A STUDY OF THE GENERATION GAP

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32494, 2 January 1971, Page 10

A STUDY OF THE GENERATION GAP

Culture and Commitment —a Study of the Generation Gap. By Margaret Mead. The Bodley Head. 99 pp. “We have moved into a present for which none of us was prepared by our understanding of the past . . . and we are all immigrants in time.” Margaret Mead, at the age of 70, has not forgotten the elegant use of words. Many who are now middle-aged or beyond and involved in sociology and anthropology feel a warm glow whenever her name is mentioned for it was she who, perhaps above all others, introduced us to the romance and humanity of discovery of the customs and taboos of primitive peoples. There have been many more scientific writers than she, many whose contributions have caused greater strides forward in the knowledge of mankind, but no-one who was better able to make a native village come to life, and the picture of the shy Samoan maiden and her consort disappearing under the palm trees lingers for decades after the palm trees have been cut down to make an airfield.

In her latest book based on a series of lectures she gave in 1969 the author still weaves backwards and forwards in her interpretation of the present based upon her studies in the 1920 s of the primitive past. Whenever she harks back, the poetry is still there as; “In the Village when a new home was built, the response of each person who passed it registered ... something that had not been here a few days before and yet was in no way startling or surprising. The response was as slight as that of the blind to the different feel of sunlight sifted through trees with different kinds of leaves, yet it was there.” On this primitive society model she examines our present culture whilst realising that “this model has been both overextended and under-differentiated during the last 25 years.” With this reservation about generalisations Margaret Mead claims that 20 years ago the central problem for young people was finding their identity while today it is finding commitment. She is completely optimistic, but in a constructive way, pointing out that when optimism is displayed by members of a whole community who rebuild their homes on the slopes of an active volcano, it can lead to world-wide destruction whilst, on the other hand, displayed by single leading individuals it can illumine the world. Moving on to her main thesis the author divides cultures into three different types, the post-figurative in which both children and adults learn primarily from their forbears. The co-figurative in which both children and adults learn from their peers, and pre-figurative in which adults learn also from their children. In the post-figurative culture we need a group of people consisting of at least three generations who take their culture for granted without questioning. In a co-figurative culture old and young alike assume that it is natural for the behaviour of each new generation to differ from that of preceding generations, but the children are reared to expectation of “change in changelessness” and should there be a sudden change in the kind of values, this is viewed as a threat by the parents.

Today, we have the pre-figurative culture in its earliest stages. Until very

recently the elders could say “You know I have been young and you have never been old” but today young people can reply "You have never been young in the world I am young in and you never can be.” Thus with the emergence of a world community, multiplication of agricultural production whilst at the same time dangerously modifying the ecology of the planet, and with the release of women from reproductivity as ail very important factors, there are in fact no elders who know what those who have been reared in the last 20 years know about the world in which they were born. “We have no descendants, as our children have no forebears” from the view of understanding of the conflicts of present-day living. The unborn child then must become a symbol of what life will be like. We do not know how this unborn child will turn out and we can only construct an environment in which a child can be safe and can grow and discover himself in this unknown world. We must create new models for adults 1

who can teach their children not what to learn but how to learn and not to what they should be committed but the value of commitment itself. We must then focus on the future . . . “and so on children whose capacities are least known and whose choices must be left open.”

Margaret Mead concludes that she considers she was seven decades ahead of her time, because of a happy childhood which left her to grow into an open and free future so that she is now able to insist because of this background that we can and must change into a pre-figurative culture. When young people now turn to her and say “You belong to us,” she replies “No . . . only because you are currently in favour of things that I have been working on for 40 years.” This is a most enjoyable book, told by one of the great after-dinner speakers of our time who has been accused of doing her field studies mainly to collect anecdotes. Some of her studies have given an opportunity for learned critics to point out faulty logic and over-enthusiastic observation of isolated vents, but she has by her very over-emphasis shown such factors as the cultural determination of the sexual role, and the complete diversity of human nature based on conditioning in childhood.

Margaret Mead ends her book with a fragment of a poem she wrote in the 19205: “The unremembering young have visions seen” and this reader may say that, as she looks back on her lifetime of enjoyment of people everywhere, the remembering old can continue to see visions.