The Perpetual Refrain of Every Generation

One of people’s favorite past-times, judging by internet articles, seems to be to complain about millennials. The articles usually point out how millennials are the problem resulting in stores closing, industries collapsing, and in more iconoclastic articles – the destruction of civilization as we know it. A quote that I enjoy and gives a good synopsis of the grievances against millennials is: “The children now love luxury. They have bad manners and contempt for authority. They show disrespect for their elders and love to chatter in place of exercise. Children now are tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up food and tyrannize their teachers…If the whole world depends on today’s youth, I can’t see the world lasting another 100 years.”

It does a good job summing up the grievances, although it could include more about technology. Of course the quote comes from Socrates who died in 399 BC. It would certainly surprise Socrates that the youth he had contempt for kept the world going for another 2400 years.

It is always a favorite pastime of each generation to bemoan how the next is the worse and the times they live in are the worst, that the destruction of the world is upon them. When Visigoths sacked Rome in 410, St. Jerome claimed that “If Rome perished can we be safe” and went on to decry local authorities robbing asylum seekers and the general outbreak of lawlessness.

A few centuries later in the late 8th and early 9th centuries, the monks of northern Europe decried the Viking invasions. One writer, Alcuin of York, claimed “Never before has such atrocity been seen” when describing the Viking invasions and the looting of monasteries. Many claimed that the Vikings were sent as part of the “wrath of God” against the sins of the age.

So it was when the Bubonic Plague hit Europe in the Middle Ages. When the plague hit Florence, Giovanni Boccaccio witnessed the spread of the disease and noted how people attributed the disease as a punishment from God so they fled the city. He also wrote about the breakdown of society noting that some people “put in practice, so far as they were able, resorting day and night, now to this tavern, now to that, drinking with an entire disregard of rule or measure, and by preference making the houses of others, as it were, their inns.” (from The Decameron)

So it was with the 30 Years War (1618-1648). The war devastated the German countryside, depleted the population, and stripped the fields of all the crops and livestocks. Towards the end of the war the Bubonic Plague returned. A protestant pastor, Martin Feilinger, wrote in 1635 that ““now the three rods all went together: war, famine, plague” referencing the apocalypse from the Bible (Rev 6:8).

So it was with World War I. Describing “No Man’s Land” between the opposing trenches the German artillery soldier Gerhard Gurtler wrote: “In the newspapers you read: ‘Peacefully they rest on the spot where they have bled and suffered, while the guns roar over their graves, taking vengeance for their heroic death.’ And it doesn’t occur to anybody that the enemy is also firing; that the shells plunge into the hero’s grave; that his bones are mingled with the filth which they scatter to the four winds – and that, after a few weeks, the morass closes over the last resting-place of the soldier.” (It is easy from Gurtler’s description to see why Tolkein used “No Man’s Land” as his template for Mordor in The Lord of the Rings.)

So it has been in the past and will continue to be going forward.

Taking the long view of history, it appears that people and all the edifices they construct their lives around are perpetually falling apart and remaking themselves. Or put more poetically, they are constantly falling apart and falling back together in new ways. So as we find ourselves in these new unsettling times it may be helpful to remember that “this too shall pass” and we will be on to complaining about the next generation and the next thing in no time. Besides, I hear that Gen Z is just awful...

#Paradigm