Premodern advice for the postmodern young

A graduation-day address at a university like my own (Harvard), where last spring University of Pennsylvania law professor Lani Guinier and Vice President Al Gore were featured speakers, has a familiar theme. In late twentieth-century America, graduating seniors are challenged to fight the good fight for civil rights, gender and sexual equality, a fair sharing of the world's wealth and resources, and in other ways to extend freedom, equality, and prosperity to all people, regardless of race, color, and creed - in a word, to engage in a major moral reconstruction of the world as we know it.

These are the high ideals of an intellectually gifted, materially secure, modern American university. For most of its history, however, and still in a great many places today (China and Singapore come to mind), the human race has acted as if crowd control were a civilized society's most important task. In traditional societies, the young have been reared on principles far more practical, and seemingly modest, than universal egalitarianism. In western societies before 1700, notions of universal freedom and equality were actually looked on as threats to what little security a society had and to any moral and political progress it might conceivably make. Communities judged themselves not only by what they might do for the weak and the poor but also by how well they prevented the strong and the successful from joining their ranks. Something thought to be more basic and elemental to human life and happiness than freedom and equality has almost always held priority among our ancestors, as well as in most present-day societies. Down through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, more often than not, the great problem of life was not to overthrow a tyrant but to find one - that is, to align oneself with someone both powerful and concerned enough to provide security against the many predators ready to take away everything one had, including one's life.

Building infrastructure

Although not always in an actual pre-civilized state, premodern societies were in a pre-civilized state of mind. People in the past never forgot that civilization was a fragile artifact, that they lived on the brink, that virtually overnight they might lose everything they had to disease, famine, war, or foreign invaders. Until just a few hundred years ago, the life span of the average person was under 40 years. Four out of ten Europeans died before age 12. The active period of a person's life was between 18 and 35, after which one was considered to be old. The material conditions of life were harsh, and people understandably thought first and foremost about the fundamentals: food and drink, shelter, warmth, health, and the protection of property and life. To these ends, self-discipline, social order, and loyalty to family and community took precedence over individual liberties and high cultural ideals. Here was the essential "infrastructure" without which a civilization's higher goals could not be reached.

Given the difficult material conditions under which our ancestors lived, parents and teachers had two overriding concerns when they gave advice to a new generation about to be left to its own devices: their physical safety and their vocational success. Premodern parents wanted their children, first, to survive and, second, to prosper, and they counted themselves blessed if their children turned out to be both healthy and self-supporting. To those seemingly obvious goals, they offered them the wisdom of their age and experience, which, in a nutshell, was this: be vigilant, cooperate with and respect others, and always work hard - advice delivered in a variety of ways through reigning domestic, educational, and religious institutions.

In the past, great feats of cultural creativity - from self-sacrificing acts of charity to dazzling artistic monuments capable of standing the test of time - were seen to depend upon nothing so much as a people's ability to survive and their opportunity to learn and to work. Freedom was not everything; it was the icing on a very large cake. The cake was everything; being safe and being strong were the recognized conditions for the blossoming of a civilization. If people could be guaranteed these things, everything else might follow in due course.

When, in the early sixteenth century, Martin Luther defined the "freedom of a Christian" in his famous essay of that title, he did not call it "one man, one faith," or "the right to assert one's individuality against the dominant culture," or "entitlement to divinely guaranteed benefits and privileges." The free person was, rather, one who understood himself to be "a lord over all and a servant to all." To be free, according to this paradoxical formula, was to be internally certain of one's own righteousness and destiny, and thereby so immune to the fear of failure and the taking of risks that charitable and protective acts on behalf of others might become almost second nature. The free person, in other words, was one who had attained self-knowledge and self-mastery, and thus could move boldly and securely in the world to his own and his neighbor's benefit.

Given the survival and health of their children, parents of old believed that their highest duty to them was to equip them for useful work and self-sufficiency. To that end, vocational training began early in the home for both boys and girls, and children were routinely sent at tender ages (anywhere between nine and fourteen) into service, apprenticeship, or private schooling away from home. There they observed human nature first hand and learned the vocational skills and social graces needed for a life independent of their parents.

Six commandments

By comparison with a modern commencement address, the advice given the young in premodern society must seem all too dark and somber a message, lacking in both ambition and compassion. For that latter sort of advice is full of talk about self-effacement, restraint, and sacrifice, staying in one's place, not rocking the boat, heeding authority, playing the cards life has dealt one, turning the other cheek, and many another seeming cliche, which a very substantial segment of present-day society eschews, especially at commencement time.

But in doing so, are we ignoring a wise and kind teacher, who is able to console and instruct us in our own present hour of need? Consider the following formula for true manhood, reputedly the most detailed surviving instruction of its kind in sixteenth-century Germany. Written in 1539, it is the advice of a merchant father, Leo Ravensburg, to his 14-year-old son, who was then departing the German city of Augsburg to begin a merchant apprenticeship 300 miles away in the French city of Lyons, an outpost of his father's business. Although written for a son, the virtues here portrayed were then believed to be just as appropriate for young women, and the instruction might as easily have been written for a daughter. The father presented it to his son in the expectation that he would read it often and heed it well.

The father's first counsel to the boy is that he strive to be loyal and obedient to God and his parents, and to any he finds in their place of authority in his life:

Dear son Christoph, may almighty God grant you good fortune and grace for your journey, so that you may live according to His will and remain true to the favor and love of your father and mother, as a devout and obedient son.... Love God, be mindful of Him, and keep His commandments.

Attend the religious service in the land where you will be, as other devout and honorable people there do. Argue neither a little nor a lot over any matter of faith, for that will only put you at a disadvantage and may even threaten your life.... Buy a Latin prayerbook like those the people there have, and use it so that God may help you and you may suffer no want.

Although the boy is Lutheran, the father instructs him to join in the traditional religious services of Lyons, which were Catholic, and in all other respects to follow the example of devout people there. There is no suggestion that the boy ignore the new society and culture in which he will be living, much less any thought of his demanding minority rights of his own within it, or in any way challenging it. Conformity with the host culture was deemed to be essential to his safety and success. Internally, he might well believe and think otherwise, as indeed he did, but he was not in Lyons to enlighten the natives and show them the error of their ways. Attending Catholic religious services also increased his knowledge of French and Latin, while at the same time providing him an occasion to make new contacts with the people of Lyons, important assets for his success.

Simply put, the father's first counsel was: "When in Lyons, do as the Lyonnaise." Abroad in a dangerous world, one was never to make enemies gratuitously, or otherwise to put oneself at risk or disadvantage.

Maintaining the appearance of honesty and good character was the father's second counsel, recommended both for its intrinsic value and its prophylactic qualities:

Above all else, take care that you do not lie and steal. Should you find yourself alone with the merchants' money or their wares in your hand, don't take anything. It often happens that money or something else is purposefully left as a test for one such as you. So as dear to you as your life and my favor are ... be false to no one about anything....

In premodern society, reputation was everything, and few second chances were given individuals and families who willfully defied community standards. To lose respect in such a rigid social world, where peace and unity depended on nothing so much as the self-discipline and trustworthiness of others, was to forfeit one's moral defenses and invite numerous predators.

Using common sense in matters of physical safety and personal hygiene was the father's third counsel:

Avoid strong drink by mixing a lot of water in with your wine. Resolve not to get drunk either during your journey or after your arrival.... Take care of yourself in this way, so that you may keep your resistance to illness high.

Keep yourself and your clothes clean, and take good care of your belongings.... Keep your feet warm and dry, for the world is an unholy bath, and dry feet will make you less vulnerable to diseases of the foot.

Do not go about the streets at night unless your master sends you out. He will then arrange your outing, so that you may go safely. Many corrupt youth hang out along the Soane and many crimes are committed there.

The premodern world held enough dangers for youth without their falling prey to preventable crime, illness, and death. Alcoholism was of particular concern to parents in this regard, especially in sixteenth-century Germany, where it was comparable to our present-day drug problem.

The father's fourth counsel was that his son keep his eye on his long-term goals, so that he may someday become self-sufficient:

Concentrate on your needs ... and don't spend money needlessly, because when you are grown and older, you will want and need it.... As you know, great expenditures are now being made on your behalf, and such will also be made on behalf of your siblings, so that after my death, you will have all the less [money]. Therefore ... plan now to be self-supporting, and consider also how you might put yourself in a position to help the children of your brothers and sisters as well [whose godfather the boy was likely to become].

The father's fifth counsel was that his son not fall in love and marry rashly, and that he be wary of sexual temptation and the sexually transmitted diseases which afflict those who succumb:

Take care in your innocence that you not let yourself be talked into a marriage on your own, or become entrapped [by some woman]. And stay away from dishonest women, so that you do not get pox and the other maladies that flow from such women.

The father feared that his son might incautiously enter, or be tricked into, a clandestine or secret marriage - that is, one undertaken without the advantage of prior parental advice and consent, and thereby unwittingly detail his career, ruin his life, and shame his family. Since the High Middle Ages, the Church, in an enterprising effort to extend its authority over the enormous world of youthful sexuality and family morality, had recognized such private marriages as true and proper in the eyes of God. Quite a few youth took advantage of this option to escape premodern society's rigid sexual regulations. But a frequent result was a lawsuit filed by a pregnant girl against an accused lad, who could not recall ever having promised to marry her. Sometimes, the evidence proved sufficient to force the accused into marriage, which was the father's fear should his son be too headstrong or casual in matters of the heart. And no more than he wanted his son to become trapped in an immature marriage did he want him to fall prey to the newly imported and barely treatable venereal disease of syphilis, then reaching epidemic proportions in parts of western Europe.

The father's final counsel to his son is also one a modern parent can relate to: Don't forget us!

Write often to me and your mother, and let me know what kind of master you have there, what his name is, what he does, how many servants he has, and how he treats you.

By such advice, sixteenth-century parents and teachers attempted to secure the moral and political foundations of their societies: loyalty and obedience, honesty and good character, vigilance and common sense, clear life goals, self-sufficiency, mature marriages, and remembrance of one's origins. It was by such individual personal discipline, they believed, that a civil society survived and flourished. In this undertaking, the young were spared unrealistic ideals and pipe dreams, whose predictable non-realization was known both to demoralize them and to divide the generations. The new generation would instead be challenged to do for itself and for society what good character and sound judgment proposed and made possible.

Caning in school

In subsequent centuries down to our own, parents and guardians, both ordinary and famous, have independently echoed and elaborated the counsel of Leo Ravensburg. There are few parental or childhood rites of passage which our ancestors did not carefully observe and confidently analyze. For them, parenting was society's highest art and science, and no other challenged so deeply the heart and the mind. When, in their attempts to guide their children and wards through adolescence and youth, they found them stumbling on the vocational tracks so carefully laid for them, the experience could be as devastating to the adults as a child's death. A seventeenth-century English father comments on a wayward son, who had walked away from an apprenticeship which promised him a secure future: "This night I had a letter ... which brought me the saddest news that ever I had in my life, namely of the miscarriage of Daniel.... It is a great sorrow, bitter; [it] reaches to the very heart."

Parents and guardians did not surrender passively to the self-defeating folly of the young. In 1687, Mary Woodforde, the wife of a retired Anglican clergyman, received the news that her son John faced expulsion from college, and with it the likely loss of his planned career. The boy had been caught writing frivolous rhymes, and although warned not to do so again, and solemnly promising that he would not, he and others were caught red-handed a second time. The punishment for not keeping their word was a caning. However, John and several of his comrades refused to submit to it, and that defiance now brought the threat of their expulsion.

Gathering her religious faith and sense of parental duty, Mrs. Woodforde implored both God and her husband to make the boy, for the sake of his character and career, change his mind and take his punishment like a man. Here is how she records the episode in her diary:

March 6 [1687]. This evening I had the cutting news that my second boy John was in rebellion at the College at Winton, where he and all his companions ... [having been] called to be whipped for [writing forbidden verses], several of them refused to be punished ... [and] must now be expelled [if they do not submit]. God I beseech thee of thy great mercy to subdue all their stubborn hearts, and to give them grace to repent and accept the punishment due for their fault, and not to let them run to ruin, for Christ's sake.

Two days later, following the father's visit to the school, Mrs. Woodforde joyfully recorded the boy's caning. Her willingness, even insistence, that he accept such punishment was a decision few contemporary parents would have questioned, or, for that matter, even faced. For long before they found themselves in so dire a state, parents had at their disposal a great arsenal of arguments and appeals to steady shaky children and keep them on the strait and narrow path to maturity and success.

Tough love at home

If behavior and relationships at school could make or break a young person's career, so also could those within one's own household. The dysfunctional family was no stranger to the past but neither were clever and determined efforts to fix it. The German philosopher Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) was the head of such a family. Among his four children by his common-law wife was a single son, Johann Michael, with whom he struggled for years. In the boy's late teens, he sent him to live with a friend, where he might continue his schooling in a more hospitable environment. The decision had been taken as much to remove the boy from the household as to further his education, so strained had the relationship between father and son become.

On the day after the boy's departure, the senior Hamann discovered many of his own books and papers trashed and scattered about the boy's room, among them a coveted unbound volume of Shakespeare covered with dust and filth. The father also found an untouched glass of beer under the boy's bed - a departing gesture of disrespect, according to the father, as nocturnal drinking had been repeatedly forbidden him. According to the father, the emptiness the boy was trying unsuccessfully to fill by drinking was an unquenchable "desire for the forbidden," which became the subject on which the father lectured him by letter upon the boy's arrival at his new residence in Graventhin:

I know how much the bewitching sin of disobedience has reigned in my house, and how little influence the promises of the fourth commandment ["Honor your father and mother, that your days may be long"] have had on your sentiments and behavior, despite my pleas.... But given the choice between two evils, I prefer your frank disobedience to deceitful and slavish lip-service. If you do not fear God, why should it matter to me, if you despise and mock me as well? If you don't love God, I have no desire to be your idol! Johann Michael, if you can so soon forget your baptismal covenant and the vows sanctioned by your confirmation, you can also forget all my teaching - and you may expect no new instruction from me.

Like the philosopher Hamann, other parents over the centuries have responded to defiant and ne'er-do-well children far more often with forbearance and fresh opportunity than with a quick and final washing of their hands of them. These same parents have also believed deeply in the redemptive power of "tough love," particularly when the point of no return between parent and child seemed to have been reached. The famous mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) struggled for years with his son Eugen, a failure at the university and at everything else he attempted. At the age of 21, the boy migrated to America, where, arriving broke and unable to find work, he joined the military, only soon to discover that he was also not cut out for the soldier's life. Once again, he turned to his father for quick rescue and support, begging the senior Gauss to make it possible for him to muster out immediately.

The father instead pointed out the advantages of his present circumstances, suggesting that he might view them as his last and best opportunity to learn one of life's most important lessons:

I can only view your repeated demand to be free from the profession of arms as groundless, wrong-headed, and contrary to your own best interests, hence, one I dare not grant.... You yourself must agree that suddenly to be free from your present circumstances would only throw you back up in the air. You have yourself blocked forever the return to Europe, since your entire life up to now, with all the circumstances, is everywhere here all too well known. And as much as I know about the latter, just as little do I know what you should do in America, were you free to come and go as you please. Only one thing is clear: your desultory dawdling must now end once and for all....

Meanwhile, womanish wailing over the difficulty of a situation you alone, heedless of all restraint, have created will find only a deaf ear with your father. On the other hand, proof that you are confronting the situation sensibly, that you recognize it to be a school for self-improvement and are making the most of it to prepare yourself for a new life in the New World - that will find an open ear with your father. When I speak of a new life, I mean one in which industry, moderation, prudence, good order, and honesty become second nature to you, and you find it within your power, for the first time, to be a useful and successful citizen of the world.

The senior Gauss had a still stiffer dose of "tough love" for young Eugen. He informed him of the recent death of his mother and, contrary to what the boy might reasonably have expected, of a tidy maternal inheritance of 4,500 taler. However, the inheritance would become his only at set times in the future and upon his fulfillment of certain conditions. He might collect the accumulated interest after six years (in 1838), if he could provide proof of self-improvement; and the capital would become his five years after that (in 1843), upon submission of proof that he was self-employed and prospering.

Sex education

As with the rearing of sons, no parental action was believed to contribute more to the fitness and success of a daughter than laying a sure spiritual foundation early in life. More so than boys, girls had to rely on their piety and diligence to escape the many temptations threatening character and reputation. Boys, by contrast, had greater civic, educational, and vocational opportunities, from which they might fashion a more varied weaponry against such hazards. In certain instances, the double standards of the past proved to be more forgiving of boys as well, even though society was inclined to view girls as the weaker sex and rather to expect their lapsing.

The ability to negotiate a man's world without coming to harm was a skill parents prized in their daughters. That they pondered it deeply and communicated it well to them is suggested by a late eighteenth-century Edinburgh physician's instructions on the conduct becoming a woman when she enters the company of men:

Converse with men, even of the first rank, with that dignified modesty which may prevent the approach of the most distant familiarity, and consequently prevent them from feeling themselves to be your superiors. Wit is the most dangerous talent you can possess. It must be guarded with great discretion and good nature, otherwise it will create you many enemies. [For while it] is perfectly consistent with softness and delicacy ... it is so flattering to vanity that those who possess it [can] become intoxicated with it and lose all self-command. Humour is a different quality. It will make your company much solicited, but ... it is often a great enemy to delicacy, and a still greater one to dignity of character. It may sometimes gain you applause, but it will never procure you respect. [Also] be ever cautious in displaying your good sense, or it will be thought that you assume a superiority over the rest of your company. And if you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from the men who generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts and a cultivated understanding.

Parents worried as much about the despoliation of sons by loose women as they did about daughters by clever men. When the seventeen-year-old son of Christian Korner (1756-1831) entered the mountaineering school in Freiberg, his father sent him the following reflections on the rewards of sexual abstinence and purity:

I hear much about the corruption of morals in Freiberg and of the enticements of immoral prostitutes there. But I am not now worried about you; you have a natural aversion to depravity, which will not allow you to succumb to the temptations of libertines, who wish to teach you their ways. I have observed with delight the respect you have for the female gender and how receptive you are to its charms. Such esteem for women is a good defense against the excesses of raw sensuality. Happy is the man who can one day stand before his beloved with a pure soul and an unimpaired body! You know the popular poem, "He who never in the lap of lust [has lain]...." Your [mother] and father have never regretted that they refused to reduce themselves to animals and saved the highest sensual pleasure for the moment when it could be ennobled by the union of [their] souls.

Realistic expectations

In the annals of advice to the young, the adult world has traditionally dwelt on the "infrastructure" deemed essential to a sound body, a healthy ego, and a good soul. The incessant instructions on diet and hygiene, discipline and obedience, frugality and moderation, deference and discretion, devotion and gratitude, have all been part of the necessary maintenance. As harsh as the advice of the past may at times appear to a modern reader, those who gave it did so confidently in the belief that they were kind and knowing guardians of civilization's core. They drew that conclusion because they did not consider their counsel to be only one generation's experience but the collective wisdom of humankind since antiquity. Here, in a word, were the basic rules of life, the recurring lessons of the ages, a true description of the way things were and would most likely continue to be.

If, by some magical means of time travel, the parents and educators who have spoken in these pages could attend spring commencement and senior-day addresses at a modern university like my own, they would find the goals we set for our young on these solemn occasions grandiose and ambitious beyond youth's ability. Only rarely in the past has the adult world plied their children with such lofty ideals and sent them forth on such foolhardy moral crusades, as we do today. That kind of advice, it was feared, did not equip the young honestly for real life and even threatened to leave them demoralized and defeated, as their reach proved ever so surely to exceed their grasp.

But what would most disturb our visitors from the past would be the folly of advising the young to right a world before they had mastered themselves. Traditionally, the latter task has been accepted as the one reform on whose success all other lasting societal progress depends. And unlike large-scale moral remodeling of the world, individual self-mastery is a highly doable task. When properly equipped, the young can apply themselves to it without facing demoralization and abject defeat, and become in the process effective agents of civilization's necessary chores and realistic dreams.

Parents and educators in the past did not put the cart before the horse, superstructure ahead of infrastructure. They believed that a society's success depended on nothing so much as a consensus on what the "first things" are and a moral commitment to keep them strong. For a society could only be as smart and foresightful, as disciplined and productive, as secure and charitable, as its individual members. To that end, our ancestors subjected the young at an early age to a demanding educational, moral, and spiritual regimen, which spared them neither swift punishment nor stubborn love. They also introduced them as honestly to the dark side of human nature as to its bright, to society's limitations as well as to its powers of self-transcendence, believing that to awaken the young from unrealistic dreams was not to interrupt their sleep but to save them from nightmares.

Fortunately for themselves and for society, many of those who will be graduating this spring already know the difference between impossible and realistic dreams. For as long as there have been sources to document it, youth have rebelled against the world of their parents whenever the latter has seemed to them to be uncertain of itself and ineffectual, or has left the young feeling confined, tyrannized, or hopeless. In such circumstances, youth have demonstrated an ability to imagine their own better world and to make a stab at realizing their own dreams. What every new generation needs most from the adult world is not the latter's guilty conscience and fantasies of redemption, but the basic skills and virtues that enable it to create an independent and worthy life of its own.

References

Beyschlag, F., ed. "Ein Vater an seinen Sohn (1539)." Archiv fur Kulturgeschichte. (1906) 4:296-302.

Hoffman, Erika, ed. Briefe grosset Deutscher an Kinder: Deutsche Manner schreiben an Kinder. Berlin: 1943.

Houlbrooke, Ralph, ed. English Family Life, 1576-1716: An Anthology From Diaries. Oxford: 1989.

Pollock, Linda, ed. A Lasting Relationship: Parents and Children Over Three Centuries. London: 1987.

STEVEN OZMENT is McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History at Harvard University.

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