Responsibilities of a Generation?

4/11/2010

A generation is a construct that sheds more heat than light.

We spend our lives in a thick cognitive soup cooked up by the interplay of our expectations and yearnings with the mass media culture that has evolved, with our full complicity, over the past two hundred years. I'm dating it earlier than many would, because the earliest evidence I have seen of the behavior I'm talking about is described by Thoreau in Walden. In his pithy description, the head monkey in Paris puts on a hat or something, and all the imitative apes in Boston obediently put their hats on too.

Of course newspapers had been around for a bit longer than that, and fashion had been a cultural force in metropolitan areas since the renaissance. But that was mostly a local phenomenon. If you were to study the social groups as systems you would draw the system boundaries on a relatively small geographical scale, such as Paris, or Rome, or London. But when Thoreau was grousing about hats the system's boundaries had expanded across the Atlantic, and the mass media culture had already started to be a global entity.

During our lives there is no question that we've been interacting with a social system of global scope. We are affected by ideas expressed by people we have not dreamed about, in languages we will never hear, about topics we will never know. So our cognitive reactions are primed by forces we somehow know are real without ever having thought carefully about them. If we were born between 1946 and 1966 then of course we're baby boomers, and we act a certain way, and think some things and not others, and we somehow understand one another and are able to communicate as members of a tremendously important and savvy in-crowd. Younger people, and older ones (the few who are still around), describe us in collective terms, and presuppose that we share certain attributes by virtue of this obvious membership. And as they expect us to behave, so we will, answering a primeval call to meet and act upon those expectations as though we had all learnt the same script and knew our parts by heart.

The head monkey at Columbia occupied a dean's office during an anti-war protest, and tens of thousands of people our age stepped up promptly to follow suit, whether we'd thought very clearly about it or not. And just as many people the same age stepped back from the mess and behaved in ways that were directly opposed to the directions in the generational script, out of resentment, or personal grief, or because of membership in some other group that was pulling more strongly than the generational one. Whether one's behavior was compliant or rebellious, nearly every one of the people in our age group behaved in ways that were dictated by the ideology that was part of the packet of meaning delivered by that head monkey at Columbia.