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 into the thin air of late-stage capitalism.

Aside from a brief mention of Run-D.M.C., Smith writes as though hip-hop—the most important cultural form to emerge from the Eighties and Nineties—never happened, as though Siouxsie Sioux, Polly Jean Harvey, and Lauryn Hill never electrified a generation of women, and as though the members of De La Soul had nothing more nuanced to offer. After all, this was the rap group that declined to use the N-word, wrote album after album about their complicated relationship with mainstream hip-hop and the record industry, and were sued by former members of the Turtles for copyright infringement. (The latter both bankrupted the band and ended an era of creative freedom for a generation of sampling artists.) No wonder Smith thinks that “we” knew better than to mix politics and art; he has omitted in his history anyone who would say anything to the contrary.

Margaret Schwartz
Associate professor of communication and media studies, Fordham University
New York City

Disaffection, apathy, irony—these virtues get a bad name nowadays, but wrapped around a core of integrity and passion they can yield great things, like the first three Pavement records. I’d rather be self-centered than self-righteous and self-pitying, so I guess it’s a good thing I was born in 1976 rather than, say, 1986. Ha! I salute my millennial friends on their recent discoveries of middle age and Sigmund Freud. Just when you thought the discourse couldn’t get any more tedious . . . I’m kidding!

I recognize the feeling of irrelevance Justin E. H. Smith mentions at the beginning of his memoir-elegy for our generation, but as soon as I felt it I rejected it. I am not a professor, just a freelance writer, so if I were to “derealize” a sense that what I have to say matters (nothing matters) I would no longer be able to afford to internalize food. (Justin, I think you should can your therapist.) Luckily, as a non-professor and non-office worker, I have no compulsory interactions with younger people (or anyone) that involve mutual evaluation. I can proceed under the delusion that I am still the hero of my own life and that my generation’s hobbyhorses are still winning the Triple Crown. Who wants to be relevant anyway? Relevance is for sellouts.

Christian Lorentzen
Rome

As someone you might call a zoomer, I would urge Smith to recognize the mark that his generation—that of my parents—left on my cohort’s tastes and attitudes. He will find that many of us are not inveterate culture warriors but backward-looking yearners in desperate search of our own depths.

I was lucky to grow up in Nashville, a city with a somewhat intact scene into which I threw myself. My tastes leaned vintage, toward a mythical time when everything rocked and nothing sucked. My favorite T-shirt in high school was a Sisters of Mercy number that had belonged to my mom. Our music sounded like it belonged to our moms. In a reversal of the youthful posturing that Smith describes, we blithely showed off these influences from without.

Gen Z is not past authenticity. Corporate tastemaking has simply handed us prepackaged subcultures, albeit without subculture’s promise of friends and a unique haircut. Our appropriation of symbols from our elders’ spent youths suggests a desire for the belonging we imagine they felt. If we seem misguided, we are, but we also know what we’re missing.

Oliver Golden Eagan
Nashville, Tenn.

The X Factor

In his recent essay [“Come as You Are,” Review, September], Adam Kirsch writes that Gen X novelists turn their gazes inward rather than outward, eschew political claims for metaphysical ones, and prefer moral ambiguity to moralizing. He claims that these preferences are crystallized in a scene from Zadie Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud, in which one character reproaches another for caring more to understand injustice than to fight against it. The character is accused of being detached from the “collective struggle” that millennials supposedly identify as central to political life.

In fact, the scene, and an analogous one in Smith’s earlier novel On Beauty, reveals the ramifications of action without understanding. In On Beauty, a working-class student from the Midwest finds herself in an art history class surrounded by upper-class, culturally literate peers from the Northeast who are involved in various political initiatives. She wants to share her visceral reaction to the Rembrandt paintings under discussion, how the facial expressions seem to capture a battle with the self, but her classmates prefer to debate abstractions that have little to do with the paintings, pushing her and the artworks to the margins.

This is an all-too-common outcome when people are intent on proving their intellectual and political superiority and immune to cultural, social, and economic differences. Smith is at her best while rendering such moments: ones that unveil what inhibits genuine human connection, an ideal that Kirsch aptly cites as quintessentially Gen X.

Jessica Swoboda
Charlottesville, Va.

Correction

The September Findings column mentioned that a NASA spacecraft altered the orbit of the asteroid Dimorphos. This occurred in September 2022, not this summer. We regret the error.