Posted on 12/29/2017 11:43:12 AM PST by nickcarraway
“Young people no longer respect their parents,” the author lamented. “They are rude and impatient. They frequently inhabit taverns and have no self control.” Not the letters page of last week’s Mail on Sunday, although a similar sentiment could well have been expressed there, but an inscription on a 6000-year-old Egyptian tomb.
The so-called ‘youth of today’ have, in short, been getting it in the neck from their elders for centuries. Plato wasn’t a huge fan – “Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?” – and the inter-generational castigation has continued ever since.
This week, another wealthy older man weighed in with his contribution to the annals of older people passing judgement on the young. Only this time, the charge is that they are too boring. Eleven years after David Cameron hugged a hoodie – a time when newspapers were full of ASBOs and high-pitched ‘mosquito’ alarms audible only to the apparently delinquent under-25s – Simon Callow, 68, has criticised young people for not partaking in enough booze and sex.
Call it ephebiphobia – fear of youth – or simply call it moaning. Either way, the ‘youth of today’ could be forgiven for thinking that they can’t win. ‘What’s going on with millennials?’ “Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?” Plato on young people “What’s going on with millennials?” the Four Weddings and a Funeral star asked in a Radio Times interview, using the term given to the first generation to come of age in the new millennium (roughly, depending on whose definition you take, those born from the early 1980s to mid-nineties).
“They remind me of what Field Marshal Montgomery said to Churchill: ‘I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I eat moderately. I’m celebrating my 80th birthday tomorrow.’ And Churchill said, ‘How?’” Callow, whose husband is 33 years younger than him, added: “Statistics say millennials don’t have very much sex, either.” The charge sheet against Millennials was already lengthy. They are “The Dumbest Generation,” according to a high profile book of that name, which points to social media, computers and phones, and the subsequently dominant influence of peers rather than experienced older people.
They are the selfie generation; Generation Me; entitled and narcissistic. And that’s before you even get started on the Snowflakes – our youngest adults, following on from Millennials and adding an allegedly thin-skinned propensity to offence into the mix. Read more: Old people: Let’s stop ruining Glastonbury for the young So thin-skinned, apparently, that the decision this week of a Canterbury grammar school to set up an “unsafe space” where students can experience “beautifully disturbed and disturbing ideas” free from the constraints of political correctness, was held up as something of a radical development.
Those who criticise have often found a sympathetic audience. When an American English teacher, David McCullough Jr, delivered a graduation address to his students at Wellesley High in 2012 in which he told his students: “You are not special,” the video went viral and now has three million views on YouTube. Mr McCullough, describing the cultural “epidemic” that places accolades and trophies – something to pose with – before genuine achievement, informed the listening teenagers: “Astrophysicists assure us that the universe has no centre and therefore you cannot be it.” He urged them to “climb the mountain so that you can see the world, not so that the world can see you.” ‘Only thinking of themselves’ But it was ever thus. “The young people of today think of nothing but themselves,” Peter the Hermit is reputed to have said, back when Crusading was the national pastime.
“They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint … As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behaviour and dress.” It hadn’t got much better by 1816, according to The Times.
In the summer of that year, it reacted with horror to the introduction of an “indecent foreign dance” called the Waltz at a ball given by the Prince Regent, which involved “voluptuous intertwining of the limbs”. “We feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.” Even our ‘Greatest Generation’, who fought off Hitler, were not immune; teenagers who saw the romantic silver lining to spending their evenings in Blitz shelters faced the wrath of a Southwark probation officer who spluttered to the court in November 1940 about “youngsters in their teens, of mixed sexes, making up their beds together on the floors of public shelters, even under their parents’ eyes.” “The thing about being old is that you have been young, so a) you have done more and b) you are comparing the young to your younger self and they are never going to stack up.” Harry Mount, editor of Oldie Some of those ‘youngsters’ in turn will have tutted at the Swinging Sixties as they matured, and so it goes on. Perhaps the only unusual thing about Callow’s comments is that he would like to see more, not less, ‘intertwining of limbs’.
For Harry Mount, editor of the Oldie magazine, this well-worn “griping” by older people is to some extent “entirely natural”. “The thing about being old is that you have been young, so a) you have done more and b) you are comparing the young to your younger self and they are never going to stack up,” the 46-year-old says. Yet it is also “the wrong attitude”. “It is quite often disappointed, angry old men – and I don’t think Callow is one of these actually – who say ‘the young aren’t as brilliant as I was’ and it is not, as Cicero said back in the first century BC, because they are old but because they are grumpy and jealous. Actually there are plenty of old people who are enthusiastic and energetic and curious.
It is an attitude thing rather than an age thing.” ‘If you can’t get wild at university, when can you?’ For Mr Mount, however, there is some truth in Callow’s diagnosis about today’s youth. “I am not attacking the young or saying they should get drunk the whole time, but if you can’t get a little wild for example at university when can you? If the young are more responsible I suspect there are good reasons for it and it is partly to do with how hard it is to get on in Britain today.”
On that front, he shares some common ground with Robbie Young, Vice-President of the National Union of Students. “We hear so many negative stories about students and young people,” he says. “The familiar panic that consumes the older generations about how lazy or boring we are.” “Young people are more likely to volunteer or to get involved in social campaigns through protests and online petitions, and put more emphasis on ethical concerns when it comes to where they shop or where they work.” Rhodri Davies, head of Charities Aid Foundation’s think tank Giving Thought Yet the truth, he argues, is that young people have much to commend them. “Though nearly half of us are laden with staggeringly high student debt we have high aspirations and are taking the digital industries by storm, starting our own companies and mastering new skills. We’re more aware of social issues and far from being the snowflakes so many brand us, we speak up, respond to injustices and fight for a better society.”
His claims are supported by Rhodri Davies, head of Charities Aid Foundation’s think tank Giving Thought, who says that on some measures at least, our supposedly self-centred young people are more civic minded than their predecessors: “Our most recent annual UK Giving report shows that while younger people may give less money to charity – presumably because they have less disposable income – they make up for it in other ways.
They are more likely to volunteer or to get involved in social campaigns through protests and online petitions, and put more emphasis on ethical concerns when it comes to where they shop or where they work.” Perhaps it is not Plato, or Callow, to whom we should be paying heed but G.K. Chesterton. “I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him,” he wrote. “The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.”
I think the dynamic between the “adult” culture and the “teen/youth” permanently changed for the worse around the end of WWII.
Once young people became a major source of income for business, all bets were off.
I live in a military town. I meet polite and respectful young people everyday. They always call me “sir” and wait in line quietly. I am lucky.
Such decadence!..................
I think we have already narrowed the bad ones down to “snowflakes”.
In Book III of Odes, circa 20 BC, Horace wrote:
“Our sires’ age was worse than our grandsires’. We, their sons, are more
worthless than they; so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt”
They [Young People] have exalted notions, because they have not been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things — and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: Their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning — all their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They overdo everything — they love too much, hate too much, and the same with everything else.
(Aristotle)
“”Your mother and I work hard to send you to scribe school, and do you study? No! You’re hanging around on the street corner with the wrong kind of friends instead of coming home and doing schoolwork.” -Ancient Sumerian tablet
The so-called “greatest generation” screwed things up.
My dad was a trouble maker as a teen in the 1950’s. Greased back hair, rolled up smokes in his t-shirt sleeve, motorcycle. The whole stereotyped she-bang. My mom’s parents were horrified when they met him. Went on to become an architect, start a business, raise 4 kids, hunting and fishing nut in retirement.
My own kids are in their teens now and I have to bite the bullet sometimes. I more or less followed in my dad’s footsteps and my kids are following mine. There are certainly rules and boundaries, but those teen years can be a little rough.
Adjusted for “demographic” factors, millennials are less liberal than older baby boomers were at the same age. But the people in between were more conservative than either group when they were young.
Well, sort of. I think prosperity from rebuilding the world after the war, along with marketing and demographic studies becoming a serious thing caused a lot of business to cater to youth, and they’ve been doing it ever since.
What went on in Great Britain in the 60’s is amazing. The culture was taken over by the youth.
Once the public school system was fully infiltrated with communists, all bets were really off.
It took several generations, but mission accomplished. Without a shot fired.
Thank God for President Trump.
And each generation gets worse. So comparing every other or third or fourth generation is telling.
The United States lost WWII badly, and everything that’s ruining our country now was brought back from WWII.
They are guilty of ruining rock music. That’s a fact!
I think this is the first time in history when society ensured their young will have no assets whatsoever to fend for themselves.
I blame the hula hoop,45 records and obviously the moptop.
Oh,and elvis’s gyrating hips.
And the McBugerler!
The Watusi. Dancing by oneself!
They are not bad people. The problem is they are so thoroughly well versed in emotionalism as a counter to modernism and rational thought. They are also totally “all in” with the whole gender confusion nonsense.
I had to actually ask my young daughters what God says about homosexuality. They had the right answer, but definitely no passion on the issue.
Without intervention millenials are doomed to grow up to be easily offended snowflakes. The First Amendment is really at stake in the future.
Trying to characterize a generation of people by shared traits is a fools errand. There will always be exceptions to the shared traits. I deal with a lot of the so called millennials and generally speaking they’re perfectly fine people. Although there is a sense of having been screwed over by the political class. Which they have been.
Politics is a scam and we’re suckers for playing.
I teach them at the university level; most of them are a product of our fraked up K12 system who pushes them to the college/university level when most cannot even put a simple paragraph together. To be blunt, most are self-indulged idiots....I could go on, and on, and on...
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