No, I’m not becoming a Mormon. But I had intended to get into the habit of every Sunday posting some interesting book excepts or extended quotes from some of the great writers and thinkers in this field, but I didn’t get to it last night. So instead of yesterday, I present something to you one day late. (get it, latter-day? har har har)

Anyways, this is an excerpt from an interview I did with Mike Males back in May 2004. The whole thing, pending Mike’s approval, will be posted on the NYRA site and Youth Rights Network soon.

Alex - How does the theory put forward by Margaret Mead in “Culture and Commitment” play into getting that power when she supposes that coming into the modern age in recent decades society is progressing at such a rate that the culture comes from the youth to the adults and the technology and the future comes from the youth to the adults. How will that give youth the power necessary to take back the rights they need?

Mike - Mead is actually one of my older life role models, because she was tremendously optimistic about adults, she was actually an optimist. Her point in “Culture and Commitment” as you already explained is that in societies that humans lived in for 99.9% of our existence, life was pretty static. Adults could predict how the culture was going to be, what the skills the kids needed that the kids were going to turn out more or less like the adults. The ancestor was really the model for all of them and society would replicate that. And that’s no longer true in societies of rapid social change, much of what the ancestors know is completely irrelevant, much of what the grandparents know is completely irrelevant, and half or two-thirds of what the parents know is irrelevant.

Kids are really growing up as the models of the new society. That’s going to be really rough on adults, and she acknowledged that and went through all the litanies we see today, that adults do, this harkening back to this supposedly wonderful past, which is sanitized in our minds, its legendary, it never existed. And this great fear and hostility toward younger people and this tendency to see teenagers, as she puts it, as an invading army, that’s really assaulting all of our values, and all the things we hold sacred. When really all they are doing is representing the society to come, in the future. Which could be good or bad, but in any sense is largely neutral, its what they make of it, what we make of it. And so her book is very cogent in its arguments about what the problem is, the new problem confronting humanity. How do you prepare kids, how do adults then prepare kids for a society that’s going to be very different from the one adults grew up in.

She was very optimistic, she thought adults had the capacities to do that. That by virtue of being grown up we have the experience, there’s certainly nothing wrong with our mental capacity to absorb the fact that kids of the future are going to be very different from those of the past, and she argued we have to get over the idea of teaching kids what to think because that’s appropriate to older societies – static societies, but how to think. And what kind of questions do they need to ask, what kinds of flexibilities do they need. Especially since kids themselves – see this is our revenge – their kids will be very different from them. So adults don’t have to be so upset and angry about this, social change is probably a good thing, and certainly can be made into a good thing. She was very optimistic about this.

I’m not very optimistic because I don’t believe, especially in this most progressive state, and I mean this as in the pace of social change in California where we have seen dramatic increases in racial diversity so that California is now the first major industrial entity to have no racial or ethnic majority. I mean this is a place where you have major representations of the populations of all five major continents. And has really been a scene of innovation and a great deal of social responsibility in the past in terms of seeing that government will provide for education. Seeing that totally disintegrate over the last 30 years as adults here seem unable to handle the pace of both social change and demographic change. So that Mead’s flaw was in not realizing how self-destructive we would be and self-destructive our institutions, our major, most responsible institutions would be who have done nothing but fan fear and to try to profit from adult’s fear and anger and resentment over this social change and this demographic change and to try and make it appear that youth are menacing, and anything about the future has got to be worse than the past. Every new development has these seeds of horror and destruction in them, from the Internet, which was one dark forest out there of terrible threats and dangers. Kids themselves are a menace. It’s just disgusting.

I really admire Mead for not predicting that. First of all what good would it have done? She would have been right, but it’s a terrible outlook. So I was really glad she held adults up to a higher standard – “sure we can do this, adults of the past didn’t exactly have an easy time either maybe they had that particular predictable aspect of their culture that it wasn’t changing within their generation and becoming unrecognizable but they had a lot of other difficulties that they had to overcome – ice ages and stuff like that. But we can overcome this challenge.” Her book is very short, very optimistic, and says we can raise unknown children for an unknown world. But we haven’t done that. We’ve gone the opposite direction, we almost seem to be, here in California electorally trying to force the state into a 1950’s mold that never existed, and wouldn’t want to go back to even if we could.

First of all I don’t know why Republicans are pushing it because it was a time of much higher taxes than we have now, and much greater state spending for things like education and social services – all the things they refuse to spend money on now. So I think basically what this recalcitrant, this retro movement is now is trying to forcibly restore this presumed stable past in which the adults knowledge had some meaning. Dominant meaning. “Parents, talk to your kids about violence, or drugs, or stuff like that” what this means is: “Force them into your mold. Your knowledge is completely appropriate for them.” And its not. And that’s one of the difficulties; if current adult values were transmitted to the kids it would be a disaster.

By the way I don’t think the term “kids” is insulting, I hope nobody takes it that way. Because I don’t think it’s an insult to refer to someone as younger, though we do consider it that way. No woman wants to be called a girl; no man wants to be called a boy, etc. But to me those are not insulting terms. I hope that no one takes them that way when I use them.

I don’t know how younger people can come to the conclusion that they want culture to change and make the change. It’s almost asking too much. Even in a culture of rapid social change for younger people to make that kind of dual assumption at the same time they are growing up. So again its something I need to do much more listening about, I don’t have the answer.

As the Ewoks say: “That guy’s wise.”

This entry was posted on Monday, October 24th, 2005 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Youth Rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.