Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

On the other hand, the position of the middle-class boy becomes even more complex and pitiful, since he not only must face the fluctuating chronology of these developments to a greater degree but must free himself from his emotional dependence on his mother with little help from anyone. If his father tries to help (and he is the only one who is likely to try to do so), and insists that his son become a responsible and independent human being, the mother fights like a tigress to defend her son’s continued immaturity and dependence, accusing the husband of cruelty, of hatred for his son, and of jealousy of his son’s feeling for the mother. She does not hesitate to use the weapons that she has. They are many and powerful, including a “reluctant” and ambiguous “revelation” to the son that his father hates him. Any effort by the father to argue that true love must seek to help the son advance in maturity and independence, and that insistence that he avoid or postpone these advances might well be regarded as hatred rather than love, are usually blocked with ease. At this stage in the family history, emotional frustrations and confusions are generally at so high a level that it is fairly easy for mother and son to agree that black is white. “Momism” is usually triumphant for a more or less extended period, while normal adolescent rebellion becomes a wholesale rejection of the father and only much later a delayed effort at achieving emotional detachment from the mother.

The point of all this is that normal adolescent rebellion has become, in America today, a radical and wholesale rejection of parental values, including middle-class values, because of the protracted emotional warfare which now goes on in the middle-class home with teen-age children. The chief damage in the situation lies in the pervasive destruction of the adolescent middle-class boy and his alienation from the achieving aspects of middle-class culture. The middle-class girl, chiefly because she still tries to please her father, may continue to be a considerable success as an achiever, especially in academic life where her earlier successes make continuance of the process fairly easy. But the middle-class boy who rejects the achieving aspects of middle-class life often does so in academic matters that seem to him to be an alien and feminine world from the beginning. His rejection of this world and his unconscious yearning for academic failure arise from a series of emotional influences: (1) a desire to strike back at his father; (2) a desire to free himself from dependence on his mother and thus to escape from the feminine atmosphere of much academic life; and (3) a desire to escape from the endless academic road, going to age twenty-three or later, which modern technical and social complexities require for access to positions leading to high middle-class success. The lengthening of the interval of time between sexual awareness and the ending of education, from about two years in the 1880’s to at least ten or twelve years in the 1960’s, has set up such tensions and strains in the bourgeois American family that they threaten to destroy the family and are already in the process of destroying much of the middle-class outlook that was once so distinctive of the American way of life.

From this has emerged an almost total breakdown of communication between teenagers and their parents’ generation. Generally the adolescents do not tell their parents their most acute problems; they do not appeal to parents or adults but to each other for help in facing such problems (except where emotionally starved girls appeal to men teachers); and, when any effort is made to talk across the gap between the generations, words may pass but communication does not. Behind this protective barrier a new teenage culture has grown up. Its chief characteristic is rejection of parental values and of middle-class culture. In many ways this new culture is like that of African tribes: its tastes in music and the dance, its emphasis on sex play, its increasingly scanty clothing, its emphasis on group solidarity, the high value it puts on interpersonal relations (especially talking and social drinking), its almost total rejection of future preference and its constant efforts to free itself from the tyranny of time. Teenage solidarity and sociality and especially the solidarity of their groups and subgroups are amazingly African in attitudes, as they gather nightly, or at least on weekends, to drink “cokes,” talk interminably in the midst of throbbing music, preferably in semidarkness, with couples drifting off for sex play in the corners as a kind of social diversion, and a complete emancipation from time. Usually they have their own language, with vocabulary and constructions so strange that parents find them almost incomprehensible. This Africanization of American society is gradually spreading with the passing years to higher age levels in our culture and is having profound and damaging effects on the transfer of middle-class values to the rising generation. A myriad of symbolic acts, over the last twenty years, have served to demonstrate the solidarity of teen culture and its rejection of middle-class values. Many of these involve dress and “dating customs,” both major issues in the Adolescent-Parental Cold War.

In the days of Horatio Alger, the marks of youthful middle-class aspiration were such obvious symbols as well-polished shoes, a necktie and suit coat, a clean-shaved face and well-cut hair, and punctuality. For almost a generation now, teen culture has rejected the necktie and suit coat. Well-polished shoes gave way to dirty saddle shoes, and these in turn to “loafers” and thong sandals. Shaving became irregular, especially when schools were not in session; haircuts were postponed endlessly, with much parental-adolescent bickering. Fewer and fewer young people carried watches, even when they lived, as on a college campus, in fairly scheduled lives.

“Dating,” as part of adolescent rebellion, became less and less formalized. The formal middle-class dance of a generation ago, arranged weeks ahead and with a dance program, became almost obsolete. Everything has to be totally “casual” or today’s youth rejects it. By 1947 a dance program (listing the dances in numbered order with the girl’s partner for each written down) was obsolete. “Going steady,” which meant dancing only with the boy who invited her, became established, a complete rejection of the middle-class dance whose purpose was to provide the girl with a maximum number of different partners in order to widen her acquaintance with matrimonial possibilities.

“Going steady,” like much of adolescent culture of the “jive” era, was derived from the gangster circles of south Chicago and was first introduced to middle-class knowledge through George Raft movies of the 1930’s. It was satirized in a now forgotten popular song of the 1920’s called “I Want to Dance with the Guy What Brung Me.” But by 1947 it was the way of life of much of adolescent America. As a consequence, teenage couples at high school dances “sat out” most of the evening in bored silence or chatted in a desultory fashion with friends of the same sex. The “jive” language of the period also had a south-Chicago origin and has been traced back, to a large extent, to a saloon run by a certain local oracle called “Hep” early in the twentieth century.

Fortunately, “going steady” was only a brief, if drastic, challenge to parental attitudes, and was soon replaced by tribal gregariousness and tolerant sexual broad-mindedness, which might be called “clique going,” since it involved social solidarity (sometimes sexual promiscuity) within a small group, usually of ten or less. This became, to their adults, the “teenage gang,” which still thrives, but never in a very formal way in middle-class circles as it does in lower-class ones. Two casualties of this process are sexual jealousy and sexual privacy, both of which have largely disappeared among many upper-middle-class young people. In some groups sex has become a purely physiological act, somewhat like eating or sleeping. In others, sexual experience is restricted to loved ones, but since these youths love many persons (or even love everyone) this is much less of a restriction than it might seem to a middle-class mind. Generally a sharp distinction is made between “loving someone” (which justifies sex) and being “in love” with someone (which justifies monogamous behavior).