Don’t worship the Parkland survivors
Were you wiser when you were half your age?
We should not celebrate young people as wiser and more moral than adults
High school kids will hold big demonstrations in Washington and elsewhere to demand gun control in the wake of the shootings in Parkland, Fla. That’s fine by me. I disagree with the thrust of what they want to do as a matter of policy, but it’s a free country.
My problem is with the resurgence of an old American tradition of celebrating young people as wiser and more moral than adults. There are really three problems with the fetishization of youth in politics. First, it’s based on a faulty premise: that young people have a radically or uniquely superior insight into political affairs.
This is an ancient confusion. It usually hinges on misinterpreting the fact that young people see the world with fresh eyes, as it were.
And it’s true that young people have a gift for cutting through the false pieties and polite fictions of modern life, as when a nephew points out how much weight you’ve gained. Even the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes is a story about a kid too ignorant to know when to placate a king’s vanity. But the simple fact is that young people are not, as a group, better informed, wiser, smarter or even more enlightened than older people. This is a fact of science and social science alike. We are born ignorant of the world we live in and only lose that ignorance over time.
Think about what you knew and understood at half your current age. Were you smarter then? Wiser? Why assume it works differently for anyone else?
“To all the generations before us,” Cameron Kasky, one of the Parkland survivors recently said on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, “we sincerely accept your apology. And we appreciate that you are willing to let us rebuild the world that you f---ed up.”
I get the passion. I get the rage and trauma behind it. But this nonsense is as pernicious as it is obnoxious. (I’ve apologized for nothing, by the way, have you?) It’s also not true.
Young people today, and particularly young Americans, should be brimming with gratitude for the world they are in- heriting. Lest you think this a cranky right-wing sentiment, let me align myself with Barack Obama: “If you had to choose a moment in time to be born, any time in human history, and you didn’t know ahead of time what nationality you were or what gender or what your economic status might be, you’d choose today.”
Kasky, a junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, is standing on a soapbox built with the toil of previous generations and he’s taking a sledgehammer to it — because he doesn’t know better. My hunch is that a great many people who take offense at my criticism do so either because of Kasky’s traumatic experience or because they agree with him — if not about the bankruptcy of the past then about his anti-gun agenda.
And that brings me to the second problem with the glorification of youth: It invariably involves powerful adults finding kids who agree with them on some issue and then claiming that all young people think this way (and then hiding behind the myth that we must listen to “the children”). If these Parkland kids came out for concealed-carry or arming teachers, you can be sure MSNBC would not be touting them in commercials.
The third and most galling thing about adult partisans hiding behind kids is that it amounts to power-worship. “I know that whenever you disapprove of young people, you’re in the wrong,” author Tim Kreider wrote in The New York Times, “because you’re going to die and they’ll get to write history.” Factually, this is balderdash.
Young people change their minds about lots of things as they get older, and historians rarely lock in the views of young people a few decades later. This is also ethically bankrupt because it assumes that whatever kids today believe will be right because the victors write the history, so we should just surrender to the youngest mob.
Democracy depends on arguments that are not contingent on your age. Lots of kids don’t understand that, but grown-ups are supposed to.