'Generation next' - Thought Leader

Some people believe that things never really change in society — there are several proverbs which attest to this deep-seated belief, such as: “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” This is not true, of course — there was a fundamental change in the transition from the ancient Greek and Roman world to the Christian and Muslim Middle Ages, for instance, and again from the latter to the Modern era via the European Renaissance. The most fundamental change in thinking about the relation between humans and reality happened with the 18th-century Kantian “Copernican Revolution” in thought, though, where there was a switch from a “God’s eye view” to a subject-centred, transcendental point of view — something the consequences of which are still being worked out in language-oriented poststructuralist thinking.

But these are fundamental changes in worldview and in philosophical accounts of our knowledge of the world — usually (Marx and Foucault would agree) material social changes precede these apparently fundamental conceptual changes, and prepare the way for later reflections on such social transformations. In this respect, it is worth noting that the likes of mainstream magazines, such as TIME, sometimes come up with really important insights. Take the latest edition of TIME, the annual special issue on “10 Ideas for the next 10 years”, for instance.

If one reads the ten essays — all by knowledgeable authors in their respective fields — carefully, especially with some of the important publications of the last decade in mind, they enable one to form a kind of mental map of what may have been perceived as quite innocent, inconsequential social changes until now.
To me the most significant of the ten essays is titled “The dropout economy”, by Reihan Salam, which offers a perceptive analysis of the significance of the comparatively high dropout rate among American high school students, by linking it with the more general phenomenon of what Salam calls “ … experimentation in new ways to learn and new ways to live”.

Candidly admitting that this kind of behaviour would seem “irrational from a middle-class perspective”, s/he points out that it is quite rational in difficult circumstances for some fundamental shifts in economic demands and behaviour to occur on the part of a growing number of people — so much so that work may assume a novel, unfamiliar shape. This will probably go hand in hand with the abandonment of traditional institutions which are increasingly viewed with distrust among so-called “millennials”.

Salam continues by inviting readers to imagine a future world where people have switched from dependence on the electricity grid to inexpensive portable fuel cells for home and vehicle use, where commercial-industrial agriculture makes way for alternative ways of food-production by networking farmers using green technologies and ancient farming methods, and where an “underground”, untaxed economy of co-ops and communes emerges, which not only resists the state as we know it, but simultaneously evinces the formation of new forms of community.

In addition to replacing familiar, single-family private homes with multiple families and singles co-habiting in communal homes, characterised by hybrid kinship networks and shared living spaces such as kitchens, these communities would become the spaces for new, home-based forms of work (something that Marshall McLuhan foresaw decades ago already) in their quest for self-sufficiency.

As Salam sees the unfolding future, these “gated” communities are likely to grow larger and increasingly independent from existing municipalities (even introducing “encrypted digital currencies” to avoid being taxed — something obliquely reminiscent of the community of Orania in South Africa), effectively seeking their own version of communal happiness.

Accompanying these social changes, it is probable that home-schooling will burgeon, making increasing use of technologically enabled distance education in an effort to reduce costs and, no doubt, introduce new educational content in the face of institutions that are no longer regarded with confidence by many Americans (a theme addressed at length in another of these essays: “The twilight of the elites — why America has entered the post-trust era.” Something not only applicable to the US, in my view).

Interestingly, given the growing mistrust in the state, the corporate world, the church, public schools and so on, Salam anticipates that the coming social transformation towards “resilient communities” is likely to be more anti-political than political — what Salam calls a kind of “broadband socialism” where the production-infrastructure will be owned by the entire community. To the degree that such a socio-economic shift can prove to be viable to those who participate in it, confidence in their own ability to solve the kind of problems that traditional society has not been able to address successfully, will enhance the revival of the “commons” in the sense of “working in common” — something thematised and adumbrated by Hardt and Negri in their books, Empire (2001) and Multitude (2005). In fact, many of these developments were anticipated by Hardt and Negri with remarkable prognostication.

Salam perceives signs of these looming changes in a variety of phenomena that are already there — the growing number of families that have opted for life on the road rather than in the cages of suburban homes; the number of high school leavers who claim a “gap year” before college (which they see as a costly but hollow status marker); and the remarkable socio-economic fact that today, more than one-third of American employees live with their parents. And even if some of these would leave in the event of an economic upswing, many will probably continue living there, working out alternatives to the conventional “rat race” by means of social media networking and new forms of economic production.

This perceptive essay by Salam resonates with several of the others, notably “The twilight of the elites” (mentioned earlier), “In defence of failure”, “Bandwidth is the new black gold” and “The next American century”, as well as with Nancy Gibbs’s wonderfully insightful back-page essay, “Generation next”, which deserves some comment.

Gibbs reminds her readers of the huge gap that opened up between the younger and the older generation around the time of the Vietnam war — when the death of four unarmed students at the hands of the US National Guard at Kent State ignited a broad rebellion against authority on the part of young people (consonant with what was happening in Europe). At the time, an opinion poll among the young indicated 74% agreement with the idea of a generation gap.

Surprisingly — she goes on to say — although today’s younger generation are, by all accounts, much closer to their parents, maintaining regular contact with them and even admitting that the latter’s moral values are generally superior to their own, a corresponding poll indicates that an even larger percentage (79%) of the youth perceive such a generation gap.

Why then this ostensible distance? Gibbs’s answer is complex and interesting, and confirms some of Salam’s insights, discussed earlier.

For one thing, it is not radical political differences — like those in the 1970s — which divide young and old today. Millennials see the biggest difference in their own, as opposed to their parents’ use of, or relation with, technology (83% of them sleep with their cellphones close by). Citing social historian Neil Howe, Gibbs is quick to remind us that this is not merely a matter of children being shaped by technology, but also, more fundamentally perhaps, of children being shaped socially by the way they were brought up — “in a cocoon”, because parents were over-protective — so that they were thrown back on technology for the construction of communities (texting, tweeting, twittering, mxit-ing, e-mailing, chat-rooming etc).

The significant upshot of this is that, in Gibbs’s words: “They are the most likely of any generation to think that technology unites people rather than isolates them, that it is primarily a means of connection, not competition.” There is a lesson here for many people of the older generation, including myself, when I decry the tendency on the part of students, to use their cellphones for “connecting” with friends, instead of face-to-face communication, which I have always regarded as the most primordially satisfying way of communicating.

Young people seem to have discovered the meaning of “networking” in advanced technological terms, and it is striking that the metaphor of a “network” or “web” is also a point of connectivity between this generation and what contemporary biological science has uncovered in nature as an interconnected whole.
Gibbs goes on to list some other divisions, including the “hunger for community” (in contrast to the radical individualism of the post-war baby-boomers), expressed in (among other things) young people’s (52%) view that “being a good parent is most important to them, followed by having a successful marriage”; greater tolerance than their parents’; being “unconventionally conventional” (being as “spiritual” as any earlier generation, but largely lacking “official” religious affiliations) and the noteworthy fact that they exhibit far more hope for the future than their elders — and this despite debilitating wars and an economic recession that has impacted very badly on them.

Perhaps, she suggests, the millennial generation “knows something we don’t about the inventions that will emerge from their networked brains, the solutions that might arise from a generation so determined to bridge gaps and work as a team”. Clearly, Gibbs’s perception of the present situation in the US is consonant with that of Salam — and, dare I say, their views appear to me to apply to most of the globalised world, too, including South Africa, although the pace of such social change here is different, for historical reasons.

Still, these are social developments that one should not be blind to, lest they reach critical mass at a time when one is least prepared for the radical concrete changes that this might entail.