Wisdom is not doled out wholesale to any group of people in their 20s and early 30s. I get that. And it is unjust to expect otherwise. Still, it is incumbent upon those who are wanting of wisdom to humbly admit to their lack and to submit themselves to the receiving of such, and this the mollycoddled multitude of Millennial malefactors will never do gladly. The world’s their stage, and they were all handed a microphone straight out of the uterine canal as their birthright, doncha know.
But do you want to know something? I’m weary of yelling myself hoarse over their infirmities. I’m through complaining about them. (This commitment is guaranteed to last only until the end of this paragraph.) I’m ready to concede a point to the determinists and conclude that Millennials indeed are products of their environment. And what an insular environment they’ve been reared in, all the more so as it masquerades as a vast panorama. The mitochondria cannot comprehend a universe outside of the Coke can he floats in during his lifespan.
The little darlings were all born or came of age in that great purposeful void popularly known as the 90s – a time in which, as I made mention of in a previous piece, it was widely presumed that history as we had known it would cease to occur with the (supposed) culmination of the Cold War. Given that charming little nugget of short-sightedness, taught with great fervor in all the skoolz, and also given that their boomer parents were too busy in their still-secure careers to offer much in the way of rebuttal (this was the era of the sociological media phenomenon known as the ‘latchkey kid’, you will remember), what else could this generation do but grow up to be monsters? Who wouldn’t be gleefully oblivious to all the horrific past lessons wrought by the uncompromising socialism and egalitarianism you so obnoxiously advocate, when it’s totally obvious January 1, 1990 was the start of Year One?
Even had the Cold War soldiered on, Millennials would have been doomed to their vapid universalist mentality anyway. This is because their Boomer and Gen-X parents represent the first post-theological generations the world had ever seen. The false tenets of the old Victorian ‘muscular Christianity’ were incinerated in all of WWII’s maelstroms, from Dresden to Hiroshima/Nagasaki, and were replaced with an even more false ‘muscular cosmopolitanism’ that proceeded to enforce its sway over a burned-out world, like the Red Death at Poe’s masquerade ball. Thus, Boomers were indoctrinated with the sunny assurance that they didn’t require God, just ‘Mickey Mouse and hula hoops’ (to quote the Bellamy Brothers) and a determination to fight for civil rights so that Mr. Khrushchev wouldn’t have ammunition to use against the good ol’ U.S of A at the next Comintern gathering. Gen-X was also immersed in this humanistic mire, but as the bloom was coming off the rose of grandiose promises by the late 60s/early 70s, their worldview grew considerably bitter – though unleavened with anything approaching wisdom. This confusion only certified that the children of both generations would be reared as blank tabulae rasa, fit only for inscription of the prevailing winds of modernism…but they kidded themselves that they would be led ‘as their heart dictates’. Well, the heart of fallen man is led to embrace himself, and himself alone. And the Millennials proceeded to do just that. Screw the experiences of our ancestors – let’s get to building that New World countless others before us have tried to do with equal optimism and failed horrifically! One can only shudder to consider what Generation Z is likely to grow up to be, since it is becoming evident they are likely to be the first post-economic generation. How went the trajectory of the Soviet Union when the New Economic Policy shut up shop?
Ironic, indeed, that Millennial SJWs’ clarion call of ‘gibs me dat!’ will be the direct means of their ultimate total dispossession. In eschewing their history, they have also ceded all claim to be a people in any meaningful sense of the word. The Russians could tell them a thing or two about the path they have trodden for themselves, and one Vadim Borisov did precisely that, in an essay originally published as a collection of samizdat literature compiled by Solzhenitsyn:
A necessary precondition of the people’s existence and development is historical memory. If this is destroyed, the people’s self-awareness suffers pathological distortion; it comes to identify its personality, to its own detriment, with the present moment of its existence; it forgets that all empirical personality is imperfect and that the fulfillment of personal life can only be achieved by a continuous and conscious process of development.
The destruction of historical memory kills a people’s spiritual yearning for this fulfillment, cripples its moral personality, undermines its faith in the possibility of the creative conquest of evil and its hope of rebirth.1
Ergo, a loss of one’s history – good, bad, and ugly alike – permanently retards one’s maturation in both the temporal and spiritual realms. Is it any wonder, then, that Millennials behave as hyperactive toddlers all aglow with what they’re ‘owed’, and who resort to a nationwide shriekfest when their ultimatums are very sensibly denied them? They denigrate the very idea of a white ‘heritage’. Well, what is a heritage if not an inheritance? And what does an inheritance signify, if not a prejudicial preference towards one’s own and their well-being? Having been conditioned to live in the moment, their conception of a society extends no further than a magical ATM machine, glibly dispensing fiat paper to anyone with a self-imposed grievance and absolutely no shame in expressing their distemper to Whitey at large. Great vision, guys. A vision is nothing but a fever dream without substance underneath it. Talk about Apocalypse Now.
And the Church, to its everlasting approbation, is molding itself to this Newthink like moss enveloping a rotting log. One only has to look at the latest PCA confessional declaration to perceive this. Though the confession makes a point of tepidly condemning Marxism and socialism, ‘and all ideologies based on either one or both’, it then proceeds to negate itself by affirming every Marxist/socialist anathema against racism out there. (And, incidentally, singling out kinism for special libel – when your enemies deign to take notice of you, that’s half the battle won!) You will search in vain for any hint that their new position is in any way contradictory to the Presbyterians of old – certainly no hint that an advocacy of egalitarianism inevitably progresses from the initial ‘aw, how sweet! And perfectly OK!!!’ phase to the ‘submit, or your life is forfeit’ phase. And this despite their audacity in quoting from the segregationist Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism, besides! But it plays well with guilt-laden white boomer Presbys, and ditto with the few hipster Millennial Presbys the PCA has pathetically catered to – and no doubt the church’s brand spanking new black moderator will do double duty in that department. I hope they’re satisfied, because as pluralism is now their official polity, we in the racially vocal minority can shake the dust off our heels in the doorway of this heathen temple with a clear conscience.
To summarize, then: much as I don’t want them around me, I genuinely mourn for Millennials. Their compartmentalist worldview regarding the church and the nation is presuppositionally flawed and will forever render them a bunch of ill-humored pagans, paradoxically gnostic and materialist at one and the same times. This cannot result in anything resembling stability. But ’tis their cross to bear, and bear it they must. With God’s help, a remnant shall overcome, while the rest may feel free to haunt social media complaining about how there aren’t enough Asians in wheelchairs in the next installment of the Star Wars franchise.
Footnotes
- Vadim Borisov, ‘Personality and National Awareness’, compiled in From Under the Rubble, Bantam Books 1974, p. 210 ↩
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