There’s something unquestionably evocative about the idea of treasure hunters — perhaps scruffy Indiana Jones types, breath still tainted by whiskey — carrying torches into an ancient tomb and discovering inscribed wisdom that is itself eternal. Our hero lifts a stone tablet from its dusty resting place and gently brushes it clean. There, in ancient Assyrian (his second language, happily), is a moral lesson as true now as it was then.
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“Our earth is degenerate in these latter days,” it reads. “There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common.”
And then a central concern: “Children no longer obey their parents.”
A quick dip into the internet reveals that this verbiage, in one of several forms, is often provenanced in precisely the romantic method that I describe above. The quote has been attributed to a tablet found near the ancient city of Babylon that dates from 2800 B.C.E. but also, as a writer for the Guardian reported a few years ago, to the hieroglyphs added to an Egyptian tomb six millennia ago. (In that case, some additional disparagement was included: The young “are rude and impatient” and “frequently inhabit taverns,” which probably has a cool pictograph.)
The implication is that tensions between old and young predate modern civilization. Even without his divine mandate, Abraham might have fleetingly considered grabbing a knife and taking Isaac to Moriah. But, as you might have guessed, those quotes are probably entirely invented. They are useful phrasings made more useful by attributing them to those no longer able to disavow them, to cultures viewed as wise beyond their eras.
This happens more than you might think. The Socrates-Plato-Aristotle family and the ancient Greeks more broadly have been given credit for a slew of similar excoriations.
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise,” Socrates is reported to have said, though there’s no evidence that he did. “Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room.”
Socrates is useful as a source because his wisdom is often conveyed second- or third-hand. The distinction between Plato making up Socratic wisdom and you making it up is one solely of proximity. But even among more verifiable Greek sources, there is invented generational tension. Hesiod, a poet of ancient Greece, is reported to have said that he sees “no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words.” But he has a known body of work, and this purported sentiment about kids today is apparently not found among them.
One of the internet’s favorite iterations of the ancient-wise-man-opines-on-young-people meme is a quote attributed to Pierre l’Ermite, a French monk and ascetic whose living relatives would probably rather have the world focus on his purported assessments of generational tension than on his role in the Crusades. He is reported to have said that the “young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint.” This is often sourced to a speech he gave in 1274, a nifty feat given that his death occurred more than a century before. The quote is also occasionally sourced to Socrates, because why not?
A more interesting citation of Platonic views of generational conflict comes at a particularly interesting time and from a particularly interesting source, given the themes of the moment. At the convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1968, Chicago Daily News executive Creed Black moderated a panel titled “What About the Generation Gap?” To introduce the discussion, he appealed to the authority of another long-dead Greek.
“What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents, they ignore the laws, they ride in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decayed. What is to become of them?”
Those, he said, were “the words of Plato and were written originally in Greek about 400 years before the birth of Christ. So, the generation gap is not exactly new, but it does continue.” As you might have guessed, however, there’s no evidence that Plato said this, however true it may be that the generation gap wasn’t then new. Black may have picked it up from a commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame the previous year.
It’s not a coincidence that Black’s panel was offered during the height of the Vietnam War. Young people, millions of them, were exhibiting stark disrespect to their elders (who were trying to draft them into an unwinnable war in Southeast Asia) and were riding in the streets inflamed with wild notions (like that young people should not be drafted into fighting said unwinnable war). The tension between young and old had a very real, tangible presence — one worth de-emphasizing through Black’s historical comparison, however artificial.
In recognizing what it dubbed the “Now Generation” as its “man of the year” in 1966, Time magazine noted that some intergenerational skepticism was reciprocated. “From activists to acidheads,” the magazine reported, “they like to deride their elders as ‘stick-walkers’ and ‘sellouts.’” Harvard professor David Riesman, then 57, opined that “The generational gap is wider than I’ve ever seen it in my lifetime.”
Author Leslie Paul offered a related prediction: “The relations of the generations may become the central social issue of the next 50 years, as the relations between the classes have been for the past half-century.” To a significant extent, that came to pass.
The youngest member of Creed Black’s generation-gap panel — the event introduced with that apparently invented quote from Plato about how young people are simply incorrigible — was Roger Rapoport. Rapoport was the editor of the newspaper at the University of Michigan, though he’d also had an internship with the Wall Street Journal and written for other major periodicals. Black, the moderator, offered that Rapoport and the other members of the younger generation (including the 32-year-old quarterback for the Buffalo Bills, Jack Kemp, filling in for the musician Joan Baez) gave the assembled elders the chance to “listen and learn to understand and to communicate” with them. But what unfolded was less akin to observing wildlife at the zoo than being plunked into the savanna wearing an antelope skin.
“Far from being dismayed at the generation gap, I am pretty glad it is there,” Rapoport, the first speaker, said near the beginning of his remarks. “I think it offers a good deal of hope for us that perhaps we can do a little bit better than you did.”
He expressed his appreciation for the achievements of what we now call the greatest generation, sending fascism into remission and building America’s economic strength. But he pilloried his elders for the development of the military-industrial complex — unsurprisingly a concern of a 21-year-old at the height of the Vietnam War — for its degradation of the environment and for fostering “a racist society” in the United States. Rapoport had spent a summer covering Alabama for the Southern Courier, a weekly newspaper founded by Northern college students to provide more robust local coverage of the civil rights movement.
“We are so far behind that I am not sure we can ever catch up,” he said of the crisis of race — the overlapping crisis of the moment that, among other things, was interwoven into that year’s protests at Columbia University. “After all, it took Martin Luther King’s life to get the garbage workers in Memphis another 15 cents an hour.”
During a question-and-answer period after the panel, Rapoport was asked, in essence, whether he thought his generation would fare better on this intractable problem.
“I wonder if Roger believes, after all, that his generation will have a lot to do with handling this problem,” Arthur Gallagher of the Ann Arbor News asked his younger crosstown competitor. “It is not going to be solved in one or two days. I wonder if he believes it will be solved in the next 20 years or if, at the end of that time, his children will be holding him accountable for their failures?”
“My feeling is that we'll make it somehow,” Rapoport said in response, though he admitted that “perhaps my kids will be giving me a hard time about it too.”
Rapoport went on to a distinguished career in journalism, publishing and film. In the summer of 2021, I reached him at his daughter’s house in London to ask him about the panel and that particular question. The room that day was packed solid with “a who’s who of American journalism,” he said, and so White and male that it was “unbelievable,” though certainly much more believable in that moment.
But to Gallagher’s question: Were his kids now holding him to account for his generation’s failures?
“Yes. They do kid,” Rapoport said, tacitly admitting that Gallagher to some extent had a point. “My kids do kid me about it, you know, obviously, but in kind of a lighthearted way, yeah.”
His daughter does call him “boomer,” he added — but mostly when criticizing the failure to act on climate change, not race. On that subject, he implied, his generation's voice had been muffled as the generations that preceded him had stumbled in addressing racism or the military.
Reading the transcript of that panel from 1968, there seems to be an underlying bitterness, a hostility between the young panelists and the elders asking to hear their thoughts. Rapoport insisted that, despite that sense, the mood was collegial, however directly he and his peers were speaking truth to those with the power in their industry. That would suggest that the response Creed Black offered to Rapoport’s whirlwind of criticisms was more performatively bemused than anything. Again, it took the form of an apocryphal vignette.
“Listening to him, I was reminded of the story that appeared in Parade Magazine last Sunday in which the son says to his father, ‘I am off to the party,’” Black said when Rapoport finished. “And the father said, ‘Well, have a good time.’ To which the son replied, ‘Look, Pop, don’t tell me what to do.’”
Children disrespecting their elders, indeed.
This article was adapted from research and writing originally undertaken for my book, “The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America.”
