In the 1960s, an expression entered everyday language that would soon gain ground: the “generation gap,” the conflict between generations, a reference to the ideological and cultural rift between those born after the war and their fathers. The protest movement that began on American campuses spread to Europe, uniting the youth masses in a cross-cutting and shared rejection of the values that had until then held Western society afloat.
Among the first to pause to analyze this phenomenon was the sociologist Karl Mannheim, in his essay The Problem of Generations. Published in English in 1952, as the West was rebuilding itself after the devastation of World War II, Mannheim’s work actually dated back to 1928: even then, the world, emerging from a first epochal conflict, was facing the tedious (and futile) task of regaining a peaceful equilibrium, while the youth returning from the war openly expressed a desire to finally cut ties with the obstacles of the past.
But the clash between fathers and sons, though it reached its highest temperature in the second half of the 20th century, is not a distinctive feature of our turbulent times alone. On the contrary, it has its roots in mythical times, at the dawn of humanity, and many of the greatest thinkers of every era have tried to understand it.
THE LEGEND OF CRONUS AND THE WAR OF THE GENERATIONS
Around 700 BC, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote a poem entitled Theogony, dedicated to the birth of the gods. In it, the author, gathering into an organic whole various and more ancient narratives, sang of the origins of the cosmos and the Hellenic pantheon.
Surprisingly, the Hesiodian vision reveals that the Greek world, universally considered the cradle of Western civilization and a harmonious example of civic virtues, was born from a shocking mixture and bloody conflict between fathers and sons. Hesiod recounts that Gaia (Earth) became pregnant many times with Uranus (Sky, her own son), but never managed to bring them to life, because Uranus pushed them back into his mother’s womb, fearing that they might usurp his rule of the world. Only Kronos (Time) managed to see the light and, armed with a sickle given to him by his mother, crushed his father.
After becoming the lord of the world, Kronos behaved in the same way as his parent: united with his sister, Rhea, and upon learning that she would give birth to a son who would overthrow him from the throne, he began to swallow all the children she gave birth to. In the end, thanks to a trick, Rhea managed to give birth to and save Zeus, who forced his father to vomit the swallowed children, bringing them back to life, and overthrew him, establishing a new kingdom. Zeus’ sister and wife, Hera, gave birth to many children, none of whom tried to overthrow their father, and thus Olympus saw the birth of a real family.
THE ANCIENT GREEK WORLD
But myth is not only a sacred narrative that attempts to explain the origins of the universe and man: it is also the representation of a cultural ideal. In this perspective, the family that arises from the new order established by Zeus is reflected in the human family, as the fundamental social structure of the Greek world. Thus, since philosophy was born in Greece, the first philosophers could not help but dwell on the delicate theme of family relationships, and especially that between fathers and sons. The family model was the one that Homer had described in his poems: a pyramid, the top of which was represented by the husband and father, while at the base were the children; in the middle, the woman, at the same time wife and mother.
Roles were clearly divided, and that of children consisted of obedience to the parent, to the point of becoming his ideal continuation in the continuity of the tribe. Thus, when in the second half of the 5th century BC, Socrates gathered around him a large group of young people fascinated by his doctrine, which taught them to ask questions and even to cast doubt on tradition when it conflicted with ethics and the public good, the Athenian authorities did not delay in accusing him of “corrupting the youth.”
In reality, those who were corrupting the youth were the ruling class born after the Greek victory over the Persian Empire, which had freed Greece from the nightmare of subjugation to the eastern giant. The men who had fought at the Battles of Marathon and Salamis had built the magnificent cathedral of thought that was classical Greece, but their sons and grandsons were squandering that extraordinary legacy, consumed by a lust for power and interested in politics only as a means of enrichment, in open contempt for ancient values.
Socrates’ student, Plato (428-348 BC), understood that the replacement of social systems stemmed precisely from the clash between generations and, in Book VIII of his dialogue “The Republic”, he described the dissolution of democracy and the reasons for its inevitable slide towards tyranny:
“A father is taught to resemble his son and to fear his children; the son becomes like his father and, as long as he is free, has neither respect nor fear for his parents… the teacher fears the students and coddles them, while the students, for their part, do not appreciate either the teachers or the educators; in short, the young put themselves on the same level as the elders and oppose them in word and deed, while the old, descending to the level of the young, fill themselves with jokes and sweets, imitating the young so as not to appear annoying or despotic”. For this reason, said the philosopher, “in the city that is destined for the most perfect government, women, children and all education should be common, as should engagements in peace and war, and there the best in philosophy and war should rule”.
By eliminating the family, the risk of conflict between fathers and sons, with all the negative consequences that entails, would also be eliminated. Aristotle, although a student of Plato, did not share his ideas on the abolition of the family, which for him was “the first form of community”, “the community that is created for everyday life according to nature” (Politics, book I).
However, the philosopher also saw the family as the “place of tragedy” (Poetics), because it is there that the deepest and most powerful passions surface: love, hatred, envy and jealousy. Therefore, according to him, the family should be “led by a single one”, and the head of the family should exercise the authority of a king over the children, because “the king must be by nature superior to his subjects, even when they belong to the same tribe: and this is precisely the position of the eldest over the youngest, of the parent over the son”. It is clear that, in this rigidly hierarchical vision, there could be no room for a conflict of generations, which for Aristotle was a source of disorder.
HONOR YOUR FATHER AND MOTHER
As recent studies have shown, in ancient Rome the conflict between generations took on dimensions of unheard-of gravity compared to the Greek situation: in Urbe, in fact, patria potestas, the paternal power, held by the head of the family (who was responsible for the administration of the property and to whom the wife, children and even daughters-in-law were subject), did not end with the attainment of adulthood, but lasted as long as the father was alive.
This, of course, brought about a series of unpleasant consequences in private life and in society, due to the unlimited authority exercised by the pater familias, who had the right of life and death over all members of the family, free or slave. Thus, the murder of the father (parricidio) became, in addition to a universally hated crime, also a forbidden dream and, at some periods, a tragically widespread practice, in which philosophers were less interested than legislators. The situation was reversed with the entry of Christianity into the pagan world: the fourth commandment, “Honor your father and mother,” shed new light on the relationship between parents and children and restored mutual respect within the framework of a norm not only civil, but also religious.
The greatest interpreter of this new idea of the family was Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), who defended an extremely modern vision of the marital bond: marriage, the philosopher explained, “is not simply the birth of offspring, but is the transmission of life and, at the same time, its promotion until the achievement of a perfect human condition.”
From this flowed the obligation of parents to educate and train their children, guaranteeing them stability and support. Aware of the parental gift, the child would feel for the father and mother love, respect, gratitude and thanksgiving, preparing to devote to them the same care that he had received in childhood. According to this perspective, the possibility of a rebellion of sons against their fathers sounded like an unacceptable insult to the natural and divine order of things, reinforced, moreover, by the rigidity of the social structure of the time.
The situation remained almost unchanged until the 18th century, when the Age of Enlightenment was openly critical of maturity and old age.
THE ILLUMINATIANS ARE COMING
The first to take the side of youth was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), who presented youth as a phase of human life, certainly imperfect, but potentially better, because closer to “Nature” and less contaminated by the corruption of civilization and social conventions. It was not an incitement to youthful rebellion, but the adoption of a new and, in some respects, revolutionary perspective. And, speaking of revolution, it was precisely the year of the French Revolution and the dizzying rise of Napoleon Bonaparte that marked the entrance of the youth masses onto the scene, with a significantly more benevolent outlook towards the younger generations.
Even Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), the authoritarian theorist of the state as the highest expression of ethics, believed that the clash between generations was a painful but necessary step so that children, by becoming emancipated from their parents, could gain full maturity and their identity as autonomous individuals.
Hegel’s ideas permeated the entire 19th century, until, in 1913, Sigmund Freud published a shocking text: Totem and Taboo. In it, the founder of psychoanalysis revised the myth of Kronos in an anthropological key, hypothesizing a real event that occurred in the archaic past: in a primitive horde, subject to a tyrannical and ruthless father, a group of brothers organized themselves to kill him and then eat him in a cannibalistic ritual banquet, in order to assimilate, through his flesh and blood, the father’s own strength. In this modern reinterpretation, the sacrificial murder of the father appeared as a terrible act, but necessary for the emancipation of the sons. In the 20th century, the clash between generations took on increasingly pronounced ideological overtones, which erupted violently immediately after the First World War.
In Italy, in 1924, the futurist intellectual Alberto Cappa wrote a pamphlet in which he interpreted Italian Fascism as the final episode of the eternal clash between the young and the old. Just two years later, in 1926, Antonio Gramsci raised the issue of the “problem of the youth,” destined to become a constant in Italian history:
“The ‘old’ generation always deals with the education of the ‘young’, but when class interference intervenes, the phenomenon takes on a ‘national’ character and then the situation becomes complicated and chaotic. The young are in a state of permanent rebellion, because its deep causes continue to exist, without being allowed to analyze, criticize and overcome them… The elderly dominate in fact, but they fail to educate the young, to prepare them for succession… The old structure fails to contain or respond to new demands.”
LIQUID SOCIETY
The events of the 20th century seem to confirm this vision of History as an uninterrupted series of conflicts, in the literal and metaphorical sense, between fathers and sons. But, over time, the context has changed radically, so much so that in 1979 the German philosopher Hans Jonas raised an alarm bell with the work The Imperative of Responsibility. An Ethics for Technological Civilization. In this essay, among other things, he demanded the necessity of adopting responsible behaviors towards the planet and a commitment to future generations, to whom not only obligations but also rights should be left: “The existence of future generations and, consequently, the very existence of humanity should never be put at stake as a bet on our action.”
It is no coincidence that at the root of the generational clashes of the last thirty years, most recently the movement led by Greta Thunberg, is often the accusation, directed at the elderly, that they are leaving the young a planet destined to become uninhabitable, prey to ecological catastrophe and social tensions.
The current situation has been accurately described by the Polish sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman with the concept of “liquid society”, characterized by several distinctive features: the crisis of the state, parties and ideologies, rampant individualism, the uncertainty of law, widespread insecurity. In particular, Bauman connects the dismantling of the former security with a “liquid” life, because it is increasingly turbulent and forced to adapt to the tendencies of the dominant group. In this new and shocking dimension, young people, who will one day become old themselves, but perhaps just as lost, will have to face a similar conflict again, generation after generation, in a spiral that seems to have no end.
Even without surrendering to the bleak vision evoked by Bauman, it is certain that contemporary society seems flattened and almost amorphous, deprived of the rites of passage that once constituted the significant stages of individual growth, marked by disappointments, resignations, sacrifices and victories.
As the philosopher Umberto Galimberti clearly explains, the cause of everything must be sought in the fact that today “we are no longer able to cope with pain. We must rethink some ways of growing within a general and widespread ‘cottoning’, where everything is easy and pleasant”. The prediction is that we are perhaps heading towards a general identity crisis, previously unknown to our civilization. And the only hope that remains is that, once again, the ancient love of wisdom, philosophy, will show us the way.