Posted on 05/07/2005 5:19:57 AM PDT by Dundee
Faith restored in the young
ANZAC Day saw nearly 20,000 Australians, most of them young people, at Gallipoli. In Sydney alone, a quarter of a million more lined the route of the march and again young people and children were conspicuous. Fifteen years ago it was confidently expected that the dawn service and the march would soon disappear, becoming "one with Ninevah and Tyre", as Kipling's Recessional anthem put it.
The election and inauguration of Benedict XVI brought hundreds of young Australian Catholics, at short notice, to St Peter's Square in Rome. At home, hundreds of undergraduates and their age-mates went to special masses, held parties while watching the ceremonies on television or went out on the town to celebrate. Even the most determinedly hostile reporters had difficulty turning up plausible young Catholics to bewail the fact that the new Pope doesn't approve of sex before marriage.
One event enshrines a sense of national identity; the other a sense of religious and tribal identity. If the rising generation had followed in the footsteps of the baby boomers, we could hardly have expected them to give a damn about either. Yet many of them plainly do care. What's more, they are publicly embracing time-honoured traditions and venerable patriarchal figures: what the boomers used to refer to dismissively as "the culture of the elders" and now call "channelling great-grandpa".
How could this have happened in modern, secular, hedonistic Australia? Hadn't Alan Seymour's protest play The One Day of the Year turned patriotic sentiment and Anzac Day into hoary anachronisms? Hadn't Ron Blair's play The Christian Brothers done much the same for Catholicism and celibate authority figures? That may have been the orthodoxy of the old avant-garde, but the young, by and large, seem to be immune to all that. It's the plays that have become period pieces.
How best can we explain the way the young are so markedly identifying with the generation before last? Is it anything more than insecurity in a world devoid of norms? Are they clinging, more or less indiscriminately for comfort, to whatever forms of tradition are readily available, like children with security blankets?
Plainly there are traces of that evident in some of the vox pop responses captured by the mass media. Again, some of the obligatory lump-in-the-throat sentiment and submersion of self in a crowd may well have shallow roots. But surely it's just a boomer reflex response automatically to belittle any instinctual reliance on the traditional as somehow infantile. Traditionalists would say that's part of what established custom is all about; that inherited forms, symbols and ways of doing things have been preserved because they were useful and spared successive generations the headache of having to reinvent them.
Beyond the utilitarian, there are other benefits that flow from a sense of connectedness with the national or tribal past. Perhaps the best example I've witnessed was a group of elderly Pitjantjatjara men ceremoniously retelling Dreaming stories. Theirs is a difficult language and one speaker, who was particularly adept, reduced the others to tears of joy at the fact those solemn, timeless narratives could still be told with such eloquence. His younger listeners said it made them feel confident and proud of their culture. It was obvious that they meant it, too.
No one these days would begrudge Aborigines the comfort and sense of continuity with the past that they find in indigenous cultures. Yet when white Anglo-Saxon urbanites look for the same sorts of nourishment, they're often treated as though this were atavistic or self-indulgent behaviour. There is also a widespread assumption still lingering in some quarters that, almost alone among ethnicities, Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage has no redeeming features.
The younger generation of Australians has heard this sort of sneering ad nauseam from many of their teachers and some sections of the media. Happily, the evidence suggests that they aren't convinced and, as Anzac Day and the inauguration mass attest, are voting with their feet. To those who regard signs of conservatism in the young as an overturning of the natural order of things, it must be sheer wormwood and gall. The rest of us can take comfort in the thought that in the fullness of time more adults and adolescents will have better manners than at any period since the 1960s -- that baleful age -- and they may even, other things being equal, be inclined to defer to their elders.
What Francis Fukuyama calls "the renorming process", in which society periodically renews itself after a phase of serious disruption, appears to be well under way. And while it may be best understood as an automatic response, like skin repairing itself, there are empirical measures by which we can begin to calibrate it.
Fukuyama sets great store by fertility and divorce rates and in each case there are mildly hopeful signs. Australia's fertility rate declined to 1.733 in 2001 and rose in 2003 to 1.755. The divorce rate fell from 2.9 per thousand in 1996 to 2.7 in 2003.
A less encouraging sign is the figure for regular church attendance. As a percentage, it fell from 9.9 in 1996 to 8.8 in 2001. The survey was of Catholics, Anglicans and Uniting Church members, so it may be worth noting other evidence that suggests that the Uniting Church is in free fall and the others are more or less holding their numbers. Again, the survey doesn't take account of the charismatic groups that have been growing in strength.
Fukuyama also emphasises savings and self-employment indicators as reliable signs of stability. Australians who own shares comprise about 51 per cent of the population, up from 40 per cent in 1998, and it's a level of share ownership unequalled outside the US. Even when the young are not yet able or disposed to save, it has become a normative expectation. People who work on their own account have risen from 820,000 in 1996 to 937,000 last year, and we can be confident that a fair proportion are in generation Y.
Two more indicators suggest that the climate of opinion is becoming increasingly culturally conservative. More and more Australians are educating their children privately, whether at church schools of one kind or the other or at non-denominational schools. In 1994, about 884,000 children, or 28.5 per cent, went to private schools. In 2003 the figure had risen to 1,064,000 or 32.1 per cent. At this distance it looks like an inexorable long-term trend.
An even more suggestive figure is the decline in support for an Australian republic. Since 1999 it has fallen from 57per cent to 52 per cent. More interestingly, for present purposes, the Australian Democrats' recent youth poll found that among the 15-20 age group, support for a republic had declined from 69 per cent in 2001 to 55 per cent last year. If that trend were to continue, the Australian Republican Movement might just as well give the game away.
The first large-scale opinion survey in the English-speaking world, conducted by The Washington Post, gave BenedictXVI an approval rating of 80 per cent, and is a reasonable indication of his standing among Australian Catholics.
I really hope so because the "great-grandpa" generation were the pioneers who built this nation and we need that sort generation to rebuild our civilisation after the baby boomers.
There is also a widespread assumption still lingering in some quarters that, almost alone among ethnicities, Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage has no redeeming features.
The younger generation of Australians has heard this sort of sneering ad nauseam from many of their teachers and some sections of the media. Happily, the evidence suggests that they aren't convinced and, as Anzac Day and the inauguration mass attest, are voting with their feet.
The left in the 60's spent a lot of their time running around telling everyone that they can't trust 'the establishment' and that the young needed to think for themselves.
Well... now the left IS 'the establishment' and suddenly the idea of the young not trusting them and thinking for themselves doesn't sound so hot to them any more.
Personally I think it's damn funny.
Two more indicators suggest that the climate of opinion is becoming increasingly culturally conservative. More and more Australians are educating their children privately, whether at church schools of one kind or the other or at non-denominational schools. In 1994, about 884,000 children, or 28.5 per cent, went to private schools. In 2003 the figure had risen to 1,064,000 or 32.1 per cent. At this distance it looks like an inexorable long-term trend.
When I was growing up, my family weren't all that well off (I guess we could have been called working poor. Low wage, living in the middle of the bush with no fresh running water.) but my parents made sure that my brothers and I all went to Catholic schools (the only private schools we had in our area). My wife (who calls herself 'a survivor of the public school system') vows that our kids (if we ever get blessed with them) will never set foot in a public school.
In the US, this new generation have been called 'South Park Conservatives'. Here in Australia, there is no such term for the rising conservative young. Maybe we can be called 'the ANZAC Conservatives'.
Looking around here, even I'm amazed at just how much Australia and the United States mirror each other a lot of the time.
Ping the X'ers!
Ping list for the discussion of the politics and social (and sometimes nostalgic) aspects that directly effects Generation Reagan / Generation-X (Those born from 1965-1981) including all the spending previous generations (i.e. The Baby Boomers) are doing that Gen-X and Y will end up paying for.
Freep mail me to be added or dropped. See my home page for details and previous articles.
Australia's Gen-Xers have no wish to follow in the Baby Boomers footsteps. We've seen what happens when an entire generation goes lemming like off a cliff.
Mind you, the fact that the Baby Boomers are trying to soften their crash landing by using Gen-X and Gen-Y as bungee ropes isn't going to win them any friends with their kids and grandkids.
Besides, from what I hear it, Aussies are just Texans with a funny accent *wink* !
Best regards,
Alkhin
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