In Our Time - Youth

Episode Date: April 17, 2003

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea of youth. In 1898 Joseph Conrad wrote, “I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more – the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to perils, to love, to vain effort – to death…”From antiquity to our own time, the concept of youth, with its promise of possibility and adventure, has been greeted with fascination as well as fear. The ancient Greeks saw the period of youth as dangerous and unpredictable, but how did they seek to control it? How did the Renaissance celebrate the ideals and intellect of youth? Why was 19th century British society so preoccupied with the moral well-being of young people? And does a distinct youth culture still exist? With Tim Whitmarsh, Lecturer in Hellenistic Literature at Exeter University; Thomas Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College, London; Deborah Thom, Lecturer in History at Robinson College, Cambridge.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 1898, Joseph Conrad spoke for all of us when he wrote, I remember my youth and a feeling that will never come back anymore. The feeling that I could last forever.

Outlast the sea, the earth and all men. The deceitful feeling that lures. us on to perils, to love, to vain effort, to death. From antiquity to our own time, the concept of youth with its promise of possibility and adventure has been greeted with fascination as well as fear. The ancient Greeks saw the period of youth as dangerous and unpredictable, but how did they seek to control it? How did the Renaissance celebrate the ideals and intellective youth? Why was 19th century British society so preoccupied with a moral well-being of young people? And does a distinct youth culture still exist?

With me to discuss this is Thomas Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College London. Deborah Tom, lecturer in history at Robinson College, Cambridge, and Tim Whitmarsh, lecture in Hellenistic literature at Exeter University. Tim Whitmarsh, a useful starting point is to explore how ancient Greece understood youth. How did they define that period of life? In my view, there were three broad stages to life in antiquity. There is adulthood, which, of course, we will understand as the time when people are formed and they possess a certain sort of cultural and moral status within society.

There is, of course, childhood before that. I think the Greeks considered childhood primarily as a time of deficiency or lack a time when the person was waiting to become an adult. Aristotle is credited with the philosophical position of entellarchy, which means that every phenomenon or every process, contains within it a seed which is desiring to come to fruition. That's to say, it contains a telos or an end within it. I think childhood was similarly contained the sense of entellarchy in the ancient world. That's to say it contained the sense that you were a child in order to become an adult

and that your existence was solely determined by your direction towards adulthood. So we have these two stages, adulthood and childhood, childhood defined primarily in terms of lack a young woman, a Parthenos, a girl, maiden, whatever, was considered somebody who lacked marriage, for example. But between these two stages was a wonderfully ambiguous and wonderfully dynamic, dangerous phase. It was called by a variety of different names, depending on what aspect you were emphasizing at any particular time. But this stage was a particular fascination to the Greeks, much quite. Greek myth, Greek tragedy, for example, is dominated by the figure of the young man or young woman.

If we think of Arrestes or Antigone or Pentheus, Inuripides, Bacchi, is perhaps the most powerful example of such a figure, a tyrant, one consumed by his own passions, but at the same time, curiously incapable of leaving behind his youthfulness and his desire to control everything. So this is the most ill-defined of the three stages and yet, for what you said, it seems to me the most dynamic. How did, if it was dynamic, was they thought to be dynamically dangerous? And if so, how did the Greeks deal with it? What did they do with this person? Even so, maybe we can transfer ages between, say, what are we talking about?

14 or 15 and 22-ish, that sort of thing. We're talking about different ages between the genders. Yeah. For women, who conventionally got married 12, 13, 14, the rights of passage of transition to adulthood started of course much earlier but for males I guess we're talking 16 to 20 roughly

So what did the Greeks do about this rather dangerous period in a young man's life How did they regard it? And how did they attempt to control it? Well they regarded it as freighted with all sorts of possibilities for positive action Alexander the Great or Alcibiades, these tremendous generals

whose identity was defined, whose status in history is very much controlled by the idea of youth, the idea that they are extraordinarily able because they are young, because they inhabit this dangerous time in between. But also danger, and a figure like Pentheus and Euripidesizabaki is precisely such a figure, somebody who is troubling, disturbing, worrying figure Did they take special care to look after these young men?

Let's stick with the young man. How did they cultivate these young men to turn them into the adults that they wanted in their societies? Yes. Well, we tend to think of ritual as mere ritual, as an emptily repeated phenomenon. But the Greeks used ritual in a very precise way to manage change. And in ancient Greece,

there were a number of rituals that surrounded this period of transition from childhood to adults. childhood, usually focusing on the idea of inversion that you take on an identity for during this period, the period that anthropologist is called a liminal period, a threshold period. You take on an identity that is the inverse of the identity that you would take on as an adult. So, for example, young girls wearing beards or most famously, I think, in antiquity, and I think it can be regarded as a ritual in some respects. young men took on the role of passive lover in pederastic,

that's to say, sexual relationships between an older man and a younger boy. So when they were adults, they would be expected to take on an active, desiring subject role. But during this period of transition, they were thought of as desirable themselves and passive figures. So you're talking about young men being stewarded or monitored by older men, generally in the aristocratic or what we might call another these terms of those terms, not trans-fellow, might be called the middle-class area society, and being, as it were, brought up by these men, whom I themselves have been married and so and so forth,

there was a relationship there which was sexual as well as intellectual and one presumed civic. That's right, yes, I think it's crucial to draw a distinction between the differentiation that we adopt in our society between homosexual and heterosexual and various combinations of those, and the ancient world where, as you say, a man would be expected, normally to be married, but sometimes in certain contexts, could engage in, or was expected to engage in,

a pederastic relationship with a younger boy. Tom Haley, did the Romans build on this concept that Tim has been discussing, Tim McLeish was discussing? Yes, in a way the Romans eventually, I think, consolidate this into training, particularly young men, for the empire. And they draw on, in effect, I think, two strands in the Greek tradition. One is the Athenian training for civic responsibility,

largely through the acquisition of language skills in learning how to debate and become good orators, because there was a strong feeling which the Renaissance took up on that Eloquentia, the use of language in a well-spoken way, also had an ethical element to it, that this actually promoted people to speak good things as well as to speak ably. and they also then the Romans took up on the Spartan tradition

of the training of young men, particularly in the gymnasium for military service because the Roman Empire, of course, relied upon training not only its own young men to service of the empire in service of the state, in ideals of civic virtue, but it also trained a large number of its captive people in these ideals as a way of enticing them and to sharing Roman values.

And this is very much reflected by one of the most famous young men of late antiquity, St. Augustine, who very readily records how his training in the language arts in what was a provincial Roman environment in North Africa, then leads him to Carthage to a type of schooling, where again he's given greater training in this, and eventually becomes his passport into the heart of the Roman Empire, where he's celebrated as a great orator. What about the tradition that Tim Wittmarsh was discussing, this tradition of mentors, this tradition of responsible adults taking on the younger elite and stewarding them through that dangerous period of life, and the sexual possibility or component that Tim Wem Harshal referred to? Did that continue into the Roman time?

it did to a lesser extent. I mean, there wasn't the same emphasis on homosexuality in the Roman world that as a type of ideal in the way that it was so thoroughly celebrated in Greece. But certainly the relationship between the idea of the mentor, the pedagogous, really, who trains the young is a strong tradition within the Roman world, both in terms of the individual tutor trainer, but also within the environment of schools and of groups who are taught together

either around noble households or in towns and cities in formal institutions that we would think of as schools. In both cases there are a sense that they realise they're fairly small entities which have large territorial and other ambitions and they need the core to be unifying in uniform in their ideas of what they're setting out to do.

So they need to train these young men. One way for the Greek, because we missed out the cultural component in the Greek training, which are very important to them, a slightly different way in the Roman. Is this getting hold of the young men to make sure they run the place properly? Yes, I think that's exactly right.

I mean, really creating a type of elite of empire that I think is taken over much into the Renaissance, and then in later periods, I mean really down to the generations preceding 1914 of creating a type of elite administrative class that work on shared values of civilization. And central to the Roman tradition, as indeed central to so much of later Western European tradition in this,

is Virgil and the ideals that are spoken of in the Aeneid of the training of the figure-for-civic responsibility of the development obviously of language skills that Virgil is hailed as being particularly good at, but also the values and norms that Virgil celebrates becomes a means by which this, in Roman times, a very far-flung empire, composing vastly different nationalities,

different cultural backgrounds, creates groups of people who share a great deal in common. Deborah, Tom, in what sense of societies, through the ages, held a common ambivalent attitude towards youth. Has it always been seen as dangerous and yet potentially promising? I think it varies over time. I think it varies extremely between the genders. Female youth is generally seen as perturbing only if it's abandoning its role to bear the next generation of children and to behave in appropriate, usually chaste manners. I also think Christianity makes a great deal of difference

to Western societies and the way in which youth is conceptualised. But it is the case that male youth is seen as posing both a resource for the future in a early 20th century phrase. Youth is the visible embodiment of posterity. They therefore embody the future, but they also represent something which may disturb any civic or imperial project. and male youth needs to be disciplined, it needs to be trained, and it also needs to develop its creativity.

And that creativity, particularly when it's libidinal energy, is quite threatening sometimes to stability and order. In the Greek society that we touched on, and the Roman cites that we touched on, and the Spartan idea was introduced by Tom Healy, there's a relationship very often in use between a healthy mind and a healthy body and the sort of physical perfectional, the physical.

development goes alongside that. What comment would you have to make on that? The adolescent body is seen as particularly vulnerable because it's subject to substantial, dramatic and visible change. And it's a change whether you interpret it as hormones or the development of soul or moral training, which reflects mental activity. which is also in some cultures seen as particularly stressed during adolescence.

So the relationship between body and mind might get out of kilter. You have erotic energy, you have physical power, but you may not necessarily have control in order to deal with these forces. Tim McMahon, was there an essence equally obsessed with Greek notions of male youth, male virility, male danger? Well, it's my sense that something very peculiar happens between antiquity and the Renaissance in terms of, and maybe, as Deborah said, it may be to do with Christianity and the decisive role played by Christianity, intervening between pagan antiquity and ourselves.

But something very interesting happens when we go from Platonism, say, to Neo-Platonism. And Ficino, when he reconstructs Placetian, and the ideals behind Platonism and the ways in which the youth and the desire for youths can be accommodated within society, Ficino orientates away from, this is my understanding, away from, love of boys onto love of girls. It's a fascinating phenomenon for me. Tom Ceeley, let's take Tim Wemmarsh's first observation that the Renaissance, again, rather brusely, if I put it that way, switched interest in some way from young men, youth to young women. youth. Is that so? And if so, what's the evidence for it? I certainly think that Christianity's condemnation of same-sex relationships at a moral level is a big impetus to this. There is still the tradition within the Renaissance of a older male taking younger males or a younger male under their wing and training them. But one of the

features that I think that happens that's rather different in the Renaissance. There's a point made rather wonderfully by Francis Bacon in an essay that he has on youth and age. The first Francis Bacon. The first Francis Bacon, yes, not the painter. Sir Francis Bacon of St. Albans. He says that youth is, what is particularly distinctive about the time of youth is it is an age where imagination dominates. And that he presents this as very much a moral. imagination. He says that it actually reaches towards divinity. And he suggests that where

in a young man or indeed in a young woman that morality would tend to dominate where politicness, a sense of judgmental politic or scheming would dominate in age. And this idea of youth as a means of stimulating the moral or even the divine. And he does make this idea that the imagination may may tend to drive us towards it as divine. It's something that I think the Renaissance does take up very much with its presentation of youthful beauty as a stimulus that has all these libidness,

energies and instabilities that Deborah mentioned. But at the same time, if used rightly, can be a great impetus towards virtue, towards divinity. Well, splicing Christianity on the notion of the divine with a great figure of the Mother of Christ

at that time. Does that lead us to what Tim Whitmarsh hinted at or asked a question of really that writers such as Dante and Petrach with Beatrice and Laura actually turned their attention and turned the attention of society, just the attention, to young women instead of young men

and what were the consequences of that? Well, yes indeed, and they take what had been a developing cult of the Virgin in the Middle Ages and direct many of the ideas onto ostensibly actual young women, young women who they feel,

particularly in Petrarch's case, strong senses of physical desires for. And with Petrarch, then it becomes a type of war within him, of recognizing that Laura, in her youthful beauty, she's 19 when he first sees her in Abignon, is someone he desires, but actually is actually directing him towards the ideal, is a means of stimulating him towards,

higher knowledge and higher things, a vehicle or conduit towards the divine. And I think this is very much taken up and represented by many Renaissance painters where you often see a nude who's presented, often in quite an appealing position. It's a wonderful sleeping nude of Giorgione, say, for instance. And she seems to be enticing.

She seems to have all the types of sexual allurements that, on one hand, a desiring male view. a voyeur would wish. And yet it's clear that what the painter is thinking is that in an ideal sense, she should be stimulating us towards the divine. I mean, again, there's a wonderful painting of Titian where a man is sitting, playing the organ,

an instrument of divinity, of divine breath, looking at a nude female as he's doing so, and the implications are clear that this type of idealized beauty is a means to gain access to higher things, to divine things. But meanwhile, Deborah Tom, the idealised youth, the idealised male continues, can be seen, in one way, to put it, rather simply,

in the character of Sir Philip Sidney, who is a soldier, a scholar, an aristocrat, a poet, and dies young, and dies heroically on the battlefield, and so on. So that is persisting and very strongly. Yes, the image of the hero warrior, dying young, and therefore to be preserved in memory as in some sense sanctified by that early death is one that one can see very, very pervasively during the First World War in literature about young men who've never had the time to behave in any other way

than the moral, the good, the virtuous. And much of the most popular poetry of the First World War carries that refrain on. It isn't the poetry that later people are to read in schools about young men being gassed and dying horribly. It's Rupert Brooke who is to be found celebrating the rough male kiss of blankets and swimmers diving with classical references back. So that idea of the young hero does remain culturally present and pervasive right up until I think the First World War.

In the 19th century, in Victorian Britain, was there a change there, Deborah? It was a society which was intensely preoccupied with moral and physical well-being. It introduced the beginnings of, mass education. It took many, many young men and women away from there, as it were, in inverted commas. Until then, their natural life pattern is as soon as you're old enough, you helped, you worked, you contributed to the family income, took them out, took them to school. Did that change the idea, did that set in, say, the late 90th century, a change in the notion of society's regard a view of youth which still persist.

But let's talk about then, first of all. What happened then? Yes, there is the development of institutions for all. And I think the big change in the 19th century is the way in which ideals of youth become general. They're not just for the elite, for those that have a prolonged period of dependence and education in schools and universities, as the middle and upper class have had. It becomes something available to all, all over Europe. We find people going to school, prolonging a period of economic dependency, and then entering the labour market in specifically youthful occupations. So attention on youth divides.

between the genders and it divides between the classes. We find middle-class youth being humanised and civilised. One of the most vivid depictions of that change is, of course, the famous novel Tom Brand's school days, when we see the barbarity of youth's treatment of each other being replaced by the following of Christian imperial moral values, learned from an elder but reinforced within youth culture. Whereas among the working class going to school from 1870, having it for free from 1880, we find that the period of schooling is less about moral education,

although that's certainly there in intention, and more about training, encouraging good order, disciplinary focus in terms of work habits, basic literacy. I think one of the things that takes place at this era is the recognition of a problem that's been brewing, as Deborah's mentioned, for some time, and that is a much wider social spectrum involving youth, a growth to society being seen,

not only as training in education for the elite, but training for everyone. And it's interesting that, say, after the First World War, that the Newboldt report, as the Newbolt Commission, is set up, to look into creating norms for training in a common culture. And one of the things that they do is to establish English, really, as a subject, move away from the classics, as a group of, a basis of materials which the whole culture can share.

It's not just going to be available to an elite. And so this grows out of a fear, I think, that there is an instability within the youthful groups of society, those who'd gone through the First World War and come out and found that they didn't have a common culture on the other side and great uncertainty, say, around the general strike in the 1920s, that youth, in a sense, was not inheriting the world that was going to be fit for heroes.

And that this needed to be addressed. There needed to be then an expansion of the culture and the educational norms to embrace. to embrace all youth and not just a select group. Can I ask you a double-headed question, Deborah, Tom, if I may. First of all, how did writers such as Dickens reflect popular anxiety about the menace of youth? Because the danger of youth from Greek towns with which we began this program is feeling gives a dangerous time for the youths themselves and for society. He's still continuing in the 19th century of the menace, a feeling of menace of youth.

And Dickens represents that in, say, the artful lodger in otherwise. And at the same time, society, by setting up their boy scouts, the military academy is not, he's trying to sort of calm them down. What do you have to say to that? Well, Dickens both helps to construct social institutions and change them. In Oliver Twist, we get considerable response from people who find it hard to believe that thieves' kitchens exist, as he's described them, that the poor law institutions are as bad as they seem to be. and there is some reform in these institutions

a result of that understanding. But he also, of course, reflects it. And these criminal youths are seen in some respects as people who have too early an experience with the adult world. They're premature adults and their knowledge of the world is therefore bad for them and dangerous for the future because they're morally stunted. Dickens also, I think, reflects

the uncertainty about how far these individuals are created by wicked advisors, as it were, whether they come out of Fagin or whether they come out of the poor law institutions. Henry Mayhew is another brilliant mid-Victorian commentator on criminal youth. And he talks about the industrial schools and the reformatories, which were designed to save potentially criminal children, orphan children in particular, the first institutions to educate young people before the masses were educated. And he sees them as contributors to criminality

so that the institutions that are designed to separate out young people from the rest of society may in fact be the way of leading them in to misbehavior. But the other thing I think fictions show us is the sense of, possibility that Victorians felt about the young, that they are redeemable so that we have social missions, undergraduates, in settlements, we have the training academies, the naval training ships and the military academies, which are pretty violent places, but are seen as a way of providing the forces to maintain the empire. And these institutions look both ways. They look to a possible future and

to the dangers of a minority and increasingly criminal or disorderly young people are seen as a minority people who have gone wrong and can to some extent be reclaimed and reformed Tim Whitmarsh you think that the development

of psychiatry in the late 90th, early 20th century had an impact on the general perception of what youth is I'm sure it must have done yes psychiatry is of course, rather like with the rights of passage that I was discussing earlier, psychiatry is a way of managing change and managing particularly the trauma of change. Psychiatry develops and creates a whole new language of the psyche, obviously,

and also of the relationship between the young person and the adult. And for Freud, famously, of course, childhood is a time when we are most of. obviously scarred or traumatised or whatever metaphor you want to use, but we're certainly set on our path and our narrative, our intellect, if you like, is inscribed right there at the very beginning in terms of our formative childhood influences. Freud, of course, used the Oedipus complex to articulate this, which is a reference to the Greek myth of Oedipus. The two concepts are very different, though.

I don't think that the Greek construction of the myth of Oedipus was going in anything like the same direction as the Freudian. The Freudian one is all about experiences within the economy of the household. The Greek one, the Edipus story, was about the fated, willed tragedy of Edipus. It's sort of pre-childhood somehow. Thomas Heard. Sorry, Deborah, do you want to say something? Well, I was going to say that I think a more dominant narrative in some ways than the Freudian, which has very powerful effects on the way people think about youth,

and they think about the normalness of certain kinds of disturbance. But I think the other dominant narrative is that of psychology, which we see in Stanley Hall's adolescence, which is published in 1904, and spreads throughout Britain. He goes on a major speaking tour in the early 1900s and becomes on the reading list of every writer about youth right up until about 1950. And this is a narrative of development,

and it's development in which youth is a period. In fact, it interestingly reflects what Tim was saying about the classical model that for all youths, adolescence, which for boys is 14 to 24, for girls is 12 to 22, is a period of disturbance. And that is normal. The person who is abnormal in Stanley Hall's account is the person who goes through adolescence entirely in a state of equilibrium. And that idea of development and the normal processes of development involving abnormal habits, masturbation, sexual experimentation, these will be things that everybody will pass through

and that it's only the very few that will be so severely disturbed during adolescence that they pose a social danger. So what we see at the beginning of the 20th century is the beginning of a normalisation of adolescence and a sense of general safety. Understanding that adolescence, the strangest of adolescence is normal?

Yes. Can we arguably see that earlier in the buildings of Roman and this now? narrative pattern. I mean, presumably the classic narrative pattern is that the narrative itself is a sort of deviation and the beginning and the end are periods of stability. So, of course, with birth, I am born, you have a period of stability in one sense. And then, of course, with adulthood, you have a period of stability at the other sense. And what the narrative does in a sense is takes you through that period of instability and danger and travel and so forth. Always with the expectation and the understanding that you will come out, okay. in the long run or at least that you will come out with some sort of maturity, that there is an aim inside, there's an end in sight, and that's reassuring. I think it, sorry, I think it goes earlier than that, too,

if one thinks of perhaps from our point of view the most recognizable Renaissance youth, Prince Hal and Henry IV, that we have there exactly a figure who creates anxieties to his superiors, who seems to be unstable and slightly out of control. And yet at the same time is depicted as having this extraordinary energy which allows him to mix with different groups of societies, to undertake activities which the plays suggest will actually prepare him to be a better king that will actually enable him to come out of this period of instability

as a much better adult, a much greater leader. And I think that that ill-defined quality of youth, that is it simply a transitional stage? What is it transition to? It's something that resonates throughout a great deal of literature, really from the classical world, as you said. I mean, throughout the conversation, we're talking youth as almost set the agenda to him,

I think, as youth is the Greek idea, a passage from one fixed date, you can't know anything about being born, and the next fixed state, which you arrive at, and it's sort of as fixed, although we could examine that in another programme, adulthood, and there's this thing in between. And many of the things you've been talking about all three of you

to do with the passage from the moving through, the turbulence, and Deborah was speaking about it very eloquently a few minutes ago. But we come to, say, the 1960s, late 50s and 60s, and we have the teenager as a block. And it seems to me you could look at that. Please, not me down. You could look at that as a different way of looking at youth. These are kind of almost like a class, an army of their own.

They're not going anywhere. They're staying where they are, and where they are is good. and they'll feed on everything to, and we know 60-year-old teenagers today still. And they're going to be happy at what they're doing. They don't want, none of this transition nonsense, they like it where they are. Is there something in that? I think there is. I mean, one of the things that I think the 60s brings about

is an economic development for youth. I mean, youth suddenly become much more affluent. They, as a result, have cultural products specifically directed, at them in a way that they really have not had beforehand. It is finished. Before Deborah chews you up. I think that

creates an ideal of youth which lasts and can last a very long time into 60s and 70s. So that youth culture is still often seen now as being

performed by artists who increasingly have grandchildren. Yes, but it's also a culture at the time. It's a culture which says we are sufficient to ourselves. We're not, as it were, in one sense, going anywhere. We don't need to. We've got our music.

We've got our, in certain cases, we've got our drugs. We've got our style of life. We've got our money. We've got the way we want to dress. We know our place as a society. Why do we have to grow up? It's not, no, Jeb has got to come in. Yes.

Right, sorry. Well, I was going to go back to the question of mass production of commodities specifically named at youth. We can see the penny gaffs in the 1840s, theaters producing cheap melodramas. We can see the penny dreadfuls in the 1880s. We can see the huge spread of comics in the 1950s, which is resisted and people attempt to ban them.

There's concern about the cinema also in the 1950s. That is, there is a long history of articles specifically produced for a youth market and deplored by contemporary commentators because they're seen as desensitising, they're seen as keeping youth in an immoral place where they ought to move on from. Yet these moral panic, some have called them, do recur, but they're about different objects.

And I think to some extent the change in the 60s is a material one. It's about the availability of birth control, the spread of higher education, full employment briefly, which is something, of course, that comes to an end, shortly after that, which means that for most young people, there does appear to be a chance of sticking in a simple, rather hedonistic lifestyle, which can indeed be very enjoyable and can be indefinitely prolonged.

But I don't think there's anything very new about the mass production of commodities for young people. What might be new is that the young people have got a lot more money, haven't they? Is that too simple? Isn't it also about media and the fact that there is a representable youth culture that in a sense globally, nationally certainly, but globally also we have the idea, a shared idea of what it is to be young. That's an extraordinarily powerful thing in terms of creating and entrenching this idea of youth. But it's a very ambiguous thing, isn't it? Because on the one hand, it is impelled from below and it's young people expressing themselves. But on the

other hand, as we've said, it's also a targeting exercise. It's a way that multinationals use to create a category of market targetable category and of selling to that. Isn't this a question, I'm asked Tom this, but just come back to you, Deborah, where quantity changes quality, where the quantity of money, the quantity of people, which Tim has mentioned, the quantity of commercial concern, the quantity of, I'm going over the top now, but the quantity of expertise devoted to this particular group of people, which still goes on.

I mean, television programs are targeted at this particular things, goods are targeted at. And around those programs, advertisement scheme come in exactly for the sort of lad who wants to drink like, do-d-d-do, we'll know that. Now, the quantity of that, has that not changed the situation? I think so.

One of the things that I think takes place is that youth culture moves from a part of an overall cultural pattern to being really at the centre of what the culture defines itself at. It becomes, as it were,

the way that the culture is characterized. And particularly, I think, this takes place during the 1960s, where if we think of that in retrospect of what is distinctive about that particular period, it is youth culture. That has come to seem, in political terms, 68 and its sense of revolution, in terms of lifestyle, in terms of music, across a whole range of activities, really. It is youth culture which has set the cultural agenda for the whole. Youth culture calls in non-use.

But President Kennedy is claimed for youth culture in a way that I can't think he would have been in any period before then. You would not have claimed, what was he, 42, whatever he was. You wouldn't have said, look, he is part of it. youth culture you're so well he's a man he's being a man for 20 years for goodness sake and a living

got a wife, got children get on with it but he was claim back as being part of the youth thing is that never never has got a coming she's going to explain I was going to say

that I don't think there is a youth culture or even the youth culture I think there are many and you can see it in the multiplication of specific music channels those that listen to

one sort of MTV you don't listen to another sort of MTV it is fragmented even fashion is fragmented fashion is fragmented. Different groups of youths consume different drugs. Some follow illegal drugs, others drink more commonly.

People drink specific kinds of alco-pops or whatever. These are very different from each other. They know about each other's cultures, but they don't necessarily share them. So I'm not sure that I would accept that we're talking about a homogenous general culture. I think most young people would find the sense that JF Kennedy or our current Prime Minister were part of youth culture quite laughable, would they not? I think that's certainly true

and it comes back to the idea that experiencing life as a youth is different from the construct that is placed on the youth as a whole. In this respect, I wonder whether our fascination with youth is, in a sense, an allegory for our fascination with technology, with futurity. That's to say looking towards energy and change, which is, of course, one of the motors of capitalist economics, whether, in a sense, our obsession with the young is a way of figuring our obsession with change

and the dynamics of the future. Tom, would you agree about, Thomas? I think there is a lot in that, although, perhaps to make a trite point, I think that there is throughout history, a period in which the old look back to, the youth as a time when it all took place and they look at it longingly.

But I think Tim is right that I think as a feeling of very rapid transformation within the culture, that the culture reinvents itself somehow every 10 or 15 years, means that the youth becomes the central player in it and that the later generation feels slightly isolated, slightly tangential to what's taking place. Finally, Deborah, do you think that generations are blurring in a sense now, and that the idea of youth is not as distinct as it used to be in the previous periods we've been talking about?

I think you're right about the prolongation of youth and youthful pleasures. I'm not sure that generations do blur. I think at the time, people are quite distinct in how close they feel to those next to them. I think that the period of youth has always been very difficult to find precisely because it is a transitional period and transitions by definition have fuzzy edges. But I would agree broadly with what Deborah says, yes. And finally, Tom O'Mus Healy.

I think there's a great deal of emphasis put on youth being a state of mind rather than a distinctive period today, which I think is one of the changes that has taken place. I'm not sure that it's true. I think that youth is still a particular period, although a very ill-defined one. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Deborah Tom, Tim Whitmarsh, Thomas Healy, and thank you for joining us. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.