Class History: 1969 to 2018

[Editors Note:  Originally published on 26 May 2019;  This is fifth in a series of re-published Essays from the 50th Reunion ClassBook.]  

Back again, your whilom class historian here reviews our half-century of adulthood by examining the world and American culture at the milestones of our graduation in 1969, the 25th reunion in 1994, and the date of this writing, 2018, a year before our 50th reunion. At each of the three points, I review culture, expression (sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll), the social landscape, politics, and technology. Strap on your safety belt, it’s pedal-to-the-metal time.

1969: Things Unknown to Us Would Shape Our Lives

“People try to put us do-down (talkin’ bout my generation)

Just because we get around (talkin’ bout my generation)”

—The Who

The World Around Us

1. To begin, at age 21–22, we did not know that major events of which we had no clue had already defined the world we were entering as adults.
2. When we graduated, the Cold War antagonists specialized in otiose proxy wars, the biggest of which we mostly evaded or lotteried out of. Only 17 percent of us went full-time into military service, and hardly any saw combat in Vietnam, but most of us considered continuing conflict with the Soviet Union and its allies to be inevitable and enduring. That was wrong.
3. In 1964, Leonid Brezhnev and old-guard communists ousted Khrushchev. That commenced what Mikhail Gorbachev later called the Era of Stagnation. It guaranteed the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. Time would give the United States victory in the Cold War. We had no idea.
4. We thought we were counter-cultural. In fact, we grew up in a particularly robust culture—defining that term as the web of opinions and values, beliefs and ethics shared by a community. Strands of the web include religion, ethics, artistic sensibility, and norms of utensil use at dinner, among other constraints on behavior.
5. Whether self-selected or other-determined, culture’s web is suspended on three pillars: the social landscape, law (or politics), and technology. Each of these limits and sustains a culture. In our adult lives each pillar was rebuilt, and each of us tried in our way to reweave the web of opinions and values, beliefs and ethics. Not everyone in our class shared exactly the same views or held themselves to the same standards. Many in our generation have tried for 50 years to create a different culture than the one most of our class preferred. However, most of our coevals understood how we ran counter to our parents’ culture.
6. In respect of the social landscape, we Boomers composed a huge spike in American population growth.
7. Sex-starved, life-grasping GI’s raced in droves off the boats from Europe and Japan and then bred abundantly from 1946 to 1964. They reared us during two decades of a swelling middle class, ever-increasing and widely distributed income and wealth, justified patriotic pride, and burgeoning public goods such as bigger public schools and interstate highways. In this optimistic era, we believed the world was our oyster, and we each should determine our own values and beliefs. That distinguished us from our conformist parents. Our stance was belied by our nearly unanimous adoption of the same modes of self-expression. Everyone was free to make their own decisions, but collectively we shunned barbers, shared the same slang sans-Twitter, and outfitted at army surplus stores.
8. To express ourselves, we chose the themes of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. We brightened our college years by rolling back Yale’s repression against these modalities. Our music ruled at mixers and proms. It invaded fussy Woolsey Hall where Vladimir Horowitz tickled the ivories one night but on another I covered Janis Joplin’s drunken, scintillating performance for the Oldest College Daily.

Sex

9. Only in the year of our matriculation did the anachronous Supreme Court hold that Connecticut’s criminal law against the use of contraceptive devices violated the right to marital privacy. Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). But the military had handed out rubbers for the previous 25 years. Unless married, we had no constitutional right to birth control until Baird v. Eisenstadt (1972). These rulings led to the creation of a constitutional right for women to control their own bodies in Roe v. Wade (1973). Meanwhile, feminists used Congressional hearings in 1970 to obtain improvements in the safety of the pill. Centuries of heartbreak and misery did not end immediately. In 1969, few among us grasped that the battle for female sexual freedom had begun. It continues to this day.
10. On June 28, 1969, outside the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, lesbians and homosexuals protested violently against police raids. Those among us who lived their sexual lives in shadows, who accepted silently everyday discourse replete with slurs and snickers directed at sexual preference, moved from shame to pride. Hardly any of us knew that the gay rights movement began when we graduated.
11. The first successful fertilization of a human egg cell in vitro occurred in 1969.

Drugs

12. Strobe Talbott, ’68, chairman of the Yale Daily News, editorialized in favor of the legalization of marijuana. We took him to have established a new norm. High on Saturday night, sweat it out in Payne-Whitney’s steam rooms on Sunday, soberly chew London Broil at lunch. Some dipped into psychedelic waters too. We did not realize that a war on drugs would ensue. Even a half-century later, relatively anodyne Mary Jane would not be accepted legally in every state, and anti-psychotic hallucinogens would not be widely available in the United States. On the other hand, three years after our graduation Lilly discovered fluoxetine, later commonly known as Prozac or Sarafem.

Rock ’n’ Roll

13. As Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the Paris student movement in ’68, explained in 2018: “the idea of a counterculture…was mainly carried via rock music. Woodstock Nation: that was the myth of a new America, and we were all for it.” On July 21, 1969, Neil Armstrong planted the first human step on the moon. We could have cared less.
14. As it turned out, in the race between Dionysus and Apollo, the god of knowledge won. Technology, not “peace & love & music” would rule the long duration of our lives.
15. We thought rock ’n’ roll was here to stay. “Sugar, Sugar” was number one in 1969. Four years later I had a date with one of the singers in the band, but even she was impressed that I had been at Woodstock. August 15–18, 1969. It was hot fun in the summertime. There was crimson and clover everywhere on Max Yasgur’s farm. People were grazing in the grass. We let the sunshine in. But I was thinking about my baby who dumped me at the junior prom. I thought I will never fall in love again. No magic moment for me. That’s the way love is. Only the strong survive. You dig it: every day the radio waves tied our generation into a common sensibility.

Americans

16. When we graduated, fewer than 5 percent of Americans, less than 10 million people, had been born in another country—the lowest percentage in a century. We thought the land of the free and the brave was a blissfully isolated land populated mostly by white people with European roots. By and large we did not know many “foreigners,” and few of us had been “overseas.”

Law (Politics)

17. Four years before we graduated, a liberal Congress changed the immigration law to eliminate what was seen as a racist preference for people of European origin, and to bring whole families into the country. From 1931 to 1963 legal immigrants averaged 150,000 a year. Legal arrivals poured in at an average of more than 400,000 a year in the 1970s, more than 600,000 a year in the 1980s, and almost one million a year in the 1990s. In addition, as many as 10 million had entered illegally by our 25th reunion. No one knew in 1969 that the social landscape of the United States would shift so dramatically. The percentage of foreign-born American citizens almost doubled by the 25th reunion. Although the composition of California, Texas, Florida, and major cities changed the most, in whiter America the backlash began at graduation, and continued through this writing.
18. Mary Jo Kopechne died a little more than a month after we graduated—July 18, 1969. Unbeknownst to us, that tragedy marked the beginning of the end of liberal politics for our generation. Ted Kennedy could not try for the presidency until 1980 and then he could not escape the shadow of Chappaquiddick in his failed contest with Jimmy Carter. After that, neoliberalism ruled the Democratic Party, and the policy differences with the neoconservative Republicans diminished.
19. Cohn-Bendit said in 2018 that “The American SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] was characterized by a veneration for the US Constitution that was totally foreign to us.” That respect undergirded the ouster of Richard Nixon five years after graduation. We did not know that the Constitution’s antiquated Electoral College system and an elitist, conservative Supreme Court would thwart the realization of our ideals.

Technology

20. As to technology, we knew nothing of the great events that had already occurred and would define society for all of us in the next half-century.
21. If computer science had met the language requirement, and also if it had been in the course catalog, maybe one of us (instead of a Harvard dropout) would have invented MS-DOS. Our hypothetical occluded genius would have dropped out after junior year, missed The Tie Game, thus retaining optimism about the future. In the fullness of time he could have built a new gym where unfortunately Morse and Stiles now stand and moved science hill into the hole left by the welcomed demolition of Payne-Whitney.
22. In The Graduate (1967) the businessman leaned over to Dustin Hoffman and told him, “There’s a great future in plastics. Will you think about it?” That proved to be still another oil derivative that unfortunately proved over fifty years to be not a dream product but a nightmare problem. Since our graduation, about seven billion tons of the stuff have been dumped, and 90 percent was not recycled. An island of plastics floats in the Pacific. About 700 marine species have absorbed microplastics. The junk will not deteriorate into molecules for about four centuries, or perhaps longer. We have trashed the planet more than all other generations combined.
23. On July 18, 1968, Intel incorporated. In 1965 co-founder Gordon Moore had published a paper observing that manufacturing advances could double the number of transistors on a given area of an integrated circuit, aka “chip,” every year. Ten years later he reduced the pace to every two years. He and Bob Noyce, co-creator of the integrated circuit, created Intel to fulfill this prediction. The company’s success meant computation increased in speed and fell in cost on an exponential curve. That guaranteed that software increased in complexity on the same cadence. The computer industry produced increasing returns to scale, the opposite of experience in the resource-constrained industrial economy. In addition, Intel also effectively proved the merit of Silicon Valley venture capital: a few brilliant minds can attract capital to a new company they form. They do not have to waste their genius on corporate politics. Before we started our senior year, the technological history of our lives was foretold.
24. It followed that Intel’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California would become the geographic locus of innovation and new company creation for the whole world. We empty-headed students of les belles-lettres thought our generation’s revolution was occurring in the Haight or over at Berkeley, not down on the Peninsula.

1994: We Did Not Have a Clue About the Future

“So you’re telling me there’s a chance.”

– Dumb and Dumber

The World Around Us

25. Not long before the 25th reunion the United States convincingly won the Cold War: In 1989, people tore down the Berlin Wall with their bare hands, the next year Germany reunified, and in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. By the end of the 1990s slightly more than half the people on the planet chose their governments by one person-one vote elections. We thought democracy had conquered the world.
26. Fox cable debuted on June 1, 1994, and only its owner knew that democracy was then at risk.
27. By the 1990s, gone were the double digits for interest rates (18 percent in 1980!) and inflation that had quickly trivialized our student debts and made us beg the ‘rents for the down payment on the first house. By reunion time we were at last comfortably long cash. Being the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in 1994, I told you, or should have told you, about the profound changes stemming from the Internet and digital mobile. Like the average American with a credit card, you should have heeded my prediction, re-levered vertiginously, bet the ranch home on the NASDAQ—and sold at the 30th reunion.
28. In 1994, Donald Trump was in the salad days of his second marriage, and on a roll. He had reduced his personal debt from nearly a billion dollars to about one hundred million and escaped from his bankers’ golden handcuffs by taking his casinos public. He had negotiated his prenup with Marla Maples, he said, down from a $25 million to a $1 million payout upon the inevitable divorce. The future commerce secretary Wilbur Ross praised Trump’s special skill in translating a flamboyant public persona into financial success. That would not even be the half of it.
29. In 1989, Deng Xiaoping went to Southern China and reportedly said, “It is glorious to be rich.” That fortune cookie utterance marked the fusion of communism and capitalism. With this new model, China inevitably would become the greatest economic rival America faced since the Revolutionary War. Few of us knew that while we were in college Mao’s cultural revolution murdered millions. Fewer still knew that Deng had changed China’s future even more dramatically than Gorbachev had done in his country. Most did not know Deng’s name.

Sex

30. The 25th reunion occurred in the decade of ubiquitous sex. Sex was everywhere, but politicized and professionalized. (“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro” —Hunter S. Thompson.) It always made news, in the excess and without constraints, as exemplified by the extensive reporting on Lorena Bobbitt’s revenge against her abusive husband. The head of ABC visited me, the FCC chairman, to let me know that Andy Sipowicz on NYPD Blue would show his naked rear end to America in primetime. In 1992 the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a judge’s holding that 2 Live Crew’s performance of “As Nasty As They Wanna Be” was obscene. You can look up the lyrics—too dirty for me to type. In light of that ruling, I did not deny the television audience a look at Dennis Franz’s backside. In the same spirit, our generation did not raise a censorious eyebrow at the Rabbit (Babeland sold an early model in Seattle in 1993), Madonna’s Sex (the fastest-selling coffee table book ever), or a former presidential candidate’s endorsement of Viagra (“I wish I’d bought the stock earlier,” said Bob Dole in 1998.). The affair of Monica Lewinsky was inevitable.
31. The sex had repercussions. Puritan Ken Starr practically quoted 2 Live Crew in his report to the House. The scurrilous details boosted the successful campaign of George W. Bush, (’68), who coyly pledged he would “usher in a new era of integrity inside the Oval Office.” When he said that, he barely succeeded in suppressing that roguish wink I recall from the Davenport lunch line.
32. Gore (Harvard ’69) might have paid more attention to the August 2001 memo about Al Qaeda’s plans, would not have invaded Iraq, would have battled climate change, might have bailed out Lehman Brothers, and stopped the financial crisis. Sex mattered in the Presidential election of 2000, in a way we did not anticipate at the 25th. (Then again not so much in 2016.)
33. At the time of the 20th reunion three of four Americans claimed they did not know anyone who was gay. By the 25th reunion AIDS had killed more than 500,000 Americans, including two members of our class who were friends of mine.

Drugs

34. Drugs had moved past gentle grass, through the coked years, and into ecstasy, leaving most of us behind.
35. In the reunion year Merck announced results from a study that argued strongly for taking statins to reduce heart attack risk. In 1995 Merck made a billion dollars from each of two statins.

Rock ’n’ Roll

36. Our music survived disco, got a shot in the arm from punk, but was on its deathbed at the 25th reunion. Ace of Base had three songs in the top 10! Saccharine saturated the airwaves: Elton John, Michael Bolton, Luther Vandross, and Mariah Carey. Bon Jovi… Politics had evaporated from music. You could’ve gagged us with spoons.

Americans

38. By the 25th reunion about one of every four people in the United States benefitted from some form of affirmative action.
39. The complexion of America changed between graduation and the 25th reunion. Latinos equaled African Americans in numbers and held more political power in many areas. More than four million Asians immigrated to the United States between 1969 and 1994. The Harvard admissions department has been revealed this year to have struggled to balance legacy admissions and cultural preconceptions against the merits of applications by the children of this diaspora. One wonders if Harvard alone failed to find an equitable standard.
40. We had no idea that backlash against the cultural change most of us espoused, embodied so admirably in Barack Obama, would help propel Donald Trump into the White House.

Law (Politics)

39. Liberals thought they were winning the culture wars between 1969 and 1994, but the Law remained, in the timeless phrase of Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist, an ass. In 1986 the Supreme Court upheld a Georgia law criminalizing oral and anal sex between consenting adults. Bowers v. Hardwick. Congress passed, with the encouragement of Bill Clinton, the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act in 1996.
40. In 1986, Ivan Boesky, giving the commencement address at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, said, “Greed is all right, by the way… You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” Even though he later spent two years in prison for violating securities laws, by 1994 his advice had become a tenet of both Democratic and Republican politics. The Tweedledum Democrats said a growing economy was the best welfare policy. The Tweedledee Republicans extended the argument to say that wealth transfers hampered growth, so were paradoxically bad for the poor transferees. Complacently, our left-leaning class agreed with conservatives on the virtue of growing rich, and for the most part was well on the way to that end by that reunion.
41. By 1994, most women, virtually all African Americans, most Hispanics, almost all gays, and first and second-generation immigrants tended to vote Democratic. That party had championed the rights initiatives of the 1960s–’70s which most of us vigorously supported. By the 25th reunion these causes had coalesced into factions defined by race, gender, sexual preference, and ethnic backgrounds. Politics was about identity first, and policy second—a distant second since liberalism no longer had much juice. Caucasians of our generation, and especially males of that label, tended to side with Republicans. That party’s leaders railed against crime (usually linked by them to people of color), immorality (meaning adultery), equal rights for women, and pornography.
42. Crime would become an excuse for the Clinton Administration to side with the Republicans in locking up a generation of black men.
43. Despite bipartisan endorsement of “family values,” the Internet soon would make pornography ineluctable.
44. Women at work kept family income rising slowly—a very hard-won step toward increasing gender equality.
45. By the 25th, most cities banned smoking in public buildings and restaurants. We supported the nanny state because that was more effective and certainly cheaper than, well, relying on nannies for the parenting. Notwithstanding our support of state-provided paternalism, the generation after us stayed far more present in our lives than we had done vis a vis our preoccupied parents. We had no idea every weekend would be parents’ weekend.

Technology

47. By 1994, breakthroughs in genetics had opened the possibility of convicting criminals, exculpating defendants, eliminating defects prenatally, and—not soon enough for us—commoditizing intelligence, athletic skills, and good looks.
48. On June 13, 1994, days after our reunion, Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman were found dead in Brentwood. DNA testing of a glove found in O.J. Simpson’s residence matched the blood of the victims. But this technique had only been invented a few years earlier, and in the subsequent trial Barry Sheck, ’71, Davenport College, cast reasonable doubt on its accuracy, or on the LAPD’s competence and motives. Major mapping of the human genome was completed by the 25th reunion year. By the 50th reunion anyone could discover their lineage at a low price. The concept of race had no important scientific meaning. Nevertheless, during our whole adult lives people as disparate and differently motivated as James Watson, Charles Murray, and Donald Trump, to name only a few falsifiable characters, bandied about versions of racism and its flipside, white supremacy. We supported the civil rights movement, sympathized with affirmative action, and elected Barack Obama, but our generation still failed to solve what W. E. B. Du Bois called “the problem of the color line.”

2018: Backlash Triumphant

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing

– W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”

The World Around Us

49. We helped create an America, unlike the country that welcomed us at graduation, marked by appalling disparities in wealth and income. Our parents’ generation endorsed meritocracy, an approach that opened Yale to many of us, but in our half-century those who won what Warren Buffett called the “genetic lottery” seemed increasingly unable or perhaps uninterested in extending opportunity for improvement to everyone else. In our own generation, cruelty, indifference, and irrationality seem to have planted new roots in our culture. The president who would reweave our culture with these strands currently treats the desk made from the timbers of H.M.S Resolute as a prop in a reality TV show. Executive orders, treaty negotiations, and Congressional communiques now reflect as much forethought as saying “you’re fired” to a bunch of fake apprentices.
50. Is this our fault?
51. In 1969, we did not know what had already happened that defined our lives. In 1994, most everything we believed about the world was wrong. Probably now something we don’t know about matters a lot, and what we expect to happen won’t. Is that a comfort or a final blow to hopefulness?
52. I prefer to think our generation changed the culture for the better and for the long run. Most people believe in individual freedom. Most Americans prefer “love & peace & music” to hatred, war, and vendettas via Twitter. The race-baiting out of the Oval Office cannot undo the 1965 immigration law, and the white-male-representing Congressional majority cannot figure out how to pass something else, as of this writing. The United States will grow ever less Caucasian for decades to come. No ban on Muslims can make up for the fact that there’s nowhere to get more white immigrants.
53. Our 50 years have been an era of greatly increasing wealth in our country and around the world. Global poverty is much diminished. Nevertheless, about half of American households have less wealth in real terms than the median family had when we graduated. Explanations include decreasing returns to college-only education, increasing product market size, winner-take-all effects in our connected economy, oligopolization, compensation firm advice, corporate governance norms, stock market value increase, options, decline of unions, and tax law changes. Whatever. The spirit of ’68 deserves a comeback if we want our republic to survive. We need to push against the backlash.

Sex

54. Sex is still part of life for 70 percent of the class, according to our survey. But we did not do enough in our prime. As a class, we have had an estimated 1,749 children. That’s below replacement rate, given that it takes two to tango.
55. Five million test tube babies have been born since we graduated.
56. Everyone can now sequence their own genome, and that of their fetus, at a low and falling price. About three to five percent of all babies are born with severe genetic disorders. The government should offer free sequencing so that every potential parent can know if their offspring will have such a problem. Then everyone can make such decisions as they, and not the government, think appropriate.

Drugs

57. Now teenagers are returning to the more modest, less rebellious predilections that we had in high school, before the occasionally artificial brightness of college years: drugs trending down, educational aspirations up. One explanation is that this is the first generation in America to have grown up mostly lead-free.
58. Prozac is the most popular selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor in history, but pharmaceutical companies look to genetic treatments for future revenue streams. About 2000 gene therapies are currently in clinical trials.

Music

59. Now we don’t have a voice in music anymore. We can’t make out the words too well. Fortunately, television has captions. But here’s what the titles of the current hits teach us: This is god’s plan. You know things will never be the same. It is Sad! But be careful. Everything’s gonna be alright. This was all meant to be…after the storm. This is America, so walk it talk it. Everyone is as nasty as they wanna be. It’s bad news but we got no tears left to cry. Yes, I’m upset but I tell myself whatever it takes. Get boo’d up. Yes indeed.
60. Since you were wondering: “Boo’d up” means to be in a relationship. Come to think of it: you cannot hate a song with these lyrics: “Listen my to heart go ba-dum, boo’d up. Biddy-da-dum, boo’d up.” But I’m not saying it beats “Oh sugar, pour a little sugar on it honey. Pour a little sugar on it baby.”

Americans

61. As we gather for the 50th, the percentage of foreign-born legally residing in the United States is the highest it has been in a century.
62. Now in 2019, for every two males who get a college or more advanced degree, three women do. This is the opposite of the statistic that existed when we entered Yale. Young women in cities earn between 10 percent and 20 percent more than men. We helped make this happen.
63. We mostly live in the Northeast and the West. In our areas the white working class accounts for about a quarter of the population, whereas 43 percent in the Midwest, and 51 percent of rural America are in that category. They are in Trumpland, egging each other into a common misperception of our reality. The best bet is to outvote them as often as possible.
64. Half of the class started a business. I myself have co-founded several and a couple of non-profits to boot. None are called Google or Facebook, so I will travel to the reunion commercially, but our collegiate commitment to individuality has translated to an entrepreneurial proclivity. We should be hectoring the young now to crack open the power structure and let their sun shine in. See Hundt: In China’s Shadow: The Crisis of American Entrepreneurship (Yale: 2006).
65. According to the class survey, 2 percent of us got an engineering degree, and 11 percent graduated with a degree in natural science or math. These very low numbers were close to the opposite of what is useful in America today. More than half graduated with degrees in humanities. Our education is almost useless in today’s economy. But we are beyond the getting and the grabbing, so perhaps can turn our broad, purposeless reading to some advantage by grabbing passersby and arguing for timeless values.
66. Most of us are still vaguely protestant, at least when it comes to deciding where to hold the funeral, but now at the 50th only 30 percent of white Americans fit that bill, down from nearly 60 percent when we graduated.

Law (Politics)

67. In Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) the Supreme Court belatedly caught up to our culture by holding that people of the same sex can marry. Justice Kennedy thus maintained his batting average for doing the right thing at or below the Mendoza line.
68. When we graduated, students and workers composed the left; those with Yale-style educations and upper-middle-class incomes and above were on the right. Now, as Thomas Piketty has explained, a Brahmin left (most of us) opposes a merchant right, leaving the low-education and low-income groups for the taking by a populist or a poseur. Race-baiting on the right drives people of color to the left, but the ethnic-educated alliance is unstable. A century ago, Democrats ruled poor states, but now they control only the richest states. Piketty speculates that increasing wealth and income inequality eventually leads to a two-party system, but one is high-education, high-income globalists (like us) and the other is low-education, low-income. In this scenario racial minorities too separate according to their height on the ladder of success. Other outcomes are possible—much depends on the 2020 election, and, importantly, whether the states decide their electors should vote for the person who wins the national popular vote. See makingeveryvotecount.com.
69. As our numbers decline, we still can push history in the direction most of us prefer. We believe in the common good, citizenship, and shared history. We can affirm our lifelong belief in autonomous agency while still marching with others toward the sunny uplands of justice for all. Back in the day we wanted to give peace a chance, but most of all we stood for fairness. That ideal never needed champions more than now. See my book: A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama’s Defining Decisions (Rosetta: 2019).
70. If backlash against our preferred culture often has dominated politics, we should recognize that for the most part our views have prevailed in time. Until the end we can weave our threads into the culture, believing that the fabric eventually will carry our design.
71. Some, maybe many, of us worry about what philosopher John Gray called “hyper-liberalism,” according to which “toleration” that “used to be… essential to freedom” is dismissed as “repression” and “the policing of opinion is now established…in societies that believe themselves to be freer than they have ever been.” Many believe the politics of identity has undercut, Gray says, “a common culture…necessary if freedom is to be secure.” The incumbent president arguably is the flip side of political correctness. How did our ideals come to this? we wonder. Our work as a class may not be finished: we have some preaching to do, if we can find an audience, or open our wallets to pay for one. Facebook ads are cheap.

Technology

72. When we graduated, cardiac arrests typically killed the victim. Today death has to wait four to six minutes after the heart attack, because during a playing of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” (5min 12sec) technology can bring us back. Ten minutes more will be gained by the 75th reunion, and the next generation may pick up an entire extra hour.
73. With respect to the end game, those who attend the 75th reunion will be planning to send their cremated remains into space, leaving a DNA sample in a tube, and a chip replicating personal memory in a niche at Amazon Web Services. All that will be cheaper than shipping the corpus delecti to one of the last Episcopal graveyards still open for digging.
74. Given adequate funding and regulatory blessing, science has a decent chance of turning stem cells into brain tissue before our 75th reunion. Dementia might be stopped, or even cured. Possibly intelligence can be added, commoditizing the attribute that got us into Yale to begin with.
75. If you want to hate government, hate it, inter alia, because in the absence of large government subsidies more than half of present high-seas fishing would be unprofitable. If this disgusting proof of failed collective action couples with the same technologies that have enabled fracking, soon the bottoms of the deep, dark sea will be plundered for sushi and manganese, cobalt and giant squid. There’s a good case for reviving our youthful antipathy to machines and suspicion that government is a form of organized crime.
76. In June 2018, the political leaders of the G-7 met in Canada to discuss how to avoid destroying life in the deep. Our president left before this topic was bruited. I choose here and elsewhere fancy diction as a pale but purposeful imitation of William F. Buckley Jr. answer on Firing Line when a flabbergasted guest asked the meaning of one of his recherché usages: “It’s a word I learned in my second year at Yale.” I myself have never found an appreciative audience for high-falutin lingo. This is my last try.
77. When we graduated, quantum physics taught that perception created reality. Thomas Kuhn (1962) explained that there is no objectively true science. Instead, power and politics selected the explanation of reality that suits the privileged. Fifty years later, physics has humbled this elevation of the individual, subjective point of view. Soon after we graduated, John Stewart Bell proved that the world does not exist purely in a local sense. What happens here connects to what happens somewhere else, beyond what we can see. This is a shot in the arm for spiritualists, but not for human agency, or any claim for exceptionalism in our generation. Or even our species. In the intervening half-century, most physicists concluded that this universe is one of innumerable possible worlds, and hidden extra dimensions dictate all our so-called laws of nature. In the only perceptible domain for us, we have about another billion years, barring self-destruction or misplaced spending priorities, to develop a less disturbing theory, although Go-playing computers may get close to answers by the 75th reunion. The chips in our cortex, of course, might not bother, or know how, to tell what’s left of us what’s going down.
78. Looking forward, in a century or two the melted ice caps, barring political miracles, will bring the Long Island Sound to Phelps Gate. Only about 250 million years later, the Americas and Asia will have shifted to create a super-continent, changing the basis of trade wars significantly. In 600 million years the total volume of carbon dioxide, notwithstanding our generation’s prodigious efforts to burn oil and coal, will have shrunk below levels necessary for plant life to survive. Our computer-enhanced bodies then will run, fortunately, on electricity. Unfortunately, in one billion years the increased luminosity of the sun will evaporate the oceans, which is curtains for whatever passes as humanity at that point. However, the Yale endowment will be large enough to fund the migration of all alums and family members to other solar systems, and not a moment too soon because in about four to eight billion years (not very precise are they, you veterans of rocks & stars may note) our sun will have become a red giant with a diameter larger than the current distance between our planet and that shiny orb that gives life and, eventually, death. In a nutshell, your contribution at this reunion will go to a cause useful to some people.
79. By the 75th, one or more habitable planets will have been discovered within 10 to 20 parsecs away. (One parsec = 3.26 lightyears.) Robots will be sent forthwith, landing and sending back video long before Harkness Tower falls, regrettably. In any case, at the time of the reunion the same fully sensate robots—As Nasty As They Wanna Be!—will already be marching on other planets. Personally, I hope Venus turns out to be like Miami on a cloudy day. We will know by 2044.
80. “Here’s what I crave most…an old age that still maintains a stylish grip on itself, with the lyre beside me.” —Horace