Boy bands, weed, and abortion: how fast does culture change?

How fast does culture change, and what controls it? This topic deserves a lot of words (even more than I'll write here), so it's going to feel a bit long, and it won't be as topical as some other posts (e.g., Trump's effect on US culture). To keep the discussion grounded, I will draw from real-life examples of cultural change, such as boy bands, marijuana legalization, and the abortion debate (below).

But before diving in, I need to construct some conceptual building-blocks. You'll might be familiar with some of these:

1. Intergenerational conflict
2. Generation length
3. Loss aversion
4. Multiple time scales

The first concept is intergenerational conflict. I wrote in a previous post, "[C]ultural change is the result of a continuous conflict, taking place as the world continuously changes, between the entrenched, habituated, but efficient 'old', and the brash, foolish, time-wasting, creative, non-entrenched 'young.'" Norman Ryder of the University of Wisconsin made a similar point in 1965* when discussing the sociology of intergenerational conflict:

Society persists despite the mortality of its individual members, through processes of demographic metabolism and particularly the annual infusion of birth cohorts. These may pose a threat to stability but they also provide the opportunity for societal transformation.

This conflict's constant dynamism ensures that the experience of the old and the new insights of the young are continuously "metabolized" to create novel -- hopefully positive -- cultural solutions.

This is not a perfect process. If the balance is off (and it is a near certainty that it will be), then the tendencies of one side or the other predominate. If there is too much "parent" influence, then novel cultural solutions tend to look calcified, inappropriate to their times, outdated, possibly self-damaging, and maybe even catastrophic. Too much "children" influence, and society roams too far into uncharted territory, without the wisdom of experience, making self-damaging and maybe catastrophic decisions along the way. Theoretically, a good balance could be struck where neither side "wins" outright, but rather the community does (see here for more). Here are some simple examples of intergenerational conflict:

1. A toddler wants to touch a hot stove out of curiosity; her parent tells her not to and holds her back from harm.
2. A grown son wants to farm his family's land, just like his dad did; daddy's still farming it.
3. A boy wants to see more of his father (he misses his daddy); dad needs to work harder, away from home, to pay for his son's eventually very expensive university education.
4. A child is curious about where babies come from (and is in danger of hearing the incorrect story from peers); the parents would like to hold off discussing it as long as possible (to avoid putting ideas in the child's head).
5. The young want government investment in education and infrastructure; the old want government investment in the social safety net, especially for retirees.
6. "Don't trust anyone over 30" (quote attributed to Jack Weinberg, 1964)
7. "A man who is not a Liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a Conservative at sixty has no head." (Attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, but possibly coined by Edmund Burke)

None of these is rocket science -- these examples are just natural conflicts that exist between generations. There are no obvious solution to any of them, only the process of finding a good answer. The toddler wants to touch the stove, and the parents make the correct move to prevent the toddler from doing so. But it would be a mistake to discourage the curiosity itself. The grown son might solve his farming problem by moving away and buying/leasing his own farm; but then the father would lose an experienced right-hand man.

In general, due to their deep experience, the older generation wants to continue to control and guide the activities of their communities (see Hillary Clinton); but the young can see where that experience is outdated, or where it doesn't solve their own problems, and so advance solutions of their own, regardless of support from the old (see Bernie Sanders). Meanwhile, the old push back and put roadblocks in the way of the young (see Democratic super-delegates). In any event, the young want to invest in future possibility, while the old want to invest in the past comfort they have become accustomed to (or they at least fall back on the cultural solutions they developed when they were young, e.g., Clinton praising Kissinger). And so on. No equilibrium is ever reached; there is no stable "fitness" maximum (i.e., Sewell Wright's adaptive landscape). Nevertheless, this is the principle engine of cultural change.

The second concept is generation length, or the average familial generation length (see here, too). This is the time between the birth of one familial generation and the birth of the next (on average). In developed economies, this time period is typically in the upper 20s or 30s, depending on the country. In developing economies, generation length has consistently remained in the lower 20s. It makes sense that generation length should set a tempo for cultural change -- by the time a person is grown enough to have children of their own, their personality and foundational experiences are already locked in (i.e., culture has been set); a great deal of effort would be needed to push those experiences aside. But before that happens, young people are as malleable as they will ever be, and so the time available for cultural attitudes, beliefs, and habits of thinking to change is approximately the generation length.

To make writing about time scales and generation lengths easier, I'm going to adopt some symbols. I'll use a capital T to refer to the generation length (i.e., T = 27 years, etc.).

The third concept is loss aversion,** or the fact that there is a much stronger impulse among humans (and probably other species) to avoid a loss than there is to seek a similarly sized gain. This aversion is particularly intense when times are lean, and even a small loss could lead to catastrophe. If a cultural change looks like it will leave you with less than you had before (in terms of influence, money, property, a comfortable daily routine, connections, etc.), then it is very likely that you will resist that cultural change. By this logic, loss aversion should be more intense when real effort or competition is involved, or when people perceive the odds of catastrophic loss as high. As long as the risk of this loss is perceived to be real, then people will resist the cultural change that drives that perception. I make the general assumption (while fully expecting there to be exceptions) that when the stakes are high, loss aversion entirely prevents individuals, and by extension communities, from changing their minds. Only big cultural or external changes can shake the deeply held, politico-economical perceptions of entrenched and very often older cohorts.

The time it takes for people to get around, over, or through the perception that loss will result from a cultural change sets the core time scale of cultural change. For simplicity, I'll use the greek letter tau, \(\tau \), to describe this time scale. \(\tau \) is the time it will take before we can expect one or many of the following to allow the perception of potential loss to be overcome:

1. Fizzle: The loss associated with a cultural change is no longer deemed serious, either because another solution has appeared or because the problem that the solution solved is no longer a threat (e.g., as child mortality rates drop, so can birth rates)
2. Crisis: The loss associated with NOT undergoing a cultural change reveals itself to be more serious than the loss associated with the change itself (e.g., the impact of future climate change if nothing is done) -- even then, there will be core constituencies, usually the most powerful with the most to lose, that will not buy in, so the conflict may still continue
3. Upside: The benefits or advantages associated with a cultural change reveal themselves to significantly outweigh the cost (e.g., getting a smart phone versus a flip phone)
4. Death: The loss associated with a cultural change is now moot due to lack of standing interest (i.e., the dead have no need for a lower retirement age).

The fourth and final concept is that culture can change over multiple time scales. This might seem like a trivial point; after all, we would expect fashion (\(\tau \) ~ 0.5 yr; Paris Fashion Week happens twice a year) to change faster than the legal system (\(\tau \) ~ 25-100 yrs), faster than the interstate highway system (\(\tau \) ~ 60 yrs), or faster than the reverberations from our nation's history of enslavement and plundering of African Americans (\(\tau \) ~ 400 yrs). Some cultural changes occur many times within a generation, while others may not happen at all in our lifetimes.

This is all true, but the point is that while culture is changing, so are the individual people who comprise society. New ones are being born all the time, and the old die off. So what I really mean by multiple time scales is that there are processes with time scales that are tied to the cultural problem itself (\(\tau \)) and there are others that are tied to the people and how quickly they "turnover" across their generation length (T). We would expect that some things change faster than a generation length, and some things change more slowly.

I'll use all of the concepts discussed here as I dig into the examples. You'll note that each is organized to illustrate different values of \(\tau \) with respect to T:

• Boy bands: \(\tau \) < T, where cultural change requires less time to happen than generation length
• Marijuana legalization: \(\tau \approx T\), where cultural change occurs at the same time scale as generation length 
• Abortion debate: \(\tau \) > T, where cultural change requires more time to happen than generation length

(These also correspond to three of the four "cultural institutions" buckets in the 2-by-2 matrix I shared in the posts on Trump: "transient," "fragile," and "fundamental," respectively. More on this in another post.)

BOY BANDS

So let's dig in. Fandom in the boy band universe is about meeting deep, largely adolescent or pre-adolescent needs that can't be met elsewhere, such as the need for romantic escapism. Until other means of meeting those needs are found, typically prior to the close of adolescence, being a fan of a boy band is one of many means of coping with the stress of adolescence and even surviving it. So given what stands to be lost should these two to five boys from the boy band stop doing what they're doing (or get accused of lip-syncing ... remember this?), perceived catastrophe is just around the corner, and boy band fans will do what they can to avoid that (i.e., loss aversion).

Normally, once a cohort of fans committed to a particular boy band moves beyond the need for boy bands (i.e., the perceived loss fizzles; see above), then -- with a few exceptions like the Beatles (see Beatlemania) who also hand mind-boggling songwriting talent -- the boy band will quickly wash up. Sure, if the members still get along and can still produce music and go on tour, and they are still young and cute, they could continue to draw fans; but as young and cute as they might be, they're not younger or cuter than the next generation of boy bands ... you know, the ones who really have little sister's attention.

Here's a timeline of the history of boy bands since 1958 (sources here and here):

An abridged timeline of the history of boy bands, 1958-2016.

Note the rapid rise and fall of different bands, especially since Milli Vanilli and New Kids on the Block's 1988 album Hangin' Tough. Not only does the throne rapidly switch owners, but there are even periods where the public becomes sick of the lot of them, or at least contemptuous of them enough to not pay as much attention for a few years. Widespread mockery and derision followed after accusations of lip-syncing were leveled against Milli Vanilli (totally justified) and New Kids on the Block (partially justified, but the claim was later recanted). Then the mid 1990s saw a resurgence of boy bands with Boyz II Men, Take That, the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC. Boy band "overload" led to another backlash in the early to mid 2000s. The gap was filled in 2006 by the Jonas Brothers, and more recently and overwhelmingly by One Direction.

Which band rose to prominence at any given time was entirely market driven, and so the particulars almost don't matter for how we understand the process. Basically, their success was founded on lots of kids buying singles and albums, and attending concerts. And the time scale of change was set by the time it takes for a boy band to burn through an adolescent's musical attention span (or by a much rarer capacity to carry their success into subsequent cohorts or to evolve along with the kids who made them huge). Here, \(\tau\) is set by the time it takes for the underlying cultural problem solved by boy bands to fizzle.

So the time scale of cultural change in the boy band universe is less than the generation length. There are lots of cultural phenomena that behave this way. In general we would call these phenomena low stakes (see recent post) because (a) we don't put much faith in these sorts of cultural institutions enduring for very long, and (b) only a subculture cares about them anyway. But calling them low stakes is misleading; in the moment, to those participating, the stakes are quite high. The difference is that these phenomena are fundamentally transient and the constituency is limited. They are associated with limited periods in our lives or important events that present specific, short-lived, but still intense problems (e.g., adolescence, work functions requiring formalwear, getting married, going to a wedding, taking advantage of the latest technological advancements, a newborn infant, first day at school, this spring's fashions, etc.).

The generation scale doesn't matter much in this case, except insofar as an inspection of human life histories would tell you that adolescence is a very sensitive and scary time for everyone, as well as short, and all sorts of cultural solutions are thrown at the problem to try to manage it, none of which are long-lived, but all of which leave their mark on our collective view on the evolution of what is often narrowly defined as popular culture.

MARIJUANA LEGALIZATION
Until recently, the use of marijuana was something that I more or less expected to be illegal. I recall, in my childhood (30-40 years ago), hearing my parents and their peers talking about marijuana almost entirely with a chuckle. Stoners were made out to be funny, as was being high itself. My recollection as I was growing up of the arguments made by those who would have opposed legalization is that their arguments (had it come to the ballot) were based on a defense of law-and-order.

Poster for the 1936 film Marihuana. Note the odd overlay of intravenous drug delivery (the needles), which makes no sense if you know anything about marijuana, and the oversexualization of the drug's use, including two images of scantily clad women (one of whom is hanging out with a guy in a suit who looks like he could be black?) and what frankly sounds like a sales pitch to young moviegoers (orgies, passions, parties). Source.

In fact, the history of marijuana criminalization in the US is one of a prolonged battle to keep lawlessness at bay (source here and here) with high stakes perceived by those who feared (and fear) its legalization. So as we dig into its history, keep it in the front of your mind that the only way that marijuana was ever going to be legalized was if those stakes were somehow lowered to a negligible level.

As early as the 1890s, the American press began to report on purported marijuana-induced gang violence across the border in Mexico. The potential for that violence to spread with the drug then began to emerge in the public consciousness, even though few knew what the drug was or how it was used. In the decades that followed, cannabis smoking became more common in the United States, thanks in part to the Mexican Revolution driving an influx of Mexican labor in the early 20th century. Smoking mature male flower parts (rather than rendering them as hash) became the most popular form of administering the drug, especially among jazz musicians (Louis Armstrong, who called it "gage", was arrested for possession and sentenced to a 6-month suspended prison term).

After alcohol prohibition was repealed in 1933, the temperance movement, having for a long time embedded themselves within government institutions with a mandate to curb the distribution and consumption of illegal substances, needed to turn its attention to something new. Concerns about the supposedly unpredictable effects of marijuana reached a fevered pitch in the late 1930s (the same decade that produced the laughably risible 1936 film Reefer Madness), and those concerns reached their logical conclusion with the passage of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which banned the use, sale, and distribution of marijuana in the United States, at the Federal level. Harry Anslinger, the zealous anti-drug crusader who led the federal Bureau of Narcotics from the 1930s through the 1950s, even tried to get jazz musicians to inform on each other. Quoted by Doug Snead, Anslinger once said:

Marihuana is a short cut to the insane asylum. Smoke marihuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters. Hasheesh makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him ... 

So the American public, already used to the idea of criminalizing drug use (e.g., the Volstead Act), driven into hysteria by misinformation about the effects of cannabis smoking (along with the racial overtones of its Mexican source and transparent use among African American artists), and with many laws on the books, finds itself in the 1940s and 1950s institutionally and rabidly opposed to cannabis smoking. When the actor Robert Mitchum was arrested in 1948 for marijuana possession (I can almost see Kevin Spacey's Jack Vincennes from the film LA Confidential making the arrest), people kind of flipped out. People Magazine wrote:

The press nationwide branded him a dope fiend. Preachers railed against him from pulpits. Mothers warned their daughters to shun his films.

In the 1950s Anslinger and other strong drug control advocates used the increased public fear of out-of-control drug use, and the subsequent social mayhem that would ensue, to start branding marijuana as a "gateway" drug, meaning that pot smokers were more likely to move on to heroin. At this point there was a perception among the vast majority of the public that the stakes associated with legalizing cannabis use would be very high.

But then something important happened: a stable constituency appeared in favor of cannabis use that would eventually successfully fragment its near universal opposition. In the 1960s, cannabis smoking began to expand into the white, middle-class, college student demographic. White kids, previously only minimally exposed to cannabis, found themselves with access and motive to give it a try. The "don't trust anyone over 30" crowd tested the assumptions that they and their parents (and their government) had made about the use of the drug. While most college students still opposed its use (for standard reasons), there was now a core -- if small -- constituency that was regularly experimenting, and had no problem with legalization. This was a relatively protected constituency, too; there was little appetite to start locking up American colleges' best and brightest white students.

By the end of the sixties, even Life magazine was wondering why cannabis use was still illegal. More and more voices were defending its use, or at least openly wondering why cannabis was singled out but alcohol and tobacco weren't.

Nevertheless, this new cannabis-smoking constituency, arising from white middle-class America, scared the bejeezus out of Richard Nixon (and most everyone else, to boot). As before, its use was perceived as a strong signal of cultural decay. With his "War Against Drug Abuse," Nixon began to enlist the support of pop-cultural icons. Incredibly, Elvis himself was eager to sign on, requesting in a six page letter to Nixon that he be installed as a "Federal Agent-at-Large" in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (source). Ironic. In 1970, Nixon signed into law the Controlled Substances Act, which placed cannabis in the most restricted category along with heroin (Oxycontin and cocaine are in a less strict category). By now, the war on drugs was well under way.

Elvis Presley meeting President Richard Nixon at the White House in 1970.

And now it was a cultural conflict. On one side was a relatively meager minority of people who felt either that (1) the drug should be legalized because it's harmless (or at least no less harmless than alcohol) or (2) that keeping the drug illegal was preventing its useful properties from being delivered to people who needed it. On the other side was the weight of a 50+ year history of villainizing the drug and its users, stoked by fears that people would lose their minds, that the youth of the country would be corrupted, that racial minorities would insane and destroy our cities, etc.

What came next is an excellent example of fizzle coupled with the rollover of demographics as American culture passed through one generation length after another. Cannabis use was becoming less likely to be viewed as a high stakes problem, so the need for a strong cultural solution, like prohibition, was becoming weaker over time. There were even perceived upsides, such as the use of cannabis to address a range of medical ailments (this rationale is widely abused today in the "medical" marijuana world). And there was a crisis, as society writ large was beginning to understand the damage that had been done to poor and minority communities by the war on drugs (especially through the high rate of drug-related incarceration among young, black males). Furthermore, those who had fully absorbed the anti-cannabis perspectives of the bulk of Americans throughout the 20th century were now dying off, and young people were coming up in the world wondering what the big deal was. If alcohol was legal, then it was very hard to understand why weed wasn't. Fewer people were still alive who remembered Robert Mitchum's and others' arrest. And eventually, this initially small, but stable constituency grew, and public opinion shifted to legalization (or at least de-criminalization).

So the fizzle and die-off led to a huge change in attitudes toward marijuana legalization over the course of 1 or 2 generation lengths:

There is still a very large chunk of the population that would like marijuana use to remain illegal (and I would say they have many valid arguments, and many bad arguments), but they are facing a tough demographic battle, as young people growing up today now live in a world in which cannabis use is nearly fully mainstreamed, with no clear downside effects that are any worse than the use of alcohol.

By fragmenting public opinion in this way, a shift in attitudes that was based largely on the merits became relatively easy (putting it in the "fragile" box of the 2x2 matrix, and eventually in the "fundamental" box). The cultural solution to the problem of marijuana's existence tipped from prohibition to acceptance. Today, it's very hard to imagine the debate reversing itself, barring the appearance of a newly realized "crisis" associated with the drug.

(Side note: Trump's success in the presidential campaign has been due to his early identification and stabilization of a still small but strong nationalistic, xenophobic, and even racist constituency among Republican primary voters, which formed out of response to the perceived crises of falling economic fortunes, illegal immigration, and a social-order flipping black President.)

THE ABORTION DEBATE
Note the discomfort you feel as you start this paragraph. Boy bands ... ha ha ha. Marijuana ... ha ha ha. Abortion ... very serious. You might have strong feelings about the abortion debate, but even if you don't hold a strong position, you are concerned about discussing it candidly, and for good reason. The topic is very high stakes and dominated by what seems to be an irresolvable debate in the United States. Both sides have a position that is robust to argument, and there is a squishy middle in the electorate that will react if policy swings too far one way or the other. While unresolved, the stability of the debate and the low probability of a resolution in the near future put it squarely in the "fundamental" box of the 2x2 matrix.

In contrast to transient or fragile cultural phenomena (boy bands and marijuana legalization, respectively), the abortion debate is a very high stakes battle that does NOT take place in the market. It is a battle of attrition, fought with grudging intensity for every inch, until the enemy is destroyed. This stance is reinforced by politicians who use the debate to galvanize and consolidate their supporters, which means that opinions on the debate now fall along party lines and become part of package deals that include other party planks. (Indeed, nothing could be higher stakes for the pro-life community right now than an Obama Supreme Court nomination to fill Scalia's seat on the bench.) When actual policy action is taken, it's usually carried out by the courts, or by supermajority state legislatures that feel they have the mandate to make a sweeping change for their constituents.

Opinion on abortion has been highly stable since Roe v. Wade in 1973. There appear to have been no meaningful moves that weren't promptly reversed (Gallup):

Both sides have existential arguments: (A) those who express varying intensities of the pro-life stance are deeply uncomfortable with the loss of potential life (if they don't already see it as murder), and many see it as a a gateway to increased cultural erosion of sexual morality and traditional family structure (which has its own forgotten backstory as a backlash against feminism and women's economic liberalization); while (B) those who express varying intensities of the pro-choice stance are deeply uncomfortable with the State controlling women's bodies, let alone controlling their economic and social lives, and see a return to the pre-Roe world as a return to world of widespread economic and medical harm to all women. I do the debate an injustice by summarizing it so briefly, but I think I make my point that both sides see battle as very high stakes.

The way that the stakes are perceived on both sides and the size of their respective constituencies means that the abortion debate is something different from marijuana legalization. Proponents of legalization, once they began to be taken seriously, found that very few of their opponents' arguments were strong enough to win over hearts and minds. Loss aversion evaporated as the stakes fizzled, new status quo crises emerged (mass incarceration), and some upsides were realized. Ultimately, with enough demographic turnover, the opposition to legalization evaporated.

Abortion is different because the stakes are unlikely to fizzle. Pro-lifers can't easily back down from claims that abortion is murder. And pro-choicers can't easily back down from claims that their anti-abortion foes want to control their bodies. The less committed middle in this country is no less affected. As policy moves in one direction or the other, the bulk of the populations reacts to move the debate back to the center. And so the debate goes on, with little chance of resolution.

There is middle ground that is not comfortable for either side, so it is seldom explored, that would involve having state and federal governments provide aggressive economic support for children born of unwanted pregnancies, especially when those pregnancies have reached a stage where legal restrictions on the availability of abortion are strong. This would lower the stakes on the pro-choice side by fizzling the economic security argument, and do the same on the pro-life side by drastically reducing the demand for abortions in the first place. Thus, abortions are drastically reduced de facto, while avoiding stranding mothers economically as they make what would become the much more common choice to continue with the pregnancy. It's a testament to the deep emotional content of the debate that I don't think this solution would be acceptable to either side. Nevertheless, it is only when the stakes are reduced for one side or the other that change will occur, and it's impossible at this time to know how or when that might occur.

Notes
* See here for Ryder article in the American Sociological Review.
** See Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A. 1984. Choices, Values, and Frames. American Psychologist 39:341–350 (here).