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Depression
Do Generations Exist?
Are generations caricatures or are they drivers of social and cultural change?
Posted February 26, 2015
How useful is it to speak of the Lost Generation, the Greatest Generation, the Silent Generation, the Baby Boomers, the Vietnam or Watergate generation, Generation X, or Millennials, and attribute to them certain common characteristics?
Is it misleading to speak about a self-absorbed “Me Generation” or jaded, cynical GenXers, overeducated and underemployed?
Is generation-speak, in short, little more than conjecture or cultural stereotyping, or does it speak to a fundamental truth: That a cohort of people often share certain shaping experiences, economic or developmental challenges, childrearing patterns, and cultural touchstones, which, in turn, breed a distinctive outlook and leave a lasting imprint on behavior and attitudes?
It is easy to dismiss the concept of generations as a gross oversimplification. After all, diversity based on gender, class, ethnicity, and politics makes any sweeping generalizations problematic. The politics of an age cohort generally vary widely. In the late 1960s, more young people supported the conservative Young Americans for Freedom than the left wing Student for a Democratic Society.
The precise meaning of generation is contested. It has been viewed as a culture, a demographic, an outlook, a style, an economy, a scene, a literature, a political ideology, an aesthetic, an age, a decade, a way of life, a marketing category, and a lazy shorthand. Age cohorts clearly differ markedly in the homogeneity of their experience.
Only rarely are generations clearly delineated, in the way that the Baby Boom generation of the 1950s and early 1960s was, reflecting the depressed birthrates and delayed marriages of the 1930s, the disruptions of World War II, and rapid post-war economic growth. Also, generationally defining events—such as the deprivation, skewed sex ratios, delayed schooling, in Europe following World War I and II -- are unusual.
Nevertheless, no one would deny that certain historical upheavals or social realities leave a stamp on large segments of an age cohort. A detailed sociological study by Glen H. Elder Jr. of the children who grew up during the Great Depression uncovered marked differences in the life experiences of older children (who were born around 1920) and younger children (born around 1928), with those who were adolescents during the 1930s forced to take on adult responsibilities from an early age and, as a result, developing a strong sense of independence among many boys and a commitment to familial responsibility among many girls, while those who were younger were better insulated from the Depression’s hardships. It also found that those Depression era children who entered a stable marriage and who attended college following military service were best able to overcome the Depression’s impact on life trajectories.
The notion that society is divided into distinct generations is an old one. In their sermons, the New England Puritans drew a negative contrast between the founding settlers and the rising generation, which were supposedly straying from their elders’ religious faith. The Romantic movement gave added impetus to the notion of generations, contrasting "fuddy-duddies" and "old fogies" (pejorative terms for the older generation) with the vibrancy and creativity youth. In the mid-nineteenth century, many younger writers and staunch nationalists in the United States embraced the label Young America.
But it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century, when a French lexicographer defined a generation in 1863 as "all men living more or less in the same time," that a recognizing modern use of the word generation emerged, partly reflecting the rise of military conscription, in which young men were called into military service by age.
The influence of Darwinian evolution was apparent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century argument that the clash of generations was one of history’s driving forces. The Young Turks were only one of many generational groups that were thought to be driving historical transformation. Young Germany and Young Italy were said to propel national unification in their regions.
It was a German sociologist, Karl Manheim, who, in a 1923 essay, advanced a formal theory about the origins of generational consciousness and the role of generational cohorts as agents of change. Mannheim rejected the notion that every age cohort develops a distinct generational consciousness. Rather, he claimed, it was during times of crisis or extremely rapid social change that such a consciousness was most likely to emerge.
Despite their enormous diversity—in terms of race, geographical residence, gender, ethnicity, education, and class—it is not wrong to speak of today’s young people as a generation. They have confronted certain shared experiences, including the Great Recession and a protracted, seemingly futile war on terror. They’ve had to wrestle with the impact of certain widely shared generational experiences, notably their parents’ high divorce rates and slow economic growth, increasing levels of economic inequality, and high unemployment rates, which have bred pessimism about stable relationships and upward economic mobility. A substantial generation gap has arisen in social values, family structure, racial and ethnic identity, gender norms, religious affiliation and practice, and technology use.
Generation is a problematic term, one that must be used with care and caution. But, nevertheless, it represents an aspect of our social and psychological reality that can’t be denied.
