Hannah Arendt is said to have remarked that civilization is always being invaded by barbarians we call “children.” I don’t like to put a dangerously hard-to-trace quotation in the newspaper, but I first heard this half-jest decades ago and its depth has only impressed me more every year. Whoever said it first was obviously pretty learned and subtle, even if it wasn’t Arendt. “Barbarians” is a Greek word for incomprehensible, gibberish-spewing foreigners, but one of the great discoveries of the Greeks is that of the barbarians’ point of view, and the additional idea that this point of view deserved equal esteem.
Every nation believes its own customs and habits are the best, Herodotus said, and you would have to be nuts to dismiss those prejudices as though they were somehow objectively wrong. (I grant that this is a free translation, but he said it, and it is one of the intellectual breakthroughs with which we associate the Greeks.) As with nations, so it is with generations. The formative experiences, inherited expectations, and learned fears of somebody born in 1985 are hardly less different from mine than a foreigner’s would be.
If I say that my attitude toward millennials is that they are barbarians, I am asking for trouble, but I must insist on being understood: it is only that they are persons whose habits, prejudices, and values are foreign, formed by a different set of events and influences — not that they are inferior. In the right mood I can even be persuaded that their actual knowledge is simply of a qualitatively different character, rather than simply being more meagre because they have lived less long.
Colby Cosh, “‘Millennial’ gets used as an insult. But millennials aren’t actually inferior”, National Post, 2017-10-25.
November 16, 2019
QotD: Millennials as barbarians invading our civilization
Comments Off on QotD: Millennials as barbarians invading our civilization
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
