Over recent weeks, I’ve been intrigued by the thesis of a book I read early in the new year.
It was Mark Bauerlein’s “The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults,” a sequel to his 2008 examination of the high-tech millennial generation for which so many parents had the highest hopes.
For those uninitiated in the philology of generational divisions, Baby Boomers were born between 1946 and 1964, Generation X between 1965 and 1980, millennials from 1981 to 1996, and Generation Z from 1997 to 2012. Generation Alpha, should this label stick, will grow up in the 15-year cycle after 2012.
Bauerlein’s analysis was advertised as an urgently needed update on the millennials. He sought to explain this generation’s “not-so-quiet desperation and, more important, the threat that their ignorance poses to the rest of us.”
The book points out that millennials were the first generation to reach young adulthood in the Digital Age. They were said to be at the cutting edge of a tech revolution. They were taught to achieve, compete, pursue their passions, and be all they could be.
In reality, according to Bauerlein, many millennial undergraduates were culturally and academically adrift. Their humanities courses demanded very little attention to the great literary and artistic works of Western civilization. Outside college classrooms, they spent little time on coursework and much more on cellphones, the internet, and social media.
Hyper-progressive senior mentors provided millennials with a very high opinion of themselves. By the first decade of the present century, teachers, professors, journalists, business executives, professionals, and political pundits regarded them as the next “greatest generation.”
“Here Come the Millennials,” Bob Herbert cheered in a May 2008 edition of The New York Times.
They were poised to save the planet from the perdition of their elders and usher in a new global utopia.
Young adults imagined themselves predestined to dominate the professions, develop tech start-ups, earn six-figure incomes, organize for social justice, and do wonderful new things with media and art.
Bauerlein says the millennial generation produced small numbers of super elites, but these were well out of proportion to the actual numbers in their demographic. He contends that, if we step outside the top 10 percent, they were left with their digital devices and video games and 500 TV channels, as well as hundreds of photos on their phones. They were fed with “diverting apps, stupid movies, and crass music.”
“[We] stuck them with crushing student debt and frightful health-care costs, a course and vulgar public square, churches in retreat, and an economy of ‘creative destruction’ and ‘disruptive innovation’ which the top 10 percent exploited, but the rest experienced as, precisely destructive and disruptive,” he wrote.
A Troubling Generational Schism
In the interest of full bias disclosure, my wife and I are both boomers. But we freely acknowledge that our generation produced its fair share of reckless and disruptive adolescent behavior.We went through a self-destructive sexual revolution, an expanding drug culture, and unruly protests against the war in Vietnam. In the United States, being drafted amounted to the real risk of injury or death on a foreign battlefield, but much of our general angst was driven by fashionable politics.
Nevertheless, even the most radical anti-war protesters of the 1960s and ’70s were willing and often anxious to openly debate the reasons for their objections to the status quo.
Today, debate is off the table. A significant number of young adults now hold anyone who disagrees with them in complete contempt. They have no time for opposing views, free speech, diversity of opinion, or rational disagreement. If the evidence doesn’t fit their narrative, they don’t want to hear about it. They believe that intellectual opponents should be shut down and punished.
Woke Schools Produce Dangerous Adults
Bauerlein blames “woke” higher education for much of the intellectual bankruptcy that caught up with millennials. More recently, set-upon and traumatized liberal professors are beginning to agree with him.I’ve spoken with dozens of boomer parents who have had second thoughts about the decision to send their children to university. They say the same kids that they sent off to college never returned home. This troubling observation usually comes from ordinary folks in sturdy households who led productive lives and love their children.
Thankfully, not all 20- or 30-something young adults share the corrosive frame of mind that Bauerlein described. But we all know graduates from some of North America’s top schools and universities who are remarkably in sync with his analysis.
In short, “The Dumbest Generation Grows Up” rings some uncomfortable bells for anxious parents and grandparents, many of whom are seriously beginning to question the emotional stability of their own sons and daughters.
