The Rebellion That Was Not There

So the disruption of the parent-child relationship is a deep disruption within a social order. And we can see that, not simply in our own societies, but as quite a global phenomenon: the idea of rebellion. There is an idea in our culture, certainly, that it is a given that children will rebel.

This does not happen everywhere. Among the Wolof of West Africa the question was put to someone who had grown up in that culture: is there any idea there of adolescent rebellion against the parents? The answer was that, given the way they are socialised, it is beginning to happen because of Westernisation, but it was not there. That would be consistent with the experience of those who have lived in Mauritania, where they really had no concept of children rebelling against the parents — whereas it is becoming a norm, and with Westernisation it is increasing, because of the idea of the rebel without a cause: this idea that children have to rebel, that they have to establish their identities.

There is an awful lot of identity foreclosure, in the Eriksonian type of model, in the Muslim world. There is an idea that one really has to do what one's parents say, and there is a lot of abuse that happens from the parents to the children, because they do have the upper hand there. So one does see that. A child will become an engineer because that is what the parents say he should be. In our culture, in a sense one of the positive aspects is that there is a type of freedom that is allowed for a young person in very many families. It is certainly not true across the board, but there are many families that do allow a child to experiment and to try to find out, and that is actually a very positive aspect of our society and civilisation. But the idea of the breakdown of the social structure is something that is definitely part of the end of time: that we move into a disequilibrium.