Generational Angst

Italian demographic statistics reveal an alarming drop in the national birth rate, alarming for the Catholic Church for all the usual reasons, perhaps, but also for the economy. The birth rate has fallen below the 2.1 children per woman which is needed for the Italian population to maintain itself, allowing for the difference immigration could make in the short term. In the relatively near future the demographic problem facing people under 70, to use a fairly arbitrary cut-off age, will focus on the problem of how to care for the disproportionate numbers of earlier generations who, thanks to medical advancement and better standards of living, are living ever longer. Here, in the UK, this is seen to be a source for real concern and a degree of ill-disguised resentment. The ‘baby boomer' generation is blamed for having had life handed to them on a plate from the cradle almost, but not quite, to the grave. The extent to which this judgment is valid is open to question as, for example, in regard to climate change. Did global warming begin in the 1960’s when that generation was starting to take full advantage of its new found freedom, both economic and sociological? Of course not.

Generational blame is bad for our collective social consciousness. Just as the older generations who bemoan the fact that things were so much better in their day, the same rubbishing of the post-war generation denies and wastes the hard won wisdom of that age. Despite the horrors of their times (Biafra and the Six Day War, to name only two) they were part of a tectonic shift in values and mores which gave many people today, women in particular, the freedom and opportunity which they have come to expect. They were, and remain, a generation which is not afraid to challenge the status quo.

The so-called ‘baby boomers’ were at the cutting edge of  the confrontation of capitalism with communism, of freedom with totalitarianism. They were the students marching to the Arc de Triomphe in 1968. They were in Washington and Central Park protesting the Vietnam war. They were the Greenham Common women, the Black Panthers and the Civil Rights movement. They were the makers of great films, the writers of great plays and novels, the creators of art which challenged and played with conventional ways of looking at space and colour and which was highly political. They were theologians who broke boundaries and challenged the Church.

Patronising that generation as ‘baby boomers’, a term which implies ‘superfluous and costly’, fosters a spirit of contempt between generations. Contempt between generations breaks down social cohesiveness because it destroys the possibility for the kind of trust which comes with honour given where it is deserved and due. Without trust, and without honour, there is no wisdom. Learning becomes impossible because there is no one to learn from. Where one generation despises and distrusts another, that generation is left alone to rediscover what it needs for its own spiritual, as well as physical, survival. We cannot begin our life as a world and as a society all over again every fifty years or so. There has to be something understood and passed on which is only learned through a willingness to honour and learn from the generation that has gone before.

Perhaps the difficulty today lies in the fact that Western Europeans have not been obliged, as entire populations, to fight wars, so this leaves us without a way to honour the older generation through collective mourning, which is not to say that we do not honour those who have fought the wars of the last sixty years. But we do need to rediscover, to remember, what it is we have to be grateful for in those who are now in the second half of their lives, who, admittedly, thought they would never grow old, as all generations are prone to thinking while they are young. If we do not do this, we will not learn the particular wisdom which they have to bring. It is the wisdom of life experience seen in a less clearly defined context than that which is provided by world wars, but it has much to teach. For one thing, many of the so called ‘baby boomers’ have travelled a hard road in the journey from head to heart and from heart to spirit, from self to other, to God. Perhaps the freedom and hedonism of the sixties disposed them to do this without their realising it, or perhaps their need for structure made them question the kind of freedom they thought they were enjoying, or were promised they would enjoy, as with advertisements for a certain cigar and brand of soft drink. Perhaps they outgrew that particular freedom and began to see it as not quite ‘the real thing’. They still have much to teach in this respect.