Nostalgic millennials need to demand a restriction free future

The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard’s walks around his native Copenhagen were legendary, notably for the rather unnerving atmosphere he generated wherever he went. A contemporary remarked: “One was always being pushed, by turns, either in towards the houses and the cellar stairwells, or out towards the gutters.” He called his excursions “people baths” – first the plunge, the slow immersion of the body, then the long soak. A tempting metaphor for our post-lockdown re-socialisation, perhaps. For the hot splashing of water, read friends re-united, and colleagues too; new faces, and then the steady background thrum of life, encounters at coffee shops, bookshops, restaurants.

Stage two of the lockdown roadmap feels less conditional than the first – only being able to meet in parks left me with the faint notion that contact with others was still very much “at Her Majesty’s pleasure”. If “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”, as Kierkegaard once wrote, then the state is subjecting us mostly to anxiety, with dizziness and freedom as mere afterthoughts. The state has given us a roadmap, and its course may be diverted or even reversed at any time. If not now, then. If not then, then at some point.

“Enjoy summer safely” is the government’s mission statement – not so much an advertisement for Merrie England as for Boris’s toytown society, life at Boris’s Pleasure. Gone is the youthful libertarian columnist of the mid-2000s who promised, if asked to produce an identity card, to “masticate [it]… to the point of illegibility”.

In the first phase of the crisis, many members of Britain’s older generations ended up benefiting, in personal terms, from restrictions on their own freedoms. Although the risk of death or serious after-effects from the disease were many times higher for older people, the unexpected social and economic “wins” of Covid-19 have overwhelmingly accrued to the affluent elderly: the WFH economy works well for those with nice homes and leafy gardens.

Young people have been acquiescent in this process, partly because they feel an obligation to their elders, partly because they have been the generation to benefit most concretely from the furlough scheme.

But they expected that, once the vulnerable had been protected, a full resumption of normality would follow. And yet, in Boris’s toytown – in which society is remodelled on bio-secure terms – younger people will continue to feel that their lives are fundamentally constricted. The vaccinated over-50s will be insulated from the rougher edges of the checkpoint society – constant testing and travel effectively banned.

The more intelligent advocates for this nascent techno-authoritarianism appeal to the examples of Singapore or South Korea. If they can make it work, why not us? But this is a naïve view. Our fundamental attributes are not those of the thrusting new Asian democracies; Britain is instead far more comparable to a country like Japan. We are blessed with the twin attributes of an ageing society and a younger generation embracing a culture of withdrawal. The characteristics of the Japanese hikikomori generation (literally “pulling inward”) are replicated here – fewer young people have sex and more and more live with their parents.

It is not surprising that British Millennials are the most nostalgic generation – strange as it might seem, but young people are still marooned in the “Landfill indie” era of the mid-2000s. The most successful cultural product of Millennial culture is Sally Rooney’s Normal People, a paean to teenage angst, the world of the school disco and the school playing field, the university library and university parties. The future doesn’t look much better – if the Atom Bomb represented a potent source of anxiety for the post-war generation, it was a drama played out alongside multiplying socio-economic opportunities. It was also felt that its outcome was in the gift of our leaders. Now, to many, the climate crisis appears to be an emergency without realistic endpoint or political remedy.

We need a fundamental re-statement of what it means to live in a free society. At present, neither Millennials nor Boomers are willing to make that argument. The free society is not implied by the absence of constraint, any more than secular beliefs depend on the bald statement of the absence of God. It is constructed by people who, for a variety of reasons, maintain a shared interest in the state of being free.

In this country, the post-war period of rationing and control only eventually gave way because people demanded its conclusion – through legal challenge, democratic agitation, and an optimistic outlook. West Germany’s economic success story followed the quick relaxation of price controls and wartime measures. The terrible experience of the Occupation in France was followed by an awesome flowering of culture, new fashions, cinema, and philosophy. A newly confident working class in the UK produced not only Look Back in Anger and The Beatles, but Prime Ministers for the next few decades.

We need to remind ourselves that no roadmap can determine the terms on which we build the future. At present, it feels like stagnation is winning the day. Both young and old cannot allow that to continue.