The Generational Identity Myth

                                  Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own

                                  authorship of the human world, and further, that the dialectic

                                  between man the producer and his products is lost to consciousness.

                                  [This world] is experienced by man as a strange facticity…over which

                                  He has no control, rather than as the [outcome]…of his own…activity.

                                                    Berger and Luckmann, The social Construction of Reality

The codification of the idea that those born into western societies at particular times constitute discrete icebergs of identity known as ‘generations,’ is so pervasive as to be accepted without question. Central to this concept is the notion that generations have a set of identifiable characteristics that distinguish them from previous generations, whose own identities are, by extension, established through their differences with earlier generational constructs. While one can generalize in regards to the cultural similarities of people born within the parameters of a particular segment of time, the very act of calving one of these icebergs of historical specificity from the primal glacier of earlier definitions relies on criterion that must constantly be updated in order for the construct to remain coherent. The problem, of course, is both the tendency to revise the temporal parameters of previous ‘generations’ to fit within the updated conception of the newest version, and the fact that such generalizing—if it is to have any semblance of accuracy—borders on descriptions so vague that they become abstract to the point of dispersing into a crudely conceived exercise in pop-taxonomy.

By criticizing these distinctions as being a new form of stereotyping, I am not suggesting that ‘generations’ do not exist; or, that individuals born in a specific time period do not hold in common a generally defined cultural frame of reference and identity. Rather, I am asserting that the idea that generations have specific themes and practices is undermined by the tendency to extrapolate from those general trends a definitive and circumscribed index of qualities. The latter are subsequently imposed like a pie graph over the messy, overlapping of cultural behaviors and attitudes too varied to be corralled within such a narrowly conceived aperture; invariably, leading to the presumption that the aforesaid qualities constitute a social fact without the mediation of nuances. This is because any acknowledgement of the essentially contingent nature of the concept would stretch and abstract it to the point of syncretistic near-indistinctness.

One illustration of how this process works is the gerrymandering of previous generational boundaries in response to the defining of the recent age grouping known as ‘Millennials.’ These so-called ‘Millennials,’ are the subject of a Time Magazine cover story from May 20, 2013. One may argue, and with good reason, that the sort of sensationalistic generalizations that pass for social facts in the reporting of Time Magazine are too structurally unstable to have any real meaning outside of a critique of hatchet-journalism. However, it is precisely this tendency to exaggerate and caricature that I am interested in because it is emblematic of the intellectual processes at work in these, and related, epistemological constructs.

The article’s author, Joel Stein, asserts—with tongue apparently in cheek—in his opening paragraph that he has “statistics...[and] quotes from respected academics.” And, just in case, one takes these claims too lightly, he adds in the following paragraph that “The incidence of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their twenties as for the generation that’s now 65 or older.”(P-28)  There are a number of questions that immediately come to mind when evaluating a statement like this. The first might pertain to how he or, presumably, the source of this un-reflected upon statistic—which is culled from what is apparently some sort of survey done by the National Institute of Health—accounts for those people between the ages of 30 and 65. Moreover, he does not  bother to examine this proposed correlation between age and selfishness by asking about how such questionnaires are structured, or whether the criterion upon which the scoring is based are actually connected to their ostensible object of analysis. Thus, by being taken out of any nuanced context, Stein extracts the kind of factoid that sounds good as supporting evidence, until the reader asks questions that cannot be dealt with in the framework of the article itself.

To that end, the most obvious question is one of value: Do normative categories applied to human personalities really reflect the way in which those ‘personalities’ function and react in the actual world; or, do they reinforce socially defined paradigms, that often disguise themselves as legitimate medical, or scientific, frames of inquiry by reifying the already questionable notion that the contingent epistemological basis for making such evaluations constitutes a transparent branch of empirical study? This is obviously a very complicated interrogative—and one whose full implications cannot be dealt with in this essay. However, it is fair to say that basing an already dubious label—itself part of a category of so-called ‘personality disorders,’ most recently utilized by the military as a way of denying benefits to thousands of Iraq war veterans—on something as thin as a survey purporting to reveal underlying tendencies in large groups of people towards certain generally defined characteristics, without any examples of the sorts of questions asked, or inquiries regarding how such tests are constructed and arranged,  does not quite constitute evidence of anything except that the way in which a questionnaire is constructed will probably determine how the answers are constrained and interpreted. Such misleading agglomerations of evidence are equivalent to asserting that the majority of the American population would rather have ‘security’ than ‘freedom’ based on results from polls that utilize vaguely worded, false dichotomies to turn such speculation into a yes/no binary question. In fact, Time Magazine previously did this very thing; and, its writers have a long history of regularly using statistics taken out of context to bolster already biased and simplistic arguments. 

However, this is not the only problem with the thesis promulgated in this article. Stein also arranges the responses to specific questions as proof of his argument rather than examining the context in which such answers occur. For example, he points out that the “development” of ‘Millennials’ is “stunted,” because “more people ages 18 to 29 live with their parents than with a spouse.”(P-28)  Such ridiculously narrow extrapolations don’t try to account for such statistics by inquiring about the mediocre economic prospects encountered by that very same age group; instead, the author makes an unrelated assumption to rhetorically bolster a flabby and evaluative argument. While such reckless assertions do not bear well under more detailed scrutiny, they serve the function of reinforcing both the new myth of a totalizing generational narrative, and a set of simplistic assumptions regarding the identities of those who fall within that age grouping.

Finally, the author, finds it necessary to alter the previous groupings of earlier ‘generations’—already dubious, as are all such categories when interpreted as totalizing designations— in order to arrange this newly established paradigm in a way that takes note of certain historical events and cultural shifts. Thus, by neatly situating the so-called ‘Millennials’ as representing people born between 1980 and 2000, he is forced to relocate preceding generations accordingly. Of course, it doesn’t matter much, since how one defines a generation is determined precisely by those historical criterion used to distinguish it as a discrete entity bounded and defined by important events. This raises a fundamental question: namely, how one can be sure that one generation is distinct from the one before it? But such a question is inherently absurd, since these definitions are heuristics to begin with, based on how people born around the same time, adopt their attitudes and react to historical and cultural change. However, by presenting these categories as historical facts, not only does the beholder—In this case, Joel Stein—disregard their largely heuristic purpose, but he is also compelled to make evaluations regarding historical events, as they are now to be perceived as rigidly defining a set of naturalized social categories. But, as everyone who has ever read any sort of historical document knows, events do not happen in neatly arranged 20-years periods; rather history is simply an imperfect and much mythologized record of how events unfold; and like meteorological disasters—which have, especially of late, a disconcerting tendency to occur frequently, even if labeled 100-year anomalies—they tend to pile up regardless of the categories used to constrain their meaning. Hence, the circumscribed boundaries of various ‘generations’ have to obey a fictional historical symmetry which does not exist.

This is because generations are always established in the context of certain historical criterion, whose relative importance changes slightly from era to era. Moreover, the parameters in which one generation is established as a distinct point of rupture from a previous generation, must be constantly retrofitted to allow for the fact that even the most privileged historical events do not occur at neatly circumscribed twenty year intervals, but are widely dispersed in the same way as natural changes, despite their being averaged into an historical indexing of discrete intervals of recurrence. The latter, is of course, an artifact of a rigidly Cartesian way of cutting up historical events and changes into the demarcations of periodicity. These precise fault lines of change are most likely intended heuristically, as a way of orienting and framing an understanding of the historical shifts to which they refer; but, are instead adopted without discerning the hazy boundary between the container and its contents.  Moreover, the extrapolated qualities said to be representative of such designations, are based on averaging from a broad array of data, a specific set of individual characteristics—a logical error, which is, in fact, a product of statistical reasoning, rather than a reflection of subjectively observed qualities. Thus, these concepts are imbibed without regard to the difference between the encapsulating rind and the cheese which it shapes and contextualizes.

One may, of course, speak of generations, in terms of vague characteristics, or more specific, but extremely limited relationships and interests—as one can speak of tendencies evinced by statistical majorities towards certain attitudes, or of how people born between, say 1946 and 1950, probably watched ‘The Mickey Mouse Club’ on television. The problem arises when the heuristic categories utilized to foreground and make sense of a certain cultural gestalt, are reduced to neatly arranged, and itemized, historical facts, no longer subject to interpretation, or necessarily constrained by context. Once freed from their analytical role as tropes used to familiarize one with a time and place, they expand like cartoon floats in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, as caricatures unfolding into rigidly schematic indexes of developmental and historical tendencies. This process may answer a deep epistemological need for new master narratives to replace the certainties that no longer dominate the fragmented mosaic that confronts those who wish to make sense of the larger culture; but, it is also a disingenuous distortion of something much more complicated, which is an outgrowth of specific and peculiar social practices and relationships—themselves subject to rapid transformations rather than being static phenomenon that can be easily gauged and situated in misleading categories.

In consuming both, in their entirety, without regard to such subtle distinctions, historians, media pundits and others, partake of a modern form of mythologizing, which in its distortion of cultural identity creates a malleable demographic fiction that can then be sold back to the same people whom it purports to represent. This form of cultural simulacra would not be the first of its kind, as the marketing system depends on such reductions into type in order to coopt and absorb traditionally hard-to-define populations within the rubric of consumer-categories. The latter, cause-and-effect formulation is itself an heuristic model, intended to contextualize the repositioning of culturally diverse groups as newly gentrified marketing classifications, ripe for further dissection into various sub-headings and gradations of type. This anatomizing of what are, at best, vague designations of different identity constructs, strays into the territory of overt caricature, by emphasizing specifically attributed predispositions and interests at the expense of others for the sake of making it easier for Amazon.com, CheapAir.com, and others, to precisely locate potential customers. While this may seem like a positive effect to many, one should be mindful of other, more far reaching, consequences of such designations. The collating of various types of demographic data into convenient electronic honeycombs to form the basis for a customer data pool—which is itself an eerie mirror to the way in which social perceptions are systematized and then arranged as facts within a larger taxonomical structure—is only the most obvious problem with this tendency toward the reductive streamlining of diverse information.

Less well known is that this methodology is borrowed from the basic structures around which knowledge categories have been oriented since the time of the enlightenment. This ordering of diverse and highly eccentric facts, constructs and ideas, started with Linnaeus and his specific botanical taxa. The break-down of flora into separate species, whose diversity could then be compartmentalized as discrete and measurable qualities, influenced and determined the subsequent categorical reduction and reification of every type of phenomena that could potentially be studied and thus anatomized similarly. Hence, scientists, researchers and statisticians reduced the disordered complexities of speculative theorizing, into an easily reproducible and portable model for even the most abstract conjecturing on the nature of things. This Cartesian approach to organizing knowledge about the world quickly reinvented the existential uncertainties of being, transforming them into a precisely ordered and symmetrical pyramidal sequence of cosmologically and ontologically identifiable gradations of existence. Subsequent generations of researchers, technicians and bureaucrats have accepted this organizational paradigm as a convenient and overarching social fact.  

One article of faith held by all of the above-mentioned, is the conception that meaning itself is modular. Thus, it occurs within the confines of grids, or boxes, very much like those reproduced as artifacts of the analysis of larger epistemic/ontological western cultural phenomenon (collated similarly to records within a filing cabinet, or the Windows and Macintosh systems on computers) and a defining characteristic of ‘Americana’ itself: Everything from the geometricized gerrymandered boundaries of the Midwestern state and county grid, to the electric-utility infrastructure, to the various forms of official architectural modes seen in public buildings in most cities and states( New York being the one glaring  and world-class, exception)—as well as their conceptual equivalents, ranging from the organization of cultural forms of knowledge, to the Fordist ethos, and its restrictive box-like mandala—is structured according to the principles of the assembly-line, the conveyor belt, and its attendant order-of-efficiency.

One need only walk into a McDonalds anywhere in the world to see much of this rendered spatially: There is the factory like design of the seemingly transparent kitchen area, the utilitarian arrangement of everything from the seating plan, to the method of food preparation and even the organization of various amenities. This principle is followed right down to the structure of the bins where the extra big-macs and french fries are held, and even to the arrangement of spaces in the parking lot. In fact,  the grid is so ubiquitous in contemporary society as to be almost invisible; it is the overlapping and basic design element in everything from classroom seating to suburban housing developments, and one would be naïve to think that it does not extend directly to those millions of individuals ensconced within its boundaries, right up the asphalt-driveway bends of their spinal cords, through the public-school, and private-home,  hallways of their respective brainstems, medulla’s, and cerebral cortexes—the very psyche’s that then carry this knowledge within them like an invisible and viral organizational principle. Such a principle must have a massive, if still largely invisible, effect upon everything that this, thus affected, American—and by extension now, globalized—psyche comes into contact with.

One problem inherent in such a broad conceptualization of underlying order is that something expressed heuristically, as a method of orienting a certain kind of knowledge, quickly becomes an end in itself. This is the crux of the difficulty here; for, despite the necessity of conceptualizing various phenomena as if they were specialized entities stored in discrete containers, they are in fact fluid and interrelated. Moreover, the very way in which they are framed, packaged and presented creates the basis for how they are perceived. In other words, most of the classifications used in western epistemology since the time of Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon—our specific boxes for artificially distinguishing between forms, and gradations, of knowledge—produce results derived from the way they are construed through this very type of analysis. Thus, our augmented categories are artifacts of the aforesaid reasoning, imposed over phenomenon reconstituted into an index of separate data categories. The result has led to a widespread tendency to reify and present as hard, incontrovertible fact, many ideas whose validity is entirely contextual, rather than totalizing or universal. That this is not generally noticed says a great deal about the extent to which such narratives of structure, meaning and value have been enshrined as totalizing epistemological myths.

This tendency is reflected in the practice of reifying particular characteristics from generalized samples. The inherent act of extrapolatory presumption entailed in this, creates a fictional ‘typicality’ whose existence is the final product of a deductive reasoning that excludes the very specifics that would otherwise constrain and contaminate its scope with individual peculiarities. It is, however, those very ‘individual’ eccentricities that distinguish between one person and another, and between various phenomena. Thus, a paradox is created in any form of generalized analysis of data, whereby the actual is supplanted by a simulacral entity borne of the conflation of indexed information, and hypothesized qualities. This is a problem besetting numerous forms of systematic analysis—particularly if they involve evaluative aspects of being and sensibility—as they tend to produce fictional ontologies within hypothesized contexts, behaving in typical patterns, whose overall uniformity undermines their credibility as accurate models for anything other than self-replicating artifacts of methodology.

The assumed correlation between empirically compiled statistics and what they purport to describe is itself enshrined within an often unexamined paradigm that privileges such practices as truth-constructs. In a primal society with few members the outgrowths of such alluded-to constructs would probably occur as a derivation of cultural practices that, in the words of Emile Durkheim, would amount to “organic solidarity.” In a large and diverse bureaucratized society however, like the modern globalized state entity, these one-size-fits all narratives can be wildly inaccurate and impossible to fit within a quotidian urban context coherently. The causes of this disparity between theoretical models of this type and subjective experience stem from the primary assumptions that constitute early enlightenment thought.

One of the simultaneously empowering and mythologizing qualities in the Cartesian discourse on the conceptualization of being, is that it confers on the individual the ability and objectivity to conceive of the world as an entity within which various phenomena are embedded; while constraining any subsequent insight into the problematic contextualization of that knowledge as independent and transparent. Part of the problem here is that it is probably not possible to force certain broad knowledge constructs across diverse spectrums of individuals through the implementation of institutionally validated models without creating an increasing disparity between the fundamentally stereotyped qualities inherent in those constructs and the incommensurable particulars of actual subjective experience. Once the gulf between the two widens sufficiently, it becomes necessary to reconcile the fragmented pieces to the whole by re-constituting the enshrining myths that comprise its mosaic structure as a unity—although this very unity is a theoretical state which only comes at the expense of the necessarily diverse perceptions of its separate individuals. Hence, a dialectic emerges between holistic ontological constructs, and the fissionable outgrowths of the organically conceived differences that contest them.

This conflict between a quilted pattern of standardizing unity and the tattered multiplicity of hybridized entities that frays its edges cannot be abstracted into a false symmetry by implementation of the same methodology.  Instead, one must endeavor to rethink the entire paradigm upon which the ‘science’ of averaged generalizations is based, and transform it into a less rigorous model that acknowledges diversity as more than mere statistics. This may be beyond the ken of most forms of systematic thinking, as they are characterized by their heuristic reduction of all phenomena into the corralling structure of data. As data, things are broken down into artificial unities that can then tell stories which are, sometimes, as unrepresentative as they are concise.

Part of this paradox is caused by the tendency for heuristics to be soaked up into the data-specific categories which they define and circumscribe, thus reifying them as actual entities rather than hypothesized constructs. In being so enshrined, the information matrix through which certain categories of knowledge are codified and described take on a life of their own, as organisms within a vacuum. The lack of competing paradigms further enhances and exaggerates their prominence, until they re-emerge as largely mythical, overhanging constructs that distort the basic nature of what they apparently claim to represent. This is the essential problem with the aforesaid category of discrete generational entities; and, the primary reason why I have chosen to speculate on the larger subject of epistemology through that particular prism, since it provides a neatly sequential view of how such a concept has developed and become popularized.

It is the popular enshrinement of such concepts that reduces them to abbreviated flags that serve as emblems for ideas now compacted into misleading molecular sound-bites. This shrinking of a framing device, originally designed to clarify a broader historical period, into a slogan that functions as an end in itself, translates an iceberg fragment into an autonomous entity, which shrouds  its relationship to its parent glacier. And, similar to the connection between the principles in this geo-climatological analogy, a ‘generation’ is an outgrowth of a larger, contingently connected, historical construct. The point being, that none of these entities can exist autonomously once cut up like artichokes and presented as closed and discrete systems without muddying the lines that comprise the complex latticework of which they are but a single part. To consistently slice multifaceted strands, intrinsic to a holistic understanding of any phenomena, into tiny garnishes of painterly color, is just another version of that artifactual Cartesian process that misrepresents byzantine realities by distorting them into constrained categories of being.

Although there exists no simple, or programmatic solution to this epistemological incommensurability—as those are precisely the sort of quantitative methods that created the problem in the first place—this should not prevent scholars and editors from demanding greater adherence from colleagues and writers to more individualized social concepts tailored to specific contexts rather than modular blocks of so-called taxa. Admittedly, as the very language used to asses an idea or concept is constituted within the same Cartesian framework that has culminated in the previously cited methodological distortions, this is not a panacea for the inadequacy of constructs used in forming such ideas. Rather, it is a call for a reconsideration of the way that these constructs are formed and how that leads to popularized journalistic distortions which employ historical tropes like those used in Stein’s Time article on “Millennials.” But, the larger questions raised by this argument are still those of how to speak the world accurately without completely fictionalizing it in the process; or, even whether applying such empirical notions can ever translate into the innate indeterminacy of complex social realities not decipherable within the simple schematics of geometric quanta.

If one has any doubt as to the distorting effects of imposing such taxonomically naturalized categories over the vertiginous array of divergences that comprise the human experience, a quick perusal of the categories used by anthropologists as late as half a century ago will provide a sobering corrective. Sadly, even though certain academic disciplines now devote a good deal of their time to explaining the value-laden nature of their own epistemic assumptions, other areas of the human sciences insist on the “disinterested objectivity” informing theirs. One could, in fact, easily compose an entire monograph regarding any single manifestation of this practice, but only a very generalized view of its ramifications attests to its near universality, and its unfortunate effects on how the so-called modern-mind, forms concepts and ideas. It remains to be seen how future scholars and researchers will react to this widespread set of practices, and what, if any, solutions they might improvise to augment their accuracy; or, lastly, if they would even be open to a new set of evaluative criterion which do not equate certain forms of knowledge with precise quantification.

 

JZRothstein (most recent revision of draft) 2/17/2014