THE NEW ‘BARBARIANS’
MILLENNIALS MAY BE FOREIGN IN THEIR HABITS, TASTE AND PREJUDICES; THEY MAY HAVE DIFFERENT INFLUENCES AND KNOWLEDGE. THAT DOESN’T MAKE THEM INFERIOR.
On Monday, our MarieDanielle Smith reported on a marketing study of millennials that had been done for the sake of improving outreach by the federal department of Employment and Social Development. The punchline of the report was that millennials hate being called millennials. “There is a stigma attached to that word,” warned one focus-group millennial ( Sorry! Sorry!); another millennial ( Dammit! Sorry!) told researchers “I’ve never heard it used as a compliment.”
I suppose the natural response from an older reader would be a sneering, “Well, no, I suppose you wouldn’t have.” Unfortunately, newspaper columns have no known way of allowing for a rap-battle microphone-drop. And, anyway, I find myself in some sympathy with the complainers in the government’s focus groups.
Millennials are a perennial target for lazy trend journalism. Natural, historic patterns of economic destruction are assigned to them like unsolved crimes, as if a generation had intentionally conspired, in the shadows of some age- restricted clubhouse, to make businessmen miserable.
They are inevitably castigated for the ways in which their relative strengths reveal themselves. They all grew up reading, and being comfortable and happy reading, so of course we pull faces at them for making Harry Potter references. They have a taste, and the cognitive capacity, for complicated narrative and world- building: we bash them for being helpless nerds. We gave them a world of cheap debt and strong money and complain as they take advantage of it; we preach higher education and laugh at them for falling for the swindle.
They grew up in a world depleted of much of the violence, aggression and everyday prejudice that characterized even a 1970s or 1960s childhood: we flinch when they try to follow through on this, to push this environment of social peace a further step forward. Sometimes we are right to flinch! — but there is a lack of even-handedness in the way older folk of Generation X or the Baby Boom discuss millennials. No group is going to come off well while being overrepresented in the media — as the young always are — by student politicians, single-issue maniacs, and socially ambitious attention fiends.
If you were born in 1971 like me, at the moment when women were buying birth control and joining the workforce, you can see that this ill treatment partly arises from natural resentment. You are trapped in the generational trough that demographer David Foot called the “Bust,” enjoying a brief twinkle of relative social power between the more numerous Baby Boomers and millennials.
To take the obvious example, we now have a prime minister who was born in 1971: we have never had one born in the sixties, and probably never will. As has frequently been observed, the leaders of the main opposition parties now both have 1979 birthdates. The metaphorical millennium at which the term “millennials” hints, the nauseous revolution in the generational order, is pretty much here.
Hannah Arendt is said to have remarked that civilization is always being invaded by barbarians we call “children.” I don’t like to put a dangerously hard- to- trace quotation in the newspaper, but I first heard this half-jest decades ago and its depth has only impressed me more every year. Whoever said it first was obviously pretty learned and subtle, even if it wasn’t Arendt. “Barbarians” is a Greek word for incomprehensible, gibberish-spewing foreigners, but one of the great discoveries of the Greeks is that of the barbarians’ point of view, and the additional idea that this point of view deserved equal esteem.
Every nation believes its own customs and habits are the best, Herodotus said, and you would have to be nuts to dismiss those prejudices as though they were somehow objectively wrong. ( I grant that this is a free translation, but he said it, and it is one of the intellectual breakthroughs with which we associate the Greeks.) As with nations, so it is with generations. The formative experiences, inherited expectations, and learned fears of somebody born in 1985 are hardly less different from mine than a foreigner’s would be.
If I say that my attitude toward millennials is that they are barbarians, I am asking for trouble, but I must insist on being understood: it is only that they are persons whose habits, prejudices, and values are foreign, formed by a different set of events and influences — not that they are inferior. In the right mood I can even be persuaded that their actual knowledge is simply of a qualitatively different character, rather than simply being more meagre because they have lived less long.
The millennials I know are certainly superior to me in obvious ways: they seem to be less neurotic, more physically courageous, inclined to be creative, fonder of travel. I have lived through more of history than any millennial, but anyone who had grandparents who emerged from the Great Depression ought to know that this is not entirely a benefit or a merit: it is also baggage. Honestly, I just thought an older person who works for a newspaper should stop and say, “We are sorry that ‘millennial’ sounds like an insult, millennials: I understand why, and I accept my share of the blame.”