THE OLDEST YOUNGER GENERATION
215
pIe disconcert the old gentlemen with a lack of hypocrisy which is
wrongly interpreted as a lack of youthful idealism. There is the story
of the two paratroopers, which exasperates many grown men. Sexual
morality was being discussed; they showed a complete lack of inter–
est in the life of the woman before marriage. "I don't see why any–
one shouldn't use a thing before it's mine," said one. And the other
added, "But if somebody takes my wife, it's exactly as if he took my
car
and
drove a few miles in it. It may even be the better for being
used.
But I like to drive it myself." Anyone who
is
shocked by these
statements should read Kant's definition of marriage: "The union of
two
persons of different sex for the lifelong mutual possession of their
sexual characteristics." What have Kant and the two paratroopers in
common? The simple dis-ideologized formulation of a social institution;
the only change is in the "lifelong." This Younger Generation has had
no opportunity to live several undisturbed decades apart from life.
For the same reason it has had no opportunity to become disil–
lusioned; without illusion, no disillusion. That too runs counter to
the agreement, the disappointed old gentlemen think. But the young
begin where many a father arrived only after three decades; that gives
them a look of unyouthfulness. In their life there was Mussolini's
Ethiopian expedition, Hitler's concentration camps, uncounted sacri–
fices in wars and civil wars. All that gave little opportunity to pre–
serve one's beautiful innocence. The world became global, right
enough-but the citizen
of
the world began not even to understand
what went on in his own street. The felicitous simplifications of the
young and unsuspecting will no longer succeed. The Younger Genera–
tion believes everything and nothing. There
is
no Younger Generation.
There is only eighteen to twenty-eight.
The young ceased to live in a world apart-so did the old ; the
dissolution of the structure of a society makes twin concepts like un–
developed and developed, immature and mature, non-adult and adult,
correspond to nothing. They have a meaning only where beginning
and end, promise and fulfillment are statically related to each other–
where men develop aocording to a law which governed their lives
from
the
start. Today, what they begin they do not finish; and what
they finish they do not begin. Neither possessions nor experience last
even for a generation. We must beware of similes drawn from the
organic kingdom; let us rather take them from the realm of the split
atom. Fathers and sons reveal unsuspected potentialities: the sons look
wise before their time, the fathers like vital old donkeys. Common ex–
periences, so explosive that there was not a children's playground which
