It seems that every time period is plagued by trends and styles. I am old enough to have seen many come and go. In my teens, it was “Do your own thing; be an individual; peace, love.” I watched some of the music, now rock classics, yield to the sensitive, bland, forgotten music of the late ’70’s. I remember fading out of pop culture in the late ’70’s and listening to classical music (symphony, not rock). Then came the ’80’s with money, power, cocaine, preps and Yuppies. I rebelled against these values angrily, though I was, myself, a prep at Harvard. I can’t find a trend that dominated the ’90’s. But today, it seems that LGBT is the centre of gravity, along with eco-justice, women’s issues, and pop culture.
I’d like to think that in universities there is free intellectual inquiry. But this is not the case. There are styles and trends there too. Back in the late ’50’s, symbolic logic was the rage. Philosophers and even anthropologists wrote their ideas in those strange (laughable) symbols trying to look all mathematical and scientific. That eventually got debunked. Then I remember existentialism coming around. When I was in grad school and when I graduated from grad school, it was all gender issues, power dynamics, wealth and poverty issues, and Nietzsche was the prevailing world-view, along with Richard Rorty. I watched Derrida and deconstruction come and go in about a decade.
The thing about trends is that there is power behind them. If a person wants to talk to others in society, he or she needs to buy into the current trends. The alternative appears to be isolation. And if a person wants to publish, one needs to write and think in the terms that are current. But I believe that everyone has an intuitive sense of the true. I believe that Emerson called it the Oversoul. We know when a given trend is ridiculous, or doesn’t fit with human experience we know. We sense the vacuity of certain ideologies. I believe that’s why I turned to classical music in the late ’70’s, for instance.
Some people dedicate their lives to following trends. It is their quest to recognize the prevailing trends immediately so that they can be in the vanguard. In the ’90’s it was goatees, in the mid-2000’s it was mountain-man beards. Maybe in Hollywood or fashion this is a necessity to survive or to make a fortune. But I suppose there is enough of the old hippie in me not to worry too much about trends and to follow my Oversoul.
David Fekete 