Hello readers! I’ve decided this year, for my annual Birthday Lecture, I figured I’d try to get some groundwork related to the Big Project under my feet, and the feet of the people who most reliably pay attention to my cultural products- my friends. Just what is a “generation” anyway, and how did we come to define it as we do? Like a lot of our identity categories, it seems natural enough, but the way we use the concept is anything but natural- is definitionally “artificial,” as in, made by people. Let’s put it this way- if you ever thought to yourself, “man, generational politics is stupid,” well, I’m going to get into why. I’m going to try to make a short (as in, readable aloud in the span of a half hour or so) readable essay about the intellectual origins of our ideas about generation.
It’s too early in my process to really state this conclusively, but I’m increasingly confident that the real origin point of our generational discourse can be located in early twentieth century Spain. And the guy who kicked this discussion off wasn’t shy about claiming that distinction for himself: one Jose Ortega y Gasset. I just got done reading a biography of him, entitled The Imperative of Modernity, by the historian Rockwell Gray, published in 1989. Along with being the most prominent Spanish intellectual of the first half of the twentieth century, he was also rather dapper-
Ortega was mostly a journalist and essayist, who got a Neo-Kantian philosophical education in Germany, and who wanted to spread modern philosophical thinking in Spain (widely understood as “backwards”) and contribute to the broader European discussion of ideas. He was one of those European conservative-liberals, a believer in progress and freedom… within limits, and along his lines. This, along with the provocative title of his 1929 book, The Revolt of the Masses, helped catch the eye of the midcentury American social sciences academy, which was in the market at the time for non-fascist, “responsible” critics of democracy and mass society and mostly coming up with Europeans (Max Weber, Alexis de Tocqueville, Vilfredo Pareto, Ortega)... which, among other things, means you can find old editions of Ortega’s works, paperbacks aimed towards students back when, pretty easily.
Critics, in his day and after, dinged Ortega for shallowness. It’s a low blow, but, isn’t that appropriate for the grandfather of generational discourse? Ortega didn’t really flesh his theory of generation out that much, but he laid down a lot of elements of the concept as we know it today, and which distinguishes it from earlier ideas that came down from as far back as the Bible. For Ortega, a generation consists of people born within a given fifteen year span of time. This way, Ortega pointed out, you get roughly five generations at a time, each corresponding to a stage of life- from birth to fifteen, from fifteen to thirty, on and on to your seventies (this was before people in rich countries lived as long as they do now). Each generation has a “way of life” and a historical mission, a purpose it must fulfill (you see translations of Ortega’s words on generational purpose shared as inspirational memes, sometimes).
There are some important differences, of course, between Ortega’s idea of generation and those that, say, Strauss and Howe laid out in the nineties, or those found online today. Ortega shared with previous ideas of generation, particularly those of the Romantics of the nineteenth century, an exclusive focus on a cultured elite as the ones who make up any given generation. Ortega was an avowed elitist, in the way of most liberals of his day, but there was more of a rationale than that to it- cultural divides between classes were much higher in the nineteenth century, and were still much higher in Spain in Ortega’s day than in most of the rest of Europe. So our generational formations – Baby Boom, Gen X, Millennials, and so on – which are meant to encompass the entirety of a given birth cohort, weren’t what Ortega had in mind. Ortega didn’t use demographic statistics, lists of technological innovations, exegeses on pop culture, or even really historical landmarks to make his point. For one thing, he didn’t seem all that interested in proving things at all, as opposed to proclaiming them. For another, the point of generations, in his view, was the accomplishment of high cultural goals. In his first big lecture on the subject, he held that the goal of his generation was to solve what he saw as a philosophical crisis, the conflict between epistemic rationality and art and thought which emphasized the experience of life in its rationality. In this, the common people didn’t enter- though, being a good liberal, Ortega thought that the expansion of schooling could expand the numbers of those educated enough to matter… a little.
Rockwell Gray makes much of Ortega’s Spanish context in The Imperative of Modernity, and it makes sense. Ortega understood himself as someone who was bringing European high culture, in the form of the philosophy of people like Heidegger, Nietzsche, etc., to Spain (and other Hispanophone countries, like Argentina, where he spent much time), in order to improve the country and bring it out of its “backwardness.” It’s funny- to me, the one area where Spain seemed to have been well-stocked at that time was in people who took philosophy seriously. It’s just that for most of them, philosophy was either Catholic or heresy. As the title of his biography implies, Ortega saw embracing modernity as not just a practical imperative, if Spain didn’t want to be left behind, but a philosophical one- the point of life is to meet “the level of the times” (as determined anew in every generation, by its great geniuses).
Like a lot of intellectuals in downtrodden countries and nationalities between roughly the 1820s or so and the end of WWII, Ortega was part of a small and nervous world, a hothouse of ambition, fear, hope, and backbiting. It was hard to be “just” an intellectual in Spain at the time (or in India, or Mexico, or Ireland, or within numerous communities ruled by the Hapsburgs or Ottomans, or…). You were expected to do your part and win acclaim in advancing your people to some version of national glory. This was before “intellectual” had “useless” for a synonym! In many respects, Ortega’s version of generation – defined by a high stakes, high-cultural mission, driving history as understood in largely cultural terms, with new and more or less commensurate generations coming with metronomic regularity – bears the indelible stamp of the Spanish intellectual scene of his time.
Around the time Ortega was formulating his generational theory of history, another Spanish writer coined the term, “The Generation of ‘98,” to denote the men playing a major cultural role in Spain at that time. These men – Miguel de Unamuno or Antonio Machado would probably be the best known outside of Spain today – “came of age,” as they say, around the time of Spain’s massive defeat at the hands of the US in 1898. This traumatic experience, the argument goes, compelled intellectuals coming to maturity at the time to consider Spain’s role in the world, what being Spanish meant, how to reverse the country’s decline, in new and compelling ways.
It wasn’t altogether uncommon, in the nineteenth century, for people to refer to generations that way, by a given year when something important happened, especially a revolution, successful or failed. What Ortega and other Spanish intellectuals who followed him would do would be to serialize and routinize this generational concept. The Generation of ‘98 would be followed by the Generation of ‘14, Ortega’s generation. The concept got a major boost by the experience of the First World War, which traumatized the world, but in very different ways depending on how old one was when it occurred. Then we get the Generation of ‘27, the Generation of ‘36, and so on. In all of these, the generation in question is understood to be mostly limited to intellectuals, or at most the educated class that pays attention to high culture, which in Spain at that time was a much smaller portion of the population than you’d see in Northern Europe or North America. What distinguishes each is the way in which they were stamped by the time in which they came up, and how they dealt with crises that came their way.
Ortega, typically, did not provide much more theoretical grounding, or even speculation, to the generational concept, even as he helped define it. Might that count as a “baller move”? We do know that one of his greatest pupils, Julian Marias, wrote extensively on generations in the years after WWII, when repression of liberal thought lifted a great deal in Franco’s Spain. I haven’t read much of him yet, but what I have seen shows him complicating and adding armature to the generational concept as laid out by Ortega. Marias, in turn, is heavily cited, alongside Samuel Huntington (the “Clash of Civilizations” guy, who I guess also dabbled in generational discourse), as the main inspirations for the four-part cyclical model that William Strauss and Neil Howe rolled out in their big bestseller, Generations, which laid the terms of debate – if nothing else, the definitions of which birth cohort belong in which generation – for the generational discourse we all know and… are obligated to know about.
Honestly, I think it’s pretty appropriate. Ortega, like most of the members of the educated upper classes of his time, had the kind of erudition you just don’t see much of nowadays, but I agree with the critics- he is superficial. Maybe it was to get across to the audience in Spain, like he said, but still. I would likely disagree with a generational take on history in any event, but unlike other intellectual system-builders with whom I disagree, I don’t feel obligated to take Ortega’s system seriously… except as an artifact, a part of the intellectual inheritance of others, sometimes others with power.
Beyond that, Ortega always understood himself as a man in the middle. He was in the middle between Spain and Europe, as he understood it. And he found himself in the middle during the Spanish Civil War, as the Republic – which he supported full-heartedly – went further left than he wanted. If only both the right and the left could get behind his modest proposals! If only they could see that culture, not power, is what makes the difference!
It’s been a little hobby horse of mine for a while, that liberalism, across the centuries, can be understood as one body, that you can put Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes and John Rawls and maybe some people -not- named John in one conceptual body, regardless of their differences, not by reference to a value – liberty, law, etc. – but by reference to an operation. That operation is the mediation of power struggles between the elite and the common people. This mediation can be a redirection, or an evasion, or an attempted solution, or an imposition of values, norms, rules, etc to soften/deprioritize/whatever the basic struggle between the powerful few and the individually powerless many. But I think that’s the key.
Among these mediations are the construction of intellectual structures that disprove the existence of, the priority of, or both, of the basic struggle. To put it bluntly, if history is about generations, then it isn’t about classes. Counting off time by reference to which group of kids went to college together and came up with ideas when produces a very different understanding of the past (and present) than would denoting time by reference to turning points in the struggle of who controls the systems of material (and cultural!) production and reproduction.
I’d put generational history close to the bottom of the list of intellectual schema made or enlisted to provide an alternative to ideas that came from recognition – on the left or on the right – of the power struggle dynamic. It’s especially clunky now that this essentially elite-driven engine of cultural change, first laid out by a man who wrote a book called The Revolt of the Masses, has been frankenstein-plugged into explanations for changes in societies that are a good century past the point of “mass man” and “mass culture” taking the historical limelight. But, it does some things that a good sham historical scheme should, or anyway, has been plucked out by a much more robust liberal mechanism for mediating power struggle, the market, and raised to the prominence it has now.
A provincial intellectual, turning the self-concept of a provincial intellectual scene into a design for universal history which he himself didn’t even really spend that much energy on… his work plucked out of the smoking ruins of Europe by American social science nerds who needed respectable (European, and not openly Nazi or Communist) intellectual forebears and co-thinkers, with help from some the intellectual’s plucky ex-students… the ideas thrown into the churn of a social science establishment with more funding than sense, until in between figuring out how to kill rational peasants, the provincial intellectual’s scheme finds its way into the broader liberal intelligentsia and then made part of the structure of the theory of history promulgated by a clown and a grifter, themselves invested in evading the power struggles of their day, and who happened to publish as this thing called the World Wide Web was coming into being…
That’s the kind of story I like to tell. I haven’t told all of it here, clearly, but I feel like I’m on good ground.
Mithra is always on good ground, even when it’s the arm of a chair-