Recently, singer/songwriter Oliver Anthony, “a high school dropout who lives in a log cabin in the woods” and Ph.D. classicist and historian Victor Davis Hanson both gave passionate speeches expressing their faith in the American people, past and present.
It was amazing to listen to these two men from vastly different backgrounds give commentaries that so closely intersected with each other.
Commenting on the thousands of people he’s met since achieving celebrity status in 2023, Anthony told a packed room that “we don’t have any clue … how many around us are really broken; how many are silently suffering and barely hanging on.”
He said these afflicted souls often describe themselves as “nobodies,” adding that “modern society’s convenient, comfortable, fragile little existence is oftentimes carried on the backs of these self- declared nobodies” and that “many of our real heroes are drug through the mud and never once given a genuine thank you.” He said this happens because “we are so busy idolizing the genuine nothings of society – the self-centered celebrities, spineless politicians, [and] clickbait social media influencers.”
It was clear that some of the heroes he was talking about were the people who showed up to help in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene. After federal and state agencies had failed them, he said “tens of thousands of people … showed up to help from all over the country. No one asked them, no one paid them, and most of the world has no idea they were ever even there.”
Switching gears, he expressed concern about the effects of the digital age on the human mind. He said we’ve lived into a time of “global connectivity, infinite information and … artificial intelligence.“ “We are the last few humans in world history who remember what life was like before,” he said. “We are the last living people in history to have experienced life before the digital age, and I fear that it may become nearly impossible for younger generations to even differentiate the digital world from the real one before the end of my lifetime.”
Indeed, we who are alive now are the last generations who remember what life was like before the chaos of computing.
Some of us remember life before cellphones and laptops. More importantly, we remember life before algorithms that treat our private thoughts like commodities to be bought and sold on the open market.
And let’s be clear, this isn’t the usual whining about advancing modernity and the passage of time; it’s not even on par with giving up the horse and buggy in exchange for gasoline engines and cars that can barrel down the road at 30 mph.
It’s so much bigger than that.
The Information Age is a scarier place than anything that came before because it has the power to rewrite history.
“They said that they were sexist, racist, homophobes and they had it easy, they had privilege, they were supremacists. They weren’t.” For the most part, he added, those who came before us were hard-working folks who followed the laws; they didn’t bring shame on their families, and they didn’t “treat people by their superficial appearance or the color of their skin or their accent, but by the content of their character.”
Yet, he said, they’ve been slurred by an inferior generation—our generation—and it’s shameful. “It’s a rewriting, a Trotskyization of history,” he concluded.
Hanson was focused mostly on his own experiences with the “lost, agrarian world” of his youth and the California pioneers who were “largely farmers in the 19th century who came out with nothing and … worked until they died in obscurity.”
But I couldn’t help but relate his comments to my own family and the culture I experienced growing up in the Northeast.
I was reminded of a discussion I had with an Anglican deacon who said he doubted “all those stories about how big Christianity was in the 1950s. All you had to do was open the church doors and the people would fall in. I bet they weren’t even true. Or if they were, people weren’t really Christians, they were just going through the motions.”
Hanson finished his commentary defiantly: “I think it’s past time to just say these were wonderful people. The agrarian world of the United States gave us much of the singular American character and we’re not going to sit here anymore and listen to it being slandered and smeared by people who would not last one day behind a team of horses or on a John Deere tractor.”
Oliver Anthony concluded his remarks in the same spirit: “[W]e don’t need our false idols. We should no longer rely on politicians who bow down to money to manage our city or our states. We need to find real leaders everywhere and empower them. Western North Carolina was proof to me that there is an army of good people left in this world who want to do good things; we just have to give them places to gather and … the ability to act.”
Only in America would a high school dropout and a Ph.D. be on the same page. We should note that ours was the first country in the history of the world that believed their voices were equal. With that in mind, let’s make a concerted effort to stop maligning—and start honoring—the heroes and nobodies of America’s past and present.
