Unplanned Obsolescence

What Justin E. H. Smith perceives as the younger generation’s parochial attitude toward art [“My Generation,” Essay, September] is in fact a healthy skepticism regarding claims about universalism and anything as facile as “human liberation.” Millennials and Gen Z-ers take it upon themselves to ask, “liberation for whom?” They recognize the violence of any work of art that lays claim to a totalizing ethos. The young people I know are more concerned with the liberation struggles of real people than they are with cultural posturing in a world where morality and artistic purity have evaporated…