The Makers Of The Snowflake GenerationIf millennials are fragile, it’s because their teachers and institutions have made them that way for their own self-interest.
By Jeffrey Polet
March 14, 2022
When our children were young and would fall, they would look at me to gauge my reaction. If I responded with, “Oh my goodness, are you ok?” they would inevitably start crying. If I told them to shake it off, they’d get up and go about their business. Kids are naturally resilient, but they can become thin-skinned and neurotic if constantly subjected to parental overreaction. A certain amount of benevolent neglect goes a long way. Being thick-skinned and tough-minded are valuable characteristics for children to develop as they learn to navigate this world.
This observation echoes one of the central claims of Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind, namely that when we tell students they are unsafe, they internalize the claim and come to believe that the world is a hazardous place where people are constantly out to get them. As a result, students become increasingly fragile and unable to deal with the friction and disappointment of social life. We would do well to remind them that a useful life is marked by struggle, hardship, failure, difficulty, and pain. We can try to insulate ourselves from all that, but we would become genuine good-for-nothings in the process.
Goethe noted that all regressive regimes become obsessed with subjectivity and elevate feeling over reason. The tyranny of feeling, sociologist Robert Nisbet argued, marked life in an iron age, the last stage of civilizational decline. He continued: “there are those who feel and feel that they feel; those who feel and feel not that they feel; those who feel not and feel not that they feel not; and saddest of all on the scene today, those who feel not and feel that they feel not.” We are to take feeling as both ineluctable and authoritative, just as we are to take “lived experience” as a special form of experience that justifies any interpretation of it. Referring to “lived experience,” like feeling, is not an invitation to conversation but a barrier to it.
Psychobabble and its laser-focus on feeling encourages egoism. And it’s the worst kind of egoism, because it stipulates that any insult the self experiences has to be recognized by everyone else as an insult. In the absence of any code of honor, insult becomes purely subjective. It is impermissible to suggest that someone is thin-skinned and needs to toughen up. Instead, we need to nod thoughtfully, purse our lips, furrow our brows, and be “empathetic,” which really means enmeshed in the other’s feelings. Heaven forfend we should say the obvious: the world is a tough and indifferent place where most people you run into won’t care about your feelings, they’ll only care whether you live up to your responsibilities. Minimally, we might try to see a middle ground between those two things. William James noted that philosophy needed both tough-minded and tender-minded thinkers, but we have become all tenderness and use very little of our minds.
Nisbet lamented his era of “self-spelunking, awareness-intoxication, and ego-diving.” Fate spared him our present moment. One expects teenagers to be all passion and no reason, and one expects them to be egocentric, but it’s the job of adults to break them of these habits. Instead, our schools—primary, secondary, and post-secondary—not only encourage this behavior, they denounce any resistance to it as a form of the bogeymen the students are told to fear.
The people who run our institutions actively frame the student’s experience of the world with the intention of making them feel frightened, unsafe, and harmed. That frame is pathological, because it’s less concerned with the student’s well-being than confirming the ideological preferences of faculty and staff. More to the point, it’s an abuse of power. (Emphasis added).
* * *
Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-makers-of-the-snowflake-generation/
