According to one of my students at Yale, where I taught English in the last decade, a colleague of mine would tell his students that they belonged to a “post-emotional” generation. No anger, no edge, no ego.
What is this about? A rejection of culture-war strife? A principled desire to live more lightly on the planet? A matter of how they were raised ”” everybody’s special and everybody’s point of view is valid and everybody’s feelings should be taken care of?
Perhaps a bit of each, but mainly, I think, something else….
Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration ”” music, food, good works, what have you ”” is expressed in those terms.