Young graduates in search of meaning announce that they will not waste their lives earning it. Teenagers flaunt their gender “fluidity” in front of adults who feel like their world is melting away. Activists spray tomato soup The sunflowersby Van Gogh, in order to alert on the ecological emergency, wiping out the exasperated remarks of their elders, pilgrims of culture or former activists for whom the museum has become a temple, and art, the last refuge of the sacred.
A “Covid generation” perceived as “sacrificed” by a society which has not chosen to confine only the oldest. An “eco-anxious” generation from whom the impression that the “boomers” have wrung a now overheated planet cannot be removed. High school students more tolerant or, it is according to, more complacent with regard to signs of religious affiliation and what their elders qualify as “attacks on secularism”. Historical feminists confused by the “radicality” of new forms of intersectionality. Editorial writers with Pomidolian accents who hold forth against a generation supposedly fascinated by paid wokism.
It floats in the air of time like a new conflict of generations. Not a simple difference between the behaviors, tastes and aspirations of children and parents. But what the anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-1978) called a “generation gap”. In the essay published in the United States in 1970, the American intellectual indeed showed that, contrary to traditional societies, contemporary societies were “prefiguratives”insofar as an inversion of transmission takes place there: it is the children who teach their parents how to approach the shores of the new world, in which new technologies, practices and mores are being deployed (The geration gaptranslation by Jean Clairevoye, Gonthier-Denoël, 1971).
“The agitation that shakes the youth of the whole world”, she wrote in a time upset by the student movements, is incomprehensible, if one does not measure “universality” of the generation gap, which is “without homology in the past”. In effect, “no generation has ever known or assimilated such rapid changes” that a world then unified by information technologies or globalized by the end of empires – without forgetting a scientific revolution which multiplies industrial and agricultural production, but which is also “changing in a terribly dangerous and radical way the ecology of the planet”, she wrote. Are we witnessing the same type of phenomenon today?
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