I’ve been impressed (depressed?) lately with the slide of a middle-aged friend into the moralism of an old fuddy-duddy. Specifically, she is convinced that “young people today” (YPT) have no sense of the common good and no meaningful sexual mores. Let’s take these two complaints in reverse order. Then we’ll look at what her complaints have in common.
When it comes to sexual mores, she is concerned that YPT have moved from dating to “hooking up” and “friends with benefits.” She fears that YPT will not learn the habits of intimacy they’ll need later in life and that they experience a vacuousness in meaningless, isolated flings.
I remember when I first heard about the shift away from dating to hooking up, probably about ten years ago. At first they were calling it an increase in group dating, since mixed groups would hang out together as the rule, with couples pairing off only ocassionaly and without any real duration. From there we went to the terms “friend with benefits” and “hooking up.”
As a married thirtysomething now, I can’t profess any expertise at this. But I do recognize it from when I was younger, I suppose when it was just developing. Dating, whatever its benefits, is a bitch, as any insipid Cathy cartoon strip will tell you. Most people aren’t any good at it. Hanging out with mixed groups of friends, however, is much easier to pull off. You can hang out with people without the manufactured risk of “the date” and without closing off your options prematurely. Frankly, I would have been happier in high school had dating been dead then.
That being said, I am concerned that oral sex has (reportedly) become the new goodnight kiss. (Though I’m suspicious of how they unearthed this information among gossippy teens). And if hooking up apart from circles of friends is really that prevalent, I might be mildly concerned. But as long as they’re being safe, I say let them do it and draw what life lessons they can from it. And it’s certainly nothing new. We’re talking the sexual revolution here, or the flappers if you want to pull up ancient history.
When it comes to the sense for the common good, the concern is that YPT don’t see a need to vote. This, also, is nothing new. Or the concern is that they don’t see a need to educate themselves about important public issues.
When I was a YPT, I was interested in important public issues–because Rush Limbaugh told me to be. There is only so much sophistication in public matters you can expect from people in late adolescence: they are still learning to be public people without resorting to wanton stereotypes, ideological tropes, and shrill. And, frankly, how much should we expect from people we choose to raise watching the McLaughlin Group and Crossfire as the norms of public discussion. If they’ve been taught that public debate means yelling at each other in legalese and economicese, is that their fault?
My real counter to the charge is that YPT are more civically engaged than any other generation for quite some time, as measured in volunteer time. You can counter that their volunteer time is required by school. But how better to habituate them into civic engagement? In my view, the most common types of volunteering (soup kitchens, etc.) teach a shallow understanding of social problems, but we can leave the lesson of the difference between giving someone a fish and teaching them to fish for another day. At least they know how to give away fish and not simply horde them.
What both complaints have in common is the larger, more abstract complaint that YPT don’t honor public institutions (specifically, the insitutions of “dating” and “civil society”). And to that I say, why should they?
Philosopher James Faubion writes,
There is no thinking of ethics without thinking of power, or rather of powers, whether they are those that suppress autopoiesis [self-creation] or those that allow it to flourish.
Those of use who were raised after Vietnam and Watergate have picked up a different understanding of institutions than our predecessors. On one hand, it was in the water, and we can hardly have been expected to go about it otherwise. On the other, to return to a pre-Watergate trust of institutions would be recklessly naive.
More to Faubion’s point, whether or not institutions serve the common good as intended, institutions are always tools of power. This is neither good nor bad—it just is. Because they are always exercising power, it behooves us to remind our institutions that “by their fruit we will know them.” An institition’s stated good intentions are a big sack of bullshit; they simply exercise too much power to be given the benefit of the doubt.
The institution of dating arose as a rejection of ealier courtship rituals. If YPT in the first half of the twentieth century could reject courting if they found it unhelpful, why can’t YPT at the start of the twenty-first century reject dating for similar reasons? Dating requires social skills and political nuances that many YPT do not possess. The intricacies of dating are only needed by those who choose to date, so what purpose do they serve? Only to perpetuate to the culture of dating. So what’s so great about dating that we need to keep it around?
Perhaps we can come up with a test to judge the utility of institutions, or at least to judge the requirement to be loyal to them. We can ask, Does this institution help me or others flourish? If it doesn’t promote human flourishing, what use is it? Coupled to the first question we can ask, Does this institution harm me or others, or even prevent us from flourishing?
Institutions’ harm-causing is evil. There can be no justification for it, and often no remedy either. Because institutions exercise so much power, shouldn’t institutions that habitually cause harm be abandoned, ignored or perhaps even destroyed?
That YPT cannot see how civic institutions like welfare democracy benefit them is unsurprising given their stage of development. What is surprising is that many (most?) older adults fail to see how welfare democracy has allowed them to flourish, and how the dismantling of welfare democracy is now preventing them from flourishing.
Another angle on YPT’s disinterest in the civic sphere is the civic sphere’s ignoring and slighting of YPT. Again, it is unsurprising the YTP do not on the whole care about the social security debate, given where they are developmentally. What is surprising is that older adults do not care about the lack of higher education funding for YPT or for YPT’s lack of health insurance, given where older adults are developmentally. Again, older America, by your fruit we will know you. And given the much decried deterioration of civil society over the last generation, we might add something about planks and thorns and ask whose eye it is that needs fixing.
