Big news today, a failure of parents and schools to enforce boundaries has created an entire generation of ‘infantalised’ millennials and fuelled the rise of identity politics. Sounds pretty bad, huh?
In a piece in today’s Times, Professor Frank Furedi talks about his new book, in which he claims that millennials in their 20s behave like teenagers because their parents didn’t discipline them and instead wanted to be their best friends.
The ‘failings’ of the older generation to parent these children has meant they’ve not had to battle against their parents rules and therefore skipped becoming self-sufficient and intellectually independent, he says, talking about his book, Why Borders Matter. Meanwhile, ‘moral boundaries’ (he cites men/women and public/private) are being dismantled and young people abhor those who make moral judgements. But paradoxically, he says, have created their own strict boundaries, by becoming more interested in ‘safe spaces’ and identity politics.
That’s just all a bit… ughhhh isn’t it? Firstly, millennials were born from 1981-1996, so are 24 to 39. So, the majority are in their 30s and therefore maybe don’t even fit this picture of 20-somethings roaming around like mad Kevin and Perrys (which ironically is a reference only the older end of that group will get).
Yet again, it feels like people are widely swiping at the term ‘Millennials’ as a catch-all for ‘those bloody young’uns’. Like, there’s a dictionary definition for the age of people who are classed as millennials, people could probably stop with that now.
And while the piece seems to be addressing the parenting of the Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers that raised them, neither of those terms are even mentioned in the piece, let alone given a real bashing. There’s a moody swipe at them shopping with their 18-year-old kids and wearing similar clothes (again 18 YEAR OLDS ARE NOT MILLENNIALS), but the piece appears to just be a long list of things that millennials are doing that is annoying because of how they’re raised.
The end point is about… Millennials’ ‘inherently judgemental identity politics’. The Professor says: ‘The thing about identity politics is that every expression they use is actually a contradiction. They talk about diversity — that’s one of the key values of identity politics — but identity politics is totally hostile to a diversity of viewpoints. So if you argue a different narrative to what they are arguing that is seen as racist, as offensive, as hate.’
So, ok, we’re back tocancel culture then aren’t we? And the confusion around cancel culture and call out culture and the different possible benefits of either. We’re back to this debate about free speech and the blurred lines of whether the bid to fight for what you believe is right and wrong is the same as demanding life become an echo chamber of only your feelings.
It’s a huge and fertile area of debate, but bringing race into it, I’m not really sure was the best idea. Fair enough, there are lots of shades of grey on the internet, lots of differentiation of thought, things still being worked through and different political alliances that get fought along. But when it comes to race, aren’t we just all now agreed that calling people out for being racist is the thing to do – and that when it comes to racism, there’s not really much debate? That racism just is, or isn’t? There’s no ‘seen as racist’, is just ‘is racist’?
I think conflating the idea of debate and censure and cancel culture with whether racism is ever up for debate, is a case of bringing a lot of things that don’t necessarily belong there under one umbrella, but maybe that’s because I’m a millennial.
The main problem, yet again, is this whole finger-wagging-pesky-kids approach to discussions about millennials, without well, first accuracy about who they’re talking about. It also chucks into a group a bunch of people who’ve probably had more spectrumed and diverse upbringings than any generation ever and so therefore, I’d argue, are harder than other generations to place together of one mindset. It also doesn’t account for the hugely different lives they are living to two even three generations previously, thanks to the rise of technology and the internet, the increased interactivity that is innate to their lives.
It also seems to tick them off for being political as if the generations before us fought that good fight and sorted everything and we just need to leave it alone now BECAUSE YOU’RE DOING IT ALL WRONG. And it’s insulting.
In fact, perhaps, what’s happening is that the generations of X and Baby Boomers above the millennials never grew up. So, as well as raising children without boundaries, as the Professor suggests, they just can’t bear the fact that there is a generation below them. One that is doing things differently and changing the world as younger generations have done forever and ever and ever. Maybe (and especially now that many of them are old enough to be parents) it’s time the millennials started to set their own boundaries. They’re trying to. It just seems like some people can’t stand it…
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