Siva writes . . .
Thank you for the kind words about my essay on generations. I am pleased that you have pushed at the idea of the utility of generational thinking. And your invocation of the Port Huron statement is helpful.
We remember the Port Huron statement now as standing as a manifesto of a new kind of left politics in America, one in which those born on one side of a major event—World War II—distinguished themselves from activists born on the other. The subsequent fights between old and new left took on generational patterns, largely because participants invoked the organizational principle themselves.
Remember, though, that the Port Huron statement was a sales document. It was a rallying cry. It was not in itself a work of social or historical analysis (although it owed its inspiration to both fields).
I don’t think we are ever going to get marketers, consultants, songwriters, activists, or the laziest journalists to abandon the use of “generations.” But I would hope that at least scholars would eschew the term.
Consider the complex and troublesome category of race. Race exists in America because (to paraphrase William James on God) it has real effects. But it has real effects because many of us act as if it has some basis beyond the social and historical construct in the particular American experience. This social tautology is almost impossible to break. Scholars who write about the construction and function of race have been trying to break it since the days that Franz Boas roamed the Earth. We know that the borders of “races” are no easier to delineate than those of “generations.”
Yet one category, race, has had real effects. The other, I maintain, has not had anything more than mythological effects. While Tom Hayden et. al invoked generations as an instrument of distinction and motivation, its effects were largely literary, I dare say. People remember the times and movements through generational eyes. But they did not mark the world that way. I regret to say that the lasting effects of the New Left were so few and slight that we can only count them through their shadows cast on the New Right of the same time (and, of course, our time).
Say, that reminds me: Did you see the episode of Mad Men when the young consultants brought the Port Huron statement into the ad agency to invoke how “our generation” resists old-style ads? Wonderful—right out of Tom Frank’s first book, The Conquest of Cool, I might add.
I am curious about the trepidation you sense among academics when you
invoke social discrepancies among races. Please write more about it. Are you encountering a “Moynihan moment,” in which you say something important, yet uncomfortable, and others are not sure what to think of the statement?
