Half-Baked College Kids?
I saw it again today: the claim that young people are congenitally incapable of earning our attention for their beliefs. Author Shalom Auslander recently called on the media to “stop taking students too seriously.” More pointedly, Auslander wrote:
…the question I most found myself asking as I watched these newsclips was this: “Who gives a fuck what college kids think?”
And of course this is all confirmed by science, namely the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which Auslander quotes:
“The brain finishes developing and maturing in the mid-to-late 20s. The part of the brain behind the forehead, called the prefrontal cortex, is one of the last parts to mature. This area is responsible for skills like planning, prioritizing, and making good decisions.”
Then the 54-year-old Auslander goes on to explain that his own 18-year-old son and his generation are “half-baked,” as they should be per NIMH. But then he closes his essay by quoting his teenage son, at an elite university with protests, and his son provides a nuanced interpretation of the ongoing protest, closing with a witty insight that papa Auslander admits “no media parasite would ever dare.”
Oh, but wait: I thought we weren’t supposed to give a fuck about what college kids think! That’s what Shalom Auslander said just 750 words earlier in his essay. He didn’t even exempt his own kid from that analysis, either.
You really can’t invent this level of blinding hypocrisy. Auslander needed a good ending for his ranting essay, and his 18-year-old provided it even though the reader had been previously informed that the poor child’s prefrontal cortex was up to a decade away from being able to prioritize or make a good decision. We aren’t supposed to give a fuck what the kid thinks, until the kid thinks up something clever enough for dad to quote and monetize?
The Undescendants
Auslander’s hardly the only person to invoke NIMH as an excuse for ignoring or ridiculing the thoughts, actions, and beliefs of young adults. You can find the ridicule on a regular basis on social media, usually in the presence of people the next generation up from Auslander and me (I was born in 1965). Those poor kids, they just have jelly for brains that won’t congeal until they’re 25 or 28. In Auslander’s telling phrase, “Their emotional testicles have not yet descended.”
Ah, how times have changed. Where were these assessments during the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, for example when 22-year-old Paul Soglin was beaten by police during the Dow Chemical protests in Madison, Wisconsin? (I think the cops would have agreed with Auslander, but history says otherwise.)
I sure wish we’d had those NIMH stats to quote to John Lewis when he met Rosa Parks at the age of 17 and then Martin Luther King, Jr. at age 18. We could have talked him out of the error of his decision-making that led him to have his head caved in on the Edmund Pettus Bridge at age 25. Silly kid with silly ideas about “good trouble.” And Fred Hampton was even sillier, since he was 21 when the authorities fired 90 bullets at and through him. Who gives a fuck what he thought — right, Shalom?
And what of the 26th Amendment, that lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 in 1971? Where was science and its shills back then, telling us that letting the 18-to-21-year-olds vote was a terrible mistake? All those poor decisions at the ballot box. Maybe today we should raise the voting age to, say, at least 30?
And we should definitely keep the voices of the past who didn’t clear the magic NIMH threshold silenced: no Beatles prior to at least the White Album, since not even Lennon was 27 when Sgt. Pepper’s was released. No Bob Dylan before Nashville Skyline. None of that puerile insight in “Won’t Get Fooled Again”; Pete Townshend had just turned 26 and couldn’t have understood anything deep at such a tender age. Almost no Sylvia Plath. No Keats. Almost no Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mary Shelley was a teenager when she wrote Frankenstein, so that’s definitely gotta go too. All these undescended emotional testicles requiring surgical removal from our culture and civilization… snip, snip, snip.
And back to the present: David Hogg, Greta Thunberg, Lorde, and Malala, all unworthy of our attention and respect because of their lack of planning, prioritization, and decision-making. Just a bunch of silly kids fixated on stupid fads like gun control, climate change, anti-materialism, and women’s education. Taylor Swift too, at least until the late 2010s — now there’s you a poster child for lack of planning!
Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30?
Jack Weinberg at UC-Berkeley originated the phrase “don’t trust anyone over 30” in 1964. Weinberg’s poor decision-making as a graduate student in mathematics had led him to getting arrested for setting up a CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) information table in front of Sproul Hall, the administration building at Berkeley. Weinberg said, “I was being interviewed by a newspaper reporter and he kept asking me who was ‘really’ behind the actions of students, implying that we were being directed behind the scenes by the Communists or some other sinister group. I told him we had a saying in the movement that we don’t trust anybody over 30. It was a way of telling the guy to back off, that nobody was pulling our strings.”
Now, of course, we have the benefit of research and NIMH to tell us that Weinberg’s lack of prioritization made his advocacy of free speech and racial equality unworthy of a single solitary fuck, in the Auslanderian sense. Get back to math, Jack.
Tanks for Nothing
And then there’s the guy with the shopping bags in the photo at the top of this essay. Nobody knows who he is, or was. He was part of a million-person revolt in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989. I vividly remember their protest, in a year when the impossible briefly seemed possible. The protesters, both students and workers, erected a “Goddess of Democracy” that closely resembled the Statue of Liberty. To see that goddess go up in Communist China, right in Beijing, sent chills down my spine. But then the tanks rolled in and untold hundreds or thousands of protesters were killed, victims of their lack of prefrontal cortex development. The day after the crackdown began, though, Tank Man stood in front of a convoy of tanks and temporarily halted them. Silly, silly boy.
We don’t talk about the Tiananmen Square protests or massacre anymore; I knew a student Fulbright Scholar who’d never even heard of it, just months before she was traveling to China. Back in 1989, the first Bush administration hastened to console the Chinese after they had murdered and silenced the best of their young adults. And that’s because we know, via science, that protests by students demanding democracy are just a sign of emotional immaturity, and we sure wouldn’t want to encourage such embarrassingly immature thoughts or actions among our own young here in America, would we?
Sarcasm Off
I hope that the foregoing pointed remarks illustrate just how self-serving and offensive the scientific reductionism of older people is, when they reject out-of-hand the beliefs and actions of young adults on the basis of NIMH. They are basically echoing, with a veneer of science attached, the same arguments used against them when they themselves were young. But back then our society flexed, in a way that’s unfathomable today — can you imagine a Constitutional amendment being passed these days that would do anything positive for 18-to-21 year olds?
I’ve taught over 7,000 undergraduates in my career, most of them in the 18-to-22 age range; the oldest are now in their early-to-mid forties. I’ve never understood the general contempt for them in the eyes of so many in our nation. The vast majority of students I’ve known have been good people, more well-behaved than any other generation, with many of them determined to try to improve the world. That’s not immature; that’s downright heroic.
Do we mock them and their alleged arrested mental development because of science — or because they are making the rest of us look bad by comparison? Do we ridicule them because they “just don’t understand” the issues involved, or because we have compromised so much that we have found ourselves on the wrong side of a debate about genocide? What if their supposed lack of prefrontal cortex maturity turns out to be less disqualifying than our own deterioration due to age and complicity?
There are children being born,
Who will amaze you with their minds.
Leave them be, help them grow, and watch them fly.
— Jefferson Starship,
“Song to the Sun: Part I: Ozymandias / Part II: Don’t Let It Rain”; lyrics by Paul Kantner, age 35 (prefrontal cortex fully formed)
