magic (and if you’re me, probably because all the magic, I’ll get back to that soon.) So I found a lot of things I thought were really wrong with Tolkien myself, though I also didn’t end up giving him the caveat I did for other stupid ideas like “the Earth used to be flat,” which is that yes, all the things I criticized as being heretical in Tolkien were also from the Silmarillion and other works that were only published by Christopher Tolkien. Once you just look at what Tolkien actually published, all the really obviously heretical elements are again absent, but that still leaves the fact that Middle Earth would not be a very interesting place to live even if it might be fun to visit and go ride the eagles and whatever. Tolkien really spends half the time describing trees, which just highlights that the 1960s seem to have been the product and/or cause of poor biology knowledge because I have no interest in Tolkien’s descriptions of trees when I can just read a botany textbook.
Middle Earth just seems like a place to go if you want to smoke some pipe-weed, have second breakfast, and not have to worry about operating heavy machinery, which made me think wait a second, I know this book series definitely had heavy associations with the psychedelic culture of the time. Maybe the only way this series and all fantasy by extension got so popular is because people were smoking some pipe-weed and having second breakfast, and smoking some trees and looking at trees, even if Tolkien said pipe-weed is supposed to be tobacco and not cannabis. Maybe Tolkien was a biological mutant who was constantly stoned because his body produces some THC analogue or something, and whenever everyone was stoned they could enjoy it, but that doesn’t change the fact it’s bad to be high literally all of the time, that’s an addiction, and being genetically high all the time thus sounds like a disability that should’ve been treated somehow. Lots of people like taking marijuana with tobacco after all, so pipe-weed not being weed shouldn’t be too surprising. Of course there’s no way to posthumously examine Tolkien to see if he had a mutation that made him constantly high without ingesting any THC at this point in time.
I have indeed repeatedly blamed “the Boomers” for everything that’s wrong with our culture today, and now I kind of wonder if it’s all just because they did a lot of drugs and got addicted. I wonder if this basically changed everything about the world to an extent because people were changing their state of consciousness, and for the most part this wasn’t for the better. Now I doubt it was all bad. I do tend to think a limited use of psychedelics is probably harmless and possibly actually therapeutic seeing as psychedelics and cannabis were used since the Victorian era (which is probably why there are so many hippie Victorian houses despite there otherwise being an association between Victorians being prudes and conservatives to be honest) and before and none of this happened back then. So any positive changes since the 60s are likely to be related to the psychedelic culture as negative ones were. Just, there seem to be a lot more negative ones. Society was really taking off, partially literally due to the Moon landing, and then everything went way backward, the economy crashed, scientific progress came to mostly a halt, music mostly got worse, art mostly got worse, fiction definitely got worse, all around everything started going backward. When I lodge my complaints about the 60s, I’m not longing for the past, I’m annoyed that the future apparently got cut off. What now seems to be a key piece of the puzzle is something I used to consider marginal, the whole fantasy fiction thing I complained about. The fact is Tolkien is probably pretty mediocre writing, though I’m certainly not saying this in favor of the books people usually read in English classes because the entire problem is those are mediocre too. You can’t complain about Middle Earth when your only alternative is English professors contemplating adultery, yes, this means Stoner by John Williams, which is incidentally probably the most popular book that stoners don’t like since it’s about a guy named Stoner who is an English professor contemplating adultery who is never stoned at any point in his entire imaginary life. If the only reason Lord of the Rings got popular is because people got addicted to drugs, well, there you have it with how culture been held back. People became a bunch of druggies who weren’t even close to hypothetically using them in moderation and this probably had an affect on later generations through environmental changes or maybe even morphic resonance or something. That latter point is ironic because that’s a theory that I’m sure some people would associate with being on drugs, though that’s yet another reason I would say maybe the key was moderation and medical research instead of just throwing them all on Schedule I or whatever. Then, I heard the only reason that even happened was so Nixon could put the hippies and black people in jail.
Another point that’s not peripheral is the role of the occult. When you look into the Inklings, one of the first things you’ll see is there was some occultist guy in their circle, in addition to the fact Tolkien seems like he was never a very good Catholic to be honest. It largely seems like the occultist guy, Charles Williams, is the one who influenced the Inklings who converted to various branches of Christianity to include magic in their stories at all, which, as much as it sounds like something from a Chick tract, is now making me kind of skeptical of any uses of magic in these kinds of stories at all. To be honest, magic just doesn’t seem like a very interesting ability. You don’t have to have magic to be able to fly, teleport, use telepathy, throw fire, or whatever kind of thing you want, you could do the same through scientific means, anomalous natural means (mutations, non-understood materials, etc.,) or of course good miraculous means since religion is very much on the table here.
The only things magic brings to the table are basically entirely negative in light of that. You can’t just fly, you have to cast a spell to fly! You’re in service to some kind of spirit now! You have to pay costs like blood, gold, bad luck, etc.! And you don’t get to understand it, which you would if you took the scientific route even if the ability were just some kind of paranormal mutation or material or a miracle to begin with and you were reverse-engineering it! What’s the appeal of magic really compared to other powers? It can be narratively interesting, but so are miracles, advanced science, and the paranormal. It’s basically left as, well, something for bad guys that’s kind of gross and ugly and not very interesting. Of course a lot of this depends on what the definition of “magic” is. Maybe “magic” is related to “magi” and the “magi” are the guys from Persia who were the only ones who understood Plato and Aristotle or something. So in that case it’s basically some kind of natural philosophy aka science. That saves the word magic, but it doesn’t really save concepts of magic. It’s not very interesting to say bippity boppity boo or abracadabra or whatever when you can just have a power and use it quietly and calmly, never mind the perennial question of “what’s the origin of magic.” Even in these fantasy series it’s usually not mentioned at all. Maybe there’s “good” magic but it’s still not explained how it differs from “bad” magic since it all works in the same way and the explanation of morality in the story is often flimsy itself, usually something shallow like good guys have white hats and bad guys have black hats, and if the “good” guys do something bad it all falls apart too.
The Problematic Inklings (mereorthodoxy.com)
No, Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” isn’t Christian | by Jonathan Poletti | I blog God. | Medium
Yes, as much as I’m the polar opposite of some kind of extremist who would hand out Chick tracts I genuinely find this whole idea of magic in C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien fairly suspicious now that I’ve read about who the Inklings actually were. I’m starting to find magic in all of fiction fairly suspicious as well except when used by the bad people, but just because I think it’s suspect for the reasons I’ve outlined doesn’t mean it’s automatically guilty. If anyone else has any good information sources or wants to research this themselves and post comments here or make their own post about it I’d find that very welcome, if you do make an entire post please link it here so I can see it and other people can too, thanks.
Another thing is, if you look even more into the whole occultism thing and psychedelia, Timothy Leary was also related to the occult, he said he got his ideas from Aleister Crowley. So if everyone was reading some book that’s apparently insufferable unless you’re really high, and that book appears to have been influenced by occultism itself, and then the guy who tries to get everyone really high has them do drugs, it just looks like occultism all around. That’s really nothing new. Most people generally believe in some kind of cultish ideology (though not necessarily conscious enough to be called occult,) that’s what thousands of years of paganism were for after all. The whole reason we don’t have records of those thousands of years of paganism is also because they sucked. People didn’t leave historical records when they were too busy going like “it doesn’t matter if you kill me in battle because I’m going to die anyway” and trying to make sure they had a sword in their hand so the Valkyries would find them, and other kinds of pagan beliefs. People were poor and had a terrible standard of living.
For example, look at Japan. During Edo Japan they had the fumi-e, which were icons of Jesus and Mary, first taken from the missionaries and later designed for the purpose, that they made everyone step on to try to prove they weren’t Christian and killed you if you didn’t step on them, and Japan was considered an extremely backward and poor regime. Then later during Meiji Japan the state still wasn’t officially Christian, the official religion was Shinto, but they didn’t persecute Christians, and Japan became one of the most advanced industrial economies in the world. This is one piece of evidence among many I have that no, Christianity isn’t about trying to live in the past, the entire standard of living of the modern world is the result of Christianity and one of the things Jesus was trying to bring even though it was 2,000 years ago. You don’t understand Christianity through the so-called fundamentalist extremist versions that want to turn the world back to the past but through the prosperous, advanced society around you. In a strange twist of irony, it might also be the case that all the medievalist stories about magic and whatever are themselves the result of extremist perversions of Christianity, though that’s just a direction I need to research more and I would like other people to research more too.
Of course even if the 1960s were a time where the kids all got addicted to drugs or maybe got STDs or something and it messed up their brains, the social conditions that allowed that to happen are unique because drugs have always been around, sex has definitely always been around, but it’s only with the Baby Boom that things seemed to be allowed to go really out of control. Maybe prosperity itself was the cause of the problems, people didn’t have any discipline. However, people could’ve still been better and resisted it. Maybe the Boomers also just happened to mostly be bad people and that was essentially just random. The biggest glut of resources ever just randomly went to the worst people in all of history and there wasn’t really any external factor forcing those people to be the worst. On the bright side, if the pattern holds, all it will take to take their resources from them is just to hold out and be better people than they are, which I think is already happening, science is definitely progressing again among other things so I take that as a sign.
No, see, the 60's really didn't ruin everything. I believe that reaction to the 60's by those with political and economic power (The Greatest Generation) had more to do with change from and stagnation of some of the most intensely creative art, music and culture in America.
In one sense, the 60's were an awakening of individual power and freedom for a generation who stopped an unjust war, made a president resign (Nixon) and carried shattered dreams from seeing Dr. Martin Luther King and John & Robert Kennedy executed violently, needlessly on Black & White Television. That decade also brought The Women's movement and laws giving Equal Rights to minorities - (Civil Rights Act 1963-1964)
We did good for future generations, bringing one decade later the Americans With Disability Act and ultimately the ERA.
Before you hang troubles of the world on Boomers, tell us all the positive results from YOUR generation...the artists, poets, musicians, playwrights, photographers, authors and politicians who changed the world for better. Where are YOUR spokespeople, the doers, the doctors and philosophers who have made the world a better, safer place?
You claim PSYCHODELIA - I am impressed...we need to talk. I took acid with Timothy Leary and Minor White, (https://www.moma.org/artists/6342) - { not even the mighty ADOBE could match the skill, eye or narrative of Whites mastery of tonality or spirituality.} it was supplied by Lisa Bieberman .
No, we were not perfect, but we gave you gifts, learning, experimentation and the freedom to enjoy both. Now show us what you are giving back!