Isegoria

Older generations continue to surrender moral authority, Rob Henderson notes, to the most naive, narcissistic, impulsive, and dishonest age group:

In his appearance on Bill Maher’s podcast Club Random, physician and media personality Drew Pinsky described ongoing generational conflicts between older and younger adults: “When we were young, we didn’t want to be ‘The Man.’ It wasn’t cool to be The Man. Our generation [baby boomers] grew up not wanting to be the adult. Now college administrators refuse to be the adult because they remember when they were in college and were demonstrating against their college administrators, and they don’t want to be like them.”

I can’t help but think of “Homer Goes to College”:

As author and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist observes, “In the old days young people went to university to learn from people who were perhaps three times their age and had read an enormous amount. But nowadays they go in order to tell those older people what they should be thinking and what they should be saying.”

A social-class element may be at work here. Growing up in a dusty working-class town in California, I noticed that adults paid little attention to what children thought. Not that this is always a great thing—parents and guardians were often neglectful or totally checked out. School-bus drivers regularly told kids to shut up. Teachers had little time for kids’ interests. One teacher in one of my elementary schools in 2000 knew what Pokémon was—he didn’t pronounce it “Poe-Kee-Man”—and by default, that made him the “cool” teacher.

Many poor kids grow up with negligent parents, but many wealthy kids are overprotected by helicopter parents. Parents in this educated class care too much about what young people think.

For better or worse, the educated class largely molds the culture. I witnessed this firsthand shortly after I was honorably discharged from the U.S. Air Force and went to study as an undergraduate at Yale. I was at a breakfast with some fellow students. Our guest was a former governor and presidential candidate. He was gracious and spent most of his time answering questions from us. His answers were often variations of the same response: “We screwed up, and it’s up to you guys to fix it. I’m so happy to see how bright you all are and how sharp your questions have been because you will fix the mistakes my generation made.” This mystified me. This guy was in his sixties, with a lifetime of unique experience in leadership roles, and he was telling a bunch of 20-year-olds (though I was slightly older) that older adults were relying on them?

In the military, we thought of those senior to us as the leaders. Feedback was encouraged, and commanding officers would regularly consult lower-ranking and enlisted members to see what was working and what could be improved. But that occurred only after getting through the filter of the initial training endeavors.

I remember in the first week of basic training, our instructor declared, “I don’t want any of you [expletive] thinking you are doing anyone a favor being here. I could get rid of all you clowns and have your replacements here within the hour.” (This was 2007, well before the recruitment crisis.) My 17-year-old self heard that and thought: he’s probably right. I thought of the busloads of other ungainly young guys I saw waiting in the endless processing lines.

Then I got to college and learned that, even though any seat—at least at selective schools—can be filled immediately with another bright applicant, students seldom get expelled for showing disrespect to professors, or anyone else. In the military, the first message was: you are a peon, less than nothing, and we can easily replace you (this changes, at least to some degree, as you advance in rank). In college, the first message was: you are amazing and privileged and a future leader (though, for some, also marginalized and erased), and you will never lose your position here among the future ruling class. That feeling of whiplash will forever linger in my mind.

Older people are now reluctant to say that they have accrued some knowledge and have some wisdom to impart. Yet young people have a massive hunger for this wisdom. Part of the reason they behave so erratically, I think, is to test where the line is, and to see what knowledge older people can share to steady their anxieties.

Older adults are also reluctant to exert such authority. They might want the prestige that comes with having power, but they don’t want the responsibility of exerting it when challenged by a bunch of naive and pampered kids who have experienced zero percent of real life and its attendant hardships.

Why should older generations reclaim their authority and leadership? Because everything we know about the brain and behavior shows that they are more responsible, reflective, and stable than the young. In his classic text Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, published in 1966, the sociologist Helmut Schoeck observes: “In the United States cases of vandalism involving the children of the middle and upper middle classes are becoming more frequent…. [T]he culprits may be turning against too perfect an environment which they did not themselves help to create. They are trying to see how much grown-ups are prepared to stomach.”

In other words, young people act out to see what they can get away with.

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