Generation Gap or Gap Within a Generation?
Tyler, Gus
CAN THE AMERICAN SYSTEM, which does fairly well at accommodating political or economic conflicts, handle a cultural battle, which begins to shape up more and more like the pointlessly...
...These figures clearly show the young are less religious than their parents...
...At the right end are the conservatives with 19 percent...
...In between is 70 percent of the generation...
...And doubly ironical is the use of modern mechanisms (physical and psychological) by the "revolutionaries" against the technocratic order: cameras, electronic devices, media manipulation, chemistry, image-making, miniaturized high-speed explosives...
...They sample instant bosoms and a novel bustle touted as "instant fanny...
...In sum, the conservative youth comes mainly from America's bulge in the middle...
...but he quickly separates out the real from the unreal in the crucible of daily demands and deeds...
...In the fantasy of the son, the father appears as a deceitful, money-mad dictator...
...Relatively few conservative youth (only 11 percent) come from homes making more than $15,000, whereas 22 percent of all youth come from such homes...
...In part, this is a prolongation of boyhood with its street brawls—a commonplace of blue-collar life...
...They are surrounded by instant coffee, tea, heat, and refrigeration...
...that there is virtue in being of the common clay...
...This closing query in a section entitled "Ananke and Thanatos" poses the problem of man's ability to relate to reality in a workless world...
...Thus, 36 percent of the revolutionaries' parents believe that parents are "more interested in other people" than youths are, while only 14 percent of the conservatives' parents think so...
...This in-between group covers a wide spectrum, including the "New Left," the "Old Left," people who like to join civil rights protests, or favor a "fundamental reform" of the military, big business, political parties, etc...
...For blue-collar folk, notes the sociologist Mirra Komarov sky, "the parental family...
...For instance, in questioning college and noncollege youth on "fighting a war," twice as many noncollege as college respondents felt it worth fighting to "keep a commitment," or to maintain "our position of power in the world," or to protect "our honor...
...82 percent believe compromise is essential for progress...
...the revolutionary intellectual sees himself as planner of societies, setter of style, maker of eternal peace...
...It cannot employ more than a fraction of untrained youngsters fresh out of high school...
...A perfect example of a recurrent incongruity between style and substance is the class that the CBS Report calls the "radical reformer...
...He likesthe feeling that something violent is about to happen...
...They learn the artifacts of imagery projected in colorful conflict or sweeping symbolism...
...Only 34 percent believe their parents "have strong moral principles and live by them" while 71 per GENERATION GAP OR GAP WITHIN A GENERATION...
...As babies [records Roszak], the middle-class young got picked up when they bawled...
...The job, like the neighborhood, is another piece of turf to which workers are attached: by choice, necessity, and habit...
...He is put on an incentive system rewarding a mastery of routine that speeds output...
...In the case of the craftsman— like the electrician—the locale may change but not the chore: installing a switch is, with few variations, installing a switch...
...the latter views the "hard hat" as an ignorant, useless slob...
...Consider the very first and perhaps most important proposition stated in the Yankelovich questionnaire: "Hard Work Will Always Pay Off...
...However, once the student crusade began to get out of hand, the Chairman ordered the kids back to their classrooms...
...If black revolutionaries were excluded from the count, the percentage of white "revolutionary" youth from affluent families would even be higher than 44 percent...
...The parents of "revolutionaries" have less faith in kids than do conservative folk...
...Although composing the bulk of youth in America, the influence (and eventually the size) of this sector could dwindle rapidly...
...Moreover, the labels of revolutionary, conservative, etc...
...In Western civilization, notes Bell, work has stood at the center of moral consciousness and moral unconsciousness: consciously, work was the compelling virtue of Genesis, the Protestant ethic, the Carlylean homofaber...
...But there is little doubt that a sizable body of affluent youths in America, because of the death of that oldfashioned god, Ananke, have been liberated from humdrum toil by the very technocracy that many of them yearn to destroy...
...repetitive rather than innovative...
...Because a large percentage of them come from working-class families (55 percent from families making less than $10,000 a year), and because nonwhites are disproportionately represented (26 percent...
...There was something about the life-style of these zealots that did not yield to Maoist manipulation...
...Many will not leave a job even for better pay because GENERATION GAP OR GAP WITHIN A GENERATION...
...How and whether this can come to pass is an item for another discussion...
...Whether or not the worker onthebelt is part of this nonwork unreality because his toil is unvaried and unchallenging is open to debate...
...Thirty-six percent of the "revolutionaries" believe their parents "act out of expediency rather than out of any moral principles" while only 10 percent of the "middle-roaders" and only 7 percent of the "conservatives" have this tacky view of their parents...
...What are these types...
...And he dignified the bloodletting by naming it a "cultural revolution...
...As a result, the worker is not generally anti-institutional...
...In the blue-collar family, notes Arthur B. Shostak in BlueCollar Life, child-rearing is a total activity, possibly the most important in the maintenance of the entire marriage relationship...
...Of college youth (here seen as a class), only 56 percent agreed, of noncollege youth 79 percent agreed...
...in construction he must swing with the crew—as much as if he were on a PT boat or a bomber crew...
...Parents also differ about the character of youth...
...The old man learned his craft to earn a living while the son, taking economic security for granted, feels free —as Roszak puts it—to "build a new uncompromised personality, flawed perhaps by irresponsible ease, but also touched with some outspoken spirit...
...The child grows up a neophdiac—yearning for change per se...
...Without such attachment to institutions that are the twin pillars of blue-collar life, the child of leisure lacks a personal model for accepting almost any institution...
...Traditionalism is reinforced by the fact that the polls of work, shunning change qua change, is basically neophobic...
...No matter how irksome the sacrifices to both these deities, the bluecollar worker continues to pay homage at their shrines...
...Again, the noncollege youth are more like adults in general than like their college contemporaries...
...Homosexuals are "queer...
...70 percent favor more respect for authority...
...It is underexposed by the media that prefers the pyrotechnics of confrontation...
...THE YEARNING FOR NEWNESS and Nowness is of course, stimulated by a highly technical society with its magical inventions...
...FROM THIS SCATTERED DATA a pattern begins to emerge...
...By two to one, the "revolutionaries" believe there is a "large generational gap," while middle-roaders and conservatives believe (72 percent and 70 percent) that the gap "exists" but is "exaggerated...
...Fathers appear as hypocrites who, preaching high ideals to their children, prac GUS TYLER tice the mean trade of peddling mischievous myths...
...WHAT MAO KNEW by heart—life-styles derive from class (as well as generational) differences—CBS has recently discovered through the research of a 1969 report prepared by Dr...
...Among the college young 42 percent said "yes...
...84 percent think education is very important...
...One could eliminate death from consciousness by minimizing it through work...
...The GUS TYLER traditional family structure is further perpetuated among blue-collar workers by the disproportionate presence of Catholics, rural elements (about one-fifth of the blue-collar force is off the farm), and immigrants...
...The media make instant heroes, idols, ideas, ideals, and widely imitated idiosyncracies...
...The well-to-do parent, especially the mother, has time to in GENERATION GAP OR GAP WITHIN A GENERATION...
...The old man, under the lash of Ananke, serves Mammon while the son, believing Ananke is dead, enshrines Thespis...
...At the center is a big chunk of kids—college and noncollege, affluent and not, Left and Right and Center—whose cultural attitudes are pretty much the same as, or at least not vastly different from, those of the adult generation...
...Tough problems are resolved through theater...
...Although the study is entitled "Generations Apart" and described as "a study of the generation gap," it might better have been called GUS TYLER "Classes Apart—a study, etc...
...A high percentage of the rich "revolutionary" youth are the children of men who made their wealth recently in the manufacture and sale of images: teachers, preachers, PR men, ad men, artists, writers, foundation executives, psychologists, psychiatrists, lawyers...
...Out of this counter culture arises a sophisticated dramaturgy whose real-life enactment is intended to be an instrument of profound social change...
...The right wing is swiftly de veloping a style for public confrontation, a GUS TYLER kind of war paint, like the flag decal on the hard hat...
...As a corollary, only 9 percent of the revolutionaries' parents think the young "more interested in other people" while 33 percent of the "conservatives' " parents think so...
...Although probably unaware that Dr...
...Daniel Yankelovich...
...In this ordered universe, he believes that there are traditional roles to be played by boss and union, by priest and congregation, by friends and neighbors, by "them" and "us," parents and children, men and women...
...In part, it is the result of constant living with physical danger: in the last half-dozen years more lives were lost in industrial accidents than in Vietnam...
...The "revolutionary" youth often sees his parent as a money grubber...
...College youth, by two to one, reject this waiting period...
...The worker favors social change that is tangible and measurable—job, wage, pension, home, health care, house, vacation—and uses proven methods of collective action, like bargaining and balloting, to make progress through cumulative reform...
...On closer examination, it appears that these "radical reformers," no matter how dissident, are traditionalists in life-style: 68 percent of them want more emphasis on law and order...
...Yet this is a sector of youth that can moderate the cultural clash within its generation and turn politics from theater to reality...
...The similarity of life-style with this traditional "lower class" has not gone unnoticedby a sector of the counter-culturists who have tried to copy habits and make activist alliances with theirimpoverished twins...
...society as his and sees the "hippie" as an alien to be tolerated up to a point and, beyond that, to be chained...
...Here again the noncollege youth were far closer to the adult generation as a whole than they were to the college kids...
...Here the difference among the young is far greater than between noncollege youth and all adults...
...Blue-collar processes tend to be imitative rather than inventive...
...Its mood is left-of-center...
...Very few individuals totally fit any of these stereotypes, and even within the defined categories there are variations...
...Change may, indeed, be downright threatening...
...Mao Tse-tung's experience with his explosive students may suggest an answer...
...The highly dramatized clash of cultures is a conflict among contemporaries fired by atypical extremes who, in a period of high tension, come to appear as spokes men for the typical...
...Together the couple struggles to combine the concern of the wife with the child's self-actualization and the husband's more traditional interest in making men out of boys...
...Life flickers by like a movie montage with new faces and scenes to excite the senses...
...His household is part of an ethnic and economic unity...
...In this life curriculum, discipline appears as an unnecessary evil...
...Noncollege youths find it easier to accept restraints, whether it be police, "boss," or conventional clothing and grooming...
...Some share opinions with the far Left...
...But in the herdish blue-collar world it is natural to believe that a "sane, normal, decent" man will stand by his own—will remain loyal...
...Among "conservative" youth, 84 percent are religious, while 91 percent of their parents are—nearly no difference...
...Manual labor, except when artsy-craftsy, is a collective effort with built-in congregational compulsions...
...Among conservative youth, 83 percent believe "hard work" pays—as do 86 percent of their parents...
...The "revolutionary" feels he is alienated from this society and that— to find a home—it is not he but the social order and its hordes that must be changed...
...From such parents, the children learn the power of the word, the repeated cliche, the dramatic act, the surprise move, the subliminal suggestion, the amorphous abstraction with its catch-penny appeal...
...Nor is the difference solely ideological— although that dimension is certainly there...
...The resulting cosmopolitanism, conditioned by a nonfamilial and antiparental bias, slips easily into a practicing xenophilia and autophobia...
...The only real loyalty is to the countercultural sect with its own flag, shibboleths, and heroes...
...This didn't work, either: the Red Guards continued to tear things up, this time on the campus...
...But the starting point must be a realization that the struggle between generations is far less significant for the politics of our times than the struggle within the generation of the young...
...Sometime he may be rendered obsolete by a new process...
...are—like most modern packaging— somewhat misleading...
...As children, they got their kindergarten finger paintings thumbtacked on the living room walls by mothers who knew better than to discourage incipient activity...
...While the old man made a living out of peddling detergents, cigarettes, or a political candidate, the son makes a religion out of denouncing the parental products as poison...
...And there are the puritan rebels, the Jacobin squares...
...dulge the whims of the infant...
...One of the propositions in the CBS report that separated college and noncollege youth related to this matter of loyalty...
...College years are intended to shake institutions, challenge authority, create a workless world...
...In the entire system of rationalizations that blue-collar men derive for life as it is lived (or better yet, tolerated), the working-class family remains the key factor, the beginning and end of all things...
...At home and at work, he seeks stability —regular employment and regular meals, discipline and authority, predictable production, safety on the job and the street...
...Thirty-nine percent believe that what their parents' "way of life brought them" was "material comfort," while only 8 percent of the "middle-road" and 7 percent of the "conservative" youth have this image of their parents...
...In the blue-collar world, two gods preside: Ananke and Eros...
...In his Work and Its Discontents Daniel Bell concludes with a thought that might well have served as the introduction to a sequel on "Leisure and Its Discontents...
...For the "revolutionary," college is where you learn how to change the system—not fit into it...
...THIS SENSE OF LOYALTY that starts with family and fellow-workers and extends to neighborhood and nation results in such a complex mixture of behavior patterns as class solidarity, family devotion, gang unity, patriotism, parochialism, and prejudice...
...They are encouraged to buy instant teeth, nose, hair, and beauty...
...If that doesn't work, offer another food and another and another—change the world, not the child...
...Above all else, the blue-collar worker is reality-bound...
...But they show even more clearly that noncolIege youth are far more like adults than their contemporaries in college...
...The commercial world joined the schools] to elaborate a total culture of adolescence based on nothing but fun and games...
...His bodilyneeds (especially for sex) and his taste for `action' take precedence over everything else...
...One may therefore assume that if a youth is both white and "revolutionary," the chances are better than even that he comes from a well-to-do family and doesn't believe in "hard work...
...Nor does college change this cultural fix...
...It turns out that 44 percent of the "revolutionary" youth have parents making more than $15,000 a year, whereas only 22 percent of the young as a whole have parents in this upper bracket...
...Its composition is cross-sectional in terms of blue- and whitecollar mix, family income, percentage in and out of college, religion...
...More leisure, greater voice, less pressure...
...CAN THE AMERICAN SYSTEM, which does fairly well at accommodating political or economic conflicts, handle a cultural battle, which begins to shape up more and more like the pointlessly violent strife of hostile religions sects...
...But basically it is an unstated acceptance that a man cannot go through life without being physically bruised or bruising...
...Their parents agreed, respectively, 76 percent and 85 percent...
...Though of the same age and same nation, they are ages apart, locked in combat like warring "nations" arising out of hostile subcultures...
...The Kulturkampf to which it referred was an "argument over the way people think of themselves and how they should live .. . a cultural conflict [that] is potentially every bit as volatile as conflict over more sub stantial issues...
...Some perennial students were "volunteered" to distant farms, to pitch hay, and replaced in the classrooms by cadres from the unions and armed forces, whose term on the campus was limited to two years lest they also be corrupted by too much comfort...
...The child is exposed to new decor, dwellings, visitors, places—even new fathers and mothers...
...but as prevalent myths they suffice to motivate or justify the extension of infancy through college and beyond...
...They learn the superiority of package over content, style over substance...
...Revolutionary style does not necessarily signify revolutionary content...
...Since the worker is expected to turn out as much as possible in as short a time as possible, he is not encouraged to experiment...
...In The ' Roszak writes: A high consumption, leisure-wealthy society simply doesn't need contingents of rigidly trained "responsible" young workers...
...No more free bed, board, and travel: return to the parietals...
...If the family moves, it is likely to do so as part of a tribal migration...
...The latter are far more traditional...
...if he likes his job, he is doubly blessed...
...In mass production, he must move with the ruthless rhythm of the machine...
...Each thinks he is the true fount of creation: the bluecollar man sees himself as builder of cities, maker of things, defender of the nation...
...If that doesn't work, sing a song, play a tape, dance a jig, do anything, even beat a drum—but not the kid...
...They get instant attention and authority, money and credit...
...The former—the god of necessity, before whom all others must bow—drives the man to work, to hard work, even when it doesn't pay very well...
...He is reared with it in his family where parents traditionally teach their chil dren to "honor your father and mother...
...still others hold a mixed set of views...
...In any event, comfortable habits and rhythms are disrupted...
...Young people disagree about the nature of the generation gap...
...Its life-style isstrikingly like that of affluent counterparts...
...among noncollege youth, 71 percent...
...An old dog must learn new tricks...
...Half the noncollege kids, for instance, assume that for the first couple of years on a job they will have little decisionmaking power...
...He lives in a fairly homogeneous neighborhood where he mingles with his own kind most of the time...
...My descriptions are less characterizations than caricatures...
...New means good, old means bad, just as youth is virtue and age vice...
...He may be critical, even cynical, about his institutions— company, family, church, union, political party, or country—but he remains loyal...
...He lives from moment to moment...
...58 percent believe religion is important...
...Only 6 percent of the "revolutionaries" thought of college as preparation to "earn more money, have a more interesting career, and enjoy a better position in society...
...The parents of 41 percent of the college youth earn more than $15,000 and only 24 percent of them under $10,000...
...At work and at home he is GUS TYLER put to the hard test of personal and familial Making of the Counter Culture, Theodore survival...
...Then comes a closing query: if work (as Freud believed) was "the chief means of binding an individual to reality, what will happen then, when not only the worker but work itself is displaced by the machine...
...The noncollege, lower-income, blue-collar, middle-of-the-road or "conservative" youth is far more like his parent than like his rich intellectual counterpart on the campus...
...The Kulturkampf is less one of age against age than class against class...
...He and his kids may spend all their lives in that enclave, traveling only short distances and at rare intervals...
...It could be the core of a progressive coalition that reaches into both the leftist (especially the radical-reform) and the conservative (especially the trade-union) wings of the nation...
...From high chair to higher education, these youths are reared in a hurrying hothouse...
...This is to say, he does not discipline himself to acquire an occupational or other skill, to holddown a regular job, to maintain stable family ties, or to stay out of trouble with the law...
...It has natural ties to the nation across economics, education, and ethnicity...
...The blue-collar man thinks of this * The rich, white revolutionary is not the onlygroup conditioned by the unreality of the worklessworld...
...Less than half the college youth thought so...
...Daily dress is costuming, intended far less for comfort or esthetics than for role-playing...
...In short, Mao moved to change the life-style on campus by changing its class content...
...The adults, respectively: 81 percent and 91 percent...
...The rich young "revolutionary" feels no strong tie to work or family...
...When asked about "relations between consenting homosexuals," 72 percent of the noncollege youth thought it was "morally wrong...
...Sex is instant: mate now, meet later...
...Above all, the "revolutionaries" think of their parents as immoral...
...Here, for instance, is Edward Banfield's description: "The lower (as opposed to working) class person never sacrifices any present satisfaction for the sake of a larger future one...
...For the counter-culturist, higher education is not intended to have practical consequences...
...No doubt, he has his fantasies...
...As adolescents, they perhaps even got a car of their own with all of the sexual privileges attending...
...Without strong ties to immediate family, the cosmopolitan child feels no strong attachments to the expanded family—the "tribe"—whether ethnic, geographic, or political...
...Seventy-three percent of the "conservatives" saw school in just these practical terms...
...These neighborhoods, points out Shostak, are "social class enclaves relatively untouched by time and emphatically personal in character...
...Quite the opposite...
...By unleashing the Red Guards on Liu Chao-chi, his favorite scapegoat, Mao took the generational drive and turned it into ideological channels...
...The significance of work was that it could still mobilize emotional energies into creative challenges...
...These "black militants," notes Yankelovich, "are radical on domestic issues but highly disciplined in terms of upholding certain standards of personal morality...
...It has little internal cohesion, and is united neither by an easy outlook nor by a recog nizable style...
...While holding radical views on most ideological questidns," comments Yankelovich, "these radicals appear more like middle-of-the roaders on traditional values like patriotism, sex, and religion...
...And in-between are most of the youth—about 70 percent—with a spectrum of in-between activity...
...While 29 percent of all youth come from this sector, 43 percent of conservative youth do...
...Consider a second proposition posed by the survey: `Belonging to some Organized Religion is Important in a Person's Life...
...cent of "middle-roaders" believe this about their parents...
...When the Chinese campuses began to heat up in the mid-sixties, Chairman Mao—in good Leninist tradition—tried to harness the energy...
...Yet, ironically, it is precisely against this technical tyranny with its rigid disciplines that "technocracy's children" are in rebellion...
...For what the report reveals is that while there is a generation gap, it is not as great as the class gap within generations...
...From the cosmopolis of leisure arises a life style where play's the thing: an attitude nurtured from cradle to college...
...The proposition: "No sane, normal, decent person could even think of hurting a close friend or relative...
...The contrast is most apparent as between rich "revolutionary" students and hard-working "conservative" workers...
...the "hippie" lives in it...
...There is a "lower class" that is also liberated from the compulsions of labor...
...The blue-collar man looks upon disloyalty as treason...
...unconsciously, work was man's answer to death in an era when the traditional hope of immortality—religion—was in decline...
...In the eyes of the blue-collar beholder, they can't lift big weights or raise big families...
...Men are expected to be men: masculine and muscular...
...The result has been to make of adolescence, not the beginning of adulthood, but a status in its own right: a limbo that is nothing so much as the prolongation of an already permissive infancy...
...Many of these young have traveled widely during their teens, soaking up the cultures of many peoples...
...The worker assumes this whether he is "on the belt" or on high steel...
...If he likes his family, so much the better...
...Ninety-two percent of the "revolutionaries" found college to be "something more intangible...
...In such families, the generation gap is great...
...This acceptance of bellicosity, plus a sense of loyalty and patriotism, makes it easier for the blue-collar man to go along with a national war...
...The conflict is truly cultural: over life-styles, authority, boss, cops, drugs, education, fags, flags, family, girls, hard hats, intellectuals, jobs, kids, love, muscles, neighbors, etc...
...70 percent believe private property is sacred...
...These cultural differences appear to have an economic origin...
...Why...
...Life is expected to imitate art —including the theater of the absurd...
...In life-style, this sector is also in-betweenish: a bit obedient and a bit rebellious, liking old shoes but trying new boots, respecting the folks but battling the old man, tied to home and job but on a long elastic tether, remembering that all work and no play makes Jack a jerk...
...others share opinions with the conservatives...
...The middle class can therefore afford to prolong the ease and drift of childhood, and so it does...
...A confrontation between guardsmen and students at Kent State or hard hats and demonstrators in New York they see as a clash of hawks and doves, or old and young: as ideological or generational struggles...
...Freud looked upon Ananke ("the compulsion to work") and Eros ("the power of love" with its resultant family) as "the parents of human culture," the plebeians of all ages—including the present—sense the importance of these institutions in the making of a viable society...
...A pill, a sniff, or a needle makes fantasy instantaneously real...
...What does culture have to do with it...
...82 percent believe society needs some legally based authority to prevent chaos...
...And like any middle child, it is least likely to be put on public display...
...This continues into maturity...
...When asked whether the adults "considered" their "opinion" or granted them "a full vote in family matters," only 27 percent of the "revolutionaries" said "yes" while 43 percent of the "conservatives" said "yes"—although the latter come from more authoritarian homes...
...In short, college youth are more reluctant to take orders and more impatient to give them—a not uncommon upper-class trait...
...A turn of the TV dial turns off one fantasy and turns on another...
...This set of traditional loyalties is constantly reinforced by the fact that the worker is turfbound— both at home and on the job...
...Both think of the other as dirty, though in different ways: the blue-collar man works in dirt...
...In the work polis, discipline is part of the job...
...In some major respects, however, they are unlike their parents...
...But, like it or not, family and job are his cross to be car ried to his own calvary for personal salvation and social survival...
...The prolongation of infancy sustains the notion of life as play rather than work...
...While 54 percent of "revolutionary" youth note "very great" differences with their parents, only 11 percent of "middle-roaders" and 12 percent of "conservatives" feel that way...
...To those who think in terms of issues, such a cultural conflict may appear implausible...
...The Chairman's conclusion was that the universities were overloaded with children of the privileged, who for too long had been exposed to the temptations and trauma of purposeless leisure and were caught up in unrealistic discourse over abstractions rather than in a serious involvement with matters that mattered...
...While the old man must "kowtow to the organization," the son "can talk back at home with little fear of being tossed out into the cold...
...perhaps the opportunity to change things rather than make out well within the existing system...
...In discussing the "revolutionaries," Yankelovich notes that "this group is so small (only 1 percent of the youth) that it should be looked at in combination with the radical reformers," making up 10 percent of the youth...
...They are also proud of what Edward Ryan calls their commonness, "the strong theme that the good man is the plain man...
...But the rebellion is careful to preserve the work place physically, to seek a settlement, and to run its course in a disciplined way...
...He worries about safety and stability in his urban village and is prepared to protect its borders...
...MY CONTRAST between the children of "labor" and those of "leisure" is exaggerated...
...So he simply changed the college curriculum and its constituency...
...The blue-collar man thinks of the rich "revolutionary" as a self-inflated, useless snob...
...The carriers of this counter culture are a cadre of youths raised in an elysium whose propagation as a universal life-style they envision as a social utopia...
...The notions about the American economy just noted are open to serious doubt...
...Oversimplified and overdrawn, they are those who come from the polis of work and those who come from the cosmopolis of leisure...
...He is paid to produce—not to probe...
...GENERATION GAP OR GAP WITHIN A GENERATION...
...fifty percent of the parents of noncollege youth make under $10,000 and only 18 percent make more than $15,000...
...Immersed in a masculine mystique, the blue-collar man accepts combat—at the bar, on the picket line, in the convention hall, at home, overseas—as an inevitable aspect of life...
...The percentage of conservatives in the lower bracket (up to $10,000) is 48 percent—almost exactly what it is for all youth...
...The ultimate symbol of loyalty—the flag—is an abomination...
...It was now that Mao's Marxism came forward—as an inevitable search for the class origins of collective human behavior...
...The way to handle the problem of tasteless Pablum, for instance, is to serve it in a variety of containers of varying colors and shapes decorated with characters out of the comics...
...Life, like theater, is expected to be instantaneous: to transport the onlooker, to resolve problems, and to render pleasure or catharsis—in a matter of minutes...
...This faith in group loyalty on the part of the blue-collar boy was not mere naivete: they believed in greater number than the college youth that "anyone who completely trusts anyone else is asking for trouble...
...When work discipline comes to seem too oppressive, the worker changes the rules through the structured rebellion of his union...
...If one adds this "radical" group to the "revolutionaries," then the total at the left end of the spectrum is 11 percent...
...This discipline is not as irksome to the worker as it appears (or would be) to the child of leisure, because the blue-collar boy is accustomed to authority before he gets to the job...
...They become master dramatists, directors, actors, and publicists at an early age, certain—as are their parents —that they know how to merchant dreams...
...In the case of a man in mass production, this is obvious...
...But Mao also recognized classstyles within the young: which he used to purge the purgers...
...As in theater, novelty is an essential part of the action...
...the "revolutionary" sees disloyalty as loyalty to a higher reason...
...The rich "revolutionary" favors social changes that are conceptual and abstract—freedom, justice, equality, participation—and turns to novel methods of individual action, like booing, burlesquing, or bombing, to make progress through sudden revolution...
...Here, adds Scott Greer in The Emerging City, we see "not the `faceless world of megalopolis,' but men in shirt sleeves playing softball, groups of women gossiping on the porches, children swarming in the streets...
...Of the noncollege youth 43 percent strongly agreed, as against a mere 18 percent of the college youth...
...When the same question was put to the "revolutionaries," only 7 percent found it "wrong" as against 83 percent of the "conservatives...
...The worker looks on these "revolutionary" methods as a threat to his existence and to his social order: the "revolutionary" sees the worker as an obstacle to his personal liberation and the freedom of man...
...However slumlike this urban village may look or smell to the visitor, the natives feel at home on this piece of turf that has "an old-shoe comfort and reliability...
...In a period of polarization its ranks are thinned to Left and Right...
...II N THE COSMOPOLIS OF LEISURE, however, a contrary culture is aborning—with play substituted for work, innovation for imitation, style for content, universalism for tribalism, conscience for loyalty, individuality for collectivism, neophilia for neophobia, theater for reality...
...There are differences of significance within the youth generation as between college and noncollege, uppermiddle and lower-middle income, whitecollar and blue-collar, "revolutionary" and "conservative...
...Today I'm Sitting Bull or Pocahontas, Fidel or Che, Bill Haywood or Joe Hill, Gandhi or Lumumba: clothes make the man or woman...
...There is also a moral justification, for, as Roszak insists, the young are thus "influenced to believe that being human has something to do with pleasure and freedom...
...The revolution itself is theater, inspiring drama critic Robert Brustein to insist that it was within his professional jurisdiction to review the current crop of "revolutionaries" as he would any other batch of plays...
...The latter—the god of love—is the maker of his family...
...Among "revolutionary" youth, only 8 percent are religious, while 73 percent of their parents are—a very big generational gap...
...The campus—at this crucial moment of self-assertion—becomes a stage where the "revolution" as theater conducts its rehearsals for the real "revolution" to come.* III T T HE CHILDREN of the work polis and those of the leisure cosmopolis have contrary images of self and of the other...
...These young conservatives come from families with a disproportionately heavy percentage from the middle-income bracket ($10,000–$15,000 a year...
...remains their major reference group after marriage...
...To the worker, the family—like the job —is accepted for better or worse...
...Loyalty to company, union, family, or nation consequently becomes difficult if not downright craven...
...the workplace is a social center—a locale of a subculture—with strong emotional ties and loyalties...
...Mao was aware of the generational impulse: he harnessed its energies for his purge against Liu...
...Crap courses were eliminated...
...The percentage of "revolutionary" youth who says "yes" to this proposition is a low of 12 percent, but the parents of these same "revolutionaries" answer "yes" by a high of 91 percent...
...The university is not a place to discover reality through work, to accept discipline, to develop institutional loyalty...
...Which suggests that for the latter "hard work" did "pay off...
...In their attitudes toward money, sex, lawandorder, and authority, college and noncollege kids differ widely...
...So asked the Wall Street Journal in May 1970...
Vol. 18 • April 1971 • No. 2
