We're the dumbest generation. Now what?

English professor Mark Bauerlein (Emory) writes in The Dumbest Generation that the digital age is stupefying the youth of America, who are so ignorant and so blissfully unaware of past and tradition that they're unfit for the pressures and duties of informed citizenship. His evidence is dozens of scholarly studies showing a steep decline in youth's reading habits and critical skills. They (well, "we": at 28, I fit into his "Don't Trust Anyone Under 30" warning...) are less and less able to retain even basic information and perform simple intellectual tasks. The cause? For one, even though high technology and the media offer plenty of informational opportunities, young people are less and less informed, and so tech is to blame. But so (and primarily) is the previous generation, his own. In what he calls "the betrayal of the mentors," the X-ers haven't fought the stultification of the Y-ers, but instead have glorified it and ennobled it. They've placed it on a pedestal as a new and untouchable status quo. The millennials are rising, they've got cool gadges, they're smarter, and need to be let do as they please. The consequences? Very grim, says Bauerlein, and not at all a bright, multicultural future as the indulgents claim. Knowledge and tradition should help young people become informed citizens and fight their battles, but knowledge and traditions are being lost and battles are being fought on mere hearsay and sheep-like herding. Informed civic engagement is an essential prerequisite for citizenship and a thriving democracy, but very few of tomorrow's leading citizens are informed in any conceivable way, old or new. Consequently, the decline in reading and sound schooling among the youth will result in not only a loss of our common heritage, but possibly in a failure of the democratic system as a whole. When reading ends, so does our way of life.

I'll argue that despite his insufferable style and cheap kid-bashing, Bauerlein is basically correct. His evidence is sound and devoid of major bias. He clearly establishes the situation, points his finger at the right causes, and predicts a sensible set of near-future consequences. Unfortunately he doesn't offer a solution beyond the obvious "kids should read more," though that was never the book's goal. The goal is to awaken the adults, the mentors, to fight the ever-spreading kid-centered media culture, even at the risk of being tacitated as old dinosaurs. The author holds some assumptions that aren't self-evidently true as he claims, and he fails to argue some points as thoroughly as he should, but overall he's right on the mark... unfortunately.

For one, let me get the ad hominem out of the way: Bauerlein is an asshole. His (excellent) writing is pompous and verges on self-righteousness, attitudes largely mirrored by his media appearances. He is not the kind of person with whom I'd pleasantly converse. The most annoying feature of his book is the kid-bashing. In countless instances he describes everything adolescent as "petty," "irrelevant," "silly," "stupid," or downright "mindless." These refer not only to the generation he criticizes, but to the status itself of being an adolescent. He spits venom like a cobra on anything that isn't intrinsically intellectually enriching. To boot, he severely downplays many achievements of the Y-generation, wich I'll argue later is the book's main miss. So while I endorse the main claim and most of the evidence, I could have done with less fervor and judgment, which is as immature as that which it criticizes.

Now to the meat of it. It takes The Dumbest Generation 163 pages to get to the point. The first four chapters provide the evidence on which Bauerlein's case rests, and it's pretty good evidence. If you're strapped for time, all you need to know about the first two-thirds of the book is that he proves that kids read less and watch too much tv. We knew that, and now he's proved it with high stockpiles of scholarly evidence, so we're good (but I'll discuss a couple shortcomings in the evidence later).

In the two concluding chapters Bauerlein first sums up his evidence, then affixes the blame, and finally spells out the consequences. The first argument is simple: kids in the digital age have isolated themselves into a nexus of high-speed information that overblows the importance of peer validation and transient concerns. In other words, we and our peers matter too much and we seek quick, cheap thrills. We live in a present that centralizes us and blots out everything else, and tradition and knowledge are first to go. It's true that everything is social, but it's individualistically and narcissistically social, not culturally so. It's hard to counter this argument, which has been true for quite a while. If anything, I take issue with how Bauerlein downplays some achievement of "my" generation, namely the increased interconnectedness and the spike in volunteer work and community caring. While it's true they were more in touch with tradition and knew more overall, older generations however promoted violence, segregation, and quasi-theocratical forms of church and state. Our generation is following in the X-ers' footsteps in moving away from those and toward a one-race notion of humankind... but this Bauerlein mentions only in passing and drowns in "but" and "however" phrases, which is a significant and somewhat sectarian misrepresentation of how things really are. The positive and the negative coexist and must both be given their due.

The blame-argument points a finger at the mentors, the X-generation. Adults who should "commend [kids] when they're right and rebuke them when they're wrong" have instead elevated adolescent attitudes to a new status quo, one that mustn't be attacked lest one be accused of being a curmudgeon, a backwards grandpa. This interpretation is also quite correct, and it struck a chord. It reminded me of a point that was dear to Stephen King, who in his autobiography On Writing wrote that his generation was largely responsible for the sorry state of the world entering the 21st century: they had the chance to change the world for good but they "preferred free trade, fast-food, and 24/7 supermarkets." In other words, our once-idealistic parents got rich, stopped caring, and raised us in a laissez-faire environment almost completely devoid of tradition and moral fiber, going instantly from one bad extreme to another. This rang another bell. Not 40 years ago corporal punishment was the accepted standard, but then came the Spockians and everything changed. While I do believe that c.p. is barbaric, immoral, and counterproductive, when it went there was nothing to replace it. Families and institutions went from inhumanly strict to unbeliavably inept as "don't punish" (a good thing) became "don't do anything at all" (a disaster) in just a few decades. Likewise it is with culture and tradition: kids are leaving behind the knowledge and methods of their ancestors but aren't replacing them with anything that yields even vaguely comparable results in terms of critical thinking and civic engagement. Yes, it's natural to ditch the old ways and it must happen for us to evolve, but more efficient new ways must come in their place, or "it's like fucking yourself in the ass" (thanks, Lewis Black).

(As an aside--take the statement I just made, that critical thinking and civic engagement must be preserved. Is that obviously true? Notice how it isn't a cultural statement, but a meta-cultural one. Why are critical thinking and civic engagement so self-evidently good that we don't even feel the need to justify them? Couldn't the new ways, which favor intragenerational connectedness and intergenerational exile, be the new standard? What's so important in having a cultural heritage that we must preserve it at all costs? Compare these questions with my previous observations on transhumanism and cybernetic enhancements: by going that route we'll probably lose our humanity as we know it today, but why is that bad? Seldom do writers seriously look into that question, and yet it always nags me, bordering on absolute nihilism as it does. Absolute nihilism feels like anathema most of the times, but at others it feels inescapable, and as such it is an extremely fascinating concept, both logically and ethically. More on that some other time.)

Bauerlein comes a bit close to answering it with his final argument, that is, what the consequences are being and will be of the dumbest generation. Functional democracy requires informed engagement, and informed engagement requires sound schooling. By simple modus tollens, if sound schooling is lacking democracy falls apart. Here we notice that Bauerlein is far from the Dickensian Gradgrind-like automaton of the opening chapters, the champion of useless educational utilitarianism. He is a defender of knowledge not in its guise of guardian of tradition, but as an essential requirement for our very modus vivendi, our way of life. His overarching purpose then is strictly pragmatic: if kids are allowed to disconnect from our common heritage, democracy will be rendered useless.

This too squares well with a notion that has been nagging me for the last few years: democracy isn't working. It isn't working because the idiot has the same voting power as the genius; the culturally isolated, 18-year-old World-of-Warcrafter counts for as much as the philosopher. Joe the Plumber's opinion counts the same as Michel Foucault's before the law and in the public square. This egalitarian character is democracy's greatest asset, but when the information superhighway leads straight off a cliff, then it's its weakest spot. This is not to say that democracy is inherently "good" or "bad," or even that some of its mechanisms should or shouldn't be contested. Surely a major point in the 1960s culture wars was that the fact that Foucault can publish his ideas while Joe the Plumber can't is reason to believe the system is oppressive and must be terminated in its present form. But regardless of whether or not this is true, culture wars must be fought with information and knowledge, which is Bauerlein's main point and which is a bloody good one. The last 5-10 pages of the final chapter are very telling in this sense. If you're a strong leftist like me you might be irritated by Bauerlein's clear right-leaning tendencies, but his points are strongly argued and very much in touch with current reality.

I never say this, but... yeah... you owe it to yourself to read this book, and of course also some that attempt to refute it (which is what I'll look for next). It's important.