Jeremy L. Berg

 

 

I found this post at Jesus Creed — originally from Umair Haque at Harvard Business Publishing.  No parent likes it when their idealistic college-aged kid comes home for Christmas and begins criticizing the ways of the older generation.  This post sounds like just such a rant. Some strong points made here, and one hopes a person can get past the snarky rhetoric to hear the actual points.  However, let’s be fair to the Boomers and admit that it is always easier critiquing the past than facing the present and creating the future.  Hindsight is 20/20. 

What do you think of The Generation M Manifesto? 

Dear Old People Who Run the World,

My generation would like to break up with you.
Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences.
You wanted big, fat, lazy “business.” We want small, responsive, micro-scale commerce.
You turned politics into a dirty word. We want authentic, deep democracy — everywhere.
You wanted financial fundamentalism. We want an economics that makes sense for people — not just banks.
You wanted shareholder value — built by tough-guy CEOs. We want real value, built by people with character, dignity, and courage.
You wanted an invisible hand — it became a digital hand. Today’s markets are those where the majority of trades are done literally robotically. We want a visible handshake: to trust and to be trusted.

You wanted growth — faster. We want to slow down — so we can become better.

You didn’t care which communities were capsized, or which lives were sunk. We want a rising tide that lifts all boats.

You wanted to biggie size life: McMansions, Hummers, and McFood. We want to humanize life.

You wanted exurbs, sprawl, and gated anti-communities. We want a society built on authentic community.

You wanted more money, credit and leverage — to consume ravenously. We want to be great at doing stuff thatmatters.

You sacrificed the meaningful for the material: you sold out the very things that made us great for trivial gewgaws, trinkets, and gadgets. We’re not for sale: we’re learning to once again do what is meaningful.

There’s a tectonic shift rocking the social, political, and economic landscape. The last two points above are what express it most concisely. I hate labels, but I’m going to employ a flawed, imperfect one: Generation “M.”

What do the “M”s in Generation M stand for? The first is for a movement. It’s a little bit about age — but mostly about a growing number of people who are acting very differently. They are doing meaningful stuff that matters the most. Those are the second, third, and fourth “M”s.

Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday’s way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government. Who’s Gen M?Obama, kind of. Larry and Sergey. The Threadless, Etsy, and Flickr guys. Ev, Biz and the Twitter crew. Tehran 2.0. The folks at Kiva, Talking Points Memo, and FindtheFarmer. Shigeru Miyamoto, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Yunus, and Jeff Sachs are like the grandpas of Gen M. There are tons where these innovators came from.

Gen M isn’t just kind of awesome — it’s vitally necessary. If you think the “M”s sound idealistic, think again.

The great crisis isn’t going away, changing, or “morphing.” It’s the same old crisis — and it’s growing.

You’ve failed to recognize it for what it really is. It is, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, in our institutions: the rules by which our economy is organized.

But they’re your institutions, not ours. You made them — and they’re broken. Here’s what I mean:

“… For example, the auto industry has cut back production so far that inventories have begun to shrink — even in the face of historically weak demand for motor vehicles. As the economy stabilizes, just slowing the pace of this inventory shrinkage will boost gross domestic product, or GDP, which is the nation’s total output of goods and services.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Clearing the backlog of SUVs built on 30-year-old technology is going to pump up GDP? So what? There couldn’t be a clearer example of why GDP is a totally flawed concept, an obsolete institution. We don’t need more land yachts clogging our roads: we need a 21st Century auto industry.

I was (kind of) kidding about seceding before. Here’s what it looks like to me: every generation has a challenge, and this, I think, is ours: to foot the bill for yesterday’s profligacy — and to create, instead, an authentically, sustainably shared prosperity.

Anyone — young or old — can answer it. Generation M is more about what you do and who you are than when you were born. So the question is this: do you still belong to the 20th century – or the 21st?

Love,

Umair and the Edge Economy Community

 

My comments: The first criticism of such a grandiose manifesto is usually to merely label it hopelessly naive and idealistic. I do not mean to defend the point of view above. I would, however, like to offer the following challenge to the whole notion of “idealism”.

My problem with the older generation simply calling such a manifesto too “idealistic” is that, for the older generation, the opposite of “idealistic” has not typically been “realistic” (as would be expected and welcome), but rather an unfettered, mechanical “pragmatism” that didn’t always count the potential human and environmental cost of their agendas.

To be honest, as a conservative Christian growing up in a very pragmatic midwestern, politically conservative-leaning blue-collar home, I was quite comfortable in my worldview — until I met Jesus, that is.

Studying the teachings of Jesus in college and seminary challenged my pragmatic, politically conservative outlook and pushed me towards what I call “Kingdom idealism”. For nothing he did or taught made much practical sense (as conventional wisdom goes). The last will be first. Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Consider other’s interests above your own. Go the second mile when treated unjustly. Overcoming evil with good (not power?). Cross trumps sword. An executed Galilean toppled Caesar’s empire. Blessed are the poor, meek…

Jesus made me an idealist. Jesus convinced me that the means do not always justify the end, nor that the end can be achieved by human means. The question is not whether we are an IDEALIST or REALIST or PRAGMATIST. The question is: From whose vantage point? Ours or God’s? For “Has not God made foolish (or naive, idealistic?) the wisdom (or realism?) of the world?” (1 Cor 1:20)  What’s better: To be a worldly pragmatist or a “Kingdom idealist”?

Above all, though, let Generation M become characterized by humility as well as all of the characteristics mentioned above and show due gratitude to our elders who have done their best with what they had. We too shall fall short of our ideals when Generation Next writes their complaint in 30 years.

Peace. JB