Ink Idle

There comes a time in our lives when we question our roots.

Each thread of our past is tied to the self that we have built and crafted up to the point that we have reached today. Many theories coalesce to this point spanning philosophy, politics and psychology. All drive home the point that we have changed. This change is not shaped as a realisation at first; it begins as an accusation. Change is not a constant after a certain age. Time seems to slip by and everything becomes a fixed reference. While the elderly hold on firmly to their references, the young while moving toward newer yard sticks, unknowingly begin building their own reference points. This is the gift and burden of heritage.

‘Heritage’ originates from c. 1200 from Old French as eritage and Latin as heres (meaning heir). Ironically, it was not until the 19th to 20th century that heritage was linked to cultural inheritance; earlier it was primarily used as a legal terminology. In fact, the many translations of our cultural use of familial habits and thought processes would be ‘breeding’, ‘manners’, or ‘upbringing’, while one of the suitable academic terms for social upbringing is ‘habitus’.

This has significance since this points to an expected rigidity in how families pass on their values and habits to the next generation. Pierre Bourdieu argues that limitations in the education system can perpetrate itself as rigidity in the transmission of cultural capital disguised as merit where change is treated as non-compliance and friction. This is common in many societies even today as to change needs development of a rational mind and development of rational mind happens through critical thinking, which is intentionally subdued in many societies.

However, this is only a partial view. Karl Mannheim and Anthony Giddens provide different perspectives toward a common view point. Historical events and actions of the present generation keep altering the views of the past while keeping the roots intact. No practice is transmitted as a fixed template.

Bourdieu even coined a term ‘hysteresis’ to express the mismatch that arises when dispositions shaped under one set of social conditions carry forward into a changed environment where they no longer fit. This causes resistance; the practices that used to fit now become maladaptive and fail to self-correct. As a generation ages, the belief cements that what we did right is the only way against hard times. The younger generation has other ideas, more suited to the new world, but it comes off as ‘they don’t know the world yet’, or ‘the young ones know too much they think, as if we haven’t lived in this world.’ The older generation remains calibrated to a world that has already passed by, while the young are busy adjusting to the one that is actually here.

Hysteresis fixes the old to yesterday’s map while the young are learning the terrain of today. The friction is merely a time lag since both insist they are reading the same terrain.

Mannheim in “The Problem of Generations” (1928) brings an interesting point of ‘stratification of experience’. He argues that experiences absorbed in early life form a kind of a foundational layer upon which all subsequent experiences get accumulated. An individual’s interpretation of new experiences is influenced primarily by this set of layers. But this is not a fresh start. View it as a graft upon the main branch of habitus. It is important to acknowledge the the common saying “the apple does not fall far from the tree.”

Even though a generation may understand that the next generation is born in a world different to theirs, they have trouble realising what would enable the younger generation to have a smoother transition into this new world. The mountain of experiences as a society gets older is already too tall to accumulate new views all over again. Inertia comes in many forms. Some are societal in nature, some individual. It is now regarded that individuals who travel more across the world or even geographies or cultures, have a broader view of the world than those who do not.

As we transition our view to the perspective of us, the folks of the millennial generation; we realise we are standing at the precipice of cultural evolution. Our world changed too fast, too soon. The younger generation knows how to recalibrate itself in this new pace. We are going to look at the generation of our parents. Well-established habitus and a strong inertia accompanied by the limitation of absorbing new experiences.

This is what leads us to question our roots. We saw, we read, we formed opinions, and now we longer agree with our parents who were used to us agreeing with them as children. We think to ourselves: do we even belong here? Some of us embrace this change with open arms, for others this conflicts with their habitus. They face an insurmountable pressure in the form of a moral dilemma as every belief they have inherited now can be challenged, but fear against hurting their parents emotionally inhibits them.

Some of us have an easier time changing. However with that we build our own version of habitus. We expect the older generation to be able to see what we see and agree with us. Jones and Nisbett in 1971 in ‘actor-observer asymmetry’ argued that people tend to attribute their own behaviour to situational pressures (“I adapted because the world demanded it”) while attributing others’ behaviour with opposing views as dispositional traits (“they’re stubborn and close-minded”). It is frequent when the young frame the elder generation’s disagreement as a moral failing rather than viewing it as their habitus formed through different environments. It is important to note that the theories of habitus and stratification are fundamentally contradicting views in the short-term and my argument in this essay is to examine both in terms of older and new generations discreetly.

On the other hand, Vern Bengtson mentions in his research ‘Longitudinal Study of Generations’ that value transmission between generations is strong enough that the convergence points of parents to children outweigh divergence points in the long run. This also explains that in healthy families, even though the differences exist, we find our parents as comfort zones since the present-environment adaptation, which comes across as unfamiliar terrain, in the short-term are often overwhelming. By instinct we are not meant to forget the foundational experiences of our birth cultures that shapes our habits. Habitus as a concept is very interesting because our native likes and dislikes are shaped in this environment. It is also possible to outgrow these preference over time, but there is always a truth to the saying “smells like home”.

I think what we take home from this train of inquiry is that empathy and acceptance are key to enjoying each aspect of our present. The unfamiliar terrain is nothing more than our inevitable present, we cannot run from it. This shapes us, makes us who we are, but at the same time it builds upon our idea of habitus. Our parents already lived their lives, expecting them to change is a difficult ask since they already went through their own journey.

We will always see the same terrain but with different eyes. That is the beauty of life. Heritage is deep; cultural and experiential at once, but most importantly it is our own. We must respect it, but also work to evolve it.

Empathy and adaptability are core to our roots. We may question it but for the right reasons.