Justin E. H. Smith’s generation
I am a Scorpio, a Rooster, INTP or INFP (depending on what day of the week I take the quiz), and who-knows-what on the Enneagram. According to current BuzzFeed wisdom, my culinary preferences reveal that the Taylor Swift lyric –
– will describe my love life for the next six months. (Why stop at my love life? Why stop at six months?)
More credibly, perhaps, I was born near the temporal boundary that separates the GenX-ers from the Millennials. I assume it isn’t a sharp boundary. I exhibit characteristics of both groups. Alas, I seem to have been born on the boundary’s twerpier side. I’d rather be an X-er. So it was with some keenness that I tracked down the magazine article “My Generation” by the entertaining philosopher Justin E. H. Smith.
A few paragraphs in, my heart sank. Smith was presenting an inventory of what music he used to listen to and when he used to listen to it.
(I remember when it was more or less obligatory to recite that sort of thing to people. It got tiresome.)
The tediousness of his musical examples aside, Smith’s point is that the X-ers were the last cohort to believe in “art in the fullest sense”:
After the X-ers, creators and audiences stopped pursuing, valuing, or even acknowledging transcendency and narrowed their focus to content shamelessly generated for like-minded people. Authenticity, as an aspiration, became a casualty. Nowadays, creators and audiences, lacking any belief in a transcendent anchor to be true to, allow themselves to be pulled along by the strongest current, and everything eventually sinks into the whirlpool of upvotes, of (Smith emphasizes) The Viral, of The Monetized.
Whether or not he’s right about the chronology, Smith does seem to have identified two strikingly opposed ways of thinking, and it does seem that the allegedly newer way (the anti-transcendence tendency) has the upper hand, Zeitgeist-wise. Or so old fogies like myself like to worry.
if the story is over, why am I still writing pages?(from “Death By a Thousand Cuts” – a song I don’t know)
– will describe my love life for the next six months. (Why stop at my love life? Why stop at six months?)
More credibly, perhaps, I was born near the temporal boundary that separates the GenX-ers from the Millennials. I assume it isn’t a sharp boundary. I exhibit characteristics of both groups. Alas, I seem to have been born on the boundary’s twerpier side. I’d rather be an X-er. So it was with some keenness that I tracked down the magazine article “My Generation” by the entertaining philosopher Justin E. H. Smith.
A few paragraphs in, my heart sank. Smith was presenting an inventory of what music he used to listen to and when he used to listen to it.
(I remember when it was more or less obligatory to recite that sort of thing to people. It got tiresome.)
The tediousness of his musical examples aside, Smith’s point is that the X-ers were the last cohort to believe in “art in the fullest sense”:
What is art in the fullest sense? It is impossible to give an answer that will please everyone, but we might say that it is a distillation of the spirit of its time that somehow succeeds in breaking out above its time, speaking to us across the generations in a way that transcends the limitations of its own local idiom and its own myopic present. It is shaped by its historical period but ends up saying something quite general about human suffering, human hopes, perhaps the possibility of human redemption (or not).(It bears emphasizing: “something quite general” is not quite something universal; I think Smith is deliberately avoiding making a claim about universality. He is interested in pitting himself against those who disavow even the more limited cases of transcendency, e.g., of art that speaks across a number of generations.)
After the X-ers, creators and audiences stopped pursuing, valuing, or even acknowledging transcendency and narrowed their focus to content shamelessly generated for like-minded people. Authenticity, as an aspiration, became a casualty. Nowadays, creators and audiences, lacking any belief in a transcendent anchor to be true to, allow themselves to be pulled along by the strongest current, and everything eventually sinks into the whirlpool of upvotes, of (Smith emphasizes) The Viral, of The Monetized.
Whether or not he’s right about the chronology, Smith does seem to have identified two strikingly opposed ways of thinking, and it does seem that the allegedly newer way (the anti-transcendence tendency) has the upper hand, Zeitgeist-wise. Or so old fogies like myself like to worry.