The Generation Gap-its Causes and Consequences

THE GENERATION GAP-ITS CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES

The most esteemed and well-known living anthropologist in America and perhaps in the world, is Dr. Margaret Mead who since 1926 has been a member of the staff of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and devoted her life to studying primitive tribes in Samoa, New Guinea and Bali. Since the outbreak of World War II, she has attempted to apply her knowledge to modern life in quest of solution to its problems.

Her latest book, Culture and Commitment (Doubleday, New York, 1970) originating from the “Man and Nature” lectures delivered by her at the American Museum of Natural History in March 1969 during its centennial celebration, is a study of one of the most disturbing phenomena of our time-the growing estrangement between the old and younger generations.

The distinctions I am making among three different kinds of culture-postfigurative, in which children learn primarily from their forebearers, cofigurative, in which both children and adults learn from their peers and prefigurative in which adults learn from their children-are a reflection of the period in which we live. Primitive societies and small religious and ideological enclaves are primarily postfigurative, deriving authority from the past. Great civilizations which necessarily have developed techniques for incorporating change, characteristically make use of some form of cofigurative learning from peers, playmates, fellow students and fellow apprentices. We are now entering a period, new in history, in which the young are taking on 118 new authority in their prefigurative apprehension of the still unknown future. (p. 1)

The first chapter discusses the characteristics of what Margaret Mead chooses to label as “postfigurative” cultures in which change is so slow and imperceptible that grandparents holding newborn grandchildren in their arms cannot conceive of any other future for the children other than their own past lives (p. 1). In this category, the anthropologist indiscriminately lumps almost all human cultures known to history until the present, from the headhunters and cannibals of New Guinea to the most highly literate Chinese and Jews. Cofigurative culture is represented only by contemporary society.

Immigration to the United States and to Israel typifies the kind of absorption in which the young are required to behave in ways that are at sharp variance with the cultural behaviour of their forebearers. In Israel, immigrants from Eastern Europe placed the elderly grandparents on the shelf. They treated them with the lessened respect accorded those who no longer have power and with a kind of negligence that emphasizes the fact that the elderly are no longer the custodians of wisdom or models for the behaviour of the young. The grandparents represent a past that has been left behind. (p. 35)

In its simplest form, a cofigurative society is one in which there are no grandparents present. Young adults migrating from one part of a country to another, may leave their parents behind them or they may leave them in the old country when they emigrate to a new one. Grandparents are also likely to be absent in a modern, mobile society like the United States in which both old and young move frequently or industrialized highly urban societies in which the affluent or the very poor segregate the elderly in special homes or areas. (p. 43)

Dr. Margaret Mead insists that the scientific and technological revolution since World War II with the successful splitting of the atom and the invention of fission and fusion bombs, the discovery of the biochemistry of the living cell, the exploration of the planet’s surface, the population explosion and the recognition of the certainty of catastrophe if it continues, the break-down of the organization of cities, the destruction of the natural environment, the linking up of all parts of the world by means of jet flights and television, the building of satellites and the first steps into space, the newly realized possibilities of unlimited energy and synthetic raw materials, and in advanced countries, the transformation of the economy from problems of production into problems of distribution and consumption-all these have brought about a drastic, irreversible division between the generations. Today’s children have grown up in a world their elders never knew.

This break between generations, is wholly new, having never occurred in history before; it is planetary and universal. (pp. 62-64)

In the past there were always some elders who knew more than any children in terms of their experience of having grown up within a cultural system. Today there are none. It is not only that parents are no longer guides but that there are no guides whether one seeks them in one’s own country or abroad.

Today’s elders have to treat their own past as incommunicable and teach their children even in the midst of lamenting that it is so, not to ask questions they can never understand. We have to realize that no other generation will ever experience what we have experienced.

120 “…fleet-footed races like ours have no descendents as our children have no forefathers.” (p. 78)

Dr. Margaret Mead proposes as the remedy for bridging the generation gap is to build a new world-wide prefigurative civilization where the authority and power rests in the hands of the children.

We must teach ourselves how to alter adult behaviour so that we can give up postfigurative upbringing with its tolerated cofigurative components and discover prefigurative ways of teaching and learning that will keep the future open. Postfigurative cultures which focused on the elders—those who had learned the most and were able to do the most with what they had learned, were essentially closed systems that continually duplicated the past. We must now move forward to the creation of open systems that focus on the future and so on the children whose choices must be left open.

Now as I see it, the development of prefigurative civilization will depend on the existence of a continuing dialogue in which the young, free to act on their own initiative, can lead their elders in the direction of the unknown. (pp. 92-94)

What is the real motive behind the compiling of such a book? A careful study of this work reveals its sinister designs to bestow “scientific” justification for universal wholesale cultural genocide and establish for all times to come, the uniform and universal supremacy of the materialistic norms now in fashion.

We explicitly recognize that the paths by which we came into the present can never be traversed again. The past is the road by which we have arrived where we are. Older forms of culture have provided us with the knowledge, the techniques and the tools necessary for our contemporary civilization. Coming by different roads out of the past, all the peoples of the earth are now arriving in the new world community. No 121 road into the present need be repudiated and no former way of life forgotten, but all these different roads—our own and all others, must be treated as precursors. (p. 93)

Here under the slogan of “progress” and “development”, she proclaims the heritage of all the previous civilizations of the world obsolescent and only the contemporary culture under the benevolent patronage of the “advanced” countries in North America and Europe should be allowed to have any future.

It is assumed by the adult generation that there is still general agreement about the good, the true and the beautiful and that human nature, complete with built-in ways of perceiving, thinking, feeling and acting, is constant. Such beliefs are, of course, wholly incompatible with a full appreciation of the findings of anthropology which have documented the fact that innovations in technology and in the form of institutions inevitably bring about alterations in cultural character. (p. 61)

This is nothing but an out-and-out materialistic philosophy of history. Dr. Margaret Mead has not originated these thoughts on her own but has merely accepted blindly and uncritically the views of Hegel that every civilization of the past vanished because of its inherent weaknesses and defects and not left anything worth preserving to the succeeding civilizations.

Therefore nothing remains of the past which may be considered as a valid precedent for future guidance. A system of values, according to this peculiar philosophy, is true only for its limited time and place.

Hegel anticipated the Darwinian theory of evolution applied to sociology, history and education by Herbert Spencer. According to their view, all change is synonymous with progress in civilization just as in each stage of 122 biological evolution, the most highly organized and complex forms of life emerged from the lowly, single-celled creatures. Like all the adherents of materialism today, Margaret Mead regards change as the highest good and the faster things change, the better. Innovations are never critically examined for their faults or their virtues since every change is regarded as intrinsically desirable in itself on the road to progress.

The new must be good simply because it is new and the old is worthless just because it is old.

Even as an internationally renowned anthropologist, she is utterly blind to the reality that such an assumption has nothing to do with fact but that she has been swayed by the prejudices and sentiments of her culture.

According to the materialistic philosophy first preached by Karl Marx, which she accepts without any question, everything is classified on the basis of time. It is argued that, as the problems and conditions of life change in every age, a system of values and institutions are true and valid for one period only and must inevitably become outdated in the succeeding age. Now I would like to ask how it is possible for either the historian or the anthropologist to draw any clear-cut line of demarcation between the various stages of history and assert that everything that man has accomplished in a certain period of time loses all its value now and that the experience of past history can provide no lessons or guidance for succeeding generations because the conditions under which the people lived have been completely transformed? Has not the traveller on the road of history all these thousands of years been the same human species? Despite the variations in 123 the circumstances and problems of the journey, has the traveller himself experienced any metamorphosis? From the inception of recorded history until the present, the body and mind of the human being has remained exactly the same. Man’s disposition, his biological and psychological needs, his physical and mental capacities, the temptations which make him succumb to evil and his eternal quest for the moral and spiritual values that give human life its meaning and purpose and distinguishes him from the lower animals, have not changed at all since the emergence of homosapiens! These being the facts no reputable scientist can deny, how can Dr. Margaret Mead, trained in the discipline of anthropology, assert with such complete conviction that what was right and true for man yesterday is wrong and false today?

This is nothing but Marxism pure and simple. In all his writings, Karl Marx preached that a change in the physical environment and economic system necessitates a corresponding change in morality and outlook as well. In other words, Marx asserted that man’s morality and religious beliefs depend upon the material conditions and type of economy of his environment. This again has no relation to fact but is pure sentiment. From her studies at first hand of different cultural systems, she must not be ignorant of the fact that peoples sharing the same kind of economy and level of technology can differ very widely in their institutional, moral and religious systems. For example, the Hindus and Muslims of India lived side by side for more than a thousand years and although they shared an identical physical environment, their beliefs and outlook clashed in almost every respect and when the British withdrew their rule in 1947, the result was Pakistan because the two communities could never merge into a single nation.

124 Material progress is no guarantee for spiritual progress. The most striking characteristic of our time is the unprecedented progress in science and technology combined with an equally unprecedented moral and spiritual retrogression which menaces the very survival of the human race, if not all life on earth. Progress has been confined to one field only—the natural sciences.

In all other aspects equally important in any human culture—religion, morality, the fine arts and above all, the quality of human relationships—civilization is decaying.

Just go to any museum in a large city and compare the artistic products of today with those of other civilizations of the past to verify the truth of this statement. Even unlimited accelerating changes brought about by scientific progress can have disastrous social consequences. In this sense, the results of rapid technological development can result in wholesale destruction and disintegration if the innovations are so overwhelming that the society has no time and no opportunity to adjust and cope with them before even more changes occur. It is extremely difficult for youth to plan for their careers because even before they complete their training for the job, all they have learned has become obsolete and the kind of work they had chosen, eliminated through automation. No doubt, Margaret Mead would assert that such maladjustment is a “necessary sacrifice” the youth must be willing to pay for¹ 125 “a society in transition.” But the question is, transition to what? Change now occurs so fast that everything is being torn down but there is no time to replace it with anything else because before it can be established, it is already out-of-date! Therefore the unrestricted pace of change, if it continues, can have only destructive results and the entire edifice of civilized life will be ruined forever.

Dr. Margaret Mead most vehemently asserts that the growing estrangement between the generations since World War II is an entirely unique phenomenon having no precedent in past history. However, a study of history and literature reveals that such is not at all the case.

The Russian novelist, Ivan Turgenev, devoted his masterpiece, Fathers and Sons, which was first published in Moscow in 1861, to exploring the causes and consequences of the “generation gap” which was evidently a very serious social problem even then.

Bazarov was a nihilist, a man whose aims were the destruction of philosophical ideas, of spiritual values, of religion and tradition. He was a person with neither roots nor purpose except hatred and destruction.

“Nihilism is a struggle against landowners,” the young man declared. “Art, love of nature, love for a woman—all this romantic stuff must give way to physiology, chemistry and other useful sciences.”

Nikolai Kirsanov, Arkady’s father, was a kind, good-natured man but even he became bitter when he overheard a conversation between Bazarov and his son.

“Your father is a good fellow,” said Bazarov, “but he is an outdated man. His day is over.”

“On what basis can you act then?” Pavel asks Bazarov as the 137 latter was renouncing everything-aristocracy, liberalism, progress, principles.

“We act on the strength of what we recognize to be useful,” answers Bazarov. “At present the most useful thing of all is renunciation. We renounce !”

“Everything ?”

“Everything.”

“It will be necessary to build too,” Nikolai remarked.

“That is not our concern! First we must clear the ground!”

“Just curse everything ?”

“Yes. Just curse !”

“And that’s called nihilism ?”

“And that’s called nihilism,” Bazarov repeated insolently.

“Ridicule everything !” Pavel broke in.

“Let’s go, Arkady. Good bye-gentlemen !”

The two friends left. The brothers remained alone and at first just looked at each other.

“There you are,” Pavel finally began. “There’s today’s youth for you ! There they are-our heirs !”

“Our heirs,” repeated Nikolai with a dejected sigh. “You know what I was thinking of, Pavel ? I quarreled with my mother once. She shouted, didn’t want to listen to me. I finally told her, ‘You really can’t understand me because we belong to two different generations.’ She was terribly offended but I thought, what can one do ? It’s a bitter pill but it has to be swallowed. So now our turn has come and our sons can say to us : ‘You really aren’t of our generation or part of our world.”‘ (p. 52)*

Although the episode quoted above took place more than a century ago, there is no essential difference at all between the outlook of the rebellious youth today² 138 and the character of Bazarov in Turgenev’s novel. In fact, Fathers and Sons, though it takes the unpretentious form of fiction, is a far more accurate, profound and objective study of the causes and consequences of the “generation gap” than Margaret Mead’s work which parades under the glorified label of “scientific” anthropology.

Like the first generation born in a new country, the youth listen only half-comprehendingly to their parents’ responses to events that deeply moved them in the past. But this is not all that separates the young from their elders. Watching, they can see that their elders are groping, that they are managing clumsily and often unsuccessfully the tasks imposed on them by the new conditions. They see that their elders are using means that are inappropriate, that their performance is poor and the outcome very uncertain. The young do not know what must be done but they feel that there should be a better way. Just how they do feel was expressed in a school essay by Shannon Dickson, a fifteen-year-old Texan boy who writes; “The answer is out there somewhere. We need to search for it.” (pp. 76-77)

It may be of some interest for Margaret Mead to know that more than two thousand four hundred years before her time, Socrates was imparting the same advice to the youth of ancient Greece. Says W. H. D. Rouse in his introduction to his well-known English translation of the classical Socratic dialogues as recorded by his pupil, Plato :

Many of the Socratic dialogues state or show a difficulty without giving any solution. Socrates himself described his object as that of a midwife, to bring other men’s thoughts to birth, to stimulate them to think and to criticize—not to 139 instruct them. Thus the reader may be disappointed in finding no solution at the end but he is encouraged to go on searching for himself. (p. 9)*

Let us take a small illustration of this same kind of thought from Socrates’ dialogue with Menon, one of the most intelligent and promising youths of the rising generation of that day.

SOCRATES: “My dear Menon, there is a regular famine of brains here. My good man, you must think that I am inspired ! Virtue? Can it be taught? Or how does it come? Do I know that? Far from knowing whether it can be taught or can’t be taught, I don’t know even the least little thing about virtue. I don’t even know what virtue is !”

MENON: “Look here, Socrates, don’t you really know what virtue is ?”

SOCRATES: “Just so, my friend and more-I never met anyone who did, so far as I know. Tell me yourself. In heaven’s name, Menon, what do you say virtue is? Tell me and don’t grudge it; this will be the luckiest lie I ever told if it turns out that you know and I went and said I never met anybody who did know.”

MENON: “That is nothing difficult, my dear Socrates. First, a man’s virtue and that is easy; this is a man’s virtue to help friends and hurt enemies and to take care to keep clear of mischief. Or if you like, a woman’s virtue, there’s no difficulty there: she must manage the house well and keep the stores all safe and obey her husband and a child’s virtue is different for a boy and girl and an older man’s or a freeman’s is different from the slave’s.”

SOCRATES: “I seem to have been lucky indeed, my dear Menon, I have been looking for one virtue and found a whole swarm of virtues in your store …. “ (pp. 28-30)

The significance of all this is clear enough-the repudiation of all t…³ 129 man’s or a freeman’s is different from the slave’s.” SOCRATES: “I seem to have been lucky indeed, my dear Menon, I have been looking for one virtue and found a whole swarm of virtues in your store …. “ (pp. 28-30)

The significance of all this is clear enough—the repudiation of all transcendental law and morality under the high-sounding slogan of “freedom of thought and expression.”

Dr. Margaret Mead would have us believe that this renunciation of absolute values rooted in the past is drastically new, a unique product of the dramatic development of science and technology in the last two decades.

Yet a careful study of the classical history and literature of European peoples reveals that though the science and technology of the ancient Greeks and Romans were rudimentary compared to the extraordinary achievements of modern science, their philosophers and sages were teaching the youth the same cynicism and contempt for traditional religion and morality that the youth are imbibing now.

Since Socrates could not find any satisfactory answers as to the true meaning and purpose of life and as he considered truth so mysterious it could never be known, any expenditure of energy and trouble to search further would be futile. As Margaret Mead concludes her work: “THE FUTURE IS NOW!” (p. 97), all one can do is “eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow ye die!” The motto was in ancient Greece and Rome exactly what it is today: “There is no cure for birth or death except to enjoy the interval.” ⁴

130 As for Socrates, his solution to the riddle of life was made known to the world at the Symposium which took place at the home of Agathon, a successful young Athenian playwright—in 416 B.C.—one of the most famous banquets in history. Socrates, now fifty-three years old, is no longer interested in discovering the nature of such things as virtue or piety since neither he nor any of his pupils have found any answers. The entire dialogue, as recorded by Plato, is given over to the pleasures of wine-drinking and a most stimulating discussion of the ecstasy of bodily love which allegedly reaches its highest expression with an older man’s worship of the beauty of young boys. Thus under the patronage of the West throughout the world, as in ancient Greece and Rome, the gratification of the senses has become the sole purpose of life.

What happens when, to put it in Margaret Mead’s terminology, postfigurative civilization gives way to the prefigurative culture she recommends? Writes a well known American social critic:

While I was travelling from Greece to Italy on a Yugoslav freighter, a group of Austrian girls and young men of late high-school age came aboard with nominal chaperonage. They seemed to have no particular place to sleep except the decks. One day as I cruised, a lad and a girl decided that the likeliest place on the deck for the to relax was a space about three feet from my chair. They put down a blue air mattress. Soon they were entwined. This was in broad day-light. The girl was in a bikini and the boy was in trunks. She had one of her bare legs thrown up over his bare legs. He had his right arm drooped across her bare stomach. What impressed me most was that as they nestling and fondled each other, she kept snapping bubble-gum out of her mouth. ⁵

If the adults in the “advanced” countries of the West have failed to find any satisfactory solutions to contemporary problems, the rebellious youth, despite feeling thoroughly at home in the new environment technology has created, haven’t found any answers either.

The hatred of the young for everything old (including old people) not because it is bad but just because it is old, has resulted in nothing but chaos, anarchy, disintegration and decadence where not only the bonds between the young and old are destroyed but all kinship ties and human relationships in general have been weakened to the breaking point.

The generation gap probably can be found in its purest form in southern California where many stretches of beach are agesegregated and even towns are known as “young” towns and “old” towns. In describing “the new life out there,” the journalist, Tom Wolfe told of the lean, tan kids who dominate a stretch of beach near La Jolla. They scoff at anyone over 25 who dares encroach into their sandy preserve as “blackfeet” people, meaning, for example, “a woman’s black street shoes out of which stick a pair of veiny white ankles.” Wolfe added that all up and down the coast from Los Angeles to Baja, teen-agers can take off from home and the beach and if they need a place to stay, “well, somebody rents a garage for $20 a month and everybody moves in—girls and boys.” He added: “All right, Mother gets worried about all this but the thing is, everybody, or at least, practically everybody, comes from a good family. We have all been reared well as they say, it’s just that this is the new order!” ⁶

This is merely a prelude of the “new order” of the future—youth is in command. It is certainly not a state of health—it is pathological beyond redemption, a diseased and perverted society.

During the last few years I have been exposed to something that I at first branded as a temptation. Young people often turn to me when we have been cooperating together for a goal we share and exclaim: “You belong to us!” This I felt to be a temptation which must be resisted at all costs so I reply: “No, I do not belong to your generation. You think that I do because you are currently in favour of the things that I have been working on for forty years. But that does not make me a member of your generation. How do I know that you will not in fact be opposing these very goals ten years from now?” I was reared as they wish they had been by a grandmother and parents who did not think they could set their children’s feet on any given path. I was reared almost seven decades ahead of my time as today’s twenty-year-olds proclaim they will rear their children, leaving them free to grow straight and tall into a future that must be left free and open. I insist that we can change into a prefigurative civilization, consciously, delightedly and industriously rearing unknown children for an unknown world. (p. 96)

If everything must change with the changing times and become obsolete and worthless, this means that there is nothing of permanent value. In fact, the denial of transcendence means the denial of value in all things, including even the sacredness of human life. The human being is so constituted that such questions as the meaning and purpose of life cannot remain unanswered. Man demands an explanation of Ultimate Truth in such a manner that satisfies both his intellectual and emotional 133 requirements. Every society known in history regulates human relationships on the basis that there are agreed, objective, absolute standards for truth and falsehood, good and evil, beauty and ugliness. Not even the wildest savage tribe in the jungle lacks some criteria for its members to distinguish between what is considered right and what is wrong. The objective of all parental and other educational training in all human societies—primitive or civilized—is to transmit loyalty (or “commitment” as Margaret Mead would put it) of the succeeding generations to the values most deeply cherished in that particular culture. What is right in one culture may be condemned as wrong in another but all adhere to some standards which they unquestionably uphold as the truth. They may be false, eventually doomed to vanish in the flux of time, but what is important is that they are always sincerely believed to be the truth which never changes. When the majority of members of any society lose faith in the moral and spiritual values of their culture, it perishes. In previous periods, in all cultures, violation of the rules was common. What distinguishes contemporary civilization from others is not the rebellion of the youth against the established standards of their elders but the absence of any standards at all. It is the normlessness which makes the present crisis unique and historically significant.

If there is no God and no reward or punishment in the Hereafter, then what is the meaning of man’s existence? If a parent must tell his son, or daughter that life has no meaning, how can he forbid him to become addicted to intoxicating drugs? How can he 134 convince his children why they should not commit suicide? And if the past has no relevance to the present and the future, then why should the schools and colleges continue to teach the students history?

Young people today feel the most desperate hunger to believe in something—anything—whether truth can be found with “mind-bending” drugs, Zen Buddhism, love, astrology, the Peace Corps, radicalism, Hedonism or Nihilism. The experience of learning that an entire civilization is founded on nothing solid morally, thoroughly corrupted with hypocrisy and that he can find nothing in it to give his life any meaning has been so overwhelming a shock that it has left them inarticulate, terrified, anxious and confused. Youth today can be certain of nothing and if there is one word that most aptly describes their emotional reaction, it is disgust.

Unlimited freedom in a society in which literally “anything goes” is no virtue at all. In fact, freedom lacking any direction can be a more crushing burden than the most oppressive dictatorship. The absence of transcendental religion, morality and law, far from creating a healthy generation growing straight and tall, is manufacturing whole armies of teen-age delinquents and criminals. In England, according to a recent report by the Ministry of Health and Social Security, the proportion of boys under fifteen in mental hospitals has almost trebled since 1954 and the proportion of girls the same age has doubled.⁷ In America and Europe, among adolescents and youth, suicide is 135 the leading cause of death. The absence of transcendental ideals even in the midst of comfort, abundance and affluence, is tantamount to pessimism, hopelessness, and despair. If postfigurative culture is transformed into a universal prefigurative society, it will not mean progress but suicide.