Paris Demetriades
Evidently, there has always been a generation gap. It is entirely natural that younger people are born, come of age, and operate in environments that are slightly, considerably, or even radically different from those in which their parents and grandparents lived and were nurtured. Indicative of this issue is the lively, and at times amusing and intriguingly provocative, debate about baby boomers, Xers, millennials, and Gen Z: a sociological and marketing narrative that categorizes people and some of their defining traits according to the era in which they were born, a narrative that in recent years has flared up as never before, becoming a field of research, observation, trends, and analysis.
What may perhaps be observed for the very first time in human history, however far-fetched such a claim might sound, is that the gap between generations has never been as vast, as chaotic, as it has in the past century. Just think of the pharaonic advances in technology which, as time goes by, grow ever more titanic and develop at such a frenzied pace that it becomes truly impossible for them to be consistently followed or even sufficiently understood by the majority of humankind.
In less than a century, after all, we have gone from humble donkeys in countries like ours, and from carriages and horses in cities abroad, to the digitization of everything around us and the exploration of Mars as a possible site of relocation a few years from now. In less than half a century, we have gone from wired landline telephones, phone booths, and fax machines, to bluetooth and fiber optics transmitting data in the form of light. And in less than a decade we have gone from the dawn of artificial intelligence to the point where we now speak of the silent spread of a new hybrid model of governance, revolving around neologisms like geo-entrepreneurship and the overlordship of humans and robots.
How are we homo sapiens supposed to be entirely well? How could we not need time to process new data that grow obsolete before we manage to stammer a good morning? And how could there not be an enormous chasm between grandparents who lived through a time when electricity itself did not exist, and today’s children and teenagers, who learned first how to handle smart devices and only later how to speak and read?
Naturally, there is also an incredible thrill in all this that we are living through. We find ourselves at the apex, or at least at a climax, of the digital revolution, whose ramifications are so vast and so pivotal that it could even be said that a new kind of human is being created, one that has never existed before. Great minds of our time, such as Yuval Harari, have made precisely this argument.
Keeping the above in mind, perhaps the rather justified critical disposition we often develop, whether inadvertently or deliberately, towards those older than us or younger than us might be softened, even tempered. In all this madness, this movement, this peculiar frenzy of our age, it is entirely logical and to be expected that people themselves should change. A reasonable association, one might think, as to how some kind of balance could be found, would be a return to those principles and values that are, not arbitrarily, described as universal and timeless.
Values that have chiefly to do with our morality and that are hard to distort or corrupt, no matter how many new kinds of humans might emerge. Does the quintessence of the human soul and essence truly change? A philosophical and existential question, yet perhaps such a cataclysmic phenomenon as the one superficially approached here cannot be confronted in any other way.
