By Stanley Kurtz
Thursday, May 19, 2022
There is a sense abroad that generational change has
placed the essentials of our constitutional system and its supporting culture
at risk. Many Millennials — the generation now in their 20s and 30s — have
soured, not only on fundamentals like freedom of speech, but on the American
story as such. Various writers have tried to make sense of this disturbing
cultural shift. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt highlight a certain style of parenting. Mary
Eberstadt explores the implications of family decline. Now, Mark
Bauerlein, in his new book, The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, adds some crucial
missing pieces to the puzzle. His focus — social media and education — may seem
well-worn, but you’ve never seen them approached like this.
I’ll get to substance, but first I want to address the
striking tone of the book. Although the work is well-documented and
thoughtfully argued, the overall feel is singular and unconventional. There is
something “prophetic” about this book. I don’t mean “prophetic” in the sense of
“predicting the future,” although Bauerlein’s 2008 book, The Dumbest
Generation, to which this is a follow-up, did in fact foresee, against the
then-reigning idealization of the Millennials, many of the problems they’re
experiencing today.
No, I mean that Bauerlein’s willingness to openly and
uncompromisingly confront, and in a sense denounce face to face, America’s
young — as well as the boomer mentors who failed them — has the ring of the
Biblical prophets about it. After publishing The Dumbest Generation,
Bauerlein was invited by many colleges and universities to address their
students (and professors) in person. After taking his audiences to task for
devoting more attention to selfies and “likes” than to serious history and art,
Bauerlein would often find himself booed.
The teachers in those crowds denounced him for giving
short shrift to the powers conferred on this new generation by their superior
technological tools. The kids weren’t reading less, or spending less time on
assignments, because they’d been seduced by the superficialities of the web.
No, they were simply smarter and more efficient than their boomer elders,
masters of thought-ways far beyond those offered by the pedestrian low-tech
education of yore. That’s how Bauerlein’s many face-to-face confrontations went
— until today, when ardor for social media has cooled and the social and
psychological costs of technology have become more apparent.
Another point of style and tone: Bauerlein often conveys
his argument in almost novelistic fashion. Instead of privately puzzling
through an issue and then offering the reader a smooth and finished
intellectual product, Bauerlein explains how he came to his conclusions in the
first place. We’re introduced to the friends and colleagues with whom he’s
hashed out his ideas, after which he recounts how his convictions grew out of
various personal encounters with students, friends, and strangers. I’ve seen
Bauerlein transfix a conference audience while explaining what turned him
conservative, or by detailing what colleagues at faculty meetings said when he
first confronted them with misgivings about the drift of his discipline
(English Literature, one of the craziest). These personal themes, and the
controlled passion they generate, add to that “prophetic” feel. (I consider
Bauerlein a friend, by the way, having seen him in action at conferences though
the years. Note also that his book cites my work on Western Civ.)
As I said, education is a core theme of The
Dumbest Generation Grows Up, although not in the conventional sense.
Bauerlein doesn’t focus on leftist indoctrination as a source of the new woke
sensibility. In fact, he plays down the importance of intentional
politicization, a bit more than he should, in my view. That hardly matters,
however, because Bauerlein has got something new and more interesting to say.
Bauerlein explains the left-utopianism of young Americans
more by what they are not learning than by what they’re actually taught. I
don’t mean that he highlights the lack of traditional American history or
civics — although that does concern him. Instead, he explains that it’s the
loss of great literature — or even not-so-great literature and film that is
nevertheless rich and serious about human motivation — that has made many
Millennials shallow. Social media has drawn young people away from serious
reading, and in general has dumbed down the culture. In the absence of the
literature, religion, music, and art that once conveyed the range, depth,
tragedy, and complexity of life, says Bauerlein, young people become
susceptible to utopian illusions. What illusions? Well, the illusion that
everyone can be happy, for example, or that people are either wholly innocent
or guilty, or that the world can be made whole by casting the guilty out.
The great Victorian English poet and culture critic
Matthew Arnold is famous for having advocated, “a disinterested endeavor to
learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.” Bauerlein
certainly favors that “great books” approach. He is more interested, however,
in a different passage from Arnold:
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 judgment, not of
literary works only, but of men and events in general.”
This is the central premise of Bauerlein’s argument.
Notice, however, that Arnold begins, “I know not how it is.” Arnold never
explains precisely how it is that the serious engagement with great writing
lends depth and maturity to personal judgment. Bauerlein, in contrast, does try
to show just how and why this is so. And he does so successfully, in my view.
My favorite chapter in the book is the one on “the
psychological novel.” Using an Orson Wells film, novels by Graham Green and
Sherwood Anderson, and other resources, Bauerlein explains in powerful and
illuminating ways how cultural treasures at once deepen the soul and shatter
utopian illusions. It’s a rich and fascinating way of understanding the link
between literature and politics, and well worth your time.
Another entertaining technique is Bauerlein’s penchant
for making his argument through the mouths of iconic leftists — reinforcing his
point that today’s naïve utopianism has deeper sources than overt leftist
indoctrination. Early on, The Dumbest Generation Grows Up presents
the surprising case of Herbert Marcuse, the intellectual father of 1960s
radicalism in general — and woke intolerance in particular — facing down an
audience of leftist students outraged at his rejection of identity politics and
his advocacy for the great books. The book ends in an encounter with Malcolm X,
whose near-miraculous self-education under the most desperate of circumstances
was, Bauerlein shows, the ultimate antithesis of woke education today. In
between, we learn that Steve Jobs and his fellow tech geniuses were wary from
the start of their creations’ effects on the young.
There’s that prophetic theme again: Grey-haired Herbert
Marcuse confronting an auditorium of students enraged at his refusal to ratify
their woke presuppositions. (Regarding that 1969 audience, the word “woke” is
no anachronism, by the way.)
When I first saw Bauerlein’s book title, I thought
“editor in search of sales chooses simplistic title for serious book.” While
there may be something to that, I don’t quite see it like that anymore. I think
the title is Bauerlein’s refusal to go along with the fawning idealization of
the Millennials that characterized almost all the early treatments of the
topic. Bauerlein’s in-your-face title is his insistence that students
systematically sheltered from their mentor’s criticisms must finally hear some.
The title also reflects another of Bauerlein’s themes: the fear of boomer
teachers and mentors of being dismissed as grouches — or worse, conservatives —
for any affirmation of the old standards, any insistence that something
irreplaceable is being lost when the classics go out the window. “The
Dumbest Generation Grows Up” signals Bauerlein’s refusal to play along. I’m
glad he didn’t.
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