There’s a year-zero tinge to a lot of the progressive intelligentsia – not the lit majors, but the kind of pop social-science academics and academic-adjacent types who show up as experts on cable news. You see any books older than the mid 20th century described as written by DWEMs (dead white European males) or “stale, male, and pale”.

For instance, Arwa Mahdawi in the Guardian dismisses the Odyssey as “a poem written by a dead man”. I wonder what would happen if I moved to Beijing and wrote a column calling the Tao Te Ching a “2000-year-old book written by a dead Chinaman” in the leading alternative daily.

That’s an extreme example, but in this country a hundred years is seen as really old and the bad side of any older time is shown exclusively, as if there’s no bad side to today or tomorrow or tomorrow. In addition there’s the “Fleetwood Mac fallacy” where tomorrow is held to be better than today simply by virtue of its coming later, as if human progress is an unbreakable incline and lifts all boats, and the reverse of that same sentiment. Old is oppressive, boring, untechnological. But there was a “tomorrow” in October 1929, too.

I blame the hippies.