Dear Friend
I, and the blog, are back once more!
I appreciate no-one cares *that* much (apart from Ellie, my
#biggestfan #bringbacktheblog #etc), but let’s briefly construct a hypothetical
universe in which the tired and weak and poor care deeply about my blog and
have been flagellating with disappointment that there hasn’t been one for two
weeks. My dears, my dears! I needed to take a blog-holiday (a bloliday, if you
will) in order to rest my weary head, and have a full and proper summery break.
That bloliday is, I hope, now over, although even I cannot tell what will come
to pass.
But for now in any case I return, and the mindless nattering
continues.
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Let’s talk about letters. Letters are totally and utterly dying
out, and this is a sad thing.
Why, I hear you ask? Isn’t it better nowadays that we can message
each other instantly (etc. etc. you get the gist of this bit).
Yeah but isn’t it sad that we’re losing something (blah blah blah
and you get the gist of this bit too).
The debate is a bit repetitive, because it’s usually conducted
between two groups of people who just don’t engage with the other form of
communication, and whose opinions on it are therefore not altogether
well-rounded and informed. Y’alls know what I’m talking about. That’s right, it’s
the cultural divide that is of late in the ascendant, the one, the only, YOUNG
VS OLD THING!!
 |
| I appreciate that I also used this picture in like my last post. But I'm having trouble uploading new photos, and it seems pretty apposite to be perfectly honest. |
We vote in different ways, we think in different ways, we are in a
general sense quite condescending to one another. Young ‘uns on the street wave
their iphones/pads/tinerays aggressively in the direction of the silver-haired
and gammy-legged, as if to say, ‘Look, we are the future. Look, we can press
buttons on things that we don’t know how they really work but look they are
like MAGIC and you can talk to people and things’. The elderly spit
half-consumed werthers in the direction of anyone who appears to be too young to
remember the advent of postmodernism or the first previews for Phantom of the Opera on the West End.
I am sad about the young/old split. It’s not totally rigid, of
course, because there are plenty of loving relationships sustained between
granddaughters and grandmothers, professors and pupils, the top of the Catholic
hierarchy and the bottom (#subtlejoke #zing #ouch #satire) - and, of course,
plenty of middle-aged people who feel stuck in the middle both nominally and
literally, and who can only wallow in their culturally normative and
advantageous-in-relative-terms-because-less-culturally-denigrated position. But
there is probably too much vitriol on each side of the young/old divide at
present.
On the one side, I feel sad that there is so much condescension
towards young people. Case in point: a 45-or-so-year-old man (so not THAT old) who
I very much admire facebooked a couple of weeks ago that his opinions on something
25 years earlier had simply not been valid because he was 20, and therefore apparently
hadn’t the brain to process anything of dramatic weight at all. I remember
being unnerved by a similar comment from a Festival of Ideas speaker at the
Barbican a couple of years ago. This way of thinking is somewhat unfortunate. Yes,
everyone is naïve in certain ways when they are young, and I’m sure too that
there is much to be learnt from the experience of life. But there are severe
problems with the ‘young=dumb’ school; first, the simple fact that life is too
complex for anyone to totally ‘get’, and that this leaves a lot of room for
many, many, many, mistaken adults; two, I believe that the idea that every
generation learns from the mistakes of the last is more than just a trope, and
that there is historical proof of this with regards to the gradual generational
progressiveness on issues such as race and LGBT rights (not to mention the
general tendency towards a ‘better educated’ young over time – whatever that
means!); three, the idea that ‘youth=mistaken’ seems to me largely to be a
notion generated by the self-vindicatory progressive narratives that most
adults tell themselves in order to feel better about their own lives and so
that they can see them as stories of ‘forwardness’ and ‘progress’, which
requires them to denigrate (perhaps unfairly) their earlier selves. It is
interesting how little we apply Edward Thompson’s call for us not to subject
past peoples to ‘the condescension of posterity’ to our own past selves, and I
wonder whether Mr. 45-year-old-something man will look back when he is 70 with
condescension on his 45-year-old self.
On the other side, though, I also feel that my generation isn’t
interested enough to see what their grandparents’ generation does have to offer
them. We may reject many elements of the majority consensus up there – and there
is no denying, it seems to me, that on issues of race, immigration, women’s
rights and LGBT+ rights we are quite right to do so – but there are other
things that we can learn by listening to our elders. Perhaps I think this is
because I am a historian, because brains are banks of information about
history, because every time someone dies a unique bank of information about
history is irrecoverably lost. On a slightly less detached level, we could also
probably do an awful lot more as young people to solve the present epidemic of
elderly loneliness. Recent political events have made us bitter towards the
elderly, but one can take this much too far. It was with deep sadness that I
remember on June 23rd last year reading the feeling of some of my
friends that the elderly ought not to have the vote by virtue of their rather ‘nearer
death’ status, which is a frankly immature attitude to take to the whole
political question. I get with Brexit the sense that our generation’s future
had been stolen – I felt that way too – but democracy functions on the notion
that everyone has at least some future, and that that is theirs to vote for,
and you pretty much just have to put up with that.
But back to letters. One of the main divides between old and young
concerns the different ways in which we communicate. We millennials –
– Hold on, let me pause for a moment to say just one thing. I’m
really very unsure about the term millennials. I can see why it’s a kind of
nice identity thing, particularly with regards to politics (generally
progressive and socially liberal) and technology (tech savvy). But nowadays –
and this is a function of the ‘old/young’ frame of thought – we do seem to take
generations to be *natural* analytical and historical units, assuming that they
display levels of similarity in behaviour which maybe aren’t borne out so well
in practice. Talking about the present or recent in terms of ‘generations'[1]
has the same slight arbitrariness that the practice of thinking of the
twentieth century in decades has: certainly the sixties weren’t just swinging,
the twenties weren’t just roaring and the eighties wasn’t just Thatcher. The
idea of ‘millennials’ doesn’t just identify real and important patterns of
behaviour; rather, it is also employed to create those patterns of behaviour
either through the formulation of a common identity or through an oppositional
and unthinking dismissal (‘millennials are so naïve!’), which is not
necessarily a good thing. Generations don’t just behave as one.
– And back to letters. We millennials don’t really write them
anymore. In the same way, the elderly in our country and elsewhere are also
much less likely to use Facebook or social networking, although this does seem
to be changing and I have quite a few Facebook friends who are ‘well-endowed’
in the age department.
I can’t really speak for how good it is for older people to get involved
in social networking, but I can say that everyone of my generation ought to try
some letter-writing. Letters are so much less instantaneous and more personal than
online messaging that they really require you to think. They take longer, but
they also mean more as a result; and there is no nicer feeling than receiving a
letter in the post.
When I was back on the WW1 show BRASS for the very first time (in
2014) Ben Till, composer and writer extraordinaire, got the cast all to write
letters to each other. Letters were a huge part of the mental universe of people
in the early twentieth century, not least during the First World War, when the
reception of a letter was I’m sure particularly poignant and anticipated to
soldiers in the trenches and to those who waited anxiously for their return. My
lovely friend Laura was the first person to send me a letter in that period,
and I remember it so distinctly, because she had sprayed it with perfume and
included pictures of where she lived. Part of what inspired me to write this
post was that I’ve just recently received a letter from another friend, ten
pages in length, which helped me out of a tight spot and which was a joy to
read. Just the fact that someone has bothered to think of you– and the fact
that they have a physicality and permanence that instant messaging online does
not – makes letter-writing a very, very special means of communication, and I
really think everyone should try it.
Anyway, this post ended up being more tangential than I’d
originally intended, but that’s sort of the way with these posts. Keep having
lovely summers all!
[1]
For more on that phenomenon see Jason Scott Smith, ‘The Strange History of the
Decade: Modernity, Nostalgia, and the Perils of Periodization’, Journal of Social History Vol. 32:2
(1998), pp. 263-85.
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