Of Teen-agers and Culture

Richard Ostrofsky
(January, 1997)
Why do teenagers dress funny? Why do they listen to outrageous music at
max volume, hang out with their age-mates in packs, and speak what
sometimes sounds like a language of their own? Why did we do our own
version of the same things when we were that age? (Hey, Mom, Dad: where
were you in the ‘60's??) The conventional wisdom calls it adolescent
rebelliousness, and tends to see it as nature’s plan for getting them kicked
out of the parental nest, so they can start lives and families of their own. I
think it may be something more interesting than that. I think – this is going
to sound peculiar – they may be showing us that they are human.
Most linguists now accept that the capacity for speech is at least partly
instinctive for homo sapiens. At a certain age, human infants start babbling
irrepressibly, learning the language(s) they hear around them. This process
is partly imitative, but also genuinely creative. Not only do toddlers utter
sentences that they have never heard from anyone – they invent words and
metaphors and grammatical structures that they have never heard. Every
parent has been delighted by creations of this kind. There is no space here to
review the evidence or cite examples, but the bottom line seems to be that
human children without a language in common will create one out of the
linguistic materials available to them. Starting from scratch (if such an
experiment were possible) it would take longer, of course, but the end-result
would be the same. Anthropologists have never found a tribe so isolated or
primitive as to be without a grammatically rich, semantically appropriate
language. And where a fully functional language already exists (practically
everywhere), it is now believed that children do not so much learn as re-
invent it – subject to more or less efficacious schooling from their elders –
in the course of growing up.
Now, my speculation is that the grammar of human society may work in
much the same way: Pubescent children may be driven by their genes to re-
create a tribe and a culture (based, of course, on the cultural materials they
find around them), as younger children re-create language. Like the deep-
structure of grammar that Chomsky posited, there may be a deep-structure
of human culture hard-wired into our brains. And, as with language, it may
be that teen-agers are driven to develop a surface manifestation of this
structure that they can call their own, as part of the process of becoming
adults. In collaboration with age-mates, they may be fulfilling a
programmed need to reconstitute themselves as a People – with recognition
signs, a status system, solidarity rituals, and a defended territory of its own.
This process would demand nothing less than a complete re-constitution
of the Self and its definitive attachments – no longer to the family as a
juvenile member, but to a peer society as an adult among adults. Of course,
while the youngsters are doing all this work for themselves, they are also
being corrected and assimilated into the culture of the adult tribe, as the
speech of younger children is corrected and assimilated to the adult
language. But, finally, it seems that assimilation to the pre-existing adult
pattern is no more complete or perfect for culture as a whole than it is for
language; so that each generation comes to adulthood, lives the events of its
own time, rears its own children and is remembered by history as having
had a zeitgeist and an idiom all its own.
If these speculations are right, it would seem to follow that pubescent
youngsters are entitled not necessarily to the forbearance of their elders, but
to as much respect as the toddler – laboriously reinventing two-legged
locomotion and speech. At the appropriate time, on the threshold of sexual
maturity, they are grappling – as their human genes command, and as we
did before them – with the essential problems of social living: membership,
constrained self-expression, peer-group status and self-respect. Wholesale
acceptance of the parental culture simply will not do. Originality, per se, is
not important, but to satisfy the genetic programming, each of these kids
has to find some way of being human and social that is convincingly his or
her own. At the same time, it must also command the respect of peers and
appease the elders (these days, that’s us). Weird dress codes and the rest of
it represent a trial solution to this complicated problem. It is a way that
human children have of joining society on what we like to pretend are our
own terms.