Generation Greta: Too Afraid To Live
Excerpt:
The Lancet recently released a study involving ten countries around the world, of young people’s (aged 16 to 25) stance towards the future in light of climate change. It was pretty distressing. For example, 39 percent say that they are not sure about having children. Huge numbers — almost half of young Americans surveyed — agree with the statement “humanity is doomed.”
Ben Sixsmith, writing on his excellent Substack (this entry is for subscribers only, but you should become one), says that some degree of existential pessimism is inevitable:
Once mankind developed the capacity for self-destruction, the sense that our luck could not endure forever was baked into our consciousness. How can our tools grow more powerful, and more accessible, without being misused? “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall,” said Anton Chekov as a rule for writing, “In the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.” The same logic of grim inevitability leads many of us to wonder about our final page.
I remember the winter day — probably it was 1979, when I was twelve — when I was sitting in my father’s Bronco, driving across a wet field on our way back from a morning of deer hunting. I had worked out somehow that it would take a Soviet nuclear-armed missile 19 minutes to reach us from its launch pad. We were always 19 minutes away at any moment from certain doom. I told that to my father, whose answer was something like, “Don’t worry about it.” I knew instantly that he had no answer for me, because there was no reassuring response. It was such an electric moment because it was the first time I knew that there were some things in the world outside of the control of grown-ups.
My father told me years later that he had been in the US Coast Guard during the Cuban missile crisis, and that his crew had been prepared by their commanders for nuclear war. They really did think this was going to happen. Can you imagine what that felt like? Well, I can to some extent, because I spent the early 1980s very scared about a nuclear holocaust. But my dad and his crew really did think it was going to happen right then. What a gift it has been to those born after the end of the Cold War, that they could grow up without this fear. Of course a nuclear war could still happen. Russia still has its weapons, as do we … and as does China, and a handful of other nations. But the palpable fear disappeared with the Cold War.
This is to say, in part, that this kind of existential doom felt by the young today feels familiar. One difference, though, is that there was no certitude that a nuclear war would happen. As more and more data come in, the certitude grows that the climate is shifting in ways that will make life on this planet more difficult. On the other hand, a nuclear war is all but unsurvivable (and those who did survive would envy the dead). We have the capacity to use our intelligence to adapt to whatever climate change throws at us. It’s not going to be easy or pleasant, but life can go on, if we want it to. What is interesting to me is the seeming unwillingness of so many young people (in the survey) to fight for the continuation of life.
…People of my father’s generation were the last ones to be formed by the Before Times — that is, by the remnants of a Christian culture. The Sixties marked what Philip Rieff called the “triumph of the therapeutic” — a mode of being that had arisen in the early 20th century, but which conquered the culture in the Sixties. In 1966, Rieff published his great book The Triumph of the Therapeutic, which was absolutely prophetic. Here are two relevant excerpts; emphases are mine:
I, too, aspire to see clearly, like a rifleman, with one eye shut; I, too, aspire to think without assent. This is the ultimate violence to which the modern intellectual is committed. Since things have become as they are, I, too, share the modern desire not to be deceived. The culture to which I was first habituated grows progressively different in its symbolic nature and in its human product; that double difference and how ordained augments our ambivalence as professional mourners. There seems little likelihood of a great rebirth of the old corporate ideals. The “proletariat” was the most recent notable corporate identity, the latest failed god. By this time men may have gone too far, beyond the old deception of good and evil, to specialize at last, wittingly, in techniques that are to be called, in the present volume, “therapeutic,” with nothing at stake beyond a manipulatable sense of well-being. This is the unreligion of the age, and its master science. What the ignorant have always felt, the knowing now know, after millennial distractions by stratagems that did not heighten the more immediate pleasures. The systematic hunting down of all settled convictions represents the anti-cultural predicate upon which modern personality is being reorganized, now not in the West only but, more slowly, in the non-West. The Orient and Africa are thus being acculturated in a dynamism that has already grown substantial enough to torment its progenitors with nightmares of revenge for having so unsettled the world. It is a terrible error to see the West as conservative and the East as revolutionary. We are the true revolutionaries. The East is swiftly learning to act as we do, which is anti-conservative in a way non-Western peoples have only recently begun fully to realize for themselves.
And:
As cultures change, so do the modal types of personality that are their bearers. The kind of man I see emerging, as our culture fades into the next, resembles the kind once called “spiritual”—because such a man desires to preserve the inherited morality freed from its hard external crust of institutional discipline. Yet a culture survives principally, I think, by the power of its institutions to bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood—with that understanding of which explicit belief and precise knowledge of externals would show outwardly like the tip of an iceberg. Spiritualizers of religion (and precisians of science) failed to take into account the degree of intimacy with which this comprehensive interior understanding was cognate with historic institutions, binding even the ignorants of a culture to a great chain of meaning. These institutions are responsible for conveying the social conditions of their acceptance by men thus saved from destructive illusions of uniqueness and separateness. Having broken the outward forms, so as to liberate, allegedly, the inner meaning of the good, the beautiful, and the true, the spiritualizers, who set the pace of Western cultural life from just before the beginning to a short time after the end of the nineteenth century, have given way now to their logical and historical successors, the psychologizers, inheritors of that dualist tradition which pits human nature against social order.
Undeceived, as they think, about the sources of all morally binding address, the psychologizers, now fully established as the pacesetters of cultural change, propose to help men avoid doing further damage to themselves by preventing live deceptions from succeeding the dead ones. But, in order to save themselves from falling apart with their culture, men must engender another, different and yet powerful enough in its reorganization of experience to make themselves capable again of controlling the infinite variety of panic and emptiness to which they are disposed. It is to control their dis-ease as individuals that men have always acted culturally, in good faith. Books and parading, prayers and the sciences, music and piety toward parents: these are a few of the many instruments by which a culture may produce the saving larger self, for the control of panic and the filling up of emptiness. Superior to and encompassing the different modes in which it appears, a culture must communicate ideals, setting as internalities those distinctions between right actions and wrong that unite men and permit them the fundamental pleasure of agreement. Culture is another name for a design of motives directing the self outward, toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied.
Rieff is not an easy writer to read. What he’s saying here, and what he says in his book, is that we of the modern West are a truly revolutionary culture. We have arrived at the conclusion that there are no higher ideals to organize ourselves around, so the only thing left for us to do is pursue the well being of the Self. This is what he means by a “therapeutic” culture: one whose purpose is to help humankind cope with anxiety. Rieff said that religious man is born to be saved, but psychological man is born to be pleased. This is us. And now, with our young people faced with panic and emptiness, we have given them nothing that allows them to control it. The best we can do is distract them.
I think wokeness — or, I guess we should use the new term, wokism — is a pseudo-religious attempt to control the panic and emptiness of the post-Christian therapeutic order. …
…Switch “wokism” for “Marxism,” and you will understand. Nevertheless, it is useful to think of wokism in religious terms, because it is meant to play the psychological role that religion once did. It is supposed to restore order to the chaos by imposing humankind’s will on it. Many people who are desperate for a sense of meaning in the current chaos are clinging to wokism because it promises them a sense of meaning, purpose, and solidarity. Older people may not really believe in it, but they submit to it because it’s the way of the world today, and if they want to maintain their position in the system, they convert outwardly, preferring to live by lies than to risk a loss of comfort and status.
I don’t want to say that sense of doom that the young have (re: the Lancet survey) is inappropriate. There can be no doubt that they face tremendous challenges trying to build a life today. We have deprived them of the only real source of hope: the conviction that there is God who orders the universe, and who loves them, and who guarantees that their suffering is not meaningless. To refuse to have children on the principle that it would be wrong to bring them into this world is to surrender hope in the future. It’s an extraordinary thing, given the dismal prospects that most people who have ever lived faced — and yet, they carried on. Not us. We face this global crisis at precisely the time when we in the West, with our global communications reach, have denied ourselves and the world what we all need to endure, even triumph over, adversity.
Hear me clearly: the therapeutic gospel — whether in its left-wing forms (woke Christianity) or right-wing forms (prosperity gospel) is false teaching. If you are in a therapeutic church, now is the time to make plans to leave. If you are not in a church that is teaching you why and how to endure suffering for the truth, then you are not in a church that is preparing you for the world as it is today, and the world very shortly to come.