Generations, choices, and duties

For a bunch of reasons I won’t go into here, I’ve been thinking lately about a book review I read several years ago (technically a book review… barely mentions the book). The review was by Christopher Caldwell, of all people, and it responded to the book The Paradox of Choice. The book itself argued that an abundance of choices in the marketplace lead to consumer anxiety and depression.* Anyway, Caldwell spends about 2/3 of his review offering anecdotes to support the book’s thesis, and the last third dismissing the thesis as a relic:

All the abstract arguments against choice become harder to make when they are translated into concrete terms. When Schwartz notes that young Americans are unduly troubled by their choice of career, because they are ‘remarkably unconstrained by what their parents did before them,’ he sounds kindhearted and sincerely concerned. But he also sounds a bit like an English nob defending the class system while he sits in a leather armchair in Boodle’s in about 1926. And if Schwartz’s book is really about the anguish of choice in general—and not merely about choice as a facet of shopping—there is no reason for any such argument to stop before it reaches, say, ‘a woman’s right to choose.’ Once you stop taking people’s expressed preferences at face value, pretty much every single contentious political, economic, sexual, familial, social, and labor issue can be opened up to unpredictable renegotiation.

Always a neat little slippery slope argument with the libertarians: take away one choice, take away all choices. But setting that aside, I don’t see concern over young Americans being “unconstrained by what their parents did before them” as a defense of the class system.

It used to be that the emphasis on duty/sacrifice and the emphasis on freedom/choice would flip generation to generation (this is described in a lot more detail than I want to go into in Generations, by William Strauss). The generation that came of age during the early years of the 20th century and again in the 1930s were harder, tougher, more attuned to duty than individual choice. In between those generations were the freedom generations: those who came of age in the ’20s or the ’60s. These generations valued breaking away from convention, questioning authority, challenging social norms, self-expression…

Each generation reacted against the flaws in emphasis of the generation that came before. It was cyclical, and that was probably healthy. But we’re two generations beyond those now – those who came of age in the ’80s (Gen X) and those who are coming of age in this decade, and the concept of sacrifice – while very much alive in some ways – has never really recovered to any pre-1950 level.

Defining four types of sacrifice:

1. Sacrificing for future self. Postponing pleasure, saving money, getting a good education, etc… Unlike the generations of the ’20s and the ’60s, there’s no real anti-establishment backlash against this kind of sacrifice now.

2. Sacrificing for future generations. Ranges from the micro (parents setting up college funds for their kids) to the macro (the entire green energy movement). This kind of sacrifice is definitely encouraged by society.

3. Sacrificing for others. Community service, national service, military service, selfless acts… This is mixed. On one hand, voluntary community service rates have risen among young people over the last decade. On the other, it doesn’t feel like duty. It’s self congratulatory – with the kids who participate believing they’re doing what is good rather than what is expected. Even more cynically, it’s often viewed as a boost for college, with a side benefit of service. In that way, the line is blurred between this and Sacrificing for Future Self.

4. Sacrificing for previous generation. Teenagers expected to work to help support the family, the expectation of taking over the family business, moving in with a sick parent… as a concept, this kind of sacrifice is pretty much dead. I mean, how many movies have as a conflict a character who wants to follow a different career path than the one expected by their parents? The positive resolution is always that the character ultimately confronts the parent/society and forges his or her own path. We’re a long way from George Bailey taking over his father’s Savings and Loan.

So, you end up with generations that are paradoxically comfortable with the concept of sacrifice, but have little use for the concept of duty – whether duty to country or duty to family. Without duty, choices are unlimited. Children are told they can go as far as their dreams take them. They won’t have to fight our country’s wars – that’s for the kids without options: more options, less duty. They can choose any career they want, live wherever they want, marry, not marry, or divorce at will.

And, as described in the Caldwell article (well, the book reviewed by the Caldwell article), unlimited options often lead to anxiety and depression, not to mention insecurity. Every decision will be subject to endless second-guessing and inevitable disappointment, because every option was available at the time the decision was made, and every decision can be easily changed. Grass is always greener type of thing.

There’s also the practical aspect: every civilization will periodically need a majority of its citizens to act according to duty without filtering that duty through their personal ethics.

For the slippery-slopers, this obviously shouldn’t be taken to its logical extreme – nobody’s talking about marching in lockstep toward an evil end (pick your state-imposed villain… fascists? communists?) Just maybe a return to something before institutional skepticism went mainstream – pre-Watergate, pre-Vietnam. It’s hardly limited to government institutions either. Duty has lost ground to personal happiness in marriage, family and career as well.

For a lot of people, this isn’t a problem at all. More choices and freedoms are seen as a sign of absolute progress, beyond question. Even for those who do see it as a problem, it’s hard to figure out an answer. There are some things that can be done at a policy level – national service requirements, for example, or making divorces more difficult to obtain – but most changes would have to come from parents, teachers, religious leaders, coaches, media, etc. I don’t see any evidence of that happening.

Quick anecdote: I was talking to a friend of mine of couple weeks ago, and she told me about a psychologist she heard speak on NPR (she does my NPR listening for me.) The psychologist described a situation in which a teenage soccer player wanted to quit her high school team. She went to her father first, and he discouraged it: playing a sport looked good on college applications, she should stick with it. She went to her mother, and she supported the daughter: she should find what makes her happy, high school should be a time of self-discovery. The psychologist noted that neither parent mentioned an obligation the daughter had to the rest of the team.

I’ve repeated that anecdote to a few people I know, and not one of them considered duty to the team any more important than had the girl’s parents. There’s just a cultural blind-spot when it comes to those kinds of priorities. Unless and until that mindset changes, it’s hard to foresee another generation motivated by duty.

*Consumers offered a choice between chocolate and vanilla ice cream report higher satisfaction than customers offered a choice between 20 flavors including chocolate and vanilla; one product radically marked down sells better than the combined total of two competing products marked down equally. That kind of thing.