The result is a generation whose members are often afraid to talk to one another, especially about anything that might be upsetting or offensive. If everyone must be emotionally safe at all times, a free discussion of ideas is inherently dangerous. Opposing viewpoints can’t just be argued against; they have to be shut down, because merely hearing them can cause harm.
She adds,
Members of iGen are also taking longer to grow up. As I found in analyzing seven large national surveys of teens, today’s adolescents are less likely to drive, drink, work, date, go out and have sex than were teens just 10 years ago. Today’s 18-year-olds look like 15-year-olds used to. They don’t reach adulthood too early, but they also lack experience with independence and decision-making.
Her book is out, but I have yet to read it. The reviews have been mixed. Tyler calls it new and excellent.
Jonathan Haidt does not mention Twenge in this interview, but his observations parallel hers.
Haidt believes there is a mental-health crisis on campus: ‘I have never seen such rapid increase in indicators of anxiety and depression as we have seen in the past few years’, he says.
The interesting brief interview with Haidt includes this:
‘Kids need conflict, insult, exclusion – they need to experience these things thousands of times when they’re young in order to develop into psychologically mature adults. Every adult has to learn to handle these things and not get upset, especially by minor instances. But in the name of protecting our children we have deprived them of the unsupervised time they need to learn how to navigate conflict among themselves. That is one of the main reasons why kids and even college students today find words, ideas and social situations more intolerable than those same words, ideas and situations would have been for previous generations of students.’
The problem I have with this is conflict, insult, and exclusion are signs of immaturity than maturity and ways of shutting down real communication and learning to ignore them may not be the path to maturity but to callused immaturity insulated from the real world, much like politics as we know it.
John Stuart Mill understood that word, harm. But he was unusual, and he was liberal, and he could think for himself. Progressive group-think, by contrast, is as old as it gets. Progressives are primitives. They’re savages, obsessed with taboos. They have this pre-scientific way of thinking, which is this pre-Enlightenment idea that if you’re true to your tribe, that’s what the truth is.
Whereas to Mill, harm and heresy are not the same thing. The lynch mobs on twitter, people stoning other people to death, the people who wanted Socrates exiled from Athens, that’s the usual and natural course of events. That’s the traditional way that people have always done things, to think that harm means disloyalty and offense to the group.
Mark Lilla mentioned taboos in his version of this. This was Lilla in the Journal four weeks before Twenge: “Classroom conversations that once might have begun, I think A, and here is my argument, now take the form, Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B. What replaces argument, then, are taboos against unfamiliar ideas and contrary opinions.”
Liberalism is the alternative to what we’re seeing on campus, and at Google, and The Handmaid’s Tale on TV. But understanding the harm principle is not a natural thing. To most people in most societies, it does harm to the group to undermine it with thoughts. Thoughts are dangerous. Argument is taboo. It’s not specific to this generation or that. What’s peculiar is the extended order, not the fatal conceit. What’s unusual is abstract thought, and reasoning from first principles, and people talking things out, reasoning together, having to use their words instead of throwing tantrums like kids.
‘Kids need conflict, insult, exclusion – they need to experience these things thousands of times when they’re young in order to develop into psychologically mature adults.
Make America Great Again by making High School completely fuckin’ awful! We need increase depression in High Schoolers to understand how awful things will be in the future.
It does seem weird how upset conservatives are that the best behaved teenagers in generation are seen as failures in life.
I think she says we need to allow conflict and disagreement in high school in order to avoid depression later. That if you have not developed ways to handle conflict and disagreement, you will wilt like a hothouse flower when you leave the greenhouse.
It still feels like Oscar Wilde “What does not kill us, only makes us stronger.”
Feels TO YOU.
That was Nietzsche, not Oscar Wilde.
Allowing disagreement without PTSD-inducing levels of conflict. It’s like trying to hit the sweet-spot on immigrants vs. natives when your only tool is a none/all switch. Pulse-width-modulation approach doesn’t work, given a loop bandwidth of a human generation or so.