Sunday Morning Contest: Generation Null Set
The Ricochet Glory Badge will be awarded to the member who finds the most compelling evidence that there has ever been a significant historical figure--or an insignificant one--who asserted with pleasure that the younger generation was better-mannered, more ethical, more learned, more disciplined, less frivolous, and generally more pleasing than his own had been when they were young.
The photo has nothing to do with this post. It's for my nephew, Leo.
Hi Leo! It's your aunt Claire! No, I'm your aunt Claire--that's Eddie the Elephant. Can you say elephant? How do you say it in French? How do you say it in Italian? Bravo! Bravo, Leo! What sound does an elephant make? What do you mean, you like trucks better? Trucks are totally boring compared to elephants. Back when I was a kid, we liked elephants.
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Apr '11
Re: Sunday Morning Contest: Generation Null Set
Bill James and Stephen Jay Gould have both argued that the "new generation" of baseball players is more disciplined and focused and better than the old, and James has populated his books with "Old Ballplayers Never Die" quotes where old-timers disparage younger ones, but that's not really what you're looking for.
Plato and Marshall McLuhan both said that the young-uns of their later years weren't really worse than their own youth, but again that's not really what you're looking for.
(And I can't be bothered to look up the relevant quotes anyway.)
I'm pretty sure, though, that I could find any number of commencement addresses where the speaker extols the superiority of the graduates over his own generation, at least in the "more ethical, more learned" categories.
May '11
Re: Sunday Morning Contest: Generation Null Set
I assert that my particular progeny fill the bill you present, and historically have so asserted. However, have never asserted same for the bulk of their peers.
Mar '11
Re: Sunday Morning Contest: Generation Null Set
Yeah, but those are commencement addresses. You are supposed to lie at commencement addresses.
Leo, I like trucks too!
Big trucks.
Apr '11
Re: Sunday Morning Contest: Generation Null Set
Well done! I toyed with the idea of quoting myself from a term paper I wrote, but didn't quite have the nerve to do so.
Apr '11
Re: Sunday Morning Contest: Generation Null Set
If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
By the horse-shoes-and-hand-grenades standard, St. Bernard of Chartres (d. ca. 1130) should count as a hit:
Granted, it is not exactly clear that he was talking about youth, precisely, but he was writing in the Middle Ages, so he must have been talking about younger people, the way middle-aged people do, and it was so much longer ago than other entries that the people must have been younger.
Edited on Nov 13, 2011 at 4:50amApr '11
Re: Sunday Morning Contest: Generation Null Set
The New York Times editorial page in the '60s called the the leading-edge baby boomers, based on the eructations of the Red Diaper contingent of the cohort, the "smartest, best educated, most moral, most socially aware" generation that America had ever seen.
Edited on Nov 13, 2011 at 6:21amFeb '11
Re: Sunday Morning Contest: Generation Null Set
Grendel: If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
Granted, it is not exactly clear that he was talking about youth, precisely, but he was writing in the Middle Ages, so he must have been talking about younger people,
Maybe he was talking about elephants.
Feb '11
Re: Sunday Morning Contest: Generation Null Set
They just wanted to build market share among the young via flattery.
Apr '11
Re: Sunday Morning Contest: Generation Null Set
Liberal Fascism is awash with this stuff, positing a cult of the youth as a central feature of fascism everywhere, dating back to the French Revolution. I think one of the problems with this site responding is that our side never feels that way, with St. Bernard being about as close as you get (and that really being the opposite). If you think that the kids are all right, the argument for a democracy including the dead is a little weaker.
Nov '10
Re: Sunday Morning Contest: Generation Null Set
Quite agree re. my progeny - ages 21 and 33, they're doing fine - and I'll add that I also have quite a good deal of respect for their peers. Boomers (of which I am one), not so much. The most feckless generation ever has left a huge mess for their children and grandchildren to clean up, and in typical Boomer fashion, wants to blame the others for it.
Mar '11
Re: Sunday Morning Contest: Generation Null Set
"[Alyosha] chose the course he did only because it struck him at that particular moment as the ideal course for his soul, which longed to escape from darkness into light. It must be added that, in a way, he was indeed a member of our younger generation, which means that he was honest, that he believed in, demanded, and searched for truth; that, because he believed in it, he yearned to serve it and give it his whole strength; he was spoiling for immediate action, was prepared to sacrifice everything, his life itself, in an act of supreme devotion."
I am not sure this fits your criteria (especially the better learned part, since he is explaining why the young don't finish school), but it is certainly a positive representation of the younger generation, given by Dostoyevsky's first-person narrator in The Brothers Karamazov. Whether that represents the author's actual view, well, who can say?
Feb '11
Re: Sunday Morning Contest: Generation Null Set
I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.
--G K Chesterton, 1922
Mar '11
Re: Sunday Morning Contest: Generation Null Set
Men, particularly young men, have always been averse to industry, the necessary prerequisite for developing the peacetime virtues necessary in modern life. John Smith, in his History of the Settlement of Virginia, notes: "The [Indian] men pass their time in fishing, hunting, wars, and such manlike exercises, scorning to be seen doing any womanlike work. The women and children do all the work. They make mats, baskets, pots, mortars; pound the corn, make their bread, prepare their victuals, plant and gather their corn, and bear all kinds of burdens." This is, I suppose, the natural disposition of my half of the human race. Just as we should not ask why the third world is poor, that being the natural state of man, but rather why the first world is rich, we should not ask why the present generation of young men is so depraved, that being the natural state of men, but rather why were previous ones so excellent.
Edited on Nov 13, 2011 at 5:54amApr '11
Re: Sunday Morning Contest: Generation Null Set
I claim the prize:
Part I. I was musing just the other day—looking on as the surviving tomatoes manfully, or fruitfully, struggled to turn an Indian-Summer-sunshine-and-enriched-CO₂ banquet into succulent carbohydrates, and sipping the last G&T of the year—what a feckless, callow, ungrateful, ignorant, arrogant, lazy, sneaky, lubricious, irresolute, grotesquely clad bunch of lunkheads were the companions of my youth, while I can aver with pleasure that the young people I know today are better-mannered, more ethical, more learned, more disciplined, less frivolous, and generally more pleasing all around (my very words).
Part II. I qualify as an historical figure of some import, if nearly 7 million googlits mean anything:
Not that, based on past experience, I expect anything to come of it. Just by participating I have kicked this contest into Limbo:
Item--Post of the week on Ricochet Podcast. Promised EB broadside never arrived.
Item--Peter Robinson weekend contest for best mnemonic of key election states. No judgement ever rendered. (Closure, Peter, we need closure.)
Item--Weekend Contest for short story based on Google search for forgotten friend. No judgement ever rendered. (Closure, Claire, we need closure.)
Jul '10
Re: Sunday Morning Contest: Generation Null Set
Every generation
Blames the one before
And all of their frustrations
Come beating on your door
I know that I'm a prisoner
To all my Father held so dear
I know that I'm a hostage
To all his hopes and fears
I just wish I could have told him in the living year
Mike & The Mechanics
While reading this post that song popped in My head and has refused to leave.
Just thought I'd spread the misery.....
Apr '11
Re: Sunday Morning Contest: Generation Null Set
Well, it's our $3.47/3.58, so I guess it's okay that our conversations veer off-course, although I can see how that's frustrating for the original topic-poser, if he/she is actually looking for input on a fairly narrow subject. That being said....
Mar '11
Re: Sunday Morning Contest: Generation Null Set
If I have seen a little further it is by standing on this here pyramid of human skulls. -- Atilla the Hun.
Apr '11
Re: Sunday Morning Contest: Generation Null Set
HalifaxCB
Quite agree re. my progeny - ages 21 and 33, they're doing fine - and I'll add that I also have quite a good deal of respect for their peers. Boomers (of which I am one), not so much. The most feckless generation ever has left a huge mess for their children and grandchildren to clean up, and in typical Boomer fashion, wants to blame the others for it.
Nah, you don't get by with that. There weren't a whole lot of boomers voting or standing for election in 1932-1965. We may not have done much to improve things, but in large part this current mess was created by The Greatest Generation.
And I don't care, about assigning blame. Back when I was a GI, I stood forward a couple times and said, "Blame me," because it seemed to me the important thing was fixing the problem, not who was to blame. "Okay, we lost a tool and maybe fodded a cockpit. It was me, alright? Let's find the [darn] missing tool and fix the problem."
Oct '10
Re: Sunday Morning Contest: Generation Null Set
Tully: Just as we should not ask why the third world is poor, that being the natural state of man, but rather why the first world is rich, we should not ask why the present generation of young men is so depraved, that being the natural state of men, but rather why were previous ones so excellent. · Nov 13 at 5:42am
Edited on Nov 13 at 05:54 am
I've not heard many good things about the boomer generation when they were in their young phase. I've noticed that American young people tend to be very pragmatic, and much less susceptible to the stupid crap that our parents generation (and young generations in many other countries) suffered from.
Of course I've lived mostly in conservative-ish places (and we all know how birds of a feather flock together) so I could be totally wrong.
Edited on Nov 13, 2011 at 7:33amAug '10
Re: Sunday Morning Contest: Generation Null Set
Maybe this isn't an exact fit, but Woodrow Wilson believed that the purpose of public education was to make children as unlike their parents as possible, and his colleague Charlotte Perkins Gilman said, "There is no more brilliant hope to-day than this new thought about the child... the recognition of 'the child', children as a class, children as citizens with rights to be guaranteed only by the state; instead of... the unchecked tyranny of the private home." (I quote from Jonah's LF)
They aren't asserting with pleasure that the younger generation is better, but they are asserting -- gleefully -- that they can make the younger generation better.