Is my generation stupid?

I fear we cannot avoid our own Cursed Days

A significant and growing percentage of young people in America are becoming unpardonably stupid about Marxism.

One recent survey found that “28% of Generation Z have a favorable view of communism, and 30% view Marxism in the same manner.”

100 years and 100 million murders later, one wonders what the victims of communism would make of such generational ignorance.

At least one such victim seems to speak directly to our dilemma. In his classic Cursed Days, the legendary Russian dissident writer Ivan Bunin published a diary of his time in Moscow and Odessa during the height of the Russian revolution. In it, he explicitly blames the stupidity, frivolity, and discontent of a specific generation for the apocalypse that overtook his world.

Every era has its faults. But there are a few periods in world history that seem to stand out as particularly catastrophic, perhaps to the extent where the blame should be placed somewhere. 

Are we in one of those eras? Are our values rotten enough to cause a civilizational collapse? Or is griping about a generation just a kind of old-fogeyism? 

Perhaps looking to the past can tell us how real the danger is.

The aristocrats of the ancien reigme in France, the citizens of Rome in the 5th century, the white Russian emigres of the Paris cafes in the 1920’s - what would they identify as the cause of their demise? That’s where Bunin comes in.

The World Changed Forever (1917)

Bunin’s Cursed Days is a strange, haunting book. It’s raw and visceral, full of hatred and grief, and also love, without which there is no hatred. Day after day, Bunin listens to the rattle of machine guns, sees friends vanish, and yearns for a biblical judgment on the Bolshevik despoilers.

Crucially, he knows who to blame for the apocalypse that has overtaken his world - his own generation. 

The overwhelming emotion in Cursed Days is loss. Bunin grieves for the world he grew up in, both good and bad. The Russia of Pushkin, sleigh bells, champagne, caviar and duels. The Russia of Tolstoy, the black earth and the everlasting Russian peasant, now already being hunted by Lenin’s industrial executioners. The Russia of his own experience, Moscow streets, intellectual discussions freely held, friendships with socialists like Gorky and aristocrats like Gruzinsky.

Bunin expresses all of this loss, pain, and rage in excruciating eloquence:

…by evening I go to bed as if in a drunken stupor, almost completely certain that something will happen during the night. I cross myself firmly and furiously. I pray with such force that my body hurts. It seems that God, or a miracle, or the heavenly powers cannot but help us. I fall asleep, exhausted from the unbelievable fervor with which I have begged for an end to the Bolsheviks. I send my soul over thousands of miles, into the night, the darkness, and the unknown so that I will be with my family and loved ones, and so that I can express my fear for them, my love for them, my agony for them, and my hope that God will save and protect them. Then suddenly in the middle of the night, I jump up with a wildly beating heart; somewhere I hear the rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun. Sometimes it is very close by, like a hail of stones to the roof. Here it is, I think.

In Bunin’s eyes, there is a culprit for all this madness - an entire generation.

Who is to blame? 

Bunin knew who to blame for the revolution and the loss of all he held dear - and it wasn’t just the Bolsheviks. It was an entire generation of Russian intellectuals who were bored and lazy, and willing to project their desire for excitement onto the Russian people. They called themselves the representatives of the people, the workers, the proletariat, the “folk,” but were in reality, nothing more than dilettantes playing with dynamite. (See what I mean about the parallels?)

Bunin noticed this: 

“People were terribly indifferent to the “folk” during the war. They lied like criminals about the folk's patriotic spirit, even when a child could not help seeing that the war repelled them.”

Then, Bunin gets to the heart of the matter: 

“Where did this indifference come from? Why, from our terribly innate carelessness and frivolity, and from the fact that we were unaccustomed and unwilling to be serious when the times called upon us to be so. 

Just think how carelessly, haphazardly, and even gaily all of Russia looked upon the beginning of the Revolution as one of the greatest events in all history, and one of the greatest wars in the world!”

The need and desire for change, excitement and stimulation - a characteristic of a generation raised on too much prosperity. (Bunin, this is too close for comfort!) 

“Yes, before the Revolution we all lived (the peasants included) extremely freely, with rustic carefreeness; we all supposedly lived on a very rich estate, where even someone who was down and out, or who had shoes that were beyond repair, or who lay down after having taken off these shoes, did so in a fully relaxed way, since his needs were so elementary and limited.

We all studied a little somehow and somewhere." Yes, we did only those things that we had to, sometimes with great passion and talent, but for the most part any old way - only Petersburg wanted to do things right.”

Much brilliance, much talent, little dedication - in a world of minuscule attention spans, how much more true of us than Bunin’s generation? 

“We cared little for long daily routines; in truth, we shirked work terribly. And from this, incidentally, came our idealism - in essence, a very gentrylike idealism - our eternal opposition, our criticism of everyone and everything. 

After all, it was much easier to criticize than to set ourselves down to work.” 

One need only to casually browse on Reddit, Twitter or Medium to find the same attitude today - thirty-somethings bemoaning late-stage capitalism on Reddit’s Anti-Work forum spend hundreds of hours racking up thousands of threads, comments, and replies, but consider work past 5 PM as a “human rights violation.” 

What an old Russian disease is all this languishing, this boredom, this babbling - this eternal hope that a frog with a magic ring will come and do it all for us, that we only have to step out onto the porch and throw a ringlet from one hand to another!

All of this is rooted in a type of nervous illness, and not at all in the famous "questions" that supposedly arise from our "depths."

And there it is - the besetting sin of millennials and Gen Z alike - anxiety, nervous illness, the never-ending need for therapy to address ills that were borne by all previous generations with resignation. 

Then Bunin attacks the philosophy at the heart of his generation’s malaise - and it rings true for ours as well. He paraphrases the revolutionary philosopher Alexsandr Herzen: 

"I never did anything because I always wanted to do something special."

This is Herzen's confession.

I recall other remarkable lines of his:

"We are sobering up humanity.... We are its hangover....

We canonized humanity. ... We canonized revolution. ... We are sparing future generations sorrow by our disenchantment, our suffering.

No, we're still a long way from sobering up humanity.

Maybe we’ll get lucky 

We’re still a long way from sobering up.

It’s hard to read Cursed Days without thinking of the Gen Z obsession with “democratic socialism” and even communism. You have to be either very disconnected or very unobservant not to notice the rising tide of Marxist theory among the Tik-Tok generation; anti-work, anti-rent, critical race theory, calls for the abolition of property, and attacks on religion and custom are coming to compete for, if not dominate, the minds of a generation. The fact that all of these theories have been tried and failed in bloody fashion doesn’t seem to deter the young from pushing for “change.”

If anything, we seem to grow more frivolous, discontented, neurotic and lazy than ever. Perhaps worst of all, we are endlessly self-pitying.

Pundits whine that we’re the “unluckiest generation in history.” Somehow, I think Bunin’s generation would beg to differ, at least those of his generation that weren’t shot or starved in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

John Della Volpe, the author of “Fight: How Gen Z Is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America” notes that when Zoomers are asked to describe America they use terms like “dystopic,” “broken” and “a bloody mess.” When asked about the moments that made them proud to be American, they have little to say. Dalla Volpe takes them at face value. But all I see is Bunin’s “nervous illness” and “shirking.” I see us “living carelessly” on a “very rich estate,” criticizing instead of working.

Implicit in our generation’s dalliance with Marxism is a malicious disregard for the real human suffering caused by that evil philosophy. Reading Bunin, you stare that suffering in the face. The bodies pile up. The outrages are personal.

But recent polling shows that we have forgotten. In one example, “Nearly two-thirds (64%) of Americans say they are unaware that the Chinese Communist Party is responsible for more deaths than Nazi Germany.” To our ignorant generation, millions of victims may as well have never lived.

Hope against hope

Is there any hope for us? Perhaps. It’s easy to fear for our future, to find the sins of previous generations in our own.

Still, history is not mechanistic, and perhaps we can hope that our generation’s dabbling with Pandora’s Box will not lead to a whirlwind of consequences.

Maybe.

I remain convinced that my generation is stupid, and stupidity has consequences.

In Cursed Days Bunin comments:

“To tell the truth, many things arise from stupidity. Tolstoy used to say that nine-tenths of human folly can be explained exclusively by stupidity. ‘When I was young,’ he would say, we had a friend, a poor fellow, who once, with his last pennies, suddenly bought a windup metal canary. We cracked our heads trying to explain this stupid act, until we recalled that our friend was simply very stupid.”