For example, Pauly recalled how the grandfather of a colleague had once expressed annoyance at how, in the 1920s, bluefin tuna would regularly get tangled in his nets in the North Sea – a region where the species is now largely absent. They did this despite stories that prior generations had experienced and observed ocean life quite differently. Despite an objectively recorded long-term decline in certain fish populations, each generation of scientists seemed to be accepting the lower abundance and diversity they studied as their "baseline". One day, the fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly looked around at his contemporaries, and noticed something curious. One of the first times this particular type of generational amnesia was observed was back in the 1990s – to describe an effect afflicting researchers who studied fish. ( Read more: Social cryptomnesia: How societies steal ideas)īut if the most recent generation is forgetful about the positive steps and changes handed to them by their forebears, then so too can they fail to notice how those predecessors have damaged the world too. It wasn't always the case that universal suffrage was seen as uncontroversially right, yet this fact is rarely remembered. New generations also have a habit of collectively forgetting how positive social change comes about through the dogged activism of minorities once shunned, such as Emmeline Pankhurst and the suffragettes' campaign for women's right to vote. If Cleopatra or Elizabeth I were to time-travel to the present day, they would marvel at a world we take for granted, with its vaccines and antibiotics, and a flushing toilet and fridge in every home. But there was a time when we hadn't worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often 'crash' when we tried to use them."Īs a result, the average person today lives a life with advances and luxuries that even the most privileged generations of the past could only dream of. As the writer Douglas Adams once pointed out: "We no longer think of chairs as technology we just think of them as chairs. Some inventions are so ubiquitous that we've totally forgotten that they even are technologies. One computer scientist once quipped that technology should be defined as "anything that was invented after you were born". The current generation's idea of technology means smartphones, cryptocurrencies or the internet, but it wasn't always so: technology was once centred on pneumatics or steam, rather than silicon. The subtle ways that 'clicktivism' shapes the worldĮvery generation is handed a world that has been shaped by their predecessors – and then seemingly forgets that fact.The unseen 'slow violence' that affects millions.
Social cryptomnesia: How societies steal ideas.And unfortunately, all of us come to suffer from it no matter how young or old we are. There's another type that is less obvious, called "generational amnesia", which has profound effects on the way that we see the world. However, that's not the only kind of forgetfulness that happens as the generations pass. One reason, the researchers say, is that people tend to forget that they themselves have changed over time, and so assume that the maturity, attitudes and behaviours of the young are also fixed. "The pervasiveness of complaints about 'kids these days' across millennia suggests that these criticisms are neither accurate nor due to the idiosyncrasies of a particular culture or time – but rather represent a pervasive illusion of humanity." "Since at least 624 BC, people have lamented the decline of the present generation of youth relative to earlier generations," according to the psychologists who named the phenomenon. There's actually a scientific term for this: the "kids these days" effect, which can be traced all the way back to the writing of the Ancient Greeks. And now it's the turn of Generation Z, with their TikToks and identity politics, to be judged by their elders. Baby boomers, he recalls, once poured scorn on Gen-Xers like him, who themselves grew up to be sniffy about the avocado-and-toast eating habits of "snowflake" Millennials. And he should know: he coined the term "Generation X". "Generational trashing is actually eternal human behaviour," wrote the novelist Douglas Coupland in an essay for The Guardian earlier this month. With age, there comes a predictable derision of youth that seems to afflict almost every demographic cohort over the age of 35 years or so. Can a generation be forgetful? It's certainly true that older generations can fail to remember what it was to be young.
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