At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian tries to gin up some sympathy for Millennial snowflakes, who feel cheated by fate (and their parents’ generation, but mostly their parents’ generation):
One of the toughest parts of looking at The Past (note capital letters) is grasping the pace of change. Oversimplifying (but not too much), you’d need to be a PhD-level specialist to determine if a given cultural production dated from the 11th century, or the 14th. The worldview of most people in most places didn’t change much from 1000 to 1300. Even in modern times, unless you really know what you’re looking for, a writer from 1830 sounds very much like a writer from 1890.*
Until you get to the 20th century. Then it’s obvious.
This isn’t “presentism” — the supposed cardinal sin of historical study, in which we project our values onto the past.** It really is obvious, and you can see it for yourself. Take Ford Madox Ford. A hot “Modernist” in his day — he was good friends with Ezra Pound, and promoted all the spastic incomprehensibles of the 1920s — he was nevertheless a man of his time… and his time was the High Victorian Era (born 1873). Though he served in the Great War, he was a full generation older than his men, and it shows. Compare his work to Robert Graves’s. Though both were the most Advanced of Advanced Thinkers — polygamy, Socialism, all that — Graves’s work is recognizably “modern,” while Ford’s reads like the writing of a man who really should’ve spent his life East of Suez, bringing the Bible and the Flag to the wogs. The world described in such loving detail in a work like Parade’s End — though of course Ford thought he was viciously criticizing it — might as well be Mars.
We’re in the same boat when it comes to those special, special Snowflakes, the Millennials. A Great War-level change really did hit them, right in their most vulnerable years. While we — Gen X and older — lived through the dawn of the Internet, we don’t live in the Internet Age (TM). Not like they do, anyway.
He does a bit of a Fisking (that’s an olde-tyme expression from when we used to knap our own flint, kiddies) of an article by a Millennial writer trying to make the case that the plight of the Millennials is comparable to that of the Lost Generation. But some actual sympathy is eventually located and delivered:
I titled this piece “Sympathy for Snowflakes,” and finally we’ve arrived. The days of life on the cul-de-sac with the white picket fence are indeed gone… but they’ve been gone for thirty years or more. They were in terminal decline since before Rush started singing about suburbs — that was 1982, if you’re keeping score at home — and what awful conformist hells they are. Ever heard the phrase “sour grapes?” I’m not going to say we invented that — after all, anything worth saying was already said by Dead White Males hundreds of years ago — but that’s why Gen X pop culture is full of rants against “conformism.” Slackers, Mallrats, all of it — sour grapes, buddy. If you in fact grew up on a cul-de-sac behind a white picket fence, your parents, who must’ve been early Gen Xers, were among the lucky few.
The difference between your generation and mine, Mr. Lafayette, isn’t what we wanted once we matured enough to start actually knowing what we wanted. It’s that my generation received rigorous-enough educations to figure out that the house on the cul-de-sac with the white picket fence is an aberration, just a flicker of static. Only one tiny group of people — middle class Americans, born roughly 1945-1965 — ever got to experience it. Young folks in the 1220s probably lived much as their parents did back in the 1180s, but modern life doesn’t work that way. These days, everyone makes do with what he has, gets on as best he can. Your generation, Mr. Lafayette, was taught to regard The Past as one long night of Oppression, and because of that, you never learned to take any lessons from it.
That’s why I’m sympathetic, even as I’m mocking you (but gently, lad, gently). That’s the real parallel between yourselves and the Lost Generation — it was done to you. You had no choice, and unlike the Lost Generation, you can’t even pin the blame anywhere. It just….kinda… happened. No wonder you feel adrift and powerless. No wonder “stand up straight” and “clean your room” seem like adages of life-altering wisdom.
So take an old guy’s advice, and READ. Read just about anything, so long as it’s published before 1950. Don’t think, don’t analyze, don’t snark, just read it. The change will come.
