Destructive Perversions of Divine Providence

How Unbelief Has Produced a Demanding, Coddled Generation

A strange phenom has hit our universities.  It is described as follows:

New York University professor Jonathan Haidt [The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure] thinks there has never been a generation as cut off from the lessons learnt by previous generations as today's so-called Generation Z, also called the iGen.  "All kinds of wild ideas that are untested and are demonstrably bad for them and demonstrably wrong – these ideas can spread like wildfire so long as they are emotionally appealing. Social media and other innovations have cut the lines that previously would have tethered the balloon to Earth, and the balloon has taken off." [Stuff]

What has caused this nonsense?  Answer: the failure of parents to prepare their children for the real world.  They have replaced reality with an emotional glass house where they try to protect their children from anything and anyone that might be harmful.  Others have called this "helicopter parenting".

As these children have grown up they have gone on to universities and the workplace carrying with them the expectations inscribed into their minds by their parental mother-ship.  They want protection from anything that might be regarded as a threat.

But Haidt and Lukianoff say that in the US, the new morality has reached its apogee in prestigious universities, particularly in residential colleges.

In these institutions, they say, student demands have escalated for "safe spaces" where students can be protected from speakers, language or ideas that offend them – if they have been unsuccessful in getting invitations to such speakers withdrawn in the first place. Some students demand that lecturers give "trigger warnings" if a lecture might contain language or ideas that might upset them, and sometimes such language can be considered aggression, or even violence.

There are shame circles, denunciations and ritualised apologies as during the Cultural Revolution in Communist China. "We have data showing students are afraid, mostly of each other, and the professors are afraid, mostly of the students."

But why have the parents of this coddled and protected generation along with all its attendant demand rights produced such a febrile, stupid, and perpetually immature generation?  The straightforward answer is that these parents long ago denied God and His providence.  Having rejected God from their families and households they have then been forced to "fill the gap".  The role of parents morphed within a generation from being responsible to bring their children to adulthood to protecting their children from anything and everything.  In other words, parents assumed the rights and duties of a perpetual nanny to their children.  Instead of telling kids to entrust themselves to God and His providence (as they face adulthood and its responsibilities) they have rather encouraged the offspring to look to their parents for their protection and well-being.  Perpetually.

We have consequently been afflicted with a whole generation of precious petals whose perpetual mien is to bleat when anything seems risky or threatening.  They want to live in a world of abiding "safe spaces".

As students from Generation Z (born after 1994) graduate, some bring to their workplaces the call-out habits and expectations developed in their university lives. Haidt cites the example of staff in an office who finished a conference call on which a man had spoken in a particularly animated manner. "He sounded like he was on Ritalin," one woman said to her colleague. The colleague filed a complaint alleging the comment had been insensitive to people with mental illness.

Disciplinary action can now arise from people speaking normally, and encountering the usual frictions of everyday life, Haidt says. "Students who have always had a bureaucratic resource to go to when someone offended them are taking this expectation into the workplace and that makes having a diverse and complicated workplace very difficult."

NZ is not exempt.  It is up to its eyeballs in the goop.  Here is one example:

Moreover, the bar for what is deemed harassment or offensive is inexorably lowering. University of Auckland political science lecturer Paul Buchanan was sacked after sending an angry email to a student who had sought an extension, telling her she was "not suitable for a graduate degree" and "close to failing". He was quietly reinstated after an Employment Relations Authority decision awarding him $66,000.

The question is begged: what has caused this generation and its parents to be so stupid and perpetually immature?  The answer is plain: all their lives they have been in an environment heavily influenced, if not controlled, by fear.   And why has this been the case?  A plain answer is this: a generation which rejects God has to occupy the "space" once taken by God.  But, in reality, man is in many ways a weak and pathetic fallen creature.  Therefore, like Sauron in his fortress, fear and doubt incessantly gnaw at their vitals.  Their response is to molly-coddle, and fuss, and overprotect their children.  They attempt to take up the responsibilities of the divine, of one whose providential provision and care never ceases.

But many of those who end up at elite universities have been coddled and nurtured since the cradle to get that acceptance letter from their chosen college, Lukianoff says.

"I think of them as being like a perfectly designed heat-seeking missile that has had an enormous amount of work and money put into it but it only knows how to do one thing. That is why you have sad stories of wonderful students turning up in places like Stanford and being on the phone all the time to their parents to help them make very small decisions. That is disempowering, and being disempowered and not having a locus of control in your own life means there is a good chance you will feel highly anxious and depressed."

That anxiety and depression, the authors believe, both encourages the "call-out culture" but, in a vicious circle, is also exacerbated by it and encourages young people to see themselves as victims.

And so it rolls down.  The end result for the "Me generation" is cultural enervation, festering under a blanket of doubt and fear.