Erikson Erik Memorandum on Youth 1967

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Memorandum on YouthAuthor(s): Erik H. EriksonReviewed work(s):Source: Daedalus, Vol. 96, No. 3, Toward the Year 2000: Work in Progress (Summer, 1967), pp.860-870Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences

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ERIK H. ERIKSON

Memorandum on Youth

IIn responding to the inquiry of the Commission on the Year 2000,I w?l take the liberty of quoting the statements put to me in orderto reflect on some of the stereotyped thinking about youth that hasbecome representative of us, the older generation. This, it seemsto me, is prognostically as important as the behavior of the young

people themselves; for youth is, after all, a generational phenomenon, even though its problems are now treated as those of anoutlandish tribe descended on us from Mars. The actions ofyoungpeople are always in part and by necessity reactions to the stereo

types held up to them by their elders. To understand this becomesespecially important in our time when the so-called communications media, far from merely mediating, interpose themselves between the generations as manufacturers of stereotypes, often forcing youth to Uve out the caricatures of the images that at first theyhad only "projected" in experimental fashion. Much will dependon what we do about this. In spite of our pretensions of being ableto study the youth of today with the eyes of detached naturaUsts,we are helping to make youth in the year 2000 what it w?l be bythe kinds of questions we now ask. So I w?l point out the ideologicalbeams in our eyes as I attempt to put into words what I see ahead.I w?l begin with questions that are diagnostic and then proceedto those that are more prognostic in character.I would assume that adolescents today and tomorrow are struggling to define new modes of conduct which are relevant to theirlives.

Young people of a questioning bent have always done this.But more than any young generation before and with less reUanceon a meaningful choice of traditional world images, the youth oftoday is forced to ask what is universally relevant in human life860

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Memorandum on Youthin this technological age at this junction of history. Even some ofthe most faddish, neurotic, delinquent preoccupation with "their"Uves is a symptom of this fact.Yet, this is within the context of two culture factors which seemto be extraordinary in the history of moral temper. One is thescepticism of all authority, the refusal to define natural authority(perhaps even that of paternal authority) and a cast of mindwhich is essentially anti-institutional and even antinomian.

I do not believe that even in the minority of youths to whomthis statement is at all appUcable there is a scepticism of all authority. There is an abiding mistrust of people who act authoritativelywithout authentic authority or refuse to assume the authority thatis theirs by right and necessity. Paternal authority? Oh, yes?

pompous fathers have been exposed everywhere by the world warsand the revolutions. It is interesting, though, that the word paternalis used rather than parental, for authority, wh?e less paternal,may not slip altogether from the parent generation, insofar as abetter balance of maternal and paternal authority may evolvefrom a changing position of women. As a teacher, I am more impressed with our varying incapacity to own up to the almost oppressive authority we reaUy do have in the minds of the young thanin the alleged scepticism of all authority in the young. Theirscepticism, even in its most cynical and violent forms, often seemsto express a good sense for what true authority is, or should be,or yet could be. If they "refuse to define natural authority"?arethey not right if they indicate by all the overt, mocking, andchallenging kinds of "alienation

' that it is up to us to help themdefine it, or rather redefine it, since we have undermined it?andfeelmighty gu?ty?As to the essentiaUy anti-institutional cast of mind, one mustask what alternative is here rejected. It appears that the majorityof young people are, in fact, all too needy for, trusting in, andconforming to present institutions, organizations, parties, industrialcomplexes, super-machineries?and this because true personalauthority is waning. Even the anti-institutional minority (whomwe know better and who are apt to know our writings) seem tome to plead with existing institutions for permission to rebel?just as in private they often seem to plead with their parents to lovethem doubly for rejecting them. And are they not remarkablyeager for old and new uniforms (a kind of uniformity of non

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conformity), for public rituals, and for a coUective style of individual isolation? Within this minority, however, as well as in themajority, there are great numbers who are deeply interested inand responsive to a more concerted critique of institutions froma newer and more adequate ethical point of view than we canoffer them.The second factor is an extraordinary hedonism?using the wordin the broadest sense?in that there is a desacralization of life andan attitude that all experience is permissible and even desirable.

Again, the word hedonism ?lustrates the way in which we useoutdated terms for entirely new phenomena. Although many youngpeople entertain a greater variety of sensual and sexual experiences than their parents did, I see in their pleasure seeking relatively Uttle relaxed joy and often compulsive and addictive searchfor relevant experience. And here we should admit that our generation and our heritage made "aU" experience relative by openingit to ruthless inquiry and by assuming that one could pursue radicalenlightenment without changing radicaUy or, indeed, changingthe coming generations radicaUy. The young have no choice butto experiment with what is left of the "enlightened," "analyzed,"and standardized world that we have bequeathed to them. Yettheir search is not for all-permissibility, but for new logical andethical boundaries. Now only direct experience can offer correctives that our traditional mixture of radical enlightenment andmiddle-class moralism has failed to provide. I suspect that "hedonistic" perversity will soon lose much of its attractiveness in deedand in print when the ava?able inventory has been experimentedwith and found only moderately satisfying, once it is permitted.New boundaries w?l then emerge from new ways of finding outwhat reaUy counts, for there ismuch latent affirmation and muchovert soUdarity in all this search. AU you have to do is to see someof these nihilists with babies, and you are less sure of what one ofthe statements as yet to be quoted terms the "Hegelian certainty"that the next generation w?l be even more alienated.As for the desacralization of life by the young, it must beobvious that our generation desacralized their Uves by (to mentiononly the intellectual side) na?ve scientism, thoughtless scepticism,dilettante political opposition, and irresponsible technical expansion. I find, in fact, more of a search for resacralization in theyounger than in the older generation.862



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Memorandum on YouthAt the same time society imposes new forms of specialization, ofextended training, of new hierarchies and organizations. Thus, onefinds an unprecedented divorce between the culture and thesociety. And, from all indications, such a separation will increase.

Here, much depends on what one means by the word imposes.As I have already indicated, inmuch of youth new hierarchies andorganizations are accepted and welcome. We are apt to forgetthat young people (if not burdened with their parents' conflicts)have no reason to feel that radical change as such is an imposition.The unprecedented divorce we perceive is between our traditional culture (or shall I spell it KulturP) and the tasks of theirsociety. A new generation growing up with technological andscientific progress may well experience technology and its newmodes of thought as the link between a new culture and newforms of society.In this respect, assuming this hypothesis is true, the greatest strainswill be on the youth. This particular generation, like its predecessors, may come back to some form of accommodation with thesociety as it grows older and accepts positions within the society. But the experiences also leave a "cultural deposit" whichis cumulative consciousness and?to this extent I am a Hegelian?is irreversible, and the next generation therefore starts from a moreadvanced position of alienation and detachment.

Does it make sense that a generation involved in such unprecedented change should "come back to some form of accommodation with the society"? This was the fate of certain rebels andromantics in the past; but there may soon be no predictablesociety to "come back to," even if coming back were a viable termor image in the minds of youth. Rather, I would expect the majority to be only too w?ling to overaccommodate to the exploiters ofchange, and the minority we speak of to feel cast off until theirfunction becomes clearer?with whatever help we can give.

nHaving somewhat summarily disavowed the statements formulated by others, I would now like to ask a question more in Une

with my own thinking, and thereby not necessarily more free fromstereotypy: Where are some of the principal contemporary sourcesof identity strength? This question leads us from diagnosis to prog

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nosis, for to me a sense of identity (and here the widest connotation of the term wiU do) includes a sense of anticipated future.The traditional sources of identity strength?economic, racial, national, religious, occupational?are all in the process of aUyingthemselves with a new world-image in which the vision of an an

ticipated future and, in fact, of a future in a permanent state ofplanning w?l take over much of the power of tradition. If I callsuch sources of identity strength ideological, I am using the wordagain most generally to denote a system of ideas providing a convincing world-image. Such a system each new generation needs?so much so that it cannot wait for it to be tested in advance. Iw?lcall the two principal ideological orientations basic to future identities the technological and the humanist orientations, and I will assume that even the great poUtico-economic alternatives w?l besubordinated to them.

I will assume, then, that especially in this country, but increasingly also abroad, masses of young people feel attuned, both bygiftedness and by opportunity, to the technological and scientificpromises of indefinite progress; and that these promises, if sustained by schooling, imply a new ideological world-image and anew kind of identity for many. As in every past technology andeach historical period, there are vast numbers of individuals whocan combine the dominant techniques of mastery and dominationwith their identity development, and become what they do. Theycan settle on that cultural consolidation that follows shifts in technology and secures what mutual verification and what transitoryfam?iarity lie in doing things together and in doing them right?a Tightness proved by the bountiful response of "nature," whetherin the form of the prey bagged, the food harvested, the goodsproduced, the money made, the ideas substantiated, or the technological problems solved.Each such consoUdation, of course, also makes for new kindsof entrenched privileges, enforced sacrifices, institutionalized inequalities, and bu?t-in contradictions that become glaringly obvious to outsiders?those who lack the appropriate gifts and opportunities or have a surplus of not quite appropriate talents. Yetit would be intellectual vindictiveness to overlook the sense ofembeddedness and natural flux that each age provides in themidst of the artifacts of organization; how it helps to bring toascendance some particular type of man and style of perfection;how it permits those thus consolidated to limit their horizon effec864



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tively so as not to see what might destroy their newly won unitywith time and space or expose them to the fear of death?and ofkilling. Such a consolidation along technological and scientific linesis, I submit, now taking place. Those young people who feel athome in it can, in fact, go along with their parents and teachers?not too respectfully, to be sure?in a kind of fraternal identification,because parents and ch?dren can jointly leave it to technologyand science to provide a self-perpetuating and self-accelerating

way of life. No need is felt to limit expansionist ideals so long ascertain old-fashioned rationalizations continue to provide the hope(a hope that has long been an intrinsic part of an American ideol

ogy) that in regard to any possible bu?t-in evil in the very nature ofsuper-organizations, appropriate brakes, corrections, and amendments w?l be invented in the nick of time and without any undueinvestment of strenuously new principles. Wh?e they "work," thesesuper-machineries, organizations, and associations provide a sufficiently adjustable identity for aU those who feel actively engagedin and by them.All of us sense the danger of overaccommodation in this, as inany other consolidation of a new world-image, and maybe thedanger is greater today. It is the danger that a willful and playfultesting of the now limitless range of the technicaUy possible w?lreplace the search for the criteria for the optimal and the ethicallypermissible, which includes what can be given on from generationto generation. This can only cause subliminal panic, especiallywhere the old decencies w?l prove glaringly inadequate, and wherethe threat or the mere possibility of overkiU can be denied onlywith increasing mental strain?a strain, incidentally, which w?lmatch the sexual repression of the passing era in unconscious pathogenic power.It is against this danger, I think, that the nonaccommodatorsput their very existence "on the line," often in a thoroughly confounding way because the manifestations of alienation and commitment are sometimes indistinguishable. The insistence on thequestion "to be or not to be" always looks gratuitously strange tothe consolidated. If the question of being oneself and of dyingone's own death in a world of overkill seems to appear in a moreconfused and confusing form, it is the ruthless heritage of radicalenUghtenment that forces some intelligent young people into aseemingly cynical pride, demanding that they be human withoutAlusi?n, naked without narcissism, loving without idealization, ethi

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ERIK H. ERIKSONcal without moral passion, restless without being classifiably neurotic, and poUtical without lying: truly a utopia to end aU utopias.What should we caU this youth? Humanist would seem right if bythis we mean a recovery, with new impUcations, of man as the

measure, a man far grimmer and with much less temptation tocongratulate himself on his exalted position in the universe, aself-congratulation that has in the past always encouraged morecruel and more thoughtless consolidations. The new humanismranges from an existential insistence that every man is an islandunto himself to a new kind of humaneness that is more thancompassion for stray animals and savages, and a decidedly humanitarian activism ready to meet concrete dangers and hardships inthe service of assisting the underpriv?eged anywhere. Maybeuniversalist would cover aU this better, if we mean by it an insistence on the widest range of human possib?ities?beyond thetechnological.But whatever you caU it, the universalist orientation, no lessthan the technological one, is a cluster of ideas, images, and aspirations,

ofhopes, fears,

and hates; otherwise, neither could layclaim to the identity development of the young. Somewhat l?cethe "hawks" and the "doves," the technologists and the universalistsseem almost to belong to different species, Uving in separateecologies. "Technological" youth, for example, expects the dominantforces in foreign as weU as in domestic matters to work themselvesout into some new form of balance of power (or is it an oldfashioned balance of entirely new powers?). It is w?ling, for thesake of such an expectation, to do a reasonable amount of kilUng?and of dying. "Humanist" youth, on the other hand, not only opposesunlimited mechanization and regimentation, but also cultivates asensitive awareness of the humanness of any individual in gunsight range. The two orientations must obviously oppose and repeleach other totally; the acceptance of even a part of one couldcause an ideological sUde in the whole configuration of images and,it foUows, in the kind of courage to be?and to die. These twoviews, therefore, face each other as if the other were the enemy,although he may be brother or friend?and, indeed, oneseU at adifferent stage of one's own life, or even in a different mood ofthe same stage.

Each side, of course, is overly aware of the dangers inherent inthe other. In fact, itmakes out of the other, in my jargon, a negative identity. I have sketched the danger felt to exist in the tech866



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nological orientation. On the "humanist" side, there is the dangerof a starry-eyed faith in the certainty that if you "mean it," you canmove quite monolithic mountains, and of a subsequent total inertia when the mountain moves only a bit at a time or sUdes rightback. This segment of youth lacks as yet the leadership that wouldreplace the loss of revolutionary tradition, or any other traditionof discipline. Then there is the danger of a retreat into aU kinds ofBeat snobbishness or into parallel private worlds, each with itsown artificaUy expanded consciousness.

IllAs one is apt to do in arguing over diagnosis, I have now overdrawn two "ideal" syndromes so as to consider the prognosis sug

gested in a further question presented tome:Is it possible that the fabric of traditional authority has been tornso severely in the last decades that the re-establishment of certainearlier forms of convention is all but unlikely?

I have already indicated that I would answer this question inthe affirmative; I would not expect a future accommodation to becharacterized by a "coming back" either to conventions or to oldfashioned movements. Has not every major era in history beencharacterized by a division into a new class of power-specialists(who "know what they are doing") and an intense new group ofuniversalists (who "mean what they are saying")? And do not thesetwo poles determine an era's character? The specialists ruthlesslytest the limits of power, while the universalists always in remembering man's soul also remember the "poor"?those cut off from the

resources of power. What is as yet dormant in that third group, thetruly under-privileged, is hard to say, especially if an all-coloredanticolonial solidarity that would include our Negro youth shouldemerge. But it would seem probable that aU new revolutionaryidentities w?l be drawn into the struggle of the two ideological orientations sketched here, and that nothing could preclude a fruitfulpolarity between these two orientations?provided we survive.But is not the fact that we are st?l here already a result of thepolarization I have spoken of? If our super-technicians had notbeen able to put warning signals and brakes into the very machinery of armament, certainly our universalists would not have knownhow to save or how to govern the world. It also seems reasonable

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ERIK H. ERIKSONto assume that without the apocalyptic warnings of the universalists, the new technocrats might not have been shocked into restraining the power they wield.What speaks for a fruitful polarization is the probability thata new generation growing up with and in technological and scientific progress as a matter of course will be forced by the dailyconfrontation with unheard-of practical and theoretical possib?ities to entertain radicaUy new modes of thought that may suggest daring innovations in both culture and society. "Humanist"youth, in turn, wiU find some accommodation with the machineage in which they, of course, already participate in their da?yneeds and habits. Thus, each group may reach in the other whatimagination, sensitivity, or commitment may be ready for activation. I do not mean, however, even to wish that the clarity of op

position of the technological and the humanist identity be blurred,for dynamic interplay needs clear poles.What, finally, is apt to bring youth of different persuasions to

gether is a change in the generational process itself?an awarenessthat they share a common fate. Already today the mere divisioninto an older?parent?generation and a younger?adolescing?one is becoming superannuated. Technological change makes itimpossible for any traditional way of being older (an age differencesuggested by the questions quoted) ever to become again so institutionalized that the younger generation could "accommodate"to it or, indeed, resist it in good-old revolutionary fashion. Aging,it is already widely noted, will be (or already is ) a quite differentexperience for those who find themselves rather early occupationallyoutdated and for those who may have something more lasting tooffer. By the same token, young adulthood will be divided intoolder and younger young adults. The not-too-young and not-tooold specialist will probably move into the position of principal arbiter, that is, for the limited period of the ascendance of his speciality. His power, inmany ways, will replace the sanction of traditionor, indeed, of parents. But the "younger generation," too, will be(or already is ) divided more clearly into the older- and the younger

young generation, where the older young w?l have to take over(and are eager to take over) much of the direction of the conductof the younger young. Thus, the relative waning of the parents andthe emergence of the young adult specialist as the permanent andpermanently changing authority are bringing about a shift by whicholder youth w?l have to take increasing responsibiUty for the con

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Memorandum on Youthduct of younger youth?and older people for the orientation of thespecialists and of older youth. By the same token, future reUgiousethics would be grounded less in the emotions and the imagery ofinfantile gu?t, than in that of mutual responsibility in the fleetingpresent.In such change we on our part can orient ourselves and offerorientation only by recognizing and cultivating an age-specificethical capacity in older youth, for there are age-specific factorsthat speak for a differentiation between morality and ethics. Thechild's conscience tends to be impressed with a moralism whichsays "no" without giving reasons; in this sense, the infantile super-egohas become a danger to human survival, for suppression in ch?dhood leads to the exploitation of others in adulthood, and moralistic seU-denial ends up in the wish to annihilate others. Thereis also an age-specific ethical capacity in older youth that we shouldlearn to foster. That we, instead, consistently neglect this ethical

potential and, in fact, deny it with the moralistic reaction that wetraditionally employ toward and against youth (anti-institutional,hedonistic, desacralizing) is probably resented much more byyoung people than our dutiful attempts to keep them in order byprohibition. At any rate, the ethical questions of the future will beless determined by the influence of the older generation on theyounger one than by the interplay of subdivisions in a Ufe schemein which the whole life-span is extended; in which the life stageswill be further subdivided; in which new roles for both sexes willemerge in all Ufe stages; and in which a certain margin of freechoice and individualized identity will come to be considered thereward for technical inventiveness. In the next decade, youth w?lforce us to help them to develop ethical, affirmative, resacralizingrules of conduct that remain flexibly adjustable to the promisesand the dangers of world-wide technology and communication.These developments, of course, include two "things"?one gigantic,one tiny?the irreversible presence of which w?l have to findacknowledgment in daily life: the Bomb and the Loop. They together will call for everyday decisions involving the sanctity of lifeand death. Once man has decided not to k?l needlessly and not togive birth carelessly, he must try to establish what capacity forUving, and for letting live, each generation owes to every childplanned to be born?anywhere.One can, I guess, undertake to predict only on the basis of oneof two premises: Either one expects that things w?l be as bad as

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they always have been, only worse; or one visualizes what one iswiUing to take a chance on at the risk of being irrelevant. As Iimplied at the beginning, a committee that wants to foretell thefuture may have to take a chance with itseff by asking what itscombined wisdom and talent would wish might be done withwhat seems to be given.

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Erikson Erik Memorandum on Youth 1967