The Weekend Eudemon

Oh, the best laid plans! It's a glorious weekend here: Spring weather in the 60s and 70s, no clouds, small breeze.

Eric left work early on Friday (4:00), came home and went for a walk with Mad Max in the jogging stroller. When he got back, he planned to sit in his Adirondack chair, sip wine, and read The Challenges of Ivan Illich. After the effects of the wine started to trickle in, he'd switch to the agrarian essays of Wendell Berry (easier fare). After the wine was firmly established, he'd read Never Let Me Go. After even fiction was no longer possible, he'd tinker about the yard and play with the kids.

It went well for twenty minutes, and then his neighbor friend from across the street swung by, 16 oz. tumbler of vodka and tonic in hand. Thirty minutes later, his wife joined them with some sort of rum drink. Two hours later, Eric had finished the bottle of wine and none of the books. After those neighbors went home, Eric and his wife talked with his next door neighbors (Eric's brother and nephews) about their recent trip to Florida, drank a can of beer, cleared the driveway and yard of bikes and toys while dancing to Fleetwood Mac's "Secondhand News" and other songs from the 1970s, and went inside for a movie that Abbie (10) really wanted Eric to watch.

Plans dashed, but replaced by things far better.

The wine, by the way, was Pepper Wood Grove, 2001 Merlot. Not highly recommended for groups, but if you're drinking the whole bottle yourself and chasing it with a can of beer, it's fine.

We hope everyone is enjoying the new layout. We're still working on details and the favorite quotes page. If you have any suggestions, please let us know. This new blogging software has a lot of features that we hope to install over the next couple of weeks, but we're just beginning to discover its capabilities.

Incidentally, we encourage comments. Someone told us that our "warning" about comments (e.g., no hatred, our willingness to delete) was borderline rude and/or pushy. We certainly didn't mean to be. We'll be even-handed in our management of comments, deleting only those comments that your average Catholic Stalinite would.

The Longest Life
The Atlantic this month has a lengthy article about increased longevity. The article starts by pointing out that average life expectancy has been climbing quickly in the last 100 years, from 47 to 77, and it's slated to increase a little more (to about 87 by 2050). That's nothing new.

But now there is going to be a rise in the maximum possible age of death. That type of rise is unprecedented. Some scientists think it'll be a shocking increase in longevity ("In ten years we'll have a pill that will give you twenty years, and then there'll be another pill after that. The first hundred-and-fifty-year-old may have already been born"). Others aren't nearly so optimistic, but all of them pretty much agree that the maximum age of death is rising.

So is it a problem? That's the whole point of the article. This "acute shortage of dead people" will cause a host of problems because "almost every aspect of society is based on the orderly succession of generations." As the older people continue to hold on–to their money, their jobs, their government entitlements–the effects will rage through the rest of society.

The whole thing rings true to Eric Scheske. As a business lawyer, he sees problems with "the orderly succession of generations" all the time, as the father refuses to let go of the family business in favor of his children, even though he'd been telling them for years that the business would be theirs. By the time the promised heir reaches his mid-forties, he's anxious for dad to retire and if dad pauses, the heir starts to get mad, family gatherings get tense, and then Eric gets a phone call.

The article discusses a host of generation-succession problems and others that will result from the dearth of death, including the following:

*Increased medical costs that insurance companies won't be able to cover without charging outlandish premiums, with the result that a potentially-disturbing gap could develop between those who can afford to pay for the longevity treatment and those who can't. Eventually it could become a government entitlement, especially if the technology comes along while the baby boomers are still living and voting.

*Delayed and decreased windfalls from inheritances, which many young people use to launch new businesses and buy homes. The overly-old will hold onto their money for many extra years and/or spend it on artificial organs and other death-defying treatments. The effect could trickle throughout the economy as all these little sources of "venture capital" disappear.

*Decreased urgency to grow up, since young people will figure they have a lot longer to make their place in the world. Adolescence will go from the teenage years into the mid-thirties.

*If the period of adolescence expands and people marry even later in life, the child birthrate will fall even more. It's already at dangerously-low levels. A further decrease could be devastating on our economy. (Side note: Maybe at some point we could push for an abortion ban on simple utilitarian grounds.)

*A brain drain to under-developed countries. Due to longevity-induced economic slowdowns (too complicated to summarize here), younger nations like Mexico will become attractive investment targets, and the youthful and ambitious will follow the money. Says the article, "In a reverse brain drain, the Chinese coast guard might discover half-starved American postgraduates stuffed into the holds of smugglers' ships. Highways out of Tijuana or Nogales might bear road signs telling drivers to watch out for norteamericano families. . .".

Interesting stuff.

The Punchy Journal. . . One last point about all this mass culture stuff.

In support of my notion that we live in a mass culture, I can also point to Bill Haley and the Comets and Led Zeppelin.

Back in the 1980s, I listened to Bill Haley, Elvis, Chuck Berry, and other pre-Beatles performers, including doo-wop.

I was derided by most of my friends. ("Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry, they accepted; but the rest? It was scoffed at. Elvis for some reason wasn't accepted until much later.)

These days, kids in high school love Led Zeppelin, The Who, and other hard rock groups from the 1960s and 1970s. Other rockers–Aerosmith and the Rolling Stones, for instance–are still going strong. The Lettermen, Platters, and Del Vikings weren't going strong in the 1980s (unless you're counting county fairs), and neither was Chuck, though he still performed regularly and a cool movie was made about him.

The pre-Beatles era ran from 1955 to 1964. In other words, about 25 years before my high school/college years. The early era of hard rockers? It ran from 1964 to 1976 or so. In other words, about 25 years before today's high school students. The same span of years.

Yet, musically speaking, fifties rock-n-roll was much, much further removed from my high school years than Led Zeppelin and Co. is removed from today's teenagers.

Why?

Hard to say for sure, but it supports the idea that there is an increasing mass culture: Everyone listens to the same stuff. Absent a sledge hammer hitting society–rock-n-roll in 1954; the Beatles in 1964–ingrained stuff will stay ingrained. And, in fact, I suspect the 1954 and 1964 sledge hammers wouldn't work in today's cultural climate because, though media was already centralizing in the 1950s and 1960s, it was nothing near today's amassing tendencies.

Today, everything comes from the same handful of media sources, you're not going to have a white kid from Tupelo, Mississippi shake up the market suddenly. The conglomerates will know about him, and either accept him and groom him in a manner they think will make the most money (like the American Idol champions) or reject him and keep him out of the spotlight. Because they control the entertainment outlets, the guy–absent a huge stroke of luck–will continue to be a regional or merely local phenomenon, like Elvis until he went to the early giant RCA.

And if the conglomerates like you but don't like your style, you'll have to conform–which goes back to my first knock on mass culture: lack of independence, free spirit. Maybe the Internet will defeat the giants, but we're not optimistic. . .