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"in the 1960s when the youth cohort of that era expressed their adolescent rambunctiousness and exuberance with particular abandon and swerved even more strongl

"in the 1960s when the youth cohort of that era expressed their adolescent rambunctiousness and exuberance with particular abandon and swerved even more strongly from ‘we’ to ‘I’ thinking: do your own thing, live and let live, anything goes." I don't see it that way (Reagan probably did). The post-WW2 era was notable for its conformity. There were lots and lots of rules, and formulas, and laws, about how you had to live your life ... from the nuclear family right down to how to comb your hair. Some individuals came together right now to overthrow many of those strictures, create music festivals and much less uptight music, explore communes, create food coops, explore religions outside the 'acceptable' ones, protest the war and the draft, read alternative histories (not taught in school after saying the pledge of allegiance), create Earth Day and a Whole Earth Catalog. In short, to create a counterculture - one with quite adult concerns. There were a lot less people in the world back then. Trying to blame today's behavior on the 10 or 20% of 60s kids among 'those hippies' (the heavily-distorting 1991 TV series 'Making Sense of the Sixties', for example) has never worked. Many mainstream adults (Howe's 'we') were constrained to conformist role-playing back then. But look at the music, films, TV and bestsellers they picked, once off-stage. IMO US people today are less 'adolescent' than in the 1960s. Prof. Howe's hidebound paean to life with the blinders on is little more than a dip in nostalgia for those without the stomach to look forward instead.

wahern 5y ago
I don't see the conflict between the two characterizations. He's making an observation, and you're simply defending it. 1960s cultural reactions were particularly radical largely because they were relative to some particularly rigid and simplistic social mores. But both generations can easily be placed on a timeline of increasing individualism. Both the construction and emphasis of the nuclear family as well as the bootstrap moralism are part of this increasing individualist tendency. Indeed, even today these norms are promoted by conservatives precisely because the implication is that failure to conform will (and should) result in impoverishment--there is no community to fall back on, and thus no allowance for failure. 1960s reformers thought they could build communities supporting radical individualism, but the latter tended to result in the dissipation of the former--literally and figuratively. Note that increasing individualism does not imply decreasing communitarianism. (Which is distinct from a concept of "we". The U.S. was one of the first modern nation-states, afterall, and helped to redefine what "we" could mean.) Specifically, the article doesn't actually claim that there was greater communitarianism before the advent of secondary school. The U.S. has always been strongly individualistic, but this was more a harsh reality and de facto state of affairs than anything else. Interpersonal communities could thrive, but they were often based around religion or economic necessity (or both). There's a plausible case that the accelerated construction of a sophisticated, positive individualist culture did indeed coincide with increasing education. I always thought this was simply an effect of more people being introduced to non-religious social concepts while standards of living were simultaneously improving (i.e. less need for communities of necessity) in large part due to industrialization (with its own implications for the role of the individual), which had the overall effect of compounding and exaggerating our predisposition to individualism. But the thesis that a large part of it may instead be related to adolescent socialization is interesting. Notably, it's falsifiable in ways that most other social theories are not.

wahern 5y ago

I don't see the conflict between the two characterizations. He's making an observation, and you're simply defending it. 1960s cultural reactions were particularly radical largely because they were relative to some particularly rigid and simplistic social mores. But both generations can easily be placed on a timeline of increasing individualism. Both the construction and emphasis of the nuclear family as well as the bootstrap moralism are part of this increasing individualist tendency. Indeed, even today these norms are promoted by conservatives precisely because the implication is that failure to conform will (and should) result in impoverishment--there is no community to fall back on, and thus no allowance for failure. 1960s reformers thought they could build communities supporting radical individualism, but the latter tended to result in the dissipation of the former--literally and figuratively. Note that increasing individualism does not imply decreasing communitarianism. (Which is distinct from a concept of "we". The U.S. was one of the first modern nation-states, afterall, and helped to redefine what "we" could mean.) Specifically, the article doesn't actually claim that there was greater communitarianism before the advent of secondary school. The U.S. has always been strongly individualistic, but this was more a harsh reality and de facto state of affairs than anything else. Interpersonal communities could thrive, but they were often based around religion or economic necessity (or both). There's a plausible case that the accelerated construction of a sophisticated, positive individualist culture did indeed coincide with increasing education. I always thought this was simply an effect of more people being introduced to non-religious social concepts while standards of living were simultaneously improving (i.e. less need for communities of necessity) in large part due to industrialization (with its own implications for the role of the individual), which had the overall effect of compounding and exaggerating our predisposition to individualism. But the thesis that a large part of it may instead be related to adolescent socialization is interesting. Notably, it's falsifiable in ways that most other social theories are not.