Can the young solve the world’s problems?

Storm clouds over Botswana - and the world?

There is a widespread tendency amongst the young to be impatient of their parents’ generation as old-fashioned, boring and out-of–touch with the modern world. And it’s common to hear older generations lament the behaviour and attitudes of the young. It’s also common to hear the confident assertion that it has always been thus.

In fact intergenerational friction – at least at the levels common in most modern societies – is almost certainly a relatively new phenomenon. It’s caused by the large and rapid changes affecting most aspects of contemporary life: the young adapt to the changes more easily than their parents and the older generation as a whole, so they’re likely to be impatient of that generation and it’s conservatism, while the old decry the changes and developments they do not always understand, nor see the need for. Many of them are incompetent users of computers and only use mobiles (cell phones) as telephones. They don’t understand or see the need for things such as iPods and the ‘apps’ that run on mobiles and tablets, and they frequently find the manners, dress, music and behaviour of the young unacceptable. But there are also less immediately obvious changes taking place, for which the older generation – largely the so-called baby-boomers, born in and between the 1950s and the 1970s – are responsible, but which many of them do not recognise or acknowledge. These involve resources and energy use and the impact of humans on the planet – matters that the young may be more aware of and concerned about than their parents. So there is plenty of scope for intergenerational friction.

This was not the case through most of human history. For long periods – let’s say for a couple of hundred thousand years – human societies were remarkably stable, changing only very slowly. Most people lived in small communities where the generations, like the seasons, succeeded each other without much change. There were blips in the cycles, caused by famine or plague or war, but these disasters were part of the accepted patterns of existence and were accepted as such. They did not bring about changes in the way people lived. For thousands of years there were few changes in the technologies used in agriculture, where most people worked and most tasks were done by hand or with the help of animals, or in methods of travel or communication. For most people, except for the rich and the ruling classes, who travelled on horseback or in some sort of (usually horse-drawn) conveyance, the only way to travel was to walk, so few people left the areas where they lived. There was, generally, none of the interchange of ideas that may come from travel. Few people were educated; work began early in life and the work done by children was often important for the survival of their families and communities. There were no books; writing in any form only developed about 5000 years ago and the first printed books (the Gutenberg Bible) only appeared in the middle of the 15^th century.

And so we could go on, and if we were inclined to get involved in detail, we might argue about differences between regions and races, or about the influence of armies and empires that may have absorbed the culture of the conquered, or transmitted to them the culture of the conquerors. Or we might argue about the relationships between generations that might have pertained in advanced cultures with complex societies, such as the ancient Chinese, or the Mayo and the Aztecs in South America, or the ancient Egyptians, and primitive cultures in Africa or parts of south-east Asia. But it is probably safe to say that, in most of these societies, rebellious behaviour by the young would have received short shrift: over most of human history cultural change was slow and, from generation to generation, young people grew up (if they survived) with the same beliefs, prejudices, superstitions and ideas about the way life should be lived as their parents and those around them. They followed, without question, the old-established patterns of living. In primitive societies life was an uncertain business and survival was the first priority. Few got the chance to grow old and there wasn’t much time or energy to spare for apparently pointless rebellion. The experience of those who did survive offered the best guide to living and the young followed as best they could – or were sternly disciplined to do so. The rewards, in the form of status, prestige and possibly authority, came with age and experience.

But gradually, at least in Europe, the long darkness of pre-medieval times began to lift. For most people the social changes that came were imperceptible, but as populations increased and cities grew larger the number of people in merchant classes, who traded with distant countries, increased. Communications improved as written material became more common among the merchant and ruling classes. The invention of the printing press in Europe in about 1450, and the advent of printed books, of which the Bible was the first, were epoch-making events in history. Before the invention of the printing press ownership of a bible, or any book, was rare. But as the presses proliferated not only bibles, but other books, became available to increasing proportions of the population, and the information available to people increased rapidly. This in turn stimulated the development of literacy. By the end of the 17^th century novels and story books, technical literature and political pamphlets, were becoming commonplace. The number of people who could read, although it remained small, increased gradually. Newspapers and magazines appeared in the 18^th century and by the 19^th century literacy was sufficiently widespread to create a market for a cheap press, which in turn led to the development of advertising.

Increasing literacy and the flow of information that came with newspapers led to increasing awareness of the world outside the restricted confines of small societies. This, coupled with the massive changes brought about by the industrial revolution of the 19^th century, and by the world wars in the first half of the 20^th century brought about immense and rapid changes in society, culminating in it’s complete disintegration, in Europe, at the end of World War II. The United States, untouched directly by the war – the country was not invaded or bombed and there was no military action on the American mainland – experienced an industrial boom triggered by the massive production of aircraft, tanks, ships, weapons and all the material needed by the military. After the war the energy and resources that had been focused on all this, and the return to civilian life of more than a million ex-servicemen, led to an unprecedented surge in production of consumer goods.

The Marshal Plan, by which the United States provided enormous amounts of aid to Europe, underpinned the astonishing economic and social post-war recovery there. Recovery in the Soviet Union was slower, and was distorted by the Communist emphasis on heavy industry and impractical production targets. Communism also imposed a grey uniformity on populations; dissent was ruthlessly quashed and personal freedom severely restricted. But in the United States and Western Europe (particularly), burgeoning technical innovations, and production of consumer goods went hand-in-hand with rapidly changing social attitudes. Ideas about social duty and obligation to society came to be replaced by the cult of the supremacy of the individual; the doctrine that personal freedom and the satisfaction of their every whim and want was the highest social priority  came to be accepted as inarguable.

The generation that grew to maturity in Europe in the 1960s and ‘70s wanted nothing to do with the world their parents had known, a world of war followed by years of shortages. They remained in school for longer than ever before and ever- increasing numbers were university-educated which, in itself, created a gulf between them and their parents. Theirs was a world of material satisfactions, of fashion and music and television and, increasingly, of self gratification. Many became impatient with their parents and their attitudes and ideas, impatient of their conservatism. The young wanted something different; utopian ideas about changing society spread, leading to dissent from conventional expectations and attitudes. Young people in the post-war United States were endlessly indulged, endlessly told they could achieve anything they aspired to in the land of unlimited opportunity. The materialist American way of life was assumed to be the ultimate good life but it produced a backlash: the feeling that there must be more to life than this led to contempt for establishment attitudes, dress and manners and exploded in the protests against the Vietnam war, in the counterculture movement, ideas about free love, student protests and the appearance of hippies.

Thirty years later much of the turmoil has subsided: economic pressures have replaced youthful idealism – owning a car and a house and all the electronic gizmos and gadgets that characterise modern life in the developed countries has become the primary objective for most people. The idealists and hippies have succumbed to middle-aged conservatism and the consumer life-style. Materialism rules. And that goes for their children, who want all the toys – and they want them now! – as well as untrammeled personal freedom. The ‘me first, and I want more’ attitude is almost universal. Education is not about ideas; it’s about acquiring the skills needed to accumulate wealth. So the objectives and priorities of the generation currently in their late teens and early twenties have converged with those of their baby-boomer parents. But that doesn’t seem to have brought the generations closer psychologically and emotionally. The young are still impatient of their parents, but for different reasons. They still want to ‘do their own thing’ and, because they are given remarkable freedom, any attempt by parents to impose control is resented. And the parents are likely to be regarded as old-fashioned because they decry modern music, may not be computer literate, or appreciate or be interested in Facebook and Twitter or spend a large part of their time ‘connecting’ through their cell phones. So the gap between the generations is maintained – or, indeed, may grow – despite the fact that, when life gets difficult many of the young turn back to their parents for support. (The situation is different in so-called underdeveloped countries, where the young aspire to the modern consumer lifestyle and material comforts undreamt of by their parents.)

All that is rather a long-winded way of making the point that (in my view) the generation gap is a modern phenomenon. Does it matter? Well, yes, it does; in fact, in some respects, I think  that there must be a generation gap. The world is changing faster than at any time in history and the changes are causing enormous problems. The flexibility of youth allows the young cope with and adapt to change better than older people, and there are encouraging signs that many of them show signs of recognising and adapting to the emerging reality that the affluent life-style in developed countries – and the life-style of the affluent in underdeveloped countries – cannot continue into the indefinite future. Things cannot go on as they are now. There will be shortages of energy and other resources – including food, although that is unlikely to affect affluent societies for some time yet. So, we need young people who will reject the complacency – or shortsightedness – of their parents and acknowledge all this, since problems can’t be solved unless they are recognised and acknowledged. Even my cursory scan through history is enough to show that human societies are not stable; in fact if we think about the explosive growth of human populations we don’t need to know much history to know that things are changing – and the changes are coming fast. If the consequences are not to be catastrophic – or at least extremely unpleasant for multitudes of people, and disastrous for the world’s ecology – the young people who will have to live with it all have to solve the problems we have bequeathed to them.