tim's experiment

This is one of the things which makes me feel slightly uneasy about being a journalist. Something about news writing makes people very eager to label generations. At various times we have had the Great Generation, boomers, Aquarians, the Me Generation, Generation X, Generation Y and goodness knows what other letters of the alphabet. Now we have the post-80s lot. And these all seem to be entirely constructed by the news business.

It is true that newspeople are not alone in producing nonsense of this kind. The marketing people come up with all sorts of ingenious categories based on consumer behaviour, like Dinks (Double Income No Kids) or Early Adopters (of new technology). Some of these are probably fictitious, but the basic idea is not inherently stupid. Sociologists are still hypnotised by social class, which probably is stupid, but we expect no better from them. The art critics are always detecting new movements. I seem to remember the mainland cinama going through four “new generations”  in about ten years, but that may be an exaggeration. I wasn’t concentrating.

The basic situation is very simple. Families have generations. My father, his brothers and his sister were one generation, along with my mother and her sister. Their respective parents and their siblings were another generation. My son, my brother’s daughter and my sisters’ kids are another generation, and so on. Since people rarely have kids before they are 20 and these days they do not go on very long the term “generation”  has some meaning. The people in each generation will be on roughly the same ages, and their ages will be nearer to each other’s than they are to most members of the next generation in each direction. In a population, though, there are many families. New generations are appearing all the time. Or to put it another way the notion that all the people born in some arbitrary period constitute a generation is nonsense.

Next point: the decade is an arbitrary period. If our ancestors had been born with six fingers we would count the years in 12s. They would still be the same years. Only historians would notice the difference. Whether a year has a zero on it or not is entirely coincidental. It has no effect on the people born in that year or after it.

That is not to deny that people who have lived through great events together have something in common. People of the same age will tend to have some experiences, and some absence of experiences, in common. But these things do not come in neat packages. I am, for example, categorised as a post-war baby, though only just; the Japanese garrison in Hong Kong surrendered on the day I was born. But I cannot claim to have been formed by the period of post-war privation. I dimly remember some things being rationed and some things being virtually unobtainable. I can definitely recall being around for the Festival of Britain and the death of George VI. But as a kid you assume that things were always the way they are now and national events only impinge if you get a day off kindergarten. I have no recollection at all of the great reforming Labour government, possibly because my parents – both enthusiastic Conservatives – preferred to pretend that it had never happened. And by the time I was taking amy serious interest in politics Harold MacMillan was telling us that we had never had it so good. To overlap the war you needed only to be born the day before I was. To have opinion-forming memories of it you needed to be born in the 30s.

So what might define the “children of the 80s”? Clearly not the fact that they were born in a year with 8 as its third digit. There does seem to be a new generation of young activists about, but it is insulting to ascribe their discontents entirely to a statistical label, and dangerous to ascribe it merely to youth. I suppose the people who are unhappy are the ones who were old enough to take an interest in the run-up to 1997, and young enough to believe the rather implausible story we were all told at the time: that we would now enter a new dawn of prosperity and contentment, cheered by the discovery that when we were clasped to the bosom of the motherland we would find she was not the autocratic and vicious old bat she seemed to be from a distance, but was actually caring, cuddly and child-friendly, not at all like that nasty colonial Mr Patten.

I never bought this story, and consequently am not disappointed. But if we keep telling our young people what a good time they are having we could raise a whole generation of cynics.