Victims of the Youth Culture
THE AGE OF MAJORITY
By BRYAN WILSON
IN the prevailing war of the generations, a truce to re-fix the age of majority had to come sooner or later. The Latey Committee consider- ing this subject will certainly hear about the concessions which the vociferous and sometimes self-interested spokesmen of one generation de- mand of the others. They may hear less of the importance of preserving, perhaps of re-entrench- ing, some of the rights of the old. The issue, ostensibly concerned with the young, is another of those matters which may be viewed piecemeal and narrowly, but which have important con- sequences for the whole of society. Now that the focus of attention shifts, at the behest of the mass media, from older people to the young, and as the youth culture increasingly imposes itself on the life of the country, it is the elderly who become the really under-privileged. Affluence, status-striving and the shift from a production- conscious to a consumption-conscious society put youth at a premium. A narrow legalistic approach to the age of majority, with only the clamour of the youth culture in mind, would be another contribution to our contemporary social malaise.
This said, it must be recognised that our regu- lation of the age of responsibility has been anomalous, haphazard and incoherent—marriage at twenty-one, or, with parental consent, at six- teen; car-driving at seventeen, motor-cycling at sixteen; buying drinks at eighteen; seeing 'X' films at sixteen, but paying adult prices at four- teen. In a society which long ago lost its ritualised initiation procedures for easing children steadily into adult responsibilities, adolescents, unsure of society's expectations of them, have long ex- perienced acute status-insecurity. Even in the 'thirties a fifteen-year-old Judy Garland could sing, 'I'm just an in-between, too old for toys, too young for boys.' In the 'fifties and 'sixties a strident youth culture has made the boys into toys, produced its own deviant life-styles and stimulated the contempt of youngsters for adult society. What were once teenagers' problems have now become society's problems, as the youth culture has mobilised the vast majority of adoles- cents behind the pop-groups, imposed two or three constantly changing uniforms and dis- seminated a range of anti-social attitudes.
In the background is the fact that teenage affluence has become a commercial opportunity, The demand for wider opportunities for youth comes largely from businessmen and advertisers who want young people to be spenders and con- sumers of new lines of fashionable trash. This is the real message behind the steadily developing movement for teenage credit-cards. At one time it was enough to induce teenagers to spend their pocket money or their higher wages on indis- pensable, but short-lived, novelties and the grow- ing stock of equipment which any youngster who is to win friends and impress people must have. But now adolescents are being induced to pawn their futures by credit-buying of consumer goods with guaranteed in-built obsolescence. The habit is as socially beneficial as smoking marijuana and as addictive as heroin. It is not surprising that the Hire Purchase Trade Association wants eighteen as the age of majority—on the strength, Dr Bryan Wilson is a Fellow of All Souls College and Reader in Sociology at Oxford. no doubt, of elaborate market research, but with no regard either for the life-long welfare of the adolescents that it hopes to turn into debtors, or for the moral stamina of society.
All healthy societies safeguard their middle- aged and older people—those who, in a period of escalated social change, find adjustment harder than do the young. New productive methods, emphasis on mobility, new consumer goods, all re-allocate social opportunity from the old to the young. A society in which it has long been hard to grow up, has become a society in which it is even harder to grow old.
But old we all must grow : the long-term interest of everyone, and of social order, is in preserving privileges to which people steadily graduate through the life-cycle, and in compen- sating for the loss of youth's freedom and care- lessness by comfort and status in old age. Com- mitment to the common good diminishes as the 'live now, pay later' philosophy of the youth culture is disseminated—a philosophy which stands in sharpest contrast to the needs of educa- tion. The society in which juvenile crime grows, in which the 'rumble' has become a common expression of adolescent disorder, in which drug- addiction increases with great rapidity, is also the society in which youth has 'never had it so good' in a booming youth culture. It is hard to suppose that teenage affluence and teenage delinquency are unassociated phenomena.
The Latey Committee must be aware that youth's acquisition of greater wealth, technical expertise and social influence has not been accom- panied by greater social, moral, political or spiritual wisdom. The reverse has occurred. With more power and lower responsibility (to their families with whom they associate less and to whom they contribute lower proportions of their income) socialisation of the young has become more difficult. If successive generations fail to transmit moral sense, social responsibility, cul- tural values, standards of taste and good manners, and of education, which once regarded these things as part of its mission, is pressed into a narrow instrumental definition of its aims, then social security will diminish and older people will become the direct or indirect victims of the stimulated demands of the young.
As society has grown more complex, the acquisition of social maturity has grown more difficult. An appropriate personal morality is more difficult to forge when moral confusion prevails within society's institutions. Formal edu- cation continues longer, but social control is less effective: the young are indulged, and the postponements and pains which are a necessary part of socialisation are shirked as youngsters are allowed to make their own choices at ever- earlier ages. The Latey Committee might address itself to the task of reinforcing arrangements which are in everyone's long-term interests, except perhaps those of the youth culture profiteers.
The specific issues on which the age of majority has some influence have been variousty affected by the growth of the modern youth culture. Some items, such as the age of voting, are of largely symbolic significance : others, such as the age at which young people can enter into contracts, have much wider implications for our way of life.
Society would have nothing to gain from a reduction of the age of voting, and much to lose if the age at which contracts could be en- tered into (including hire-purchase agreements) were reduced. The sensible thing might be to leave both as they are. The tendency for people to marry younger—when not simply a conse- quence of earlier pregnancy—appears to be more of a short cut to that adult status which adoles- cents both disdain and yet desire, than to stem from any evidence that marital bliss and marital stability are greater among the young. Although marriage may operate as a useful social control, to reduce the age at which parental consent is necessary would only promote the rift between the generations and legitimate the existing social drift. That physical maturity occurs a little earlier is irrelevant, since it has long been attained well before marriageable age. The crux of that prob- lem is not the age of physical maturity, but the social interpretation which we allow to be put on the physical fact.
The law is ineffective in regard to so personal a habit as smoking, and the obvious benefits of raising the age might have to be foregone un- less e,nforcement could be ensured. Buying drinks presents few problems, but there might be bene- fits from raising the age for driving, at least to eighteen and perhaps to twenty-one for both motor-bikes and scooters and cars. Juvenile crime and public disorder depend a great deal on easy mobility, whilst a reduction of vehicles on the road could not but improve road safety. Driving would then become one of the first compensations for attaining an age of greater responsibility. If the young are to develop their talents, such de- ferred gratifications are essential. The Latey Committee need not seek the easy popularity of 'permissiveness'; if they see their task in its wider perspective of the long-run interests of the young and the immediate interests of the community, they will certainly not do so.
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