a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

The principle that governs relations between generations goes, in Aristotle’s words from the Nichomachean Ethics (7.11.2): “The parent gives the child the greatest gifts, its existence, but also cherishment and education (trophes kai paideias); and because the child receives, it owes the parent honor and helpfulness.”  I cited this in my last post while I was making a claim that  the kernel of childism, prejudice against children, is abandonment of this principle, or attack on it.

I think that there are three fundamental ways –with many variations of each and much admixture—in which the principle can be abandoned or attacked and children not given the cherishment and education that are their right — their right for their growth and development. The first is that the children are pushed out of their family circle, sent away from the national table, excluded, indentured to others, even –at the violent extreme —eliminated. This continuum of actions is usually rationalized with some childist idea to the effect that children are a burden –too many mouths to feed—or a pollution of some sort, a kind of badness that has gotten into the family or society and needs to be purged.

Aristotle was quite familiar with Sophocles’s plays about casting out children. He had written about Sophocles in his book about tragedy, the Poetics. Freud knew the plays, too, and wrote about how Oedipus was put out of his family when the King of Athens, his father Laius, fearful that the Athenians were growing mutinous after years of suffering a plague in their city, decided his son had caused the plague and left him on a hillside to starve. The King had been swayed by a prophecy that his son would destroy him. (We have many stories from the ancient world of a whole group of children, not just one, being imagined as a threatening pollution and undermining of adult authority. In these stories, a “slaughter of the innocents” is ordered to purge them.)

A second fundamental way in which the inter-generational principle can be ignored is for the adult generation to refuse to give way to the children, refuse to let them grow up and take over. They are not to have an adult identity of their own. The adults erase their children, usually out of fear that the children will not just respectfully grow up to mind the store. They will rebel, supercede, triumph over their parents –and not give the honor and helpfulness the parents expect. There is a “succession crisis”—an event not confined to dynasties, or to elites with a lot to lose in the way of material possessions and domination.

Some family designs are more effective than others in making sure that the transition from one generation to the next does not become a crisis.  For example, when fathers keep their sons at home and have them bring their wives into the family house, they can train them for long periods in how to be obedient and how not to view their own families as distinct or innovative. It was very insightful of Mao Zedong  to realize that the traditional patriarchal Chinese family structure stood in the way of the Cultural Revolution that would liberate the masses from their oppression by the mandarins. But he twisted the intergenerational principle in his own way by training a group of youngsters, the Red Guard, to attack their parents…a national nightmare of attack and counter-attack from which the Chinese have yet to awake.

In Aristotle’s Poetics, it is clear that among the tragedians it was Aeschylus who was most concerned to give warnings about what can happen when adults who are dedicated to conservative authority structures in their families go too far and erase their children –for example, sacrifice them to further their ambitious plans. Agamemnon, assembling a navy to invade Troy, sacrificed his daughter Iphegenia to win a favorable wind from the sea god Poseidon.  All hell broke loose. His wife Clytemnestra, infuriated, took a murderous revenge on her husband; their son, Orestes, felt obliged to revenge his father and killed his mother. The Oresteia ends with an Athenian jury deciding not to punish Orestes –to step in and break the cycle of violence from going down through generationsas parents put their needs first.

A third way that the child-cherishing principle can be ignored involves making children play a role that they are in no way “by nature” ready or able to play or that they should not, for moral reasons, play. Different societies have different mores about the use of children for adult sexual purposes, for example, but they do not differ in putting some limit on such use: a taboo on incest. a limit of physical maturity or age, or, in modern times, criminalization. Somehow they say: not with children!  Those who cross whatever limits are set generally rationalize their acts by saying the acts are educational for the children—that is, they acknowledge the child-cherishing principle by saying they are following it. But, nonetheless, when the limit is over-stepped by the adults, the children are blamed for it; girls are held to be seducers, for example. Children can be assigned all kinds of inappropriate service roles –including the role of parenting their parents–but there is usually a sexual dimension to the assignment. Among the Greek tragedians, Euripides was the great student of this form of childism. As you can see in The Bacchae, or in Medea, where the scorned Medea, whose husband has left her for a child bride, takes revenge on him by murdering their two young sons, his lineage, and the girl as well.

Since the Greeks, it has been obvious to people who have paid careful attention to  conflicts between the generations that certain social and political conditions typically aggravate these conflicts –if they do not flatly produce them. Among heirs to the Greek tragic writers, the most famous student of succession crises was Shakespeare, who showed king fathers and prince sons in conflict again and again –sometimes daughters, too, as in King Lear. The fathers cannot recognize their children’s worthiness or let them grow up. The social-political context is all about property and which adults (of which religion) can profit from it, and whether children are the property of their fathers as well as the recipients of hereditary property. Mercantile capitalism and the rise of the modern nation-state out of a nexus of religious wars—that’s the book Shakespeare might have written were he not a dramatic genius but merely a professor.

Until modern times, tragedy was the literary genre in which conflict of the generations was typically  the topic, along with its social and political causes. Comedies were

originally plays in which the tragic theme was presented in a way that aroused laughter rather than the “fear and pity” tragedians aimed for. The dramatists hoped that either fear and pity or laughter and mockery would teach lessons about the principle that should govern relations between the generations and what happens if it does not.  But the major tragedians of modern times have been novelists, who specialized in inter-generational stories for the much more widely literate population of the Age of Industrialism. Their readers were people who had in their historical memories the huge generational conflicts of the American and French Revolutions –of citizens who experienced their kings as authoritarian fathers.  The most popular of the 19^th century novelists — Charles Dickens–focused directly on what we now call “child abuse and neglect.”

After the Second World War, there was a demographic context that was unlike

anything  previous writers about generational conflict had confronted. It is estimated that 55 million people died in the five years of that war, many of them children, as the war had almost no combat-zone boundaries and civilian centers were routinely devastated. During the London Blitz, 5000 children were among the dead, along with 35,000 adults, many of whom left children orphaned or in the charge of a widow. The number of people –men, women, and children—who died in German camps and killing operations was far more than the six million Jewish victims. Allied bombs flattened German cities, killing hundreds of thousands and triggering a huge German post-war internal immigration, East to West.  It is well known (and often covered over) that the American A-bombs named “Little Boy” killed instantly 150,000 non-combatants in Hiroshima, and left some 200,000 others maimed, condemned to early deaths from cancers, and reproductively damaged by radioactivity. Those parents who lived in battlefields, had the experience of being totally unable to protect their children.

Everywhere in the world, as people struggled to recover, a big demographic spike began. It stated first in America, which was both the richest and the least physically devastated and demoralized combatant nation. Between 1946 and 1964, more than 80 million babies were born in America. Along with the Baby Boom came an economic boom of comparable unprecedentedness (both in its boom periods and its recurrent bust periods).  The population growth curve for the world grew so steep that it took only 14 years, between 1960 and 1974 for the people-meter to tick over from three billion to four billion; it is due to hit 7 billion in the coming year, as the Baby Boomer’s children have finished  bringing forth their children. (After that, because family size is shrinking all over the world, the population will continue to increase, but not at the fantastical rate of the post-war period.)  The economic boom concentrated in America, then Europe (aided by American reconstructive funds), and then out to the rest of the world, but very unevenly, and hardly at all to sub-Saharan Africa. It is concentrated now in China and India.  As it spread, the economic boom also became more and more uneven in class terms.  The rich got richer and the poor got poorer and more numerous. In the West, particularly since the global economic crisis of 2008-2009, the filthy rich are –rightly—hated by the poor and by the shrinking middle class; but in the emerging world they are still admired for their derring-do and, occasionally, for their philanthropy –although that is a drop in the bucket of wealth redistribution or addressing inequality.

It should have been one of the great challenges of the immediate post-war situation for those who fought that war to recognize how horribly it had fallen on the children trying to grow up during it. And how important it would be both to provide for those child victims and to make sure that the children the combatant generation was producing were properly cherished and educated. Many people, particularly in the main battleground, Europe, and in Japan did see and accept this challenge. That, really, is the origin of the European and Japanese social democracies. People saying: we have a generation of survivor children who are victims of our war and must be cared for by our governments; and we must make a world in which our own children will never end up in this victimized position, in which they are well-provided for and safe. It is no accident that the British war-time government proposed the National Health Service in 1942, just after the London Blitz, and that their proposal won the social democratic Labour government its huge 1945 electoral victory –even over the great war hero, Churchill. All over the Continent, the first order of post-war business was to enact children’s benefits and widow’s pensions. And much of the day-to-day government business was carried on by the huge numbers of women who went into politics and social services rather than going home to homemaking. They established daycares and preschools for their children.

In America, there was no such social democratic reparative impulse, no ground swell of “never again!” The attention that was directed in policy terms at the Baby Boom

children was directed at their schooling, so that they could participate in the national agenda of the time, which was to defeat Soviet Communism and stop its missionary march out across the world. American governments committed themselves to their own  halt-Communism mission in Latin America, where dozens of countries were made into America’s farm and fortress to the south. Then other regions came in for proselytizing and conversion to the American Way. We did the Cold War, not Child Development research and social democracy. Even the great step forward of the 1950s legislation to end school segregation was not taken because white Americans suddenly got over their racism and their childism toward African-American children –whom they had sent away from the national table so punishingly.  It was taken because having a large undereducated segment of the population was a drag on national growth and national preparedness. The Russians launched their Sputnik in 1957—proof if proof were needed that we were in a close race.

When American policy began to turn actively anti-child in the 1970s, the turn was hardly recognized except among social workers, as the tradition of not prioritizing all children, as a group, was so strong. There had been so much policy made to exclude some children –the African-Americans, the Native American; to put others in the service of economic competitiveness and educational superiority; to ignore a growing problem of child abuse and neglect; to assert or reassert patriarchal control over women (given a name, “sexism,” by 1965). An intensification of childism takes time to consolidate so that its effects are obvious. Aristotle, who stated the intergenerational principle so clearly, had learned about it from the tragedians, who wrote several generations earlier, after surviving –barely—the horrific Persian War. The Greeks had almost lost their free city-states to the tyrannical Cyrus of Persia and were very concerned that they not deprive their own children of freedom as had almost been done unto them.