Should we blame the Babyboomers for the ills of modernity?

PJ O’Rourke’s latest book, The Baby Boom, slams his generational cohort of spoilt narcissists. Tim Willis, launch editor of Babyboomer website High50.com, begs to differ.

If you’re a Westerner aged between 50 and 68 – and so born between 1946 and 1964, which are the official parameters of the Baby Boom – then according to PJ O’Rourke, 67, you have a lot to answer for.  

To the future generations, whose planet you have raped; to the eco-system for your greed and lack of foresight; and above all, to yourselves for your narcissism and excuses and Peter Pan syndrome.

That’s the gist of his latest book, The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way…And It Wasn't My Fault…And I'll Never Do It Again. And it’s not a very original line for someone who used to have such a distinctive voice. 

Nor is his other theme: that the pre-Boomer era, when society seemed more cohesive, was somehow morally superior. The Cold War and McCarthyism, signs proclaiming ‘no blacks or Irish’, oppression and repression – what a gas it must’ve been to grow up then. (But hey, it was better than the Depression and two World Wars…)

PJ’s book is mainly composed of sweeping statements, muddled thinking and the occasional good joke, but if he has any thesis, it’s that – in adapting to and altering their environment – Boomers made some bad, even catastrophic choices, for which they equally bear some responsibility. 

But name one adult, anywhere, any time in history, of whom this isn’t true.  And failing that, maybe read a corrective like Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist, which demonstrates that the availability of almost everything a person could want or need has been going erratically upwards for 10,000 years – from calories and vitamins to clean water and technology – and continues to do so. 

True, Matt’s stats are disputed (and he was chairman of Northern Rock…). But that’s all part of the warp and weft of life, which is vast and complex, and in a constant state of re-stitching. 

For the purposes of this book, PJ must ignore these big truths. His conceit is that the Boomer generation has made an indelible stain on life’s tapestry, which will ruin the rest of the work. But in this, he predicts a future based on the past and his prejudices. When you actually look around at individual Boomers, they don’t fit into PJ’s little boxes.

I have spent the last three years immersed in Boomers’ lives, in a little business called High50. And far from meeting the future’s challenges and opportunities with a shrug, I found this generation to be brimming with new ideas, taking action for themselves and others, engaged in life as it is lived now.

These weren’t people sitting back and waiting for their pensions and more golf-time. Nor were they on the scrap-heap, or dreading working into their eighties, while watching their kids being swallowed by debt. 

They were getting on with things, adjusting to new social, economic, medical and technical realities. Their mindsets may have been young, but that didn’t mean they were infantilised.

Take just one area: business. It’s a little-known fact that not only are Boomers the biggest age-group to start up companies on their own – that is, to innovate – but they have the highest success rates. 

Why? Because of the experience they’ve acquired since achieving adulthood in the late Sixties and early Eighties. Add a young mindset to a wise head and anything’s possible. That’s why they also surprise in another area of employment: chucking it.

While I was at High50, I came across fashion stylists who’d become novelists, an NHS honcho who started an educational trust, a corporate suit who’d turned into a vintner, a newsreader re-training as a PTSD counsellor. The world was changing – and they were both changing it and changing with it.

For myself, I’ve often had the kind of irresponsible, self-centred, pleasure-seeking life that PJ excoriates (while ‘fessing up himself). But that’s not the whole story. Every day’s also an adventure, and I hope I’ll be learning and growing until I die.

Self-employed again at 56, I take heart from new Boomer heroine Jill Abramson, 60, last week ousted from her editorship of the New York Times. Addressing a graduation ceremony, she told the leavers:

‘What’s next for me? I don’t know…I’m in exactly the same boat as many of you. And like you. I’m a little scared but also a little excited.’

You see, PJ, life doesn’t split into neat little generations on whom one can load generalisations. It doesn’t begin, or end, at 50, or 68, or 101. It just goes on. 

The beat goes on.

[O'Rourke is speaking at the How To Academy on 27 May 14; click here for more]

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