Thursday, December 03, 2015

Blaming Millennials

Some version of this post has been bouncing around my brain ever since 2003, when I started reading articles by Baby-Boomers complaining about how the current generation wasn't protesting the Iraq War as much as their generation had protested the Vietnam War.

I wanted to write this post then, but I never got around to it, and the issue faded from my mind.

But is it just me, or have there been an awful lot of articles recently criticizing Millennials?

Examples are too numerous to mention, but one typical article is from the Daily Mail:

The wasted generation: Even millennials think they are self-absorbed and lazy, claims study

There are two stock responses to this common accusation.  
One is to dispute the factuality of the claims, and to cite statistics that prove millennials are just as productive as any other generation.

The other stock response is to point out that the "aren't young people these days lazy and worthless" accusation comes up with every generation.  
I'm old enough to remember the days when people used to complain about how lazy and worthless Generation X is.  And the Baby Boomers, who are now the principle source of complaints about Millennials, were themselves subjected to numerous invectives from the older generation in the 1960s.  
(Contemporary examples of old people complaining about hippies are, once again, too numerous to mention, but one among many is cranky old man John Updike complaining about how lazy and stupid the Baby Boomer generation was in his novel Rabbit Redux.)

Neither one of those arguments is the tact I would like to take, however.  
I am willing to concede that each generation takes on certain unique characteristics, which separate it from the generations before it.  After all, people are shaped by the culture in which they are raised, and the culture changes with each generation.
And I'm also willing to concede that some of these distinctive generational characteristics might be negative.  (The law of averages would dictate that at least some of these characteristics must be negative, right?)

But what I can't understand is why people are blaming a generation for being the result of the culture that shaped it.

Free Will is a very debatable subject even when we limit ourselves to talking about individuals.  People don't choose to be introverted, or extroverted, or shy, or confident.  Their personalities are shaped by external influences plus their genetic material.

But this is especially true when you are talking about whole generations. 
It's not like the whole millennial generation just woke up one day and, each person, independent of the others, with no coordinated or concerted effort, just decided on their own that they were going to be lazy and worthless.

If Millennials are all lazy, it's a result of the culture they grew up in.

 So, for example, when people complain that Millennials don't know how to cook for themselves--SEE THIS ARTICLE HERE--what good does it do to blame Millennials for this? As if every single Millennial independently decided that they were not going to learn how to cook. The more productive conversation would be to ask "Why can't this generation cook?"  "What was it about the way that they were raised that caused them to turn out this way?", and "What should we do to fix this with the next generation?"

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky Student Debt And Indoctrination 2013

5 comments:

dpreimer said...

My thoughts on this are a bit scattered. The business of protesting, for example, seems curious to me. Why is that the hallmark of a generation with git-up-n-go? Staying inside seems perfectly justifiable to me, given how gazillions turned out in the streets -- around the world -- to beg the US not to invade Iraq, to absolutely no avail.

Another thought: it has struck me, multiple times, just what a profoundly ineffective launching point into adulthood the average high school is. Basic skills like learning how to balance a personal budget are left entirely to the individual -- never mind the difficulties associated with seeking out one's vocation, etc.

Anyway. Early morning thoughts, from a cloudy brain.

Joel Swagman said...

First off, I totally agree with how high school (and for that matter, most University educations) leave you totally unprepared for the adult world.

As for the protest bit...
The complaint I referenced dates from articles I read back in 2003, so it's over a decade old now, and was perhaps a bit of an out-dated way for me to have begun this post.
But when I read those articles, I thought the same thing that I think now: What good does it do to blame young people for this? Why not try to look at the causes of what shaped this generation, rather than just try to act like one generation is somehow superior than another?

That was my primary response. But there were plenty of other responses you could take. One other response is to point out that the Vietnam War had been going on for many years before it affected college campuses, and to contrast this with how the 2003 generations launched massive protests before the war even began. And I saw this response mentioned in print a few times back in 2003.

But your point is to question why protesting-levels should be used as a rubric to judge generations in the first place, correct?

I think we have at least one protesting success story in American history, and that is the Civil Rights Movement. So that shows at least that it is theoretically possible to bring about positive change by getting out into the streets.

The Iraq War Protests are, I concede, an example to the counter-point. It was an example of how easy it was for the government to completely ignore all the people out on the streets. And perhaps (if we're looking to try to understand generational characteristics, instead of just blame them) this experience was a reason why further anti-war protesting never really took off on college campuses.

The Vietnam War Protests are, I think, debatable. You could make the argument that they were ineffective, since Nixon kept increasing the bombing despite massive anti-War protests. But I've also heard the story that Nixon wanted to increase troop levels in Vietnam, but was told by Hoover that he could not guarantee domestic security if Nixon increased the draft, and so that was the beginning of the end of the U.S. ground presence in Vietnam. (Although, admittedly, the air-strikes continued for several more years after that.)

At any rate, regardless of how effective protests are, I think they can perhaps be used as a sort of gauge about how concerned young people are about political issues. And being concerned about political issues strikes me as a good thing.

Whisky Prajer said...

When I was in University an older (late boomer) relative asked me what students were doing, politically. I gave some bullshit response, but honestly felt like saying, "Nothing!" That was the mid 80s. I envied the earlier generation. I would have loved to march in the streets (did a couple of "no-nukes" rallies, of dubious measure). Heady times, the 60s and 70s. All it took to be pertinent was to grow your hair and show up for a Happening. Managing geopolitical awareness was challenge enough for my g-g-generation.

Joel Swagman said...

The 1968 generation occupied a certain fascination for me as well in my younger days. And for many of my peers as well.

Of course, it's important to realize it didn't come out of nowhere. Years of Civil Rights protests--going all the way back to 1955-- started to snowball into anti-Vietnam War Protests.

A documentary you might be interested in is: Letter to the Next Generation

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0162438/

...although it's probably bad form to recommend an obscure documentary that you probably have zero chance of every running across.
But my professor showed it to us in history class, and I found it interesting. It's dated 1990, but I think the film footage comes from some years before, so around your generation.

The film maker examines how apathetic College students were in the 1980s. He at times falls dangerously into the trap of being a self-righteous baby boomer, but then at the end he does actually stop to ask why the difference exists. He tries to examine the events that shaped his generation, and the events that shaped the 1980s generation, and concludes that if he were young in the 1980s, he probably wouldn't have been any different.

Joel Swagman said...

There is of course a counter-view to all this: I read Howard Zinn somewhere say that 1980s college students get a bad rap, but his experience on college campuses in the 1980s was that students were interested and engaged with political issues.

I don't remember the exact quote I read previously, but I found another interview of Howard Zinn saying something similar:

http://revcom.us/a/v20/980-89/987/zinn.htm

HZ: I have heard so much, as you have I am sure, about the apathy of the younger generation, the lack of social consciousness of the younger generation. I think very often part of this is a romanticization of our own generation, which almost assumes that there is something very special about the people of the '60s, almost genetic, that these young people don't have it. And I never believed that.

I taught students in the 1980s in the Reagan years when people were saying, "oh, this is a silent generation,'' and my students were not young radicals. I had lecture classes attended every semester by 400 students, who came from all over the university, who came with varying degrees of political consciousness, from a high degree down to close to zero. And it was very clear to me as we engaged in discussions in class that my students were eager, when information was presented to them, to learn about what was going on in the world and that they cared about what was happening in the world.

I firmly believe that young people, always at all times, are open to engagement with the world: one, if they are given the information; two, if they are given the opportunity, if they are presented with a social movement, if there is something going on in the world which they can attach themselves to.