In a 1936 essay entitled “The Literary Twenties – The Younger Generation” a New York literary critic, Carl Van Doren, looks back at the generation of the 1920’s which he was on the cusp of. Among his pearls of wisdom is that no generation can really understand the one behind it or in front of it. Here’s how he illustrates that view: “I loved danger, says the father, and it hurt me. The sons says, I love danger.” Another pearl is that there is always a “Younger Generation”.
He capitalizes both words and if you’re familiar with the “Roaring ‘20s”, The Great Gatsby, Sinclair Lewis, Edna St. Vincent Milay, and/or Eugene O’Neill, you know why. What the 60s were to the WWII generation the ‘20s were to the WWI generation and Generation Z is to Baby Boomers. The “Z” stands for Zombie. (That’s not actually true but illustratively so.)
But the following quote is really why I returned to this essay for a second dip. Van Doren has told us that the Younger Generation always rebels against two specific things: old ideas and old manners. Having explained the first, he says of the second. “The rebellion against old manners was merely a widespread unrest, with no focus but in literature. It was like the unrest of any young generation except that it was now easier than it would once have been for the restless young to learn how numerous they were, and so conspire.”
And to use the most-often, least deserved to be quoted lyric (almost 20 years old now): “Whoop! There it is!” Do you see the touchpoint between the Younger Generation of the 1920s and the Zs of the 2020s? Whereas the former had print literature (finally magazines had caught on), newspapers, and syndicated columns to gin up a bandwagon feel, Gen Z has Social Media. And this is print media on steroids. This is radiation turning a small lizard into Godzilla. This, not only allows but causes, cancerous, malignant, supercharged, uncontrolled growth.
Colin Cowherd, a Fox’s Sport’s radio personality, helped me to this conclusion. There was a “controversy” over the presumptive #1 pick in the NFL draft appearing on social media at a women’s college basketball game in painted nails using a pink smartphone. Cowherd thought it a non-issue ginned up by social media and said that’s why he now uses social media for advertising but not for commenting or interacting. He said – I paraphrase – I no longer wanted to provide oxygen for misfits, malcontents, and pot-stirrers.
Yes, that’s who is dominates the land of social media. (As an aside, I suspect the Millennials knew this all along, and us Baby Boomers (at least this one) are late to the party.) Whereas 100 years ago the Younger Generation was dominated by literary people whose only real affliction was youth, so when their opinions, views were magnified all out of proportion they were tolerated, accepted, promoted even, until the reality of the Great Depression and WW II snaped everyone back to reality.
Social media is its own reality. When a movie portrays a malcontent dweeb, nerd, or misfit with an avatar, it’s always of heroic size, statuesque looks, and solid poise. That right there is a snapshot of what social media does for us all. It gives us a false, outsized view of either our popularity or lack thereof.
Generation Z is dominated – through the multiplication effect of social media – by misfits, malcontents, and pot-stirrers who are more akin to a young, ax-grinding, egomaniacal Hitler than to Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, or Lewis. I don’t know what, if anything, can snap them back to reality except possibly an EMP.
Christians can deal with them the way, until HIV and AIDS became a social justice, racist causa belle, epidemics were dealt with. Isolate from the diseased, so you and yours don’t get infected with a hateful unreality and an inflated, unrealistic few of self.
