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Friday, January 9, 2015

Post WWII generations would have changed our world even if they hadn't been a boomlet of kids

True, some of my primary school classrooms may have held close to thirty kids in them when the same classrooms in the decades before and after me might have held only around 15 , but that alone did nothing to make me and my fellow pupils fierce rebels against the values of the 500 years of generations before us.

What is the evidence, or the even the old fashioned appeal to timeless common sense, to support the absurd claim that bigger clumps of kids are more liberal/left wing than smaller clumps ?

No, what makes the pre WWII generations and post WWII generations so fundamentally different is one word : WWII .

My book is not going to focus on the physical cataclysm that was WWII : one or two (million) writers have already done so.

I wish to prove up, instead, just how truly great an intellectual cataclysm it was.

So much so, that pre WWII reads as 500 unbroken years of modernity and the enlightenment project & hegemony while post WWII was reads as postmodernity, hetro hegemony, commensality, plentitude, diversity et al.

We're probably stuck with this misleading 'boomer' moniker forever - but I will still try to make a case for re-naming it and its children's children 'the post WWII generations'.

I suspect a very good place to start is to compare the social values of the post WWII kids and their parents in nations that had almost no post WWII baby boom.

Even more interesting, would be to look at nations with almost no baby boom and who also remained Neutral during WWII ....

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