The Coming New Dark Ages: Millennials say why they are fragile

Millennial Offers the True Reason Her Generation is So Fragile

In a recent op-ed for Detroit News, millennial Kaylee McGhee offered an insightful explanation of her own:  

“Millennials are in a constant contest to one-up each other in showing tolerance, and when anyone or anything stands in their way, they collapse into temper tantrums.   

And the truth is, none of us should be surprised. My generation is a symptom of the society past generations have built — one characterized by immediate gratification, the breakdown of a moral code and the victim mentality. It’s the wreckage of past generations’ experiments with post-modern liberalism, and millennials are trying to wade through it.  

Millennials are desperately searching for answers to questions they’re afraid to ask. And because our predecessors failed to defend the moral code that once provided clarity, my generation replaced it with the morality of political correctness. The result is the snowflake-ification of a generation.” 

Millennials Value Tolerance Over Freedom

Pew Research Center, reports 40 percent of millennials believe government should be able to prevent people from saying offensive things to minority groups. A devout individual objecting to taking photos at a same-sex wedding could qualify for being offensive to a minority group. Thus, Millennials either keep quiet to be perceived as “tolerant” or supposedly fight for equality.

And politically conservative Millennials tend to fold like a tent rather than defend their beliefs:

Conservative Millennials have a tendency to discard their religious values to appease culture, like on the issue of abortion. In politics, conservatives consistently concede to culture’s vocal opposition to pro-life policies. ... millennials have a tendency to keep the peace with secular culture as its values seep into academic institutions and the workplace. Standing with the religious baker or florist objecting to an action to preserve their conscience may result in social ostracism.

All of which seems to me that this generation is relapsing into being ruled by honor-shame dynamics, in which the inner compass of conscience, objective moral codes and universal values are diminished - in fact altogether discarded. Instead, wholly subjective assessments reign supreme.

Jon Miltimore, whence the first link, responded to Ms. McGhee that her op-ed,

... relates to the thesis of Alasdair MacIntyre’s seminal philosophical work After Virtue. In the book, the Notre Dame professor posits the theory that the Aristotelian moral framework that had existed in the West for over two thousand years was essentially destroyed during the Enlightenment, and efforts to unify it with a coherent Enlightenment philosophy failed, though philosophers failed to realize this.   

The result was that man still largely practiced and observed traditional moral values for generations, but did so largely lacking any understanding of the ideas that underpinned these values. MacIntyre, whose book was published in 1981 (the dawn of the Millennial Generation), concluded with an argument suggesting that man, almost entirely unbeknownst to him, had entered a dark age in which moral clarity and consensus were virtually impossible.

I have written about this quite a bit. What follows is an excerpt from my post, "Honor, shame, the Middle East and the American left."

The psychologist who uses the nom de blog of Dr. Sanity explained in Shame, the Arab Psyche, and Islam, that in Arab cultures, the principal concern over conduct is not that which is guilty or innocent, but that which brings honor or shame.

[W]hat other people believe has a far more powerful impact on behavior than even what the individual believes. [T]he desire to preserve honor and avoid shame to the exclusion of all else is one of the primary foundations of the culture. This desire has the side-effect of giving the individual carte blanche to engage in wrong-doing as long as no-one knows about it, or knows he is involved.

In contrast, she says, the West has a Guilt/Innocence culture. "The guilt culture is typically and primarily concerned with truth, justice, and the preservation of individual rights."

She illustrates the great difference between the two cultures by this matrix:

The key: if your principal concern is your standing in your community and what others think about you rather than your own inherent sense of conscience and personal sense of worth, then you are operating on a honor/shame model.

And that seems to be the social dynamic at work among the Millennials. If so, if Alasdair McIntyre is correct, we are indeed entering a new Dark Ages.