Bill Kristol has a conversation with David Gelernter — who doesn’t mention surviving a mail bomb from Ted Kaczynski, by the way:
Gelernter describes America-Lite, where the past and future are blank and there is only a big now:
I’m a teacher of college students. I’m lucky to be at one of the best colleges in the world, at Yale. Our students are as smart as any in the world. They work very hard to get here. They are eager, they’re likable. My generation is getting a chip on its shoulder, we always thought we knew everything about every topic, our professors were morons, and we were the ones who were building the world.
My students today are much less obnoxious. Much more likable than I and my friends used to be, but they are so ignorant that it’s hard to accept how ignorant they are. You tell yourself stories; it’s very hard to grasp that the person you’re talking to, who is bright, articulate, advisable, interested, and doesn’t know who Beethoven is. Had no view looking back at the history of the 20th century — just sees a fog. A blank. Has the vaguest idea of who Winston Churchill was or why he mattered. And maybe has no image of Teddy Roosevelt, let’s say, at all. I mean, these are people who — We have failed.
[...]
They know nothing about art. They know nothing about history. They know nothing about philosophy. And because they have been raised as not even atheists, they don’t rise to the level of atheists, insofar as they’ve never thought about the existence or nonexistence of God. It has never occurred to them. They know nothing about the Bible. They’ve never opened it. They’ve been taught it’s some sort of weird toxic thing, especially the Hebrew Bible, full of all sorts of terrible, murderous, prejudiced, bigoted. They’ve never read it. They have no concept.
In other words, the current plan to shelter kids from unpleasantness has succeeded.
Apparently when Trotsky described the New Soviet Man, he was just ahead of his time and on the wrong continent.
The scary part is how ignorance is worn almost as a badge of honor; it’s now cool to be a mindless cog. And if they are liberal, enlightenment is just assumed.
Still Grey Enlightenment is bullish on millennials:
I highly recommend this Grey Enlightenment blog for a rare view opposite to ZeroHedge, because it can’t be all doom & gloom all the time, right?
I have no words for that. Has the person who wrote that visited reddit in the past five years?
As one of the Millennials in question (b. 1988) I can’t say I find that description of my peers to be terribly accurate. I have noticed an odd duality, though, that might be responsible for Grey Enlightenment’s take. Most of my peers (East coast US) have “get blind drunk” as their primary hobby, with Tinder-facilitated hooking up as a close second. There is a large subset, however, that take things very seriously and show an obsessive focus on their career and/or education. There doesn’t seem to be much of a middle-ground, in my observations at least.
Obviously this spectrum is present in every generation, but I’m curious to hear if the sharp, middle-less bivalence has been a characteristic of prior cohorts.
They know nothing. And to top it off, they’re on his lawn.