Passing the Torch

“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans”

John Kennedy spoke these words in his inaugural address on January 20, 1961. For most of recorded history, the passing of the torch meant that each son would do exactly what his father did, and each daughter would do exactly as her mother did. In Fiddler on the Roof the opening song is called “Tradition” and it tells of the timeless roles of each part of the family:

1. The Papa: Who, day and night, must scramble for a living, feed a wife and children, say his daily prayers? And who has the right, as master of the house, to have the final word at home?
2. The Mama: Who must know the way to make a proper home, A quiet home, a kosher home? Who must raise the family and run the home, so Papa’s free to read the holy book?
3. The sons: At three, I started Hebrew school. At ten, I learned a trade. I hear they’ve picked a bride for me. I hope she’s pretty.
4. The Daughters: And who does Mama teach to mend and tend and fix, preparing me to marry whoever Papa picks?

In a world that changes slowly, it is easy to pass on the knowledge of the old in terms of skills, beliefs and values to the young. Everything the young need to survive is available to them. But today’s world changes with light speed.  Few of us earn our living doing the same job as our parents did. Our marriage choices are no longer made for us. The very idea of the family is changing.  We have witnessed the death of the extended family and are witnessing the sickness of the nuclear family. We no longer live in a world where a “village” raises our children. With the majority of both parents working, the lion’s share of child raising (at least in quantitative terms) is contracted out to schools and daycare.

With family structures changing, with a declining role for the church, and with more children being raised, at least in part by commercial parents, it should not be surprising that it is much more difficult to pass on values from generation to generation, and that consequently our beliefs and values are changing more rapidly than they ever have.

Take religion, for example.  According to Tobin’s “religiosity index” (presented in chart below) religion in America peaked around 1960, declined by 1.2% per year between 1960 and 1973, hardly changed at all from 1973 until 2000, and then began to decline precipitously (2.9% per year from 2000-2012).

Or look at the family. By many measures –divorce, age of marriage, number of children–the structure of the family is changing dramatically. Since 1960 the median age of marriage has been increasing by 0.5% per year. Anna Swanson presents Randy Olsen’s data on marriage and divorce in the United States (see chart below). Between 1860 and the 1940s marriages averaged about 10 per 1,000 people, while divorces slowly increased over the same period from less than 1 per 1,000 to around 3 per 1,000. Everything changed with WWII; the end of that war saw a tremendous spike in marriages as the GIs came home and a concomitant increase in divorces. The most striking fact in these data is the rapid rate of decline of marriages from 1980 onward. Marriages declined by 1.5% per year from 1980 to 2010.

One more piece of data: in 1970 forty percent of all families in the U.S. were two parents with children; by 2013 that number had declined to 19%.

These dramatic changes in the structure of the family makes it harder for traditional American values to be passed from parents to children.

Cultural Drift can occur because people change their minds or because the makeup of a population changes. On nearly every cultural marker –religious, political, behavioral, family formation — younger Americans have much different views than older Americans.  For example, while all Americans show declining religious commitment (see chart below), that is particularly true of Millennials.

Why are behaviors changing so rapidly? Perhaps a bit of self-reflection might help. I (born in 1943) am different from my parents (one born in 1914 and the other in 1918) because:

• I was educated to a higher level than they were.
• Thus, I was exposed to more differences in culture, both historic and ethnic, than they were.
• The pop culture of my generation was vastly different from that of my parents in terms of music, television (they had none growing up) and movies.
• The values of the 1960s when I was coming of age was much different from those of the 1930s when my parents were coming of age.
• I read more and different books than they did.
• My friends had different values and behaviors than my parents.
• I travelled much more than they did and had a much more diverse set of friends.

Thus, as our worlds open up, it’s likely that our adherence to what we learned at our parents’ knee will be threatened by the beliefs of the culture around us. With the rapidly changing cultural norms, the distance between what we learned as a child and what is believed by the adult world we are in, grows very difficult to bridge.

Happily, it may be true that while behaviors change, core values do not. If one is taught to have concern for others, that sometimes expresses itself in acceptance of different behaviors that one disagrees with, such as homosexuality. Thus a recent study found “In the cross-generational study, millennials stood out for their clear, shared vision of what kindness and thoughtfulness mean during the holidays and their commitment to going above and beyond to demonstrate it.”

Chuck Underwood in giving marketing advice, wrote the following: “Millennials have a sense of selflessness that leads them to engage in social actions that make a difference. ‘They have a strong core value of teamwork,’ Underwood notes. ‘We sometimes call them ‘Generation Give.”’ Because they want to be part of something larger than themselves, ‘Millennials are active and engaged. They are joiners.’” 

The fact that Millennials have behaved differently from their parents, does not mean they have rejected their parents’ fundamental teachings of the value of kindness, empathy and selflessness. In the end it is these values that determine what kind of society we have.

This is such an important topic that I intend to dedicate the next two posts to the issues of “What makes Millennials Different?” and “The undeclared Generation War between Millennials and Boomers.”