James (millennial intellectual) Marriott
Photo credit: The Times
'I am very eager to be liked, and I want people to think I'm a nice person.'
I.
The obsession with dividing people up into generations, just as once we used to categorise individuals by their star sign, is deeply stupid and, I suspect, it's something driven by those working in media and marketing who like to simplify and stereotype in order to target consumers and create cultural trends.
The millennial, for example, is largely a fictitious figure invented by William Strauss and Neil Howe [1].
Nevertheless, there are some who take generational theory seriously and identify not by race, class, or gender, but by what era (or decade) they were born in. And there are some - proud of their ability to read serious works of literature, understand complex ideas, and who just happen to be born between 1981 and 1996 - who call themselves millennial intellectuals ...
II.
Aged between thirty and forty-five, millennial intellectuals have been shaped by digital technology and are motivated by a wide range of social issues and cultural concerns, often allowing the work they do in a professional capacity - lecturing, writing, podcasting - to be infected by their political activism (and vice versa).
Two words seem to dominate their vocabulary: authenticity and sincerity and they loathe the irony and indifference, the artifice and ambivalence, of Gen X nihilists, such as myself, who couldn't care less about their personal experience or their precious feelings.
Unfortunately, judging by a number of events I've attended recently, these millennial intellectuals are in the ascendency and exerting an ever-greater influence over public discourse.
III.
I don't know if he's regarded as a spokesperson for the millennial intellectuals, but James Marriott was the one who coined the term [2] and this Times columnist and reviewer is, for me, the baby-faced face of this generational grouping.
Asked in an interview to say what it is that unites them, he replied: "being unafraid to talk about feelings" [3] and he then went on to contrast his generation with those intellectuals in the 1990s who were obsessed with irony in a time in which "nobody could be sincere anymore".
Wanting to press Marriott on this, the interviewer, Nicholas Harris, reminds him of the original New Sincerity movement - sometimes known as post-postmodernism [4] - that arose in the mid-1980s and was popularised in the following decade by David Foster Wallace.
Marriott says that it wasn't sincere enough and that the sincerity of Wallace and company pales in comparison to the sincerity of the millennial intellectuals, which is so off the charts that many find it discomforting.
By way of providing an example, Marriott mentions the 2018 novel by the celebrated Irish author (and fellow millennial) Sally Rooney: "'When I speak to a lot of middle-aged people about Normal People they think it was so embarrassing and overwrought.'"
The book may, he says, have technical faults, but can be defended on the grounds that it is still incredibly moving and concerns itself with the lives of good people:
"'Normal People is about people who are incredibly good-looking and incredibly clever and incredibly nice. But in a way that is part of the Sincerity we were talking about. A lot of writers at the end of the 20th century were ostentatiously concerned with writing about 'bad' people in a slightly showy, shallow way - that Bret Easton Ellis stuff. And I think that became a literary affectation and it was cool to write about people who were bad or morally questionable. Whereas [...] I thought it was interesting and almost revolutionary for [Rooney] to write about people who are good. Because some people are good.'"
This, from someone who aspires to become a literary critic (rather than merely a book reviewer) ...! Even by his own admission, this is "'probably a really stupid attitude to literature'". Nevertheless, that's his attitude and his desire is to know about nice people, with nice feelings, leading nice lives - people just like him, in other words.
And, it seems, there are plenty of readers out there who share his wanting to be moved by niceness and express their feelings in all sincerity (if hopefully not in a manner that is too cringey). But I'm not one of them: I remain a Gen X nihilist and ironic postmodernist and have no wish to re-engage with Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, even when, as here, they are reduced to an insipid level of niceness.
Notes
[1] Strauss and Howe are widely credited with coining the term millennials in 1987 and assigning them a place within their (crackpot) psycho-historical theory which associates different eras with recurring generational personas or archetypes.
The theory is popular with the kind of people who read Ayn Rand or Jordan Peterson and run motivational business seminars, but less so amongst those who still require things such as empirical evidence for claims made and dislike unfalsifiable theories on principle. Critics also reject the idea that vacuous generational labels might play a bigger role in shaping identity than class, race, sex, or religion.
Readers who are nevertheless interested in Strauss and Howe's pop sociology can consult any of the numerous books they co-authored, beginning with Generations: The History of America's
Future, 1584 to 2069 (William Morrow and Company, 1991).
[2] Marriott originally used the phrase millennial intellectuals to describe a group of young, female writers including Jia Tolentino, Sally Rooney, Naoise Dolan, Megan Nolan, and Hera Lindsay Bird.
[3] James Marriott, interviewed by Nicholas Harris, Review 31 - click here. All further quotes in this post are taken from this interview.
Readers who may wish to know more about Marriott might like to see an interview he gave to Cosmo Adair that appears in the arts and culture magazine Wayzgoose (19 February, 2024): click here. I was interested to discover that Marriott's father was a nihilist who insisted on the material nature of existence.
[4] New sincerity and post-postmodernism are perhaps not quite one and the same, but they are closely related enough to be used synonymously. Both were trends in the arts and philosophy that wished to move beyond the ruins, so to speak, but not in a good way (by which I mean that rather than tentatively build up new little habitats, they seemed to wish to return to the safety of old values and narratives and act with sincerity and conviction once more).
