How do youth make a difference?

December 30, 2008 6:48 PM

My dad says that his generation is more altruistic and believes in/practices activism more than my generation. I say he is full of it. Help me prove him wrong!

I'm 26, my dad is 64. We got into a big argument about activism. He says that I don't understand the power of grass-roots organizing because I'm young and he comes from a generation that was brought up believing in the power of local change. I am certain I've read articles/studies that actually come to quite the opposite conclusion - that young people actually spend far more time affecting social change, albeit in different ways - than their parents. But, of course, when the money's on line, my google searches are coming up short. Can anyone give me some evidence to back up my side? Bonus points for anything quantitative.

posted by rjacobs to human relations (27 comments total)

President-elect Obama says hello. FiveThirtyEight has some good posts on the effect of the Obama campaign's ground game; while it doesn't seem to have data on the makeup of those organizers, it's a safe bet that they're mostly people from our generation (my own experience suggests this, at least).

In general, though, I think this is a pretty silly argument. How can you possibly prove that one generation is more "altruistic" than another? What metric is there for altruism? I'm sure you could gin up a proxy for it, but then, so could he. Any statistic purporting to demonstrate some objective measurement of altruism is bogus.
posted by sinfony at 7:01 PM on December 30, 2008

Next time is comes up, ask him what positive aspect your generation exhibits or embodies more than his generation. If he is unable to easily identify one, then you know he hasn't spent much time contemplating the differences and his opinion is probably nothing more than the common battle cry of a hopeless baby boomer. You can undermine his position with the first fact, but the second fact all but ensures your failure.
posted by milarepa at 7:30 PM on December 30, 2008 [2 favorites]

Times have changed, but by and large young people have not. As a 30 year old dude who was, in his twenties, a guy who spent a bit of time trying to affect social change, I'll relate my experiences, and then relate them back to what I know of the generation that came before us.

First of all, there are some kinds of alturism and social change practices that our fathers' generations did that we don't really do today. For example, the Peace Corps. The generation of yesteryear was highly active in volunteering for the Peace Corps, which was in many ways a very alturistic thing to do. However not many people join the Peace Corps today. The generation before us also liked to protest a lot more. Our generation still does, but not anywhere near as much.

I would probably agree with your father that there are less young people today who get involved in social causes. But that's a sign of the times. When our fathers were young, they lived through the 60s and 70s, a time of massive social change, brought on by such things as the realisation that people with a different skin colour should be equal to white people, that women deserved equal rights. Meanwhile wars in countries like Vietnam and Korea were being fought and news services had evolved to a stage where getting information about war artocities committed by both sides of the conflict into peoples homes was quick and easy, as opposed to the days of WW2 where news footage of wars was a heavily censored thing you would see at the local cinema. Meanwhile, Neil Young and Bob Dylan and other artists were singing protest songs to young people on a weekly basis. All of this leads to protests, greater scrutiny of government, resignations of Presidents... you get the picture.

With this kind of stuff going on, it's probably no wonder that young people, inspired by their peers and social democrat university professors, would feel the need to protest and do so often. And look at what they achieved! Full credit to the generation of the past... they achieved a lot and have much to be proud of. They might have left much of the job unfinished but by and large the situation for many minorities is probably far better than it was pre-1960.

Then came the 1980s. The old saying that yesterday's hippies are tomorrows business leaders was proven true during this decade. The 80s saw capatalism trump pretty much everything else. The decade paved the way for the 90s which was all about individualism. Looking after numero uno. People became far more litigious. And as we moved into the new millennium, people became richer, news services started to care less about the truth, singers started to sing about sex and suicide and social change was left largely by the way side.

So here we are today. 2008, almost 2009. What is there left to fight for? Equal opportunities for same sex couples? That's a big one, and certainly worth fighting for. But what else is there, really? And if lessening discrimination for homosexuals is such a big thing, where's all the protests? And if we hate the Iraq War so much, why arent we out there protesting that, like our forebearers did with Vietnam and Korea? Why arent we out there finishing the job that the previous generation began, ensuring that all discrimination against minorities is stamped out?

Truth is, all these things are being fought for, but its not as obvious these days, and that is because, as I said right from the start, because times have changed. Again, I would say that largely because the 80s and 90s left most of people comfortably well off and didn't stoke the fires of social change as the 60s and 70s did, the number of social warriors has decreased. But they are still there.

What's changed? Well for starters, there's the internet. Didn't exist when your dad or my dad was out there protesting, but does now. There's a tonne of blogs and twitter accounts out there, all debating and arguing for social change. Moveon organises large swathes of people, both young and old, to get out there and advocate for change, be it through volunteering or through simply donating money (alturisim at work!). The internet, with its world wide reach to billions of people is perhaps the most powerful tool for social change ever created. It can mobilise people at the drop of a hat, get large sums of money to causes that need it most and can spread positive social messages to countries like China and Iran where these kinds of messages are often drowned out.

Meanwhile protests still happen but less often. Again, times have changed. With most people working hard in jobs that require a lot of their time, getting out to a protest march isn't as practical as it once was. Plus while protesting is still a right in most western countries, you usually need to apply for a permit and with a protest these days requiring costly police supervision and often blocking access to many businesses, city authorities are less willing to grant such permits. But I have still protested, as have many young people I know. I protested many times against the invasion of Iraq, marched here in Australia on the Sorry Day parade and fought for my rights at work with the Union movement.

And although I've largely sold out and am becoming The Man, my position allows me to see many, many dedicated people in their early 20s still carrying the torch for social change, who will be out there protesting for whats right while I'm at a boardroom somewhere making (I hope) tonnes of money.

So tell your dad that grass roots activism is alive and well, but its not the grass roots activism he remembers.
posted by Effigy2000 at 7:35 PM on December 30, 2008 [2 favorites]

I'm afraid your dad may be right.

There's lots of hard data to consume.

It's not all bleak; things have improved, but I don't think we're at the point where we can say that there is the same level of civic engagement as there has been when your dad was young.
posted by brookeb at 7:43 PM on December 30, 2008

Funny this comes up today. I'm a subscriber to a financial-industry mailing list that I've felt has been fairly prescient in the last few years. Their mailing this week was a re-run of a post from nearly a decade ago, updated, that focused on generational tendencies and how patterns repeat.

There might be something to what your dad has been arguing - not that he's right per-se, but moreso that certain patterns were more prevalent - you & your friends could be far more active, but the generation as a whole?

I'm not making the call either way, but This article might be interesting reading for you.

Text form of the URL - the site shouldn't require login, but I'm not sure. If this doesn't work, "Investor Blogs" -> "John Mauldin" -> "Outside the Box" -> "Foundations of the Crisis"


http://www.investorsinsight.com/blogs/john_mauldins_outside_the_box/archive/2008/12/29/foundations-of-crisis.aspx
posted by swngnmonk at 7:45 PM on December 30, 2008

[a few comments removed - "get off my lawn" is, while amusing, not data.]
posted by jessamyn at 8:05 PM on December 30, 2008

I would delicately say that most of the stuff the younger generation has done has been more "touristy" and kitschy. Whereas the Vietnam generation were trying not to be rounded up and flown to a country to shoot people.

Fighting for social change counts less when its not about the people doing the actual protesting, right or wrong.
posted by gjc at 8:09 PM on December 30, 2008

I think that the generations active in the 50s through mid-70s in the US and Europe were more active and engaged in politics, as a group, than any generation since (including my own).
posted by zippy at 8:12 PM on December 30, 2008

I think, in evaluating your data, is the fact that people around your age have basically wised up to the following "facts" (perceived facts, I should say):

1) The hippies sold out, became yuppies, and are now The Establishment. First they fought to get the drinking age lowered to 18, and one they were comfortably out of that, they raised it again.

2) The kids who came after the hippies had just as much vim, but their energy was captured and redirected the way the previous group wanted it to be. They weren't aware of it at the time.

3) The current "kids" have figured out/believe to be true (depends on your perspective) that a lot of grass roots organizations are astro-turfing, that the game is fixed from the beginning, and that most of their chanting will be done in Free Speech Zones far away from anyone who might possibly be bothered by protest.

I'm wildly cynical, but I think the point under all of it is that the motivation is still there, just that they're a bit too jaded to have much follow-through.
posted by adipocere at 8:54 PM on December 30, 2008 [7 favorites]

I like the question but I don't entirely get it. If he's referring to the action of his time there's no way you can match what went down in the 60's. The closest we've been to that was WTO Seattle in 1999.
posted by ezekieldas at 8:58 PM on December 30, 2008

The premise is a bit of a red herring. Although it's a common shorthand, ascribing the zeitgeist of a vaguely-defined epoch to the behaviour of a vaguely-defined age-group is an oversimplification. Your father's idea of his generation is a myth, a media fiction. Someday you'll have a myth of your own to try and foist on your kids. The important question, it seems to me, is not what actions either of you may ascribe to a putative generation but what actions you and your father can take yourselves.
posted by Jode at 9:01 PM on December 30, 2008 [6 favorites]

I think that while previous generations were certainly more active in visible, in-the-street ways, and ways organized as youth movements, there are also ways in which the current 20something generation is pretty activist, particularly in politics (the Obama campaign giving an excellent example) and the environment. A lot of that idealism and activism does escape the notice of people who are not particularly active online, since people tend to look for activism in the same places they remember it rather than in new places. Marches on Washington are totally spent as a political statement. Unprecedented amounts of campaign money raised in incremental donations through the use of daily email and social-networking communication are not.

Still, the times we live in have not offered as many opportunities to make nation-changing political and personal decisions as the 1920a, 1930s, 1940s, or 1960s did, no matter how you slice it. I just re-watched the beginning of "Eyes on the Prize" and it is just profoundly impressive to see the individual and collective courage embodied in these early civil rights protests - let alone the sophisticated and tightly managed organization of the actions and the simple sanity and reasonableness of the demonstrators. I can't think of any issue that young activists of today could coalesce around that would cut across that large a swath of the culture and draw in as many passionate supporters ready and willing to accept death, if it should come, for the good of the cause. The fact that there was a generation that produced enough people willing to do so has to do with demographics firstly (there are a lot more baby boomers than there are members of any other generation; they dwarfed their parent's generation and felt themselves to be a force from the time they were in kindergarten), then economics (they grew up in a time when most of their needs, as children, were met adequately due to postwar prosperity, then historical conditions and events and legal evolutions.
posted by Miko at 9:05 PM on December 30, 2008

I would say your dad was right, the generation of Reaganism and Fox News was probably a low point. Labor organizing and the civil rights movements were far more culturally accepted as a valid ethos among baby-boomers than they were in among gen-Xers (where unfettered capitalism was most often believed to be a new invention that superseded all fruitcakey cultural sentiments, hence libertarianism). From observation, after the embarrassment of losing Vietnam, it tainted the left as defeatist and wimpy without anyone even talking about it (funny how embarrassment works that way). That opened the door to blatant wannabeism. Nearly everybody since thought they were a born-again genius for hating most liberals and forgetting all about environmentalism, as if someone had proved them wrong or something. (I call it the Southpark generation). These days, especially among Obama groupies, they tend to care more about what someone says than does, even demanding blandness, which is to be expected among people who pretend that the middle way is a blend of religion and capitalism.
posted by Brian B. at 9:05 PM on December 30, 2008

Oh, and unprecedented numbers of them went to college, so they had this unusual amount of free time as a generation. Today, even more kids go to college, but the intellectual focus of college has become more dilute, so it's no longer a political hotbed of serious debate and consciousness raising. It's more of a parking lot for late adolescents of all stripes than a place to incubate social change based on knowledge of past movements and liberal thought.
posted by Miko at 9:09 PM on December 30, 2008 [1 favorite]

However not many people join the Peace Corps today.

There are way more people applying to volunteer for the Peace Corps who meet there criteria today than the Corps has room for.
posted by grouse at 9:40 PM on December 30, 2008 [3 favorites]

It's true.

His generation of experienced grass roots style altruistic activists brought in Ronald Reagan and the 1980s.

Y'know, Milton Friedman and his economics of Love.
posted by sien at 9:47 PM on December 30, 2008

Brookeb's link is interesting, but Robert Putnam, the convener of the seminar and the ore-eminent expert on social capital, seems to think boomers actually destroyed social capital from the late 60s on. He points out that all measures of civic engagement rose steadily through the first 6 decades of the century (with a brief dip during the Depression). They started dropping once boomers came of age and have been dropping since, but have recently began rising a bit again.

Also, I think it's important to consider the role of perception as its shaped by the media. In the 60s, the idea of young people protesting and sitting in and such was really exciting and new because it was such a departure from the young people of the 40s and 50s. Add to that the emergence of the counterculture and it made for a pretty exciting media story.

On the other hand, it's really difficult to get serious media coverage for any protest these days. So even though there is still a lot of activism, it's not nearly as high-profile.

Anyway, I would really recommend reading Bowling Alone by Putnam. It's given this Gen Y activist a lot of ammo to use in such discussions/debates with smug boomers. ;)

/activism geekery
posted by lunasol at 9:56 PM on December 30, 2008

Ugh, ore-eminent should read "preeminent." Stupid spellcheck!
posted by lunasol at 9:59 PM on December 30, 2008

When I see photos of activists, rallies, protests and the like I don't see anyone of your dad's age, they're all your age. I take that to mean that -right now- your generation is a lot more active than your dad's. And Right Now counts for a lot more than last generation.
posted by Ookseer at 11:04 PM on December 30, 2008

Ha, this is something I'm passionate about. Here's a few links to dive through:

TakingITGlobal
YSEI
Futureshifters
FreeChild
World Youth Congress

etc etc etc.

From what I've observed, a lot of community development/activism tends to be on a more regional and national scale. Youth in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia are particularly active - though of course they don't get all the media attention. The Internet is a massive factor; blogs and social media have been crucial not just in Obama's campaign but in other elections such as Malaysia's. There's also a growing movement of activism through art, performance, and craft - which, again, isn't necessarily high-profile in the mainstream but really buzzing within their communities.

A lot of things are more related to individual behaviours - my boyfriend and his housemates are nowhere as activisty as I am but they're all keenly aware of small things to do for the environment, such as recycling, enviro-friendly cleaners, and so on. Also social enterprise has become a strong method for activism - combining business methods with social good.

There was a paper earlier this year about youth, social media, and social change that went around the Internet. The website was something like SocialGood.com or something or other, but I can't remember it now. It was a PDF report with an associated blog. Does anyone know what I'm referring to? It relates to this question.
posted by divabat at 11:26 PM on December 30, 2008

Your dad's generation also practised the wearing of sequins more than today's, but that doesn't make his generation more fashionable.
Activism as he knows it has been defeated and so adapted and evolved into new animals - animals which he doesn't notice because his idea of activism is fixed by his generation-old experience of what constitutes activism.

The protest, for example, has been defeated. They were an extremely powerful tactic decades ago when they were new, but counter-tactics have since evolved to the point where a protest is largely ineffective at best, and actually detrimental to its cause at worse. Today, protests serve mainly to fire up the faithful, and are normally quite ineffective otherwise.

So if you were judging activism today by protests, you would easily conclude the activism was lacking, just like you would easily conclude that people today have no style if you were judging by how many people are wearing giant medallions in their chest hair.
posted by -harlequin- at 1:34 AM on December 31, 2008 [10 favorites]

As for evidence of gen-X altruism, a presentation on open source software at mit.edu (which sounds like a respectable source :)) notes that 85% of contributors are gen x or y, while only 16% are Boomers.

When he scoffs at software being activism, you point out that it's only natural that he would not be aware of the importance of software in the modern world and thus underestimate the importance of freedom in that software in his fixation on obsolete forms of activism.
(To be fair to his scoffing though, the presentation also indicates that only about a third of contributors are doing it for reasons that could be considered altruistic or activist, but that's still an astronomical number of man-hours.)

When he argues that the under-representation of Boomer contributors should be attributed to software being a young field and thus a young person's trade, you can point out that exactly the same principle applies to the forms of activism that he see gen-Xer's being underepresented in - young people are not attracted to forms of activism that have been superceded, while (according to his own arguement) older people stay with what they know.
posted by -harlequin- at 2:08 AM on December 31, 2008 [2 favorites]

Sigh. Nothing worse than a smug baby boomer. For every one thing that generation did right, they did 5 things wrong.

Ultimately, it was proven out that the baby boomers of the late 60's became the coke-snorting zombies of the 70's and ultimately, became the Reagan voter in the 80's. Anecdotally, there is not a bigger group of hypocrites. I don't know your father, and maybe he's still reading Abby Hoffman's playbook, but the fact of the matter is, the altruism of the baby boomer generation is more mythos than anything else.

Baby boomers may "understand" grass roots activism, whatever that is supposed to mean, but they sure have done more than their part in creating the self-centered, consumer-driven culture we live in today. Heck, they are the leaders and CEO's you see today getting indicted and arrested. Check out this article for more.

And after reading this article, please don't hate your father. But please do ask him not to break his own arm patting his own generation on the back.
posted by PsuDab93 at 6:40 AM on December 31, 2008

Anyway, I would really recommend reading Bowling Alone by Putnam. It's given this Gen Y activist a lot of ammo to use in such discussions/debates with smug boomers. ;)

But another way to look at the retreat from "civic engagement" is to note that what the boomers did after civil rights and drawing down from the Viet Nam war was to turn their attention to the personal battlegrounds - social insitutions, rather than national legal and political ones, which needed reforming. So they didn't exactly withdraw from engagement with society, they just changed the arena. As they matured and faced new life stages, they turned their attention to matters like: expanding child care and family leave opportunities; knocking down barriers for women as they entered and moved up in the workplace; investing in expanded educational offerings within schools and colleges; increasing the quality and quantity of medical care available to everyone, the poor particularly; pushing for legal change in personal arenas such as reproductive rights and family law, and so on. The baby boom has continually reshaped its world to meet its needs at every stage of life. We will continue to see this in action as they transition into retirement - expect everything to change shape, from retirement funding and activities to geriatric care to living alternatives to the rituals surrounding death itself. Baby boomers have redeveloped every social institution as they encountered it, and though their attention shifted from public life to personal life - from the political struggles of the 60s to the interpersonal struggles against custom and tradition in the succeeding years - that is not at all unusual in any human being's life. The young have more time and attention to invest in social change at the macro level, since they have fewer distractions yet at the micro level of personal life and professional life. It is somewhat inevitable that much of your attention shifts to the smaller arena, though not at all necessary that individual activism needs to lessen because of that shift of venue.

"Bowling Alone" is a great book, but there's a flaw in the thesis - civic engagement of a narrowly defined type is conflated with all social engagement. Certainly many things in society have changed, but the decline of people with the inclination to spend their free time at the Rotary or the town picnic has been more than offset by the increase of time, and investment of energy, in change to the workplace, school, and home and in the rise of new social networks through personal interests first (in the 70s and 80s) and then the internet (more recently). The old models of engagement were no longer serving the needs of the people; so they have been largely discarded. I really don't want to spend my evenings playing canasta, thanks. I love volunteering for charity, but not at the Lions Club Dinner Dance, thanks. I share the author's concern that civic engagement and involvement in community and change is not what it was at its American peak in the mid-20th century, but I blame part of that on institutions that refused to evolve and another part of it on the growth of corporate culture and increased pressure to see ourselves mainly as consumers. Still, there are forms of civic engagement that are alive and well, and new forms have been emerging (open-source software is a great example; the localism movement; new agrarianism, the green movement, etc) that are simply not obvious enough for people looking for marches and picket signs and freedom songs.

You might also point out that the thousands of young people in the military serving in Iraq and Afghanistan and other postings are also quite busy being civically engaged.

Still and all, I don't think today's youth activism can possibly match the sheer numbers, focus, and force of politicized youth seen in the 60s, though you can make strong arguments why today's youth movements are significant in their own ways and should not be dismissed.
posted by Miko at 8:35 AM on December 31, 2008

Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody uses the example of two different Catholic-priests-abusing-kids scandals to illustrate this point. One was in 1992 and another in 2002. The 2002 organizing to do something about it was enabled by the Internet.
posted by k8t at 11:39 AM on December 31, 2008

I think I might agree with your dad, although I'm 23 and an activist! I was a teaching assistant last year for a women's studies course and I found it next to impossible to get those first year students to care about anything social justice related! As well, I have so many friends who could care less to even vote, let alone go protest something they feel passionate about. I always thought it was even more strange, considering I'm in graduate school and I'd assume students in my program would care more than they do. Even my program... it often feels more ivory tower than concerned with changing the material conditions adversely affecting many. I find myself very frustrated a lot of the time, because I want to do more than write about social justice issues... I want to change them! Perhaps during your dad's time, people might have been more interested in social change. Also... John Mayer's song "Waiting for the World to Change" seems like a perfect example... we need to stop waiting and force change!
posted by DorothySmith at 5:29 PM on December 31, 2008

In my observation it's difficult to get us university aged youth types involved with the whole social justice circus because it's become the bailiwick of aging hippies and people who like the trappings of living granola.

I care passionately about my causes: feminism, free speech, protection of pornography, and to a lesser extent drug legalization and regulation, and relaxation of sex offender laws (ie no more sex offender restrictions). However, the act of doing a protest has become a sort of religious ritual, with ye traditional blobby "Uncle Sam fondling money and oil" puppet, a cast of geriatric retiree activists for your local Unitarian church, silly costumes, and so on. I avoid protest culture because I am tired of hashing over the same shibboleths: weird diets, distinctive dress, and Armageddon theory (global warming).

I also feel like the focus of these protests is based on cultural expectations not social good, so seeing a bunch of upper middle class types show solidarity for the end of the Iraq war while ignoring the troubles at home (ie the city's teenage pregnancy rate and never ending cycle of grinding poverty) exactly because it's non-contraversial. These aren't 'real' issues the way that the vietnam war or racial tensions were because nobody's being drafted and while gays getting married is nice, they can vote and drink at the same fountain.

And I'm struck by his narrow definition of youth participation. Of course we aren’t activists like back in the 60’s. It’s not the 60’s. It’s been almost fifty years, and complaining that kids these days don’t act like they did when you were a lad is as practical as the reactionaries who want to shove us back to the 19th century to renew that old biblical sense of community.
posted by Phalene at 12:20 PM on January 18