Who are those who will shape the future, and how have they been shaped through the education they’ve received? Mark Bauerlein argues that the Millennials are set to decide the shape and direction of American society for decades to come, and that this moulding will be influenced by their education, which he shows has been minimal at best, a deformation at worst. In his book, Bauerlein lays out in stark detail and with eloquent lament the state of the Millennials’ education, which set them up for failure, and by extension has placed the viability of the civilized order at risk. This threat goes beyond questions of ‘wokeness’ or ‘cultural Marxism,’ and goes to the root of what a true liberal education is for: forming the character in virtue through the learning of, and participation in, the tradition which gives memory of the past and direction to the future. We have produced a lost generation at risk of losing a civilization of which they are largely ignorant, or which they despise from the little knowledge they have.
Education and Dissipation
Bauerlein cites many statistics showing that Millennials read less and less than their predecessors, having done the bare minimum to meet course requirements at school and university. And if they did less than that, they could usually count on forgiving institutions and inflated grades to get them through the system anyway, passing through the stages of an education that leaves them as ignorant, if not more so, as when they began. The numbers also show that young people spend hours on end online, texting, and gaming, while reading little or nothing for pleasure outside the institutional context. For Bauerlein, this matters because “it was obvious to me that a twenty-first-century teenager who didn’t read books or magazines or newspapers, who had no religion and ignored history, civics, and great art, would grow into an unsatisfied and confused adult.”
Why read when one has access to a networked hive-mind of banality and opportunity for overstimulated sensory titillation through the glowing portal in your pocket? The offer of peer-to-peer networking was hailed as the new dawn for education, but Bauerlein cites researchers Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, who reported that “students who entered college with higher academic aptitude spent proportionally less time studying with their peers than students who came in with less prior demonstrated ability.” Smartphones therefore offer an escape into the digital wastes of what Mark Dooley calls ‘Cyberia,’ while books offer an escape into the landscape of the mind, formed through the dialectic with the words on the page and the ideas and concepts they articulate. ‘Cyberia’ presents itself as closer to reality but delivers the opposite, while books and their contents seem further from reality but enable young people to face and experience it with a far deeper richness.
The act of reading is a practice that takes time and effort, but for which the rewards are practically infinite once the skill is mastered. The act of reading itself, when oriented towards good content and substance, is a testament to the need for patience and temperance in service to one’s own higher good. But this of course assumes that there are such categories of value as better and worse, which itself assumes the existence of hierarchies of value—anathema to today’s culture of repudiation against that which is seen as marked by the moral stain of oppression and victimisation.
One of the most interesting sections in the book is when Bauerlein cites Maryanne Wolf, author of Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, who reports that researchers “found that when we read a piece of fiction ‘closely,’ we activate regions of the brain that are aligned to what the characters are both feeling and doing.” Furthermore:
another [study] found that the somatosensory cortex, the portion of the brain that registers touch, lights up when someone reads a metaphor of texture, while “motor neurons are activated when we read about movement.” The act of imagination while reading, it turns out, entails a lot more than pleasure. We have a fuller cognitive reaction. Another study goes so far as to conclude that, in Wolf’s paraphrase, “when we read fiction, the brain actively simulates the consciousness of another person.” Again, this is more than sympathy for or identification with characters. It is an imaginative reconstruction of the characters’ experience.
This comprises the development of what Edmund Burke and others called the ‘moral imagination,’ the ability to attain the universality of truth, beauty, and goodness through a literary tradition, mediated by one’s own particular experiences.
But achieving any of this requires constraining oneself to a seemingly limited way of doing things with no obvious, immediate benefit. Bauerlein spends part of the book making the case that in order to change the culture, or the socio-political order, one must conform oneself to an inherited intellectual tradition and its rules of conduct and transmission before one can think about moulding the wider order to one’s vision. You must start from somewhere and with something even to know who you are, what you are, where you come from, and where you are going. This means that cultural tradition and habituation, in service to the individual’s apprehension of the universal through the contingency of the personal, are crucial. In light of this, Claes Ryn, in A Common Human Ground, argues:
the compelling experience in which universality is concretized is at the same time and indistinguishably that of a particular and unique individual and that of humanity in general. To the extent that tradition can connect man with the universal, it is, to underscore a crucial point, a living past. In the experience of the particular person, tradition at its best joins past and present in a new, direct apprehension of universality. From within a direct consciousness of enduring higher good, personal and social life can be continuously assessed.
If this isn’t achieved, one is left to thrash around in a sea of confused and half-formed pseudo-idealism, ending up unhappy and having achieved little but self-deception and destruction of the social order. Bauerlein sees this breakdown in transmission of the past via mediation by students in the present as a betrayal by those adults who ought to have maintained their role as mentor and guide. As he writes, “this was the sorry irony: the more the mentors complimented teens and early-twenty-somethings as a vanguard sufficient unto itself with no need for the guideposts of tradition, the more they ill-equipped them for adulthood.”
What is the result of this derogation from what was seen as a sacred responsibility for practically all of human history? Bauerlein puts it this way:
To cut the young off from a living past was to deprive them of a profound and stabilizing understanding of life, of themselves. To immerse them with one another, the private space of the teen’s bedroom now a bustling social space open for business all night long, was to ramp up peer pressure like crazy. To neglect the masterpieces of art and ideas, epic events and larger-than-life personages, was to level their enjoyments to the mundane. To allow their religious impulses to flicker, not to expose them to the orderly ministrations of Sunday mornings, was to leave them among the “Nones,” a label with sad undertones. The bold and giddy digiphiles exhorted them, “You’re free—be creative—change the world—you’re the future—the iPhone 4 is out next month!” But there was a grim subtext: “There is no tradition for you—you have no usable past—no greatness to revere—you’re on your own.”
Going Back to Paideia
The traditional goal of education, going back to the groves and stoas of ancient Greece, was to form the young into the competent and prudent citizens of the future, worthy of continuing the project of the polis in service to one’s people and the gods. This was updated by the Romans under the name of paideia, the teaching and moulding of minds through instruction in the practice of right-reason, logic, rhetoric, and grammar that comprised the ground from which one’s Romanitas, the defining complex of concepts, beliefs, and myths that defined what it was to be a Roman, could grow.
The classical view of education was to cultivate the rational, higher nature of man and to restrain and channel the violent, chthonic drives of our lower, irrational, animal nature. Both were seen as part of what makes us human, but a synthesis and mastery could only be achieved through first practicing obedience to an accepted tradition. Christianity reflected this view with its intention to counter the effects of the Fall, and to know the wonder of God’s rationally-ordered and therefore knowable creation, thereby glorifying His name. The conclusion to all of this is that in order to achieve any sense of liberation, the obsession of today’s young and the culture that they have imbibed is in need of limits, both internally and externally.
Is it any wonder, therefore, that the upheavals periodically seen over the 20th century, and at an increasing pitch over the 2010’s, have been instigated by young people who report lower and lower levels of life satisfaction, and higher levels of discontent, all expressed in soaring mental health problems and attendant social pathologies? As Bauerlein writes, why is any of this surprising when the older generations have given up their role as teachers, in both the narrow academic and broad experiential senses, and have left the kids to work it all out on their own? The great thread of inheritance has been snapped, and those who stand at the end of this line back to the past are left wandering in a world that they cannot comprehend, and thus resent for not conforming to their untutored expectations and ideological delusions. As Hannah Arendt wrote in the mid-20th century, raising and teaching kids free from the supposed tyranny of adults has simply left them at the mercy of “the tyranny of their own group.”
The refusal of adults to continue their role of maintaining the memory of civilization for the young has therefore bred an ill-informed contempt for the past, now seen only as a barren wasteland of prejudice, bigotry, and hatred that only serves to furnish the tools of oppression in the present. By contrast, Bauerlein quotes that 19th century master of humanistic learning, Matthew Arnold, who wrote, “I know not how it is, but their commerce with the ancients appears to me to produce, in those who constantly practice it, a steadying and composing effect upon their judgement, not of literary works only, but of men and events in general.” Being soaked in the lessons of the past, absorbing the endless examples of our human condition in all its triumph and tragedy, grounds the young mind in a reality that no longer seems quite so confusing or chaotic—and even when it does seem so, the young person facing the tragedy of life has the resources from which to draw support in the face of life’s vicissitudes.
Going from the abstract to the concrete, Bauerlein recounts how those who lived during times of crushing oppression and prejudice joyously raided the great storehouse of history to equip their spirits with the armour and weapons needed not only to survive but to thrive in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges. W.E.B. Du Bois is one for whom Western civilization and its wide legacy provided the hope of transcendence from the iniquities of his day, through the vision of the future that it offered from the past. As Du Bois wrote, “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. I cross the color line and move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”
Bauerlein also unexpectedly writes of the case of the black radical, Malcolm X, who fulfilled the criterion of auto-didact to the utmost, again reading voraciously from his time in prison, going in illiterate and coming out hungry for the wisdom of the past denied him by the bigotries of his time. While not figures whom conservatives would necessarily admire, these and other examples would not compute with the Millennials or Gen Zs who have been denied such a vision of the universality of truth attained through the particularity of personal circumstance and individual history. But the existence of these examples is an antidote to the malinformed determinism that infects the lives of today’s younger generations.
Authority and the Moral Imagination
Another antidote to this distorted view of life is to remember that education, in the truest sense of the word, relies on hierarchies of value and status in order to fulfil its mission of formation, cultivation, and transmission. I would argue that this goes hand in hand with the urgency of accepting elites as both inevitable and necessary in society. As Ryn writes, “each society needs leadership that inspires its people to live up to its own highest moral and cultural standards and that draws attention to how those standards correspond to the aspirations of other peoples.” If elites, whether political, cultural, or academic, embody in their own lives the highest aspirations of a culture and its conceptions of the good, then those who look for examples of leadership will be far more likely to accept their authority. This neglect of authority in favour of an egalitarianism that ends in coercion has been at the core of the decline in education since the explosions of the ’60s. Only through the reassertion of the principle of authority can this trend be reversed.
It is through such relational contact with authority that true education once performed its sacred duty of passing on the glories and sorrows of the past. The achievement of universality through particularity is embodied in education. For Ryn, “the normative authority of universal values becomes known to a person in specific instances of moral action, thought, and art. Through them experience is structured and directed in ways that invest life with a special significance.” Furthermore, “transmitting or deepening a sense of the universal is not a matter of copying a standard already available. It requires constant moral, intellectual, and aesthetical vigilance and fresh articulation of meaning. Goodness, truth, and beauty are in a sense an ever-unfolding discovery.”
The moral imagination mentioned above is only cultivated and nurtured in this way. Postmodernists deny any possibility of meaning across particularity, and they are right that “meaning is intensely personal,” yet “it is meaningful precisely because it links unique individuality with universal humanity.” As Ryn puts it,
A great work of art can indeed be the special and indispensable treasure of a particular people, helping to form its unity and identity, but it can also become a treasure for all of mankind. In the very process of creating cultural distinctiveness and boundaries the great work does, in its humane significance, simultaneously break down those same boundaries among those who are capable of truly absorbing it, giving humanity a common frame of reference.
Bauerlein demonstrates in clear, elegant prose that this common frame of reference no longer exists, and the result for Millennials and Gen Z has been a disaster. This happened because the adults in the room abdicated their responsibility to be adults, to guide and guard, to say “no” to the Millennials’ deluded desires rooted in an extended infantilization. The outcome is that,
we have handed the young a history that is miserable—so forget about it. Our country has done many wrongs—so drop the patriotism. The literary canon excluded women and minorities—so skip it. The future is uncertain—so look out for yourself and trust that the “-isms” and phobias that demean and deny will soon end, and do your part to make that happen. We have told them that Great American Novels aren’t so great, that the Old Masters had some real problems, and that Western Civilization was built on the labor of the oppressed.
Given that this is the case, why is anyone surprised that large numbers of the younger generations embody a culture of repudiation? The belief of those who should have been the mentors was apparently “that the more we denigrate the past, the more we shall escape its errors and make the twenty-first century the so-much-better antidiscrimination community that the world ought to be.”
The Long Road Before and Ahead
The reality is that the revolution of the last decade stems from a rootlessness that reaches back even more decades, where “for the Millennials’ Boomer parents and mentors, the inherited cultural universe—Western Civilization, the Great American Novel, the Christian churches, and America from Plymouth Rock to the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement—was already deteriorating, but the remnants were still there for transmission.”
We have now long since drawn down on this inheritance, and there is nothing left to scrape from the barrel. Even the fumes are dissipating. We can see the results all around us today. Going forward, this poses a threat to the maintenance of a civilized order. Repairing the damage, if it is possible, will take as long, if not longer, than it did to cause such destruction in the first place.
