Generational Amnesia

 

Criticizing different generations is a normal human behavior. This behavior can be traced back to the writing of the Ancient Greeks. Since at least 624 BC, people have complained about the decline of the present generation of youth. According to one psychologist, such complaints about ‘kids these days’ across millennia suggests that these criticisms are not accurate. One reason, the researchers say, is that people tend to forget that they have changed over time and assume that the maturity, attitudes, and behaviors of the young are also fixed.

However, that's not the only kind of forgetfulness that happens as the generations pass. There's another less obvious type, "generational amnesia", where every generation is handed a world that their predecessors have shaped – and then seemingly forgets that fact.

One example of "generational amnesia" concerns technology. The current generation's idea of technology means smartphones, cryptocurrencies, or the internet, but it wasn't always so: technology was once centered on steam rather than silicon. Some inventions are so common that people have forgotten that they are even technologies, such as chairs; we just think of them as chairs not as technology. But there was a time when it was needed to work out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often 'crash' when one tried to use them.

New generations also have a habit of collectively forgetting how positive social change comes about through the persistent activism of minorities, such as the campaign for women's right to vote. It wasn't always the case that it was seen as a right, yet this fact is rarely remembered.

But if the most recent generation is forgetful about the positive steps and changes handed to them by their elders, then so too can they fail to notice how those predecessors have damaged the world as well. One of the first times this type of generational amnesia was observed was in the 1990s – to describe an effect afflicting researchers who studied fish. Despite an objectively recorded long-term decline in certain fish populations, each generation of scientists seemed to be accepting the lower abundance and diversity they studied as their "baseline". They did this despite stories that prior generations had experienced and observed ocean life quite differently. Their grandfathers observed that in the 1920s, Bluefin tuna would regularly get tangled in nets in the North Sea. In this region, the species is now largely absent. What this blindspot meant, , was that the scientists were failing to account fully for the slow creep of disappearing species, and each generation accepted the reduced ocean biodiversity they inherited as normal. This is called the effect "shifting baseline syndrome".

A few years later, the psychologist Peter Kahn of the University of Washington described a similar effect in a completely different context: the black communities of Houston, Texas. he found that they could easily describe what air pollution was, for instance, as well as highlighting other cities that were polluted – but simultaneously, they failed to show much awareness that Houston had become one of the US's most air polluted cities. They just accepted it as the way things were, they thought it was a normal environment.

We all experience this environmental form of generational amnesia. It is not so much that individuals fail to recall the past they themselves have lived, it's more that humanity collectively "forgets" the natural world as it once was, as the generations pass. Even the most familiar examples of nature, close to home, can be forgotten. Younger people were less able to describe the true long-term ecological change that had happened among British bird populations. Starlings were once a common sight in the UK but their numbers in England alone declined by 87% between 1967 and 2015. Another example might be the "windscreen phenomenon", which describes the observation by all but the youngest generations that fewer insects are splattered on their cars nowadays.

Is there any way to avoid such environmental generational amnesia? It might seem that it's simply a matter of educating each new generation. Older generations should foster what they call "interaction patterns", a more experiential approach where children and young people are encouraged to meet nature wherever they can find it, walking along the edge of a body of water, identifying berries on a summer's day, or even simply lying on the grass or earth.