Lost Generations
“Everyone behaves badly, given the chance.” Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises
In the years after the First World War, the celebrated author, Ernest Hemingway, was troubled by the cultural disintegration that threatened western civilisation. Most of his fellow intellectuals applauded what they saw as the demise of religion and morality, and exulted in the permissiveness they misconstrued as freedom, but Hemingway knew it would engender greater despair.
His novel, The Sun Also Rises, deals with the social turmoil unleashed by the collapse of moral standards, and the psychological torment that inevitably flows from a disintegration of meaning in society.
The novel tells the story of a group of WWI veterans living in 1920s Paris. Physically and psychologically wounded by the war, their lives are centred on alcohol and sex, with little regard for life’s deeper meaning. Promiscuity and rivalries undermine relationships within the group, and a trip to Pamplona brings matters to a head.
The consequences for Hemingway’s characters foreshadow those experienced by many people in the postmodern West today. Hemingway’s message is simple: break down moral norms, and you emasculate your male population. When a man has nothing to fight for, he quickly falls prey to soul-destroying hedonism.
And that is the simple message we all need to take on board if we want to avert the collapse of our troubled civilisation. Without agreed moral standards, healthy relationships are impossible – in the home, the workplace, the community, and the nation. There has to be a sound consensus about what is right and what is wrong.
It was Gertrude Stein who dubbed Hemingway and his friends members of a lost generation, and Hemingway repeated the phrase in The Sun Also Rises. The novel explores the existential acedia that characterised the Lost Generation, young people who were psychologically adrift. A lack of meaning and purpose, and the frustration and disillusionment that inevitably accompany unstable relationships, particularly between the sexes, constantly reminded them that things were not what they were meant to be. Sex, alcohol, and partying became rituals of joyless escapism.
Tragically, another Lost Generation has arisen in our time. The boundaries are never hard and fast, but Generation Z, the Zoomers, born between 1995 and 2012, are the new Lost Generation, and the consequences for them, and also society at large, are ominous.
The new Lost Generation has sprung from postmodern western society’s misguided obfuscation around the existential question: What does it mean to be a man?
The anti-masculine mood developed in the West over the past six decades has produced, predictably, a Lost Generation of young males that poses a significant threat to all other demographic groups, western society as we know it, and the Zoomers themselves.
Feminisation and the related Woke phenomenon, with its identity politics, left-wing extremism, and cancel culture, were always going to provoke a reaction. Disaffected young males are becoming increasingly loud and active in right-wing circles, some extreme, in a sort of foot-stomping refusal to accept decades long trends that have disadvantaged them.
In the US, law schools became majority female in 2016, law firm associates became majority female in 2023, 63 percent of judges appointed by the Biden administration were women, 55 percent of New York Times staff are now female, and medical schools followed the trend in 2019, the same year in which women became the majority of college educated employees.
To glibly claim that women have outperformed men is to ignore the anti-discrimination laws and societal taboos that have swung the employment pendulum heavily in favour of women.
Hence, young Zoomer males find themselves denied the economic security enjoyed by previous generations, and the idea of a lasting career seems a pipe-dream for most, particularly with AI looming. They have grown up in a world in which stability has splintered in the family, personal relationships, communities, and the nation, and the Internet, social media, and smartphones have fashioned their depressing reality.
It is no wonder that video games and pornography play such a big part in their lives, since social atomisation and polarisation characterise their societal landscape. The incidence of nihilism rampant among Zoomers was predictable given the widespread ignorance of history and their justifiable lack of trust in relationships as a result of the Sexual Revolution.
Their plight recalls Hannah Arendt’s warning signs for a society prepared to accept totalitarianism. She lists them in her seminal 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism:
1. Endemic loneliness and atomization.
2. Acceptance of transgressiveness for its own sake.
3. The disintegration of trust in hierarchies and institutions.
4. The ascendancy of ideological agendas.
5. Sacrificing the pursuit of truth for narratives that appeal to personal preferences.
In short, these young men, as well as their female counterparts in the process, have been misled; their lives are based on lies. What they need, and what western society has failed to provide, is leadership, which has to be based on truth; in the case of this Lost Generation, specifically, a reality-based answer to the question: what does it mean to be a man?
Well, what are the failings of western leadership in this age that scorns what it calls “toxic masculinity”? Deceit, betrayal, confusion, cowardice, incoherence, inaction, and injustice. The remedy for this civilisational fiasco is to restore the masculine virtues of honesty, loyalty, clarity, courage, logic, decisiveness, and justice. And women leaders need them as much as their male counterparts.
The Zoomer denizens of this contemporary Lost Generation need to stand tall and become protectors, providers, and paragons of virtue.
In the final analysis, men are naturally equipped to be husbands and fathers, and women are naturally equipped to be wives and mothers. Both can obviously be many other things as well, but their very nature as men and women orients them towards specific spousal and parental vocations, which crumbling western society desperately needs.