The eternal minority: January, Gen Z, and the myth of generations

When I finished reading the essays gathered in Al Manassa’s special series, “Gen Z & the Revolution| Speak, and be seen” I found myself asking: whom, exactly, had I seen? And what had I seen? I was, in other words, attempting to sketch in my mind the contours of a collective portrait—a provisional profile of this new generation of writers—in order to better understand the social and intellectual ground from which their reflections on the January Revolution, and on its generation—my generation—emerge.

Piecing together the scattered clues embedded in their essays—references to the neighborhoods in which they were raised, their early educational and professional trajectories, the families that shaped them and the affiliations of their parents—I arrived at what can only be described as a highly preliminary sketch.

We are dealing, it seems, with individuals drawn from what is conventionally grouped under the rubric of the “middle class,” particularly its urban segments and its upper or comfortably situated strata. All are university educated, some already embarked on postgraduate study. Most appear to be graduates of public schools or modest private institutions, with occasional mention of international schooling. Those who have entered professional life are employed in the private sector, or at least I encountered no indication to the contrary.

All of them share an evident concern with public affairs—by which I mean an interest in the nature of the relationship between the organs of the state and the mass of those governed—in both its material and cultural dimensions. They possess the intellectual and stylistic tools that enable them to formulate normative visions of this relationship, and even to reflect on its reverberations within the most intimate recesses of their personal lives.

Yet despite this attentiveness, none of the writers declares a clear partisan or ideological affiliation. What dominates the essays instead is a profound sense of estrangement from all existing structures purported to organize what is assumed to be the sovereignty of the national community over its own affairs. There is a palpable feeling that these structures—indeed, the totality of prevailing social relations—do not arise organically from within the self, but rather stand as obstacles to its realization.

It is equally easy to discern among them a belief in the necessity of regulating the relationship between state and citizen according to the familiar minimum standards of representative liberal democracy—under the canopy of the rule of law—as a means of overcoming this estrangement, and of transforming society into a “homeland” in which the self might finally actualize its possibilities. 

Notes on a national intellectual in exile

But pause for a moment. Of which generation are we speaking? To what age cohort do these writers belong? For as I read, I was struck by the disconcerting sensation that I was revisiting blog posts or online forums on the eve of the revolution, rather than encountering texts produced in our present moment. The “preliminary profile” I had assembled bore an uncanny resemblance to the features of my own generation—its writers, its emblematic figures, its “influencers.” Or rather, it resembled the image that was manufactured and disseminated about us: the millennials.

We too were drawn from a middle class that was more than merely secure. We received higher education, largely in public institutions. We were absorbed in public affairs without identifying fully with any of the prevailing ideologies. We were united by a deep sense of alienation and a thirst for belonging to a “homeland.” We imagined democracy as the means by which the rift between ourselves and that imagined homeland might be repaired. In our expression, we blended the intimate with the rational, the personal with the political. Are we truly so different from the writers of Gen Z, when what binds us appears to outweigh the chronological boundary said to divide us?

This peculiar parallel gave rise to three interrelated reflections that occurred during the reading and persisted thereafter.

Children of blatant contradictions

The general image that came to define our generation—disseminated across media platforms and social networks alike—was less that of a distinct age cohort than of a cross-class, cross-generational social formation. It was, quite simply, the image of the alienated, democratic national intellectual.

This formation is as old as Egyptian modernity itself. It developed its own intricate particularities, which consigned a segment of the highly educated to live within a stark contradiction. The national creed they had absorbed—of society as the sole arena of self-realization, of the nation as a distinctive entity whose authentic voice they believed themselves to articulate and whose heritage they were entrusted to safeguard—sat uneasily with their persistent marginalization from the political structures and dominant ideologies ostensibly tasked with representing that nation’s unity and sovereignty.

For most among the educated, this contradiction led in divergent directions: toward accommodation with the status quo, or toward total rebellion against it—in the name of various supra-national or sub-national radical imaginaries. Yet a minority remained, bound to the contradiction itself. Unable, for various reasons, either to adapt fully or to revolt without remainder, they transmuted their predicament into an intellectual or literary endeavor: an attempt to restore the homeland—the nation—to what they imagined as its rightful course. In truth, both we and the writers in this series belong less to our respective age cohorts than to this transgenerational minority.

The rebellion of this formation is typically met with swift repression, with incorporation, or with a combination of the two, depending on the circumstances. What facilitates either outcome—or their fusion—is precisely the ideological neutrality, the abstract character, and the idealism of its vision. Repression is easily observed. Incorporation is subtler. It often begins with paternalistic celebration in the media, proceeds to the construction of a romanticized and caricatured image of the group, and culminates in the re-exporting of this image back to it—where it is frequently internalized and becomes the horizon within which it thinks and acts. The result is the confinement of its energies to a posture of moral protest that does not extend much further.

I had once imagined that the January Revolution would represent this formation’s final appearance upon the stage of Egyptian politics, particularly in light of the state’s retreat from education and its various ideological functions, and given the radical transformations in media, expression, and narrative forms. Yet what I encountered in this series suggests otherwise.

We appear to be on the cusp of a renewed—and imminent—reemergence of this formation within the ideological sphere. And the inclination to incorporate it—by celebrating it, spotlighting it, and then embalming its expressions within the category of beautiful but impossible romantic visions—remains intact. It is nourished in circular fashion by the protest movements that have raised the banner of “Gen Z” in various parts of the world and the region.

It is equally apparent that contemplating the January Revolution through the familiar lens offered to us—as the thwarted rebellion of a betrayed, dreaming generation—reproduces inherited modes of narration and expression. The language of Gen Z writers thus begins to echo the rhetorical patterns of our own generation of dreamers: the millennials.

Retreat into the margin 

Our estranged formation—with its characteristic visions and narrative modes, whether millennial or Gen Z—constitutes a marginal minority within society at large and within its political and ideological fields. It is marginal even within its own generation, within its own age cohort. One need not excavate statistical data at length to arrive at this conclusion in a country such as Egypt. The experience of the revolution itself delivered this lesson to our millennial cohort with unmistakable harshness.

Each turbulent turn following Mubarak’s departure in February 2011 exposed more starkly the breadth and depth of the gulf separating our formation from the majority of its own generation and its concerns. The alignment of most of that generation between a passive “Couch Party” and various strands of political Islam was only the beginning. The subsequent politicization of the “couch party” itself—first on the basis of hostility to Islamists, then hostility to the revolution in its entirety—deepened the divide.

Today, many of those who underwent that politicization reappear as ministers, holders of executive office within the state apparatus, or overseers of the regime’s various media arms. Some have even emerged as prominent figures in the world of private business, without advancing managerial or social responsibility models that even faintly approximate the slogans of January.

On the other side, prisons and exiles are filled with Islamists from our generation—and with ISIS militants (yes, millennials as well)—who share with us scarcely any value or principle. Beyond them stand millions more, crushed in silence by the economic conditions that followed 2013. These, in fact, are the destinies of the overwhelming majority of the millennial generation, far removed from the narrow and marginal circle of national democratic intellectuals. Some emerged victorious; others were defeated. But neither victor nor vanquished shares our preoccupations—ours and those of Gen Z writers—nor our modes of expression and narration.

Lost imperatives

Finally, our formation’s insistence on defining itself generationally—and its surrender to the paternal mechanism of incorporation that elevated it as representative of an entire generation in which it in fact constituted only a marginal minority—and its subsequent treatment of a vast and complex event such as the Egyptian revolution as the exclusive property of that minority, were partially responsible for much confusion and many misguided approaches. These misjudgments, in turn, brought upon this formation personal tragedies that defy description, not to mention the collapse of its own national-democratic slogans.

A revolution—any revolution—is a compound process. It entails the breakdown of the authority of a ruling social coalition that loses its capacity to take and enforce decisions necessary for the reproduction of social relations within its sphere of power. It also unleashes a broad struggle to establish a new coalition, a struggle that unfolds outside the formal frameworks shaped and imposed by the collapsing order. A revolution, therefore, is an objective phenomenon that exceeds the will of its participants. Its direction cannot be controlled without conscious planning and organization, including the mobilization of resources and people. To presume that such an event possesses an intrinsic liberal, national, Islamist—or any other—orientation, determined by the identity of those who called for it or championed it, is an idealist assumption unsupported by historical evidence.

In truth, our national democratic formation was ill-prepared for such a challenge, not least because of its historical marginalization from political organization prior to the revolution. Yet it also failed to exert the collective effort necessary to overcome that marginalization and to engage effectively in the struggle once structural obstacles were temporarily lifted after Mubarak’s departure. Its self-image—as the representative of a singular generation and the disinterested spokesperson of a popular revolution—proved too seductive, too flattering, to be sullied by the mud of revolutionary social conflict. After all, it rested upon modest securities: a private life to which one might retreat, a professional future to which one could quickly withdraw when matters grew serious.

From the outset, there was a palpable aversion to partisan political practice, dismissed as opportunistic. Political organizations were regarded with condescension, as relics unsuited to the movement of new generations. It is, of course, legitimate—even healthy—to think creatively about new forms of organization and mobilization. But such thinking carries its own obligations, and these obligations were not met by our formation.

The justifications for evading these imperatives were numerous. The most frivolous, in my view, was the call for political consensus among contending forces—a consensus whose preconditions the national democratic formation understood, better than most, to be absent. Trade union work, particularly among workers, was hardly attractive; it was early on derided under the caricature of “sectoralism.”

As for civil society activism, especially in its corporate-style organizational forms, it did absorb some of the formation’s energies. Yet it did not present a convincing alternative to what had prevailed before the revolution. And the minority within the minority that belatedly recognized the importance of oppositional party politics did not develop a model substantively different from that of opposition parties under Mubarak—whatever their good intentions.

The need for radical questions

The bitter truth, then, is that our formation—by virtue of its structural characteristics and its inflated conception of its own size and role—did not possess the imagination or the tools required for effective engagement in the political struggle that accompanies any revolution, let alone for leading a project aimed at competing for power.

This is a structural incapacity. It is one that the heirs of this formation within Gen Z will not be able to overcome unless they first break with themselves—unless they open themselves to the complexity of reality in order to grasp the truth of their position and its limits. Indeed, why not go further and interrogate the national-democratic slogans themselves: Are they still viable? Under what conditions might they be realized? And do they, in fact, represent a path beyond the alienation that envelops the lives of our new intellectuals?

Such questioning will not be possible so long as they cling to the illusion of a unified generational identity—let alone to the fantasy of representing an entire generation, with all the conceptual habits and expressive modes that such a fantasy engenders.

In short, what nationally minded, democratically inclined, publicly engaged members of Gen Z require today is a deeper openness to their own generation—an effort to understand its diversity and the social and cultural contradictions that shape it, given the profound disparities in education and lived experience. Egypt is no longer a relatively homogeneous society in which the majority lives according to a common pattern. It is a country far more complex than the one whose regime we rose against fifteen years ago. If our failure to grasp this reality brought upon us multiple personal and collective tragedies, a similar failure on the part of Gen Z intellectuals may yield consequences still more severe.

Today, the image of Gen Z is being reproduced as a potential protest formation, associated above all with the expansion of digital technologies and social media. We may say that identification with this image—just as identification with our own romantic protest image once was—will lead only to incorporation into the machinery of power, or to a nihilistic rebellion sustained by fleeting moments of exhilaration followed by years of frustration.

What is required now is sustained doubt toward the image of the self, and a patient search beyond it—without illusions and without preconceptions.