Adbusters: Hipsters the end of Western civilization? Ehhhh… Part II

I ended Adbusters: Hipsters the end of Western civilization?  Ehhhh… Part I by saying that I do feel that shallowness and disconnectedness is becoming pervasive enough in our culture to be worrisome.  I also said that I don’t attribute that only to alleged hipsters or to the generations under the age of twenty-five.  A reader, Molly, commented on that first post that every generation freaks out about the perceived social ills and behavioral problems of the day’s youth, and that to her these hipsters don’t seem any worse than the greasers or the hippies or other groups were in their respective eras.  (Thanks for your comment, Molly!)

To an extent I agree.  We shouldn’t whine about how our society’s going downhill without pausing to consider the fact that every generation has thought that about it’s younger generations, probably since the beginning of civilization.  I discuss this issue in another post, Writing Skills of Little Ones.  But:

• Technology has allowed for more vanity and self-centeredness (paradoxically, as it’s supposed to connect us more with the outside world), which serves as a perfect stepping stone for superficiality and disconnectedness.  For example, instead of just imagining how we’ll look in our outfit at the bar or at that party, we also imagine how we’ll look in the pictures taken of us in that outfit, and immediately imagine what sort of poses might be best for a facebook or myspace profile picture, and what those pictures will convey about us to those who see it.  We’ve been given an additional, immeasurable medium to misrepresent ourselves, and the more prevalent and primary the internet becomes as our means of communication, the more opportunity we have to continue judging ourselves and others by profile pictures and meticulously selected lists of interests and activities, and the more accustomed we get to not having authentic contact with others and boiling ourselves down to lists of things that other people said and trying to come up with the perfect list of favorite movies so as best to display the various parts of our personalities.
• As I’ve said in several earlier posts, our media, our politics, and our popular culture are getting out of control, but it’s our fault.  Every generation and culture has its shallow indulgences, but we can’t let ourselves be so arrogant that we assume it will never be too much.  We don’t parade through the streets to gleefully watch a criminal get hanged, but we happily watch while morons go on television with a lie detector and willingly ruin their marriage for money (on the other hand, good riddance, because if you’re that stupid then your marriage was going to end anyway, so go ahead and get some money for it).  We have trivia shows making light of how dumb so many American adults are.  Every channel has their offer for regular people like us to strike it big by auditioning for one of their reality shows.  We eat it up, and media see it.  They don’t, unfortunately, pass up an opportunity to whore for our attention, and we validate their every move by drooling in front of the television or computer screen.  And while even I complain about dishonest politicians, we’re the ones who keep electing them, we’re the ones who let them get away with it, and we’re the ones who complain when they are honest (“Bittergate”, for example).  Whatever the problems with our economy, our education system, many of our problems are ones for which we should take responsibility.  But if a politician, or a journalist or media commentator, says as much, he or she is accused of hating America, hating the American people, not having faith in the American people, and all together deemed a sort of elitist enemy that doesn’t understand the real woes of American society.  Until we can admit to ourselves that we, the regular people, are to blame for a lot of our problems, be they national or within our smaller communities, nothing will improve.  There is a limit.  No civilization or society lasts forever.  There’s always a turning point.  I don’t believe that point is tomorrow, but it’s foolish to think we will forever be immune to the damage of societal ills and dysfunction.

Hipsters alone will not be the end of Western civilization.  We have working in our favor the fact that modern Western civilization is not always purely Western.  Globalization does help us to inject some outside good into our culture as we see fit, and I think that will increase our longevity.  But we are not indestructible.  A taste for extravagance, gluttony, glamorous but vapid lifestyles will ultimately come back to us.  I do think, as I’m guessing Haddow does, that we will in one way or another be our own demise.  But I still retain a grain of optimism.  We humans have a unique intelligence, compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, that has gotten us this far.  But true intelligence comes with realizing your shortcomings and being willing to hold yourself accountable.  I don’t think we’ve lost our chance quite yet.