In defence of hipsters

Yesterday, Christy Wampole wrote a piece in the New York Times titled How to Live Without Irony. In a long piece, Wampole takes a look at the tale of the hipster, providing a cultural critique of our new cultural phenomenon.

Wampole’s argument is hard to describe in one go, but here goes. Her argument is that the cultural phenomenon of hipsterism is based around irony, or living an ironic life. In doing so hipsterism represents a cultural void in Generation X – an attempt to relive the success of the baby boomers in order to fix the cultural weakness of the current generation. Furthermore, Wampole argues that hipsterism also represents an emptyness in young generations, a cultural phenomenon that represents our lack of passion for the real things in life and our need to replace this passion with irony about everything that we surround ourselves with. This leads to a disengagement within young people – a disengagement with the good things in life, and a disengagement with the political processes in life.

Let me start by saying that I don’t identify myself as a hipster. With that in mind, I think Wampole has some really interesting points about the cultural realities of today and the potential long-term impacts they will have on our society. However, I get tired every time I read articles about my ‘youth’ and more importantly, criticising our complete ‘lack of culture’. Even more annoyingly, I get constantly frustrated with those who are ready to criticise youth culture without taking a proper look at the reasons behind the growth of these cultural phenomena.

Let’s have a look at each issue one-by-one. First, Wampole seems to take the position that hipsterism represents something of an attempt to fill a cultural void that exists within young people. As she says:

How did this happen? It stems in part from the belief that this generation has little to offer in terms of culture, that everything has already been done, or that serious commitment to any belief will eventually be subsumed by an opposing belief, rendering the first laughable at best and contemptible at worst.

In other words, hipsterism is just a response to the lack of culture that exists in the modern day. She expands on this in the way she describes hipster culture:

Manifesting a nostalgia for times he never lived himself, this contemporary urban harlequin appropriates outmoded fashions (the mustache, the tiny shorts), mechanisms (fixed-gear bicycles, portable record players) and hobbies (home brewing, playing trombone). He harvests awkwardness and self-consciousness. Before he makes any choice, he has proceeded through several stages of self-scrutiny.

Irony is the most self-defensive mode, as it allows a person to dodge responsibility for his or her choices, aesthetic and otherwise. To live ironically is to hide in public. It is flagrantly indirect, a form of subterfuge, which means etymologically to “secretly flee” (subter + fuge). Somehow, directness has become unbearable to us.

Whilst I think there is some value to Wampole’s arguments about hipster culture, I think to deny that it has any value at all is nonsense. The reality is that whilst hipsterism may have been born from an idea of irony, it has expanded well beyond that in the modern age. Hipsters have created their own cultural form; one that mixes values of the old world and new world. This cultural form is a reaction to the world we have grown up in; one in which many have seen a selfish form of passion (often focused around individual gain) in many of the older generations – the sort of passion that Wampole so reveres. And whether you like hipsterism or not, it is undeniable that it has it’s own cultural value, one that tries to bring in what many consider to be the good parts of previous generations into a new world order.

And it is ironic (funnily enough) that Wampole wants to use this mixture of old and new to criticise hipster lifestyles. As someone who is so keen to return to the non-ironic values of the past, she is stuck in a past where hipsters lived solely on irony and refusing to see the value the culture provides today – one that has gone well beyond irony. She wants to revere in the past, but then criticise the way this culture builds into the past at the same time.

But let’s build on Wampole’s argument and look at some of the criticisms she has of hipsterism. Wampole’s largest argument against the ironic lifestyle is that it is a lifestyle that lacks meaning, one in which we have disconnected ourselves from reality and importantly from community. As she states:

While we have gained some skill sets (multitasking, technological savvy), other skills have suffered: the art of conversation, the art of looking at people, the art of being seen, the art of being present. Our conduct is no longer governed by subtlety, finesse, grace and attention, all qualities more esteemed in earlier decades. Inwardness and narcissism now hold sway.

In other words, the hipster can frivolously invest in sham social capital without ever paying back one sincere dime. He doesn’t own anything he possesses.

In many ways I have to say I agree with Wampole in her criticism. There is, in many ways, a lack of meaning, and importantly a lack of community than runs through much of our modern culture. But where Wampole falls down is finding reasons behind this malaise. Reading this in the context of so many other articles on youth culture you can easily read into it a sense than young people are simply just lacking culture, they don’t have the same temperament that the baby boomers in particular (noting that Wampole isn’t a baby boomer) had to develop their fine culture and political engagement.

Yet what this refuses to realise is that this is the very culture that the older generations created that lead to the world in which we live, and the cultures in which young people pursue. In particular, it was the older generations who developed the individualistic society focused largely on consumerism that lead to the development of the ironic society that Wampole so chastises. It is the older generations who took away meaning from our society and replaced it with consumerable goods and then expected younger people to find passion and excitement within it. When you look at it this way, you cannot help but think of course people may become disconnected.

And that is where arguments like Wampole’s become so potentially dangerous. As part of her piece, and as an extension on the argument, Wampole also stated that young people have become completely disengaged with the world – a passionless group who can only live an ironic life. Whilst she didn’t specifically target political engagement, the subtext there was clear – we have created a generation of people who just don’t care about the future of our world.

Of course, as an initial reaction these sorts of sentiments are an insult to every young person who is engaged politically and otherwise within our society. But at a higher level, it completely ignores the role that older generations have played in disengaging younger generations. It’s not just about the systematic talking down to young people, pushing young people aside or creating structures that make political engagement difficult. It’s much more than that. The last decades have seen generations create such an individualist world that it actively and systematically pushes many people out of the political process. A world which focuses so heavily on the individual that civic and community engagement is seen as secondary.

The result of this is that yes, many young people are disengaged. But that has nothing to do with an inherent nature of our age – it is all to do with being brought up in a society in which individual consumerism is rated more highly than our communities – the very society that baby boomers developed.

It may be nice and easy to blame young people for all our ills and complain about their lack of engagement. But to systematically ignore the role that older generations have had in creating such a malaise is not only lazy, but it completely lacks any analysis on how we can make the world a better place.