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Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Boomers transitioning from pre-war socialism to post-war greenism

I do not know if the comfortable (conservative) boomer mind, in its innermost heart of hearts, actually changed at all between 1941 and 2015.

I mean most conservatives of all ages have learned not to describe the world's various 'colored'* people as inferior -at least not in public .

But I do not know how they actually feel about them in private.

(*Colored people as in 'not-pink colored' people presumably.)

But the uncomfortably minded boomer does seemed to have gone through quite a sea change between 1941 and 2015.

In 1895 future King Edward II was reported to have said "we are all socialists nowadays" and it seemed that all of the uncomfortable , at least while young and unsettled in good jobs, were a bit bolshie in the Era of Modernity.

But somewhere along the line as Modernity faded out, the young stopped being socialist - either of the bolshie red kind  or of the barely pink democratic socialist kind.

I know this was my personal trajectory - being a strong democratic socialist from age of 18 until my late thirties (coincidentally when a whole lot of young people in the bolshie east of Europe declared they felt the same way).

Socialists like pie , being merely unhappy that it isn't divided fairly, with a much bigger slice going to the ordinary worker.

And an absolutely bigger pie to them was always better - even if their relative slice size failed to reach what they deemed fair.

To use Schnaiberg/Dunlap/McCright's term,  they were pro 'production science' --- bigger was always better.

But green minded people began to feel that it was the constant chasing after the ever bigger pie (and even the pie itself) that was making them unhappy - sick and unhappy.

Industrial pie making was making their families and the environment sick and now it appeared that it would certainly kill off the planet in a way that the pre-1989 capitalist versus socialist nuclear arms race had merely threatened to do.

Greens dislike uncontrolled production science and want to see its excesses tempered by more 'impact science' - again to use Schnaiberg/Dunlap and McCright's term.

That is, they wanted scientists to monitor the ratio of all the bad outputs of industrial production against all the good things it gave us.

And that is what happened to me --- I gradually saw more and more clearly how socialists could ruin the Earth just as quickly as capitalists could.

The sin they held in common - I saw - was Modernity.

I was becoming post or anti Modernity without becoming what the textbooks called postmodernist.

 I prefer to think of my new faith as being more an 'involuntary open commensality' with all of the planet's beings .

Not exactly lambs lying down with lions, but there you have it....

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