Emphasis Added : Silent generation, Strauss & Howe

The Post-Millennial Generation

Rob — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:24:00 GMT

If one reckons the basic boundaries of the Millennial generation to be 1981-2000, then we are now nearly 8 years into the birth years of the post-Millennial generation. How might this new cohort be different from their well-publicized older peers?

Strauss and Howe's methodology offers one possibility. According to their theory of the procession of generations, a Civic cohort like the Millennials is usually followed by a generation they call "Adaptive." Adaptives are late-bloomers, growing up in the shadow of their assertive and accomplished elders. Their historical role is to institutionalize the material innovations of Civics and correct some of the excesses and rigidity of the Civics' approach to social order. Adaptives in their youth have historically been leaders in the crusades for social justice (earlier iterations of this generational type were the abolitionists, the Progressives, and the civil rights activists of the 1950s and 60s); in later life, they tend to prefer compromise over confrontation as a leadership style, and are usually swept aside by the crusading, spiritually-aware Idealists (like the Baby Boomers) coming up behind them.

Earlier this month, when I spoke at an insurance conference in Phoenix, I heard a lot of concern from the (mostly Boomer) crowd about the gaps in learning they've seen, even among well-educated Millennials. My standard retort is that this is probably something that will swing back in coming years. Adaptives historically take learning and literature more seriously than Civics, frequently taking a more overtly intellectual and satirical approach. Harvey Kurtzman, Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, Thomas Pynchon and John Updike were all members of the most recent Adaptive generation, the Silents, born 1925-1945. It is not too early to start looking for clues about these kinds of tendencies in the cohort now in early childhood.

The factor that gives Adaptives their defining qualities and their generational coherence is their historical experience in youth. Typically born to Reactive parents (Lost Generation, GenX) who provide them with plenty of attention in compensation for the more "hands-off" style of their own upbringing, they grow up amid economic turbulence (the Depression of 1873, the Great Depression), where they internalize habits of thrift and caution. They observe the flamboyant, assertive manner of their next-elders and initially tend toward conformity. Their frustrations and discontents only bubble to the surface relatively late, in their early to mid-20s, and linger into adulthood.

The other critical defining quality of Adaptives? Their earliest experiences of American government occurred under the leadership of bold, transformational figures. In 1800, when Thomas Jefferson took the young country in a new direction, the oldest of the new Adaptives was in their early teen years. In 1865, the future Progressive generation had just been born. In 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt took the oath of office in the depths of the Great Depression, the oldest Silents were just 7, just as today's New Adapatives will be in the first hours of the new Obama administration.

Post-Compromise Politics

Rob — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:35:00 GMT

While the AARP is open to anyone over 50 - a cohort which now includes increasing numbers of Baby Boomers - the organization's demographics now fall solidly across the pre-Boom Silent Generation (b.1925-1945), and it shows. Silents, in Strass and Howe's taxonomy, are considered an "adaptive" generation, motivated by a desire to infuse the collective spirit of their next-elders (in this case, the Civic "Veteran" Generation) with a sense of fairness, social justice, and self-awareness that is painfully absent from the culture during their formative years.

In their youth, in the 50s and 60s, Silents were the impetus behind the civil rights movement and the early dawnings of feminism. They were also the humorists and literary gadflies, including Harvey Kurtzman, the genius behind Mad Magazine, Woody Allen, Philip Roth, and the irreplaceable George Carlin. Unlike Boomers, Silents are not as deliberately disruptive in their social protest (Carlin notwithstanding), because their orientation is toward achieving actual change rather than self-actualization. The difference between Silent Generation and Boomer political activism is the difference between William F. Buckley and Newt Gingrich, for example.

Strauss and Howe, among others, have observed that this quiet determination to drive social change, combined with the disaproval with which many aging Adaptives view the noisesome protests of their younger Idealist siblings, can develop into a leadership philosophy that prizes compromise, not just as a method, but as an end unto itself. This has plusses and minuses. While younger Adaptives can provide much-needed agility in static systems (as the young President Theodore Roosevelt did in breaking a political logjam in the early 20th century, and as the generation of organizational leaders of the 1980s and 90s did when creating a more inclusive workplace), elder Adaptives from previous American generations proved to be some of the most disasterously ineffective executives in the country's history because they will do practically anything to avoid pitched conflict.

This brings us to the AARP, whose latest advertsing campaign, "Divided We Fail," saturates cable news political coverage. Its pointedly non-partisan message is that politicians need to "stop bickering" and solve problems like healthcare, social security, and the economy. It recalls the cranky centrism of Ross Perot in 1992, but unlike that campaign, it offers no solutions and presents no single figure around whom the compromising problem-solvers of America can rally. And while Perot came at the high-water mark of Silent political and cultural influence, today the "let's sit down and reason together" message seems utterly old and tired.

The fact is, both parties have ideas on how to address the problems that concern the AARP and others, and their approaches are, by and large, fundamentally incompatible. We don't need to "stop bickering," as if our principled differences were just childish misunderstandings: we need to air the differences as loudly and clearly as possible. We don't need to compromise. We need to choose.