The phrase Generation X, when Douglas Coupland coined it over two decades ago, was always supposed to be a placeholder, an unknown variable. We were the generation who didn’t know what the terms of our generation were. Now we know. Covid-19 has solved for x. We belong to Generation Lockdown.
As we all joked on Twitter, there was always something inevitable about our generation being asked to save the world by sitting at home watching television. Covid-19 affects everyone; it is killing older people and it is ruining the childhoods of the young. But it belongs, in a unique way, to those of us who find ourselves with young children and elderly parents. For that cohort, the feeling of being under lockdown is oddly familiar. At moments, Covid-19 feels like no more than an allegory for the condition of my generation: we have been inside, behind screens, while a global catastrophe unfolds, since our 20s. The defining fact of our generation is that the defining fact of our generation happens to each of us alone, apart.
The crisis is extraordinary but the standard position of my life has been the one I find myself in right now – everyone I know isolated and suddenly broke, unless they inherited money, watching the bottom fall out of things. The obvious historical events like September 11, the 2008 crash, Covid-19 were interruptions in a series of longer-term collapses: the manufacturing sector, the humanities, media, the American republic. As severe and nightmarish as Covid-19 is, I can’t help feeling that it’s just the dress rehearsal for the 21st century.
The problems of the 21st century will be global and they will be intimate. Covid-19 is the purest demonstration possible that, in the very realest sense, there is direct physical connection between the wet markets of Wuhan, the piazzas of Lombardy and the office buildings of New York. Everyone breathes the same air. It’s all the same spit. The solutions to the problems of the 21st century, like the solution to Covid-19, will come only one way: through an empowered bureaucracy informed by expertise. That’s it. Nothing else will solve it. Libertarianism in the 21st century is about as relevant as geocentrism.
In the 21st century, it is solidarity or death. That’s what we’ve been shown. That’s what Covid-19 is, a crisis of intimacy that can only be solved by solidarity. This has been, in hindsight, the task of our generation: the confrontation with crises of intimacy, the shattering of the terms of intimacy and the attempt to put them back together.
The consumer culture built since the second world war exists to destroy union, to break communion, to collapse community, to eviscerate solidarity. “Each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,” is how WH Auden put it. We are a generation steeped in cynicism and skepticism and irony but it cannot last. The generational task of confronting and overcoming brokenness has turned political.
The divisiveness that has overwhelmed our political discourse cannot stand. If you wish now that your government had listened to the experts on infectious disease, go and listen to what the climate change experts know, right now, is going to happen over the next 30 years. A recent study charting the inevitable displacement of Americans from the eastern seaboard estimated the number of internal refugees at 13 million. That’s not a problem that can be solved by a huge military thrown against foreign opponents. It can only be solved by collectively accepted information and collaboration and sacrifice.
The older generation continues their rake’s progress of conspiratorial recklessness. The 2020 election is going to be two ancient boomers looking for one last grope. The fury of the millennials has been well earned: why any one of them would believe in or participate in the system as it currently exists is beyond me. Surely this catastrophe will point them towards an alternative future. One thing that has become clear in each of the crashes: the responsible suffer, the irresponsible triumph. At what point does it become beneath basic human dignity to continue to play a rigged game? Careerism is futile, yet somehow it is the only ism standing. The 60s enjoined the boomers to turn on, tune in, drop out. I don’t see how younger people have any choice but an even more wholesale rejection.
And yet this time, as desperate as it has been, has been the first time I have felt hope since I can remember. The choice of the 21st century has been clarified: how much mass death is acceptable to maintain the economic status quo? We have seen that governments can take significant interventions. We have seen that the vast majority of people are willing to go on a war footing to protect their fellow citizens in emergencies. This is a realization with profound consequences. Economic interactions are not the sum total of human society. Market fundamentalism has its limits.
As for the Generation formerly known as X, a generation educated in radical skepticism now must find a way to collective action. This isn’t hippy nonsense anymore: we must work together or die alone. Are we ready for war without enemies?
Covid-19 proves it: unity is the only remedy for 21st century global crises
Stephen Marche
The problems of this century will be global and they will be intimate. Our culture of division cannot stand
Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters
The phrase Generation X, when Douglas Coupland coined it over two decades ago, was always supposed to be a placeholder, an unknown variable. We were the generation who didn’t know what the terms of our generation were. Now we know. Covid-19 has solved for x. We belong to Generation Lockdown.
As we all joked on Twitter, there was always something inevitable about our generation being asked to save the world by sitting at home watching television. Covid-19 affects everyone; it is killing older people and it is ruining the childhoods of the young. But it belongs, in a unique way, to those of us who find ourselves with young children and elderly parents. For that cohort, the feeling of being under lockdown is oddly familiar. At moments, Covid-19 feels like no more than an allegory for the condition of my generation: we have been inside, behind screens, while a global catastrophe unfolds, since our 20s. The defining fact of our generation is that the defining fact of our generation happens to each of us alone, apart.
The crisis is extraordinary but the standard position of my life has been the one I find myself in right now – everyone I know isolated and suddenly broke, unless they inherited money, watching the bottom fall out of things. The obvious historical events like September 11, the 2008 crash, Covid-19 were interruptions in a series of longer-term collapses: the manufacturing sector, the humanities, media, the American republic. As severe and nightmarish as Covid-19 is, I can’t help feeling that it’s just the dress rehearsal for the 21st century.
The problems of the 21st century will be global and they will be intimate. Covid-19 is the purest demonstration possible that, in the very realest sense, there is direct physical connection between the wet markets of Wuhan, the piazzas of Lombardy and the office buildings of New York. Everyone breathes the same air. It’s all the same spit. The solutions to the problems of the 21st century, like the solution to Covid-19, will come only one way: through an empowered bureaucracy informed by expertise. That’s it. Nothing else will solve it. Libertarianism in the 21st century is about as relevant as geocentrism.
In the 21st century, it is solidarity or death. That’s what we’ve been shown. That’s what Covid-19 is, a crisis of intimacy that can only be solved by solidarity. This has been, in hindsight, the task of our generation: the confrontation with crises of intimacy, the shattering of the terms of intimacy and the attempt to put them back together.
The consumer culture built since the second world war exists to destroy union, to break communion, to collapse community, to eviscerate solidarity. “Each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,” is how WH Auden put it. We are a generation steeped in cynicism and skepticism and irony but it cannot last. The generational task of confronting and overcoming brokenness has turned political.
The divisiveness that has overwhelmed our political discourse cannot stand. If you wish now that your government had listened to the experts on infectious disease, go and listen to what the climate change experts know, right now, is going to happen over the next 30 years. A recent study charting the inevitable displacement of Americans from the eastern seaboard estimated the number of internal refugees at 13 million. That’s not a problem that can be solved by a huge military thrown against foreign opponents. It can only be solved by collectively accepted information and collaboration and sacrifice.
The older generation continues their rake’s progress of conspiratorial recklessness. The 2020 election is going to be two ancient boomers looking for one last grope. The fury of the millennials has been well earned: why any one of them would believe in or participate in the system as it currently exists is beyond me. Surely this catastrophe will point them towards an alternative future. One thing that has become clear in each of the crashes: the responsible suffer, the irresponsible triumph. At what point does it become beneath basic human dignity to continue to play a rigged game? Careerism is futile, yet somehow it is the only ism standing. The 60s enjoined the boomers to turn on, tune in, drop out. I don’t see how younger people have any choice but an even more wholesale rejection.
And yet this time, as desperate as it has been, has been the first time I have felt hope since I can remember. The choice of the 21st century has been clarified: how much mass death is acceptable to maintain the economic status quo? We have seen that governments can take significant interventions. We have seen that the vast majority of people are willing to go on a war footing to protect their fellow citizens in emergencies. This is a realization with profound consequences. Economic interactions are not the sum total of human society. Market fundamentalism has its limits.
As for the Generation formerly known as X, a generation educated in radical skepticism now must find a way to collective action. This isn’t hippy nonsense anymore: we must work together or die alone. Are we ready for war without enemies?
Stephen Marche is a novelist and columnist