Figure 26:?. Stages in Three Contemporary Life Courses.

Under slavery and serfdom everyone except the very youngest had a long period of compulsory service before being relieved by incapacity. When free labor markets became the rule in industrialized society, the standard stages were employment (with wages or salaries) and retirement (with pension).

A period of formal schooling of young people has defined a definite stage in life for them as pupils and students. When schools became compulsory everyone had to go through this stage. With the introduction of ideas such as “on the job training” and “lifetime learning” education becomes a companion also in adulthood.

The Educational Phase

A heroic attempt to re-establish general education with new (or reinvented) pedagogy was undertaken at the University of Chicago after World War II. This studium generale consisted of a set of courses in certain subjects with a tradition of basic research. All beginning college students – in Europe the equivalent of the last year or last two years of the Gymnasium or Lycée − were afforded reading, discussion, and analysis of the most prominent original works in philosophy, physics, history, literature, and the social sciences. The aim was not to have the students learn the whole series of “Great Books of the Western World” selected by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler. The goal was to develop critical thinking through associating in seminars, not only with teachers and other students, but with the foremost thinkers in the western world.

The Chicago model was soon copied at Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Brown, and other ambitious undergraduate colleges in the United States. Fifty years later all these programs were withering away, victims0of students’ wishes for easier courses with direct relevance to future jobs and to the attacks on their contents mounted by Marxists, ecologists, feminists, and crusaders for multicultural curricula (Bloom 1987).

The Job Career

The position of employment in a paid job is probably the most important position for an individual in advanced societies of our time. The job determines the major rhythm of man's life. The rhythm of jobs can be organized by the seasons, by the days of the week, by the hours of the day. Jobs are patterned, not haphazard, scattered events. Jobs give us social contacts. A widespread fear of being without a job exists in modern society. While the economic losses of unemployment can be compensated by social assistance, nothing of the sort can make good the human losses to someone out of a job and, consequently, without the companionship and social capital a job offers.

The job stage of a life course is divided into occupations and employments. To have one and the same occupation and one and the same employment throughout working life is a pattern derived from agricultural society that lingered on in the industrial society. Labor unions may prefer it since it provides for a stable membership, but the job market favors flexibility. This life course is now perceived as a sequence of different employments and often also as changes of occupations in the course of one's working life.

An equally arresting fact is that the Life Course Based on Education and Job has become common for both sexes. A lifetime position as housewife is no longer a realistic option for most women in the modern world. A long period of formal education and jobs with pay has become self-evident parts of practically all women’s lives. (More on this in the section on “Life Courses and the Sexes” below.)

The stage of pensioner in this Life Course Based on Education and Job was formalized in 1881 when Bismarck began to introduce legislation dealing with the welfare populations in Germany. After a decade, the ambitious program was on the whole accomplished: the disability pension in 1883, industrial disability insurance in 1884, and the old age pension in 1889. In this legislation, especially in respect to the pension, there were several innovations, among others, a fixed age (67) at which the pension began, which became the standard in a number of European countries. Another innovation was a fixed pension payment, which was financed from taxes paid by those who were then working, an arrangement which meant that one did not need to save for his entire pension. It was a pension for those who at that time were very old; when the reform began in 1889, the average length of life in Germany was 44 years. In the year 2000 the life expectancy at birth is about twice that age.

Ever since the system started in 1899 the ranks of German pensioners have swollen. Here, as in other countries, the number of people reaching retirement has increased because of improved health levels, but also because of a decline in retirement age. In the welfare states with pay-as-you-go financing of social security, the cost of pensions are usually the largest in the consolidated budgets of the governments.

Toward the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century we notice an emerging stage of post-career jobs, sometimes called “bridge jobs” if perceived as bridges to retirement. These may involve a partial retirement instead of a full retirement from the old career job. But more commonly, they may be new "plus-jobs" that add meaning to life without the level of responsibility, working hours, and pay of the career job. After their retirement from the career job an increasing number of modern people look can look forward to the plus-jobs and partial or postponed pensions, not a stage of the full-time pensioner.

In post-war Japan the stage of the post-career job became structured already in the 1950s by the so called teinei system. It provided retirement at age of 55 for a majority of employees in big industry and governmenttaptop bosses. Since few could afford to retire so early they took new and easier jobs with lower pay, often with the same employer. Japan never had an extensive governm Sci-ence Art Eco-nomy Reli-gion Polity Wel-fare ent-run social security program of the Bismarck type.

In other economically advanced countries post-career jobs is a spontaneous way in which The Life Course Based on Education and Job adjusts to the unmanageable size and costs of the numbers of retired persons. It does seem to be a more humane adjustment than the technocratic response to this problem from ministries of finance which call for an increase in the legal retirement age.

Life Courses as Stages of Personality Development

Personality studies define the stages of growth from psychological immaturity to a rich and full adult life. Their inspiration comes mainly from Erik H Erikson (1950), David McClelland (1961), and, above all, Abraham H Maslow (1960). This research tradition has been given a reinterpretation by Arnold Mitchell (1983, Chapter 2) with the thesis that there are two parallel paths to ego development, one outer-directed and one inner-directed. Mitchell’s “double hierarchy” is presented in the last column in Figure 1.

Everyone starts his or her psychological development with a primacy of the basic needs of nutrition, sleep, and physical security, followed by basic emotional needs of trust and belonging. Those who retain these priorities also in adulthood are called "Survivors," "Sustainers," and "Belongers" by Mitchell.

Among Post-Belongers there are two alternative options. First, those who give priority to their need of esteem are called Outer-Directed and found on the right-hand side the column Personality Development in Figure 1. Mitchell divides those whose adult priority is the need for esteem into two levels, the "Emulators" and "Achievers."
The other route − on the left-hand side of the column Personality Development in Figure 1 − concerns self-development. Those who put their priority here are called Inner-Directed. The Mitchell team distinguished in the United States of the late 20th century between three levels of self-development: "I-Am-Me," "Experiential," and "Societally Conscious."
At the joint top of both paths, Mitchell places a small number of exceptional individuals who are able to successfully balance all phases and priorities, the Integrated. Not everyone reaches this level.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s Mitchell’s system became widely used under the trade name VALS in marketing and advertising research, mostly in the United States. When some of us adopted it for use in European markets we preferred other labels for the stages; they are found in the in Figure 1. Here are capsule descriptions of personality developments that are also stages in a life cycle.

Sustenance Stage 1: The Subsistence-Minded. Infants fill their time by meeting basic needs such as eating and sleeping and moving about. Grown-ups who seem overly stuck at this stage tell you that they get along all right, but that it is a struggle. Young school dropouts are often Subsistence-Minded. Others are social misfits, and are living proof that also in the mature welfare state there are pockets of need and misery. Still others are not down-and-out, but available for odd jobs and seasonal jobs. If self-employed, their business does not survive them but maintains them at a level well below that of a worker employed in industry or service. As consumers Subsistence-Minded concentrate on their basic needs. Price, of course, is paramount - they want the cheapest they can get of everything. They are attracted by rebates and special sales and yesterday’s bread at half price.

Sustenance Stage 2: The Security-Minded. Having security as one's lodestar is normal in childhood, but some never leave this stage and stay content with their lot at this station. They usually want to own the right to a job as their parents often owned a plot of farmland. They drive a safe car, have an account in the savings bank, and look forward to their Social Security payments. In the store they look at prices, but are also concerned about guarantees.

Sustenance Stage 3: The Group-Faithful. The Group-Faithful have belonging as their key to living, starting with their belonging to the primary groups of their childhood. As adults they may be reluctant to move from their hometown. They put in overtime at their job in order not to let their fellow workers down. They become the pillars within the organizations they belong to. Divorce hits them hard even if love has left the relationship. In politics the Group-Faithful are unlikely to stray from the party line. As consumers they prefer familiar brands of standard products.

Outer-Directed Stage 1: The Status-Seeker. To the Status-Seekers, becoming an adult means being competitive and being set on a career, striving for better living quarters and better jobs. The people they most of all like to associate with belong to a group that they admire and aspire to, represented by the upper rungs of their particular social horizon. Their purchases are usually guided by what they consider appropriate for the roles they aspire to and identify with at the time.

Outer-Directed Stage 2: The Movers. The Movers (a designation used here as in the phrase “movers and shakers”). They move out of the belonging and status-seeking stages. Efficient, active, externally oriented individuals who get things done, they can sometimes become driven by their own demands for accomplishment. As consumers they appreciate quality but also products that save time during their busy days.

Inner-Directed Stage 1: The Self-Faithful. The Self-Faithful grew up by going beyond the belonging stage and setting off as self-contained individualists who are sufficient unto themselves − however flamboyant that self may appear. Since they prefer to go their own way and not melt into the mainstream, they go to stores that offer a wide or special assortment and sales personnel that refrain from trying to influence their purchases.

Inner-Directed Stage 2: The Experience-Seeker. To Experience-Seekers maturation does not end with the assertion of the self; they are particularly receptive to fresh ways of looking at experience and its meanings. They value a rich inner life, and emotion and intuition are meaningful words for them. Mental health is as important to them as physical health. As consumers the Experience-Seekers are difficult to influence through worn-out advertising or marketing approaches. As employees they much prefer to work with people rather than with machines.

Inner-Directed Stage 3: The Reformer. Reformers have developed strong inner convictions: they are convinced of the merits of their values and want to change society to correspond with their values, not adjust themselves to society. On balance, they seem to prefer one-issue groups to political parties. They want to maintain or enhance the quality of their daily lives. They do not rush through the day, but rather pace themselves in order to avoid stress. As consumers Reformers are distrustful of advertising and critical of commercialism.

The Mature Stage: The Integrated. The Integrated persons are mature. They command fully both Inner-Directed and Outer-Directed paths of life. They are comfortable and embrace their life in the present, but, if need be, they have faith that they can change conditions and at the same time grow as persons.

In total, this makes for a life course with seven possible final stages of development. Along the routes from the Primary Stage of childhood to full maturity, different people achieve some but not necessarily all of the different levels of personality development. They continue to exhibit the traits of their final levels until they meet the Ultimate Stage. It never seems too late to start growth into the next level.
There is a correlation between chronological age and these stages of personality development but it is not strong. For example, in the late teenage period one is more likely to be Self-Faithful as hippie, punk, or whatever, than in middle age. At the other pole, The Integrated exhibit what is often called "the wisdom of old age," but in fact you can become an Integrated person much earlier in life.

Excursus: Measuring Stages of Personality Development

The measures of VALS mixed some demographic information into its classification of stages. There is nothing wrong in doing so, but the correlations with chronological age and other demographics used in the classification are then not discoveries, but are built into the stages by the researcher in the construction of his measurements. It is possible to measure the Stages of Personality Development without reference to demography. You may, for example, confront your respondents with the statement "I have to count my pennies and live frugally, and I always buy the cheapest of everything." With a high probability those who agree belong in the Sustenance stages. Confront those who disagreed with another statement "Feelings are just as important in making decisions as numbers and cold facts." Those who agree belong probably in the Inner-directed stages and those who disagree in the Outer-directed stages.

Using a number of statements of this kind in interviews we can place people in the stages of personality development. In a 1981 survey conducted in Sweden by the Swedish Institute for Opinion Research (no. 81057 in Sifo's archive) the respondents were asked to indicate to what extent they agreed with 69 statements. The extent of their agreement was given by the respondents on a 5-point scale on the questionnaire. The answers were first used to divide the respondents into the Sustenance, Outer-Directed, and Inner-Directed stages. We found that the stage “Integrated” could not reliably be classified in this manner: it called for in-depth interviews. Secondly, cluster analyses within each stage provided the sub-categories developed by Mitchell. Thereafter, to make practically useful scales, all 69 statements were reduced to a minimum of 12 by means of factor analysis. Using logit regressions these then classify the respondents according to the results obtained from all the answers. Without mixing in demographics, our following surveys provided the seven stages – through only 12 questions. That is almost as easily managed as when one asks for other background variables such as sex, age, or education.

We found in the Swedish data that the correlation between chronological age and personality development is overwhelmed by the correlation between education and personality development. The older generations have much less formal education than the younger. Education has a remarkably strong and lasting effect on personality development, particularly if it includes the impressionable teenage years. See the table in Figure ??:2

Figure 30:?. Stages of Personality Development. Ages 18-75 nationwide in Sweden 1982

	Elementary School	High School	College/ University
Subsistence-Minded	141	72	27
Security-Minded	148	59	28
Group-Faithful	138	67	45
Status-Seeker	81	128	109
Movers	84	102	150
Self-Faithful	84	100	143
Experience-Seeker	56	147	148
Reformer	49	106	250

Source: Sifo Diagnostica 1982. The numbers in the table are Target Group Index (TGI). They are based on 2400 interviews. TGI = ( Share of target group / Share in total population) * 100

The Ultimate Stage of Any Life Course

The stages of the life courses become part of the identity of the individuals and they are often commented upon by people in their groups and networks. Sometimes they are embedded in legislation such as the obligatory school age, the lowest permissible age for marriage, the age for Social Security payments. The childhood stage is particularly well structured by the family and educational system, coordinating the children's biological, intellectual and emotional development. Children who deviate from the expected pathway in spite of the social controls may be put into separate correctional or remedial institutions. In adult life, stages are separated by titular designations such as Miss or Mrs. or Grandmother in family life, exams and degrees in the educational world, job titles in careers.

Stages of personality development are not so clear-cut. They are more like geological sediments; parts of the older sediments remain while new ones are added. However, people who rise above the basic stages of subsistence and security do receive recognition and sometimes admiration for their qualities. The Integrated usually get more deference for their maturity than people at earlier stages of personality development.

Interplays Between Life Courses

Life Courses and the Sexes

The modernization of society implies among many other things a shift in the dominant life course, from a Life Course Based on Kinship and Households to a Life Course Based on Education and Jobs. The change affected both men and women, first men and then women, and it probably affected women more than men.

In a standard work, The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi (1944) tells the story of the first generations of men who left their traditional agricultural tasks to work for wages in the new English capitalist and industrial society. At great cost and sufferings, they created a new life course based on wage-earning jobs. They faced massive changes. For example, as a matter of course, they had brought their children along to assist them at their new workplaces, only to find that the children did not work for them but were exploited by the factory owners and managers. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the struggle for better working hours, living wages, job security, workman's compensation for injuries, workman's education, vacations, and pensions is in the main a story of men's struggles to shape their version of the Life Course Based on Education and Jobs.

In the twentieth century the focus changes to women. In increasing numbers in the advanced countries they, too, adopted a Life Course Based on Education and Jobs. They fought to get into the same schools as men, to get into the same occupations as men, to get the same wages as men, and the same positions of power as men. This struggle has been facilitated by the fact that the goals have been well understood; they had already been achieved by men. But the women's struggle is more difficult since it has to overcome patriarchal sex roles, particularly in the organization of households, which is a structure much older than industrialization. A standard work on the Great Transformation for women comparable to Polanyi's book remains to be written. The major insights of the transformation are found in feminist literature, beginning with Simone de Beauvoir (1949) and Betty Friedan (1963). The Second Sex is the title of  de Beauvoir’s book, and it means the second-class sex. Women had become second-class humans, not due to biological circumstances, but for reason of their social history. Women are perfectly capable of living like men; this position in her 1949 de Beauvoir’s book has became increasing accepted as correct. A modern society is wholly dependent, not on physical strength but on the language brain, an organ where there is no female disadvantage, perhaps even an advantage.

The transformation for men in the nineteenth century was facilitated by collective actions congenial to the Group Faithful in the Life Course of Personality Development. The transformation for women in the twentieth century seems to have been more influenced by ideas from more advanced stages, often the inner-directed ones, in The Life Course of Personality Development.

Life Courses and Population

The life course of Education and Jobs is superimposed in our society on the older life course of Kinship and Household. Usually when couples have young children, they also are faced with heavy demands of jobs and careers. Jobs and career tend to win out over family and children. Thus birth rates decline and many modern societies cannot replace their populations except through immigration.

The childbearing stage can more or less fully fill the fertile period in women. Marriage can take place at puberty as, say, in old India, or much later, as in most of Europe. Traditionally, Western Europe has promoted a shorter stage of childbearing. The interrelation between the life courses based on training and jobs and the life course based on kinship and procreation separated this part of the world from others already in the Middle Ages.

Guilds generally did not permit apprentices to take a wife until they had finished their training, and this regulation meant that a substantial portion of the urban population had to postpone marriage for a considerable number of years after it was physiologically possible. In agriculture, numerically the most important sector of the late medieval and early modern economies, farmhands were almost members of a farmer's family, and thus were under no social or economic pressure to marry early. Men were induced to put off assuming parental responsibilities until they had acquired the means to care for a wife and children. This meant in many cases that they never married, but lived as fully accepted members of a household headed by an older brother, who because he had inherited the family plot was able to be a "husband" (which means, literally, householder). As a result of this personally onerous but socially effective system of birth control, Europe's population generally did not press as heavily on the subsistence available to it as in the Asian civilizations; compared with China or India, Europe was relatively free of great famines. And at the beginning of the modern era, the continent was still relatively sparsely populated (Petersen 1964, p. 126).

Europe's share of the world population was 21 percent in the year 1800. It rose to 27 percent in the year 1900 when Europe was at the peak of its power, mostly because the more advanced hygiene and medicine was available than in the rest of the world. The large-scale emergence of The Life Course Based on Education and Jobs for both men and women cemented birth rates at comparatively low levels in Europe during the twentieth century. By the year 2000 Europe's population had declined to 13 percent of the world total. In the year 2100 it is expected to be about 7 percent of the world total.

Jobs and the Life Course of Personality Development

Many aspects of living are affected by the Life Course Based on Personality Development. Let us single out how it affects work, a key stage in the Life Course Based on Education and Jobs.

In the Sustenance stages jobs are sheer breadwinning. Here you look for survival and security, and often long for faith in the authorities. At this stage, you do not ask for amenities on the job — except perhaps the right to phone home from the job during a break and the right to join a union — you ask for a job. Marx held that capitalists always and everywhere press workers' wages to sustenance levels, or below. In the main, however, our research findings on this score run contrary to the common assumption of Marxist scholars (e.g. Braverman 1974) that jobs are getting more controlled from above, more subdivided, and voider of human content, and that workers are exploited by the lowest wages. The contrary is true (Yankelovich et al. 1985). In the last few decades of the 1900s, the worker’s discretion on the job is increasing. Also, in eras when economic performance is bleak and there are too few jobs to go around, much effort is being put into existing jobs, with the result that they are improving and becoming more interesting. The labor market in the advanced countries is increasingly populated by persons in the Outer-Directed and Inner-Directed stages of personality development and they want jobs that suit them.

In the Outer-Directed stages, jobs mean material success. Here you work for an improved standard of living and a career. These values are favorable to production, and they welcome advances in technology. A better overcoat, a better home, a better car, a better job, in short a better standard of living, is important here. External signals of success loom large. This view of life goes hand-in-hand with economic growth, an alliance very prominent in the advanced economies of the 1950s.

In the Inner-Directed stages expressivism prevails. Here you look for creativity, self-realization, harmony with nature, and a good and deep inner life. You work to develop yourself. Inner signals of success are more important than the external ones. Quality of life becomes as important, or more important, than a material standard of living. This view of life grew rapidly in the industrial world in the early 1970s and seemed at that time to be at cross-purposes with economic growth.
It is with jobs as with marriages: what is a mismatch for one may be a good match for another. One person may desire a husband or wife who is stylish and elegant. He places less importance on emotional depth and intelligence. Another puts a premium on deep emotional contact and attaches less importance to external attributes. Depending on our stage in the life course, certain jobs will be mismatched and others will be matched to us.

In the Sustenance stages people give their best to jobs with steady remuneration and complete job security. The older blue-collar generation of industrial workers fits into this category. Here, one is willing to forego other amenities and opportunities if there is enough to provide for self and family.

People in the Outer-Directed stages give their best to jobs with incentive pay, advancement opportunities, and clear and fair rules for promotion.

People in Inner-Directed stages give their best to jobs that allow for personal, not just material, growth. They give their best when the job allows for creativity and self-development.

In interviews from the 1970s mismatched people were many: forty-nine percent in the United States, forty-two percent in Israel, forty-seven percent in West Germany, sixty-three percent in the United Kingdom, forty-four percent in Sweden, and sixty-eight percent in Japan. (Yankelovich et al. 1985)

In the 1960s and 1970s, many people in the Inner-Directed stages of their life course gave up on their jobs and thought they could only realize their values during leisure time — by being close to nature, walking in the mountains, sailing on deep waters, meeting with close friends. These persons were a drain on working life. In the 1980s and 1990s, the story changed. People in these stages of their life course increasingly looked for jobs that allowed them to live out their inclinations on the job rather than outside it. And they loved the newly created jobs with their freedom of decision-making and opportunities for creativity.

Generation and Opinion

Let us now continue our exploration of age but turn from life courses to the study of generations, i.e. cohorts of the same age group.

Every member of a generation inherits a gyroscope for its orientation in life. The gyroscope spins in a way set by parental values and experiences. Its course is set in what we, following Cooley (1902), have called the “Primary Stage,” i.e. ages from infancy to pre-puberty. It represents primarily lessons that are learned from generation to generation.

Every member of a generation also is equipped with a radar screen that constantly scans what happens among contemporaries. It picks up unique events and the reactions to them that each generation experiences. These events may re-evaluate traditions and make the opinions of peers more important than those of one’s parents.

The radar is especially sensitive during an interval ranging from the height of puberty through the first years of adulthood. During this period many young people have personalities that are “Group-Faithful” and “Self-Faithful.” In these years, they are especially impressionable by ideals, they are unusually open to embracing extreme opinions, to recruitment into queer groups, and are quick to go through conversions, be they in fashion, politics or religion. It is believed that what happens in adolescence may color much of the later life of a generation (Mannheim 1928). I will call this period the “Renewable Age,” in the dual meaning of this word; it is capable of reaffirming and/or changing what was learned in the Primary Stage, and it is able to be sustained throughout adult life.

Organized educational, religious, political, or commercial interests can more easily exploit the “Primary Stage” and the “Renewable Age” than other periods. For example, many lasting preferences in food, religion, sports, et cetera are set in the Primary Stage. Many lasting preferences in music and politics are set in the Renewable Age. Most suicide bombers are apparently recruited during their Renewable Age.

The gyroscope and the radar that orient every generation may have unequal importance. Riesman (1953) suggested that the radar generally became dominant in the United States by the middle of the twentieth century. Peers then became more significant than parents.

With these analytical ideas we may better understand the shifting tides of the last half of the 20th century.

People who experienced the Depression of the 1930 usually found it difficult to defend individualism in a liberal and capitalist order. They found it easier to embrace collectivism in the form of fascism or socialism. Although fascism was discredited with World War II, the post-war years and the 1950s were imbued, on one hand, with sympathy for a victorious Soviet Communism which gained many fellow travelers in the West, at least as long as Stalin’s terror was ignored. On the other hand, a majority in many western countries came to believe in a kind of “collective liberalism.” (The term is Edward Shils’; in Europe it covers the reform socialist, social democratic, and welfare-liberal currents.) Collective liberalism combined democracy with economic growth, full employment, an awe of science, and, not least, political engineering of various “reforms,” from child benefits to old-age pensions. Despite the cold war, western nations seemed briefly to be living in an idyll. Old ideological conflicts were defused; Daniel Bell entitled one of his books End of Ideology. A new promising era had begun.

European colonies were freed, and there was hope for the low-income countries (at that time called the Third World). But there was a darker side to world affairs. The war efforts and the cold war had resulted in an oversupply of armaments. Cheap firearms and new weapons of mass destruction had made it ever so easy to kill and ever so hard to defend oneself. However, most people suppressed the thought that peace is really another term for an interwar period. “Make love, not war” became the slogan among youths reaching the Renewable Age in the 1960s and 70s.

This was part of the growing liberation from tradition and discipline in the West that had a breakthrough in the 1960s. Emancipation was not just about sexual morals. Churches abdicated from their traditional leadership, patriotism was ridiculed, knowledge was mocked, populism extolled. Hierarchies crumbled and equality was proclaimed to be the natural order of things. Only old fogies did not wear jeans. The Vietnam War added a sizeable dose of anti-American sentiment to the cultural climate in the world. Marxism came out of its ghetto, and Marxist-colored teaching at colleges and universities was called “critical social science.”

In the aftermath of the youth rebellions of 1968, the environmental movement gained ground. It was followed by other movements such as women’s lib. Their proponents described them as progressive, and they gained credibility since many of the artists, journalists, academics and other intellectuals in the West gladly joined in the criticism of central powers, tradition, and authority.

Reagan and Thatcher — or rather Reaganomics and Thatcherism — undermined collective liberalism, particularly its predilection for political governance of the various parts of society outside of the strict body politic. Unshackled market forces created great prosperity in the West. The Berlin Wall was torn down by people desirous of freedom and hankering for consumption. The Soviet regime fell. The old individually centered liberalism had returned and was called neo-liberalism in Europe and neo-conservatism in the United States. But the surprisingly rapid growth of globalization became a new object of hatred.

People from the former colonies streamed to the cities of the former colonial powers. Civil wars and minor wars added to the influx of refugees. European nations were somewhat taken by surprise when they discovered that they had become multicultural, just as the United States and Canada, but without the cohesive force of the national ideologies of the latter. The field was open for the growth of xenophobia, an ingredient in a new fascism.

The decisive events for every generation of youths after 1968 have been many and multifaceted. Generation X, influenced by AIDs and Chernobyl, adopted a reserved, ironic attitude. Generation Y (or whatever we shall call it) learned to live and express their identities with cellular phones and on the Internet. The impact of September 11, and of the rise of Muslim extremism with a terrorist agenda yet to be fully studied.

None of the experiences of these generations were as great as those of the Depression and the Vietnam War, which were so overwhelming to those who had lived through them that they reverberated among their children. The children of the generation that had demonstrated during the Depression years became the protest-wise generation that made itself heard and seen in 1968. Then it was time for the children of the ’68 agitators to make their own protests. The emergent generation of youths during the first decade of the 2000s – we can call it generation Z – is more eager to protest and more sophisticated in agitation than both the X and Y generations.

The antagonism toward authority, capital, and central powers is on the upswing. In the period after the millennium, growing agitation, demonstrations, riots, violence directed against globalization and the establishment have become the order of the day. The esteem and dignity of the authorities have been diminished. The police have, as usual, become a target for protest, and their "zero tolerance" has become a particular object of hatred.

A serious study of these changing tides would have to recognize that all eventful circumstances may (and usually do) affect all people of all ages to some extent. However, to identify major influences, we must record three different circumstances and measure their impact:

• The eventful circumstances shaping the parents at their Renewable Age which would become included in the gyroscopes of their children in the Primary Stage of the latter.
• The eventful circumstances that were contemporary with the Primary Stage of the same children.
• The eventful circumstances of their own Renewable Age.

These three effects are enhanced if the generation experiencing them is large in numbers. The size of the generations is given in the census. The great impact of the many postwar “baby boomers” is often noted in contemporary generational analysis.

Cohort analysis, developed in the science of demography, should be the method of choice for these analyses. It is striking, however, that so far, few examples of cohort analysis of opinion polls can be found in writings about the generational changes mentioned above. The main sources of generational research are found in historical and biographical archives, not social science data bases (see, for example, Strauss & Hove 1991).

The Ultimate Stage of Life in a Many-Splendored Society

At all stages of all life courses, the occupants have a sense of what the next stage will bring. You can look forward to something that you have seen in others. Even the "young-olds" can still conceive of a new residence, a new love, a new hobby. But when you reach the 'ultimate stage' there is no longer any stage to move into. This stage coincides roughly with "old-old" age as it nowadays is called by gerontologists.

We distinguish between biological death and social death. They need not concur. An established family in ancient Egypt could mummify its dead and keep the mummies in the family home, drink toasts to them at dinner, perhaps take them out for a hug or a dance on the floor. Their biological death had occurred, but not their social death. In the contemporary world the old-old often suffer a slow social death with successive disengagements from established roles prior to an ultimate disengagement through biological death. Their deteriorating appearance may seem scary and ugly to the non-old. They impose on the non-old the unwelcome thought of everyone's inevitable death. And many die a social death ahead of their biological death.

In the ultimate stage chronological time loses its iron grip. This may simply be due to failing memory, but other processes may also be at work. In the ultimate stage the old-old themselves may develop a dual personality. One internal personality reshuffles memories, reformulating acts in their biography over and over again. A second, external, personality responds more or less adequately, but often superficially, to the routines of their settings: greetings, goodbyes, mealtimes, bedtimes, and what have you. (Hazan 1994, Chapter 7)

In the chorus that ends Sophocles' Oidipus the King we hear this conclusion:. "Count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last." A tragedy may not necessarily be so total.

In his drama Faust, a Tragedy, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) illuminated a multitude of dilemmas and opportunities inherited in the vision of freedom to pursue any cardinal value, including the right to accept or reject divine messages. Doctor Heinrich Faust, frustrated by the slow progress of his scientific research, sells his soul in a pact signed in blood with Mephistopheles, the devil in the guise, first of a pliable poodle, and then of a traveling scholar. In return Faust gets extraordinary abilities as a scientist. On another level, he finds a passionate love for a lovely bourgeois girl named Gretchen, a passing affair for him, but not for her. He also gets the companionship of Greek goddesses. He finds worldly riches and gains. He gets consulting power at the courts where he solves their economic problems by inventing paper money. Faust, like Goethe himself, can reach the top in a career in his first chosen realm of knowledge, but also in the pursuits of rich comfort, political power, and the creation of beauty in poetry and drama.

As death approaches, Faust looks back at his life cycle from childhood to old age. He celebrates his glad activity to stand with free men upon ground that's free.

Tomas Mann observed that the character of Mephistopheles is more interesting than Dr Faust's person. Mephistopheles is the wiser of the two. Their joint forays into the various periods of history and realms of society are an adult education for Faust who fully enjoys his newly acquired carnal, esthetic, intellectual, political, and business acumens.

In the end Mephistopheles is cheated by the contract, and Faust's soul slips from his hands. It is saved by Gretchen's love. Faust, the modern man, has been free to pursue without restrictions his bodily lusts as well as all knowledge, riches, power, beauty and virtue (all the cardinal values) his time and society offer. And, since he also has found love, Faust's soul will live for ever in loving memory. To all his accomplishments eternity is added.

Not bad.

This is the end of Volume 7 and of the maim text of The Many-Splendored Society