From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults
Back in 2008, Mark Bauerlein was a voice crying in the wilderness. As
experts greeted the new generation of "Digital Natives" with extravagant
hopes for their high-tech future, he pegged them as the "Dumbest
Generation."
Today, their future doesn't look so bright, and their present is pretty
grim. The twenty-somethings who spent their childhoods staring into a
screen are lonely and purposeless, unfulfilled at work and at home. Many
of them are even suicidal. The Dumbest Generation Grows Up is an
urgently needed update on the Millennials, explaining their not-so-quiet
desperation and, more important, the threat that their ignorance poses
to the rest of us. Lacking skills, knowledge, religion, and a cultural
frame of reference, Millennials are anxiously looking for something to
fill the void. Their mentors have failed them. Unfortunately, they have
turned to politics to plug the hole in their souls.
Knowing nothing about history, they are convinced that it is merely a
catalogue of oppression, inequality, and hatred. Why, they wonder, has
the human race not ended all this injustice before now? And from the
depths of their ignorance rises the answer: Because they are the first
ones to care! All that is needed is to tear down our inherited
civilization and replace it with their utopian aspirations. For a
generation unacquainted with the constraints of human nature, anything
seems possible.
Having diagnosed the malady before most people realized the patient was
sick, Mark Bauerlein surveys the psychological and social wreckage and
warns that we cannot afford to do this to another generation.
