Generation in Transition

What are today's young people really like? Are they only a "silent generation," looking for nothing more than security?. Last week, in a special book published by the Yale Daily News in honor of its 75th anniversary (Seventy-Five: A Study of A Generation in Transition; $4), a distinguished group of greying Yalemen and professors, only yesterday members of the "lost generation," offered some answers:

Realistic Odds. Headmaster Allan V. Heely, '19, of the Lawrenceville School, believes that the younger generation is "harder to fool than we were . . . [It] is fired by the same romantic ardors that bemused and entertained its elders; but it places more realistic odds on the probability of their fruition. This realism is not the expression of deep intellectual or philosophical convictions; nor is it to be interpreted as superficial adolescent cynicism. These young people are aware merely that you cannot count on as much as you used to be able to...

"When it comes to security, I recollect that in the early Twenties we were mad for it. Furthermore, we were certain we would get it--a delusion to which the young today are too perceptive to attach themselves . . . Young people want answers to their questions about the meaning and the destiny of man . . . The pathos of their situation is that in their quest for faith they have no one to turn to but their elders, who have gone so long themselves without it . . ."

Deeper Foundations. Whatever affirmations today's young people may discover, adds Theologian H. Richard Niebuhr (B.D. '23, Ph.D. '24), they will probably be conservative ones, for the young "are less disposed to be antitraditional than their predecessors were . . . They have been made aware of the fact that the moral, scientific, political and religious life of the West rests ... on principles historically realized, which the earlier generation often took so much for granted that it thought it could deny what it was in fact assuming. It was relatively easy in the 1920s and early 1930s, when democracy seemed so well established, for the bright young men to criticize it as a bourgeois invention; in the 1950s the deeper principles of democratic life must be called to mind and the fundamental tradition re-appropriated . . .

"Earlier generations had a large-scale security within which they took their small or greater risks. They believed in progress,' in the indestructibility of the republic . . . Present-day youth has to rest its large-scale security on deeper foundations ... a foundation on which life can rest unmoved, if not unshaken, in stormy times."

Ethical Cynics. The quest, says John C. Schroeder, professor of religion, is partly a religious one--a reclaiming, as Niebuhr put it, of "the ancestral ground on which previous generations were nurtured but which they abandoned." Yet, "if students 25 years ago were shallow in their disdain of theological speculation, they had ethical verve in believing that they had to do something about their world. The religious problem of this generation is that they do not see that the price they have paid for intellectual maturity is a loss of ethical commitment. Paradoxically they have become religious believers and ethical cynics . . . They may smile at the moral naivete of their fathers, who were too ready to mount their ethical horses and ride off rapidly in every direction; but nevertheless they lack the conviction that they ought or that they can significantly affect their world . . ."

New Mentality. Perhaps, says Thornton Wilder, '20, the reason for youth's apparent lack of conviction is that the silent generation is actually "fashioning the Twentieth Century Man. It is not only suffering and bearing forward a time of transition, it is figuring forth a new mentality. In the first place, these young people will be the first truly international men and women ... In the Twenties and Thirties one felt oneself to be one among millions; these young people feel themselves to be one among billions . . . On the one hand the individual has shrunk; on the other, the individual has been driven to probe more deeply within himself to find the basis for a legitimate assertion of the claim of self . . .

"Some of us in the previous generations hurled ourselves into social reform and social revolution; we did it with a personal passion that left little room for deliberation ... To correct one abuse we were ready to upset many a benefit. It was of such crusaders that the Sidney Webbs were finally driven to say, 'We hate moral indignation.' The emerging International Man will move less feverishly in his enlarged thought-world. This generation is silent because these changes call not for argument but for rumination. The mistakes of the previous generations are writ large over the public prints."

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