Born for More Than Ourselves Alone
How Millennials Rediscovered Duty in an Age of Selfishness
You don’t hear much about duty these days. It seems perhaps a little old-fashioned, a little reminiscent of bygone ages. It can feel quaint, even dangerous. After a century of conflicts, beginning with one supposed to end them for good, the word echoes with the sound of young men marching off to die for no reason other than that their country asked.
But no soldier ends up fighting for their country. Not really. They certainly don’t die for it. They’re willing to give the last full measure of devotion for the men and women next to them, for their families and fellow citizens back home. People will do the most dangerous, costly things imaginable to save a friend or comrade. They rarely do them for a flag.
That’s a kind of duty, too. One more potent and more deeply rooted than any hollow idea of nationalistic service. It’s love, in point of fact. Love motivates us to look beyond our own needs, our own narrow field of view, and care for one another even in the most extreme and terrible of circumstances. Firefighters run into burning buildings, teachers educate and inspire, people spend their entire lives lifting others to their feet. All out of love. Love pushes us to be better than we know we can be.
Love contains and inspires duty. There’s no separating the two, and we shouldn’t try. In making the attempt we lose the truth of both. The problem is, so many of us have.
How Our Parents’ Generation Lost Their Sense of Duty
For all the ’60s are known as the decade when love became all you need, they ended up destroying our understanding of it. The breakdown of a collective concept of identity, and its replacement with one predicated purely on individual expression, was not followed by the fundamental change in society its proponents hoped to produce.
Rather than allowing everyone a chance at true happiness, the philosophy that came out of that decade instead stripped away many of the bonds which helped us to see ourselves as part of a larger whole. When we lose those links we lose the ability to truly connect to and love people we don’t already know, and the drive towards duty outside oneself that love inspires.
In spite of the hard-won progress made by the Civil Rights Movement and other social justice movements of that decade, the ’60s neither destroyed existing oppressive institutions nor allowed for progress to be sustained when they weren’t. As a result of that failure to achieve transformational change, many of the people who had sought it turned inwards. If they couldn’t change society at large, they thought, maybe they could change themselves. That society, reeling from widespread change and the loss of faith in institutions previously thought infallible which accompanied Vietnam and Watergate, was primed for such a movement too. The emphasis on individual expression during and after the ’60s — necessary to counter the conformity of an oppressive post-war culture — blended toxically with the loss of faith in collective action and institutions alike to produce a deeply fractured, selfish generation.
The philosophy which sprang from the social movements of the ’60s, the changes in American life that decade wrought, and the reaction against them came of age in the ’80s. As did the generation who subscribed to it. The ideological emphasis on the individual and the economic and political turmoil of the intervening years made the conservative revival in that decade — Ronald Reagan, Thatcher, and co. — an inevitability. The loss of collective consciousness made the damage done as a result much harder to either resist or repair, and we’re still living with the consequences today.
This is why we see an entire generation convinced that their only responsibility is to themselves. It’s why my father has repeatedly expressed the conviction that his only duty when it comes to taxation is to pay as little as possible. It’s why people of his generation vote time and again for leaders who promise they won’t have to take care of anyone other than their immediate family. It’s why they won’t take steps to solve climate change and why they don’t recognise people not exactly like them as worthy of the same freedoms or quality of life they enjoy. It’s the reason their politicians have no shame. They lost any real sense of collective duty, loyalty, and love for their fellow human beings long ago. The worst part is, they’ve been taught that’s a good thing.
Our generation can try to help them back to a fuller understanding of the world, and maybe we can even succeed. It is, however, going to be very, very hard. Because they were right about one thing: that kind of transformation has to come from within. They have to want to change; and right now, they don’t. Their selfishness is too ingrained and they’ve amassed too much money and power to see the writing on the wall. Their blindness may yet doom us all.
But to try and effect the large-scale change required to fix the problems the generation currently in power created by encouraging them to remember their duty to others is to repeat their mistake. We can’t rely on our parents’ peers to suddenly figure out that greed isn’t good when they’ve been told it is their entire adult lives. And we certainly can’t rely on whatever realisations they do eventually end up having to change the world. We need to step up, and the good news is: we are.
How Millennials Found Duty Again, and How Love Can Save Us All
This year has been a watershed moment for the Millennial generation in America and around the world. Though some of us (about 20% or so) still cling to cruel, selfish ideologies and ancient hatreds, the rest of us are in the process of leaving them behind. The studied cynicism and apathy engendered by over a decade of watching the future we were promised ripped from us is now passing. We have been forced into the streets, the polling booths, and even onto the ballot by necessity and daily, terrifying reminders that politics doesn’t run on autopilot. Pain is at least an effective tutor.
Thanks to the internet we can see far more easily than any generation before that people are people, worthy of love and deserving of devotion wherever and however they live. When they suffer we feel it more keenly than those who came before, because we ourselves have suffered — we can relate and imagine, even if their pain is orders of magnitude beyond anything we’ve experienced. When we see the world we’re about to inherit destroyed around us, we protest because we understand our place in it better than those who chose to stay home.
Here and across the Atlantic, the vast majority of us lean towards collective solutions to common problems. We tend to vote for parties, politicians, and practical policies which reflect that reality. After more than a year of constant horror, attacks on our freedoms and the people we love, and being robbed blind by old men without conscience or decency, we are now showing up and fighting back in our millions. And we’re starting to win. The victories may seem small now — a couple of seats here, an unjust law blocked there — but snowflakes make avalanches.
Conservative politicians and oligarchs across the industrialised world have been counting on us imbibing the same toxic ideology they did. They want us as atomised and unconcerned with the world outside our immediate surroundings as they are, denuded of love for and denying our duty to each other while they strip-mine our future. Thing is, thanks to the clear effects of that ideology on the world around us and our own lives, we came to the opposite conclusion. While a minority of us have turned inwards, lashing out at others and seeking refuge in some truly dark places, the rest have taken a different course entirely. To one degree or another we have been reminded of what our parents forgot: we are a part of this world and deeply connected to everyone in it; and if we don’t act together to build the future we want, those who don’t see that truth will create one in which we cannot survive.
We have learned to love one another again, and the duty to act that entails, because we’ve been given no other choice.
Millennials are often derided as selfish and entitled by older generations, dismissed as unrealistic in our goals. Nothing could be further from the truth. We simply believe more in our ability to improve the world and our duty to do so than our parents did in theirs. That was their mistake; it will not be ours. Our survival as a species depends on our working together, and most of us know that. It depends on the love we’ve found for each other and our planet, on the duty we feel to fashion a society with and in which we can live. Call that entitled if you want.
I’ll leave you with the words of Viktor Frankl, who survived the worst cruelty humanity has to offer as a prisoner in Auschwitz, and said it better than I ever could:
“A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart:
The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
- Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
