My history thesis advisor in college was fond of saying that one of the main drivers in new scholarship is the desire to kill one’s father. The ambitious young scholar gets a thrill out of saying, “aha, look at the pitiful errors made by those who came before me, and admire how wise I am to overcome those errors through my sheer intellectual prowess.” While acknowledging that this desire can be productive, my advisor pushed his students toward a counterbalancing ethic of charity toward the past as a means of facilitating greater understanding.
Helen Andrews is one of the sharpest writers of the millennial generation (of which I am a part). I mean sharp in a double sense, the first being that she is incisive and the second sense … well, as she reports her own editor saying in the preface, she can be mean. Andrews’s new book Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster embodies much of the “kill your father” ethos—and it does so with plenty of sharp zingers. A particularly memorable example occurs early in the book: “Before the Renaissance, would-be discoverers of Aristotle were sometimes told by zealous churchmen that anything written before Christ was ipso facto not worth rediscovering. This is approximately how the boomers feel about themselves.” Less comedic, but no less sharp, is Andrews’s more sociological description of the generation: “drugged up, divorced, ignorant, and indebted, but at least they did it out of idealism.”
Read Full Article »
