Millennials aren’t all terrible, society has detested young people for centuries

“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.”

Young Man Blues - The Who

Oh, well, a young man
Ain’t got nothin’ in the world these days
I said a young man
Ain’t got nothin’ in the world these days

Well, you know in the old days
When a young man was a strong man
All the people, they’d step back
When a young man walked by

But you know, nowadays
It’s the old man
He’s got all the money
And a young man ain’t got nothin’ in the world these days
I said
Ain’t got nothing
Got sweet nothing

The past “bad” generations did not have Facebook and twitter - I work with Millennials and they drive me crazy. They refuse to listen to people my age and instead goggle everything before they believe it. If their I-Phone told them to jump off a tall bridge they would be over the hand rail in a second. This is a different bunch from past generations.

What I noticed is that Millenials have abandoned civility because a) they feel oppressed by requests for mannerly conduct b) they feel weakened by considering other’s feelings and c) they demand anything goes in the commons because you can leave if you don’t like it - they’ll just log onto their phone apps and chat with “better” people all over the world.
Can’t have a conversation without a 25 year old woman unless full frontal profanity is in play - anything else is limiting and you’d be advised to remember there is no such thing as profanity or social considerations if they say there isn’t.

These articles come out periodically, in an attempt to mislead the public into complacency. The issue is not that every generation has despaired of the “young.” The issue is that the current adult generation or maybe two have deliberately neglected and subverted the societal process of enculturating the young.

Remember the “copybook headings” immortalized by Kipling. The proverbs of Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. The Northwest Ordinance enshrined universal education as a responsibility of the new republic, and its goal was explicitly to produce moral and responsible citizens for the Nation.The series of McGuffey Readers inculcated JudeoChristian ethics into reading and writing assignments. Through the fifties, despite the predations of Dewey’s “Progressive education,” patriotism was considered a civic good that went without saying.

All these things, and others as well, including a consensus about respect for religious observance, have been systematically attacked by the Marxist project. The destruction of civic education and organized religion have been their greatest achievements. The destruction of the family is a close second or third, still in process. Obliteration of history has begun.

It is idle to blame the snowflakes for being the way they are, when they are only what the “institutions” have made them.

What is different now, as a result, is this: previous generations grew up, came of age and found their way back. Too many of the recent generations have begun to leave orbit, and not come back.

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