I bring you a tale from now long past times. It is a sad story of how much better the previous generation was. Because, blimey, society has gone to pot owing - in large part - to this Internet thing. In previous times, teenagers would return from a day at school and spend their evenings productively reading Homer, with Handel playing in the background. Then at the weekend, they’d trot off to their local art museum and soak in Rembrandt and Picasso. They had respect for their elders, respected the police, went to church and combed their damn hair. Now it’s all gone to pot. They spend all their days on MySpace, eating Pot Noodles and sending gossipy texts on their blinged out phone. Oh, the calamity!
My older readers, those not children of the late nineties and noughties, will have to consider this for themselves. Youth culture just didn’t exist before about ‘94. That’s the unwritten presumption of the latest oh-boy-Western-culture-has-gone-to-pot-ist, Mark Bauerlein, Professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, whose written a book decrying my generation for being halfwitted social networking addicts. There’s a review over at the Wall Street Journal, and an interview available on YouTube. There’s a jolly good post at MetaFilter too.
I have some sympathy for the thesis that the world is going to pot, and that it’s all the fault of young people. But before we consider that thesis, let us consider a related thesis to see if it fits the facts better.
Those who are graduating from college this year are entering a world that - thanks to the previous generation - is rapidly approaching it’s own destruction as the polar ice caps melt (but, of course, that’s not a problem, since Jesus is coming back - the guy at the megachurch told me so!), and with a population too addicted to burning fossil fuels and watching television to do anything. The generation now in the position to write books decrying the Facebook generation are the ones who profited from television, fossil fuels and cheap education. If you are graduating from university this year in the United Kingdom, you will have at least eighteen thousand pounds of student debt. You will probably not be able to buy a house until you are in your forties. You will likely pay more tax than the previous generation, have to pay more for transport, food and public services than the generation now retiring - and you will enter a world standing at the brink of environmental collapse (rather that than give in on our emotional principles and build nuclear power plants). The previous generation enjoyed cheap - almost free - university education (although it was not as widely distributed), cheap flights, more secure employment and lower taxes. They are now buying yachts and second homes in the south of France. You only exist so that your taxes can pay for their retirement. The politicians ruling the previous generation were short-termist, revelling in opinion polls, avoiding tough decisions in favour of arguing over minutiae. It wasn’t the Facebook generation who created Abu Ghraib, it was the CNN generation. Sorry to burst your bubble.
And just so we know, I’m betting the numbers of people reading Kierkegaard and Baudelaire is pretty constant. The number of people who are spending extravagant amounts of money getting a university non-education studying the cultural significance of David Beckham and so on has dramatically increased though. Who was it who ransacked our universities, replacing the intellectually demanding stuff with identity politics, politically-correct cultural studies, postmodern faff and golf course management degrees? Not my generation - we just have to live with it. If you want to complain about people not reading Kant, perhaps you should take a look at who writes the curricula for schools and universities.
If we’re the dumbest generation, then at least we don’t have to teach you how to read your e-mail any more, or help you design a new and exciting viral marketing campaign to help you sell widgets and blue jeans. Seriously, that’s it, isn’t it? Finding a lot of different ways to sell blue jeans was the philosophical height of your generation. Finding a way to live on the planet without all killing one another or drowning under rising sea levels is our generation’s moral challenge. Reductionist? Yes. But I’d say it’s fair game. I want to be proved wrong by my elders, but they’ve been a bit of a disappointment, to be honest.
Blaming the Internet is so much easier than taking responsibility for the failures of your generation. If the elder generation want to disown the under thirties, that’s fine by me. I disown them. I’m fed up with teaching them how to use their computers (we write documentation for a reason, so read it, and use your initiative for chrissakes), and then being told condescendingly that they know better, when a huge proportion of the problems of the twenty-first century are of their making. It wasn’t us that voted in Bush, remember, it was your poorly educated “values voters” and “security moms”.
Yes, stupid young people exist. But what differentiates stupid young people from stupid old people is the latter get elected and end up writing the education policy that does nothing to prevent stupid young people from remaining ignorant.
