howestra

1. The newest generation may become as great as the "greatest"

In the popular eye, today's late-Generation-X college students have often looked bad. They have been accused of being apolitical. They have appeared to be mired in material things. They seem to have looked for the easy way even if it has meant cheating. Too many have needed remedial academic help or psychological crutches. Too many have indulged in too many alcoholic binges. Too many have played with sex, drugs, and violence as if they were toys.

Anyone upset by this popular (and skewed) portrait should cheer up. Whatever the facts about Generation X, born between 1961 and 1981, they are moving off the youth stage. Taking their place is the new Millennial generation born since 1982. In the view of Howe and Strauss (H&S), these "Millennials rising" will reverse the negative portrait of youth painted over the past couple of decades.

If national and world circumstances should go a certain way, H&S say that the Millennials will play a heroic role comparable to that of the GI Generation of World War II (Tom Brokaw's "greatest generation").

H&S acknowledge that their view runs counter to conventional wisdom. Typical critics of youth culture assume that it is evolving on a straight line. If abuse of drugs was bad among Boomers of the 1960s, such critics assume that it had to have worsened among Gen-Xers and that it will only get worse among Millennials. So too, pessimistic critics think, will all the other excesses of youth. H&S amass evidence and advance argument to contradict this gloomy outlook. In the matter of illegal drug use, for example, they report declines that bode well for the future. (205-6)

Their study of American generations some years ago persuaded H&S of a cyclic rather than a linear pattern of generational development. (They originally advanced this thesis in their book, Generations:The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 [New York: Morrow, 1991.]) What they found in their examination of the newest cohort of kids within a cyclic pattern leads to their surprisingly optimistic prediction. Millennials, they say, are preparing for a socially redeeming style of life that will change the nation and the world. They are breaking away from the familiar negative attitudes and behaviors of the past twenty years. Most significant, they are "running exactly counter to trends launched by the Boomers" who as kids created the social revolution of the 1960s. (7)

Indeed, the Boomers are the key to this story. Their belated discovery of the joys of parenthood by the early 1980s led to the demographic "echo." Their Millennial children are part of a huge new cohort outnumbering the original Boomers themselves. Because the later Boomers consciously decided that they wanted children, their Millennial offspring now have positive attitudes about themselves and about the environment their parents have created for them. This contrasts with the negative self-image of the middle generation, the "throw-away" Gen-Xers. Moreover, Boomers discovered that the deconstruction of social norms, their revolutionary generational project, provided a bad setting for the rearing of their precious kids. So, as H&S tell it, they have gone about creating a new protective environment for children, unprecedented in our history.

And what are the characteristics of the generation being nurtured in this environment? H&S find the Millennials optimistic. They are cooperative team players. They accept authority without resentment and think government can do what's right for them most of the time. They are not the neglected kids of a latchkey era; instead, "they're the most watched over generation in memory." They are smart and do gobs of homework under great pressure to perform. They believe in the future. Indeed, they are confident that they will be a major influence in making the future better. (6-10) They are conventional in that they believe social rules help. They are not turned off when teachers talk about values such as "honesty, caring, moral courage, patriotism, democracy, and the golden rule." (188)

Applying their insights on generational dynamics to the Millennials, H&S hold out an interesting national agenda for them. The authors predict that Millennials will work to correct the deconstruction of social norms performed by the Boomers. They will end the negativity and disengagement of the prior generation, the Gen-Xers. They will fill the positive role of social building being vacated by the generation that is now dying off, the GI generation. In sum:

[Millennials will] "rebel against the culture by cleaning it up, rebel against political cynicism by touting trust, rebel against individualism by stressing teamwork, rebel against adult pessimism by going positive, and rebel against societal ennui by actually getting a few things done." (316)

You want to say "Wow." The younger generation can't be all sugar and spice. And H&S acknowledge the limits to their generalizations. Young people face perilous problems in the fragmented state of our social order. And H&S admit their rosier predictions might not prove right. Like the GI generation whose role they will fill, Millennials will make commitments to rational actions for the good of the social order. H&S believe there is a dark underside to this "can-do" attitude. If disruptive world forces demand order and control, H&S believe that Millennials will heroically provide it--even possibly at the expense of civil rights and due process. In their zeal to correct things, they could even provoke a major world crisis that could work against the values of individualism and multiculturalism (shades of the leaders who took us to Vietnam).

However, the authors lean toward a positive outcome, captured in the subtitle of their book, which capitalizes on the current celebration of the generation that fought World War II--"the next great generation."

end of 1. The newest generation may become as great as the "greatest"

2. Maybe kids are incubating a new metanarrative

3. The end has come for the old breed of student

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2. Maybe kids are incubating a new metanarrative

When I apply H&S's predictions to the evolving state of our postmodern culture, some interesting possibilities come to mind.

The upheavals of the 1960s and their aftermath produced a set of beliefs and behaviors that aptly coalesce around the term "postmodernist." Among other fundamental changes of values, postmodernists famously have found it futile to perpetuate large narratives that pretend to direct our lives within a coherent and comprehensible vision of the world in process. They have discredited the modernist presumption that through reason or art or religious experience human beings could approach a depth of metaphysical meaning.

If you look at the rise of postmodernism through the prism of H&S's generational studies, you see Boomers and Gen-Xers producing it as a reaction to the modernist culture that reached its apogee in the hands of the GI generation. The GI generation has spent its mature years (unsuccessfully) resisting the postmodernist culture that Boomers and Gen-Xers created. And insofar as the young Millennials resemble their GI grandparents, they too, according to H&S, find themselves preparing to resist the essential postmodernist beliefs and behaviors that they have known since their birth.

H&S carefully deny that Millennials represent a return of the very same GI generation. Their cyclic paradigm of generational evolution takes in the reality that all generations "start from a different location in history--and face a different life challenge than today's older generations remember from their own youth." (214) Nevertheless, their paradigm puts each generation in a dialectical relationship with others in any four-generation series. And it confers on the first generation in a series of four a similar role to the one played by the first in a preceding series: that's why Millennials rising look so similar to the dying GIs. (Reminder: H&S identify the following sequence of generations: GI, Silent, Boomer, Generation-X, and Millennial.)

Millennials are indeed maturing in an extremely different "location in history" from that of the GIs. Their parents are handing them a "globalized" experience unlike anything that came before. These kids value cultural diversity and live in a new electronic "neighborhood" that girdles the globe by way of the Internet. They already know the power of the Internet to shape actions around the planet; and H&S seem right to say that it is a key to their future leadership. H&S document current global teen activism by way of the Internet, which is a prelude, they suggest, to what Millennials will do when they take charge. (300-302)

Postmodernists have talked us into dead-ends to history, paralyses in politics, and the foreclosure of progress toward any discernible betterment. While this "aporia" at the heart of contemporary cultural vision and philosophical idea has not stopped our popular life from going forward, few can deny the "end-of-something" feeling of the last thirty years.

In my reading on postmodernism, I've always assumed that some thinkers would eventually punch through this impasse. They would point us toward a new idea of the wholeness and direction of personal and collective experience. Or, perhaps they would rehabilitate modernist liberal values for a new day (this has been the objective of Jurgen Habermas). H&S do not specify the kind of intellectual rescue mission that will come from Millennials. Nevertheless, their model of generational dialectics reinforces my assumption. It is a reminder that the heart of postmodernist theory will die as postmodernists die. (Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions saw that the old paradigms become finally inoperative when their authors and advocates die.) The philosophical dead-ends will die with them, even though the argument remains unfinished. Texts by the likes of Jameson, Derrida, and Baudrillard already are beginning to sound dated. (Foucault, I think, may have more staying power.)

H&S make me realize that, contrary to Fukuyama's finding, history will continue. Millennials, they say, will want to chart a course toward world betterment; that will require them to theorize why they should expend their energy to that end, yielding a new vision of historical development. A new metanarrative of world destiny may thus be aborning in the minds of some brilliant Millennials even as they finish their first year of college in spring 2001.

end of 2. Maybe kids are incubating a new metanarrative

3. The end has come for the old breed of student

1. The newest generation may become as great as the "greatest"

3. The end has come for the old breed of student

I recently read a portrait of college students and their changed world at the turn of the millennium by a careful observer, Charles C. Schroeder, vice chancellor for student affairs at the University of Missouri at Columbia. (AGB Priorities, Number 15, Fall 2000).

The blurb to the article catches the essence of the portrait: "Today's students are a new breed. More students than ever are dealing with high levels of stress, demanding outside jobs, and various psychological disorders."

Schroeder draws on twenty years of research on students to compare the current crop with their predecessors. Today's students by comparison are passive, less tolerant of diversity, dependent on immediate gratification, lacking in basic reading and writing skills, and desirous of knowledge not for its own sake but for its immediate practicality. (5-6)

This portrait looks a lot more like the one in the popular eye today than that drawn of the Millennials by H&S. However, if H&S are right, college officials like Schroeder are in for a surprise. Today's students are not a new breed but the end of the old breed--they are Gen Xers who absorbed and internalized the cultural shocks created by their Boomer predecessors of the 1960s. This year's first-year students, the oldest Millennials, should already be manifesting distinctly different attitudes and behavior on campuses.

As empiricists, Howe and Strauss have studied a mass of cultural data through all American history to derive their paradigm of generations. I could not help thinking that this paradigm has something of Hegel's dialectical concept in it. But it is Hegel lite. It does not presume to see an ultimate outcome of the play and interplay of generations beyond four-generation cycles. Within each cycle, though, they have observed constants that give them confidence to predict what's ahead for the cycle at hand.

My granddaughter was born in 1990, about in the middle of the Millennial generation, whose births run, according to H&S, from 1982 to about 2002. Reading H&S has made me watch her with new interest. She thinks wearing a school uniform in her public school like her parochial school friends would be cool. She lugs a ton of books home on her back every day and does hours of homework. She routinely does team projects with classmates; she willingly accepts a grade that her teammates in part determine. She handles adults with courtesy. (She also has a bureau top full of cosmetics from the "Bath & Body Works," her own computer with a long list of IM--instant message--buddies, a repertoire of once-scandalous dance moves, and a voice inflection that I hear in every pre-teener on the Disney channel, which she watches daily.) Parenthetically, I also note that she alternately expresses love and hate for her mother in a timeless way that surely overrides patterns of cultural change.

In a fresh and innocent way, in brief, Lizzie gives me a living example of the Millennial behavior that H&S have been studying. They've pasted together the bits and pieces of her young life and given me a newly meaningful sense of what may become of her and her world. Perhaps it will be a world that allows itself to hope in a manner reminiscent of the world I remember as a kid. That may be good and it may not be--look at what happened to the world since I was Lizzie's age in 1942.

end of 3. The end has come for the old breed of student

1. The newest generation may become as great as the "greatest"

2. Maybe kids are incubating a new metanarrative