One of my first reactions to the row about anti-semitism at Oxford University Labour Club was: why are the silly sods paying so much attention to Israel-Palestine given that the issue seems to drive so many people insane? In my time, it was apartheid that bothered us, not Israel.

But then it struck me: to today's students, apartheid is distant history. Nelson Mandela was freed in 1990, seven or eight years before today's first-year undergraduates were born. To today's students, anti-apartheid protests are as far away as the Aldermaston marches or Suez crisis were to my generation.

This is only one way in which there's a generational gulf between today's students and my generation. Douglas Adams proposed the following rules about attitudes to technology:

1.Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

These surely apply. I suspect my generation's default setting is to think of books rather than the internet as the repository of research, and to regard Spotify and Tinder as novelties.

Or take attitudes to football. My generation was brought up to think of Liverpool as the dominant team in England. But they've not won the league since 1990. To today's students, Rush and Dalglish are as temporally distant as Stan Cullis was to us.

Or music. The Spice Girls are as temporally distant to today's students as the Beatles were to us. And "old skool" dance music - the music of the early 90s - is as distant as 1950s rock n roll was to us.

I suspect this is true of political attitudes too. Take four examples:

- My formative years were shaped by overt class struggle: the strikes of the 70s and 80s and Thatcher's attacks on unions. To today's young people, class is less salient - which is, of course, not to say that it's less important.

- In my day, there were fewer graduates and hence less competition for good jobs. Today's students face more of a buyers' market, and so must be more career-oriented whist at university.

- 50- and 60-somethings grew up under the threat (which might have been exaggerated) of the Soviet Union. We had therefore a large and obvious example of the dangers and costs of a lack of political freedom. Today's young people don't have so salient an example, and so might be less aware of the value of free speech and discussion.

- My generation grew up in violent times: today's youngsters didn't so much*. I suspect this might shape attitudes in all sorts of ways, because we are less likely to regard others as threats. But it might help explain campus politics: students worry about "microaggressions" because they don't have bigger aggressions to fret about.

In saying all this, I'm taking a Humean position. There is a big difference between impressions and ideas. Our direct experiences, reports by our friends and TV news stories have a more forceful effect upon our minds than what we read about in books. My knowledge of WWII is of a very different kind to that of my grandparents.

This, I think, is also the presumption of a lot of identity politics: growing up as, say, black or gay or a woman gives us different presumptions and instincts than we'd have if we grew up white, straight or male. But the same, surely, is true for cohorts; growing up in the 1970s gives you different presumptions than growing up in the 00s.

This is not to say that generational cleavages must be massive and confrontational, any more than other identity-based ones must be. Instead, my point is simply that we must be aware of these differences - and we never will be if we don't try.

* Is sexual violence and exception to this?