Things we lost along the way....

I read a couple of books on the 60s and once again I was struck by the contrast between the social responses by the people in general and the youth in particular between then and now. True, movements haven’t ceased to exist, in fact they have grown and today they encompass a wide range of issues, many of which owe their origin or inspiration from the vanguard movements of the 60’s. And in fact they cover even more issues than before, the fight for recognition of homosexuality is one….but many of them have been relegated to niche issues and concentrating on small term victories.

But the main contrasts and the reasons are the middle class and the media…lets take up one at a time…..because all other contrasts can be drawn from these two…..

The middle class is something which is becoming increasingly difficult to define and delineate for me. Who or what is a middle class?

The middle class arose out of the mercantile capitalism of the industrial revolution, an educated class of people who had an interest in overthrowing the feudal order (the aristocracy) in order to gain more power. Over the years, it was more or less achieved, either through violent revolutions or peaceful transitions (the various republican revolutions like the French revolution is an example of the former). Either way, the middle class rose to fill the vacuum left by the aristocracy whether in terms of formulation of government policy (since most aristocracies became systems more or less looking like democracies) or in terms of patronization of arts (again through the government).

But more importantly, the middle class became an engine of ideas. This became a catalyst for the next cycle of historical change when part of the middle class (mostly the industrial owners) started adopting ways of the overthrown order and the ones who had not (the professional class) began to become radicalized in various degrees over time and called for the overthrowing of the former (now dubbed capitalists) and calling for rule of the latter (proletariat) and this became the socialist or the communist movement. The nature of various revolutions may have varied and over time became more complex (e.g. the Russian revolution was a revolution by the industrial workers but the Chinese revolution was an agrarian revolution, both of which have historical reasons) but in most cases and in areas where a complete revolution never took place, the middle class (which may or may not have been the classical proletariat) played a major role in dissemination of ideas and in vanguard action.

In America (whose 60’s era has the most recall value, which of course does not mean that it was the most important), a deep fissure occurred between two generations which radicalized the whole country and generated much hope of positive change (of which many did occur but most did not). The cultural innovations that took place during this era (short though it was) in terms of music, cinema, literature was phenomenal but the most important change was the acceptance and experimentation with new and even radial ideas. The middle class was the main agent of change in all these and not only in USA but in the Latin American, the Arab, Asian and the African world as well.




The media as we know it today must have had its origin during the same time as the rise of the middle class since it provided for one of the main feature of the middle class – knowledge which was believed to be their main strength and which was a part and parcel of the Renaissance. I am hazy about the history of media as such but I do believe that the nature of the media must have experienced a big change during the great technological innovations starting from the mid 19th century starting from telegraphs, postal facilities and later telephones and radio. The last must have let media make a giant leap from mere written words to voice. Television of course later changed the picture drastically. The media in all its form played a big role in providing for the need for knowledge among the people trying to make sense of a world becoming increasingly complex. The newspaper became a support system by which the people could understand the issues around them. It helped make or break opinions and the best among the newspapers helped mold the arguments for or against the contentious issues (in their time) in an objective manner which have since changed the way we approach these issues (abortion and other women rights for example).

This era also produced the best journalists and the ideal of journalism was born during this time, an ideal of fierce independence from any side, an ideal of reporting for the public good, an ideal of reporting no matter what the issue and no matter who in power. Of course, there were exceptions and sensationalism was there but not in the form or degree as we see it today and not at the sake of reporting and analysis.

The fact that the last century was perhaps a century of much upheaval was a cause and reason for the rapid rise of media as an integral part of our life……
For most of its history, most of them media was non-partisan and usually had a flavour of anti-establishment, perhaps because they were run by people who were fiercely independent and were also a product of their age, an age of swirling radical ideas and also because they had people employed who too subscribed to the general anti-establishment ideas of the age. Since the media had started to become a major opinion maker, the stance taken by the media (and not only the most circulated newspapers but also many small independent media entities) had a major impact on the way the people, especially the youth thought and saw themselves.




Now, however, the media has become an entity which caters to the lowest common denominator. In its quest for profits and success, it has begun to emulate and resemble those entities which it once fought. It is has come to this, that news, real news and analysis is considered boring and something that the general public could go without. Instead it peddles wares for vicarious pleasures. Its reporting is relegated to statistics (which have a notorious ability to change form according to what one wishes) and mere reporting of facts, increasingly without comments. Its analysis is being confined to speculation of marriage between celebrities (or their breakups). When reporting events, the events are shown to be springing out of nowhere, without historical reasons or precedents as to why or how (maybe because the writer himself/herself does not know). It employs people proficient in Photoshop but weak in history, social or political. In the end, it has become, in a world increasingly obsessed with consumption of commodities, a commodity to consumed itself.

Television has played a major role in this, by providing a visual outlet for ideas which has more or less an advertisers paradise (advertising has become embedded in movies and soaps as well, in its newest avatar). Since television provides a more or less complete sensory experience, it has become a major part of our waking hours and it has dethroned the written word in dissemination of ideas, but it is a well known fact that fleeting images (the technology of Television) leads to lesser retention than non-moving words (books and written word), so the dissemination is powerful if the imagery is powerful, which given the high cost of television broadcast, can be managed by few. So then, it becomes the bastion of the advertisers who peddle their wares and not for the person who wants to speak his piece (unless he is Donald Trump, then he can have his own very show). This itself has led to the unbelievable speed of commodification that we see around us.




And whether the middle class today is made by the media or media made by it, is difficult to tell. Perhaps a person with greater insight than I can answer that but for me it seems, it is somewhere between. It has become increasingly common for the youth today to harp on tradition, without questioning whether that indeed is a heritage to be cherished or not. A belief that parents are right on all issues is becoming more prevalent without considering that our parents might be victims of prejudices themselves, which we would do well to be without.

We claim our freedom by becoming bolder in expressing our feelings for the other sex yet we fail to see that the expression itself has become commoditized to a large extent. We claim our freedom by claiming that we are more independent in career choice but we fail to ask ourselves (or perhaps we ask ourselves for some time and then move on with some learned justification, however specious) whether the cost of ‘getting there’ was worth it, we fail to ask whether what we are doing makes our world any safer for those who come after us (or perhaps that posture has itself become an oxymoron today when we live as if there is no tomorrow).

Our rebellion is confined to wearing T-shirts with wise cracks on them or perhaps for the more ‘intellectually cool’, a T-shirt with Che on it. And yet, asked about the major problems facing the world today, we would be fumbling to give an answer of any measurable depth, the answers confined to clichés and phrases and half baked opinions picked up from popular magazines.




Why has this come to pass? Why has the youth celebrated on TIME cover in the late 60s (’68 I think) degenerated into a mass consuming class without trying to understand where or how the consumed goods come from?

I think that therein lies the answer which implicates both the youth and the media. The youth put on the TIME cover became a commodity itself. Rebellion and free expression became packaged and were sold back in forms that can be consumed. The ones who came after the initial wave of authenticity seekers (like the ones who traveled to Greenwood village in New York), craved for authenticity themselves and these provided for the target audience who can be sold radical ideas but repackaged and labeled. The impatience to be ‘in’ and to get a feeling of authenticity themselves was to prove the undoing.

The 70’s drug culture was more media created than we would like to think. Bob Dylan understood it and poured out his feelings in his songs but it was not enough, the march towards commodification had begun and the media followed suit. The media labeled this as ‘cool’ and that as ‘uncool’, which was then endorsed by people who had to sell products. And the people who wanted the feeling of rebellion in them but unwilling to follow the hard path of self-discovery caught hold of media-endorsed products as short-cut to that feeling. Magazines which provided short easily consumable nuggets began to replace books and then books themselves began to resemble magazines (a trend which has reversed to a small extent but still it needs a long way to go).



What that resulted in was a vicious cycle where the media gave the people what they thought was needed to fulfill their desires and the people encouraged it by consuming the same. And with material prosperity reaching the shores of middle class homes in many parts of the world, the ability and thus the want (however manufactured that want might be) to possess goods and commodities became acute. Mark it, material prosperity is in itself a healthy sign, but not at the cost of the atrophy of mind and emotions. But atrophy it is becoming.

And with this has come cynicism, cynicism of the state of the world, which we know is seriously imbalanced. But with the deluge of information from all sides (mark it, it takes effort to wean out knowledge from information), we have tended to view the world as something which cant be changed much or worse, that the effort to do so is not worth it, since there are already people to do the job, the ones we elected (without stopping to question how our imperfect democracy can be made better).

Thus cynicism and commodification of everything in our lives and the constant effort that is made to manufacture the feeling that consumption of goods is a birthright has led to the fall of what is perhaps man’s highest purpose (without meaning to sound pompous) – self discovery and also to the fall of something that has led to the progress of civilization – the need for questioning, questioning ourselves and the world around us. We are being made to believe that this is the best we can do and whatever events are happening are being taken care of and that those events won’t really affect us and we are buying that as well. Those who question or protest are looked at with incomprehension or worse as madmen.

That is not to say, that protests have stopped. They haven’t and they have become more sophisticated but many times the protest itself assumes the character of what they are fighting and many times, no real solution is provided and ultimately protest becomes another commodity to wear up your sleeves. There are genuine protests of course but they don’t get the attention nor the understanding they warrant.




So then, who is to blame? Commerce did what it does, look for areas of profit and so really cannot be blamed. Its we, the youth and the media who need to take the blame for failing to differentiate between commodities and ideas, differentiate between what can be bought and those, when bought loses its meaning altogether. We need to take the blame for believing that rebellion is a T-shirt, that music is a video and that anything that cannot be felt or heard or read does not exist.

There are ways out of this of course but that is something I hope to tackle sometime later. But if one would require a one-liner answer (as we with our ever-decreasing attention span seem to prefer), how about this from Bob Dylan? When asked (in 1966) as to what advice he would give the youth, Dylan’s curt reply was “keep a good head and keep a light on”. If there is wisdom, it is in these lines.....