Someone who was my age now (62.5) at the time of my birth was born into a world where Queen Victoria was still ruling the Empire and a person could pretty much travel and live anywhere without justification or the approval of authority and, for the most part, pretend to be whomever he chose. (See The World of Yesterday.) Interestingly, that time would also see the first use of the word "computer" and the first organization dedicated to LGBT rights. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, eh?
To quote the above mentioned The World of Yesterday:
None of these young people believed their parents, the politicians or their teachers. Every state decree was read with distrust. The postwar generation [post-WW1] emancipated itself with a sudden, violent reaction...Anyone or anything not their own age was finished, out-of-date, done for...School councils...were set up, with young people keeping a sharp eye on the teachers and making their own changes to the curriculum, because children wanted to learn only what they liked. Girls had their hair cut in such short bobs that they could not be told from boys; young men shaved off their beards to look more like girls. Homosexuality and lesbianism were very much in fashion, not as a result of a young person's instinctive drives, but in protest against all the old traditional, legal and moral kinds of love.
A lesson I learned far too late in life is the people of the past were no different from us. None of the motivating ideas of Wokeness that so entrance the youth are new. They in fact, were born from the very people the movement looks upon as morally backwards and reprehensible. For balance, none of the ideas of what has been called the New Right or the Dark Enlightenment (or whatever euphemism is being used today) is new. At least, to their credit, they believe that is a feature, not a bug. The nature of humanity is the same as it always was. We delude ourselves that we are different out of hubris.
And yet, the past is a foreign country. We can read of their habits and manners and be amused or appalled or confused. To pick on a cliche example, slavery was broadly accepted as normal for most of the world's history. (No, I'm not just referring to slavery in the Old South, which seems to be the only one anyone thinks of anymore.) We can't understand how this could be. How do we reconcile the fact that these humans were exactly like us, yet manifested behaviors we can't fathom?
I can only think that there are certain behavior patterns that are endemically human, perhaps encoded in our DNA or perhaps so foundational to our social beings that you can easily track them through time. But they can ultimately manifest in behaviors that are almost 180 degrees opposed to each other. For example, an innate sense of fairness can lead us to conflict whether it is applied to outcomes or opportunities. An instinct for defiance can lead to embrace or repulsion. A desire for security can lead us to conform or isolate.
What people mean when they describe a piece of literature as timeless is that the core themes emphasized are those behaviors that survive over time, as opposed to "ripped from the headlines" narratives.
This is where I start yelling at clouds. Feel free to bail.
In the current age, drama, in the form of TV and Movies and, to some extent, stage plays, gets created almost on a whim. There are so many productions that it's impossible to keep track. How many streaming channels are producing original content. Beyond that content from across the globe is readily available. As recently as 20 years ago it was possible to have at least a decent enough grip on the market output to know whether something was worth watching or not and feel confident that you were able to keep up on most of the worthwhile releases.
No longer. The quantity produced is too great now to even begin to survey a large portion of it. And, as we know, when quantity goes up quality goes down. The thing is, dramatizing timeless themes is hard. It takes insight and consideration to even identify them and it takes talent, sweat, and toil to dramatize them. The talent to do so does not increase anywhere near the rate the quantity of drama increases. We're now producing so much output that we have reached far outside the talent pool for the needed labor.
You see it every day. Most streaming services are on a kick now to remake, or reboot, or reimagine -- pick your euphemism -- previously successful works. Almost all of them fail outright. The successes are little more than average. They consist of characters shouting their feelings and intentions at each other so you know what to think; they gender- or race-swap legacy characters and somehow believe that constitutes creativity; they write dialog at a third grade level; they work from formulas that they hope are low risk, but they are just plain low. Honestly, ChatGPT could probably do better.
This is a time where quality drama is so rare that not only is nearly impossible to find, the audience has been so numbed by the content from Disney or Amazon that they don't even realize how truly awful most of it is. So desensitized to quality are viewers that, were they to watch some truly remarkable they would only see it in terms of what formula it fit. Show them The Sopranos and they say it was a mob soap opera, instead of seeing it for the tour-de-force portrayal of our human capacity for self-delusion that it is.
What do you do when you live in such an era? First, convince yourself it can't last forever. Quality never completely disappears, it just gets lost in the shuffle most of the time. Treasure the good stuff you do find: Better Call Saul, The Bear.
Second, resort to the old and timeless. It's hard to read old books when you've been conditioned (or reconditioned) to Twitter and Instagram, nevermind TikTok. They are often written in rich, florid sentences that can take a minute to parse. The vocabulary is beyond you and you have to resort to context to understand. The cultural references of their moment are unrecognizable. But I have found wonders of similarities to today; I can relate to many of the characters. Take for instance the common theme of men lost in young adulthood. In This Side of Paradise (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920) we follow privileged young people as they hedonistically make their way through their college years. Try watching The Graduate (1967) for a take on being adrift in early adulthood. In The Wrecker (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1896) our lead is a young man who pursued his dream of being an artist against the wishes of his father -- I know many such 20-somethings today. And if you're concerned about the interaction of college an ethnic identity I humbly suggest Apple Pie (David Mazzotta, 1999).
My pipe dream is that all young people read these and understand their struggles are nothing new. The fears and insecurity that underlie all their false confidence and righteousness are precisely what is expected of them. That thing many of them call depression is just the normal way they are supposed to feel at their age. That it will be a struggle, but they will find a way through it and the world won't end if they compromise or fail. Basically, that they are OK and can chill out a bit and maybe lay off the Zoloft.
And that maybe everyone will realize that there is nothing special or apocalyptic going on. That, as always, it is the best of times and the worst of times (another nugget of timeless wisdom from an old book). That they live in a world of endless noise; of tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing (how could Shakespeare have known about our new cycle -- yes I know that's not exactly what MacBeth meant; work with me). Then maybe we'd all chill out. Maybe we could give more thought to our humanity instead of dwelling on our neurosis. Maybe we could have real tolerance of each other instead of divisive social engineering. Maybe we could see our own absurdities and laugh at them.
Maybe there would be something worth watching on TV.
