No Hope For MillennialsMark Bauerlein chronicles the decline of a generation too far gone to be saved.
By Casey Chalk
March 23, 2022
The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults, by Mark Bauerlein, (Regnery Gateway: 2022), 256 pages.
Complaining about the youth of today is an ancient pastime. The Roman poet Horace (first century B.C.) wrote in his Odes:
Our sires’ age was worse than our grandsires’.
We, their sons, are more worthless than they;
so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.
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Emory Professor Emeritus of English and First Things Senior Editor Mark Bauerlein, whose book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, elicited much criticism when published in 2008, is familiar with people waving away his concerns about millennials by citing such examples. Unlike the ancients, who relied on anecdotal observation to complain about the young, Bauerlein had statistical evidence—mounds of it. That body of research continues to grow, as he documents in his sequel, The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults.
Millennials read less than earlier generations: most spend an hour or less on leisure reading per week. The number of people in their age cohort who read “almost every day” is a third less than Gen Xers at the same age. They are the least engaged generation in the workforce and change jobs more often than other generations. Anecdotally, they also have a reputation for being whiny, entitled, and requiring constant positive reinforcement—attributed by many to their “everybody gets a trophy” upbringing.
They are depressed, distrustful, distracted, and disconnected. More than half of millennials reported feeling overwhelming anxiety in 2020. A majority of them believe “most people can’t be trusted.” Many are addicted to their smartphones and pornography. They are marrying less: the percentage of millennials who marry by age 40 will be lower than any previous generation of Americans. And they are irreligious, with 40 percent claiming no religious affiliation.
Bauerlein doesn’t catalog all this as an exercise in self-righteous finger-wagging. Rather, the retired professor intimates that his generation, the boomers, failed millennials because they indulged and perpetuated the latter’s narcissistic adolescence. He explains:
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Bauerlein says the youth are not curious about the past. I think that’s half-right. They may not be curious about understanding it as it actually was, but they are deeply interested in recasting it as a subservient idol to their narcissistic identitarianism. Thus, an abundance of historical television programs, movies, and novels filled with anachronistic homosexual trysts, black utopian communes, and gender-fluid characters. For them the past is less a tutor than an outlet for egoistic fantasy.
Boomer enablers have raised a generation of young adults and thirty-somethings not only suffering from cultural illiteracy, but obsessed with microaggressions and trigger warnings. These weak-kneed militants throw around accusations of bigotry with the kind of haphazard, reckless abandon of a third-string quarterback hopelessly attempting a fourth-quarter comeback. That they’re unaccustomed to playing games they might lose only intensifies millennials’ emotivist proclivities.
Bauerlein cites one Oberlin student activist who complained about how “tired” the anti-racist, pro-LGBTQ+ fight made her. I noticed the ubiquity of such complaints in the highly combustible days and months following George Floyd’s death. Liberal media outlets overflowed with op-eds by anti-racism activists complaining about how exhausted they were having to explain the reality of systemic racism to the ignorant and unschooled, even including those with sympathetic ears.
It is the elevation of a self-assured, emotivist self that helps explain why woke ideologues don’t have the time or energy to entertain opposition to woke dogmatism. Just shout your enemies down, or cancel them. Depersonalize them so that you don’t feel guilty when you silence them or banish them from polite society. Do whatever it takes to preserve the millennial mantra, something Bauerlein calls the “happiness mandate”: Everyone deserves to be happy.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/no-hope-for-millennials/
