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 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"...
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 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:-)
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"...