St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in Manhattan is now known for the young-adult Mass, celebrated by Fr. Jonathan Morris, it hosts for a lively twentysomething Catholic community every Sunday at 7 p.m.
The advantages and attractions are apparent. Church attendance has collapsed among youths and urban dwellers, so giving urban-dwelling youth special attention makes sense; congregants are interested in coreligionist marriageables, and the church has a clear interest in their meeting. It is unsurprising that young-adult services are an accelerating trend, in Protestant and Catholic churches alike.
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Critics worry that a church trying to be hip is self-defeating — in being too accommodating of its parishioners’ wants, it softens its majesty. But the more important loss is much less abstract: old people. They are, by the nature of the service, missing, in a way that is peculiarly noticeable and sad because church might otherwise, did it not balkanize its generations, be the only place unrelated youths and geriatrics communed.
America today is startlingly segregated by age relative to historical norms, a change that is as lamentable as it is unremarked upon. Alarms have not been sounded — partly because we have chosen this separation, partly because it is unnoticeable in its progress, partly because its harms are not concrete or statistically measurable. They fall on our patience, our humility, our relationship to history, our gratitude, our preparation for death, in short our wisdom — things that are hard to put before Congress or in a think-tank finding.
What is the origin of age segregation? Most broadly, it is a component of modernization as the expansion of individual autonomy. Modernization in that sense includes the agricultural revolution, which inverted man’s relationship to his environment, and the Enlightenment, which inverted the individual’s relationship to the political order — man went from creature to a creator of each. (The troubling prospectus for modernization’s future is that computer science and biotechnology may invert even our relationship to human nature, making the next generation’s biology and consciousness a product of human design rather than an inheritance.) And with our new autonomy we have chosen to part with the elderly for obvious reasons: They can be costly, grumpy, or stodgy, they are not useful for advancing our careers, and we are not attracted to them. Let them live in their own communities, then.
How can this bad (separateness) come of this good (freedom)? The best allegory for this, the dilemma of modernization, is C. S. Lewis’s imagining of Hell, The Great Divorce (the title implying that it is a response to Blake’s Marriage). Lewis envisioned that the damned suffer not a fire, or any physical torment or confinement, but absolute dominion and inalienable rights: the liberty to roam an infinite and borderless land, and to freely and instantaneously build castles wherever they like.
Lewis’s damned enjoy this freedom by abandoning locations and acquaintances the moment they become inconvenient. The awkwardness of an exchange with a neighbor we think has slighted us can, in Lewis’s Hell, be evaded by simply moving away. So after a few years’ stay in Hell, each of the damned is thousands of miles away from any other, pacing solitarily in his castle.
The political moral is that unchosen obligations, restraints, and dependencies are the things that push people together, despite our irritableness and our inconvenience to each other. Our limitations and inadequacies counter our selfish bent, and become a foundation for community. (Lewis’s cosmic allegory, then, doubles as theodicy, showing how it can be good for us that we do not always get what we want, and are sick and feeble.)
We’ve been making Lewis’s Hell for ourselves for a long time, expanding autonomies in ways that cause social separateness in general, and generational separateness in particular. A brief historical sketch:
As Americans encountered a continent of unclaimed land and began to move westward, we conceived of property less as a family trust to be preserved for our children because it was imbued with the spirits of our grandparents (as it was traditionally conceived — even in Christendom, which always preserved some element of ancestor worship), and more as a commodity to be taken, possessed, alienated, and leveraged for personal uses. In ancient Rome, a family was more possessed by its home than vice versa. In modern America, individuals own houses temporarily, their eyes fixed not on the intrinsic value of the land or the spiritual continuity it could provide, but on constantly fluctuating real-estate values and interests rates as they relate to a financial portfolio. The hearth around which three generations of one family could gather is now archaic.
The root of the problem of generational separation is pre-modernism and post-modernism. The former believes in absolutes in all aspects of life: family, business and spiritual; while the supporters of the latter embrace relative truth that moved through civilization the last 50 years to give rise to "if it works for you fine, but it just doesn't for me--you believe what you want to believe and I'll believe what I want". This is a serious clash of thought playing out today in issues like this article and SSM. I can't see the polarization ending any time soon.
I agree completely with your concerns.What i learned about life from my large extended family was has been far more important to me than any course I ever took.
I do think that some creative use of the internet can help with intergenerational connectedness. I know people that really keep up with their grandchildren via eMails. The kids tend to be the experts on the tech side, and the grandparents offer all kinds of input on the real life side. Perhaps NRO could do a symposium on how people use the net to stay in touch.
It does have a little bit for everyone doesn't it.
This provides thought for how the expansion of individual liberty (both economic and political), which is a byproduct of classical liberalism, can create the climate for a rejection of the social institutions which actually allowed it to flourish in the first place. Sprinkle in a healthy dose of progressive political philosophy and the natural stress on these social institutions goes on steroids. Continued reliance on the govt to provide just increases the need for these social institutions, which are increasingly less supported as we move away from them and the govt places barriers to their ability to operate.
I'm not sure that there is any real answer, the govt is too big and attempts to do too much, reducing its scope would be helpful. But our welfare programs all were designed for a different age, re-creating them for today would be an excellent start, why should people be subsidizing the elderly (and taking their families off the hook btw) for multiple years when initially these programs were there to help with just a few remaining years. Why should the subsidization of debt for both individuals and businesses allow us to make economic decisions we would not normally make?
I don't think you can just say lets go back to the past, because the past was somebody else's today, who also might have looked back to the "good ole days". But a very interesting article about the need to infuse into tomorrow some of the goodness of yesterday.
One problem is that parents are afraid of having more than 1 or 2 kids. They are afraid of the cost of college, or of sacrificing their Pilates time or foregoing their golf game. What they don't understand is that large families operate on a complete different baseline.
First, assuming you take your parental responsibilities seriously, having a large family frees you from the tyranny of your possessions, to a large degree. "We can't have anything nice around here", gets said a lot in a large family household, but it is also quite liberating. Materialism is a sickness in society.
A large family can also free you from the tyranny of your profession as well. It might be very easy to shoo 1 kid into daycare so husband and wife can work but after 4 or 5 kids, hard choices have to be made as to who will stay home and be responsible for the kids. Not convenient? Sure, but I rarely have met a stay-at-home mom that didn't feel incredibly blessed by this unintended path in their life.
And most relative to the point of this article, parents can find themselves depending upon their grandparents for help with the kids and that's where the real magic across the generations begins.
This viewpoint is very unpopular, not only with the Left, but also with people either defending the unalterable paths they have chosen in their lives regarding kids, or those with whiff of narcissim about them. And for some, its simply the jealousy of a childless or infertile mom, a very old story, one that is sadly repeating with greater frequency. Parents of large families put up with a lot of garbage from folks about their kids & know EXACTLY what I'm talking about.
Tax prescription: one way into paying AMT is having too many dependents along with a mortgage. That needs to be changed, and while we're at it make deductions for children dependent on having an intact traditional parents living together.
Conservatives do well and WILL make their stand by getting married, staying married, going to church and having more kids. Just have one more kid than you think you can - you can manage. Find yourself by losing yourself.
Generally agree with your approach, but you go a step too far with "make deductions for children dependent on having an intact traditional parents living together."
This won't keep a cad from walking out, and then only the children suffer.
"As Americans encountered a continent of unclaimed land and began to move westward, we conceived of property less as a family trust to be preserved for our children because it was imbued with the spirits of our grandparents (as it was traditionally conceived — even in Christendom, which always preserved some element of ancestor worship), and more as a commodity to be taken, possessed, alienated, and leveraged for personal uses."
Agree with much of what you say - but I don't think the New Deal has any part of it. I've talked quite a bit with my friends' parents - they all remember the days before the New Deal - that is, the days of the poor farm. Here, mostly elderly people with no one to care for them were warehoused. Don't think we want to go back to those 'good old days'.
The dysopian novel and 1971 movie Logan's run killed off anyone over 30 years old. Sandman is bewildered when he meets the first old man when he escapes to the surface. The computer asks him "Did you find sanctuary?" He responses "there is no sanctuary." American Indian and Hispanic culture and to a much lesser extent Asian cultures still value extended family relationships. The mobility required to seek employment and promote careers and the ease in which the transportation system can facilitate travel has broken up the traditional family relationships. Each generation is estranged from the prior one. Cicero complained about the disrespect the young had for thier elders. Even the Scriptures complain about the generation gap.
Hebrews 3:10
That is why I was angry with that generation, and I said, 'Their hearts are always going astray, and they have not known my ways.'
Great article! I was at a children's church activity the other day when I witnessed a pre-teen walking around engaged with her smartphone rather than the fun activities surrounding her (I would not be suprised if she was one of our school districts 6th graders who get property tax funded free cell phones and service, the Anatole France loving principal claims they are a necessary learning tool, did I mention our property taxes just went up and we own a business and manage to get by without cell phones... sorry got off topic). So I agree, technology can be a detriment to face to face life interactions. However, I do think many grandmothers and distance families have found facebook to be a nice way to share photos and skype a way to read bedtime stories. Sometimes the neccesities of life make moving away a sad reality. In some ways perhaps technology is helping to maintain family connections.
I am glad that one of the solutions mentioned in this article is for greater grandparent involvement in their grandchildren's lives. It is not an uncommon story these days for young families to get little attention from baby boomer grandparents. So believe me, those of us on the young family side of the fence are longing for intergenerational connections too. It is not just the young causing this divide, as a matter of fact the baby boomers have contributed greatly to the foundations of this problem. On one hand you have the world convincing young people that they must wait for the perfect time to have children and that having too many makes you an Earth killer, then on the other hand you have boomer parents pushing their children down paths of immense college debt and chasing career success, it is no wonder that young people remain in a state of perpetual adolecence. Those of us who do grow up get bombarded with constant guilt about our choices and little support (even psycological or emotional) from our elders.
If you think things are bad now, just wait. Over 24% of the population is now between 46 and 64 years old; the birthrate in the US has been consistently at or below replacement levels for 35 years. And without Hispanic immigration (legal or illegal), it would be much worse.
It's not just a matter of "culture". The problem goes much deeper than the symptoms the author points out.
You neglect the legitimate cultural differences between generations.
It's a little too convenient that you neglect to even mention that the generation currently running the show even as they begin to retire is the same one that sat around with Mao's little book chanting nonsense about how that was the future. Or that they are the generation to whom cultural control was handed in the 60s. Or that they "didn't start the fire" (in the words of their ridiculous self-adoring "music") but they dang sure poured a whole lotta gas on it!
Theirs/yours is the generation that after being told for the umpteenth time what they ask for will destroy everything and leave nothing for those who follow says "GIMMEE!!!!" So for their supposed "wisdom"; you can keep it! You can also have the "wisdom" of the generation that raised those brats on the faddish advice of "Doctor" Spock!
My generation and the generations of my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren will be left picking up the mess you created. THAT separates us in ways that the breaking of extended family bonds cannot even approach.
There has always be a ‘generation gap’, no biggie, kids want to separate themselves from parents, then prove themselves, and as they age (and have children) they gravitate back to the parents. The tragedy in life is that many remember that parental bond too late...but this is nothing new...society has survived.
And I’ll take modernity any day over pre-modernity...it just takes one tooth abscess to appreciate the wonders of the modern world.
If we can purge the extreme leftist cancer which has metastasized throughout out education/labor/government etc, we as a society can begin to heal and re-embrace our tradional values.
Concomitantly and ironically, absent the left’s uncivil ruthless assault, mutual respect will be enhanced...amazing what a salve tolerance can be (don’t you find it funny that it’s conservatives who are open minded and respect the liberal’s values more than the other way around).
I agree that larger families find navigating these waters easier. I'll admit that my relationship to my in-laws is still a little fraught (religious differences), but since we had kids, the relationship has gotten much better on both sides. I expect, as a stay-at-home mother of six, that the skills and lifestyle we are now acquiring (cooking for many people, providing a comfortable home for several people with different needs, saving money, etc.) will be well-suited to caring for my own parents as they age.
It also helps if you attend a non-trendy, age-integrated church. If it's liturgical, so much the better. The children and elderly can still participate even when they can't read yet/anymore.
Your observation about liturgical churches being more intergenerational is very true - except for those places that have special "worship times" geared to specific generations. (One congregation in Nebraska geared services to five different demographic groups!)
But if the congregation is, as you say, 'non-trendy', then, yes, the old and the young can and do worship together. And talk to each other before and after church and at church functions.
The young need to learn the songs of the old (literally as well as metaphorically), and the old need the songs of the young as well.
Having done genealogy as a hobby for a while, I've developed an intense envy for previous generations, where one member founded (or helped found) a town, and the kids and grandkids stayed there for at least a couple of centuries.
They did, however, leave for a reason--jobs. As the agricultural field grew less important, it became necessary to move to where the steel mills were, in order to make a living. Then, when the steel mills closed, there was no obvious magnet, and the kids just ran to wherever they could find work in their chosen fields. There's no more question of the drama of following one's dream vs. keeping the family store open--the family store is pretty dead anyway, and the young rebel's choice is between working in a chain or following a dream to some other place. So let's not put it all on culture--economy has been a major, driving force here. I'd rather be living at home in Western New York, where my family lived since just after the Revolution, but I can't go somewhere if I can't work there.
I was lucky in some ways--my mom was a single parent who leaned on her family to help, so I grew up with my grandmother and great-grandmother (alas, my grandfather died the year I was born). Mom was also a geriatrics nurse, so I spent a lot of time with her patients, some of whom were cousins and great aunts. Now I work in a library, where I interact with toddlers and senior citizens and young marrieds and... everyone, really. But they rarely interact with each other, and if we tried to facilitate it with a deliberately inter-age program, they'd ignore it. It's sad.
1. "These friendships never become inconvenient, because no obligation can impose itself through the digital medium."
Obviously you've never live-chatted with a Facebook-friended co-worker distraught over her husband's refusal to seek medical aid for the health crisis that was happening right at that precise moment a 30 minute drive away.
2. "...bribe us into lower-density life."
You think people need to be bribed to stay out of the hell of high-density, urban life where you have no land to call your own, no privacy, no quiet, no peace, and not even the right to choose the color of your paint?
How does that fit with your complaint that people have real estate investments instead of homes?
You have some very good points about the importance of resisting the temptation to self-segregate in a way that blinds us to what we're missing, but these two statements above are really quite foolish.
I did not understand the call to urbanize us either. If anything, the few communities that still have intergenerational connections and values still living are small towns. I do agree that the problem is that houses have become investments rather than homes, but apartment living will not solve any of these problems. What would solve the home problem is for the government to stop interfering and let the house prices fall to their natural affordable levels, then a new generation can buy homes and metaphorically speaking plant fruit trees for the next generation.
The call to urbanization is not one away from home or towards the apartment (and in fact, in most cities, if someone owns their own home, they have much more freedom to do what they want with it than they would if they lived in a suburb with a HOA.), but towards living in a place where people of various ages can be autonomous enough to interact with society. The elderly and youth are two groups that suffer by living in a place where, if they cannot drive, they are not a legitimate member of society. Cities (or towns, but not single-use suburban development) give those members of society who cannot drive a dignified and realistic way to get around. I grew up near the downtown of a small city, and as a child enjoyed the freedom of being able to get myself to school, soccer practice, friend's houses, etc. without a chauffeur (mom). When I am old, I still want to live in a place where I have a choice as to how to get around, even if I cannot drive.
Mr. Shaffer, Good article...it causes me to pause and reflect at many of the decisions we've made in our lives (including moving our family cross-country --and away from grandparents -- in search of a better opportunity). Ironically, I see the bitter fruits of modernism in the "Faith Communities" of our local Catholic parishes. Perhaps this is a opportune time to review Pope Pius X's 1907 Encyclical "Pascendi Dominici Gregis"
