Let the golden age begin

“Welcome to the new age,” as Imagine Dragons sings, and so here we are. It is a strange and uncanny time, as befits the long-deferred rise to power of America’s strange and special Gen X cohort. They are a generation — especially the so-called Xennials on the cusp — for whom the drama of their lives has entailed a special kind of mystical belief and experience.

While the mysticism of the standard Millennial is still of the kids’ table variety — Harry Potter and the zodiac of identity – and the Boomer variety remains, now more than ever, one that leverages radical skepticism toward authority with credulous speculation, Xers as a whole have always found themselves in the shadowy borderlands between the two.

Gen X is more skeptical than Boomers and Millennials about the magic of imagination, yet more savvy about the power of meme magic. They’re more attuned to the spiritual pull of technology, whether utopian or dystopian, yet distinctly more attracted to the high-church Christianity that stands as the last bulwark against the post-human gnostic heresies that tempt their elders and youngers.

For these reasons, I have flagged the importance to future human events of the relationship between Gen Xers and their children, who straddle the ostensible generational divide between Zoomers and Alphas. In "Human Forever," I wrote that generations as Boomers understand them ain’t what they used to be, in large part because the triumph of digital technology over the intimacies of everyday life has aroused spiritual sensibilities to which people are now increasingly drawn regardless of age or cohort.

I don’t get everything right — God forbid — but here I’ve been vindicated. The Trump coalition is dominated spiritually and generationally by the Xer-Zoomer alliance, and because of this, the varieties of spiritual mysticism among Gen X men and their heirs are weighing heavily in the balance amid the onrushing future of technological advancements so profound and pervasive that only trustworthy spiritual authorities can rise above it to guide the many lost, confused, exhausted, battered, broken, and tempted among us.

Same as it ever was, of course. It has always been thus with trustworthy spiritual authorities — the only difference is the rejection and rebellion against them taken up in earnest over the course of modern Western history. That approach has clearly burned itself out, with the remaining well-organized options being, for the vast majority of Americans, two: the out-and-out worship of tech or the worship of God under the guidance of the church’s spiritual authorities.

The X-Z alliance has an outsized influence and responsibility in choosing carefully — not just because of their dominance in the Trump era, but because America can’t endure if Americans succumb to the theocratic temptation, whether in the form of an empire with an established church of tech or in a turbo-trad throne-and-scepter Leviathan.

Nor will things shake out too well if, instead of these established churches, the many simply lose confidence in “the American idea” and run for the exits — into the kinds of techno monasteries Elon Musk has referred to in typical winking fashion or into the real and ancient monasteries. I believe it’s very likely that lots of people will go into these latter monasteries and that the ancient church must be more than ready to receive them. But the life of the monastery is just about the total opposite of the life of the American dream, and in pain and love for the American people, the sudden implosion of American socioeconomic order can’t be desired or encouraged.

For that reason, ruling Xers, particularly those drawn to high-church Christianity, must take their people where they find them and avoid thrusting them into strange and new situations to which they are unaccustomed and which will break them instead of guide them. Even one small step in a scary direction is a profound spiritual and practical challenge, and it is in this way that people are most often led toward reliable and lasting improvement.

But this is tough counsel for Xers who understand that we are in a long-overdue regime change or refounding moment, when swift and decisive action really does seem to be necessary on a paradoxically prudential basis. The same goes for Xers who grasp that the technological leap that must be made to compensate for the precipitous decay in America of basic competence and functionality is a practical necessity given the ugly alternatives — such as the uncontrolled demolition of the so-called “global American empire,” which would introduce a degree of chaos at home and abroad that seems sure to spiral swiftly into anarchy or oblivion.

And yet one more difficulty intrudes. Even more troubling than the prospect of catastrophic meltdown is that of a golden age in the bad sense, that of an artificial Avalon constructed by an AI-powered antichrist. The bad or satanic golden age is actually now more plausible, and the apocalyptic end the church anticipates when the logic of simulating God (the better to replace him) is pushed to the limit now looms even in the minds of some of the leading tech figures, such as Peter Thiel.

So our ruling Xers find themselves faced with the double challenge of avoiding false Avalon and real apocalypse — all while preserving America instead of forcing it back to Old World forms or simulating it (the better to replace it) in cyberspace or on Mars ... without entombing America in a kind of sociopolitical embalming fluid.

Glad it’s not my job, as I sometimes like to joke. And yet in a very real sense, it is all of our jobs — especially those of us Xers who know from long experience that life simply cannot be reduced to mathematical technique or to power politics, even though these things cannot be expunged from the world through sheer force of intelligence or will. Many such Xers have themselves reached a midlife point at which the intellectual pursuits they adopted to survive the cataclysmic sequence of 9/11, the financial crisis, and the COVID lockdowns now seem inadequate to the moment. People really are getting burned out on merely intellectual content — and the expert explainers, critics, interpreters, and talkers who churn it out instant by instant.

The intellectuals, even those who are the most right most of the time about the most things, just can’t do what needs to be done to escape the bad golden age — in fact, they are leading us all too much, whether intentionally or not, toward just that future. To forge ahead in the right directions, fruitful directions, we need people with competence and clarity not just in intellectual and spiritual pursuits but in artistic ones. Soulful art that scales is what gives the many the ability to transition to what is coming in a way they can survive — gaining confidence, courage, and health relatively gradually at a time that seems always to be screaming at them for the kind of immediate radical transformation that shatters people instead of sculpting them.

Of course, art can induce cathartic change — that’s one of the main reasons people often seek it out. But far more important is that art communicates in ways people are starved for: in silence, in mood, in subtext, in the implicit, without explicit elaboration or expert explanation. This is, of course, the mode of communication that is ultimately to be found and sought out in communion with God and in church life, whether in the cathedral or in the monastery. But if it vanishes from public life, our social communication will be dominated by will and intelligence alone, and our given humanity will swiftly disappear or become unrecognizable.

Tacitly, almost instinctively, artists understand this. Unfortunately, art over the past decade or more has become so colonized by ideology or false idol worship that many have lost faith in the ability of artists to serve, as Marshall McLuhan said, as society’s “early warning systems,” or to share, as Andrei Tarkovsky said, “the misery and joy of bringing an image into being.”

Beck, one of the great Gen X artists, understood this well, and expressed it implicitly in “The Golden Age,” the opening track off of "Sea Change," his sumptuous and desolate record, also suitably titled for our moment.

“Put your hands on the wheel,” he sings. “Let the golden age begin.” Initially, it seems fabulous, freeing: “Let the window down, feel the moonlight on your skin / The desert wind cool your aching head / The weight of the world drift away instead.” But the good aspect of his golden age is tangled with the bad, in a way no man can tease apart: “It's a treacherous road with a desolated view / There's distant lights, but here they're far and few / The sun don't shine, even when it's day / Gotta drive all night just to feel like you're OK.”

In typical Gen-X style, Beck wrote these lines about a breakup. But they apply now to the specter of a national, social, personal, and spiritual crack-up. So much fear of the bad golden age permeates life, and so many explicators and elaborators focus our attention on the prospects of fighting the fire of will and intelligence with the fire of will and intelligence.

The church, by contrast, conveys to us that the push for golden ages, with all the good and bad they bring, will never end until the end times, which will come at a time none of us may know. It is safe to assume that technology will advance, that wild doctrines will proliferate, that people will do what we do as we always have, just all the more so. In this sense, and not just the celebratory one, it is time to let the golden age begin — and to focus, not only through will and intelligence but through art and soul — on surviving and thriving amid it, come what may.