LURCH AND LEARN
Address to DYG's Annual SCAN Conference
New York, New York, May 1997

by Daniel Yankelovich

The philosopher Hannah Arendt once observed that eras of history are at their very clearest at their beginnings and at their endings.  We have now reached the end of an era extending from the mid-sixties to the turn of the century, a period of about 35 years.  In preparing this talk, I've been trying to find the right label for the era that is now receding into history.  Although it's not a crisp sound bite, I think "The Era of Expressive Individualism" is an accurate label.

The tradition of individualism is, of course, as old as the nation itself.  Prior to the 1960s, however, individualism confined itself mainly to the political domain -- freedom to speak our minds, to pursue our own religious beliefs, to live wherever we chose to live.  In the 1950s and the preceding decades we were political individualists but social conformists.  The 1960s introduced a radical extension of individualism, broadening it from the political domain to the realm of personal self-expression.  In the 1960s and 1970s self-expression became a national preoccupation. 

This theme has been playing itself out for more than three decades.  Now, however, the era of radical experimentation with expressive individualism has exhausted itself, and the effects of social learning are starting to take hold.  As a result, we are on the verge of evolving a new conception of individualism which I will describe at the end of my talk. 

I had the good fortune in the 1960s to begin to track the era of expressive individualism in its initial stages of development.  In preparing this talk, I reviewed all of the tracking surveys we conducted in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The scope and extent of them surprised me: they constitute a unique archive of data.  I believe historians of the future will find our data to be the most thorough survey documentation of what actually happened to the nation's values during those years.

What I'd like to do this morning is first to share with you a brief history of our research efforts and crystallize some of our major findings from that period.  Then I'll say a few words about the theory of tracking changes in social values.  Finally, I'll share some thoughts with you on where we go from here.

The early stages

Let me start with the first glimmerings of social change we detected way back in the 1950s.  Our chosen field of consumer behavior opens a unique window on American society.  Consumer behavior has proven to be a leading indicator of social change because it anticipates changes that show up later in other parts of the society.

We didn't realize it at the time, but a major harbinger of societal change occurred in the automotive industry in the 1950s with the spectacular failure of the Edsel.  At that time General Motors was the undisputed industry leader.  General Motors had developed a line of automobiles built up in step-by-step price and status increments: Chevrolet to Buick, to Pontiac, to Oldsmobile to Cadillac.  The GM line was a wonderfully apt expression in steel of the status structure of our society in the 1950s.  Americans celebrated each rise in their own status by moving up the GM line. 

The Ford Motor Company concluded that it had a serious hole in the middle of their line which they decided to fill with the Edsel.  At the time it seemed a no-brainer.  The need to fill the gap in the Ford line in order to compete with GM seemed a self-evident marketing strategy.  I suspect that if Ford had made the same decision five years earlier, it would have been successful.  They just happened to pick precisely the wrong moment in history to do it. 

Several years after the Edsel fiasco we began to work for Ford on two other aspects of their business -- the influx of small foreign cars into the United States and the introduction of Ford s Thunderbird model.  Ford management reacted very differently to our research findings on these two marketing issues.  Initially, they utterly rejected our research findings on the impact of small foreign cars.  Ford management took the position that the only conceivable reason anybody would want to buy a small foreign car was because it was cheaper and used less gas.  They refused to believe that the buyers of these cars actually preferred them to the domestic product because they expressed the personality of the buyer better than the big-finned, boat-like cars that Detroit was producing at the time.

Their refusal to accept research findings they themselves had authorized was my first encounter with the massive blind-spots a tight-knit corporate culture can create.  Since then, I have found that when very intelligent managers make very stupid mistakes, these are almost always the products of a sub-culture -- of managers isolated from the rest of the society who talk only to each other and who develop their own special mind set.

Ford management's reaction to the Thunderbird research was altogether different.  They were much more responsive to the data.  It was through research on the Thunderbird that Ford got the first inkling of the power of the concept of a personal car,  a car that expresses a person's individuality rather than his or her social status.  That insight has served them in good stead.  It also served to introduce our firm to the impact of social change on consumer behavior. 

Our most direct encounter with the changing values of the 1960s came with a consulting project I was invited to do for the Institute of Life Insurance in 1964.  Prior to the 1960s no product or service more fully expressed America's social values than life insurance.  The values of "live for tomorrow not today," and "save for the future, sacrifice for your family" underpinned the purchase of whole-life insurance policies.

The head of the Institute, the late Blake Newton, a visionary thinker, sensed that something was happening on the nation's college campuses that might impact the life insurance industry.  He asked us to review all existing demographic and survey data on changing values and make a report at the industry's annual meeting in 1965.  In the report (Young Adults: The Threshold Years), we identified a forerunner group of college students who had begun to question some of their parents' core values.   They had concluded that their fathers' nose-to-the-grindstone way of life and their mothers' sacrifice of self for the family somehow didn't make sense in the new affluent society.  They felt that sacrifice for the family was all well and good if you were obliged to do it.  But if it was economically unnecessary, why sacrifice something as important as one's own self-expressive needs?  They had come to believe that the self-expressive aspect of their lives was too important to sacrifice for no good reason.

In the later 1960s these student attitudes began to spread rapidly beyond the nation's campuses.  Initially the war in Vietnam obscured these deeper trends.  But it gradually became clear that underneath the surface of political protest about the war something more fundamental was going on, a revolutionary shift in social values.  Fortune Magazine developed an interest in these value changes and invited us to quantify the size of the forerunner group we had identified in the Institute of Life Insurance study.  In 1968, they published our findings in an article titled "A Special Kind of Rebellion."

Towards the end of the 1960s, our market research studies were picking up more and more reverberations of the nation's changing values.  One of our clients discovered, for example, that the foundation had dropped out of the girdle business (no pun intended).  Quite abruptly, the new value of embracing nature and the natural expressed itself in a variety of forms ranging all the way from women's undergarments to a sharp rise in the sale of natural foods.  Across the board, in life insurance, cars, foods, cosmetics, housing, women's clothing and other products and services, the new values began to express themselves both in consumer behavior and on the societal front.

These value changes were strongest among young people, creating what was famously called a "generation gap."  That was the big news of the late 1960s.  CBS decided to do a series of specials on the generation gap and authorized us to do the research for it.  The raw data on which the series was based is documented in this report, Generations Apart.

By the end of the decade the enormity of the change was unmistakable.  The John D. Rockefeller III Fund then gave our firm financial support to launch a series of national studies to track the changes.  The studies began in 1969 and continued in 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973 and 1974.  I reported their findings in two books: Changing Youth Values in the '70s and The New Morality.

In 1981, I summarized the value transformations of the 1960s and 1970s in a book titled New Rules -- Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside-Down.  The book reported our findings from the surveys of young people and also from the data starting to emerge from the firm's annual tracking studies of the general public, out of which grew both the Yankelovich Monitor and DYG's SCAN. 

Let me briefly summarize some of the most important shifts in values of this period:

The concept of duty: less value placed on what one owes to others as a matter of moral obligation.

Social conformity: less value placed on keeping up with the Joneses.

Respectability: less value placed on symbols of correct behavior for a person of a particular social class.

Social morality: less value placed on observing society's rules.

Pluralism: greater acceptance of differences in ethnicity and life-style.

Sacrifice: less value placed on sacrifice as a moral good, replaced by more pragmatic criteria of when sacrifice is or is not required for economic reasons.

Expressiveness: a higher value placed on forms of choice and individualism that express one's unique inner nature.

The environment: greater value placed on respecting and preserving nature and the natural.

Technology: greater value placed on technological solutions to a vast array of problems and challenges.

Sexuality: less moral value placed on "morally correct" sexual behavior; a loosening of some but not all norms of sexual morality.

Pleasure: less Puritanism about pleasure, especially about bodily pleasures; pleasure regarded as a good.

Family: a high value placed on family life, but with a vastly expanded concept of family beyond the traditional nuclear form.

Husband-wife relationships: a far-reaching shift from role-based obligations to shared responsibilities.

Health: greater value placed on one's own responsibility for maintaining and enhancing health.

Work ethic: a shift from the Protestant ethic valuation of work as having intrinsic moral value to work as a source of personal satisfaction, and therefore less tolerance for work that does not provide personal satisfaction.

Women's rights: a high value placed on women achieving self-fulfillment by paths of their own choice rather than through roles dictated by society.

This enumeration is far from complete, but it does suggest the great breadth of the value shifts.  Some are so extensive that they virtually reverse previously held values.  For example, social conformity and respectability were once the norm of the land, but self-expressiveness and choice of life-style are now the norm.  Marriage once revolved around sharply differentiated roles for men and women.  Now marital roles have blurred, and a radically different conception of marriage has taken hold among most Americans.

          Our research uncovered several extraordinary discontinuities in values which we later came to think of as "lurches."  There were two such lurches that later turned out to be closely related.  One was a lurch from a depression psychology  to a psychology of affluence.   The depression psychology had taken hold in the 1930s and, remarkably, had persisted throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, even when the economy was steadily improving.  Indeed, it wasn't until the middle of the 1960s that people began to think, "Well, maybe these good times will continue.  Maybe they will really last."  Almost overnight, people shifted from the conviction that "it won't last and we had better save every penny" to the conviction that "it's here forever; there's no limit to what we can now do with all this new affluence."

My associate Florence Skelly coined the phrase the "fix-it psychology" to describe this outlook.  After the Kennedy Administration, the conviction grew among average Americans that "if we can send a man to the moon, surely we can fix the race problem; surely we can fix poverty; surely we can fix all those other minor problems of existence."  Americans adopted an expansive outlook, a view that everything is possible, we can fix anything."  That euphoric mood affected not only the public, but also government policy.  I want to come back to this point later because I think that the fix-it psychology of the 1960s laid the seeds for many of the problems we are struggling with today.

The other lurch was, as stated earlier, a shift from automatic sacrifice for the family to a questioning of the need for sacrifice in an affluent society.  Unfortunately, questioning the desirability of unnecessary sacrifice in the 1960s and 1970s evolved in the 1980s into questioning the desirability of any sacrifice whatever.  We have been struggling with the consequences of this shift ever since.

Theory Building

I want to turn briefly now to a second theme: theory building about social change and how to interpret it.  What has the data we have collected over the past 40 years taught us about social change? 

First of all, we were impressed by the rapidity of the spread of the new values -- from 3% of the population in the mid-sixties (the college-student children of affluent, well-educated parents) to 80% of the population by the mid-seventies, a mere decade later.  In historical terms, this is extraordinary.  To be sure, the dispersion was not universal, and among the 80%, a majority were highly selective in picking and choosing among the new values they found most congenial. But nonetheless it was an extraordinary transformation in social values of the sort that one usually associates with several generations or even centuries.

We were also struck by the unusual pattern of transmission of the new values.  We are accustomed to thinking of values spreading from the two coasts, especially from California, to the rest of the country and from the upper-middle class to the population at large.  But this was not the pattern of transmission of the 1960s values.  They traveled from a subset of college students to their affluent parents, then to other young people, college and non-college educated, and only then to the broad adult, middle-class majority.

The spread of the new expressive values to the other industrial democracies of Western Europe and Japan has particular import.  The pattern of value changes we uncovered in the United States began to show up in one European country after another, with a time lag of about five years.  In the mid-1980s, I formed an association with a small group of European social scientists.  We now meet every year to compare notes on what is happening in our societies.  It has become clear to all of us that the social value changes we are struggling to adapt to are not specific to American culture but are linked to the stage of development and evolution of the advanced industrial democracies in general.  This finding is particularly important for those of you involved in global marketing because it gives you a framework within which to see variations from culture to culture.

We were, I think, a little slow in coming to the most important insight suggested by the data.  It is that societies learn and react differently than individuals do.  Suprisingly, social learning is often far more abrupt than individual learning.  It's more extreme.  It's less incremental.  Mature individuals who encounter new circumstances will usually adjust to change in a slow and moderate fashion.  They have learned that cautious adjustments keep them from making huge mistakes in their lives.  But for a variety of reasons societies are less cautious.  They tend to lurch suddenly and abruptly from one extreme to the other.  Such trial-and-error learning is probably society's most typical form of adaptation to change.

These abrupt societal lurches raise a host of questions.  One such question is about making predictions (a major purpose of tracking studies being to make predictions).  If your theory of predictions is based on extrapolating from trends, you tend to assume,  "Well, this trend is moving in a particular direction, and therefore it's going to continue to move in this direction."  But then it suddenly changes direction.  You find yourself face to face with sharp and unexpected discontinuities.  If you are to make accurate predictions, you need a sound theoretical understanding of what's going on.

Since discontinuities have always been present in human history, a number of theories have arisen to account for them.  The oldest theory is the concept of cycles.  Cycle theories are still around, for example in the work of historian Arthur Schlesinger.  The theory of cycles is based on the notion that there is an eternal pattern to social change, like the change of seasons.  In seasonal change, as fall evolves into winter, the days grow shorter and colder.  But the trend toward shorter, colder days doesn't continue.  With the onset of spring, it begins to reverse itself in a highly predictable, cyclical fashion. 

The trouble with the theory of cycles is that it's too static to account for most social change.  It doesn't take the presence of new forces in the world into account, and more seriously, very few forms of social change turn out to be cyclical in character.

The most popular theory of discontinuity uses the metaphor of a pendulum swing.  That's the way most people look at discontinuity.  They see a sudden reversal of direction and say, "well, the pendulum is now swinging the other way."  In our empirical research, we have found this clear, simple, common-sense pendulum metaphor invariably misleading.  In the evolution of societies, the pendulum never truly swings back.  You never go back to where you were before.  There are always new and important factors shaping outcomes.  You can't help but be misled if you interpret social change as a pendulum swing. 

Today's most fashionable theory of discontinuity is the concept of changes in the life cycle: the idea that as a generation ages, it invariably shifts its outlook and values as part of the normal maturation process.  This is a particularly appealing notion today because of the size of the Baby Boom cohort.  The Baby Boomer population is so large and forms such a vital part of our culture that any changes in Boomers' values as they mature will have a huge impact on society. 

The underpinnings of life-cycle theory can be found in the works of Erik Erikson and Dan Levinson, as popularized by Gail Sheehy.  The concept here is that individuals reorganize themselves, their needs and their outlook on life at each stage of the life cycle.  This concept brings a valuable theoretical orientation to bear.  But for predictive purposes it has several limitations.  It was developed primarily by psychologists and therefore tends to focus on the individual psyche rather than on changes in the social environment.  That orientation is useful for some purposes, but a focus on changes in the social environment is more relevant to our kind of work.  The life-cycle theory also has a static quality.  Because each generation inevitably matures, the maturation process has a universal sameness, whereas what we are living through today doesn't seem at all universal or the same as in the past.  We are caught up in the ephemeral and difficult transitions of a global economy, an advanced industrial society, and transitory changes in technology and social values that interact with the normal maturation process in novel ways.

In Europe, the most familiar and sophisticated theory of discontinuity is the concept of the Hegelian dialectic.  A situation first gives rise to its opposite, and then the two blend together.  In Hegelian terms, a thesis evolves into its antithesis, which then further evolves into a synthesis combining the best elements of both thesis and antithesis, resulting in a spiral of progress.  It's a lovely theory from an aesthetic point of view.  But from the point of view of our empirical data, it's too neat, too elegant.  History doesn't seem to work that way.  It's a lot messier.  A phase of social evolution does sometimes give rise to its opposite, but rarely does it then lead to a synthesis of the best elements of both.  Sometimes it leads to a deterioration -- the worst of both changes -- or to a sideways movement that is neither progress nor setback.

Lurch & Learn

Having tried out all of these various theories, we have evolved our own theory to fit our empirical data.  We have come to the conclusion that the theory that best accounts for the discontinuities, the seeming contradictions, and the odd patterns of movement in the tracking data we have been collecting over the past 35 years is a theory we call "lurch-and-learn."  It is a pattern that starts with a sharp discontinuity, often a reversal (a lurch), which is then followed by a complex series of modifications based on social learning, some of which are valid and some of which are false learning. 

This theory raises a host of theoretical questions.  The two most important are: what precipitates the initial lurch and how can you distinguish between valid and false social learning?

Regarding the initial lurch, we have found that two factors are almost always present: a change in external circumstances and a lack of responsiveness on the part of institutions to the change.  If government, business, schools, colleges, churches, the media, medicine, law and the family are slow to adapt to external change, people who are affected by the change can build up a great deal of frustration and anger.  It is the frustration that causes them to overreact in the form of a lurch.  As an individual you can control your own life, but you have little or no control over the society and its institutions.  Often the only way to get an institution to respond is to push things to an extreme.

As an example let me cite the dramatic and unprecedented change in former president George Bush's standing with the public in the aftermath of the Gulf War.  In the space of a few months in 1991, Bush plunged from the highest poll ratings that any President ever had ever received in the history of polling to the lowest!  At the end of the Gulf War, he could not have ranked higher in the public's esteem; a few months later, he was transformed from hero to bum in the public's eyes without having done anything visible to warrant the change. 

The plunge in his popularity came about because of the public's growing frustration over the state of the economy and Mr. Bush's seeming indifference to public fears.  The high levels of unemployment and fear of stagnation that characterized the recession of the late 1980s and early 90s were deeply distressing to average Americans, who not did buy the idea that these events were a matter of the business cycle working itself out.  They were, in the public's eyes, at least partly due to Presidential inaction.  When in early 1992 George Bush said, "There is no recession, technically the recession is over, the economy is okay," people's reaction was:  "Well, the recession may be over but we are not okay."  The institution of the Presidency had failed to react to the stresses of dual-earner households, stagnant incomes and the high level of expectations people had.  Bush's poll numbers didn't merely stagnate, mirroring the economy.  They plunged abruptly downward.  The lurch in public opinion lasted a few stressful years as people learned to live with more modest expectations.  1991 to 1995 was a period of social learning in the form of lowering expectations as the public came to accept a situation that a few years earlier had seemed intolerable. 

Society's lurch and learn process is far more mistake-prone than individual learning.  Society's lurches can lead to serious mistakes before corrective learning takes hold.  We have developed some useful insights into the kind of learning that occurs in the lurch phase.  When people find themselves in the full heat of a reactive lurch, their mood is unstable.  Learning occurs exclusively in the direction of the lurch.  In the lurch phase, people are quite error prone because of their strong emotions.  In the momentum of the lurch, they are blind to the positive features of what they are reacting against.  Consider, for example, welfare reform and the role of government.  The lurch against government in recent years is so strong that people don't want to hear arguments about good things the government is doing or is capable of doing.  That will come later, when the lurch subsides.  A balanced perspective on the proper role for government will come only after people have worked their way through the lurch phase.  In this instance, the government had been unresponsive to the welfare problem for decades.  For years people grumbled ineffectively.  When the lurch against government finally came, people over-reacted.  They concluded:   "The government has failed; jobs in the private sector for people on welfare are the answer."  A few years from now when the drawbacks of market-based solutions in welfare (and managed health care) come to the fore people will then have time to reflect and sort things out.  Often, you may have to wait for the post-lurch phase to generate valid learning. 

I want to come back to a point I made earlier about the great lurch of the 1960s -- from a depression psychology to a psychology of affluence.  It was people's perception of affluence that precipitated the lurch, not the economic realities of the time.  The relations between people's perceptions of affluence and the actual economic facts were quite indirect.  First, there was a long time lag.  The nation began to grow more affluent at least five to ten years before the public recognized it.  Actual economic affluence arrived in a slow and incremental manner, but the public's psychological reaction was abrupt and extreme -- from the unrealistic conviction that hard times would go on forever to the equally unrealistic conviction that the hard times were over forever.

With increasing affluence came the highly exaggerated conviction that because of it our society had more than enough resources to do anything we had the political will to do.  This conviction affected the government as well as individual consumers.  A few weeks ago, I spoke at a Harvard conference to explore the public's loss of confidence in our institutions, especially government.  One of the other speakers was Richard Darman, who had been a high official both in the Reagan and Bush administrations.  I found his observations particularly striking. 

Darman was reflecting on what happened in the nineteen sixties, seventies and eighties not from the public's point of view, but from the point of view of the impact on government. Darman quoted Senator Moynihan's observation that during the 1960s (when Moynihan was in the Nixon White House) "the government didn't know what it was doing." Darman added that in addition to not knowing what it was doing, the government plunged ahead with great optimism, with virtually no empirical data, and with a high chance of failure.  The unrealistic, fix-it, "we can do everything" psychology of the public had spread to the government, causing it to launch massive entitlement programs that we are now struggling to undo. 

I believe that the public's present loss of confidence in government can be traced back to the mistakes government made as it was carried away by the national lurch to an unrealistic psychology of affluence.  We are saddled with the mistakes made in the heady enthusiasm of the lurch phase of the '60s and '70s.

There are other false learnings associated with other lurches.  I mentioned some of them earlier: the lurch from automatic sacrifice for the family to the view that there is no need for sacrifice at all, from the conviction that some social morality is unnecessarily rigid to the view that "if it isn't illegal it's okay,"  from Puritanism to casual sexual experimentation.

Inferences

We have drawn several inferences from our value-tracking experience.  One is that any theory of social change must be grounded in a theory of social learning.  How societies learn is, we believe, distinct from the way individuals learn.  The "lurch and learn" concept, while not as elegant as Hegel's dialectic, will, I believe, prove a more useful, pragmatic framework because it explains the data and it raises the right questions, such as:

What causes the lurch? 

How does learning take place, both in the lurch and the post-lurch phases? 

How do you know whether learning is valid or false, and what can you do about it? 

How long does it take to learn from our mistakes?

Is there any way we can do better?

I want to comment briefly on the tempo of social learning.  Valid learning, as we've seen over past 30 years, is often agonizingly slow.  People have to make mistakes and then realize that they are mistakes before they can correct them. Then they have to work out some way of dealing with the consequences of the mistakes, and at the same time adapt to changes in the external environment. 

People don't like to change.  They don't like to admit to mistakes.  They don't like to be reasonable when they are frustrated.  So it takes a very long time for post-lurch learning to take place.  In brief, what we are living through right now in the late 1990s are the results of both valid and false learning from lurches in value changes that took place in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.  It has taken us a long time to deal with mistakes made in that period, and we still have a long way to go.

The New Path for Individualism

I want to now turn to my final subject: what the society has learned about individualism, and where the ethos of expressive individualism seems to be heading.  We have learned that we like many aspects of expressive individualism and want to hold onto the gains.

We like the right of individuals to choose their own lifestyles; we do not want to return the social conformity of the past.

The women's movement, which grew directly out of the new values and is in my view the most powerful force transforming American society, is still building momentum.  We want to hold onto its most positive and constructive features. 

There is also an enduring acceptance of diversity and difference.  We are aware of conflict around issues such as affirmative action and identity politics.  But even with these difficult issues to contend with, there is no desire to return to a form of society where one particular ethnic group sets the cultural standards, defines the taste, and hogs all of the available status.  We have a commitment to diversity, even though it leads to conflict.

We want to preserve the focus on health, well-being and fitness that emerged in the Seventies. 

We will continue to regard sexuality as an inherent good to be expressed openly, rather than as an urge to be suppressed puritanically.  People are becoming more prudent about sexuality, but the change in orientation is firmly in place.

Above all, there is a continuing elevation of self-expressiveness as a major goal of life. 

There are, however, some aspects of expressive individualism that the public has come to reject, particularly its overtones of moral relativism.  Significantly, we are beginning to edge away not from its expressive side, but from its individualistic side.  This is a fascinating state of affairs.  We appear to be holding onto the new expressive values, but are in the process of changing our conceptions of what it means to be an individual, to be a "self."

This is a subject that is difficult to grasp concretely.  It sounds abstract, it is abstract, and it is subtle.  But it is very powerful.  Conceptions of self are incredibly powerful forces that shape the destinies of cultures.

A small incident involving an interview with a doctor I watched on French television last week sticks in my mind.  The topic was the need to reduce health care costs, a familiar subject in France as well as in the United States.  The French doctor took the position that there was no way health care costs in France could be reduced.  He pronounced with great assurance,  "After all, we are a civilized people." His argument was unambiguous: a civilized people does not reduce the health care that people need.  That was his conception of France and the French, as a "civilized people." 

In recent months we have all become aware of a blow to the self-conception of the Swiss, who regard themselves as a morally superior people.  The stream of news events about how Swiss banks hoarded Nazi gold that had been taken from Jewish victims of the Holocaust has shaken the Swiss sense of self as morally superior.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to state that the fate of cultures and civilizations, and their ability to adapt to change, is closely tied to how people see themselves.  These last 30 years have, I think, witnessed a series of learnings in American culture about what the self is and what it means to be an individual. 

Let me illustrate a few of these learnings.  Consider the goal of self-fulfillment.  The 1960s conception was that self-fulfillment consists of filling as many personal needs as possible.  This goal is based on the conception of the self as an aggregation of needs such that the more needs you fill the more fulfilled you will become.  This is the ethos of "you can have it all" -- career, family, affluence, leisure, self-esteem, sexual gratification, self-expression, and guaranteed entitlements. 

Today's culture is evolving a different notion of the self.  It holds that self-fulfillment is not a matter of how many needs you can fill, but whether there is a good fit between you and the world in which you live your life.  I'll come back to this conception in a few minutes.

In the moral domain, the assumption in the 1980s was:  "if I want it and it isn't illegal, why shouldn't I have it?"   The image of the self here is that of an autonomous person governed by needs, wants, self-interests and external constraints in the form of the law.  A shift is now occurring toward a perception of the self as a moral actor with obligations and concerns as well as rights.  There is a growing realization that lots of perfectly legal actions hurt other people and are morally wrong.  The recognition is dawning that moral rules are not always relative to individual preferences, and that there is such a thing as right  and wrong.   In our tracking studies, we are beginning to measure a shift back toward absolute as distinct from relative values.

We are moving away from the doctrine of need-based rights ("if I need it I have a right to it") to a conception of the self as part of a larger community, enmeshed in a network of responsibilities and obligations as well as rights.  We are edging toward a concept of reciprocity -- the idea that people should not expect to get something for nothing and that if you are able-bodied and adult, you should give back something for what you receive.

There is also a shift away from indulging in feelings of victimhood anytime our rights are not honored.  Instead, a greater emphasis on self-reliance is coming into play:  ("I am not a victim; I am responsible for my own actions").

In the trend toward Social Darwinism that shows up clearly in our data, there is a shift away from the kind of egalitarianism dominant in the '60s and '70s which dictated that everyone was entitled to share in the bounty of available resources, even if this required large-scale redistribution.  The assumption then was that unequal results were society's fault, and that it was society's obligation to address and correct them.  We are moving toward the view that people are responsible for their own lives, and that the reality of life is such that there inevitably will be both winners and losers.  This conception limits the society's moral and legal obligations, but it does not rule out compassion.  The view is compassion, "yes," legal obligation, "no."  Unequal results are no longer deemed to be society's fault.

In the domain of spirituality, a shift is occurring away from the assumption that the individual is autonomous and complete in and of him or herself.  The conviction is growing that we are part of a larger whole and that our relationship to this larger whole is not fully captured in our relationship to conventional churches and religions.

With respect to the idea of sacrifice, a shift is occurring away from the notion that with enough energy and juggling you can have it all (family, career, self-expressiveness) without sacrifice, to the notion that if you want your children to grow up into caring, responsible, effective adults you do have to sacrifice more of yourself for them than you may have once assumed to be necessary.

Where does this all net out?  With all these changes, what is the emerging conception of the individual? 

I would characterize the changes as organizing themselves around an important social learning.  Americans have come to realize that the image of the individual as an aggregation of needs, each demanding to be filled to the brim, is false and misleading.  Young Americans are learning that self-expression is not necessarily achieved through a career as a dancer, filmmaker, photographer, body-builder or architect.  Instead, self-fulfillment is expressed in phrases like "he is his own person,"  "she is a real person," "she knows who she is."  Respect for the willingness to give something up is growing; the urge to accrete as many satisfactions as possible, each one piled on top of the other, is receding.

Earlier, I mentioned Erik Erikson, whose insights are germane to this conception of the individual.  Erikson was bold enough to use the word "virtues" long before it became fashionable.  His concept of virtues refers to those strengths of the individual that have moral overtones.  Erikson observed that we bring to living an infinite variety of possibilities, only a small fraction of which can ever be realized.  Erikson argued that identity is formed as much by what you give up as by what you add.  Like a sculptor working with a block of stone, the figure emerges from what is chipped away from the block.  The moral discipline of self-fulfillment as the giving up of possible selves reverses the conception of filling all the little pots of needs that people think they have.

Seeking self-realization by giving something up is related to the shift away from the image of the individual as an atom -- a free-standing, autonomous, self-sufficient entity -- to the image of the individual as part of a web of relationships: relationships to self, to others, to the community, to the society, to humanity, to the world.  Centuries ago John Donne said,  "No man is an island, but each a part of the mainland."  People are realizing that the self, considered apart from family, friends, community, country, tribe, society and civilization, is a meaningless abstraction.  As part of a web of relationships, the self is not so much a lone power center engaged in a struggle for more at the expense of others, but a center of care, love, responsibility, playfulness, warmth, concern for others.  This is a decisive shift away from the narcissism of the 1960s toward a broader, deeper conception of individualism.

Conclusion

This change in what it means to be an individual is one of the most heartening I've seen in years.  As part of the World War II generation, I've always had a strong ambivalence about the 1960s.  I've been cognizant of its positive accomplishments in enlarging individual choice, physical fitness and autonomy. But I've been troubled by its self-centeredness, and by the sheer hubris of the "we can fix everything" outlook that came with the 1960s' cultural revolution.  (This outlook still has tremendous momentum.  You see it in the spread of Social Darwinism.  You see it as part of the thrust of the women's movement.  You see it in our blind faith in technology.)  I've always suspected that the 1960s' conception of satisfy-my-needs individualism is bad for the society, bad for personal relationships, bad for children and bad for the people who hold it.

What now appears to be taking place is a major shift in the conception of what it means to be an individual.  There is less pride and hubris, a less confrontational attitude, a greater emphasis on cooperation.  The focus is less on rights and more on the community and the society; there is less preoccupation with "me," and more concern for children, civil society, quality of life and the spiritual dimension. 

I believe that some truly valid learning is taking place, and it leaves me more optimistic about the future than I've been for a long time.