Will 'Generation Z' Take Us All to Hell?

The Catholic Thing

By David Warren
"Well done, good and faithful servant," as we said to ourselves in thinking (here) of Saint Bruno today, that courageous enemy of decadence and filth, and of the Carthusian Order he founded. "Euge!"
I've been trying to catch up with our social degeneration with the help of Jonathan Haidt, the only social psychologist who is, apparently, not also a left-wing lunatic. His recent book, The Anxious Generation, is a study of the latest generation of our youth, and how they've been rewired by the Internet.
It's a challenging topic, for none of the subjects of his study has - as a result of entanglement in apps, video games, and influencers - what was previously known as an "attention span." Dr. Haidt writes about people who have no use for books, and will only tune into a summary for as long as it takes to call up another screen.
The beginning of this "revolution" was in approximately 2014, or prior to the visitation of Batflu. Or perhaps 2011, according to alternative reports. The "Zoomer" cohort was born about 1997, so as their teens began to pass into adulthood, "social media" arrived.
It arrived for their elders, too, but we had the advantage of familiarity with a world before, which I fondly remember. The speed with which it came, saw, and conquered, was not an event. There is simply a before, and an after, when nothing will ever be the same.
Around here in Toronto, for instance, it is difficult to spot a young person who is not jangled and inhabited by extra-planetary voices, to which he is wired via headphone. Except, the little buds sticking out his ears seem now to have been "integrated" with his flesh.
Dr. Haidt investigates the brave new world of mental illness that follows from youthful addiction, in America, and more or less simultaneously, everywhere on earth. He looks at the consequence of lost childhoods, where play has ceased to happen, along with independent exploration, on the path to maturity. He surveys the explosion of anxieties that have resulted: the children have freaked out.
My son, who is a technologist (but nevertheless sane) points to the apps, rather than the telephony, available through various hand-held devices. It's more or less plain that unrestricted commercial "sponsors" govern them, and direct the social damage for their own material gain, without the slightest sense of responsibility.
As are the political interests, which do not give a damn about moral consequences, but wish to censor deviation from their narrow party lines. They are the co-authors of the catastrophe, by using heretical inquisitions to constrain our ability to resist, by suppressing freedom of speech.
Yet so would the (sometimes attractive) idea of shutting the whole Internet down - which would be the shortest way with the abusers. The sun will do that anyway, at the next Carrington Event.
For Generation Z itself, there is a question whether it would survive Internet closure - as the final step in the dramatic decline, from many causes, of the birthrate. For we were counting on the younger generation to provide us with further generations of kids; but they have better things to do.
Perhaps they are "the last generation"? Or maybe they merely precede a great depopulation, as the Black Plague did in the XIVth century.
For like ants, and bedbugs, the creatures with which Heaven favors this world are characteristically robust, within their allotted "time zones," and do not simply disappear without something ready to replace them. It isn't for us to know what, or who, that will be.
And if we did know, we would be mortally surprised.
But meanwhile we have some years to run, with a generation that can't be counted on, for anything. This is what makes Generation Z unique.
We cannot even count on them to be evil, in the time-honored ways, as previous generations were, since Adam. I would not mistake this for innocence, however.
We cannot expect them to follow self-interest, or even the perversions of self-interest that...