Where Are We Going?

where are we going


Tom Nichols (« The Narcissists Who Endanger America, » The Atlanticprobably got it right when he identified narcissism as a common trait linking compromisers of our national security – from those older, more traditional spies like Aldrich Ames and Robert Hansen to those ostensible « whistleblowers » like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden to the young braggart Jack Teixeira, whose main motivation seems to have been to impress teenagers in a chat group and thus establish himself as an important person in an ultimately unimportant community of ultimately unimportant digital gamers. Indeed, Nichols identifies what he calls « a protracted epidemic of nacissism » of which Teixeira and his ilk are products. 

Of course, spies and leakers may have old-fashioned ideological motivations, or they may be motivated by greed, but neither seems to have been the case in this latest instance. And, inasmuch as someone like Robert Hansen seemed to have been motivated in some significant measure more by personal grievance than by those more traditional causes, obviously one cannot accordingly ascribe narcissism exclusively to the young. Hansen, however self-absorbed he may have been and however much he may have privileged his own personal grievance over the common good, was also smart and successful, in ways Teixeira does not appear to be. Perhaps before asking what motivates a chat-group gamer to betray his country one should first ask what would motivate anyone with aspirations to adulthood to be a chat-group gamer in the first place?

The media have been filled with questions like what was a 21-year-old doing with a security clearance? That is a very good question. But the more basic question, perhaps, is why a chat-group gamer with no apparent higher ambition than to impress teenager chat-group gamers was entrusted with any real-world responsibility at all, let alone access to national security classified documents! And the perhaps even more basic question is what has gone so radically wrong with our society that such activities actually exist as alternatives to growing up and assuming adult responsibility. (The social media platform Discord, where this mischief initially took place, describes itself as « Where just you and a handful of friends can spend time together. A place that makes it easy to talk every day and hang out more often. »)

Of course, young (and many not so young) men have always been obsessed with impressing other young men, and many young men have been tempted to chronically anti-social behavior. I think it was the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan who suggested that every generation is in a sense invaded by a new generation of barbarians, in the form of its young men. And it was Barbara Tuchman, I think, who ascribed the endemic violence of the middle ages to the medieval population’s relative youth.  In any case, it has been the traditional role of society’s essential institutions to perform the necessary socializing and civilizing functions to transform the next generation from swaggering but insecure adolescents into the next generation of parents, productive workers, and engaged citizens. That something has gone radically wrong in the United States in recent decades as the breakdown of traditional social institutions and most accompanying civilized expectations has upended this necessary generational socialization process appears increasingly evident in the dysfunctionality and fragility of so many young (and some not so young) people who are now on-line rather than forming families and building careers.

That this was not always the case in the United States and that it is still not the case in much of the rest of the world highlights the situationally specific character of these contemporary pathologies, which in themselves have little to do with age and a lot to do with six decades of institutional social breakdown and correspondingly increasing bad manners. The contemporaneous collapse of the cultural and political norms that are necessary to sustain democratic governance is but further evidence of how far gone we are as a society.

Dare one ask, Where are we going?