But maybe it would be more appropriate to think of us as the Faustian generation. We didn’t exactly sell our souls to the devil—not collectively, anyway—but as we jog toward senior status, it’s hard to escape the sense that we were complicit in our own unique kind of unholy bargain.
Most of us born in the early years after World War II grew up in a world of stability and order: lasting marriages, moms at home, fathers with permanent employment, local merchants who knew us and watched us, neighborhoods where the people next door were ever-present and predictable. The three television networks ran essentially the same programs; the bread and soup and cereal all tasted alike. It was snug; it was also, as we all know, widely perceived as monotonous and a little claustrophobic, as well as unfair to many members of society.
“The dull ache will not depart,” Faust says in the first part of Goethe’s epic, as he laments the cozy tedium of his cloistered life. “I crave excitement, agonizing bliss.” That does pretty well as a mantra for the best and brightest of the early baby boomers as they reached mid-adolescence in the early 1960s.
Faust was offered a simple form of relief for his confinement: He contracted with Mephistopheles for 24 years of unending novelty, physical gratification and encyclopedic knowledge. The baby boomers didn’t sign any such contract, but as they became adults the most fortunate soon found themselves tasting similar treats: the erosion of sexual restraint, the ability to travel virtually anywhere, magic electronic devices that brought instant knowledge and entertainment even Faust never imagined, and most of all, ever-expanding choice—the freedom to make important life decisions and then unmake them at will: new locations, new spouses, new careers, all subject to endless re-evaluation out of a concern that something more exciting might lie around the corner.
Needless to say, this doesn’t depict the life course of all the boomers who came to maturity in the 1960s. Beneath the hype and the rhetoric, millions of them managed to do things the old-fashioned way right up to the end of the 20th century: one spouse, one house, one neighborhood, one career. But for large segments of the elite, the ones who went to the best schools and found their way into prestigious professions—the Bill Clintons of the world, if you like—life really did open up in the 1960s in ways not too different from the ways it opened up for Faust after he met Mephistopheles.
By the late 1980s and early 1990s, a fair number of these early baby boomers began expressing a sort of Faustian bewilderment at the excesses of temptation and the erosion of rules and standards. “I want to live in a place again where I can walk down any street without being afraid,” Hillary Clinton lamented in her mid-40s, when she was First Lady. “I want to remember what I used to be able to do when I was a little kid.” In her own way, she was suffering from Faustian overload.
It was a common enough sentiment among some of my contemporaries as they passed through the trials of middle age, unsupported by any clear set of values or moral compass. Work, marriage and community had lost their permanence; schools that instructed pupils in the minutiae of personal behavior in the 1950s no longer felt comfortable offering guidance on the most fundamental questions of moral conduct. And so, remarkable as it might seem, quite a few of these baby boomers began to feel nostalgic for the limited life they had resisted so vehemently when they were young.
It’s in the nature of human beings to grow somewhat nostalgic as they reach middle age, to look back fondly on the simpler and more innocent days of childhood, to lament the complexities and stresses of life as it has evolved for them. But few generations have lived through a moral and cultural upheaval quite as wrenching as ours has been. If you were born in 1947, as I was, then the odds are you spent your childhood learning one set of social customs and moral rules and the prime years of your youth throwing them overboard. That’s precisely the revolution that the smartest and most articulate among us wanted and fought for—it’s just been a very troubling revolution to live with. If that isn’t a Faustian bargain, I don’t know what is.
Ehrenhalt is executive editor of Governing magazine, and author of two books on American politics: “The United States of Ambition” (1991) and “The Lost City” (1995).
