A guy dropped in. With his round face and long overcoat, he gave the impression of two children, one standing on the other’s shoulders, who have teamed up so as to gain admission to an age-restricted movie. In his conversation, he always seemed to be skating over an abyss; he once told me “As our bodies get older, did you know they are actually cooking?”
One symptom (at least, in my humble opinion) of the transition from a Civilizing society towards an Informalizing society, is the loss, as a result, of a coherent sense of any continuity in history. The aping of the upper-class involved consciousness of hereditary background -- Your girlfriend is nice; who are her parents? -- and, writ large over society as a whole, the persistence of important historical events, even among the proletariat (Remember, Remember, the Fifth of September).
So a school-level joke book of my Boomer youth had the title, "1066 and All That".
The Informalizing process has taken concerns such as those not only out of the school curriculum but also out of social memory. Not only have we dropped History in favor of Social Studies (and now, apparently, Critical Race Dogma) but we also rename our schools and public buildings on behalf of micropopulations rather than former presidents and nationwide heroes.
In my home town of Portland, Oregon, Madison High School -- after the Father of the Constitution -- is now Leodis V. McDaniel High School (the gentleman was principal of the school for four years, back in the 1980s).
One symptom (at least, in my humble opinion) of the transition from a Civilizing society towards an Informalizing society, is the loss, as a result, of a coherent sense of any continuity in history. The aping of the upper-class involved consciousness of hereditary background -- Your girlfriend is nice; who are her parents? -- and, writ large over society as a whole, the persistence of important historical events, even among the proletariat (Remember, Remember, the Fifth of September).
So a school-level joke book of my Boomer youth had the title, "1066 and All That".
The Informalizing process has taken concerns such as those not only out of the school curriculum but also out of social memory. Not only have we dropped History in favor of Social Studies (and now, apparently, Critical Race Dogma) but we also rename our schools and public buildings on behalf of micropopulations rather than former presidents and nationwide heroes.
In my home town of Portland, Oregon, Madison High School -- after the Father of the Constitution -- is now Leodis V. McDaniel High School (the gentleman was principal of the school for four years, back in the 1980s).