I Hate My Generation
by Shane Rosenthal
© 1996 (revised 2002), Modern Reformation magazine (May / June Issue, Vol. 5.3). All Rights Reserved.
A few years ago, an alternative rock band by the name of Cracker released a song entitled, “I Hate My Generation.” Quite typical of this particular music genre, the song’s lyrics, theme and mood, were dreary, pessimistic, and mildly self deprecating. Generally speaking, this was not true of popular music a few decades ago, a time in which the airwaves were filled with gentle and optimistic songs such as, “Sunshine on My Shoulders,” “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow,” “What the World Needs Now is Love, Sweet Love,” etc., etc. Whereas in the late 70’s Paul McCartney sang, “You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs…I look around me and I see it isn't so,” by the mid 90’s it in fact was so. Think about the lyrics and mood for example, of the songs by a popular recording artist such as Alanis Morrisette. These are not silly love songs. Her music and lyrics are filled with pain, jealousy, rage, etc. She is not merely angry at the world, but is often frustrated even with herself and sings freely about her own failures and struggles.
Perhaps this shift from the gentle to the harsh, optimism to pessimism, dreamy to dreary, is merely a pendulum swing reaction, but regardless of the underlying cause, I find it curiously refreshing in some respects. Refreshing not because pessimism is a cherished virtue in and of itself, but because as I see it, modern pop culture is beginning to realize that it is coming unglued. Underlying the optimistic lyrics of the previous generation one could detect a sort of striving for a utopian paradise. And how were we to arrive at this Utopia? We were told by the Beatles, “All You Need is Love.” Many artists currently producing the various artifacts of modern pop culture grew up listening to their parents sing “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius…”, but never actually saw this new golden age dawn. Instead, they suffered the devastating consequences of the Me-Generation with its out of control divorce rates, drug abuse, broken families, etc. So many of today’s artists like to wallow in despair, because at least despair is utterly honest.
I too am a product of the Me-Generation, and this is perhaps why I find alternative music so attractive. When I was eight, I wished I could “teach the world to sing in perfect harmony,” but as I grew up I realized that the consumption of Coke® didn’t exactly achieve this goal. That perhaps helps to explain why Cracker’s song immediately struck a cord with me. There is much about my generation that I hate, and as a result, there is much in me that I hate. Just as I learned to speak English by listening to and imitating those around me, I also learned certain customs, habits, attitudes, ways of thinking, etc., from the generation in which I was reared. So to say that I hate my generation, is in some respects to say that I hate myself.
My Generation’s Biggest Problem
One of the things I hate most about my generation is the fact that by and large, we are not readers. We were not raised on books but on TV. We value images over words, entertainment over serious thought, the trivial over the eternal. Neil Gabler, in his book, Life the Movie, has written in fact that entertainment is now the dominant force in modern life, and as a result, things of a more serious nature have been pushed to the side. Whether politics, education, or even or religion, Gabler argued that many important elements of society have been marginalized and treated as if they were basically irrelevant primarily because they are not immediately gratifying or entertaining. For example, Edie Brickell in a popular 1990s told us that “Philosophy is the talk on the cereal box, and religion is the smile on a dog.” She went on to sing in this same song, “I'm not aware of too many things, I know what I know, if you know what I mean....Shove me in the shallow water before I get to deep” This is very common with people of my generation. We are a self admittedly shallow bunch. In the age of microwave ovens and fax machines, we want things fast and easy; quality matters little. And what could be easier than TV? Here there is no thinking required, no work at all, only stimulation. Politicians and Pastors alike quote lines from movies or TV commercials to make a point stick, because that has become our primary world of reference. It is the place we all live. In fact most of us know more details about television and movie celebrities than we do our next-door neighbors.
In a Saturday Night Live skit-turned-movie-series, Wayne from Wayne’s World asked this telling question, “Was it Kierkegaard or Dick Van Patten who said, ‘To label me is to negate me?’” Here, for comedic purposes, Kierkegaard is confused, not with other philosophers or men of significance, but with the star of the 1980’s TV show Eight is Enough, because that is the chief world with which Wayne is familiar. This reveals much about my generation. On the one hand it reveals our attitude: we don’t take things––even serious things––too seriously. Thinking deeply about anything is for unusual, intellectual types. Second, it essentially reveals that we have literally been catechised by TV.
Sadly, all this has not been without its affects in our own Christian communities. There is an appalling ignorance of the Bible and basic Christian doctrines in the modern church. Unfortunately many modern Christians simply think they’re being spiritual for highlighting the practical and experiential sides of faith, while avoiding what they call “heady theology,” but in doing so, are they perhaps merely following the spirit of the age? The fact that there is a “cognitive” side of faith is evidenced by the fact that God wrote a book for us to read and comprehend. Moses wrote that we are to diligently teach the words of this book to our children, and talk of them in our houses and as we walk by the way (Deut 6:7). Jesus told us that we are to love God with all our minds (Matt 22:37). It was the apostle Paul who wrote that we are to be “transformed by the renewing of our minds” (Rom 12:2), and this same apostle also called us to demolish any and all arguments that set themselves in opposition to the knowledge of God (2Cor 10:4). Put simply, all this is the work of theology! Clearly, the intellectual side of the Christian life is not the only side––we are also called to love God with all our heart, soul and strength as well––but we are living in a time when there is hardly any emphasis on the life of the Christian mind at all. Is it any coincidence that just at the same time our culture encourages us to entertain ourselves to death, and to ignore the life of the mind, Christian churches are jettisoning doctrine, theology, and tradition in favor of music and programs that uplift and entertain. Could this be a result of the fact that we want Christianity to be more like TV than a book?
I have personally taken a number of polls of Christians at various conventions for a number of different production assignments. Astonishingly, after interviewing hundreds of believers over the past ten years only about a handful of people I met could name all ten of the Ten Commandments. When I have asked about the meaning of the Biblical word “justification,” 75% of those polled were unable to give an adequate definition, even though this is arguably the most crucial doctrine at the heart of the Christian gospel for all Protestants. Now, on one level this is a doctrinal crisis, but on another level this reveals a much more basic problem, and that is this: we are not reading God’s book. We are not being saturated with Holy Scripture, either in our own personal study or in the lives of our more entertainment oriented churches. Today’s churches, rather than teaching us about the Bible are competing shopping malls, amusement parks and TV variety shows. This is the trouble with my generation. We are so addicted to entertainment and comfortable with that world that we hardly even realized that we have raised up teachers for ourselves to tell us what our itching ears want to hear. And since we are bored with God and his thick book, things that remind us of television will just have to do.
What’s A Christian to Do?
The lack of personal discipline among individual Christians (myself included), and even more importantly, Christian parents, is a troubling characteristic of the contemporary church. Lamenting the present crisis, Allan Bloom recalls better days:
It was the home––and the houses of worship related to it––where religion lived. The holy days and the common language and set of references that permeated most households constituted a large part of the family bond and gave it a substantial content. Moses and the Tables of the Law, Jesus and his preaching of brotherly love, had an imaginative existence. Passages from the Psalms and the Gospels echoed in children’s heads. Attending church or synagogue, praying at the table, were a way of life, inseparable from the moral education that was supposed to be the family’s special responsibility in this democracy....The loss of the gripping inner life vouchsafed those who were nurtured by the Bible must be primarily attributed not to our schools or political life, but to the family, which, with all its rights to privacy, has proved unable to maintain any content of its own. The dreariness of the family’s spiritual landscape passes belief. (1)
Now obviously, Bloom is writing from outside the Christian perspective (which itself is interesting to think about––i.e., the issues involved concern more than Christians). Nevertheless, it is amazing to me how similar Bloom's comments are to those made some sixty years earlier by J. Gresham Machen. “The most important educational institution,” Machen wrote, “is not the pulpit or the school, important as these institutions are; but it is the Christian family. And that institution has to a very large extent ceased to do its work.”(2) This was written in the early part of the twentieth century, so as you can see, seeds of our present crisis were sown a good many years ago. But again we must counter these trends. We must again heed the instruction of Paul who wrote,
But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. (2Tim. 3:14-15).
Notice that Paul indicates that Timothy had learned the Scriptures from infancy. This must be our goal for our own children. We must not let our children be catechised by television. Rather, parents must take the heaviest responsibility of equipping children, and bringing them up in the fear and knowledge of God. We must raise our children, as Bloom wrote of a former generation, with “passages from the Psalms and the Gospels echoing in their heads.”
I am the first to admit that it is easier to turn on the TV set than it is to open a book. But our generation must begin to wean itself from this nasty habit. We are increasingly becoming entertainment junkies, to the neglect of our own spiritual growth, the nurturing of our children, and participation in the larger community. Christians must resist this trend. Nietzsche once made the disturbing observation that the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of modern man, meaning that the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurped all that remained of the eternal in his daily life. Alan Bloom then adds to this thought by saying, “Now television has replaced the newspaper.” Are we going to let the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral usurp all that remains of the eternal in our own hearts, minds, and churches? We must not. Our job is to take up the Scriptures once again, and we must teach them to our children.
Now, in order not to be misunderstood, I want to clarify a few things. I am not saying that television is completely a waste of time, nor am I saying that it is wrong to be entertained. It is just that we are becoming a nation of entertainment addicts. My generation has grown up on television. We are sort of like crack babies, who've needed the fix since before we can remember. We're so addicted to entertainment we hardly noticed that many of our churches had been turned into fun, happy, exciting places––like late night TV variety shows. But we are neglecting so many other important responsibilities in exchange for entertainment, and this at a time when knowledge of the Scriptures is at a critically low level among Christians.
Without being legalistic, we must begin to take our entertainment in moderation. Our generation has a lot of work to do. The culture is collapsing and we ourselves are partly to blame. There has never been a time like the present to swim against the cultural tide. Many people in this country, having been reared on television's slick images, long for the sublime, the unseen, the transcendent. We have that in the eternal Word of God, and this is no time to squander our treasure.
― chuck, Monday, 30 August 2004 18:41 (twenty-one years ago)