Inherently Bad or a Product of their Circumstance
By Phillip Taylor 2017
There are many ideas put forward by the readings this week and by a viewing of Teenage by Matt Wolfe. Of these, perhaps the most pertinent is that teenagers are a product of the time in which they live.
Wolf’s documentary is clear on this, taking the audience back to the early twentieth-century to explore the antecedents of todays teenage generation: “As the cultural landscape around the world was thrown into turmoil during the industrial revolution, and with a chasm erupting between adults and youth, the concept of a new generation took shape.” In this way, we learn that the teenager is not merely an invention–in the way that the category of ‘teenage’ is realised after WW2–but a group that responds in similar ways and for similar reasons across time; this makes the act of categorisation possible. Importantly though, we see that as cultural and situational contexts change (WW1, the roaring twenties, the Great Depression, the rise of Nazism, WW2, the birth of the atomic age), the ways that teenage-hood is manifested stay remarkably similar. That is, that different contexts give rise to similar patterns of adolescent development: release from childhood, a new sense of the future, personal independence and agency, the search for meaning and relevance, identifying a cause to which to belong, the perceived failure of the parental/adult world, railing against adult conservatism and control, hedonistic and reckless release, moral re-identification, the future. The cycle clearly repeats and this is Wolf’s point. What we have come to see as a post-war invention begun decades before.
Think about it. The abolishing of child labour in the early 1900s and the subsequent development of the rights of children allows youth the time and the space (they no longer have to work, they are protected in and by law) to focus on those ideas that are synonymous with being young – fun, frivolity, escapism, the desire to be free, the search for independence, the seeking of pleasure for pleasure’s sake (narcissistic hedonism?). Without a defined or mandated purpose (to work in the factory, the chimney, the mines) young people begin to ask defining questions such as: ‘Who am I’, What is my purpose’, ‘Where do I fit’? These questions are new in the early parts of the twentieth century, but over time become commonplace with and synonymous of the teenage experience–they are the same questions teenagers today ask as they finish school and look forwards to the adult world. The point is that these question come about as a direct result of cultural shifts that position the adolescent as an age group in need of ‘protection’ from the difficulties of an adult world. Jon Savage supports this in his book, Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture, when he says, “adolescence [is seen as] a separate stage of life subject to enormous pressures and strains and therefore [it needs] to be treated with special care and attention”. Clearly, a shift in the cultural context of teenagers–and here don’t forget that Wolf shows us teenagers from Australian, Britain, America and Germany–that abolishes child labour and legislates for the rights of children, leads to the beginnings of a group that we come, ultimately, to know as teenagers–that group who are too old for “dolls and carriage, too young for marriage” (Judy Garland).
What we begin to see, however, is that into this vacuum (left by the removal of work and the expectation of it) arrives, if you will, a generational malignancy; with a chasm erupting between adults and youth, the concept of a new generation takes shape. Youth begin to act out as the “many children and adolescents . . . left to fend for themselves [struggle with] the lack of adult imposed structures” (Savage – Teenage: A Prehistory of Youth Culture). Indeed, what is obvious is that the rise of crime, gang affiliation and ‘hooliganism’ in the early parts of the twentieth century is not isolated to America or England, but becomes prevalent in Germany, France and countries around the globe. Now, while it is not in the scope of this piece to discuss variations to do with class, race and gender, it is the case that as a general rule “juvenile delinquency had come to international attention as a serious social problem” (Savage). The criminologist Douglas Morrison observed at the time that “it is a problem . . . not confined to any single community; it is a problem confronting the whole family of nations; it is rising out of conditions which are common to civilisation.” In other words, in every civilised nation, juvenile delinquency rises because the “conditions” are ripe.
The question of cause then is an important one to address; what was it about this time (and others, for the pattern is clearly apparent post WW1, post Depression, post WW2) that leads to such a delinquent response in this particular age group. In part, the response is to a culture that has failed youth, that tries on the one had to instil moral constraints and attitudes that seek to ‘protect’, but come over as “old”, and on the other a growing sense of importance that youth are indeed the future – they have a purpose, except they are not sure about the nature of it. Consider this world, where youth are compelled to join groups like the Scouts (and later, the Swing Kids, Hitler Youth, the CCC, the Peace Camps movement, the jitterbugs, the Wandering Birds) because they offer belonging, connection and purpose, a sense of freedom without the fear of adult responsibility. As TIME Magazine puts it: “there is a time in the life of every American girl when the most important thing in the world is to be one of a crowd of other girls and to act and speak and dress exactly as they do.” Consider then that every time, it seems according to Wolf’s documentary, that these groups form, they are overtaken by adults who wish to use them to fuel, fulfil and forge a future that is adult in nature – war is the archetypal situation here. In the context of WW1 and, later, WW2, youth are seen as the answer, as the people who will steer the world to a just and morally correct future. Jump forward five years to the end of WW1, and we are left with a youth generation who feels betrayed, used, and abandoned: “They sent us to die and we hated them for it” (Teenage, Matt Wolf). A generation who has been slaughtered on the Somme and left to deal with the horrific outcomes of a war that has left them destitute, forgotten, and broken unsurprisingly rail against an adult world that has failed them individually and as a generation. Teenagers as young as thirteen went to war for a cause, convinced that this was their adult responsibility. They entered an adult war that maimed, killed and destroyed them. hence, as logic would follow, if this world was adult, then it was to be rejected in its entirety.
And, thus, the cycle continues until the next crisis occurs and youth again are left holding the baby. Be it the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression, the rise of Nazism, the outrage against segregation and Jim Crow, WW2 or the arrival of the atomic age, youth are left too often as disillusioned and angry, rebelling in ways that extend from simple resistance to outright riots and crime (later it would be replaced by things like the feminist movement, the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War, the development of PCs and the WWW, the Gulf War, 9/11, social media, etc). But, they are also left to fix the now to ensure the future. Indeed, after World War Two a new era had been heralded in, an atomic age that made humankind focus on the present, that meant what people wanted from life began to change. “The old world was dead and the best-placed group to flourish in the uncertain post-war era were the young” (Savage); the young who had always been the heralds of a new future and who had been so since the end of the last Great War. In this sense, for the cycle to continue, the crisis is forgotten and teenagers are held up as a tabula rasa upon which the world’s future can be written. Put another way, as the voices of the focalisers do in the final moments of Wolf’s documentary, Teenage:
“The teenager was an american invention, it’s what we wanted to be.”
“We knew we could be blown up in an instant so we lived in the now.”
“Teenage was a compromise solution, we got the freedom we were looking for, but adults still had some control.”
“A lot of people try to shape the future, parents, governments, bankers, the police. But, it’s the young ones who live in it and we’re the ones who will fight for it.”
So, yes, it is clear that teenagers are a product of their times, of the situational and cultural contexts within which they exist. Yes, it is also clear that as the future is written, it will be written by the young and that some of these inscriptions will be criminal, delinquent, tumultuous. But, clear too is the idea that the teenage years are a hiatus between adulthood and childhood. It was and is a liminal time when change is rife, when becoming something more than self and now is the goal. This does not change, simply the way in which this ‘becoming’, this ‘coming of age’ is expressed does. In this way, “the future is teenage”.
