264. WHAT IF THEY WERE RIGHT? - On Kids These Days
I was painted a fairly bleak picture the other day looking at data around the reading ages and reading habits of 12 - 14 year olds. As often happens when given negative news about the youth of today, there was a lot of grumbling in the room about how things were different “back in my day”, and some of that grumbling was coming from me. I grumbled about the decline in reading even though I have clear memories of being 12 - 14 years old myself and my voracious reading habits, even back then, being an anomaly. My peers weren’t ignoring books for their smartphones, as smartphones hadn’t been invented yet, but they still weren’t reading. They were playing football or watching TV. Listening to music or just hanging out with friends. And to be fair, even though my own house was stuffed full of my educated parents’ books, I went to plenty of houses that weren’t full of books. It wasn’t just the children back in the 1990s who weren’t reading as much as they used to, it was the adults too.
At least anecdotally. From my own hazy memories. But despite believing that, I still indulged instinctively in the idea that things were better “back in my day”.
A few years ago I heard a parent saying that they weren’t worried about the impact of smartphones and AI on their children because their own parents used to be worried bout the impact of rock and roll and television on them, and they turned out fine despite the loud guitars and TV. At the time, the argument seemed solid. Every generation faces a moral panic about the changes in the next. But it is not borne out of anything more than a fear of, or lack of understanding about, how things are changing. Cars replacing horses and carriages, the radio replacing direct communication, the telephone connecting places that shouldn’t be connected, the television replacing the radio, the rise of the computer and the invention of the internet… The music is faster now, the lyrics harder to hear, the films have lost their heart and the acting has changed, we don’t talk enough about a shared culture because we’re all on different streaming services, what happened to the ballet, the opera, the symphony orchestras… Humans like to wrap up the unknown and the unexplained in moral outrage and disapproval. My instinct was to agree with the parent’s point of view: ignore what fearful adults are saying about change and have faith in the wisdom of children and how cultures and people evolve.
These days, however, I’m not so sure.
Of course I, too, am older. Perhaps it just took a little bit longer for my knee-jerk “back in my day” instinct to emerge. But I don’t think it’s just that because I think my problem with kids these days is that the kids these days are the product of people like me: kids from back in my day. And they, in turn, were the product of their own parents before them. Kids from even further back in the day.
In philosophy we are well aware of the fallacy of the Slippery Slope. But unlike a formal logical fallacy, the Slippery Slope does not indicate a definitive problem with an argument. It merely sounds the alarm for what might be the case. What is possible. And often (hence it being seen as a fallacy) the possibility can be highly unlikely. But unlikely does not mean the problem can be completely ignored. It still might prove to be an issue.
I look around the world today and wonder if, perhaps, the car, the radio, the television, rock and roll, the computer, the internet, etc. might not have been, in themselves, the dramatic danger past generations worried they were. That the panic older people expressed about the “kids these days” might still have been an over-reaction. But that, maybe, taken as a whole, and taken as an interconnected cultural progression of technological advances which supercharged the gradual advances of culture and civilisation over hundreds of years and accelerated change, within just over a century, beyond the speed of evolution and the capacity for the human brain to adapt swiftly to it, the worry highlighted a Slippery Slope concern which we might now be suffering the impact of?
In other words — what if too much television did rot our brains? What if the replacement of well-considered poetry with commercial song lyrics did mark some sort of intellectual decline? What if the computers we started spending too much time on were a problem, and led to us being addicted to the phones in our hands? What if delegating everything to AI is the disaster it feels like it might be? What if what our parents warned us about did cause us harm but we were too harmed to see? What if one damaged generation has been socialising each consecutive generation into a worse and worse declining culture until the end of the Slippery Slope is reached?
If thinking is something we still do, it might be something to think about. But, of course, you’d have to read this first to do that.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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