(NB that this page is very under construction, but should stabilize by Wednesday)
You do need to survey the entire history
that shaped the world into which you were born
in order to know who you are and where you stand.
(Justin EH Smith)
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literature consulted (a bibliographic ramble)
*****
I've been concerned with age cohorts as cultural loci for a good 60 years, ever since I first learned about "age grades" in the first Anthropology course I took, so Justin Smith's piece in the September 2023 Harper's ("My Generation: Anthem for a forgotten cohort") was irresistible. While I remain leery of the glibness and imprecision of the broader labels for cohorts/generations (Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, etc.), the Wikipedia summaries are not without utility for broad-brush characterization:
Generation XResearchers and popular media use the mid-to-late 1960s as starting birth years and the late 1970s to early 1980s as ending birth years, with the generation being generally defined as people born from 1965 to 1980.Baby Boomers: 1946-1964Age Cohorts have come up in several other Questions: Maureen's Question of mid-April 2023, Wende's of November 2022, and several blog entries: Shakespeare und sein Zeitgenossen, chronotopes, The Earnest and the Bogus: Of "Folk Revival" ....Millennials: 1980-2000, 81-96 (Most millennials are the children of baby boomers and older Generation X)
Gen Z: 1996-2010 (Most members of Generation Z are children of Generation X or younger Baby Boomers)
(For a good time, read Elizabeth Bastos' "Open letter to the pair f Gen-Z men in the Northeast Regional Quiet Car loudly discussing...")Gen Alpha: 2010- (Scientists and popular media use the early 2010s as starting birth years and the early-to-mid 2020s... Members of Generation Alpha are mostly children of Millennials,and older Generation Z..)
Here are two slightly time-worn paeans to the generation to which I belong, which is composed of folks Born During The War (and thus distinct from the Baby Boomers). The songs are in very different genres, but as Justin Smith reminds us:
The musical totemism by which postwar youth consolidated their identities
through affiliation with some genre or other
was as real as any other social fact.
The Goodle Days (John Hartford, 1971)
One day about twenty-five years from now,
When we've all grown old from a-wondering how,
Oh we'll all sit down at the city dump,
And talk about the Goodle Days.
Oh you'll pass the joint and I'll pass the wine,
And anything good from a-down the line.
A lot of good things went down one time,
Back in the Goodle Days.
And the Good Old Days are past and gone.
A lot of good people have done gone on.
That's my life when I sing this song about
Back in the Goodle Days
Sometimes I get to thinkin' that we're almost done,
And there ain't nothin' left that we can figure out.
And I guess it must have seemed a lot more like that
Back in the Goodle Days,
But when ya gotta go, ya gotta go.
There's always somebody don'tcha know, A-hangin' round a-sayin "Well I told you so",
Back in the Goodle Days.
And the Good Old Days are past and gone.
A lot of good people have done gone on.
That's my life when I sing this song about
Back in the Goodle Days
Oh we''l all join hands and we'll gather round,
When that old guitar starts to make that sound.
A lot of good things went down down down,
Back in the Goodle Days.
We's in love with the people that we hadn't even met,
Out for anything that we could get.
Oh we did it then and we'll do it yet,
Back in the Goodle Days.
And the Good Old Days are past and gone.
A lot of good people have done gone on.
That's my life when I sing this song about
Back in the Goodle Days
*****
My Generation (The Who, 1965 and after)
People try to put us d-down (talkin' 'bout my generation)
Just because we get around (talkin' 'bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold (talkin' 'bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old (talkin' 'bout my generation)
This is my generation
This is my generation, baby
Why don't you all f-fade away (talkin' 'bout my generation)
Don't try to dig what we all s-s-s-say (talkin' 'bout my generation)
I'm not trying to 'cause a big s-s-sensation (talkin' 'bout my generation)
I'm just talkin' 'bout my g-g-g-generation (talkin' 'bout my generation)
My generation
This is my generation, baby
Why don't you all f-fade away (talkin' 'bout my generation)
And don't try to d-dig what we all s-s-say (talkin' 'bout my generation)
I'm not trying to 'cause a b-big s-s-sensation (talkin' 'bout my generation)
I'm just talkin' 'bout my g-g-generation (talkin' 'bout my generation)
This is my generation
This is my generation, baby
My my my generation
People try to put us d-down (talkin' 'bout my generation)
Just because we g-g-get around (talkin' 'bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold (talkin' 'bout my generation)
Yeah, I hope I die before I get old (talkin' 'bout my generation)
This is my generation
This is my generation, baby
My my my generation
this is my generation
(Talkin' 'bout my generation) this is my generation
(Talkin' 'bout my generation) this is my generation
(Talkin' 'bout my generation) this is my generation
(Talkin' 'bout my generation) this is my generation
(Talkin' 'bout my generation) this is my generation
(Talkin' 'bout my generation) this is my generation
(Pete Townshend credits Mose Allison's "Young Man's Blues" as his inspiration for the lyrics:
*****
But let me back up just a bit, to a couple of weeks ago (August 2nd, to be precise), when I read in Literary Review about Sarah Knights' Thoroughly Modern: The pioneering life of Barbara Ker-Seymer, photographer, and her brilliant Bohemian friends. Bar Ker-Seymer (1905-1993) was a Personage in post-WWI London, a Bright Young Thing for sure ... which reminded me of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time novels, 12 volumes covering 1921-1971, with more than 400 characters, which I'd embarked on reading in the 1970s but couldn't sustain sympathy with through all the volumes — the characters (and the society in which they moved) were just a bit too far removed in time for my patience at the time. The recent discovery of Hilary Spurling's Invitation To the Dance: A Handbook to Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (which arrived in today's mail) offers the essential scorecard to help me through a re-reading of a clutch of books that deal quite specifically with an age cohort seen over time.
***** Justin Smith's article in the latest Harper's has many quotable bits, a few of which I'll repeat here because they cast such interesting light on cohorts besides those of Gen-X (to which Smith [in his mid-40s] himself belongs):
I had not fully admitted to myself that the world belonged to young people now — who plainly did not belong to my universe and did not share my points of reference — and that from here on out my presence was, at best, to be tolerated. (45)Smith's piece contributed a notion that hadn't occurred to me as a vital element in my understanding of cohorts: the Year Zero, "the moment when the world as I knew it came into being..."...the authenticity-mongering that, alongside its partner irony, are the twin pillars of Gen-X identity... (30)
Gen-X's famous aversion to selling out cannot really be understood without considering the world that was actively being created by our parents in the years of our generation's formative experiences...
...against the rising force that would, soon enough, cast us into whatever came next: the world whose most important narratives are shaped by algorithms, and in which the horror of selling out no longer has any purchase at all, since the ideal of authenticity has been switch out for the hope of virality. (30)...the cartoonist R. Crumb, who created so much of the visual template for the way we see late-Sixties and early-Seventies America... What remains unsaid, but what he seems to know, is that he, Crumb, is in fact compelling, and is likely to remain so. And he is compelling because of the history he is channelling—the fucked-up American history that coughed him out, and made him its vessel, made him speak in a new way of what it has all been about. (32)
...the new system of constant cybernetic feedback-looping between content producers and "fans" is one that primarily functions to reduce entertainment products to the role of norm enforcement... Likes, retweets, upvotes, customer feedback, and algorithmic incentivization had already won out over any ideal, however imperfect, of self-government, autonomy, saying what you think, striving to know your own mind, loving the truth while always remembering how hard it is to find it. (32)
And so I wondered where to locate my own Year Zero, and decided that it was 1952-1953, the fourth grade year, when I explored Boston's subway system and took the Red Line to the Telepix theater (short subjects) by myself; when my friends and I were deeply engaged with stamp collecting; when we moved from Cambridge to Andover and I adopted 'Pogo' as my name; and when I generally began conscious construction of a persona to present to the outside world.
***** I have mentioned George WS Trow (1943-2006) before in blog posts Trow take 1 and Trow take 2 and in Convivial discussions. He was a Harvard classmate of ours, went from the Harvard Lampoon to the New Yorker staff, started National Lampoon, and was a NYC bon vivant. Trow's Within the Context of No Context (1980, 1997) and My Pilgrim's Progress: Media Studies, 1950-1998 are utterly and absolutely about the sociocultural setting of our cohort.
George Trow's Battle With Insanity (Ariel Levy, 2007)
***** Taking a step back from birth-year cohorts to the broader perspective of ranges of years that get labeled as separate Generations, my hunt for a variety of perspectives on the Generations phenomenon, began with Jean Twenge's Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future (2023); which led me to thinking about life stages, and thus to revisiting Erik Erikson's Childhood and Society (1950, 1962) and then to The Life Cycle Completed (with Jean Erikson, 1997); and a comment from John-the-son sent me to the new edition of Strauss and Howe's Generations (1991, 2023) and on to The Fourth Turning (1997). See the very useful Wikipedia article on Strauss and Howe.
I'm still deep in the weeds of all of the above texts, via Kindle. There are Notebooks for each of those.
***** So where next? My Medium feed brought me Daniele Nanni's "A Glimpse into the Future" (which might be paywalled) a few days ago, which invokes
"a future where digital and physical worlds merge into one augmented reality... the Synthetic Age... an historical period where reality merges with technology and data... AI systems can exponentially enhance our capacity of process information, create media and make decisions.......The Digital Age revolutionised civilisation by digitising information, encoding words, sounds, images as abstract 0s and 1s independent of physical media. This let messages transcend distance and time creating the seed for new forms of culture that decentralised communication, democratised creativity, and diversified expression.
...Our attention has been commercialised and our personal time disrespected. In the digital economy, our focus has become a commodity to be extracted, monopolised, and sold to the highest bidder.
...We have nearly forgotten time's contemplative essence, our senses dulled by this acceleration and commercialisation of our private life.
...reality is becoming something we can not just digitally encode, but also physically construct and enhance; that we can synthesise... Synthesis means combining parts to form a new whole. ...Synthesising is basically creating by convergence.
In the Digital Age, computers were distinct objects that mediated tasks which we could choose when and for how long to interact with. As the Digital Age progressed, we started to have less and less choice over our technology interactions. Connectivity became an assumed constant.
...As we enter the Synthetic Age, the prospect of disconnection shrinks to zero. Future generations will be born into a world where digital information and technological augmentations are seamlessly integrated into their identities and cognition.
...How will we embed ethics and humanity into technologies fusing into our nervous systems?
And thence to Douglas Rushkoff's Team Human (2019), snagged for the Kindle.
Team Human is a manifesto—a fiery distillation of preeminent digital theorist Douglas Rushkoff's most urgent thoughts on civilization and human nature. In one hundred lean and incisive statements, he argues that we are essentially social creatures, and that we achieve our greatest aspirations when we work together—not as individuals. Yet today society is threatened by a vast antihuman infrastructure that undermines our ability to connect. Money, once a means of exchange, is now a means of exploitation; education, conceived as way to elevate the working class, has become another assembly line; and the internet has only further divided us into increasingly atomized and radicalized groups...When will it ever end?