Incapable of Innocence: Generation Y’s place in the 21st Century
‘Innocence’ is defined by the Merriam-Webster online dictionary as: “the quality or state of being free from guilt or blame (‘Innocence’ 1).” Dictionaries are not considered by linguists to be the end-all be all arbiters of lexicological meaning in society today, but this definition should be inclusive enough to either be built upon or already suit our purposes here with little to no modification (Curzan). Loss of innocence is an important theme in many works of fiction, both literary and genre. It has been throughout literature for some time, and continues to be a relevant theme in our society and culture. Tony Tulathimutte is an American writer (b. Sept 1, 1983) working in New York (Tulathimutte 1). His 2016 novel Private Citizens shows us cast of characters losing the innocence of the era: an erosion of the barrier between childhood and a once neatly defined understanding of adulthood combined with a cultural malaise which is at once paradoxically self effacing and self aggrandizing. If our innocence could be considered in every aspect and dimension of social and political life then would have to conclude that innocence in the modern era innocence is much harder to preserve due to increased awareness in information is more prevalent and easier to access than any other time in human history, modern social problems, and a malaised social and political climate. These attitudes of awareness about the destructive nature of consumerism, gender identity and LGBTQ social constructs, and an omnipresent web 2.0 contribute to an amplified desensitizing effect of modern culture on young people in Generation Y, the prime subject for most ‘loss of innocence’ stories, esp. Private Citizens.
Tony Tulathimutte’s 2016 Novel Private Citizens follows the exploits of a (fictional) group of college grads and dropouts of Stanford University from the year 2000 up through 2008 as they grow and develop from early adulthood into a new frontier marked by identity politics and the self-destructive nature of generation Y’s self reflexive nature to examine intent as the first point of entry in any discourse (Tulathimutte, 182, 250). Generation Y is defined as people born from 1977 to 1994, and who came of age from 1998-2006 (Generations, 7). In her 2008 book Identity Politics in Deconstruction author Carolyn D' Cruz addresses the need to acknowledge that identifying the cultural and political identity of the speaker is the first and most critical step in a deconstructive discourse (D’Cruz 11).
Innocence, from the working definition earlier established, is almost immediately in peril in the minds of the protagonists of Private Citizens due to the fact that most of them are automatically inclined to look at the deontological ground upon which their assumptions on race, gender identity, and their assumptions about a multitude of other social and political identifying signifiers such as ‘disabled’, class, and sexuality (Alexander, Moore 1). Linda Troland, one of the Novel’s main protagonists aspires to run a non profit which attempts to popularize humanitarian socio political issues in an effort to convince a less than enthusiastic Gen Y populace to solve the world’s problems essentially by partying, with a business model designed to turn party attendance into donations, forwarding those donations to good causes (Private Citizens 5, 43, 201). “The body politic had become so fat, so lumpen, that it needed morality incentivized (Private Citizens 6).”
But if a morally malaised populace needs incentivization to act, that populace is an antithesis to the protagonists on display in Private Citizens. Vanya, who is a paraplegic woman running a social media platform for and by disabled people in an effort to offer a place to normalize disability is met almost immediately with the counterpoint by her boyfriend Will questions the nature of an attempt to “...redefine’ disability stereotypes instead of eliminate them (Private Citizens 46). Journalist Polly Toynbee explains the original impetus for ‘politically correct’ terms “as a coded cover for all who still want to say Paki, spastic or queer, all those who still want to pick on anyone not like them, playground bullies who never grew up (O’Neill 279).” There is a type of double negative at play when characters in Tulathimutte’s novel even when it comes to many of the left wing’s more radical solutions to social and political problems in one scene where two of the protagonists, Cory and her roommate Roopa are debating the morality of freeganism, not for the aspects of reappropriating someone else’s trash (which Alex V. Barnard argues is a morally upstanding thing to do, citing Alain Badiou’s principle of a ‘sense of one’s place’ about the ‘freegan’ approach of dumpster diving) but for the idea that such reappropriation create(s) a social institution dependent on corporate excess (Tulathimutte 28, Barnard 1018). In one scene Roopa and Cory are both eating, Cory is eating leftovers which have been left in their communal refrigerator until the point of desiccation, and Roopa is eating food she’s acquired from a dumpster as per her freegan lifestyle dictates. Roopa sees Cory about to eat food which is days, perhaps weeks beyond expiring, and Roopa urges Cory: “Try my food. I know it seems gross to eat ‘garbage,’ but people have to get over that (Private Citizens 26).” The issue at stake here is not the morality of freeganism, but the effectiveness with which Generation Y attempts to combat previously established social order, but finds themselves trapped within previously established modes of discourse, unable to break free from their circular logic due to the fact that they fail to truly understand the ethical didactic guiding their conclusions, thus they are never able to break free from the patterns of thinking that put our society in the unethical position Tulathimutte’s protagonists are trying to fight their way out of. Larry Alexander and Michael Moore (not to be confused with the filmmaker) point out in their Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy entry on Deontology that a deontologist is capable of a type of supra modality of thinking which divorces the ethics of their actions from the discourse of said actions (and actions in this instance are even conceived actions, or an orwellian type of ‘thought-crime’) (Alexander, Moore 12).
Private Citizen’s characters’ self awareness about social issues culminates into a type of hypersensitivity which paralyzes the characters in Tuluthelme’s world. After Linda, a Stanford dropout, splits with a boyfriend she has an epiphany which is symbolic of the protagonist’s failed attempts at reappropriating previously established cultural morays and perceptions: “... she’d go ‘homeless’. Why not? It’d be hilarious. The only thing she needed was herself… That was the worst thing about cities, the lack of storage. People complained about owning a car; how about owning a body (Tulathimutte 69)?” This outlines a fatal flaw in Generation Y’s logic (if we are to take Tulathimutte text as descriptive of the nature of Gen Y), that it seeks to heighten and advance the social and political dialogue of the culture without acknowledging or addressing the underlying flaws in its discourse. Tulathimutte’s Generation Y attempts to change the social and political narrative of modern American life, but in their efforts they fail to make the attempt or to even see that they must first understand the deeper meanings behind why the dominant culture in society functions the way it does, and as a result they are only capable of destroying themselves, not the existing power structures which not only dictate their understanding of sociopolitical discourse.
The sublimation of previously toxic terminology in lieu of more sanitized and less offensive language is beneficial, as Ben O’Neill points out, but he goes on to say that without a historical etymological investigation of where those terms come from and the cultural opinions and attitudes which those words were employed to create then there can be no progress made (O’Neill 280). A thing to bear in mind, as D’cruz reminds us in Identity politics in Deconstruction - Calculating with the Incalculable that before the 1990s public discourse on sexuality and gender was quite limited (D’cruz 30). Before the explosion of terminologies and identity labels floating around in generation Y’s cultural ether we had the tacit and nascent inception of the ‘Will and Grace’ style normalization of homosexuality by putting Lesbian and Gay (but rarely if ever bisexual, Transgender, and less ‘specific’ queer sexualities), of pulling people out of the closet by attempting to normalize not just homosexuality, but all LGBTQ lifestyles.
Innocence for Tulathimutte’s characters is lost not in the revelation of new information which was previously unknown, but in the new understanding of data which had not been fully inculcated into the moral and ethical consciousness of the decisionmaking of an ethically reinvigorated new generation. A generation who had not yet understood the nature of it’s own understanding; a kind of self-reflexive social hyper-awareness which threatens the moral standing of all those who approach it’s light. For characters in Tulathimutte’s world, this awareness is an automatic disqualifier of innocence.
Management expert Bruce Tulgan and President of Amherst College Carolyn Martin write in their book ‘Managing Generation Y: Global Citizens Born in the Late Seventies and Early Eighties’ that gone are the days of ‘Golden handcuffs’ (benefits and salaries which are nice amenities for the employee, but keep them chained to their company with the knowledge that if they were to leave they’d be hurting themselves more than they could improve their financial and professional situations by joining a new company), ‘dues-paying’ and ‘ladder climbing’, in a new labor market where employees are more like temporarily leased free agents (Tulgan, Martin, Ch.3). The impact this has on Gen Y at large is reflected in Private Citizen in the way characters are psychologically anticipating large shifts at any given time in their life, and they understand that for however stable or profitable their employment, especially Will and Vanya, the book’s wealthy high earning power-couple. This, juxtaposed with Linda’s laissez faire attitude towards her own homelessness contrasts the wide and varying differences in the experience of jobs, career and income in Gen Y, but the similarities it highlights (a self reflexive and reflective nature of constantly questioning the moral and ethical ground upon which your propositions and assumptions are built upon) generates no new gnosis. This, combined with Gen Y’s aspirations to shape their world into a more active way, the tendency to make more informed and proactive decisions both financial and person (an average of one in nine will have a parent cosign on a credit card) (Generations 2). In a paper published in the Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing in 2014 researchers concluded that Generation Y is frequently marketed to as if they are an all encompassed mass of consumers each with generally the same interests and passions, both socially and ethically (M. Paulin et al. 336). This approach, however, is ineffective due to the intensely varied and wide range of choices and identities Gen Y finds itself presented with at any given time, and as a result non-interactive uses of social media platforms, such as a ‘one to many’ message from a corporation, nonprofit, or other organization seeking to send out information to large populations of Gen Y en mass on social media platforms such as twitter or facebook have been found to be ineffective.
But how does this relate to loss of innocence? In this context, innocence, going back to the formal definition, however limited Curzan claims such definitions to be, is already lost as a prerequisite for entry into Generation Y due to the nature of a fractured and incongruous discourse. A generation of people who cannot be reached other than through peer to peer integrated discourses (rather than a traditional top-down discourse) is incapable of innocence due to the constantly over-shared nature of their multiplicitous perspectives because to possess such knowledge is to have already lost one’s innocence (Zhang, Omran, Cobanoglu 733). Such gnosis is generative of an automatic innocence destruction which is both consequentialist and deontological by nature (Alexander, Moore 12). We find many examples of this in Tulathimutte’s prose: “political engagement somehow made you a boring caricature of the earnest liberal (Private Citizens 5).” and “Though, yes, throwing parties for money was somewhat cynical, and presumed that young people cared about progress only insofar as they could still have fun (Private Citizens 5).” Linda is herself found to be a metaphorical stand-in for many of the critiques leveled against Gen Y, as evinced by a critique by her professor of her final paper in a graduate seminar in American Modernism,which could be leveled as a failing of some of Gen Y’s tendencies at large: “ ... You’ve overthought it: you question modernism as a valid category, “text” as a meaningful term, you’ve even psychologized my personal motives for asking the question. The point isn’t to outsmart the prompt or produce lots of uncommon words; it’s to answer the question (Private Citizens pp. 76-77).” There would have to be some level of ignorance, or at least the self effacement of admitted ignorance, but research shows most technology experts subscribe to the idea that Gen Y is destined to usher culture into a new social environment of personal information disclosure via social media and mobile technology (Zhang et. al. 733).
For Generation Y, being born at a cultural crossroads diverging from the old “one true narrative” and a new set of perspectives and knowledge of the nature of social and political life, burgeoning into a new global culture which transforms one person’s individual american struggle for sociopolitical freedom and independence creates a dangerous paradox. Self awareness coupled with a deeper understanding of the self and a heightened ability to express one’s self and expose one’s self to the thoughts and expressions on an exponential scale compared to anything which was previously technologically and socially possible obfuscates the ability to govern one’s self and reach Alain Badiou’s principle of a ‘sense of one’s place’ (Barnard 1018). There is a schism in the public conscious which conflates the ability to stand outside of sociopolitical movements and cultural identities while existing inside them, and for Tulathimutte the inability to see this problem is what ultimately renders Gen Y as being incapable of effecting social and political change.This self awareness also renders Gen Y automatically incapable of innocence due to the fact that their technological and social influences have caused them to be incapable of resisting the urge to shoot the ground out from underneath themselves in a constantly faux self-questioning and self examining nature. If there were a more stringent enforcement of the rules of any strictly philosophical theoretical discourse, such as a weighed and measured deontological analysis, or even any properly regulated theoretical discourse, whether it be philosophy (Deontological or Ontological), literary theory, or political philosophy, or any intellectually rigorous exploration of the nature of the sociological background upon which these problems of society present themselves then there might be some progress which could chip away at the underlying foundation upon which the Gen Y’s grievances are built upon, but since little if any such work has been done regarding the issues which Gen Y seems to prioritize (class, race and ethnicity, LGBTQ rights, ect.) little if any progress is possible.
Works Cited:
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