1.   Normal Generational differences[i]

There always have been, and always will be differences between older and younger people.  These are differences in any culture and at any time of history that normally and necessarily exist between younger and older people because of an educational relationship between the two.   In this relationship the young learn the ways of the old but also change the culturally established ways of the old and in this way effect cultural change and renewal.

One generation introduces the next to a given culture by transmitting its experience, its expertise, its competence, and its insight into that culture to the younger generation. Without such an educational, culture-transmitting process from one generation to another, no culture can exist for long.  In addition to inculcating the next genera­tion into a given culture, the successful transmission of that culture also entails a transfer of responsibility for that culture.  Learning involves more than gaining com­petence in the ways of the old. Insofar as one is able, the learner is also expected to take respon­sibility for the ways of the old.  The success of the educational process can be gauged in terms of whether or not the behavior of the new generation manifests the ways of the old.  From this vantage point learners have rightly learned the right things to the extent that they mimic the behavior of their teachers.

However, in being educated into the ways of the old every new generation also changes the ways of the old more or less drastically.  During our period of history in particular, this process of change appears to have accelerated to such an extent that generational differences appear to be taking on the characteristics of a genera­tion chasm.  Why in learning the ways of the old do the young change the ways of the old?  Education is more than teaching new dogs old tricks.  It does not only change persons but cultures (i.e., commonly accepted ways of doing things) as well.  Education offers a culture the opportunity to change itself, to do things in a different way.  Next to providing cultural continuity, education is also a process of cultural renewal.  In this process it is the learner rather than the teacher who changes culture.

Both individual change and cultural change are products of education.  As a result of education learners change themselves to suit existing culture or change existing culture to suit themselves.  By means of this process they give their stamp of approval or critique on the culture in which they live.

Cultural renewal can be a positive result of education.  The older peo­ple become, the more they are inclined to miss-identify the way they do things with the way they ought to do things.  After decades of working at constructing a certain way of living, people can become so committed to the way things are done that they can hardly distinguish it any longer from the way things ought to be done.  Their way becomes the way to be taught and lived.

However, the next generation is not so committed to what is taught.  Because the old teach the new generation, it stands on the shoulders of the old and can thus be expected to see farther.  But also, because young people are not committed to the old generation’s way, they can stand back from its culture and see more clearly where the way things are done deviates from the way things ought to be done.  Thus, a new generation has the opportunity to be properly critical of the cultural products that are taught. It is the responsibility of each new generation to bend the ways of the old into the right direc­tion.  The task of reforming culture to make it conform to what ought to be done is intrinsic to learn­ing.

The faithful exercise of this task can renew a culture.  Whether cultural change becomes cultural renewal (in the sense of the Greek New Testament word kainos, which means "fresh, improved," rather than the word neos, which only means "different from before”) depends on whether as a result of learning the learner’s actions increase the opportunity for humanitarian function­ing in a culture.

CHAPTER FOUR

Intergeneration

 

Between the generations

In this chapter we will explore how emerging adults and previous generations differ from one another and how they can profitably communicate with one another.  Of course, one can argue that there is nothing to explore since people, whether young or old, are first and foremost human beings who all struggle with the same problems of humanity and, as a matter of fact, regularly communicate with one another about these problems.

Furthermore, one can always point to older adults who act like the emerging adults and to emerging adults who act like older adults.  So, where does one draw the line?  Developmentally speaking, when does a younger generation end and an older generation start?   The literature generally pegs the time frame for emerging adulthood between 18 and 30.   That would make age 30 the start of the older generation!  So, lots of problems exist in defining the precise boundaries of the generations. 

Yet, generational differences do exist.  Many of the parents of emerging adults find the views and behaviour of their children more than a bit puzzling and quite different from their lives when they were growing up.  On the surface then, there seems to be a decided difference, or even a disconnect between the older generations and the younger ones.  All this entails that today the generations tend to live along side one another with very little dialogue between them about life’s most fundamental issues.

8.  Irony as a lifestyle: from nothing fits to nothing should fit

Hipsters are postmodern to the core.  Postmodernism is the worldview that moves from the experience that nothing fits to the prescription that nothing should fit.  When one starts from the conviction that nothing should fit, then trying to identify even pockets of order in an otherwise absurd world or attempting to fit things together that in themselves are absurd is seen as a form of selling out.  Irony as a lifestyle is not only a recognition that nothing fits but also a lifestyle that must respond to any forms of order, be they philosophies, religions, institutions, organizations, or convictions with critique and disavowal.  

7.     Hipsters, emerging adults and mainstream North America

When asking how hipsters view themselves what strikes me is how similar they are to emerging young adults in general.  In the main, they just want to be themselves, live their own life and at their own pace.  As we saw also, like so many other young people they are deeply invested in a remix culture in response to a digital world.  But there is one characteristic about their lifestyle that is not found as much among emerging young adults and this factor, I think, explains much of their quirky, ironic, esoteric behaviour. 

The distinctiveness of the hipster lifestyle may be found in the answer to the question why they live the way they live.  What seems to motivate them, more than anything else I can think of, is their fear of being co-opted by mainstream North American culture.  All of the efforts of hipsters appear to be governed by a deeply rooted desire to exclude themselves from that mainstream culture.

What is ironic is that in all their efforts to opt out, they actually resemble mainstream North American culture more than any other contemporary youth group.[i] For, a case can be made that the strength of this culture does not lie in the originality of its ideas nor in its capacity to innovate.  Rather, its power derives from its unique ability to forage, digest and package big ideas and novel inventions originating in cultures other than their own.  So, like the lifestyle of the hipsters, North American culture does not ever produce anything new but merely remixes elements found elsewhere?   If so, then hipster culture is to be located at the centre of Mainstream America rather than at its margins.

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[i] Heath J. & A. Potter 2004 The Rebel Sell. Toronto: Harper Perennial.

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[i] Heath J. & A. Potter 2004 The Rebel Sell. Toronto: Harper Perennial.

6.  Hipster view of hipsters

These are some of the issues that arise when one consults the outsider’s view of the hipster lifestyle.  But how do hipsters view themselves?  On that score I have very little data.  What little I have comes from a series of interviews I did recently with members of the hipster colony in the Mission District of San Francisco.  These interview data represent their response to the questions I put to them.

When I asked the question: “Who or what is a hipster?”  they gave the following answers:

“Hipster” is a general term for many different kinds of young people.  It is a term that “the outside” puts on us young people.  We don’t call ourselves hipsters, but if asked point blank whether we are, we don’t mind being called that.  “Hipster” is mainly a fashion style statement, (e.g. retro clothes from thrift stores), that depicts a life style marked by irony.  Hipsterism is a deeply personal life style, i.e. each of us hipsters follows his/her own individual approach to life, a style of living that cannot be characterized as group behaviour.  We do not join groups for social action of any kind.  We tend to congregate together with other like-minded young people in groups for support, as here in the Delores Park in Mission.  But each of us just wants to be him or herself.

When asked what motivates them to live this hipster life style they did not want to disclose what is inside of them.  That belongs to each of us alone, they said.  On the other hand, they were willing to state that hipsters are mostly young people who are socially progressive and anti-mainline culture.  Furthermore, they stressed that they are serious about becoming adults, but they insist on taking time to sort things out before they settle down.  They also wanted to lay to rest the myth as if hipster young people are just a bunch of dummies.  All young people in the park here, they said, are highly educated, even over educated for the work they are doing.  Finally, they think that the reason why older people cannot understand younger people is because of a communication problem that exists between the generations due to age differences.  So, they appreciate it very much when an older person takes the time to try to understand them.

5.  Clowns or court jesters?

The whole of this deliberately creates an appearance of inauthenticity, as if nothing matters.  All of this raises the suspicion that hipsters actually “protest too much,” and I am left with a number of questions.

a)      By not even taking themselves serious are they essentially playing the class clown?  Clowns of any kind, we all know, are essentially sad individuals who wish to be accepted and respected.  But, instead of being taken seriously, judging by what is written about them, the behaviour of these hipster clowns only seems to evoke laughter and derision.

b)     Or, have they adopted the role of Court Jester to 21^St. Century North American culture?  In league with Wikileak, are they aiming to show up the hidden agenda of mainstream America?  Are they reminding us of the joke that this culture has become?  Contemporary North America has by and large become a mall-centered culture governed by the modern marketing forces of late-capitalism in which the value of everything is reduced to its price and people are treated primarily as consumers.  Is the behaviour of hipsters an artfully constructed caricature of this culture to show up this situation?

The chief aim of the hipster lifestyle appears to be to reduce to kitsch anything that is dear to mainstream culture.  That culture has by and large become governed by advertising.  The nature of advertising is essentially that it lies, or more to the point, the truth or falsehood of its statements is incidental to its purpose of selling us something.  Moreover, in mainstream North American (and also European) culture one can no longer say heartfelt, sincere things outright publicly because all genuine utterances inevitably will be stolen and repeated as sound bites or slogans in advertising and in politics.

By way of defense hipsters have taken refuge in irony.  Everything about them, the way they act, the way they look and what they say is characterized by double-speak, as if they deliberately aim to outdo advertising.  If so, by doing this and more than any other emerging adult age group, they have become poster boys and girls for Post-modernism.

4.  Hipsters as seen by outsiders

In fact, much of what is written about this way of living describes hipsters in pejorative terms.  The reaction of commentators on the hipster lifestyle is overwhelmingly critical even to the point of loathing.  What evokes such strong negative emotions on the part of these commentators is that, in their judgment, hipsters contribute nothing new or praise worthy to contemporary culture. 

Hipsters are said to have produced nothing original.  Their style is entirely made up of elements foraged from other cultural groups, with whom they do not identify in solidarity but from whom they appropriate/cannibalize only bits and pieces indiscriminately.  They then combine these elements/symbols/icons of qualitatively different/distinct/disparate styles (working class, counterculture/revolutionary, gay, upper class intellectual cultures) and juxtapose them unchanged into a mashup of their own, thereby reducing these cultural elements to kitsch, i.e. render them irrelevant and meaningless for contemporary living.

Furthermore, they are accused of being snobbish and elitist.  They consider their own mashup style of living to be superior to non-hipster mainstream styles.  They sneer at Mainstream styles and poke fun at them. Ironically they even go so far as to deride their own life style and poke fun at their tendency to poke fun at other people.  So, while reducing non-hipster styles to kitsch, they present their own style of living without conviction, as a joke, as a fashion statement only, wearing it as a costume, parading it on stage as if they are just playing a role in a comedy, rather than expressing their personal individuality.  They are in short playing Mr. and Mrs. Dress up to an audience for the effect.  They consider themselves to be beyond taking themselves seriously.  Or so outsiders tell us.  

They pretend that all of this is only a game.  They routinely tend to treat serious subjects in a playful, humorous manner.  They are especially masters at irony.  When asked, they flatly deny that they are hipsters or are living a hipster life style.  You can have two hipsters angrily accusing each other of being a hipster!  They deny that they are making a statement with their fashion style when it is obvious that they are, and they consistently profess not to be committed to anything when it is clear from the outside that they are very much invested in their style of living.  Hipsters pointedly (!) refuse to take a stand on anything or to say anything with a straight face.  They refuse to take responsibility for anything.  Furthermore, they are working too diligently at showing that they do not care to be believed.