Religious schisms as ethnic segregation

Since Christmas, I've been thinking about the religious version of the transplant phenomenon — conversion from one church to another. I've got some posts coming up on that topic in the American context using data from the General Social Survey.

But first it's worth looking at the bigger picture of church identities being part of regional ethnic identities. This will highlight the off-base nature of trying to hop from one church to another, especially across large distances of belief and practice. That is akin to trying to switch your ethnic identity from Irish to Lebanese.

At the same time, it also clarifies how church identity provides a grounding throughout time for an ethnic group's identity, and guards against a disorienting feeling of flux and chaos: what they believe and practice, regarding the sacred, is one of those core components that has existed since the old times, that exists today, and that will continue to exist into the future. And what they believe and practice distinguishes them from other ethnic groups, whose religious identities may be similar if they are ethnically similar, or religiously quite different if they are ethnically quite different.

The best way to study this is to look at a world religion that spans diverse ethnic groups and has existed for a long time.

Universal religions ought to push for similarity in beliefs and practices, no matter the ethnic group that adopts them. To the extent that the apparent cohesion at the highest level actually fractures along ethnic lines, we see just how powerful of a force ethnic solidarity can be. It is not necessarily hostile chauvinism, but at least the felt need to carve out a comfortably familiar niche within the vast universal religion, in which to gather with folks who are ethnically similar enough that much of the character of belief and practice can go unspoken and implicitly assumed, with only fine distinctive details to be explicitly discussed and worn outwardly as membership badges.

The more ethnically dissimilar the folks are, the more difficulty they will have with sharing a background foundation — what language to speak, what cultural allusions can be made, what set of moral norms and methods of norm enforcement are already in effect, what the expectations for ordinary behavior are (emotive vs. restrained, intuitive vs. rational, etc.), and so on and so forth. Although diverse groups may agree on some aspects of doctrine, they will not be able to easily coordinate on the ways in which they ought to manifest them through practice.

As it turns out, though, the superficial causes of the schisms that allow ethnic groups to self-segregate are primarily over doctrine rather than practice. I think this boils down to the difficulty of having to justify why your group does things the way it does — given all the cultural foundations and frameworks of your group, how could the practice of religion turn out in a radically different way? Yet the background or foundation is too unspoken for members of the in-group to even articulate it to an out-group, let alone try to justify it.

By contrast, the reasons that your group believes the doctrine it does can be easily stated. Whether or not those reasons are convincing to the out-group, rational arguments are easy to construct and give the appearance of approaching the matter objectively, rather than appealing to subjective impulses that "given our cultural background, this is simply the way we feel that things ought to be."

That naturally invites the response of "What do you mean, 'our cultural background' and 'the way we feel'?" and all the difficulty of having to articulate the unspoken. Just say that it's over some conceptual matter, state your reasons, and either the out-group agrees with you or it doesn't. At least you've stated your case and appeared respectable, rather than closing off debate by appealing to subjective and implicit matters.

In the next post I'll review the history of schisms within Christianity and show how they proceeded more or less along ethnic lines, although I won't speculate so much on how religious character has been adapted to ethnic character across all the different groups that have adopted Christianity over the past 2000 years.

The main point will be to note the correlation between religious and ethnic identity, and not so much to explain the mechanism underlying this link, in order to caution against the assumption that people can just shift from one religious group to another willy-nilly. Where you fit in will be constrained by your ethnic and cultural background, and not so much by superficial yet easy-to-articulate matters of doctrine.

Christmas songs by Jews: annoying, schmaltzy, and mundane

In what is becoming an annual Christmas tradition, popular web media outlets are crowing about how many of America's "beloved" Christmas songs were in fact composed by Jews. See here for a recent example from HuffPo.

I don't know about you, but I can't stand those campy Midcentury novelty tunes. "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" must be one of the most annoying songs ever recorded.

None mention Jesus or Christianity, nor do they pay tribute to pre-Christian sacred traditions either, like the old carol "Deck the Halls," which is about the pagan holiday of Yule. Some do celebrate kiddie mythology — Santa, Rudolf, Frosty — but what is there for grown-ups? The rest are only wintertime songs — snowfall, fireplaces, huddling together inside to keep warm.

It is not enough to invoke the good cheer, sentimental feelings, and family togetherness without providing the context for it all. It's not just another family get-together, like the Fourth of July, another one of those times when people feel good, like Spring Break, or another time when they feel sentimental, like school graduations.

There are only two halfway moving new Christmas songs that came out back then — "The Little Drummer Boy" and "Do You Hear What I Hear?" And to be fair, a Jew did compose the music (though not the lyrics) to the latter. But being half of a songwriting team that made one good Christmas song is hardly proof of Jewish skill in the area.

All the great Christmas songs are either hymns or carols that go back to the 19th century or earlier, before Jews left the ghetto and began appearing in elite and pop cultural fields. And sure enough, the two good new songs could easily be sung in a caroling setting.

We learn something from the fact that a choral setting would allow so few of the Jewish songs from the Midcentury — or their Gentile counterparts, for that matter ("Jingle Bell Rock" — another cringer). They aren't the kind of music that bonds a group together through song. Trying to sing them in chorus would be as absurd as a group of folks coming together to sing advertising jingles.

They're the worst example of commercial tune-peddlers trying to cash in on a sacred group ritual, and you can't ignore their irritatingly pandering style. They sound just like what you'd expect a holiday song to sound like based on the producer-consumer relationship, rather than the relationship of in-group members bonding.*

The only group that does perform them in chorus is small children, again emphasizing how kiddie and campy their appeal is. It might be charming to hear third-graders singing about Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer, but it would be even more moving to hear them sing "Silent Night" instead.

We learn more still from the fact that these annoying Midcentury songs are still played endlessly in the months leading up to Christmas, year after year, despite the melting away of all sorts of genuine, sacred Christmas traditions, and the general profaning of the holiday. Carols and hymns have joined all the other myriad traditions that are hard to find anymore, whereas the mundane novelty songs are more ubiquitous now than they ever were. Somehow the "Boo, Christmas" phenomenon of the past couple decades doesn't seem to mind those as much as the carols and hymns.

* In a lapse of awareness, the author of the HuffPo article plainly states that Jewish songwriters didn't bother composing Hannukah songs because there was so little money to be made from catering to just 2% of consumers.

What matters in life to transplants vs. natives

Is moving away from the region of your upbringing driven more by career chasing or by starting a new identity, unfettered by the ties of the past?

The General Social Survey asks a series of questions about how important various aspects of life are to you. Let's compare people who have remained in the Census region they grew up in with those who live in an entirely different region (not just moving to the nearest city). Only white respondents have been counted, to remove race as a factor. Education levels differ between natives and upwardly mobile transplants, but they didn't affect the big picture here, so I left it out as a control variable.

Across all seven aspects of life that were asked about, natives were more likely to rate them "very important," although some showed a larger gap than others. The native-transplant gap is shown in percentage points in the list below, where the aspects of life are ranked from those with the narrowest gap to those with the largest gap.

Gap, Aspect of life

1, Politics and public life

2, Family and children (nuclear family)

2, Career and work

5, Free time and relaxation

7, Relatives (extended family)

8, Religion and church

12, Friends and acquaintances

I don't know how an ordinary person would interpret "politics and public life," but it doesn't differ much in importance to the two groups.

Neither does the importance of the nuclear family. However, the importance of the extended family shows a much larger gap.

Work doesn't show a huge gap, when you might have expected the transplants to be much more gung-ho about their career. They do seem to value long hours and getting lost in their job, though, as the gap widens for the importance of free time for having a life.

The largest gaps in importance are found for communal ties to genetic strangers -- church, and friends and acquaintances.

The main difference in what drives transplants appears to be a desire to cut themselves free from a dense, rich social network -- i.e. the one that they were integrated into wherever they grew up. They look the closest to natives when it comes to how much they value their marriage and children, but that's as far as it goes. They're less worried about their extended family playing a role in their lives, and they're even less concerned with links outside the family.

So, the transplant phenomenon is not so much about chasing an ever more high-status career, but simply about liberating yourself (as they would see it) from your family and community. Being part of at most an isolated nuclear unit, and nothing further, is a feature not a bug of transplant living.

Ultimately this boils down to the desire to not be held accountable to anyone else, to be free to indulge in whatever you want to. And not only in the sense of having a far dimmer spotlight of judgment being cast on your behavior, and therefore not feeling as much shame. But in the broader sense of not having any duties and responsibilities to fulfill toward others. Sure frees up more time to focus on yourself. Just think of how tied-down you'd be with duties if you still lived near your relatives and folks-you-know.

Of course, a transplant is only too willing to enjoy the benefits of the communal ties that, over the generations of natives who stayed put there, have built up the cultural integrity of whatever region he's moved to. He just doesn't want to contribute back to his adoptive culture. He may not even be a transient -- perhaps he plans to stay there for the rest of his life. He is more properly described as a social-cultural parasite.

Naturally there are degrees of variation among transplants, some being relatively benign and others being flagrant bloodsuckers and bite-the-hand-that-feed-ers. But it's important to emphasize the common desire to leave behind their rich social ties, in order to understand how the churn of inter-regional migration fragments communal bonds, both in the left-behind and the moved-into regions.

GSS variables: imppol, impfam, impwork, imprelax, impkin, impchurh, impfrend, regtrans, race

A glimpse into the de-romanticizing of the Sixties among Gen X teenagers

In a recent comment thread about the lack of iconic coming-of-age movies in the '90s, I pointed to the sole exception -- the cult TV show My So-Called Life.

It only ran during the '94-'95 season, and was not aired much (if at all) in re-runs. So, unlike the John Hughes movies of the '80s, they were not available to rent on video long after the first run, and even the initial showing was just another prime-time TV broadcast rather than a big-time theatrical release. This kept the show from catching on with a wider range of birth cohorts -- mostly those born in the late '70s and early '80s. But at least among them, the show was iconic, one that always comes up when they think of examples that define the zeitgeist of the '90s (for better or worse).

After posting that comment, I felt a tiny wave of nostalgia and got curious about whether My So-Called Life is still being offered on a streaming service. And sure enough, all 19 episodes are free to watch on Hulu (click here). Worth checking out if you've never seen it, although nothing you need to be in a rush to see. Hearing a musical score modulate the tone from one scene to the next was a breath of fresh air, compared to how devoid of music today's movies and TV shows are.

The episode I watched, "The Substitute," starts off like The Dead Poets Society, with the high school students introduced to a new English teacher, whose iconoclastic style shakes up the stodgy status quo, and whose passion captures the attention of the previously bored-to-death teenagers. As the teacher and the students prepare for the publication of the school's literary magazine, a battle over censorship ignites between them and the principal. (One of the poems is clumsily erotic but not obscene, written by one of the girl students.) By the end of the episode, the substitute is gone, and the bow-tie-wearing principal has taken his place.

Unlike the Very Special Episodes of the '80s, the tone throughout is naturalistic and low-key, rather than histrionic shouting between the teacher / students and the principal.

But even more distinctive of its time, by the end the protagonist Angela has a bitter taste left in her mouth over the whole ordeal, rather than the satisfaction of "fighting the good fight" and holding out hope for greater success next time. After the literary magazine is pulled from circulation, only one other character joins Angela in re-distributing it. Evidently no one else is willing to stick their neck out for The Cause. Her Boomer parents instinctively take the principal's side, and she more or less calls them hypocrites who have endlessly told her stories about how they marched for ideals in the Sixties.

These are relatively minor reasons, though, for losing your youthful Romanticism. The main disillusionment comes near the end, when Angela learns the truth about why the substitute will no longer be teaching there, which leaves her feeling cynical and betrayed by him, rather than righteously hopeful after her side's defeat.*

The Boomers, who would have felt a heartwarming bridging of generations in The Dead Poets Society, would have interpreted this episode as a sign of a defeatist and apathetic mindset among the teenagers of the Nineties. The teenagers themselves, however, took it more as a cautionary tale about allowing yourself to be easily seduced by charismatic strangers who urge you to question everything and follow your passion, as they are more likely to be some kind of con man than a genuine role model.

If the take-away message had only been about choosing your battles, tempering idealism with pragmatism, and rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's, I think the Boomers could have felt that their Sixties legacy had still been passed along relatively intact to the younger generation. After all, by the mid-'90s even the Boomers themselves were no longer tie-dyed hippies.

But given the sordid and banal unraveling of the substitute's stature by the end, the Gen X viewer took away the message that being a passionate idealist was wrong-headed to begin with. Not simply that they should aim in the same direction as the Sixties generation, only walking in baby steps and not pushing as hard. But that the Sixties path pointed in an entirely off-base direction altogether.

What direction did the show preach that teenagers travel along instead? It didn't give an answer, other than "not in the Sixties direction". It was not a lame episode that would play out today about the relative merits of competing ideologies. It was a simple coming-of-age story about lost innocence, and learning from it a lesson of humility -- that your impulsiveness can lead you into acting like a naive idiot who can be easily taken advantage of.

Despite the wishes of helicopter parents, that lesson is not one that can be taught by instruction beforehand, like the alphabet or the list of American presidents. It's one of those experiences, like skinned knees, that the kid has to go through themselves in order to come away from it stronger and more mature. It's not a dangerous experience, just one that is unpleasant and uncomfortable for a little while. The relatively non-interventionist approach of Angela's parents strikes me as realistic for the time. Millennials were being over-protected during this period, but the late X-ers were still allowed to experience skinned knees in the course of growing up out of childhood.

I don't want to suggest that this episode in itself changed the minds of an entire generation. It was not one of those "Who shot Mr. Burns?" episodes that all the kids were talking about. But it was the kind of thing that strongly resonated with teenagers of the time, and marked the shift away from passionate idealism and toward even-headed pragmatism among Gen X.

Also worth noting, by way of contrasting X-ers with Millennials, that Angela doesn't throw a hissy fit at the end. The ordeal was just another one of those disillusioning experiences of adolescence -- better get over it and move on, no point wallowing in pity. She also humbly realizes that she'd allowed herself to be had, rather than putting all the blame on one or another of the grown-ups. You definitely would not see that if they tried to re-make the series today.

* Spoiler, highlight to read: [He had not been fired by the principal, as though it were the final injustice in the battle over ideals. Instead, the principal had received a notice that the substitute was wanted for deserting his family in another part of the country, and failing to pay child support all along. The substitute quit upon seeing the notice. When Angela tracks him down to confront him about leaving his family, he gives a series of evasive and empty answers, further disappointing her for having been taken under his spell.]

Transplants more adulterous in practice, and in belief more permissive

Let's take another look at how moral constraints weaken when a person no longer feels bound by the prevailing norms because they are not from the place where they've taken up residence. Every culture officially condemns adultery, but how strongly do individuals believe in that prohibition, and how well do they follow it in practice, when they did not imprint on the regional culture currently surrounding them while growing up?

The General Social Survey asks two questions about adultery -- an opinion question about how wrong you think it is, and a behavior question about whether you've ever cheated on a spouse. To compare apples to apples, first we'll split the respondents into male and female, and then look across education levels within each sex, given that education and upward mobility are a key difference between natives and transplants.

Only those who have ever been married are counted, to ensure that we're not simply observing differences between unhitched transplants and settled-down natives. And only whites have been studied, to control for race.

In this case, "transplant" means living in an entirely different Census region (New England, Pacific, East North Central, etc.) than the one you were living in at age 16.

Starting with the opinion question, here are the percent of respondents who gave a permissive answer about a married person having sex with someone other than their spouse. A permissive response is any answer other than "always wrong." Each line represents education level, where High school is 0-12 years, Undergrad is 13-16, and Graduate is 17-20. Within each line, native responses are first and transplant's second.

Men, native vs. transplant
High school: 18 vs 18
Undergrad_: 25 vs 29
Graduate__: 34 vs 40

Women, native vs. transplant
High school: 15 vs 15
Undergrad_: 22 vs 24
Graduate__: 26 vs 35

For both men and women, transplants are more permissive of adultery, and this gap widens with higher levels of education. There are two other patterns, where men are more permissive than women, and more educated people are more permissive than less educated people. The largest influence on beliefs is education level, then transplant status, and then sex.

Moving onto the behavior question, here are the percent of respondents who said they have ever committed adultery.

Men, native vs. transplant
High school: 19 vs 26
Undergrad_: 20 vs 23
Graduate__: 17 vs 22

Women, native vs. transplant
High school: 12 vs 15
Undergrad_: 12 vs 13
Graduate__: 12 vs 16

Again for both men and women, transplants are more likely than natives to have had an extra-marital affair. Unlike the opinion question, education level is now the smallest influence, and sex the largest influence. Transplant status is now a relatively more influential factor -- being a transplant is almost as powerful a force as being a man, regarding a person's chances of committing adultery.

What's going on with transplants being more likely to hypothetically condone adultery and to actually practice it? A person who is surrounded by a group that he did not imprint on growing up is less likely to feel shame, which only registers when it comes from members of the in-group.

With no childhood and adolescent roots in their region, transplants are less tethered to moral norms -- even when those norms are the same across regions. It's not as though their native region prohibits adultery, while their adopted region lets it slide. They simply don't feel the sting from norm enforcement as strongly when it's coming from folks who are outside of the target's native regional culture.

GSS variables: xmarsex, evstray, regtrans, marital, educ, sex, race

The godless frontier

If you watch any of the endless reality shows set in Alaska, you might notice something strange — for a heavily Republican state, religion doesn't appear to play much of a role in their lives. No crosses or other iconography around the house, no prayers, no attending group services, no usage of Biblical examples in their everyday speech (whether to make a serious point or just joking around).

That impression is backed up by Pew Forum research on religiosity across the nation. Here is a review on Alaska's empty pews from the late 2000s. And here is an interactive map that allows you to study religious beliefs and practices state by state. Alaska is near the bottom for believing in God, having any religious affiliation whatsoever, and attending religious services regularly.

The picture doesn't look much better in other red states out West, such as Arizona, Nevada, or Montana. Of course Colorado is near the bottom too, along with the Pacific coast. The only outlier is Utah, a colony of settled-down Midwestern types within the otherwise wild West (until it gets overrun by Californian transplants).

On the whole, Alaska looks like a state colonized by Republican-voting refugees from the Pacific Northwest. Hardly anybody has roots there, typical of the Mountain and Pac NW regions, which have attracted mainly rambling transients since the frontier days.

But nomadic peoples around the world practice religion, so why is it so thin throughout most of the frontier? Religion bonds a group together and allows for the enforcement of norms in a way that doesn't seem biased in favor of any particular group of people — the moral source is supernatural, something that every mortal human being is being held to equally. The main function of religion is maintaining social cohesion.

But if the frontiersman dreams of a place of his own, with no one else to tell him what to do, and no one else he'll have to keep in regular touch with, what need does he have for religion? The individualist impulse that led the original frontiersmen out West gave rise to the libertarian streak of the western half of the country.

And from "liberty from government" there arose "liberty from God." Any higher power, whether mundane or sacred, that could hold sway over an individual's affairs, in the service of appeasing some other individual, could not be tolerated. I don't need the gubmint bossing me around, and I sure don't need no God bossing me around.

It's no wonder that amoral hedonism took root right away in the original frontier days. It's not just that the West was "wild" — the Bible Belt isn't exactly peopled with tame, no-sex-having geeks, but they didn't have saloons and red light districts all over the place.

And the Deep South still doesn't today. Even today it's the West that is home to the pornography industry, the epicenter of gambling, flamboyant Pride Parades, and the highest levels of alcohol consumption.

Religion cannot be expected to play a large role in a region where the guiding moral principles seem to be "Leave me alone to indulge my vices" and "How dare you want to curb the commercialization of vice?"

New England shows that you don't need to be on the frontier to have low levels of religious behavior and high levels of booze drinking, but it does suggest a link to "don't tread on me" individualism and libertarianism, even if its origins are different in the founding region of the country compared to the frontier.

Someone who doesn't want to be duty-bound to others is not going to discriminate too much between a mundane and a supernatural law-giver. And the tenaciously combative stance toward the gubmint on just about all issues goes against Jesus' saying to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.

Conservatives who were raised back East may be curious about the potential for the old frontier states to serve as a bulwark against liberal degradation — some of those states are pretty red, and Arizona sure doesn't welcome the spic invasion like California does. But the more you scratch beneath the surface, the more you discover its quicksand foundation.

Have Millennials been insulated from competition or over-exposed?

Here is a post that tries to account for the blandness and weakness of the Millennial generation by pointing to their insulation from having to struggle for their goals (everybody gets a trophy), and being bombarded with egalitarian propaganda since they were children (everyone is a special little snowflake). Don't look to this generation for the ubermenschen of the future.

Only part of this explanation is correct, though — that they have been insulated from failure, from criticism, from skinned knees. But that doesn't mean they haven't been moved from one arena of mock-competition to another throughout their upbringing, and continued their competitiveness once they're relatively more in control of their lives.

Consider how pervasive it is for small kids to "take part" in a competitive activity, i.e. be shoved into it by sideline parents, whether football for fourth-graders or cheerleading for children. Their parents won't even let them rest on a family holiday like Thanksgiving, hauling them off to run a race instead, however friendly the Turkey Trot competition may be.

Pre-schoolers compete over getting into the "good schools," and high schoolers compete like never before to get into the "good colleges." All that resume-padding bullshit reveals how desperately competitive today's environment is for young people.

Participation rates in high school sports keep rising, and the number of sports keeps expanding. It's a fair cry from the old days, when a handful of natural athletes lettered in baseball, and all the other kids stayed out of the competitive arena.

These days, even geeky engineering activities like a robotics club has to be structured as a team preparing for a series of Lego robotics competitions against teams from other schools. You didn't see that competitive atmosphere among the shop class enthusiasts of the 1950s. The phrase "talk shop" suggests laid-back camaraderie, not intense Us vs. Them teamwork.

Schoolchildren have all sorts of progress charts and behavior charts that accumulate happy stickers for each micro-achievement. It's true that you still get a minimum number for doing nothing at all, but that doesn't keep the top-scorers from earning even more, and does not re-frame the environment as a non-competitive one. Only now, the winners and losers are those with 50 vs. 10 points instead of 40 vs. 0 points.

Just because there's a safety padding at the bottom doesn't mean that kids these days aren't being constantly ranked in one micro-competition after another. It's like mock-competition to prepare for a never-ending competition once they reach the grown-up world. If your parents didn't want to prepare you for such a competitive environment, they wouldn't put you through all the play-fight competitions when you're growing up.

Again, contrast this with the laid-back schools of the '50s, when teachers did not submit regular progress reports to parents with elaborate distributions of tick marks showing their child's measurement on multiple variables. And when parents didn't prepare their kids by making every one of their pastimes a (safety-padded) competition.

When given a little more freedom after childhood, what do the Millennials choose to do for fun? Invent a competition over anything at all, no matter how trivial or gay, and spend your free time checking back in to see where you stand in the rankings. Post your rig, post your stats, post your lifts, your outfit of the day, your coffee of the day, etc etc etc.

Gamerscores and leader boards in video games would have been alien to the arcade scene of the late '70s and early '80s. At most the games kept a list of "high scores," but they were only three characters long and thus effectively anonymous. Anybody trying to broadcast their high score outside of their immediate social circle would have not only been ostracized but beaten up for good measure. Video games back then were generally not player-vs.-player competitions either; if two players could play at the same time, it was usually cooperatively.

Noobs in all domains are hazed way more violently and humiliatingly than they were 50 years ago.

Fishing for compliments (likes, upvotes, re-tweets) from a vast crowd of strangers would have struck the laid-back youngsters of the '70s as appalling. It's not as though they didn't have access to cameras and mass media if they wanted to distribute them. "Who does this chick think she is? Marcia Brady?" And that little dorkmeister who managed to get his letter to the editor printed in no fewer than six local papers across the nation? "Woah dude, next stop — the White House! LOL."

For all the talk about how today's dogmatically PC climate is one of cutting the tall poppy down, the reality is just the opposite. Millennials do not ever speak up to cut down the grade-grubber, the curve-wrecker, and the know-it-all in the classroom. They may tweet a micro-aggression about it after class, but in any way that matters they are utter pussies who fail to enforce the supposed norm of tearing down the elite.

In fact, you have to go way back before the Millennial era to find widespread policing of individuals who threatened camaraderie by acting too big for their britches. High schoolers in the '70s would not have tolerated the constant hand-raiser. "Enough already, you fuckin' NERD!" Nor the over-glorified hall monitor types whose tattle-taling widened the gap, so to speak, between the goody two-shoes and those who got punished for having fun. "Thanks a lot, you fuckin' NARC!"

Even the professional victim activists back in the '50s only sought desegregation, rather than an escalating contest of whose rights had been more violated, and who had "earned" as many victimhood merit badges than who else, as you see among today's SJWs. Rosa Parks didn't make a special stink about being a black woman, only a black person. Any homos in the desegregation movement didn't limp out over how worse off they had it than the mere black heterosexuals.

Thus, it is over- rather than under-exposure to competition that explains why the Millennials are so messed up. When every social interaction their parents and teachers have placed them in has been a contest whose ranking is public knowledge — notwithstanding the fact that it has a safety padded landing for the losers — they fail to experience camaraderie while growing up, and they will remain antagonistic into adulthood. The top-ranked remain poor winners with no real friends and only hangers-on, while the bottom-ranked remain sore losers whose resentfulness alienates the others.

Over-exposure to competition may also explain their tendency to melt down over seemingly trivial trials. If they don't enjoy rest periods, as it were, between episodes of competitiveness, their minds don't get to recover and become stronger. The competitive lobe of their brain becomes fatigued from chronic hyper-extension.

If it were merely a case of having no experience with competition, and facing it for the first time, their reactions would have a heavy coloring of surprise and shock at the novelty of it all, the way a weakling would react when he tried to move a sofa. He would feel inadequate and embarrassed, rather than stressed out and ready to ragequit.

But Millennial melt-downs tend to be colored more by fatigue and being "over it," as though the competitive framework is not only familiar to them but has been ever present in their lives, all the way back to being dragged out of the house at six years old to race in a Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving.

This shows up elsewhere in their distant relationship with their parents, even when they grow up in an intact and non-abusive family. By being drafted into so many micro-competitions, and judged by so many different progress charts in childhood, they don't sense how else they could matter to their parents other than by getting good marks in some activity, which they hope will please their parents and make them proud. The most frequent expression of affection from their parents is "awesome job!" — based on their performance in some micro-trial (setting the silverware correctly, not getting any "red lights" from the teacher all week, and so on).

I doubt that the Millennials feel that their parents love them unconditionally, or that their parents are concerned for their welfare just because they're their own flesh and blood, and not because the parent acts like some genetically unrelated coach who wants his little players to win against the other team in the big game of life. That doesn't mean they feel their parents despise them, are callous toward them, or whatever — only that they feel more like their own parents are more like foster parents, albeit foster parents who are thoughtful and kindhearted.

I'm not sure how else to describe it, but it's a strange aspect of Millennials' relationships with their parents — even kids from stable, two-parent families are likely to behave as though their relationship were that of a benevolent patron and a grateful client who just happened to find their way into the household, instead of kin members tied by the special bond of blood.

In any case, whatever has gone wrong in recent decades cannot be the result of declining levels of competition, since they have only escalated. And we should not confuse superficially egalitarian dogma with real-world practices that have turned every social interaction into a status contest, however trivial.

Pairing primitivistic and futuristic sounds in '80s music

When you think of what musical timbre distinguishes a song from the 1980s, the synthesizer springs first to mind. If a pop song these days wants to "give it that '80s vibe," they are undoubtedly going to throw in a synthesizer part.

While the synth did play a central role in the orchestration of the period, it was usually paired with another instrument that sounded more traditional and organic, or at least a vocal delivery that sounded soulful rather than robotic.

This contrast of timbres relieved the song from having only a futuristic, artificial sound texture. The synth suggested the eerie, uncertain future of the modern world and its strange new technologies, while the traditional instrument (or soulful voice) provided a root in more familiar and comforting sounds.

The traditional instrument did not have to belong to the culture that the band came from — a foreign one could equally convey the impression of traditional and organic, as well as creating an exotic atmosphere. Especially within New Wave, the bands tried to strike a balance between the futuristic and the primitivistic.

There are too many examples to cover in a single post, so I'll focus things by only looking at the pairing of synthesizers with the marimba as the traditional, organic instrument.

It has its own melodic line in "Loving the Alien" by David Bowie, and the mixture comes from layering multiple instrumental parts.

A more effective use of contrasting timbres can be heard in the main riff for "Love My Way" by Psychedelic Furs, where the marimba's line hangs uncompleted until the synth chimes in for two slow eerie notes. I'm not sure why this succeeds better than the parallel layering approach — perhaps the shift at the end of a sequence strikes us more as a transformation of the organic into the synthetic.

Similar to one instrument completing the phrase of the other, a call-and-response pattern is used in "Sister of Mercy" by Thompson Twins. Both the marimba and flute-y synth have their own little riffs, and they alternate back-to-back. This is almost as memorable as the Psychedelic Furs approach, but they don't sound as intertwined because each part plays a self-contained phrase, whereas the two parts in "Love My Way" don't stand on their own and only work in combination.

Today when you hear the synth, it's more a descendant from electronic or techno music from the '90s and after, where the sole focus is on the futuristic, artificial, and hi-tech. It lacks any contrast with an organic instrument, and the vocal delivery is sure to be mechanical, robotic, and auto-tuned as well. Unlike the pleasingly surprising mixture of futuristic and primitive from the '80s, these techno-derived synth parts are more like boring gadget porn for music addicts.

We can note a similarity between New Wave songs and Art Deco architecture of the Jazz Age, which also aimed to wed primitive textures and exotic iconography with modernistic design plans and materials. Techno music's analog is more like the World of Tomorrow and Space Age styles of the Midcentury, which were entirely forward-looking and meant to dazzle the audience with hi-tech novelties.

Both New Wave and Art Deco arose from outgoing, rising-crime climates, while techno and the World of Tomorrow arose from cocooning, falling-crime climates. Based on other cases, my hunch is that people in an outgoing social mood prefer high contrast in their culture, as opposed to cocooning people for whom that would be too stimulating, and who therefore prefer lower contrast.

Cynicism and sarcasm were Gen X specialties long before the grungey Nineties

Part of the ongoing attempt to make the '90s revival happen (it won't happen) has been to emphasize the tone of cynicism, sarcasm, and irony within youth culture of the time, specifically the grunge / alternative / slacker sub-culture.

Not that there isn't a grain of truth to that picture, but what was new and distinctive of the '90s was that this tone permeated the sub-culture's view of everything — not only was the overhyped cut down to size, so were the things that ought to have been respected, even by the sub-culture's own standards. Fuzzy '60s-era utopianism was met with only a cold raised eyebrow, but so too was any practical and non-ideological attempt to make things better. "Whatever" was the answer to, well, whatever. The tone was more nihilistic and disillusioned than merely ironic.

In contrast to the across-the-board sarcasm of the '90s, teenagers in the '80s reserved their eye-rolling for only what was pretentious. Funny as it may seem, the most visible — and audible — pioneers in this trend were the Valley girls, not proto-hipster wannabes. Some little nerdlinger presumes to ask out one of the cute popular girls: "Oh I'm like so sure!" Some aging hippie teacher tries to work her students up into a burst of cleansing synchronicity: "Ugh, get a job."

Barf me out.

Gag me with a spoon.

Fuck me gently with a chainsaw.

Those teenagers still felt enthusiasm for what truly deserved it — and not just bitchin' camaros, bodacious bods, and totally tubular tunes. Letting your guard down and sharing your life with friends, and belonging to an active social scene, were still earnest and sincere pursuits. This distinguishes the zeitgeist from one of "kill yr idols."

The tone of youth culture in the '80s, then, was fundamentally one of stabilization — letting the air out of the over-inflated, while showing appreciation for what we have taken for granted.

During the '90s, this would devolve into cutting down everyone and everything, reflecting the shift from an outgoing to a cocooning social mood. Now, it was all about the lone individual who was so much more world-weary than every other individual, and too cool to need to belong to a group with others, who would probably not be as stylishly aloof as he was anyways.

Generation X is unfortunately remembered more for their '90s nihilism, when their formative years were just as much a part of the eye-rolling Valley girl '80s.

They themselves remember growing up in the '80s, but the Boomer incumbents who write the official histories in the mass media have emphasized the anti-utopian 'tude of the '90s instead because it serves as a better foil for their own generation's identity as '60s idealists. And the airhead Millennials who drive traffic on BuzzFeed, Upworthy, etc. latch on to the slacker / alterna phase of Gen X because they're obsessed with their own origins as '90s kids, and are incurious about the time before they were being doted on as babies.

But the X-ers were sarcastic way before it was cool.