Generations and the Social Order

Obligations between generations are not completely synonymous with obligations to distant strangers: when we provide for the elderly we do so in part by giving care to our own parents; when we provide for the very young we do so in part by giving care to our own children. Yet intergenerational moral obligations illustrate the general problem of organizing relations among distant others nonetheless. Obligations to the young and the old are obligations to others who, even if we know them, tend to be inherently dependent. They therefore can be taken as symbolic of all the kinds of dependency that exist in modern society. If the most visibly dependent elements of the population are not well cared for, it is difficult to imagine that others who think of themselves as independent—but who, because they are modern, are dependent on everyone else anyway—will be well cared for as well.

To examine the effects of greater reliance on the moral code of the market with regard to people distant in time from us, therefore, we must look first at the future prospects of those who are children today. To the degree that reliance on the market, especially in the economic sector of society, produces new wealth, its effects on future generations are positive, particularly for those in a position to take advantage of the new economic opportunities thus created. But we can identify three ways in which the needs of generations that will reach maturity after the present one are harmed by a weakening of the boundary between the market and civil society. One is an increase in the number of children who will grow up in poverty; the second is a weakening of the family as a support system, in ways harmful to children of all social classes; and the third is an emphasis on present consumption and gratification that encourages cynicism about the future.

The number of families below the poverty line in America rose dramatically in the early 1980s, the very years when Americans turned away from government in favor of the market. Although in recent years that trend has leveled off, the child poverty rate toward the end of the 1980s was the highest it had been since the early 1960s, despite a relatively well functioning economy (see table 2).^[2] In 1983, 40 percent of the poor people in America were children, and 13.8 million American children lived in poor families.^[3] Moreover, as these trends began to penetrate public consciousness, Americans remained reluctant to tax themselves in order to help the poor among them. As W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson put it, "In contrast to the deep love we feel and express in private, we lack any sense of 'public love' for children, and we are unwilling to make any public commitments to them except when we believe the commitments will pay off."^[4]

Of all children, moreover, those who are poorest are most likely to feel the effects of the weakening of moral ties in the intimate realm of society. Many of the trends that have weakened family bonds, such as divorce, working-woman heads of families, and the difficulties of relying on kin for child care, will, demographers project, continue over the next few decades, even if at a lower rate.^[5] Each trend will make it that much more difficult for poor children to escape from poverty. Between 1960 and 1980, the number of female-headed families tripled.^[6] As a result, in Martha Hill's words, "most children now have mothers who are balancing child-rearing and market work responsibilities, many with no father present to assist in fulfilling these responsibilities."^[7]

One likely consequence of increased child poverty will be a focus on survival in the present without consideration of consequences for the future. Phyllis Moen, Edward Kain, and Glen Elder point out:

Family responses to economic distress are generally directed to immediate needs, with an eye toward specific, short-range consequences. As elements of strategies for economic survival, parental decisions are mostly geared to the short term. But what may be functional in the short run for the family unit may inadvertently have disastrous consequences for the lives of children. It is these indirect and unanticipated outcomes that may, in fact, have the greatest significance for the life prospects of children.^[8]

American families, in other words, will increasingly live in two separate time frames. They will decide whether to pay for dental care, preventive medicine, or education based on present needs, not future potential. To the degree that they opt to live in the present—since the market leaves them little choice—an increasing number of parents will find themselves playing God, taking risks with their children's lives and praying that the risks are worth it.

Uncertain prospects face not only poor children in America. "Families at every economic level are increasingly unsure of what the future holds—for themselves and for their children," Moen, Kain, and Elder continue.^[9] Under increasing financial pressure to pay for more expensive homes with higher mortgage rates, an increasing number of middle-class American families are finding themselves unable to save for their children's college education. In the absence of direct government grants-in-aid, the amounts taken out in student loans, once thought of as a middle-class supplement, not only tripled (in constant dollars) between 1975 and 1985 but were relied on by an ever greater number of borrowers. A study sponsored by the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, while obviously unable to ascertain whether such heavy indebtedness will alter career choices and family size in the long run, pointed out that "there are clear signs that indebtedness is likely to continue on its upward course" and noted that "students cannot know what the real burden of the debt they are assuming will be."^[10] A reversal of intergenerational obligation seems to be taking place: those born around 1920 often deprived themselves so that their children could go to college; those born around 1970 will deprive themselves as adults, not to pay for their children's education in the future, but to pay back their own education in the past.

As the pressures put on the family by the market intensify, children and young people in all social classes are less likely to find parents with the time and energy to respond to their special needs. The emotional (and nutritional) consequences have already begun to worry child specialists. Rituals that incorporate children into family bonds, such as the family meal, have increasingly become a thing of the past. "Food relationships," two experts have written, "seem minimal, fleeting, and superficial."^[11] The Kettering Commission on Youth spoke of a generation of young people "never having had the opportunity to care for a child or an elderly person, never having had to be with someone who was lonely, disconsolate, sick, or dying."^[12]

Not unaware of the present generation's weakening sense of obligation to them, younger people have begun to act as if their future is quite problematic. Between 1960 and 1980, the suicide rate among young people in the United States doubled, about as dramatic a sign one can have of severe anticipations of the future.^[13] (Teenage suicide might have surprised Durkheim, for, as he pointed out, suicide is rare among children.^[14] Since teenage suicide is neither egoistic—many teenagers do not yet have a fully developed ego—nor altruistic—it is hardly an act of duty—it would seem to be an ideal type of anomic suicide.) Not a single rate of what are generally

taken to be indicators of social disintegration—from crime to drugs to passivity—failed to increase among American youth in the past decade.^[15] Eighty percent of American youths in 1980 could not name one foreign head of state, although, it should be added, adult recognition of basic political facts in America is not all that much higher.^[16] A surprisingly large number of students were found to be believers in creationism, extraterrestrial life, and other notions that were supposed to disappear with modernity.^[17] American youths, it seems fair to say, are not being especially well prepared to take seriously their membership obligations in the adult society they will join.^[18]

Most of the attitudes toward social life we associate with the market are being passed on to a new generation. It is not that youth has become "immoral"; on most moral issues excluding those of sexual behavior, such as whether lying or cheating is justified, 1980s students were not significantly different in their responses than earlier generations of students.^[19] Rather, students today seem much more attracted to educational patterns and career choices that will give them immediate payoffs in market terms. Thus surveys conducted annually by the American Council on Education have discovered a significant decrease in altruistic feelings among college students in the 1980s: the number of students who felt that being well off financially was an essential life goal increased between 1967 and 1987 from 45 percent to over 70 percent, while those who wanted to develop a meaningful philosophy of life decreased from 84 percent to 40 percent. Similarly, careers in education dropped to extremely low levels before starting a slow rise again in 1984, while business careers have consistently increased in number since 1973.^[20] There seems little doubt that American youths have become more concerned with themselves and less concerned with the needs of others.

It is evident that not all the changes in young people's outlook and behavior can be traced to a greater reliance on marketplace principles in the intimate sphere of society. It is also true, furthermore, that a concern with the alleged immorality of youth has been a theme throughout American history. Yet despite the caveats, there have taken place changes of sufficient magnitude to conclude that reliance on the market as a moral code does not leave an especially positive legacy for future generations. For all those who may benefit economically from a loosening of the moral ties of civil society, there are many who do not. Moreover, something seems amiss in the social and moral prospects of all children, not just those living in poverty. The weakening of the boundary between civil society and the market

allows little room for the symbolic ways by which present generations transfer obligations to future generations. Pessimism about the future, increases in antisocial acts such as suicide and crime, and a tendency to serve the self to the exclusion of others testify to the difficulty of considering obligations as abstract as those to future generations when present decisions are guided ever more by considerations of self-interest.

Just as a greater reliance on the moral code of the market makes sacrifices for future generations more problematic, it also suggests that present generations will be less likely to recognize that their good fortune was the result of sacrifices made by earlier ones. This is not to suggest that those who are now in retirement face a future of increasing poverty. Especially in material terms, older people in America have it better at the end of the 1980s than ever before. Indeed, the meaning of old age in the United States has been almost completely transformed, with many elderly people living longer and better than anyone could have imagined a generation ago. To the degree that the improvement in their condition is a product of the rapid increase in the stock market during the 1980s, market reliance has meant obvious benefits for those living on pensions. Much the same can be said for improvements in health care, the possibilities of warm-weather retirement, and other aspects of old age in the United States. We have, especially in contrast to previous periods, taken good care to satisfy our obligations toward those who came before us.

Yet in moral as opposed to material terms, the extension of the market into the intimate realm of civil society does have serious consequences for the lives of our elders, because the family is still the largest provider of support and care.^[21] Proximity to children is an important prerequisite of care, yet grandparents and their children live farther away from each other than ever before. As Andrew Cherlin and Frank Furstenberg put it, "Grandparents are at the mercy of their children's mobility."^[22] (Surprisingly, Cherlin and Furstenberg discuss only children who move away from their parents, not, in this age of Sunbelt retirement communities, parents who move away from their children.) Smaller families decrease the number of children available to support the elderly. Divorce, moreover, complicates the question of who is responsible to whom.^[23] Under the impact of such changes, parents, like their children, look less to the future, although positive feelings about the future still underlie a willingness to provide care.^[24] Friendship networks and ties of reciprocity can help substitute for weakening family ties, yet these aspects of civil society are also in decline as the market is relied on to organize real estate to an unprecedented degree.^[25]

Such demographic changes, in Pamela Doty's words, "are likely to decrease the availability of informal family supports in the future."^[26] The same tie between a weak sense of obligation in the intimate realm and a failure to recognize obligations in the distant realm that affects children in America, in other words, also affects the elderly.

Increasingly unsure that their families will be able to care for them and extremely distrustful of politicians at a time of cost cutting, older Americans have responded by forming interest groups and lobbying, quite successfully, for benefits.^[27] In so doing, however, they tend to reinforce the idea that each generation is a special interest, whose primary responsibility is to look after its own.^[28] As a result, talk of "intergenerational inequity" has become more frequent in the United States.^[29] Anxious to protect the benefits they have won, the elderly often become politically unsympathetic to the needs of those who will themselves be elderly in the future. At the same time, a large number of recently married Americans, about to start families of their own under conditions of uncertainty about the future, instead of recognizing that their prosperity is the product of sacrifices made by older Americans when they were young, have begun to ask whether older Americans have it too easy. Thus polling data assembled by Daniel Yankelovich in the late 1970s indicated that parents not only expect to sacrifice less for their children but will also expect less from their offspring when they themselves go into retirement: the proportion of Americans who believed that "children do not have an obligation to their parents regardless of what their parents have done for them" was 67 percent.^[30]

For all the success the market has shown in improving the material conditions of many, but by no means all, elderly people, it has at the same time confused our sense of what the young owe the elderly and what the elderly owe the young. The material success of the elderly in the United States contributes to their "modernization," to the triumph of such market-associated values as individualism. Symbolized by retirement communities in warm-weather areas which exclude families with young children or by the quest for perfect health regardless of the costs to the rest of the society, the elderly often find themselves cut off from other generations; in a certain sense, they live outside those aspects of the life course inevitably associated with aging. As Daniel Callahan has put it, "There can be no community at all, much less community among the generations, without some sacrifice of an unlimited quest for individualistic pleasure on the part of the old."^[31] It is as if the same cynicism toward the future that is now developing among the young is matched by a cynicism toward the past on the part of

older generations. In many ways, the fact that the elderly can live by the same moral rules as everyone else is a positive development, yet, like the very rich, the elderly are in fact different from everyone else. It is not discrimination, but simple common moral sense, that leads us to organize our relations with them by different moral rules than apply to individuals better situated to maximize self-interest in interaction with others.

If we take ties between the generations as symbolic of people's ability to be responsible for the needs of hypothetical and distant others, reliance on the market, as the American experience indicates, becomes increasingly problematic. Because of improved technology and health care, infants live to adulthood and the elderly live to an age that would only seem miraculous to previous generations. Yet it is not just that our obligations have expanded over time that is important; it is also that we have greater awareness of how these obligations ought to affect what we do. As Annette Baier puts the matter:

We are especially self-conscious members of the cross-generational community, aware both of how much, and how much more than previous generations, we benefit from the investment of earlier generations and of the extent to which we may determine the fate of future generations. Such self-consciousness has its costs in added obligations.^[32]

It is questionable whether the moral principles of the market constitute the best way to represent this self-consciousness of intergenerational dependency. The very features that make markets so effective in the economic sector—indirection, spontaneity, and the ability to take advantage of unforeseen consequences—are not features that make for adequate recognition of the debts that all generations owe one another. Because the social fabric is vertical as well as horizontal, reliance on the market to account for intergenerational obligations takes inadequate recognition of what can only be called "the social limits to time."^[33]