On generational differences

One of my first reactions to the row about anti-semitism at Oxford University Labour Club was: why are the silly sods paying so much attention to Israel-Palestine given that the issue seems to drive so many people insane? In my time, it was apartheid that bothered us, not Israel.

But then it struck me: to today’s students, apartheid is distant history. Nelson Mandela was freed in 1990, seven or eight years before today’s first-year undergraduates were born. To today’s students, anti-apartheid protests are as far away as the Aldermaston marches or Suez crisis were to my generation.

This is only one way in which there’s a generational gulf between today’s students and my generation. Douglas Adams proposed the following rules about attitudes to technology:

1.Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

These surely apply. I suspect my generation’s default setting is to think of books rather than the internet as the repository of research, and to regard Spotify and Tinder as novelties.

Or take attitudes to football. My generation was brought up to think of Liverpool as the dominant team in England. But they’ve not won the league since 1990. To today’s students, Rush and Dalglish are as temporally distant as Stan Cullis was to us.

Or music. The Spice Girls are as temporally distant to today’s students as the Beatles were to us. And “old skool” dance music – the music of the early 90s – is as distant as 1950s rock n roll was to us.

I suspect this is true of political attitudes too. Take four examples:

 - My formative years were shaped by overt class struggle: the strikes of the 70s and 80s and Thatcher’s attacks on unions. To today’s young people, class is less salient – which is, of course, not to say that it’s less important.

 - In my day, there were fewer graduates and hence less competition for good jobs. Today’s students face more of a buyers’ market, and so must be more career-oriented whist at university.

 - 50- and 60-somethings grew up under the threat (which might have been exaggerated) of the Soviet Union. We had therefore a large and obvious example of the dangers and costs of a lack of political freedom. Today’s young people don’t have so salient an example, and so might be less aware of the value of free speech and discussion.

 - My generation grew up in violent times: today’s youngsters didn’t so much*. I suspect this might shape attitudes in all sorts of ways, because we are less likely to regard others as threats. But it might help explain campus politics: students worry about “microaggressions” because they don’t have bigger aggressions to fret about.

In saying all this, I’m taking a Humean position. There is a big difference between impressions and ideas. Our direct experiences, reports by our friends and TV news stories have a more forceful effect upon our minds than what we read about in books. My knowledge of WWII is of a very different kind to that of my grandparents.

This, I think, is also the presumption of a lot of identity politics: growing up as, say, black or gay or a woman gives us different presumptions and instincts than we’d have if we grew up white, straight or male. But the same, surely, is true for cohorts; growing up in the 1970s gives you different presumptions than growing up in the 00s.

This is not to say that generational cleavages must be massive and confrontational, any more than other identity-based ones must be. Instead, my point is simply that we must be aware of these differences – and we never will be if we don’t try.

 * Is sexual violence and exception to this?

Comments

[donald]

I'm not sure quotation marks make it okay to call what the state of Israel has done to palistinians a micro-agression.

[Igor Belanov]

"50- and 60-somethings grew up under the threat (which might have been exaggerated) of the Soviet Union. We had therefore a large and obvious example of the dangers and costs of a lack of political freedom. Today’s young people don’t have so salient an example, and so might be less aware of the value of free speech and discussion."

This is a joke, right?

[Matt Moore]

'In my day, there were fewer graduates and hence less competition for good jobs. '...

You omit to say 'for those graduates who were fortunate enough to access higher education then'.

The increase in competition is not due to fewer jobs, but rather due to increased opportunity for access. Surely this is good.

' * Is sexual violence and exception to this?' No. There is happily a far broader definition of sexual violence today, as well as less reticence about reporting and discussing it.

[Matt Moore]

PS

'Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.'

My parents and parents-in-law all have broadband, laptops, tablets, smartphones, Netflix and iPods.

My grandmother has a 4G tablet that she uses for email. She calls it an 'iPad', even though it isn't.

[An Alien Visitor]

The Zionist and their apologists like to throw as much muck as possible and being an establishment cause the muck sticks quicker and longer. But the muck is totally irrelvant. The Israeli Palestinian conflict is a classic case of liberal concern masking the heart of the issue.

The answer to all the bullshit about anti Semitism and the evils of Hamas, or Israeli democracy etc etc etc etc is to say, well maybe but what does this have to do with anything? So let us cut the crap and get to the heart of the matter,

When are you going to give them their land back?

[Keith]

"When are you going to give them their land back?"

Off course it is slightly more complex as an issue.

In theory it is easy, you create a common polity to share the land. Works for Israel/ Palestine and everywhere else in the form of world Government.

But Israel does not want to be part of a larger polity full of non Jews. Neither has world Government taken off instead we have UKIP and the SNP reviving populist nationalism. One of the ways society has gone backwards in its ideals. Syria shows where sectarianism leads to. But people seem stuck in mentalities that lead to constant conflict.

[Dave Timoney]

Re "students worry about 'microaggressions' because they don’t have bigger aggressions to fret about".

I suspect the generational change is less the product of a Pinkeresque decline in violence and more a reflection of the changed social position of students. Those who made it to university in the 50s/60s were a self-conscious elite who combined noblesse oblige with ambition. What they wanted (certainly after 1956) was a changing of the guard, but they marched to Aldermaston in their college scarves.

The cohorts that arrived in the late-60s/70s after the post-Robbins expansion were far more class-conscious and political, because more working class, which resulted in the adoption of more antagonistic tactics familiar from the shopfloor: a shift from marches and polite placards to sit-ins, no-platform and boycotts.

What we saw in the 80s was a further shift towards identity politics as lifestyle preference, reflecting wider social change, as much in the Brideshead wannabes as feminist and anti-racist activists. This culminated in the apolitical hedonism of the 90s and early-00s.

We are now witnessing a conservative mentality among students, obsessed with property and privilege, from safe spaces to colonial-era assets. What they are mainly worried about today is debt and ROI. Their wider social role has been neutralised and their narrow, emblematic role reduced to providing fodder for the media's disciplinary narratives.

[JRH]

"..cleavages must be massive and confrontational"*

I am all for massive cleavages but I have not met too many confrontational ones ..

Seriously though agre with the thrust of the post about the different prism through which the world is viewed by generation.

* an example of watching too many 'Carry On' films - a cultural prism now shattered and dead.