08-26-2019, 12:14 PM
(05-06-2016, 04:53 AM)Mikebert Wrote: One of the reasons S&H do not get serious attention from scientifically-inclined social scientists might be because they gave little for scholars to work with. S&H never game an explicit cause for their cycle. They outlined some causal concepts and proposed a partial verbal model that goes something like this:
Basically their generations are like those Mannheim discussed. They are formed by the experience of like-aged persons to history-shaping times that they call social moments. The define like-age as occupation of a specific phase of life. In the appendix of Generations they provide an example of an event, a war, that causes people occupying different phases of life to be imprinted into different generations.
An example is the GI generation, in which the experience of depression and war over 1929-1946 imprints a certain set of attributes (what they call the Civic peer personality or Hero archetype) on those who were in the rising adulthood phase of life forging them into what is known as the Greatest Generation. So those in the 22-43 age bracket during the 1929-1946 period become members of the GI generation. Persons born between 1903 and 1907 inclusive would fully occupy the 22-43 age bracket during the 1929-1946 period, and so would constitute “core” GIs. People born between 1895 and 1915 would spend at least 10 of the years when they were in the 22-43 age bracket during the 1929-1946 period. Yet the 1895 to 1900 cohorts are considered as Lost, even those they spend more than half of their rising adult years in a 4T. Similarly the cohorts born 1916-1924 spent more than half of their rising adult years in a 1T, yet they are considered as GIs.
I know that S&H did a lot of scholarship and research on which they based their theory. It was mostly biographical. That's scholarship and the study of a lot of information. If they don't provide a mechanism that satisfies everybody in science, then that just means they go beyond the dominant old-fashioned paradigm that is even out of date in physics and probably other sciences by now. Mechanistic explanations alone are no longer appropriate. So if they don't get enough attention from "scientifically minded social scientists," that's just because most of those "scientists" are still behind the times. Social science has been a pseudo-science for a long time, claiming that "mechanisms" can explain human behavior, when they never did, and never could. For a long long time, it is the science fans who have been missing the mark and setting a worldview for society that doesn't work and is not true. It is they who are behind the times.
I agree with the S&H model because I know that it is not just certain moments that imprint a generation, but a social mood that prevails for about 20 years. The whole turning helps to shape a generation, and that includes the kind of family relationships and parenting styles that are in vogue. And the generation shapes events in turn.
We need to take a broader view of the idea of cause. Aristotle mentioned 4 causes, not just the material and efficient causes, and there are more kinds of causes than even those that he mentioned. Science and even social commentators and scholars like S&H have to contend with the fact that ultimately the cause of everything is in the present moment, and can't be explained. The past does not cause the present, except provisionally. We use causes to understand and predict things, and to create machines, but there are limits to what we can predict and what we can manipulate. If a social scientist like Mr. Howe uses other explanations like archetypes to explain events and behavior, they are only doing what they all need to do to really provide a picture of what's happening.
