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Why we need the Generation Wars Bobby Duffy's book is full of surprises about millennials and boomers

Are we on the brink of generational war (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Are we on the brink of generational war (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)


August 31, 2021   6 mins

One of the greatest myths of the 21st century is the idea that we are living through an era of generational conflict. Thanks to a clash of values between old and young, and the pinch on social and economic resources caused by an increasingly ageing population, the conventional narrative holds that, in the West at least, we’re on the brink of generational war.

The only problem is, as Bobby Duffy argues in his new book, it’s simply not true. Duffy’s research shows that on key social issues such as climate change, the attitudes of younger and older people in the UK are fairly well-aligned. When you analyse the data, as he has, it turns out that people don’t fit the generational stereotypes that have been assigned to them.

For example, when it comes to ideas about gender roles, attitudes have changed across every generation. Back in 1983, the view that a woman’s place was in the home was shared by four in ten British people; by 2018, fewer than one in ten held this view. It is not generational identity that determines such attitudes, but changes in the wider social and cultural context that frame them.

This will not surprise researchers who have spent years investigating the existence of generational conflict in the UK and US, only to find the evidence elusive. Policies designed to promote “intergenerational equity” in public spending are largely top-down constructions designed to justify the rationing of welfare resources. Meanwhile, even studies of generational differences, with regard to attitudes or behaviours, tend to be far more nuanced than newspaper headlines about “Millennials” or “Gen Z” imply.

With all the nonsense talked about generations, it’s tempting to dismiss the “tired stereotypes” that Duffy rightly criticises. But that would ignore why they retain both an appeal and some value in making sense of the times we live in.

Generations have long operated as “concepts of existence” that help us to understand ourselves in relation to the world. Laura L. Nash, writing in 1978, traced generational thought back to its Greek origins, where it was as a relative concept marking “allegiance, time of life, span of years, sameness with one group and otherness from the rest”.

From around the late 18th century, economic and political modernisation encouraged Europeans to regard themselves as part of history; both as a product of the times in which they were born and having a role to play in shaping their historical moment. Being part of the “younger” or “older” generation became symbolically attached to wider ideas about progress, the future and the past — with conflict between the “old” and “new” sometimes expressed in generational terms. By the mid-19th century, Ivan Turgenev used Fathers and Sons to depict the social changes sweeping across Russia as a clash between the conventions of the past and aspirations for the future, personified in members of the older and younger generations.

Generations, then, have a strongly cultural dimension — and, as a result, can influence the way we think about the world around us. This was the central argument presented by the sociologist Karl Mannheim in the Twenties, whose influential essay The Problem of Generations drew on philosophical, historical and sociological thought to understand the impact of wider social events on the development of consciousness.

Mannheim’s theory of “social generations” was based on the understanding that periods of accelerated social change could provoke a distinct kind of consciousness within those coming of age during that time, born out of their “fresh contact” with the “accumulated cultural heritage”. Following this approach, we can see how some of the “generation labels” used today capture a shift between old and new worlds, precipitated by significant historical events.

From the “Generation of 1914”, symbolically associated with the trauma of the First World War, to the “Baby Boomers”, apparently embodying the cultural upheavals of the Sixties, a certain section of youth came to symbolise the Zeitgeist. This didn’t mean, of course, that they represented their entire birth cohort, whose experience was more profoundly framed by class, ethnicity, and where they grew up. War poets and hippies spoke to a moment in time, not a personality type.

Over the past decade, however, wild stereotyping about “selfish” Boomers and “entitled” Millennials abounds, alongside a crude determinism that casts the so-called “Covid generation” as forever victimised by the pandemic. Imagined in this way, generations become mere ciphers for wider cultural attitudes and prejudices that our society is grappling with. This is a problem, both for our understanding of generations as “concepts of existence”, and our perception of the people forced into such boxes by their birthdate.

Mannheim would have been horrified by the crass way in which “social generations” have become weaponised. While he theorised a relationship between wider social events and generational consciousness, he rejected the idea that generations were mere products of their time. Generational consciousness is a dynamic process, whereby “new participants” encounter the cultural heritage and shape it in their own way. The transmission of the past, through older generations embodying that heritage, was crucial for the development and renewal of society.

For generations aren’t only abstract concepts — they are embodied in people. These people are our parents, children, teachers, colleagues and fellow citizens; people upon whom we rely for understanding our world and making our own place in it, and depend for love, care, and solidarity. Research such as Duffy’s is a valuable reminder of why evidence of generational conflict is hard to find: people don’t see themselves as representatives of a particular perspective, but as individuals with their own views and experiences; they don’t regard their elders or youngers as a threat but as a relationship to be nurtured, with clashes of opinion forming part of that human experience.

Mannheim understood this when he spoke of the importance of social renewal through the “continuous emergence of new participants in the cultural process”. The continuity of generational transmission — that one dies, and is born, every minute — reduces the level of friction that might otherwise result from having to induct a whole group of people into the cultural process all at once.

The dynamic nature of this interaction, in which young and old continually learn from each other, allows society, as a whole, to retain the “elasticity of mind” that would ossify if we weren’t continually having to engage in a process of “social remembering”. Although times of accelerated change do provoke tensions, it is the conversation between the generations that allows us to weather the storm; retaining our historical memory while adapting to new events and understandings.

The upheaval provoked by the Covid-19 pandemic has made this conversation more important than ever. As we emerge from the shock, we may well see a particular kind of generational consciousness emerge, as young people begin to process and express the meaning of the “new normal” in a way that is quite different from those of us who came of age in different times.

The experience of being able to take nothing for granted — from being able to see your friends to sitting the career-defining exams you have spent years working towards — has occurred at a formative phase of life for them. What many of us may have experienced as just a few weeks or months of boredom, before resuming the pattern of our lives, meant something quite different to children for whom established rites of passage were simply stripped away, and cannot be revisited.

Perhaps most significant, the effective collapse of educational assessment has brought pre-existing anxieties about the value of knowledge starkly to the fore. Put bluntly: if a cohort that has received less education than a previous one gains better grades as a result, what value do we attach to the accumulated cultural heritage in the first place? If the rules of life can so swiftly be rewritten because of an “unprecedented” situation, what do we expect our children to learn from history?

These are uncomfortable questions, to which there are no easy answers. Nobody can predict the form that a new generational consciousness may take. But we can at least take seriously our role in social remembering: ensuring that the younger generation have more to work with than a blank slate. That means, first and foremost, reckoning with our responsibility to educate young people about the past, and entering into a genuinely open discussion about what we have learned from the hiatus of the past couple of years.

Most of the discussion about the problem of education during the pandemic has focused on the failure of schools and universities to take responsibility for keeping the lessons going. But there is a far deeper issue, to do with our defensiveness, as adults, about the norms and values that we grew up with ourselves, and what we want to transmit to our children. The risk is that, in attempting to move on from the pandemic, we will deceive ourselves that we have little of worth to say to youngsters whose experience has been so novel and distinct.

But like every generation before them, today’s young need to understand the world as it was, before they can make it into the world they want it to be. They cannot do that on their own. That is why the conceit that generations exist in separate, polarised boxes is such a problem. It denies young people access to the tools used by those before them to made sense of their lives, and the resulting sense of mutual incomprehension makes conflict more likely.

It is fashionable to argue that our responsibility to the young requires greater thinking about the future — but it requires an equal commitment to the knowledge we have gained from the past.


Dr Jennie Bristow is a sociologist of generations and author of Stop Mugging Grandma


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Paddy Taylor
Paddy Taylor
3 years ago

Barely a day goes by without another (presumably) well-meaning journalist penning an article detailing how hard-done-by Millennials are compared to those who came before them. Dare I say it, Dr Bristow, but these journalists almost always back up their thesis with “findings” uncovered by your fellow sociologists.
Comments pages on the Guardian – both above and below the line – are forever castigating boomers and bemoaning the lot of poor downtrodden millennials.
This effort, by one Dami Olonisakin, headlined “Why don’t millennials have more sex? Maybe we’re just too stressed” was a classic of the genre, in which he opined that Millennials found life too anxiety-inducing to enjoy, or even have, sex anymore.

The truth, for many of us, is that we’re simply stressed out and at our wits’ end, with a million things on our minds that could be interfering with our libidos. We’re worried about finding a stable job, our university loan debt, moving out of our parents’ homes and more. Don’t let the colour aesthetic of our Instagram layouts fool you – we’re slightly freaking out and don’t really have it together.

The previous generation spent their young life under the cloud of potential annihilation in a nuclear exchange. Generations before that living through thousand-bomber raids over our cities every night.
The many hundreds of preceding generations lived (or mostly died) through several millennia of wars, disease, grinding poverty, hunger and grief.
Yet this millennial generation, no doubt suffering post traumatic stress at the price of avocados and having to live with their parents rent-free, are so ground down by life that they can no longer have sex. Sat complaining about their lot in a consoling circlejerk of onanistic self-pity, bleating at every perceived slight and injustice that has been so unfairly heaped upon them.
Poor little lambs. My heart goes out to them.
In truth I don’t know any millennials who fit the pathetic picture that is painted of them daily. All the young people I know get on with their lives with the good cheer and optimism that characterises anyone of sense and spirit. But when journalists write this sort of millennial-pitying guff they just make it too easy to mock this generation.
If such journalists actually wanted to help their generation, the best thing they could do would be to stop writing about them.

Last edited 3 years ago by Paddy Taylor
Terry Needham
Terry Needham
3 years ago
Reply to  Paddy Taylor

Maybe I am looking at my youth through rose-tinted glasses, but my recollection is that absoluely nothing could put me off sex – Whether I needed it or not.

Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
3 years ago

An observation about Covid is that many people who are anti the ruinous lockdown measures and restrictions designed to ‘protect the elderly and compromised’ are certainly older than millennials and Gen Z. Why aren’t the youth rising up en masse against these measures which will have the greatest and most deleterious impact on their futures?
I do know there are protests here and there, but I am talking about civil action that will actually make a difference. It seems to me that they have decided that BLM (not blm!) was a more worthy cause.

Julian Farrows
Julian Farrows
3 years ago

The young have been raised on a steady diet of social media. The internet has effectively circumnavigated the transference of cross-generational wisdom. ‘Lawnmower’ parenting styles, social media contagion, and lack of robust outdoor play have created a generation of coddled and fearful child-adults whose only notion of freedom is that of sexual identity and desire. Unfortunately, it is the only way society allows children to prove themselves. That, and social justice activism.

J Hop
J Hop
3 years ago
Reply to  Julian Farrows

Sexual identity, yes, but I would argue against the desire. Young people today don’t seem to have much of it, sexual or otherwise. Kids seem to choose their orientation and personality off a list online and then find creative ways to get offended when it’s not consistently validated. Instead of living their lives and learning of who they are and who they desire in the standard messy but glorious ways of youth, they’re curating an image from pre-approved identities and conforming thier feeling to that. It’s bass ackwards.

Julian Farrows
Julian Farrows
3 years ago
Reply to  J Hop

I actually agree with you about the desire. Girls are permitted everything and boys are forgiven nothing. I attended a Title IX meeting recently where one investigator said that even if a male student happened to be falsely accused of s*xual assault, he should view it as an opportunity to educate himself about r*pe culture.

Hersch Schneider
Hersch Schneider
3 years ago

There’s nothing revolutionary at all about most young people these days. They’re useful idiots. Little shouty activist mouthpieces for whatever woke, divisive crap is served up by the nutcase ‘progressives’

J Hop
J Hop
3 years ago

To be fair, most adults aren’t much better.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  J Hop

You said it well, J Hop.

One of the reasons I come here is to keep shouting my conspiracy theory beliefs as I think some one has to. Here one can read the posts in reply to Chivers technical article, and it is amazing how intelligent, informed, and well written the response it, and the sheer volume is equal to 20 X what social/political articles get – These are people of substance and thinking – but they just do not bother with the social side of the conversation, yet it is by far the more important.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago

I could not make any sense of the article, but I find young people ignorant, vacuous, sheltered, priggish, thoughtless products of an education and media which has trained them in limited ways and topics to think, and otherwise stopped actual thinking.

They are unsatisfied gamers and consumers fallowing ‘Influencers’ like sheep do the shepherd. The phones they are addicted to are what raises them, and so it is sort of ‘Lord of the Flies, Lite’

The whole conceit of Beavis and Buthead was two youths in the 1980s raised by sitting all day in front of a TV with MTV on, (a take off of Romulus and Remus, the first Roman’s raised by wolves) and what sort of person that produces.

The modern times it is young raised by peers and influencers and evil social Media and degenerate entertainments via their phones. The results will be along the lines of the B&B, but more full of self doubt and anxiety.

Kirsten Walstedt
Kirsten Walstedt
3 years ago

The one constant across these articles and books, regardless of geography, is that Gen X is completely missing from the discussion.

Jean Nutley
Jean Nutley
3 years ago

The media have much to say about everything, but so much of modern reportage consists of what might or could happen rather than facts. I am still trying to find a newspaper that reports actual facts, and leaves the readership to make up their own minds. Instead I am snowed under by columnists own opinions. I don’t care what their opinion is, I want facts so that I can form my own opinion. One thing is crystal clear though, there are plenty of self entitled whingers out there, of whatever generation.

Mike Bell
Mike Bell
3 years ago
Reply to  Jean Nutley

Journalists seem to have (subconsciously?) joined the Post-Modernists. They have abandoned facts and now look for ‘lived experience’. They no longer talk to a range of people and then deliver a considered picture, they just live-interview a few people and present this as ‘journalism.
Perhaps they have simply been seduced by the mobile phone/internet option which was not available to previous generations of journos.

Terry Needham
Terry Needham
3 years ago

“Put bluntly: if a cohort that has received less education than a previous one gains better grades as a result, what value do we attach to the accumulated cultural heritage in the first place?”
But that says nothing about how much value we attach to anything – It was just a fiddle to get the government out of a hole.

Dustshoe Richinrut
Dustshoe Richinrut
3 years ago

A good article here. I will now venture forth with a slice of where minds might need to meet.

What worries, no, vexes me, is the recent proliferation of the pained expression on the visages of young actors (not forgetting actresses too) in advertisements and what not for the latest shows on TV and what not. The guilt complex. Now built in! In the 2020s! It’s both art imitating life and vice versa. And in the internet era, with the imagery of violence and anger abounding, all the time following one about, the young are very vulnerable to trends. Well, with what’s trendy in the doom-and-gloom age. It might be virtuous to be gloomy simply because that’s trendy. And always trendy? In the olden times, people lapped up every scrap of entertainment they could get. It would have to them been odd to feel guilty about that, about forgetting their cares for a short time. That was a tonic against the hardships of living: outdoor toilet, no central heating, no antibiotics, TB rife, radio not even in its infancy yet, say! It’s as if today, to explain the look of dread, the ridiculously tiny screens we are beholden to have literally diminished all icons, whether they are good or bad. Familiarity breeds much contempt. Contempt for oneself and one’s society, too. But even the older members of Western society today let themselves be lapped up by the wonders of technology and trends and the latest misery guts TV shows and scorn the value of cheerful entertainment for its own sake. Even they say what they used to enjoy and get a good laugh out of is old hat (as if fearful of looking really old hat themselves). It’s as if it’s sinful today to laugh and cheer. And they must make a show of wringing their hands. Old modes of humour, as far as those advanced-in-years are concerned, are out! But what about newcomers to Western shores from God-forsaken lands, who might like, indeed prefer, films or shows that are seen as too wistfully reminiscent of traditional, old society by some, yet radical or the ultimate tonic for possibly quite a few of said newcomers steeped in backwards conservatism and unfamiliar with the arts and entertainments? Newcomers to the New World more than a hundred years ago relished their new-found freedom and helped make a city like New York thrive , jive and hum. “Guilty, but not so dern awful guilty!” to use the old Wild West saying, as many of those newcomers, many Jewish, proved to be not so constrained by their religion or tradition. That robustness is missing today. The mark of a more God-aware way of life? The West now shoots itself in the foot. The solution? The old and older need to simply start name-dropping old shows and old entertainers into everyday conversation whenever it can credibly
be done so, so that the young know it’s alright and just better to steer away from the pained-expression, guilt-laden look. That’s one way for the older to ditch their defensiveness. And one way to lessen the uncertainty of the young. Maybe the dread-laden actors will see the cheery light too.

ralph bell
ralph bell
3 years ago

Parents and the older generation have moulded these younger people and also often put their own needs above the greater need of young people, and other, especially during the Covid-19 period.
Its not just big tech and social justice!