General Patton once observed, “If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.” What has come to be viewed as safe and irrefutable wisdom—namely, that cache of platitudes uncritically imbibed by the Baby-Boomer generation in their own time and then mechanically regurgitated by them as sacred truth, a one-size-fits-all miracle balm for all situations—is really a roadmap for how to be outfoxed by radicals and lose the culture in just a few short years. As sanctimonious as the Boomers have been in doling out their empty bromides, the critically thinking retrograde must be equally diligent in rejecting them.
Why the Boomers are comfortable scolding retrogrades for not closely adhering to their losing set of rules of engagement is anyone’s guess. Consider this: in just a couple of decades, from the 1960s to the 1970s, America’s culture was successfully coopted and transformed by a loud minority of strung out radicals while “conservative” Boomers, hamstrung by their ill-conceived sensibilities, offered mere token resistance, giving way at every turn. Twenty years’ time gave us no-fault divorce, abortion on demand, ubiquitous contraception, mainstream feminism, the working mother, religious indifferentism, the welfare state (in the form of the Great Society), draconian environmentalism, destigmatized drug-use and fornication, and a watershed federal piece of gun-control legislation (the Gun Control Act of 1968). Yet, conservative Boomers feign indignance when younger generations refuse to march in lock-step with their feckless advice. It’s like the Cleveland Browns demanding—with straight faces—that the rest of the NFL’s teams should make use of their playbook. No thanks; we’ll look elsewhere, anywhere else. Boomers, you failed us; your time is up. Kindly retire to the ignominy of the shadows and rid us of your bad ideas once and for all.
So what are examples of the sorts of Boomer-isms that are to be spurned with extreme prejudice? The list is long, but it’s worth producing some notable examples for posterity. Boomers are obsessed with cosmetics over substance: they insist on scolding retrogrades for the “tone” that we use when doing ideological battle against radicals. They have made “thou shalt be nice” into the eleventh commandment. They are constantly finger-wagging at zealous young retrogrades who proclaim truth with fiery speech. They insist that retrogrades must use a sanitized speaking style devoid of passion, devoid of flair, devoid of any hint of righteous anger about the iniquity of the left. They believe that it’s inherently sinful to use speech with teeth, to show ire, and to meet evil ideas with harsh rebuke, when, in fact, Thomas Aquinas teaches just the opposite (it’s disordered to not act on righteous anger, to let evil go undenounced, according to the Angelic Doctor).
Bold, clear, and sometimes angry speech is the only kind of speech that is effective in calling the hoi polloi out of the stupor into which they’ve been placed by the constant deluge of radical propaganda. If Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign shows us anything, it shows just how foolish the mindless Boomer attachment to anodyne speech really is. We were breathlessly told by conventional pundits during the course of the election that Trump would have to soften his tone to win the general election because “suburban women don’t like negativity.” In the wake of Trump’s resounding victory, have the talking heads recanted their flawed advice? Have they reconsidered their attachment to insipid, idle affirmation? Of course not. Nevertheless, what matters is what you say, not how you say it; don’t let anyone tell you differently. The biblical prophets and the apostles were caustic at times in delivering the good news, when the occasion called for it, when the actions of their flocks occasioned stern rebuke. Don’t let pusillanimous Boomers convince you that there is an inherently sinful tone—there isn’t. What matters is substance; style is prudential and individual. The mystical Body of Christ has many parts—some of us are called to be the killer-T cells. Perhaps, had the Boomers delivered more jeremiads in their own time, we would have been spared rampant societal cancers like abortion, feminism, and divorce.
Another self-evidently flawed Boomer-ism is that peaceability is inherently virtuous, that peace is an end in and of itself. Cowards never admit their cowardice—they always cloak it in the extravagant garb of magnanimity. When Boomers have sounded the call for retreat on a whole slew of pressing cultural and political ideas, they have always couched their decision to stop fighting “settled cultural battles” in a slavish commitment to national unity and peace. But as Christ himself tells us, peace isn’t to be embraced at the expense of justice—it is for this reason that he announced that he came to bring not peace but a sword. Not only is it not virtuous to roll over and accept radical victories in regard to fundamental cultural questions such as the protection of life, the preservation of marriage, and the unchecked expansion of a runaway federal government, it’s actually sinful. But Boomers have declared that their lack of fight on bellwether issues is actually noble. Don’t be deceived. Fighting isn’t inherently sinful. Sometimes it’s sinful not to fight.
Perhaps the most noxious Boomer-ism, the one most stridently and priggishly espoused, is that it’s inherently wrong to pronounce moral judgment on others. It has been said that an insufficient amount of Christianity is more dangerous than no Christianity at all. The campaign against “judging” others is proof of this. Sitting on their high horses, Boomers have ripped out of context and weaponized one of the few Bible verses that the lukewarm actually know, to the detriment of Christ and his Church, truth, and Western culture.
Where Christ exhorts “Judge not, that you be not judged,” he’s certainly not telling us to refrain from labeling certain agents and actions as “good” and others as “evil.” If he were, then he couldn’t, without contradicting himself, instruct us elsewhere to “Judge with right judgment” and “If your brother sins against you, rebuke him.” What Christ is telling us is to not presume to condemn others, pronouncing definitive judgment on the eternal destination of their souls, since this is God’s prerogative. He’s also telling us not to harp on the relatively small flaws of others to the neglect of our own larger flaws. However, the righteous man, whose flaws are relatively benign compared with the vices of baser men, actually has a duty to correct others. This is why the Church has long recognized that “admonishing the sinner” is one of the spiritual works of mercy. Not only should we not refrain from making moral judgments about others, we are actually bound in our consciences to make such judgments in order to guide the culture in a just direction and to care for the souls of our fellow men. One must affirmatively distinguish what is good from what is evil in order to know what to do and what not to do, to know what to vote for and what not to vote for, to know when to celebrate and when to fight, and to know who is good and who is bad. To deliberately abstain from making moral judgments about agents and actions is to embrace moral relativism (the arch-heresy of heresies), the denial of objective truth itself.
While it is impossible to, here, compile a plenary list of the various and sundry false platitudes that together constitute the platform of “conventional wisdom,” one should be guided by the rule “common sense is not so common.” Whatever advice is rendered to the retrograde, he must take pains to examine it critically before heeding it. No “rule” is to be considered beyond reproach, save those reflecting the eternal moral law. We must, therefore, be inquisitive of the track record of every dispensary of advice. If he is reciting the playbook of an unsuccessful era, we must be firm and loud in our rejection of his ideas. To draw from an axiom that is based in truth, it is insanity to do the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. If we do not allow ourselves to be quagmired by sacrosanct tropes from the past, we have a better chance of winning back the culture of the future. Think critically and stay sharp. Never be content to be part of the herd.