I am so happy to have discovered you and your writings! I am a life long resident of Western PA. Born and raised in a small rural factory town 30 miles outside of Pittsburgh. I married and started a family and have lived in an affluent suburb very close to downtown for 20 yrs. Sad to report that the small rust belt towns outside of Pittsburgh are struggling mightily in their attempts to adapt and survive.
“ I routinely notice a postmodern-infused appearance to many individuals I see in passing that did not exist—certainly not at a sensory-threshold awareness level as this—previously.”
I had this exact experience and I remember precisely the first time. 5 years ago our little family decided to spend a day in Lawrenceville during the holiday season. We parked the car and started to walk through the area. I immediately felt a little out of place. My husband and I are Gen-X and our daughter at the time was 15. The majority of people I saw were young millennial families and couples and most definitely hipster aesthetic in dress, piercings and ink. Our teen was the one who suggested the trek, enamored with all things “hipster” at the time. I felt so out of place. We experienced the same thing when we visited Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn NY, except with far more hostile glares. 😂 I thought maybe I was imagining it but now I feel validated. It was more than a generation gap thing. It’s a seemingly vast difference in lifestyle, culture, values and beliefs.
I definitely have experienced and witnessed changes to our city as well as our current suburb over the past 20 yrs. Politically left PMC has definitely taken over in our area.
One thing I find intersting is the political shift of election results in our suburb. In 2008 and 2012 the divides were more narrow R 45% D 54% -2016 R 36% D 63% 2020 R 32% D 67%
We had a contentious school board election this last year and the D team won. I am relieved our daughter has graduated but of course still have concerns over her university experiences.
As a parent it’s felt at times downright treacherous to navigate the rapid shifts in culture. It still does.
As someone who until very recently lived in PGH, I mostly don't see it as a Successor Ideology city. That one story about the Whole Foods is entirely cherry-picked considering the rapid rate of construction in the Strip, Lawrenceville, and East Liberty; the YIMBY signs everywhere in Shadyside; and the anti-Successor Ideology engineers throughout the city. Gainey winning the primary aside (and I was against him), I feel optimistic for the city long-term because of the largely international, STEM bent of the transplants here.
This is interesting. Where I live - just beyond city limits yet urban suburban -they espouse the values but currently a NIMBY movement happening right now regarding the building of affordable town homes/condos. The signs in the yards say “All Are Welcome” -but only if you can afford the existing price of entry.
I guess I am not following. STEM transplants certainly can work against the grain of Successor Ideological ethos saturation, but we then have to distinguish individuals within STEM. I think the Tech in STEM is the vector of Successor Ideology most influential, FWIW. The Silicon Valley mindset. Construction itself does not necessarily equate to anti-Successor Ideology. But this is good counterpoise for sure.
Yes, although admittedly, the folks who live in the areas that have the most construction and are considered transplant hotspots (Oakland + East Liberty + the Strip + Lawrenceville) all went Gainey (I'd actually argue that the Gainey vs. Peduto split is actually the best bellweather for support for successor ideology). I often think of Pittsburgh as heading in the direction of SF without the liberal arts majors, but I don't know where that leads us. I haven't really sorted it out FWIW.
(Point was that the PGH techies in robotics are much less into successor ideology than the SF & Valley techies in social, but considering voting patterns I might take that back)
This is a thought-provoking essay - & a great inaugural piece to launch your (ad)venture. Focusing your inquiry on the effect of these changes at the city level is a great device to illuminate features that often remain imperceptible. Much food for thought, and hopefully further discussion:-)
More generally / deeply, IMHO there is another explanatory trend that might go as deep or deeper: The left has, after 60 years, stepwise implemented "the social is political", creeping through our institutions to gain control of the forces of socialization -- i.e., how to fit in or belong in society and "be cool". This hijacking of social development has led to the modern left construing issues almost entirely not a priori in conceptual terms, but rather in social cachet terms, i.e. not what a policy position is but who espouses it. This leads to an enormously nihilistic interpersonal nastiness, because all of the big-power amperage of politics is driven into the realm of personal social relations, embittering people and persecuting the heretics as social misfits, the terminally uncool, etc...
Following this line out, the massive fear of a label like "transphobe" is not firstly guilt -- as that would imply a moral order was being imposed via a catechism -- but rather firstly shame, i.e. the projection of social contamination and the playing on humanity's ancient fears of ostracization and exile (the Greeks thought this as bad as death).
IMHO what you and Mr. Yang are describing are profound changes, but also coterminous if not even derivative from this "rule by social cachet". After all, as you point out, intellectual rigor is cheaply derided as a white male perquisite and archaicism.
However I would hold that the cheap, thin, palpably absurd identitarianism that has swept our institutions is more like a "greedy algorithm", whereby the laziest but most effective intellectual path that can enable those in power to use the billy club to socially intimidate people is what is picked up. The point is the coercion into a larger superstructure of social lockstep, a monolith policed viciously and violently, which probably at its psychological root is a fear of individual mortality and facing our responsibilities as discrete adults -- an amniotic return to the womblike security of the mob.
It's not just that todays' artists' ideas are derivative and philistine; it is that they have no courage, none of the bravado of Wilde, and that they seek a faux profundity in parroting the ubiquitous bourgeois nostrums that a tiny number of the true psychopaths impart to burn down civilization, to "watch the world burn"...
Many thanks for this insightful reflection and the notion of 'rule by social cachet' which I find very compelling. I would add it is a sort of 'social *moral* cachet' which, ironically, is morally bankrupt. This would be consistent with your observation of a 'faux profundity' in today's pseudo-artists.
I don't mean to gainsay the many fine complex threads you have adduced here; of course social cachet can't explain many of the economic shifts that have dislocated society via globalization.
What I do mean to suggest is perhaps the elite left is taken too seriously if we treat it too syllogistically. It seems to me that peer pressure is exponentially more operative beneath the surface of the left's main creeds -- identitarianism, statism, and environmentalism -- than in today's right's desire for decentralization and de-bureaucratization.
If one takes two of the most brilliant syllogists of the left today, Steven Pinker and Sam Harris, I always find them less persuasive when they turn to weighing the comparable threats from the hard left and the hard right circa 2020. Of course my geiger counter for objective truth could be off, but assuming for the moment something is amiss, it's hard not to put that missing delta in their work down to the social cachet pressures of being "too strident" in their apostasies for the circles in which they are still ensconced...
Along with the now well-ventilated thesis that the left channeled class into race after losing the Cold War fair and square, one tends to see the present cultural revolution as purely about power and not ideas.
E.g. is it really reasonable to suppose above average intelligent people cannot detect the holes in identity politics or the way the left prates on about a climate crisis? Is it really plausible that people of good faith and reasonable intellect cannot sense the gaping lacunae of yawning social taboos that prevent an obvious and easy logical rejoinder from one's interlocutor, due to a terror of rapid, spiraling social anathematization?
It is very difficult for me -- who strives to be fair and even-keeled -- to not attribute bad faith over such tediously drawn straw men as we hear today in argument say about the police. I'm left with the impression that the deeper proclivity to collectivism is an aversion to facing questions about one's own mortality, life as an independent adult, and front the essential pain and naked realities of adult existence. This thesis too would explain why so much of leftism is callow and adolescent, often scatological in humor, nihilistic and jaded.
It might also explain why the left seems adept at "solutions" like open borders that avert any hard surface of unaesthetic pain up front, even though the complications and misery of such chaos probably produce far more human suffering in toto in the long run by making countries on both sides of the border less democratically accountable to their respective polities, and hence the world less rational and democratic.
The avoidance of adult cost-benefit analysis is again seen in covid. There is I agree an elite that wants to secede and depend on a new service class. But I would also say that the self-infantilization and prolonged adolescence of the left leads to an avoidance of simply braving the disease the way humanity has in stoic terms for 100,000 years+.
Peterson has hit on the left's desire for a totalizing mother, an all-seeing state. I would add that the seeking after one-party rule is partly to deny the inborn agon that Paglia has recognized as essential to political and social life. But sublimating all those tensions into a worship of the state, the modern left has completely fused the Social Self with the Political Self, leading to a terrifying incest that seeks to ever demolish nuance and individuality in argument and replace the discourse of ideas with a frightened and frightening system of social cues.
Hence ideas per se matter far less than a Pangaea-like social belonging.
I am so happy to have discovered you and your writings! I am a life long resident of Western PA. Born and raised in a small rural factory town 30 miles outside of Pittsburgh. I married and started a family and have lived in an affluent suburb very close to downtown for 20 yrs. Sad to report that the small rust belt towns outside of Pittsburgh are struggling mightily in their attempts to adapt and survive.
“ I routinely notice a postmodern-infused appearance to many individuals I see in passing that did not exist—certainly not at a sensory-threshold awareness level as this—previously.”
I had this exact experience and I remember precisely the first time. 5 years ago our little family decided to spend a day in Lawrenceville during the holiday season. We parked the car and started to walk through the area. I immediately felt a little out of place. My husband and I are Gen-X and our daughter at the time was 15. The majority of people I saw were young millennial families and couples and most definitely hipster aesthetic in dress, piercings and ink. Our teen was the one who suggested the trek, enamored with all things “hipster” at the time. I felt so out of place. We experienced the same thing when we visited Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn NY, except with far more hostile glares. 😂 I thought maybe I was imagining it but now I feel validated. It was more than a generation gap thing. It’s a seemingly vast difference in lifestyle, culture, values and beliefs.
I definitely have experienced and witnessed changes to our city as well as our current suburb over the past 20 yrs. Politically left PMC has definitely taken over in our area.
One thing I find intersting is the political shift of election results in our suburb. In 2008 and 2012 the divides were more narrow R 45% D 54% -2016 R 36% D 63% 2020 R 32% D 67%
We had a contentious school board election this last year and the D team won. I am relieved our daughter has graduated but of course still have concerns over her university experiences.
As a parent it’s felt at times downright treacherous to navigate the rapid shifts in culture. It still does.
As someone who until very recently lived in PGH, I mostly don't see it as a Successor Ideology city. That one story about the Whole Foods is entirely cherry-picked considering the rapid rate of construction in the Strip, Lawrenceville, and East Liberty; the YIMBY signs everywhere in Shadyside; and the anti-Successor Ideology engineers throughout the city. Gainey winning the primary aside (and I was against him), I feel optimistic for the city long-term because of the largely international, STEM bent of the transplants here.
YIMBY signs?
Yes in my backyard (i.e. we want dense housing near us). Sign here: http://jonahblumstein.net/pgh_yimby_sign.jpg
This is interesting. Where I live - just beyond city limits yet urban suburban -they espouse the values but currently a NIMBY movement happening right now regarding the building of affordable town homes/condos. The signs in the yards say “All Are Welcome” -but only if you can afford the existing price of entry.
I guess I am not following. STEM transplants certainly can work against the grain of Successor Ideological ethos saturation, but we then have to distinguish individuals within STEM. I think the Tech in STEM is the vector of Successor Ideology most influential, FWIW. The Silicon Valley mindset. Construction itself does not necessarily equate to anti-Successor Ideology. But this is good counterpoise for sure.
Yes, although admittedly, the folks who live in the areas that have the most construction and are considered transplant hotspots (Oakland + East Liberty + the Strip + Lawrenceville) all went Gainey (I'd actually argue that the Gainey vs. Peduto split is actually the best bellweather for support for successor ideology). I often think of Pittsburgh as heading in the direction of SF without the liberal arts majors, but I don't know where that leads us. I haven't really sorted it out FWIW.
Peduto vs. Gainey map: https://twitter.com/phillip_wu/status/1395158325835227140
Out of curiosity, what's your connection to Pittsburgh?
Family is here. Largely grew up here and this is my home now. So, since birth, have essentially 'lived' in Pittsburgh.
(Point was that the PGH techies in robotics are much less into successor ideology than the SF & Valley techies in social, but considering voting patterns I might take that back)
This is a thought-provoking essay - & a great inaugural piece to launch your (ad)venture. Focusing your inquiry on the effect of these changes at the city level is a great device to illuminate features that often remain imperceptible. Much food for thought, and hopefully further discussion:-)
Thank you April! Look forward to your future thoughts and dialogue on these issues.
This is a very fine entry into Substack, congrats!
Your piece cogently tracks a number of salient ideas defining our era. You might also link in the decline in average male testosterone:
https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/04/test-of-the-american-man/
More generally / deeply, IMHO there is another explanatory trend that might go as deep or deeper: The left has, after 60 years, stepwise implemented "the social is political", creeping through our institutions to gain control of the forces of socialization -- i.e., how to fit in or belong in society and "be cool". This hijacking of social development has led to the modern left construing issues almost entirely not a priori in conceptual terms, but rather in social cachet terms, i.e. not what a policy position is but who espouses it. This leads to an enormously nihilistic interpersonal nastiness, because all of the big-power amperage of politics is driven into the realm of personal social relations, embittering people and persecuting the heretics as social misfits, the terminally uncool, etc...
Following this line out, the massive fear of a label like "transphobe" is not firstly guilt -- as that would imply a moral order was being imposed via a catechism -- but rather firstly shame, i.e. the projection of social contamination and the playing on humanity's ancient fears of ostracization and exile (the Greeks thought this as bad as death).
IMHO what you and Mr. Yang are describing are profound changes, but also coterminous if not even derivative from this "rule by social cachet". After all, as you point out, intellectual rigor is cheaply derided as a white male perquisite and archaicism.
However I would hold that the cheap, thin, palpably absurd identitarianism that has swept our institutions is more like a "greedy algorithm", whereby the laziest but most effective intellectual path that can enable those in power to use the billy club to socially intimidate people is what is picked up. The point is the coercion into a larger superstructure of social lockstep, a monolith policed viciously and violently, which probably at its psychological root is a fear of individual mortality and facing our responsibilities as discrete adults -- an amniotic return to the womblike security of the mob.
It's not just that todays' artists' ideas are derivative and philistine; it is that they have no courage, none of the bravado of Wilde, and that they seek a faux profundity in parroting the ubiquitous bourgeois nostrums that a tiny number of the true psychopaths impart to burn down civilization, to "watch the world burn"...
Many thanks for this insightful reflection and the notion of 'rule by social cachet' which I find very compelling. I would add it is a sort of 'social *moral* cachet' which, ironically, is morally bankrupt. This would be consistent with your observation of a 'faux profundity' in today's pseudo-artists.
I don't mean to gainsay the many fine complex threads you have adduced here; of course social cachet can't explain many of the economic shifts that have dislocated society via globalization.
What I do mean to suggest is perhaps the elite left is taken too seriously if we treat it too syllogistically. It seems to me that peer pressure is exponentially more operative beneath the surface of the left's main creeds -- identitarianism, statism, and environmentalism -- than in today's right's desire for decentralization and de-bureaucratization.
If one takes two of the most brilliant syllogists of the left today, Steven Pinker and Sam Harris, I always find them less persuasive when they turn to weighing the comparable threats from the hard left and the hard right circa 2020. Of course my geiger counter for objective truth could be off, but assuming for the moment something is amiss, it's hard not to put that missing delta in their work down to the social cachet pressures of being "too strident" in their apostasies for the circles in which they are still ensconced...
Along with the now well-ventilated thesis that the left channeled class into race after losing the Cold War fair and square, one tends to see the present cultural revolution as purely about power and not ideas.
E.g. is it really reasonable to suppose above average intelligent people cannot detect the holes in identity politics or the way the left prates on about a climate crisis? Is it really plausible that people of good faith and reasonable intellect cannot sense the gaping lacunae of yawning social taboos that prevent an obvious and easy logical rejoinder from one's interlocutor, due to a terror of rapid, spiraling social anathematization?
It is very difficult for me -- who strives to be fair and even-keeled -- to not attribute bad faith over such tediously drawn straw men as we hear today in argument say about the police. I'm left with the impression that the deeper proclivity to collectivism is an aversion to facing questions about one's own mortality, life as an independent adult, and front the essential pain and naked realities of adult existence. This thesis too would explain why so much of leftism is callow and adolescent, often scatological in humor, nihilistic and jaded.
It might also explain why the left seems adept at "solutions" like open borders that avert any hard surface of unaesthetic pain up front, even though the complications and misery of such chaos probably produce far more human suffering in toto in the long run by making countries on both sides of the border less democratically accountable to their respective polities, and hence the world less rational and democratic.
The avoidance of adult cost-benefit analysis is again seen in covid. There is I agree an elite that wants to secede and depend on a new service class. But I would also say that the self-infantilization and prolonged adolescence of the left leads to an avoidance of simply braving the disease the way humanity has in stoic terms for 100,000 years+.
Peterson has hit on the left's desire for a totalizing mother, an all-seeing state. I would add that the seeking after one-party rule is partly to deny the inborn agon that Paglia has recognized as essential to political and social life. But sublimating all those tensions into a worship of the state, the modern left has completely fused the Social Self with the Political Self, leading to a terrifying incest that seeks to ever demolish nuance and individuality in argument and replace the discourse of ideas with a frightened and frightening system of social cues.
Hence ideas per se matter far less than a Pangaea-like social belonging.