Speaking of Casual
Not long ago, I had occasion to look at my high-school yearbook (no, Facebook was not involved). It was remarkable how many people who signed it with great affection and commitment are now mysterious strangers (demonstrating that faux-intimacy is not just a Facebook thing).
The most remarkable discovery in reading the comments of those signatories was how many of them—apparently lacking any real shared memories to commemorate—took the opportunity to celebrate one of the great achievements of our class (1970). It was on our watch—and due to our tireless efforts, I was reminded—that the school dress code had been eliminated. And just in time for the fashion explosion of the 1970s. Were we lucky or what?
“If someone were beamed forward in a time capsule from 1950 to today, the most notable thing would be that everyone dresses as if they just rolled out of bed.” So Mark Oppenheimer once commented to me in an interview about the cultural consequences of the 1960s. Oppenheimer, the author of the 2003 book Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture, insisted that the most decisive cultural change of that tempestuous decade—coming to a close as I was getting ready to graduate—was the advent of a regime of informality.
What the counterculture finally countered was formality and propriety. “Our politics are not that different,” Oppenheimer reflected, “but how we act and how we look is tremendously different.”
Formality Rejected
Was this just a stylistic shift, like a move from pastels to earth tones? Or was something more at stake? Linguist John McWhorter argues that the advent of informality throughout cultural life is an expression of a radically new suspicion toward authority that emerged in the mid-1960s. In his book Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care, he writes that “formality in all realms, be it sartorial, terpsichorean, culinary, artistic, or linguistic, entails the dutiful acknowledgment of ‘higher’ public standards considered beyond question.” Thus, formality, in the patois of the late 1960s, meant caving in to The Man.
McWhorter explores the symptoms and the consequences of the loss of the possibility of eloquence in speech . He argues that the intense distrust of the government that fueled the countercultural expressions of the mid to late 1960s had the effect of creating suspicion toward verbal precision and elegance. “Because the Establishment had traditionally been the steward of formal conventions in its language, to hold the Establishment in contempt all but entails rejecting those conventions,” he writes. One had to abandon the standards of formal speech because of Vietnam, Jim Crow, and (eventually) Watergate.
For those who were intellectually and politically attentive during the 1950s and 1960s, this might have made a certain kind of sense. But, as McWhorter points out,
people growing up in the era [and their children and grandchildren] . . . never knew the former America. They simply imbibed the assumptions and customs of the new America from childhood, and this included a basic sentiment that the formal was to be avoided, that real life is a dress-down affair. One generation put their fedoras and jackets in the closet as a sign of the times, embracing a new informality. But the next generation never knew anything else.
More Melancholy Than Irritated
McWhorter’s discussion of the cultural and political effects of the loss of standards of formality focuses on language (since he is, after all, a linguist), and he analyzes these effects without scolding or enjoining. He is more melancholy than irritated. He clearly laments the fact that “a particular kind of artful use of English, formerly taken for granted as crucial to legitimate expression on the civic stage, has virtually disappeared.”
Ken Myers is the host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Formerly an arts editor with National Public Radio, he also serves as music director at All Saints Anglican Church in Ivy, Virginia. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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