Fallout on left and right from decade of disillusion

There are eras in history, like the 1950s, when older people set the cultural and moral terms for the young. And there are eras, like the 1960s, when it’s the other way around.

The current decade has been in the latter mold. Now it approaches its end with Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, named Time’s Person of the Year.

In between, the decade has been fundamentally shaped by the technological creations of the young, in the form of social media and mobile apps; by the diseases of the (mostly) young, notably addiction and mental illness; and by the moral convictions of the young, from the #MeToo and Black Lives

Matter movements in the U.S. to mass demonstrations from Cairo to Hong Kong.

Let’s narrow the focus to America.

What history usually thinks of as “the ’60s” coincided, in the United States, with the coming-ofage of the baby boomers, roughly 75 million strong. Our current decade coincides with the coming-ofage of millennials, another generation of about 80 million. More people, more power — or at least more influence.

History is often a series of reactions and counterreactions. We remember the nonconformism of the ’60s as a response to the conformism of the ’50s. This decade, too, has been a reaction to the last: to two wars that began in moral fervors and ended in strategic fizzles, and to a financial crisis whose victims numbered in the millions and for which nobody accepted blame.

Not surprisingly, this decade has been marked by the intense hostility of the young toward truisms that once governed our thinking.

As they saw it, the liberal international order didn’t uphold the peace — it bled us dry. Silicon Valley didn’t innovate — it mined our data. The church didn’t save souls — it raped children. The cops didn’t serve and protect — they profiled and killed.

This hostility isn’t manifest just on the progressive left. It also accounts for the rise of the populist right.

As for tech, not only did the young invent and shape social media, social media shaped and reinvented the young. This was the decade when algorithms meant to cater to our tastes succeeded mainly in narrowing those tastes; when the creation of online communities led to our Balkanization into online tribes and the dissemination of disinformation and hate; when digital connection deepened our personal isolation, vulnerability and suggestibility.

One result has been a kind of shallowing of our inner life: of time spent wondering, wandering, reading, daydreaming and just thinking things over.

Another result has been a shallowing of our political life via the replacement of wit with snark and of reasoned arguments with rapid-fire tweets and hot takes.

Technology had another effect: It vastly accelerated the speed with which previously outlying ideas became, in the hands of their mainly youthful advocates, moral certitudes.

Moral certitude isn’t the exclusive posture of the young. But it is an easier one to hold when life hasn’t yet given you sufficient time to leaven idealism with experience, second-guess yourself and learn that the things you once thought were most true aren’t quite so.