It is stupid to name generations; furthermore, it is tasteless; also, I think it mean-spirited; and no, I do not know if I am a Millennial or a Gen-Xr; and yes, if you tell me I will kill you; and finally, if you look into it, you’ll find that I am quite correct in this and many other regards.
Like the bra, the car, and the canning of meat, the regular naming of generations is a less-than-two-hundred year-old phenomenon which can be ignored as such. If you count from its popularization—rather than its academic origin in the theories of Auguste Comte—it’s only as old as the internet, which should be destroyed. And if you count from its veritable explosion into common parlance; from the time that otherwise intelligent children of God began to self-identify as “Millenials” without blushing for shame—why, it’s only a recent memory!
The thing serves as a moronic sort of horoscope—that is, as a horoscope, or worse, a Myers-Briggs test. It is used to deny our own freedom and responsibility. It explains people’s behavior in a way that explains away people: an entire life, reduced to a corpse by one word: boomer.
Drop a carton of eggs at the grocery counter and some meathead will mutter, “Effing millennial.” Find some poor sucker nursing his social media addiction and he’ll explain, “As a Gen-Zr…” Ask for a raise, and your boss will begin to wax eloquent on the diverse expectations of merit held by Gen-Xrs (him) and Gen-Zrs (you). The ability to characterize free people as generational products is a convenient trick for ignoring and belittling others while aggrandizing oneself and one’s high school class as history’s wunderkind.
It is a habit which bags up and drowns the political question par excellence: how to raise up new persons into perfection through the common forms of life? How to guide a man through infancy, childhood, youth, maturity, old age, and into a happy death? Here, each form of life looks forward to becoming what others are and back, with increasing wisdom, on how to help those living out the forms left behind. The persistence and growth of all of human culture—whether in religion, literature, or technical know-how—relies on the presumption that life is indeed communicable; relies on the love by which the young long to receive the common world from those older than them and the old long to give it to them without fraud or deceit.
As long as we continue to plod the merry path towards the graveyard, this is our task: to fructify each new generation into the fullness of life. But we have made this labor of love much more laborious. We have needlessly named each generation as an incommunicable class unto itself, separating each from the other by an arbitrary and stupid device. An old man was once a young man, but he never was and never will be a Millennial. A mother “gets” her daughter because she was once a daughter in her own mother’s house—but she never was and so will never “get” her daughter as a Gen-alpha, or Gen-alpaca, or whatever it was. We fidget, fret, and write bad op-eds on the polarization of American life; we might improve the whole scene by ceasing and desisting from calling old people weird names that divide us from them and them from us.
When grown men and women preen to be called something; when they take some sordid little pleasure in being classified and categorized; when they post (and boy, do they post!) about how to be a Gen-Xr or a Gen-Yr is to be the Best Generation; when they do all this, they give obvious evidence of an underlying sickness—of an itch that generational classification scratches. Many factors contribute to the irritation of their souls. I will not mention compulsory, age-based education, which shapes every child into an institutionalized class separated out from every other age-group. I will not be goaded into discussing the loss of agricultural work, which involves each “generation” in a common task, and its replacement with an isolated “childhood” in which one is basically isolated into a socially irrelevant period of watching dumb TV shows and yearning for a Super Soaker. Even if you cry out with one voice, I will give no indication of my opinion concerning our ridiculous idolatry of Science, which would classify every star, chemical, and flower of the field, leaving man desperate for a scientific category of his own.
No, I remain content to mention the Big Factor which fathers forth the rest.
The naming of the generations began at the end-point of what historians call “the rise of the nation-state,” a long campaign of destruction wielded against all forms of belonging and sources of identity besides those provided by the centralized state. The nations in which we live, move, and have our being were once lands of great, almost unimaginable distinction: hodge-podges of intermarried languages, dialects, laws, customs, and traditions. The Catholic Church preserved all of this diversity within the unity of a common faith.
After the Church became socially irrelevant, the immense diversity of Europe proved threatening to the newly-formed states. Emancipated from her rule, they all set about replacing the Church’s universality with their own, icier version. Governments began to actively and aggressively eradicate the differences between their citizens: banning certain languages, enforcing certain dialects, centralizing law, universalizing education, bureaucratizing governance, and otherwise working hard to produce the “normal” of today, in which one is most basically “an American” or “French,” and any diversity of tongue, place, people, or religion is a relatively unimportant gloss on one’s fundamentally national identity.
Economic liberalism did for our economic life what nation-building did for our social life: homogenized it; sucked all the difference out with a plastic straw and spat both out into the ocean. The genealogy of our Wall-E world need not be recounted here. We can stick with the results: we live in a world increasingly shaped by the same few corporations who make a killing on the sale of ubiquitous, self-identical consumer goods, to the point that every place has begun to look like every other: the same chains, the same ads, the same products, the same trash, now mediated through the same screens.
All of this would be fine and dandy if man, like a species of plankton, were created for sameness and the repetition of a common type. But man is “worth more than many sparrows”—and many, many planktons. He is created for distinction. Sure, he is born similar. A baby, to pretty much everyone except its parents, is a baby. A toddler is basically predictable—people write manuals on how to deal with his class as they write manuals on how to operate a vacuum cleaner. But man’s growth into maturity is a growth into distinction; he gradually “becomes himself,” revealing himself as a radically unique creation. His rationality—an infinite openness to truth—means that he might land on anything. His freedom is met by the work of virtue, that character-building by which man, through repeated action, is carved into something definite—into someone that no one could know in advance, but whom one must get to know. There is no manual for dealing with grown men and women. No one but psychopaths write books on how to manage mature adults: or rather, they do, and we call it literature—the never-ending contemplation of an infinitely diverse and particular creature.
Whatever generation we belong to, we are all born sick of the sameness which has come to characterize our world. We are all of us infantilized, and not just because we are sold insurance and packaged food by cartoon, talking animals. We are all treated like babies whose spiritual needs and characteristics are known in advance; who can all live, and live well, in an identically-arranged world; who can be approached through a manual, with “Here’s How to Communicate With A Boomer” lining the digital shelf next to “Here’s How To Unconstipate An Infant.”
I do not mean to say that there isn’t something quite true about the characterization of each generation as one with distinct traits. But it is a characterization that is only relevant on the basis of our deep, underlying sameness. Difference is only known between things that are otherwise the same: we compare apples to apples and not to oranges. And the nation-building and economic liberalism of the last two-hundred-odd years has worked to make every man more of an apple, and less of an orange, to every other man. It is precisely by each generation becoming more similar to each other that their differences are even recognizable as differences.
Generational studies operate on the assumption that each generation is surrounded by a set of circumstances that produce, in all of their members, similar characteristics in later life. This is basically uncontroversial. But in a world of great difference, whatever circumstances were shared by a generation as a generation would have been hidden, obscured, and all but blotted out by the many, many other sets of circumstances shared with the entire community. That two men were born in the same village, between 1138 and 1145 AD, was—to judge by the historical record—an unnoticeable set of differentiating circumstances in comparison to the fact that one was born to a tanner and the other to a blacksmith. A young farmer and old farmer were more alike (and so their differences more apparent) than either farmer compared to their “generation.” In medieval France, men five-miles apart may have spoken a different language and obeyed a different law: they would have scarcely noticed a generational similarity across all this difference.
But we might imagine a world in which everyone, somehow, became a blacksmith. Suddenly, generations would matter. For precisely by being all made the same in one sense, the differences in “kinds of blacksmith” would become noticeable and important. The blacksmiths who came of age in 1138 would be nameable as such.
Something like this has happened to our world over the last few hundred years. We do not share a trade, but we share a form and kind of life that makes generational comparisons possible in the first place. This form and kind of life is citizenry within sovereign nation-states, all tending towards greater homogeneity within an emerging global nation, in which we all use computer-interface commodities for work, pleasure, communication, and otherwise getting-on in the world. Generational naming became popular after the internet because the internet produces the requisite sameness of life by which the generations can be noticed at all. This is the pathetic pride of the naming of generations: it’s mostly a way of naming the variation of our screen-technologies: Gen-Xrs remember dial-up and Super Mario; Millennials remember flip-phones and Super Mario Sunshine; Gen-Zrs are on Tik Tok and have seen the Super Mario movie. Most of the “character traits” of each generation can be reduced to this (and to the horoscopical effect of talking about generational traits at all. Who, upon reading that Gen-Zrs “don’t take themselves too seriously,” could resist living up to such flattery? And thus marketing produces its own demographics).
Drowning men will grasp at straws, and creatures born for distinction, coerced into lives of sameness, will grasp at whatever meager distinctions still float their way (I drive a truck, dammit). This is why the age of generational naming is also the age of identity politics: both are children of a completed industrial-capitalism. Only once its global, homogenous anti-culture has turned religion, tribe, neighborhood and kin into social non-entities, basically unfit for providing a person with any real distinction—only then could we imagine grasping for belonging and identity from the objects of our sexual arousal.
In the same way, we are all hyper-aware of the differences between the generations precisely as the lives and behaviors of each generation approaches an eerie identity in their near-universal activation of ubiquitous screen-technologies. When Vesuvius erupts and encases our apartments in obsidian, what do we think? That some future archeologist will make the relevant distinctions between our various, screen-clutching corpses? “You see, Kurt, this is a millennial, he’s holding the screen quite seriously. That one over there is a boomer, she’s using the screen tactlessly. And that smaller one, that’s a Gen-Z corpse. You can tell because it’s holding the screen over its face ironically.” A universe of phone-addicts, and we’re all up in arms about how different we are! But this is salvation for us. As long as we can imagine the bleak sameness of modernity as something colored by our distinct, generational characters, we can soothe our desire for difference, and smother out the siren-song of the Holy Spirit, who calls us to distinguish ourselves, not by minor modifications in the manner of our screen-use, but by virtue and genuine newness of life—by becoming ourselves before God.