Will 'Generation Z' Take Us All to Hell?

David Warren: We were counting on the younger generation to provide us with further generations of kids, but they seem to have come to believe that they have better things to do.

“Well done, good and faithful servant,” as we said to ourselves in thinking (here) of Saint Bruno today, that courageous enemy of decadence and filth, and of the Carthusian Order he founded. “Euge!”

I’ve been trying to catch up with our social degeneration with the help of Jonathan Haidt, the only social psychologist who is, apparently, not also a left-wing lunatic. His recent book, The Anxious Generation, is a study of the latest generation of our youth, and how they’ve been rewired by the Internet.

It’s a challenging topic, for none of the subjects of his study has – as a result of entanglement in apps, video games, and influencers – what was previously known as an “attention span.” Dr. Haidt writes about people who have no use for books, and will only tune into a summary for as long as it takes to call up another screen.

The beginning of this “revolution” was in approximately 2014, or prior to the visitation of Batflu. Or perhaps 2011, according to alternative reports. The “Zoomer” cohort was born about 1997, so as their teens began to pass into adulthood, “social media” arrived.

It arrived for their elders, too, but we had the advantage of familiarity with a world before, which I fondly remember. The speed with which it came, saw, and conquered, was not an event. There is simply a before, and an after, when nothing will ever be the same.

Around here in Toronto, for instance, it is difficult to spot a young person who is not jangled and inhabited by extra-planetary voices, to which he is wired via headphone. Except, the little buds sticking out his ears seem now to have been “integrated” with his flesh.

Dr. Haidt investigates the brave new world of mental illness that follows from youthful addiction, in America, and more or less simultaneously, everywhere on earth. He looks at the consequence of lost childhoods, where play has ceased to happen, along with independent exploration, on the path to maturity. He surveys the explosion of anxieties that have resulted: the children have freaked out.

My son, who is a technologist (but nevertheless sane) points to the apps, rather than the telephony, available through various hand-held devices. It’s more or less plain that unrestricted commercial “sponsors” govern them, and direct the social damage for their own material gain, without the slightest sense of responsibility.

As are the political interests, which do not give a damn about moral consequences, but wish to censor deviation from their narrow party lines. They are the co-authors of the catastrophe, by using heretical inquisitions to constrain our ability to resist, by suppressing freedom of speech.

Yet so would the (sometimes attractive) idea of shutting the whole Internet down – which would be the shortest way with the abusers. The sun will do that anyway, at the next Carrington Event.

For Generation Z itself, there is a question whether it would survive Internet closure – as the final step in the dramatic decline, from many causes, of the birthrate. For we were counting on the younger generation to provide us with further generations of kids; but they have better things to do.

Perhaps they are “the last generation”? Or maybe they merely precede a great depopulation, as the Black Plague did in the XIVth century.

For like ants, and bedbugs, the creatures with which Heaven favors this world are characteristically robust, within their allotted “time zones,” and do not simply disappear without something ready to replace them. It isn’t for us to know what, or who, that will be.

And if we did know, we would be mortally surprised.

But meanwhile we have some years to run, with a generation that can’t be counted on, for anything. This is what makes Generation Z unique.

We cannot even count on them to be evil, in the time-honored ways, as previous generations were, since Adam. I would not mistake this for innocence, however.

We cannot expect them to follow self-interest, or even the perversions of self-interest that bring wealth and power.

Of course, people will write in to tell me that they know, say, some lads or lasses who are an exception to my rule, and have not been acting like the “Zees” at all. That is the marvelous thing about the humans. You can’t expect them all to go to hell by the same route. There are, however, some very broad highways.

And the Internet has, since it was recently created (barely a generation ago), provided such a highway, over a landscape that was, comparatively, just flowers and trees. It was an extraordinary economic opportunity, for both good and bad actors. And as usual the bad were awfully quick.

If humans should last so long, it would, like other revolutions, be gradually assimilated and tamed, but how soon? The Industrial Revolution still hasn’t been assimilated, after two or three centuries. The Electronic Revolution may take much longer, for it slides much farther along the track of mobility, and moves closer to everyone, everywhere.

To a perhaps unprecedented extent, it even enables us to slide out of our minds.

This is a world in which men can become women, and women can become men, and half the men and women are comfortable with that: the former men and women in quite different ways. For the behavioral differences between the two sexes have become more apparent to psychologists and sociologists than ever before, even while their bodies become interchangeable. For females and males have succumbed to contrasting mental illnesses.

It is a time when Generation X is almost forgotten as if in antiquity, in which Millennials are about to be forgotten, and in which the new Generation Alpha (arguably still being born) does not have a parentage – except for those happy exceptions, chiefly of weird people who still go to church.

But the “reset” that Generation Z brings, rises to God; with Whom, as I have observed, all things are possible.

David Warren

David Warren is a former editor of the Idler magazine and columnist in Canadian newspapers. He has extensive experience in the Near and Far East. His blog, Essays in Idleness, is now to be found at: davidwarrenonline.com.

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