Common Beliefs and Behavior
Common beliefs and behavior of a generation show its members to be different from people born at another time. They are the means by which a generation moves history.
No element of belief or behavior ever appears uniformly across all members of a generation, of course. But conspicuous elements often do appear in a decisive majority of members—leading Comte to conclude that each generation develops a "unanimous adherence to certain fundamental notions" and Dilthey to talk of a "generational Weltanschauung," a worldview that shapes a generation’s direction from youth through old age. To quantify these elements for recent generations, you can turn to a wealth of age-graded data—from opinion surveys and educational tests to crime records and Census reports. The changes from one generation to the next are often striking and revealing.
To see how generational traits differ, consider shifts in political affiliations, such as the huge contrast between the Republican-leaning Lost (life-long skeptics of progress and organization) and the Democratic-leaning G.I.s (lifelong optimists about science and government). Consider the changing attitudes toward risk, such as the young Silent’s well-documented quest for marital and career "security" in the ’50s, versus the Xers’ ’90s-era aversion to marriage and corporatism. Consider the variable gap between acceptable sex roles for men and women, a gap that G.I.s once widened but that Boomers have since worked hard (in careers, families, and public life) to narrow. And consider a generation’s overall life goals. Back in the late 1960s, Boomer college freshman believed by a two-to-one majority that "developing a meaningful philosophy of life" was more important than "getting ahead financially." Since the mid-1980s, the Xer response to this question has switched to a two-to-one majority the other way. Between two elections, an opinion reversal of this magnitude would be considered seismic. Between two generations, these dramatic survey results show how a new persona can entirely transform the emotional texture of people who come of age two decades apart.
For generations born more than a century ago, the data become thinner, making behavior and beliefs hard to quantify. To distinguish between generations, you have to infer from anecdote, case study, and contemporary observation. Sometimes a well-recorded event will reveal underlying personas. For example, the U.S. election of 1868 turned out to be the largest generational landslide ever recorded, as the weary voters and candidates who fought the Civil War threw out the principled leaders and generals who led it. In that single year, the elder Transcendental generation (of Lincoln) lost a full third of its seats in Congress and state houses to the younger Gilded generation (of Grant). During that and the next two Presidential elections (1868, 1872, and 1876), a younger pragmatist challenged and defeated an elder reformer. With these elections, one of the most dramatic clashes between two adjacent yet very different generations finally drew to a close.
