Youthful Rebellion and Culture Change

I am listening to a terrorist thriller this week (Michael Gruber, The Good Son). One of the narrators is a Pakistani American who grew up in Lahore. He says that he was shocked by young Americans' rebellious rejection of their parents; he, he says, grew up wanting to be just like his grandfather, and he holds this up as a characteristic of traditional societies.

This set me wondering how universal teenage rebellion is. I don't buy the Margaret Meade, it's all a product of capitalism line, but it strikes me that youthful rejection of the parental generation may really have become much more pronounced over the past few centuries. In societies in which nothing much ever changes, what symbols of their rebellion could young people adopt? There is no new music or new art, no new politics. There is no new technology for young people to adopt and thereby come to feel superior to old folks. Yes, there is conflict between the generations, but in the stories I can bring to mind it seems to revolve around a few basic issues: control of marriage (Romeo and Juliet), the hot-headed violence of young men that older men try to restrain, and control of wealth, as in all those comedies in which the stodgy old people refuse to die and leave the stage to the young.

Or is that all there ever was to it? Is the modern pattern of each generation adopting its own music and styles and politics a meaningless epiphenomenon based on the same tedious conflict between generations? The old try to control the young and the money, and the young resist?