Today's Youth - Warning! Philosophical Rambling Ahead

I didn't get much sleep earlier, so between sleep deprivation and lots of coffee I'm in a rare state of mind.

You may not feel like reading this whole post, so I'll boil it down to a headline:

Things Change: Deal With It

Someone brought up the state of today's youth in an online discussion Thursday ("Are the Youth Of Today Hopeless?" BlogCatalog discussion thread (started July 17, 2008)). (In case you're wondering how the discussion came out, I think the majority answered 'no.')

The question is one which people who aren't young ask from time to time. Here's my take on it: a comment from that discussion thread, after some chainsaw editing.

Today's Kids! I Tell You, it's The End!

One of the great philosophers of the Golden Age of Greece thought that the youth of his 'today' were hopeless:

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
Attributed to Socrates (469-399 bce, by Plato - and still disputed
(quotationsbook.com/quote/44998)

My guess is that Socrates, or whoever said that, was quite correct. That's what children and youth often are like. And, that's why it takes so long to train us to be grownups. That's right - us. I haven't been a youth since around the time of the Apollo Program, but I went through that mangle, just like everyone else who survives to adulthood.

If Socrates (or whoever) was worried about civilization as he knew it coming to an end, he was completely correct.

His civilization is gone. Kaput. But not exactly finished. I'll get back to that.

A lot has changed in the roughly two dozen centuries since that Greek deplored the state of his society's youth.

Things haven't changed much.

I'm pretty sure that 'civilization as we know it' is coming to an end right now. The key phrase is as we know it. I've learned enough about history and humanity to know that, although human nature seems to be fairly constant. What makes different times and places so different is that each culture works out different ways of dealing with their humanity - and generally changes those ways over time.

The End of Civilization as We Know It

I don't think today's youth are "hopeless." Occasionally lazy, irresponsible, self-centered, shallow, uncontemplative, and impatient - but we're all like that, more or less, on our way to growing up. And after we've gotten there, truth be told.

And, civilization as we know it is coming to an end. But it's not because of those kids. The America I grew up in doesn't exist any more. There is an America, but it isn't the Hula-Hooping place I grew up in.

The Greece of Socrates has been gone for thousands of years. But the parts that worked, and the parts that added beauty and reason to life, have lasted - and are a part of today's world.

There's an interesting, and rather tongue-in-cheek, page about this general topic at "Anxiety Culture: 8000 years of (civilization-threatening) anti-social behavior". It gives a little perspective just what this 'youth crisis' really is.