In response to this reader, another snarks:
Andrew, I must take issue with your persistent, deplorable habit of using terms like “American”, “English”, and “Chinese.” Each “nationality” is wildly diverse and contains tens of millions of individuals, saints, sinners, and everyone in between. Yet certain people seem to think – wrongly – that they “know all about” others because they know what country these people live in! Moreover, each “nationality” contains tens of millions of individuals with unique biographies.
No wait. How about: Andrew, I must take issue with your persistent, deplorable habit of using terms like “Catholic,” “Protestant,” and “Sunni.” Each “religion” is …
Or, Andrew, I must take issue with your persistent, deplorable habit of using terms like “men,” “women,” and “transgender.” Each “gender” is …
In all seriousness, any attempt to group people in any way will oversimplify. We can examine categories, question them, add nuance to them, but it will make life a lot harder than it needs to be if we throw out all categorization of people.
Furthermore, the year you were born DOES matter. My dad was born in the 1950s. He knows what it’s like to live your life assuming the world will end, sooner rather than later, because somebody’s going to nuke somebody else. That’s formative. That’s an important shared experience with people his age. People who are just now starting college do not know what it’s like to have their entire outlook on the world changed by September 11th. That’s an important shared experience they do not share with me, because they were born later.
I actually agree that many people over-rely on the concept of generations, and those generations having specific, all-embracing traits. But it’s ludicrous to claim the events a person has and has not lived through don’t matter at all.
Another is harsher on the dissenter:
Hmm … quick to offend, almost comically haughty, insufferably condescending, prone to “humble bragging” (“(minor) historian…”), think they still “get” the younger generation, love the sound of their own voice (or prose), take shallow personal stands using their pocketbooks … yep, sounds like a Baby Boomer to me. But hey, what do I know … I’m a cynical Gen-Xer ;)
On the other hand:
I totally agree with the dissenter. I am a retired attorney, Ivy League educated, African–American, Vietnam vet, born in 1948 in Phoenix and still live there. I am a whole lot more than a “Boomer”. Unlike the dissenter, I will continue to subscribe, but constant assumptions about demographic groups really isn’t very helpful.
Another agrees:
I do hope you take the content of the dissent seriously. This is something that has needed saying for quite some time now. Out of so many strengths in your writing, this is one of your most unfortunate weaknesses.
Another makes the same basic argument as the first reader but with sources:
As a doctoral candidate in history who has found generational theory reasonably helpful in understanding U.S. history, I have three brief points to make about the dissent against generation labels:
First, of course these generational descriptors are over-generalizations misused by the authors of op-eds. So are groupings of people based on race, class, and/or gender. The art of history is the art of generalizing without messing up the overall picture too badly. The core question is whether the big picture can tell us anything useful, not whether it’s a perfect description of every individual in the group.
Second, much of generational theory these days comes from the work of Bill Strauss and Neil Howe (who are mentioned in this Dish post from 2008 on Obama as an Xer). Their main argument is that despite the diversity of individual experience and core traits, generations and cohort subsets within them develop general characteristics for their interactions with other generations. Furthermore, these interactions with other generations help make the whole thing roughly cyclical as the generation coming of age rushes to fill the public role they see as absent. (The Wikipedia page has a pretty good overview.)
Finally, historians discover over and over again how much formative experiences from a person’s youth shapes their later attitudes. As Howe put it, history is not “a seamless row of 55-year-old leaders who always tend to think and behave the same way.” While it would be a little silly to make a big fuss over whether someone was born in 1946 vs. 1947, an American born to white, middle-class parents in 1946 is much more likely to be (or have been) socially liberal than someone born to similar parents in 1955. In the same vein, coming of age during the Red Scare of 1919-1920 (when government officials were targeted by mail bombs) makes the ambitious and zealous in the group more likely to use fear of Communism as a path to national notoriety once they’re of an age to do so. See Nixon, Richard and McCarthy, Joe.
Something that I find striking is that when Strauss and Howe first started writing in the 1990s, many saw their prediction of a “crisis mentality” starting somewhere between 2005 and 2008 as being “overly grim.” Also, the dissenter focusing their dissent on each person having a “unique biography”: classic Boomer. A core Millennial is likely to think “yeah, we’re all on the same team.” An Xer “but does it work?” And chances are, like the Silents before them, today’s Homeland children will grow up to (largely) think, “how do we take care of the individuals in the team?” Each generation has their strengths and their weaknesses.
Granted, I’m an early-wave Millennial (1983) who has now given up on the dogmatic religious faith of my teens, along with any trust I had in Wall Street to manage my money, or any desire to support a leader promising a “quick and easy” war that had to be fought “because”, so what do I know?
Update from the original dissenter, who gets the last word:
In response to the first critic you cited, I would say that “generational” descriptors are perhaps the least coherent and most ill-defined ones commonly used. Being an American, for example, is associated with a set of generally recognized symbols. It also carries a legally-defined status. No such generally recognized symbols or statuses are associated with so-called “generations”. (If there are, I must have missed the meetings.)
In a religious group, there are definable sets of beliefs that its adherents presumably have. There are no such definable sets of beliefs in regard to “generations”. “Generational” descriptors are the least accurate ones that exist, in my view.
And no, I don’t want the examination of other humans to be easier, and I don’t mind if I have to work at knowing other people. It shouldn’t be easy to know other humans. The desire to make it easy is part of the problem. We always need to go deeper than these broad categorical definitions. The trouble with such terms as “Baby Boomer”, “Gen-Xer”, and “Millennial” is that too often it isn’t where people begin their examination of others – it’s where they end it.
Finally, I know this will be a shock to my critic here, but after the invention of nuclear weapons, almost everyone felt some level of threat because of them. In many ways it was more jarring, I think, to be in the middle of one’s life and realize that humanity could now be wiped out in a single day, and that our enemies had the capacity to destroy us. Why does this critic think Cold War hysteria in the U.S. reached such berserk levels in the 1950s?
In response to the second critic, I’ve been angered by this “Baby Boomer” nonsense for years. Yes, I do take offense at being called locust. Yes, I do take offense at being blamed for every problem by people who don’t know me. What normal person wouldn’t be? As far as understanding younger people, I taught school for several decades and I have hundreds of friends in their 20s and 30s. We seem to understand each other pretty well. I am a minor historian, and am currently working on a five-volume deep history of the world. (Volume One is finished.) Since the critic is a “Gen-Xer”, does that mean that he or she is not only cynical but shallow, underachieving, lazy, and prone to blame others for his or her problems? Just wanted to know, inasmuch as this person has decided to use stereotypes to describe me.
Finally, in my opinion the work of Strauss and Howe is deeply misleading. Only sophisticated polling and surveying done by qualified social scientists can reveal the full complexity of social attitudes. And what do we find when we do such surveying? We find that people have a great deal in common with each other. We find that people tend to respond in very similar ways to the outside world, and that everyone filters reality through an individual mindset. Of course it matters when people are born, but it is not determinative to the degree many think it is. How does the author who cites Strauss and Howe KNOW what a “classic Boomer” is? What survey data is this view based on? How does he/she KNOW what a “core Millennial” thinks? Again, what is the evidence here?
Human history unfolds for a multitude of reasons. There are countless variables that affect it. Ascribing huge changes to the attitudes of so called “typical” generation members can only lead us down a dead end of incomprehension and mistaken conclusions. History is not only the story of change; it is also the story of continuities, and the things all of us share – regardless of how old we are.
The Dish 