The Kids Are Alright
Glenn Reynolds has been writing again about how indicators of teenage misbehaviour that were so prevalent 10 or 20 years ago are actually better now, even though the supposedly corrupting factors of readily-available violent movies, videogames, and porn, are also more freely available than ever.
He says jokingly that government should mandate heavy exposure to video and porn. More seriously, he says there is no clear cause and effect between bad pop culture and bad acts. If there is one, it might work in a way opposite to what the do-gooders predict; kids might get the wild stuff out of their system ("catharsis," not necessarily in Aristotle's sense of the word) so that they feel less need to act out in the world.
This reminds me of Allan Bloom, who apparently was always willing to get into the old arguments about censorship: Plato's Republic, and Rousseau's Letter on the Arts, even more than Milton and Mill. (Rousseau says the theatre, uninhibited dancing, and probably lots of other things, have a bad effect on the young. In a footnote he says: some will conclude from this essay that I do not dance--I love to dance; or that I hate the theatre--I never miss an opening night!).
More immediately, the Toronto Star had a nice piece about a young woman in the suburbs of Toronto. She takes a reporter around to her hang-outs. She has recently left high school. She says "hey" to lots of people, everywhere she goes. She likes to go clubbing (she works for her money, but some of her friends are simply given spending money by parents), so she plans where to go, and with whom. Were the cliques bad in high school? There are problems, but she found them manageable. She actually moved to a brand new town in high school, and had other girls over to her parents' house the first day of school.
She hung out to some extent with the popular girls, the "Ho-Train Girls," as they were nicknamed by some of the boys, but she was never really in that circle, and she never felt strong pressure to do something she didn't want to do. She sees every young person as making a decision as to when to have sex, and with whom. A 19-year old virgin is regarded as unusual, but there is still a strong sense that one decides for oneself. She smokes pot, with her parents' knowledge.
This all made me think that this life actually works quite well--and, as Reynolds says, in ways that moralists would not have predicted. How far is this from the cloistered lives that women used to lead in the West, and still do in much of the world?
What I think Bloom would want to bring up is the "political" part of "political life"--which certainly includes what we call morality. Kids may not be overtly violent, drug-crazed, or whatever, but what exactly are they thinking about? Does good citizenship have any meaning?
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