American Greatness
Millennials look for meaningful existence in false gods of social justice, unable to find it where they should, in church, in tradition, in humanitas, in country.
. . ."Not the students, though. This wasn’t funny at all. They went after Trump’s racism and barked objections to “the wall.” A couple of them stormed out and slammed the doors after I answered their challenges. I had mentioned Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman in my short talk—classic voices that hailed the iconoclast and the irreverent—and the very first question I got chided me for selecting those three white males.
"I wanted to reply, “Who ever taught you to think in this way?” but I didn’t want to insult my hosts. Instead, I went with a little sarcasm: “Oh, yes, it’s really bad, especially when Emerson says that society is in ‘conspiracy’ against the ‘manhood’ of its members” (“Self-Reliance”). I stressed the word “manhood” and waited for the questioner to respond. He remained quiet, so I gave the crowd the historical fact that the “manhood” element in Emerson didn’t stop thousands of strong women in the 1840s from reading him and recognizing, “Yeah, that’s me!” The questioner still didn’t reply—had he read one word of those three men before?—so another student shouted, “But were they black women?!”. . .
. . ."Cancel culture proves that Millennials have moral fervor. They aren’t the sly relativists of which Allan Bloom warned in The Closing of the American Mind. What they lack, instead, is a solid education in history, politics, religion, literature, languages, and art. The mentors didn’t give it to them, no real heroes, no gods, no glorious past, no great nations, no meetings with the beautiful and the sublime. They disallowed identification with vivid characters and larger-than-life personages, teaching critical thinking, instead. No patriotism, no faith, no reverence—those are naïve, old-fashioned, uncritical. Let’s demystify and politicize and theorize, rather; just what rising adults need in this dynamic, disruptive 21st century, right?
"The result isn’t, however, a youth of critical scrutiny, skeptical of absolutes. It is the opposite, a moral vision that is absolute and simplistic, a Millennial outlook that neatly divides sociopolitical sins (racism, voting for Trump . . .) from utopian wishes (“No person is illegal,” “Love is love” . . .). And it springs right out of the vacancy in their hearts and minds that the mentors failed to fill. We robbed them of greatness and meaning and purpose and transcendence. We gave them no role models. The universal desire for those inspirations didn’t go away, but nobody supplied them. I’d be angry, too.". . .
