The lost generation’s private chivalry was a morality without objective basis

Evidence

Lawrence experimented fearlessly upon himself, and then came back and believed that he belonged to the “lost generation.” He thought this was because “the old men came out again and took from us our victory” in order to “re-make [the world] in the likeness of the former world they knew.” Actually the old men were quite inefficient even in this, and handed their victory, together with their power, down to other men of the same “lost generation,” who were neither older nor so dissimilar to Lawrence. The only difference was that Lawrence still clung fast to a morality which, however, had already lost all objective bases and consisted only of a kind of private and necessarily quixotic attitude of chivalry. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 562

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt here defines ‘lost generation’ not demographically but morally: a generation whose inherited morality has lost objective grounding, leaving only private quixotic attitudes.