GENERATION Z: DESPERATE FOR RULES

First Things ^ | March 14, 2017 | Betsy VanDenBerghe

[NYer]

I recently attended a meeting that many would consider anachronistic: Standards Night, an annual gathering for Mormon youth and their parents encouraging chaste and porn-free living. Some call this ritual and others like it nothing more than a chance to shame and stigmatize normal adolescent behavior. Admittedly, the baby (teaching moral standards) has sometimes been immersed in bathwater (messaging that leaves kids guilt-ridden and hopeless about measuring up). Many a memoir or critically acclaimed novel covers this coming-of-age territory well.

But this Standards Night—as I imagine similar gatherings play out, in Evangelical or Catholic circles—acknowledged the likelihood that some youth had already fallen short in the pornography and sexual-activity arenas. The messaging included a heavy dose of forgiveness terminology, which emphasized yet another anachronism, repentance, assuring those who’d messed up that they could try again. And again. And again.

Most important, the meeting emphasized the long-term gratification linked with delaying sex until marriage—and here the research offers a counterintuitive comeback to the assumption that high moral standards wreak havoc on the psyches of young men and women in traditional religious cultures. Extensive, rigorous, and long-term academic studies that control for demographic and socioeconomic factors continue to associate church-going youth with academic achievement, high self-esteem, optimism, ability to reason morally, strong family bonds, and low levels of risky behavior such as crime, substance abuse, and premarital sex.

Avoiding premarital sex not only confers present benefits—such as bypassing sexting, revenge porn, teen pregnancy, abortion, and STDs, which are now at record high levels—it also creates a buffer against future divorce. Those who refrain from sexual activity before marriage are statistically more likely to create stable, committed marriages, marriages that research correlates with better mental and physical health, increased financial stability, and (here’s another counterintuitive fact) greater sexual satisfaction. This kind of gratification really is long-term, and covers just about every aspect of life.

Abiding by moral rules, especially when they are explained meaningfully and mercifully, gives teenagers swimming in a sea of relativism and nihilism what David Brooks calls a “moral vocabulary.” Sympathy for multiple generations of family breakdown wrought by moral anarchy isn’t enough. People need norms, writes Brooks, “basic codes and rules woven into daily life” that offer an alternative to the “plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refuse[s] to assert that one way of behaving [is] better than another.”

Few teenagers, however, are getting the encouragement they need to swim against the zeitgeist. Instead, well-meaning role models hand out condoms while messaging that no bodily urge need be denied. No wonder the recent Singles in America survey shows that millennials are okay with sleeping with someone before a first date, but get turned off if their partner’s phone is cracked.

Yet short-term sexual gratification isn’t all that gratifying, a conclusion that Donna Freitas, a fellow with the University of Notre Dame, reached in ten years of researching college students’ attitudes about the hookup culture. Recently, at an Ivy League version of Standards Night, she told a Princeton audience gathered for the Love and Fidelity Network conference that young people are deeply disappointed and harmed by emotionally disengaged sexual encounters. “One student said it’s like a competition to see who can care the least,” Freitas explained, “and another told me that ‘whoever cares the least wins.’”

Kids like these grow up, I heard one radio minister say, as if driving in a blinding snowstorm with no lines on the road. Those with enough wherewithal sometimes draw their own lines. I remember a creative writing class in which a fraternity student’s autobiographical sketch described the self-loathing he experienced after running into girls on campus he had seduced. He chose celibacy, he wrote, not because of religious convictions, but because his conscience drove him to it. But as Tom Wolfe, whose Charlotte Simmons character emblematized the moral wasteland of campus sexual mores, observes, “Eventually everybody needs reinforcement by some kind of authority.”

Unfortunately, many young men craving lines are drawing them in the wrong places. For instance, white nationalism sites often require a strict code of conduct that bans porn, promiscuity, and tattoos, and promotes a self-disciplined work and fitness ethic. But people of color need not apply. Has it come to this? Where youth in and out of college have nowhere better to turn for voices of restraint? Ironically, the educated elite, with their long-term marriages and two-parent households, exemplify “the secret sauce of economic well-being that nobody on the left wants to admit to using.”

Even when kids turn to religion, it may get harder for them to find church-going friends, if Christians retreat into their own enclaves—an idea gaining traction as the Benedict Option, thanks to Rod Dreher. To his credit, Dreher insists that Benedict Option enclaves must remain hospitable to refugees from the sexual revolution and others craving rules and moral paradigms. These sojourners do exist. My friend’s son, during medical school orientation meetings, ran into a young woman who, on discovering he was LDS, asked him please to invite her to any and all church social activities. She wasn’t interested in the religion, she said, but she liked hanging out with Mormons and their no-alcohol, wholesome ethos. Even Naomi Wolfe once expressed a similar sense of “tradition envy.” Visiting an Orthodox Jewish wife in an Israeli settlement, Wolfe compared the shrouded sanctity of the Orthodox marital bedroom to the atmosphere in back home, in which, due to pornography, “our husbands see naked women all day.” Wolfe wrote of her friend: “She must feel, I thought, so hot.”

For the record, Mormon youth leaders don’t harp on sex and porn and the rules all that often. Most of the time, we’re talking about the weightier matters of the law, trying to get kids to be nice and follow Jesus, or taking them camping, refereeing the activities they come up with, and trying to get them off their %#&@ phones. My culture isn’t perfect, we readily admit, and a lot of good, moral people exist outside of it. But every once in a while, we do, with some trepidation, lay down the rules. Somebody’s got to do it.

[NYer]

(With liberalism) All relationships in a way become power-centric, i.e., who has the upper hand in controlling the other. Morality not only becomes individualized but so does authority. One can easily see how this leads to the political and social chaos and conflict we see in the world today. Looking out further however, it can be envisioned where liberalism is headed -- to an end point where not only are morality and authority being customized by the individual, but the individual is literally customizing himself (or herself).

A Preview of Liberalism’s End Point

An example from this article.

[NYer]

People need norms, writes Brooks, “basic codes and rules woven into daily life” that offer an alternative to the “plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refuse[s] to assert that one way of behaving [is] better than another.”

Perhaps we will witness the turning of the tide. It's been 12 years since he delivered his Pro Eligendo homily and his words still ring out the alarm.

“We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI - April 2005

Catholic ping!

[BipolarBob]

What a beauty you found.

[Steve Van Doorn]

That idiot you posted is a millennial not generation Z. Millennial in general seem to not be able to think for themselves. Generation Z are able to think for themselves and question authority better then any generation in decades. Because of that they seem to be the most Classic liberal types ever

[NYer]

That idiot you posted is a millennial not generation Z.

Had you read my comment, you would have understood that this photo is an example of moral relativism, the very reason Generation Z is seeking rules.

[savagesusie]

The system (skools/Hollywood, “art”) is designed by sophisticated Marxists who started taking over Western “culture” in the late 1800s by ‘Killing God” (Christianity/all traditions, all meaning, etc) so they could erase the Age of Reason and Virtue formation in children——to make them into useful idiots, ignorant of all Great Books/ideas, including demonizing and rewriting the “Bible” making it meaningless.

All people have faith, but no “faith” is as perfect, just and grand as Christianity, which acknowledges the Truth and the true nature of man. There is no utopia on earth (fact). Marxism is total removal from Reality (Truth).

Marxism throws out Rule of Law (Higher Laws/God’s) for Man-made irrational “laws” which make Good into Evil, Vice into Virtue and creates totally dehumanized cultures (slave/totalitarian systems).

It was Christianity which discovered the Way to Excellence (continuing from the Greek Masters and the Stoics of Rome which melted with Christianity to form the most brilliant, abstract “thought” in the history of mankind. The “Kill God” group—set up the Dialectical Materialism (controlled info, curricula, Words, etc.) so they could destroy the minds of little children. Repeating the lies and dysfunctions on big screens, confronting children 24/7. For radical egalitarianism, they have to destroy sexual identity formation in little children, to destroy agency and individualism—for ‘group-(non)-think” which is perfected in skools.

It conditions them to believe lies and disinformation—warping emotions— and it creates “cognitive dissonance” when confronted by Truth (God), Schools make them so irrational, and dumb and ignorant, they couldn’t even tell a boy from a girl at age four which ALL CHILDREN could do when raised in the Natural Family where individualism,, agency and identity were NOT WARPED by these psychopathic sodomites (Common Core/NCLB/Goals 2000) who warp and destroy the integration of the minds of children by operant conditioning. It creates children with compartmentalized brains-—always in chaos, never integrated and balanced and whole. They will be susceptible to insane ideologies.

Truth is never relative.. Objective Truth is what formed our “Justice” system but now moral relativism reigns and is destroying culture (moral formation in children). Toxic cultures will collapse into tyranny.

[pgkdan]

For instance, white nationalism sites often require a strict code of conduct that bans porn, promiscuity, and tattoos, and promotes a self-disciplined work and fitness ethic. But people of color need not apply.

I'm not defending white nationalism but what do you expect when the entire culture assumes that whites are evil because they're white? When college kids are forced to sit in classes and seminars harping on the depravity of white privilege and white people in general? This kind of backlash...and worse is inevitable.

Sorry for going off topic.

[Blue Jays]

Exactly correct, pgkdan.
I personally know innocent kids 11-12 years old...who possess deep guilt about their white skin tone.
There is something wrong with that picture. Perfectly nice, engaging, sweet, and friendly kids buried in guilt.

Thirty years ago they would have volunteered to collect litter in a local playground. Now it MUST be a clean-up effort at a playground in a predominantly-black ghetto because they have been shamed sufficiently to believe helping their own neighborhood is now totally inadequate.

[Tax-chick]

In case I was not the only one wondering, a preponderance of sources mentioned Wikipedia say that “Generation Z” begins with people born in 1995 and continues to Whenever.

[BlueLancer]

Z is for Zombie?

[GreyFriar]

Amen to Pope Benedict XVI’s point: “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism....”

I first saw the concept of “relativism” when I was at St. Joseph’s college back in the late 60s. It was not taught in our philosophy, ethics, and religion courses but was being discussed by students under the name of “situational ethics” i.e. finding reasons for doing things like stealing ‘because a starving person may have that as the only way to get food.’

I was against it then and have not changed my position.

[zot]

Thanks for the ping. “situational ethics” (aka relativism) was and is a highly effective attack on Christianity. It destroys the entire concept of sin and the need for repentance.