Culture

There is a collective hallucination currently infecting our cultural memory. If you listen to modern media or scroll through “revised” history on social media, you’d be led to believe that the slang of the late 20th century was only used by a handful of fringe bigots or “problematic” outliers. That is a flat-out lie. The reality is much simpler, much more pervasive, and much more uncomfortable for the “virtue” era to swallow: for decades, words like gay and retarded were the undisputed, universal standard protocol for every kid in the country. ...

Somewhere along the line, we decided everyone needed to be smart—just in “different ways.” It wasn’t enough to admire the emotionally supportive friend, the empathetic boss, or the skilled communicator for what they were: emotionally attuned, socially skilled, or just really good with people. No—we had to call them intelligent. And so was born the phrase emotional intelligence, or EQ. But here’s the problem: emotional intelligence isn’t intelligence. It’s a category error dressed up in flattery. And the more we inflate the definition of intelligence to include feelings, vibes, or social maneuvers, the less the word means anything at all. ...

Every photo album holds a quiet contradiction. Look at images from 1991 and you don’t see the 1990s. You see the 1980s — the clothes, the malls, the cars, the interiors, the hairstyles, the tone of everyday life. The same happens with 2002, which still looks like the 1990s, or 2012, which resembles the 2000s more than the decade it technically belongs to. This isn’t a glitch of memory or a trick of nostalgia. It exposes a structural truth about how culture evolves: our cultural decades do not match the calendar decades we assign to them. ...

I honk back at everything. It doesn’t matter who the horn was for. It doesn’t matter if I can even see the car that produced it. If I’m behind the wheel and a horn goes off anywhere in the vicinity, I honk. Once, firmly, with purpose. Then I continue my drive like nothing happened. I’d been doing this for years before I ever thought to question it. Then one afternoon, somewhere in stop-and-go traffic with a horn going off three or four cars ahead — aimed at someone I couldn’t see, about something I’d never know — my hand went reflexively to the center of my steering wheel. Afterward I asked myself: why do I do that? Why am I joining an argument I was not invited to? ...