The New Puritans
March 23, 2011“These kids aren’t like the last bunch” is a standard news story, the kind that gets opinion columnists through writer’s block. Laurie Penny at The Guardian writes a typical story about the Millennial generation:
My generation’s ambitions, like our pop stars, are ambitious, bland and bourgeois. But with the world falling down around our ears, can anyone blame us?
Of course, we hear plenty of this in the United States, where the Millennials are — to suit every agenda from liberal progressivism to the Christian right — portrayed as some kind of domestic counterpart to the generation that fought in the Second World War. So goes the story, Michael Cera’s acting career proves that today’s twentysomethings are the Propriety Avengers, born to repair the damage supposedly caused when their elders relaxed social standards, by flocking back to bankrupt and universally despised institutions like marriage and having a job.
Here’s a Guardian reader called Carnyx with a dose of skepticism:
You mean what pop stars exactly, Amy Winehouse and Pete Docherty?
I’ve heard all this before when I was a teenaged “Gen X’er” back in the 80′s I used to curse my misfortune to have to be teenaged in the 80s, the press was full of articles just like this one talking about the new youth as “new puritans” we were apparently more conservative, responsible, moralistic and bland, wanted careers in the city and were not into sex. Brook Shields was going on about “virginity”, Morrissey and Boy George would just prefer a “cup of tea”, and the rising ideology towards sex was anti-porn feminism (I knew lots of male friends who advanced this cause they thought such earnest moralistic posturing gave them an advantage over other men in bedding women, not that they’d admit that).
The Smiths responded to Thatcherism with self-pity instead of white riots, half my hometown were unemployed, gangs of skinheads roamed the town centre fighting cause there was bugger all else to do, conservative Christianity was rising in the States, and worst of all most of my school classmates where Tories and the music lovers whom I was learning guitar alongside liked Eric Clapton and Chris Rea and Jesus even Chris De Burgh (although that was mainly because, despite my lower social status, I went to a private school due to a combination of high IQ and severe dyslexia, the school specialised in helping dyslexics … but to this day Alan Partridge still reminds me of school).
A little later me and my mates (as in not from school) used to spend the weekend sneaking underaged into the local uni union cause it was the only place in town that didn’t play bloody Stock Atken and Waterman and demand you dressed in shirt and tie. The union also sometimes had decent bands playing, but tension grew between us townies and the students, sometimes resulting in violence and the students started protesting in the uni newspaper that “real students” didn’t like bands like The Cult, The Damned, The Cramps, Motorhead, “real students” liked “Runrig and Queen”, and those other bands just drew in local ruffians who caused trouble (the local uni wasn’t big on arts and was full of rugger bugger engineers and medics instead).
Back in the 80′s I thought I hated my generation, but that was mostly because of articles like this attempting to define ourselves for us, by the 90′s with Madchester and Grunge these articles and our generation’s former self-appointed spokespersons in the media began to look so very wrong and out of step with what was actually happening. These 80′s articles about the “new puritans” were written by the minority of public school types I was unfortunate enough to have to attend school with (or actually a scowling humourless earnest subsection of them whom had access to the media) and all they announced was their own determination to be the bland conservative Morningside bourgeois types they already were, despite their youthful arrogance in seeking to speak for their generation they simply spoke about their own narrow social circles.
If youth support for the Tories is growing I’d expect it nothing of more generational significance than the southeast of England reverting to type after an extended Labour govt, oh and maybe Laurie ought to come over to Greece, dodge the molotovs and tell the latest generation of Greek youths how restrained they are.
