By Noah Diekemper
Tuesday, March 26, 2019
A tweet last week from Time Magazine reporter Charlotte
Alter lit up conservative sites when she claimed: “.@AOC and I were born the
same year. She was a Dunkaroos kid—I liked fruit roll-ups. People our age have
never experienced American prosperity in our adult lives— which is why so many
millennials are embracing Democratic socialism”
Conservatives fought to outdo each other educating the
internet on the historic levels of prosperity enjoyed in present-day America by
everyone—especially the young people born late last century who have
contributed minimally to that success, if at all. All of this is correct, of
course, but these are just so many big sticks brought to fight an ideology
that’s brandishing a flamethrower.
The problem is not that millennials have not been given
enough, but that they have no idea how to receive. Not knowing how to
graciously receive is a problem, and
one rooted in the human heart, for human desire has a distinct tendency to echo
the desires of others.
Within families it sometimes takes the shape of “sibling
rivalry.” It is “herd mentality” or a “fashion trend” or “the latest craze.”
When it turns dark, it becomes envy. That is a trajectory Dorothy Sayers put
like this: “Envy begins by asking plausibly: ‘Why should I not enjoy what
others enjoy?’ and it ends by demanding: ‘Why should others enjoy what I may not?’”
Wherever you have human desire and inequality of any
kind, you have the capacity for envy. And envy is not only ubiquitous, it is
dangerous. Thomas Hobbes said it plainly: “If any two men desire the same
thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies.”
But material scarcity is only part of the equation.
Status itself can be a bone of contention, and anyone feeling inferior in that
respect can possess the pure spite that incites acts of chaos and nihilism.
That is why Cain murdered his brother Abel when Cain’s sacrifice failed to
please God. More recently, in “The Incredibles,” Syndrome’s plan involved not
only the murder of real superheroes but the ultimate demise of “superhero” as a
special status.
Therefore, fear of being envied, hated, and
cursed—whether “instinctual” or learned so young we forgot when we learned
it—makes us fear being too successful. “Not only do people fear envy, they fear
being envied. The more distinguished a man is, the more reason he has to fear
envy,” wrote Robert Bork in his social commentary, “Slouching Towards
Gomorrah.”
Not a Uniquely
Millennial Problem
Enter millennials. Our world’s runaway prosperity and
casual miracles do not nurture a respect for private ownership and free
enterprise, they fuel a bonfire of awkwardness. Some 97 percent of millennials
own smartphones—those internet-browsing touch-screen cameras that 50 years ago
“Star Trek” dared not imagine—and this age cohort has spent the least time
saving money over the course of their adult life to afford marvels like these.
This only makes things worse.
While this discomfort affects millennials at historically
high rates, it is not a new thing: similar attitudes could be spotted in the
youth of the 1960s. Bork drew heavily on the writings of sociologist Helmut
Schoeck, who wrote a book entitled “Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior.” It
contained the reflection that:
Overprivileged youngsters … strike
out in senseless acts of vandalism as a result of their vague envy of a world
of affluence they did not create but enjoyed with a sense of guilt as a matter
of course. For years they were urged to compare guiltily their lot with that of
the underprivileged abroad and at home. Since the poor will not vanish fast
enough for their guilt to subside, they can ease their tensions only by
symbolic acts of aggression.
He could have written that yesterday. Perhaps the only
factual matter that has changed in the intervening decades is the bit about the
poor. As even the New York Times will report, the global rate of “extreme
poverty” (defined as living on less than about $2 per day) has dropped from 44
percent to less than 10 percent since Reagan was first elected. Even so,
Schoeck’s words are no less relevant: the same Times article notes that “nine
out of 10 Americans say in polls that global poverty is worsening or staying
the same.”
After all, the success stories (“Every day, another
305,000 were able to access clean drinking water for the first time,” as the
Times also reports) do not demand action, or engage our envy-awareness and
discomfort the same way that the stories of failure, tyranny, corruption, and
poverty do. The overriding impression is the disparity between ourselves and
the less fortunate.
So the millennial problem of being drowned in unmerited
material blessings is only exacerbated by material wealth. Some have responded
by adopting the self-flagellating attitude common among the wokest millennials
who denounce their own experiences as fraught with privilege. Others shift
their frame of reference and compare their wealth to that of Bill Gates, Jeff
Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, so that they can feel solidarity with the poor.
Both of these outlooks on life are compatible with
another, more profound solution: embracing socialism. One early 2016 write-up
from the Washington Post captures this revanchism rather nicely:
The Harvard University survey,
which polled young adults between ages 18 and 29, found that 51 percent of
respondents do not support capitalism … It isn’t clear that the young people in
the poll would prefer some alternative system, though. Just 33 percent said
they supported socialism … Capitalism can mean different things to different
people, and the newest generation of voters is frustrated with the status quo,
broadly speaking.
Dissatisfaction with their demonstrable material largesse
is driving their attitude toward economic systems. Gallup finds similar results
to those from Harvard’s poll: younger people are souring on capitalism—“the way
things are now”—but they don’t necessarily support socialism as the substitute.
The Promise of
Equalizing the Many
Now, socialism’s usefulness as a solution, where it has taken root, seems like a no-brainer:
it is the promise to equalize everything. Naturally this is most palatable to
the generations least familiar with what forced redistribution looks like in
practice. Schoeck identifies another, religious dimension behind the economic
confusion:
In a Christian world where all
shared the same belief, anyone, regardless of his worldly status or position,
could regard himself as connected with his neighbor and reconciled with him
through the transcendent God, and, furthermore he might not even envy him
because to do so would reflect on God’s wisdom.
In other words, if your view of creation is informed by
Christian teachings, you believe that you and your fellow man are already equal
in the most important sense. As Paul wrote to the Galatians, “For as many of
you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor
Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you
are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:27-28, ESV).
As for the material circumstances of this world beyond
our agency or power—such as being born into a country as great as America—any
Christian could say with Job, “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked
shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be
the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21, KJV). Whatever physical chances fell to our
lot, they were the handiwork of an intelligence that was all-powerful, wise,
and loves us. These words, by the way, were Job’s response to hearing the news
of the death of his sons and daughters.
But Americans are rejecting this framework, and this
trend is greater in young people, who are increasingly less religious and
attend religious services, where they worship and commune with their fellow
man, more rarely. Schoeck continues:
So the agnostic twentieth-century
intellectual seeks a new god, promising the same protection as the Christian
God’s against the next man’s envy (often only suspected) and the same freedom
from the consuming sense of guilt engendered by his personal superiority. This
substitute god is progressivist ideology or, more precisely, the utopia of a
perfectly egalitarian society. It may never come true, but a mere mental pose
of being in its favour helps to bear the guilt of being unequal.
That is why pounding home (precisely, factually, and
semantically) correct numbers about
the state of the world is the wrong conversation to have with millennials. No,
it doesn’t help that 90 percent of all Americans are dead wrong about which
direction global poverty rates are trending, but that’s more a symptom than an
active cause of their economic confusion.
The Guilt of
Living Well
When millennials complain about “job insecurity” or not
owning homes, it’s not because they don’t realize they’re living well in a
world where people would regularly die as infants or from not having enough
food to eat. It’s because they do realize it.
The discomfort, embarrassment, and guilt of living well
in a cruel world plagues young Americans who have no framework for
understanding cosmic inequalities. That feeling can never be cured by an act of
Congress, but it can be addressed if and when the conservative movement
realizes that mouthpieces like Alter cannot be taken at face value, and that
they need to start the conversation with the actual confusion millennials are
struggling with.
They will appreciate it: speaking precisely and honestly
about the heart of a problem is liberating. Only then can we begin to discuss
the appropriate response to enormous grace: gratitude and humility.
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