How are generations punctuated?

September 29, 2016 6:44 AM

I had thought generations began after World War II, which "banged the gong" by changing when people were having babies, and we've been in that cycle since. But my googling says generations have gone back to the 19th century, to non birth-wave related events, like social change from industrialization. But if the birth rate was steady, how would you ever define the beginning and end of a generation? Ala, the distribution of age groups would be uniform.
posted by cgs to Society & Culture (17 answers total)

Response by poster: Sorry, that last sentence is poorly worded: there wouldn't be age groups, just a bunch of people aged 25, and then an equal number aged 26,27...70 etc.
posted by cgs at 6:47 AM on September 29, 2016

I don't think generations are necessarily defined by bumps in the birth rate. They're pretty much just arbitrary divisions.
posted by showbiz_liz at 7:04 AM on September 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

I'm pretty sure that generations are a very old concept. At the very least, the term appears in English translations of the Bible going back to the King James version.

Or for another ancient example, in Greek mythology there was a separation between the generations of the gods: the primordial deities, the Titans, and the Olympians. There are older documents that indicate this may not have been original to them.

(So whether or not it can be rigidly defined in any given era, it appears to always have been a salient concept.)
posted by XMLicious at 7:05 AM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

How long is a generation? Science provides an answer.
posted by DrAstroZoom at 7:10 AM on September 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

That's why people think a lot of the stuff that's out there now about generations is BS. They're fairly arbitrary divisions that try to capture similar life experiences from year to year. But it's not exact, and there's overlap. I've seen the Gen-X/millenial divide anywhere from 1978 to 1985. (As someone born in 1980, I can say definitively that it occurred in 1981 or later!)

It's very imprecise. Consider Nirvana. I was 11 when Nevermind came out. It was the soundtrack to my teenage years. My wife is five years younger than me, so she was six at the time of Nevermind. By the time she was in her teens, Kurt Cobain had been dead for years, and rock music was being discredited by Limp Bizkit. So there would seem to be a generational divide there. But then would you group me in with the previous generation, including Cobain himself? That would imply that I, a 13-year-old kid at the time of his suicide, had something in common with him, a 27-year-old superstar who had been a professional musician for over five years. So no matter where you divide the two generations, I don't really seem to belong in either.

The concept of generations goes back, well, generations. But it's always been kind of a rough division. The Greeks were able to divide the generation of the gods from the generation of the titans because there just wasn't much else happening. But once you get into the real world, it's never been precise, and until recently, nobody really cared. It was imprecise, but everybody knew it was just a rule of thumb anyway, and not to take it too seriously. It's only in the past few decades, as social science and statistics have become more important, that people have actually tried to define generations precisely. That's where you're getting the WWII idea from. The concept of generations is older, but the operationalization of the concept as a variable for social research is recent.
posted by kevinbelt at 7:26 AM on September 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

From a phenomenological standpoint, the meanings of "generations" will be different from within a person's or family's point of view, than from an outsider-who's-trying-to-generalize-about-others point of view. (Who's my uncle? who's my grandparent? vs: This mass of people had something in common and it affected the way they all behaved.)

You have just discovered an example of a "pretend moment" in social science research. What's a generation? -- It depends on why you want to know. The researcher has to consider "What am I trying to demonstrate about generations, what am I trying to say?

S/he will need to choose a definition that makes what s/he's trying to demonstrate "workable". In an effort to make the concept of "generations" "workable" (ie. operationalize it), s/he must make a decision about the definition. Many social science researchers think that operationalizing their concepts is an important part of the scientific method, and that the scientific method, with operationalization at it's core, is "objective" -- but we've just seen a decision point that is all about the researcher's initial reason for wanting to understand "generations" -- so, it's subjective. The researcher's purpose decides the definition. As a psychology undergrand, I knew something was up with this, but I couldn't exactly articulate what the problem was. As a counseling PhD student, it became obvious to me. We shouldn't try to emulate the natural sciences in an effort to understand humans. Meaning-making is socio-historical. It sits in unique combinations of time and space.

showbiz_liz is right -- they are arbitrary divisions.
posted by vitabellosi at 7:38 AM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Are you talking about the idea of generations in general, or generations united by a common culture/experience?
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 7:50 AM on September 29, 2016

Response by poster: Well, per these comments, I think more the latter (common culture/experience), but I was coming at it with the notion that there was actually a connection to biology. Ala, the wave of babies after WW2 was the Boomers, which couldn't help but be a grouped together because there was an actual gap of kids for ~10 years. Then, if you looked at the birth rates in the following decades, you would continue to see an ebb and flow of babies, coming from WW2. You could put brackets around each peak to capture that "generation" (and squabble over what to name each).
posted by cgs at 8:38 AM on September 29, 2016

It's pretty arbitrary and closely related to individual experiences to massive sudden social changes.

Rule of thumb for USians:
If you remember Kennedy as President you're a Boomer
If you experienced a sexual awakening before having in-home Internet you're Gen X
If you experienced a sexual awakening through dial-up you're Gen Y or Xennial (note this cusp cohort's definition through its relationship to Gen X)
If you can't remember a time without Internet or Inernet culture you're a Millennial

Let's face it, none of these are universal human experiences; they're pretty much only applicable to North American Anglophone cultures. In Japan, for instance, one could make arbitrary demarcations such as not remembering the war/growing up in the boom aka "suffering generation"/born after the end of the "economic miracle"/will be able to vote at 18 instead of 20.
posted by infinitewindow at 8:48 AM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

There have always been famines, plagues, and wars. These are the types of events that interrupt reproduction and create demographic gaps.
posted by bq at 8:48 AM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks, everyone! That does make sense.

Now, back to Survivor: Millenials vs Gen X
posted by cgs at 10:08 AM on September 29, 2016

As an alternate to generations, people refer to decades: the 50s, the 60s, etc. But culturally, the 50s didn't start until DDE was elected, the 60s lasted past 1970, etc.
posted by SemiSalt at 11:17 AM on September 29, 2016

I don't know when this view of history (if it actually happened this way) formed, but as a kid studying the bible in Jewish day school we learned that in the whole Exodus from Egypt/enter the land of Israel deal, they did not enter Israel until everyone who had been in Egypt had died. I think it was something about those people having been on the wrong spiritual plane, or having sinned, or something. Anyway, that's basically the concept of a generation.

My memory is rusty but googling just turned up a verse from the book of Joshua that basically describes this.

Again--not claiming that this happened or that that was the reason, just that the concept of a generation seems to have been present whenever that book was written.
posted by needs more cowbell at 1:58 PM on September 29, 2016

What memes they consider dank.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 6:30 PM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

You might find Strauss–Howe generational theory interesting:

Strauss and Howe define a social generation as the aggregate of all people born over a span of roughly twenty years or about the length of one phase of life: childhood, young adulthood, midlife, and old age. Generations are identified (from first birthyear to last) by looking for cohort groups of this length that share three criteria. First, members of a generation share what the authors call an age location in history: they encounter key historical events and social trends while occupying the same phase of life. In this view, members of a generation are shaped in lasting ways by the eras they encounter as children and young adults and they share certain common beliefs and behaviors. Aware of the experiences and traits that they share with their peers, members of a generation would also share a sense of common perceived membership in that generation.

Their research identifies four current active generations: Millenials born after 1981 in young adulthood, Gen-X born 61-81 in midlife, Baby Boomers born 43-60 in old age, and Silent born 25-42 and dying off. In their theory, each generation responds to the actions of their predecessors in predictable ways, leading to a repeating “two-stroke” model of historical change. The current Millenial generation is expected to respond to a crisis and emerge similar to the triumphant G.I. generation who fought and won WWⅡ.

I enjoy the theory though I’m unsure I believe in it — it has a certain perfectly spherical neatness that seems too clean. We’ll see how the predicted crisis (“an era in which institutional life is destroyed and rebuilt in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s survival”) shakes out.
posted by migurski at 8:46 PM on September 29, 2016

Two professors have written books for the rest of us about their theory of generations in the USA. They propose 4 distinct generational types, which keep repeating in the same order.
posted by Homer42 at 8:52 PM on September 29, 2016

Grant Morrison believes/claims to believe in the The Sekhmet Hypothesis, which ties generations to 11 year solar cycles.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 9:03 PM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]