ON NOT LOSING ONE'S COOL ABOUT THE YOUNG

A RUSSIAN revolutionary once suggested that everyone over 25 should be shot. His proposal was not adopted, but he might feel reasonably comfortable in the U.S. today. Nearly half of all Americans are now 25 or under, and the rest of the population, while not yet in danger of being liquidated, appears rather nervous and definitely on the defensive.

The situation is not exactly new. The man who first said "I don't know what the younger generation is coming to" probably died several thousand years ago. But Americans in the mid-1960s seem to have more reason than ever to lose their cool about the young. FBI statistics tell them that youngsters under 25 account for 73.4% of the arrests for murders, rapes, larcenies and other major crimes, and cause 31.5% of all traffic fatalities. Youth stages demonstrations in support of the country's enemies. Youth parades with placards of four-letter words. Youth scandalizes proud suburbs with grass parties--grass being one of the hippiest synonyms for marijuana. The latest campus fad seems to be underground "anti-universities" with courses in such subjects as revolution, "Search for the Authentic Sexual Experience" and hallucinogenic drugs. Boys look like girls, girls look like boys, and the songs they sing are not of love and laughter, but sour, self-pitying whines about how awful things are in a culture that supplies them with about $12 billion worth of such essential equipment as cars, clothes, acne lotions and hair sprays. The blaring jukebox message to the adult world seems to be: "Get oft of my cloud . . ."

Even liberal intellectuals can be shocked at the frequent failure of the young to take ideas seriously. Writes Critic Leslie Fiedler, 48: "Not only do they reject the Socratic adage that the unexamined life is not worth living, since for them precisely the unexamined life is the only one worth enduring at all. But they also abjure the Freudian one: 'Where id was, ego shall be,' since for them the true rallying cry is, 'Let id prevail over ego, impulse over order'--or 'Freud is a fink!' "

Freud is not the only fink. Marx and the Communists, at least in their Moscow incarnations, are just as Out with the new radicals, who prefer Peking and Havana. Complaining that the young are not really interested in ideology but only in protest for the sake of protest, Editor Irving Kristol, 42, notes that the same middle-aged critics like himself who so fervently condemned "the silent generation" of the '50s "are now considerably upset and puzzled at the way students are 'misbehaving' these days. One wants the young to be idealistic, perhaps even somewhat radical, possibly even a bit militant--but not like this! It used to be said that the revolution devours its children. It now appears that these children have devoured the revolution."

The Teen-Age International

This, of course, is a picture of a minority, and a noisy, one at that; the majority of American youth would say, "Not me." But the youth that makes the noise sets the tone, and the tone remains significant--and unique in comparison with the rest of the world. The noisy, "alienated" young are an American monopoly at the moment.

The youth of Britain and France have the same blue-jeaned bottoms and fright-wig haircuts as their U.S. contemporaries, and they dig the same big beat and atonal balladry. Still, the Teen-Age International is largely confined to matters of style; underneath, European youth today seems less discontented and considerably more cowed by the adult world. In Germany and Italy, the young are just too busy cashing in on their new prosperity to protest against much of anything. In Soviet Russia, while society is changing and the young show signs of restlessness, youth by and large remains earnestly conformist. In Japan, despite occasional student riots organized by the left, the students' competitive drudgery makes even the American race for college seem relaxed by comparison; a Japanese youngster who fails to get into a university is called a ronin, the term for the pathetic samurai who wandered about without a master.

U.S. parents and teachers who may hanker for a bit more obedience and less obstreperousness from their own young should take comfort in the recollection that things have been worse. Riot and rebellion are a student tradition in the Western world; university records from the Middle Ages abound in accounts of pitched battles, rapes and homicides. A proclamation of 1269 denounced the scholars of Paris who "by day and night atrociously wound and slay many, carry off women, ravish virgins, and break into houses."

Britain's illustrious public schools suffered repeated student rebellions in the 18th and 19th centuries. At Winchester in 1793, after stoning the assistant headmaster with marbles, the boys locked him up overnight in the dining hall with the warden and a teacher. When the high sheriff was appealed to the next day, he refused help because the boys had firearms and were getting ready to defend the Outer Gate by flinging flagstones down on the police. Harvard and Princeton experienced numerous such episodes. In 1788 the situation at Harvard was so bad that Professor Eliphalet Pearson kept what he called a Journal of Disorders. "In the hall at breakfast this morning," he recorded on Dec. 9, "bisket, tea cups, saucers & a knife thrown at tutors. At evening prayers the lights were all extinguished by powder and lead." A partial list of college casualties during this period includes one undergraduate dead in a duel at South Carolina College and another at Dickinson, several students shot at Ohio's Miami University, a professor killed at the University of Virginia, and the president of Mississippi's Oakland College stabbed to death by a student.

All this past history suggests that Americans, in their tendency to idealize youth, often forget what it is really like.

The Invention of Youth

Society's important political, moral and intellectual changes, according to U.C.L.A. Historian Eugen Weber, have always been brought about by that section of the population that was "most available." Sometimes it was the nobility, as in the curbing of absolute monarchy, sometimes the rich, as in the rise of mercantilism, sometimes the bourgeois intellectuals, as in the French Revolution. In recent times, Weber holds, the most available group for rebellion has been the young, with more time--and certainly more energy--than anyone else.

Before the industrial revolution, "youth" could hardly be said to exist at all. In primitive societies, children become full-fledged members of the tribe in one painful and often hazardous initiation, which compresses--and purges--the terror of entering adult life. In Europe until well into the 18th century, children were both indulged and ignored. Medieval artists even seemed ignorant of what a child looked like; they habitually painted them as small adults. A 12th century miniature illustrating Jesus' injunction to "suffer the little children to come unto me" shows Christ surrounded by eight undersized men. Before the 17th century, a child passed directly into the adult world between the ages of five and seven. Schoolchildren carried weapons, which they were supposed to check at the schoolroom door. Marriages often took place in childhood. Youngsters drank heavily and even wenched according to their abilities. Montaigne wrote that "A hundred scholars have caught the pox before getting to their Aristotle lesson."

At the same time, society firmly kept the young in their place. In times when life as well as education was far shorter than today, they often made history at an age when the modern young are still working for their degrees; Edward the Black Prince was 16 when he won the battle of Crecy, Joan of Arc was 17 when she took Orleans from the English, and Ivan the Terrible was the same age when he hounded the boyars to death and had himself crowned czar. But for ordinary people, particularly under the long-prevalent guild system of apprentices and journeymen, life was a slow progression toward experience and eventual reward.

In the 17th century came the beginnings of the modern idea of the family with the child at its center. With greater concern for children and more schooling came a new stage of life between childhood and adulthood: adolescence, a new combination of weal and woe that has profoundly altered human institutions and attitudes.

If adolescence had an inventor, it was Rousseau, who was cynical about man in civilization: "At ten he is led by cakes, at twenty by a mistress, at thirty by amusements, at forty by ambition, and at fifty by avarice. When does he make wisdom his sole pursuit?" Rousseau saw wisdom in nature. Against the traditional Christian notion that children, scarred at birth by original sin, must be civilized through education, he felt that they were really innocent and that they are best educated through the emotions. In Emile, in 1762, he advised: "Keep your child's mind idle as long as you can."

Romantic Alienation

The young thus "educated" by the emotions took stage center in the romantic era, when the glorious dreams of the French Revolution--and their bloody, reactionary demise --turned youth toward an eccentric sentimentality. "They found satisfaction in ideals," wrote Madame de Stael, "because reality offered them nothing to satisfy their imaginations." Goethe intended his Werther as a warning to this mooning generation, but the young character who committed suicide for unrequited love became the hero of romanticism. The dirty speech movement of that day was suicide. It was, as Princeton Historian James Billington points out, the first major appearance of alienated youth.

Just as Rousseau had provided the ideological basis for adolescence, the industrial revolution provided the practical one: the factories needed the young as workers. Compulsory education was sold to the House of Commons largely as a device to keep the growing number of unemployed agricultural workers under 15 from "idling in the streets and wynds; tumbling about in the gutters; selling matches, running errands; working in tobacco shops, cared for by no man." The time spent in school fitted them for jobs in the new industrial world, and the young acquired greater economic importance than ever before. On the Continent, they also began to perform an entirely new political role in the liberal revolutions of 1848. They manned the barricades--against Louis Philippe in France, against King Frederick William in Prussia, against Metternich in Austria. They set up a quasi-revolutionary government at the University of Vienna, issued proclamations and organized an Academic Legion uniformed in blue coats, red-black-and-gold sashes and scarlet-lined cloaks.

Although the young rebels were brought back into line quickly enough, the European student remained a political force that reached a climax in the youth movements, both Fascist and Communist, between the world wars. Yet throughout all this, Europe refused to take the young more seriously than absolutely necessary. Until after World War II, the European social pattern closely resembled the ancient Chinese formula, according to which a man married at 30 and continued his learning, was first appointed to office at 40, promoted, if successful, at 50, and retired at 70. Disraeli might proclaim that "almost everything that is great has been done by youth." But the vast majority agreed instead with Lord Chesterfield, who remarked, "Young men are apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are apt to think themselves sober enough."

It was different in the U.S. From America's beginning, youth was not a shortcoming but a virtue, not a time of preparation to be got through but a glorious Eden to be prolonged and preserved. Americans do not really want to keep the young in their place; they expect that the young will stay there out of their own essentially good nature. America's alltime young hero is Huck Finn, but not in the role of the brave rebel which serious critics (including T. S. Eliot) have cast him in, but in the safe and comfortable role of a backwoods Penrod or Andy Hardy--the eternally lovable bad boy. Until very recently, the sheltered and privileged American young gladly went along with that role. Their hell-raising was equally far removed from Werther's despair and the political barricades. The U.S. was thus enabled to go on worshiping youth without really facing the traits of youth that all other civilizations have accepted as inevitable--rebelliousness, moodiness, shifting passions for shifting causes. Americans want to deny the basic conflict, not to say war, between youth and age. Thus when the young do flare up, their elders are surprised, hurt and disappointed.

In part, this situation was fostered by the immigrant nature of American society. The children of the immigrants were the pathfinders in a new world, and taught their elders its ways. This contributed to the child-centered--some say childridden--nature of American life. More recently, what has caused American youth to live increasingly in a separate enclave or "subculture" is the ever-lengthening education process. In no other civilization have so many of the young been kept so long from the responsibilities of adult life. This prolongation of the school years, argues British Sociologist Frank Musgrove, is partly a ploy by the adult world to keep the young out of competition as long as possible, for, he asserts, the "mature of Western society" regard the young "with hatred." With people living longer and retaining their vigor into advanced age, there is certainly less disposition by the mature to make way--although "hatred" seems overstating the case. Still, the diagnosis may yet prove accurate, unless the older generation keeps its cool about the young.

Search for Fidelity

Every parent should know that his child judges him; but he should also know that the judgment is that of a child. The U.S. has alternated between taking the judgment of its children not seriously enough--and too seriously. What is regarded as today's youthful nihilism is undoubtedly much less alarming than it seems. Whatever political causes the apolitical American young managed to find before have virtually disappeared--hence the concentration on the few remaining ones, such as civil rights and Viet Nam. Among the young bored by prosperity and consensus government, some observers discern a special group, the "New Puritans," who may be toting a protest placard alongside an anti-everything beatnik, but with an entirely different altitude inside.

Sociologist David Riesman agrees; he finds that service careers--schoolteaching, social work, government--are increasingly popular with undergraduates, and many of them are working at them part time while still in college, "trying to show that they are capable of human concern," says Riesman, "even while they are competing for grades." And Harvard Professor Erik H. Erikson believes that youth's main virtue and need is "fidelity"--to a worthwhile cause. Until that object of fidelity is found and tested, rebelliousness may simply be "a period of delay, a moratorium."

It is difficult to do justice to the young without being alarmist about their failings, or sentimental about their charms, or condescending about their rawness. The dialogue between experience and naivete, between "we-know-better" and "we-don't-care," is in a sense impossible, because it is eternally carried on in two different languages. In this dialogue, youth is bound to have the last word--but only by the time youth itself is no longer young. In the face of this ultimately common destiny, Robert Louis Stevenson struck perhaps the best note of loving humor when he said: "Prudence is not a deity to cultivate in youth. Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other both in mind and body; to try the manners of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verse, run a mile to see a fire."

But it still matters where the fire is, and who set it.

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