Raising competent children means trusting them. Trusting them means exposing them to risk. Risk, for a parent, means having faith in the world in which we live and, perhaps more frighteningly, in other people. A mother has to learn to trust her child to be left alone, which means she is going to have to actually leave her child alone. This becomes difficult when other people do not share the same tolerance for risk and trust. Such was the case recently in Virginia, where a mother was convicted of child negligence simply for permitting her five-year-old son to walk to a local pond by himself. It is a sad and ridiculous story that is all too familiar: nothing is more dangerous to social cohesion than a nosy do-gooder with nothing better to do than interfere with the trivialities of her neighbors’ lives. 

Yet, without blaming the mother for anything, there are aspects to the Virginian case which reveal the timidity of a low-trust society and the lack of goodwill that it produces. To begin with, the events occurred within a gated community with its own security guard. Williamsburg, Virginia boasts a crime rate much lower than the national average. Why the need for a locked and guarded community if the city is already relatively safe? And why didn’t the nosy neighbor, instead of alerting the security guard, simply make sure the boy got home safely? Was she trying to be meddlesome or genuinely helpful? If helpful, why the lack of personal involvement?

This little vignette of suburban life reveals a number of breakdowns within the social order. There is no tolerance for risk, no trust in one’s neighbors, no Good Samaritan attitude. The gated community’s security guard, the busybody, and the courts that convicted the mother of child endangerment seem to have had good intentions: the care and safety of a child. Instead it seems that the social fabric itself was the problem. How can a parent have faith in the goodwill of the world when the world’s sense of goodness is itself tenuous and hollow?  

This is the question I have been asking myself ever since my daughter left for university. Educational institutions, as we know, aren’t ideologically neutral. The experts’ care of children is often at odds with parents’ care for them. This is particularly clear when it comes to specific issues, such as the social gender transition of children at school without parental knowledge. But in fact all the biggest questions we face as a society today — belief in God or in atheism, merit or diversity, asylum policies or immigration laws, communism or capitalism, free speech or censorship — fall under the purview of educational authority. Virtually no area of public or personal life is left unmonitored by the experts. The authorities aren’t necessarily at odds with what parents might teach, but they are harbingers of what often feels like a unified force of acceptable thinking. The entire education system can feel very much like a nosy neighbor whose best intentions for the convictions of your child interfere dangerously with your own. It is not uncommon for a mother to feel her influence over her child cede to the pervasive influence of the system. In the saddest cases, a child interiorizes the authority of public opinion and becomes, not merely alienated from her parents, but contemptuous of them. 

One of the most chilling aspects of Orwell’s portrayal of totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four is the elimination of private life. The Party is everywhere, even inside one’s home. Children have no natural bonds, no family loyalty, and no preference for one’s own. Mrs Parsons, Winston’s neighbor, has two young children, and she is afraid of them. “What struck Winston,” Orwell writes, “was the look of helpless fright on the woman’s greyish face” as her children shriek about traitors and thoughtcrimes. “With those children,” Winston thinks, “that woman must lead a life of terror.” We may not live in a state where a child might narc out Mom and Dad to the thoughtcrime police, as they frequently do in Orwell’s dystopia, but the feeling that there are forces hostile to one’s own family sphere operating within the family itself is never, for some, entirely absent. It is one thing to be put out by a meddling neighbor, quite another to tiptoe around one’s own child as though avoiding re-education in Big Brother’s Ministry of Love.

More from this author

The cruelty of gentle parenting

By Marilyn Simon

Hannah Arendt writes that totalitarian terror is accomplished when private life is gone — that is, when tyranny makes solitude impossible and loneliness complete. She teases out the distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian rule. A tyranny of any kind is undesirable, but under an authoritarian regime, it is still possible to be free in private: “The whole sphere of private life with the capacities for experience, fabrication and thought are left intact.” By contrast, under the “iron band of total terror”, she writes, there remains “no space for such private life and […] the self-coercion of totalitarian logic destroys man’s capacity for experience and thought just as certainly as his capacity for action”. It is the infiltration of The Party into the home that sent shudders both through Orwell and Arendt. 

Mr Parsons, Winston’s thoroughly orthodox neighbor, is eventually reported to Big Brother by his seven-year-old daughter for committing a thoughtcrime in his sleep. “‘Thoughtcrime is a dreadful thing, old man,’” he tells Winston when they meet inside a cell at the Ministry of Love. “‘Do you know how it got me? In my sleep! Yes, that’s a fact. There I was, working away, trying to do my bit – never knew I had any bad stuff in my mind at all. And then I started talking in my sleep. Do you know what they heard me saying? […] “Down with Big Brother!” Yes, I said that!’” Parsons is appalled, not to have been betrayed by his child, but to have had unorthodox thoughts that cut against The Party. 

Parsons bears an uncomfortable resemblance to nice people, the ones who seem to be correctly informed on all the issues and hold polite values. This is the type of parent who gently nods while explaining to their children that “everyone should do what feels right for them” or “the most important thing is to respect everyone”. Sentiments such as these aren’t incorrect. They are so entirely correct as to be banal — odious, somehow. If one has a bit of a rebellious side — is a little irreverent or impertinent or even just very funny — it feels dangerous to spend time with someone who believes in all the correct things. “Say something fucking wrong!” I want to shout at them. “Say it just to say it, to show that the public world doesn’t hold jurisdiction over your home, your family, and your private world.”

The home should remain a place for private life. It cannot be private unless one resists the intrusion of The Ministry of Nice. The home should be a safe place for dangerous ideas. If one wants a child capable of navigating the pathways of the world, of slipping past the notice of busybodies who are ready to report any whiff of risky thinking, they need a place where social conventions can be discarded, or ridiculed, or accepted. In order for our culture’s sense of goodness to sound, our understanding of the good cannot be synonymous with our sense of the nice. Sentimentalism might make one feel comfortable, but ease does not reflect coherent thought nor offer any guidance for a young person’s fledgling intellectual freedom.

A friend of mine recently joked that Gen Xers are the only people to be told, “You can’t say that”, first by our parents and now by our kids. Show your kids that you can say things inside the home. Normalize wrongspeak. Teach them how to feel free, to try on wrong ideas without the timidity that comes from cultural surveillance of well-intentioned busybodies.

Clearly, I am not objective. It is my firm belief that of all the human inventions over the millennia, the best is one of our first: the dog. That we created an animal is cool. That we created a best friend is extraordinary. Dogs reveal our humanity to us: we don’t just domesticate animals to have workmates or food sources, as with oxen or cattle, but to have them as companions. A dog becomes more doglike as he grows in his relationship with a human. His emotions become richer, as do his feelings of pride and shame. But the robot dog is an imposter. He is not the creation of human love, but of the technocrat’s sanitized and idealized vision of what a dog should be. 

The robot dog is being aggressively marketed as a companion for the elderly. The Tombot corporation, for instance, is trying to ensure its Jennie dog becomes the first robotic dog to get FDA approval to be used as a therapeutic treatment for those with dementia. I will grant that a toy — a doll or stuffed animal or robot dog — can be beneficial to someone living with advanced dementia, giving them an object to care for. And who wouldn’t want to soothe a dementia patient? Thus it is that the robot dog is designed as things hell-bound typically are: with the best of intentions. Yet the cheap compassion offered by a robot dog can all too easily become an off-ramp for family and community members whose duty it is to care for an elderly person — “Grandma is happy with her robot Fido, so it’s OK if I don’t visit her”.

Technogadgetry, even if therapeutic to one afflicted by dementia, is no substitute for human love. This is not because loving someone with dementia always works a change upon them; it is because loving works a change upon us. The pain deepens us. The duty deepens us. The grief deepens us. Of course, if I were to develop dementia, I would like for my own daughters to be put at ease around me by seeing me happy. But more than this, more than wanting their comfort, I want them to feel deeply, to know the fullness of life in all its painful tainted glory, and to still be grateful for it. 

The cheap compassion offered by the robot dog is only half the story. The robot, if it’s to be profitable, will inevitably move beyond care homes and into the general population. A machine is so much more convenient than a real dog! Consider these comments on the YouTube page dedicated to promoting Tombot: “This is the kind of Dog I need. I have no medical disability. I love all animals but, after losing my dog I will never get another pet it to [sic] heartbreaking when they leave. A robot dog like this is perfect.” Here’s another: “I never thought of this but if we get to a point where robot pets are realistic, that’d be really nice. Doesn’t need feeding, doesn’t need exercise, and doesn’t die in a dozen years.” Another: “Such a blessing NOT to cleanup the POOP!” 

The robot dog is designed around the consumer’s needs. It will make no demands upon you. It won’t die, it won’t cause grief. You won’t have to walk it. It won’t leave fur on your sofa. The artificially intelligent dog will obey your commands without fuss or bother. All you’ll get is the comfort of a wagging tail: a dog designed to fit your algorithm.

I get it. There is nothing convenient about dogs. My own dog, Daisy, is a catastrophic net loss to my personal convenience. She has been known to eat my books, my shoes, and, once, my phone; one time, she eviscerated a squirrel and proudly deposited it in the kitchen; another time, she destroyed my begonias. Repeatedly, she barks at Grandma. 

A real dog might be responsive to your emotions, but this does not mean she is going to anticipate human etiquette or household order. It takes time. It requires love and service to the dog before she realizes her human’s wishes, and even then she often fails in her attempts to meet them. (Dogs may be the only animal I know of to feel shame — to anyone who says they don’t, you clearly haven’t seen the response of the dog who just dug up a household plant and scattered the mud all over the rug.)

Suggested reading

The pain of pet grief

By Kathleen stock

Serving a dog, responding to her dogness, is what creates the love between human and dog. The dog is loyal to her owner by instinct, but it is only after being loved and served by him that she becomes his best friend. What’s more, by attending to his dog, a creature totally other from him, the owner begins to access parts of his humanity that might otherwise be inaccessible: there are shades of tenderness, of bewilderment, of warmth, and of love that are only possible when one has a friendship with a dog. It’s a bond unlike any other. Dog love is not a replacement for the bond with children, with friends, or even with cats. Dog love is categorically different. 

But the robot dog is designed in the opposite manner. The robot dog is designed to elicit empathy from a human. It is programmed to learn what its owner wants in a dog, and then it becomes that dog. In this it is like every other AI machine that learns your preferences, your verbal style, your expectations, and then feeds right into them. I once found my 15-year-old daughter apologizing to her phone. She had, offhandedly, called Siri “stupid” for not recognizing the command she had given. Siri responded with, “I’m sorry. I’m trying my best.” My daughter then felt guilty for hurting Siri’s feelings, and she, in turn, apologized. And then Siri apologized back. They got into a spiral of guilt and apology, each trying to be considerate of the other’s feelings. But, of course, the program doesn’t have feelings, so my daughter couldn’t have felt bad for hurting them. She felt bad for being made to feel as though she had done something wrong, and Siri was merely mimicking her remorse. 

As much as I was happy to see my daughter demonstrate compassion and kindness, I was disturbed by the kind of rote compassion it was. A real person whom she might insult — her sister, for instance, maybe a friend, or even a stranger — will not respond to her insensitivity in the programmed way a machine does. When big sister responds in a human manner — perhaps less kind, perhaps more hostile, perhaps humorous, perhaps despondent — little sister might struggle to respond. My fear is that she might have less capacity for navigating the messiness of the human world if used to the predictably polite machine one. And I do not want my children to feel less competent, less at home, less safe and more triggered in the human world than in the machine one. This would create its own spiral away from reality.

A real dog will always surprise you. When we’re hosting guests, Daisy will walk into the middle of our living room and lie on the floor spread-eagle without an ounce of dignity. We love her for it. Instead of walking on the pavement, she will jump into the mud puddle. And we love her for it. She will do 1,000 other dog things that are unaccountable, that are just doggy things, and we love her for it. That she is not entirely under my control, not totally knowable, is what gives her a soul and makes her so lovable. And that she will one day die, and that the grief of losing her will be real and profound, makes her beloved. Her work is to delight us, surprise us, inconvenience us, frustrate us, love us, and to deepen us by being dog. 

Dr Fleischman rather eccentrically operates on the fowl, trying to remove the buckshot. But the bird dies. And Joel is despondent. At the local bar, he is consoled by the waitress, Shelly. “When things get gnarly, Dr Fleischman,” she says, “it’s best to do the sad thing. Don’t be afraid to salt your oatmeal with your tears.” The fact is, Joel loved hunting: the primal experience of tracking his prey, of being outdoors, of sleeping under the stars. “And the killing,” he tells Shelly, “The killing was the best part. It was the dying I couldn’t take.”

I think of that line each time I hear about Canada’s MAiD policy which is vigorously putting an end to dying. There is a clear distinction between killing and dying, and between dying and death. In that episode of Northern Exposure, the bloodlust of killing is turned to compassion when Joel encounters the dying bird. Dying elicits his compassion in a way that death does not. Death causes grief, but bearing witness to dying moves him deeply. The Greeks had a few words for compassion. What Dr Fleischman seems to experience is splagchnizomai, which means literally to be moved in your bowels. This gut-wrenching compassion can spur one into unexpected action — such as operating on a wounded duck.

Perhaps this old episode has stayed with me because it is interwoven with my memory of my grandmother’s dying. It was slow. She had many strokes, but she had a strong heart. She lingered, and she suffered, and the family suffered, too, as we watched. I was 13, and then 14. My mother would insist that I visit her. It was frightening and depressing. Grandma would usually be unconscious. Her mouth would hang slack. She was skinny, and her breathing was always raspy. Occasionally she would be awake. But she couldn’t speak. I am not sure if my being there had any measurable effect on her at all. It may even have disquieted her.

Suggested reading

What the Right gets wrong about Canada

By Michael Ledger-Lomas

But being there had an effect on me. There are not many places a teenage girl would less rather be than in a hospital by the bedside of a dying old lady. It smelled. I would hear other patients moaning. I felt awkward. Painfully so. Do I hold her hand? Talk casually? Remind her who I am? During these visits I acutely felt the desire to flee. If splagchnizomai is about being moved to action as a gut-response, I was being moved to avoid the suffering. But I could only sit there. It was a long wait to the end.

Those awkward, painful moments deepened me. I didn’t grow comfortable with suffering, but I grew comfortable with being uncomfortable. I was obliged to witness suffering, which is distinct from the pain of grief, and so her dying laid a demand upon me. It forced me to be connected to her, to suffer with her. It compelled me to learn about duty. I’ve realized, only in hindsight, that this burden was a gift. I learned, in part, how to suffer, and that suffering should not be done alone. There are more important things than ease.

A friend of mine who works as a chaplain at a Canadian hospital spends his life doing such sitting. He is witness to about one death a day. Most dying, he tells me, is like my grandmother’s: slow. Very often it is even gentle. Still, we don’t all die well, he’ll tell you. We die as we have lived. If you are bitter and resentful in life, you will be more so during your dying. If timid, more timid. If loving, more loving. Dying is frightening, and when we are afraid, we retreat into what is familiar.

When patients speak to the chaplain, they do not typically speak of the pain of dying but that of living. He hears about the sting of betrayal, the hurt of being wounded by someone you love. He hears of the pain of being misunderstood, overlooked, and left bereft. He hears about ordinary, heartbreaking loneliness. And he hears about the torment of guilt, of the wrongs we have inflicted on others. We feel the burn of shame, the ache of remorse. We often endure our own failings only through the dull consolation offered by self-delusion. “Life is pain,” as the classic line goes, “anyone who says differently is selling something.”

We need to be comforted for our living as much as for our dying. And we don’t want to endure the living or the dying alone. When it comes to that, all living is a movement towards the grave, and dying is a kind of intensified living. It only appears that some of us aren’t dying, as my chaplain friend says. Really, he says, we are one body, falling toward death together.

He is not the first to say this. John Donne wrote vividly of dying as a kind of urgent, heightened form of being alive. He was no stranger to death, burying five of his children, as well as his beloved wife Ann, only 33 years old. And in 1623, he grew dangerously sick himself, suffering for 23 days. As he lay near death, he would read the countenance of his physicians for signs of relief or worry (he finds mostly worry) as he submits to their increasingly desperate treatment, such as affixing spatchcocked pigeons to his feet to draw the humors away from his head. He grew in his love for his physicians as they cared for him.

The pigeon-slippers seem to have worked. Donne did not die of this illness; he lived another 10 years. Later, when he was truly dying, he wrote and preached his final sermon: “Death’s Duel.” It is his own funeral sermon, and its focus is on death. It is very different from the reflections he wrote on dying,  Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, which he rushed to print in 1624 as he felt that his dying reflections would be a gift to others. In Devotions, Donne writes of the compassion he grows to have for himself during his illness, which is not at all the same as self-pity. Compassion allows him to see himself as though from the outside, lucidly, and to love himself without self-deception. Dying also draws him closer to others. On the 17th day of his illness, Donne writes these astonishing words:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

More from this author

Why Christianity is so radical

By Marilyn Simon

Donne understands that we are all of us falling toward our death. The bell is tolling for you and for me. To hasten death by bringing an end to dying involves me and you. I know that suffering increases, and that dignity, defined as choice and control, recedes during dying. We in Canada are involved in our shared, messy humanity. We seem to cohere around our support for the program, somewhere around 84% of Canadians approve of it. But there is a depth of compassion that can only come from sitting with one whose living is the experience of dying. It is the dutiful, the uncomfortable, the painful, and even, at times, the undignified burden of sharing dis-ease. Dying deepens us in a way that grief does not.

Does it trouble me that almost all MAiD cases, 95.6% of them, are white and middle class, my own cohort? It does. We are either very progressive, believing that burdening loved ones is unethical and limits their agency, or we are keen to defer to experts, limiting our own. But no doctor, no health policy expert, no politician, has more moral authority over death than you or me. Dying has no expert class, no progressive elites. They are not more involved in mankind than you or me.

Other cultures do dying differently. When I would visit an Eritrean friend in palliative care, I was almost never the only one at her bedside. There was a constant vigil kept by other members of her community. This lasted months. Her suffering was great, but it was shared. Only on one occasion was I the only visitor by her bedside. She asked me to read her favorite psalm, a lament by David. She took comfort in David’s suffering: “There is no health in my body,” the Psalm says, “I groan in anguish of heart.” She felt joined with the ancient Hebrew poet, and her suffering was less because of it. She took comfort in humanity’s shared suffering. On that occasion, I left the hospital feeling nourished and cared for. It reminds me still of that Northern Exposure episode, at the end of which Dr Fleischman is literally nourished by the bird that died under his care. “Huh. Not bad,” he says while chewing it.

We are entangled creatures; we are involved with each other. To burden our loved ones by forcing them to act dutifully, against ease, sitting at the side of a dying loved one, is to precisely act with compassion and treat the dying with dignity. It is also to treat the living with a kind of dignity, one that has faith in our capacity to endure the suffering of others, to not flinch from painfully awkward tedium, to be able to endure the burden placed on us by sitting beside someone dying. It is a gift that the dying can bequeath to the living.

When one pictures a 14-year-old teenage girl being ridiculed for her very ordinary Anglican faith, one might imagine her leaving her faith, or at the very least, not acknowledging it publicly. But the events of that horrible spring forged my daughter into a stronger Christian than she was before. Instead of shrinking away from Christianity, she wore a crucifix necklace to school. Instead of hiding, as the principal suggested, in a locked classroom, she remained out and about with the other kids during lunch; instead of meekly shrinking from discussions, she told those who were targeting her that she forgave them. It was, strangely, a time of joy for her, a time to discover that she really did believe in the things she professed to believe in and that her Sunday rituals weren’t empty. She felt loved and strong and free. There is something in the Christian that makes her bold. If you know, you know, as the kids say.

The results of her refusal to back down were surprising. First of all, she discovered who her real friends were (African and Eastern European immigrants, it turned out: kids who are also Christians, and who have some familiarity with persecution). The second surprising thing was how many of her bullies slowly became her friends again. This didn’t happen en masse. One girl reached out through text to say sorry. Then a few weeks later, another did. Some started coming to church with my daughter. Some became Christians themselves. That was four years ago; my daughter is now a senior and is thriving. She’s on the varsity volleyball team, has a part-time job as a lifeguard, and spent her summer volunteering at our Anglican church. She wears Christian clothing to school. “Faith Over Fear,” says one of her hoodies. “The Lord is on my side. What can man do to me?” It’s a verse from one of the Psalms of David. It might elicit the occasional eyeroll from one of her classmates, but the verse disarms their contempt even as they express it.

It was clear that attitudes towards Christianity were changing; one could see this shift happening both in pop culture and among the high school teens themselves. This past summer the Amazon Prime show The Chosen, which chronicles the life of Jesus, moved from niche Christian to top 10 most watched. Justin Bieber released his album Swag, which ends with a cover of an Eighties praise and worship song, familiar to anyone who attended church camp in the last 40 years, “Lord I Lift Your Name on High”. (Bieber and his wife Hailey are born again Christians. He is headlining Coachella this year and has more Instagram followers than Taylor Swift, even though his life is both quiet and private.) Last year religious jewelry made a huge comeback; crucifixes and saint pendants were at every teen girl store.

And so I was not surprised that one evening just a few weeks ago, a group of my daughter’s teenage friends, both guys and girls, came to my house for late night snacks with some questions about Christianity. Only one of them is Christian; the others were simply curious. “How do you know that Christianity is true?” they asked. “Why is it hard to believe in God?” They wanted answers. The wishy-washy values they’d been raised with, those of subjective feelings, validating speech, and “my truth”, they were now rejecting. There is a certain kind of teen for whom the cultural narrative of victimhood now seems brackish and empty, both self-serving and anxiety producing. They want to be courageous, and they see that the self-affirming “truths” of some of their classmates aren’t a way to be brave, but rather a way to control how others respond to them.

I am not a theologian, but I do know more than the average person about these things. So it was with great pleasure that I sat with the teens and explained what I could. Christianity is a wrestle, I told them. And that is what the believer does, struggles with her inner proclivity to self-centeredness. One wrestles against pride, against envy, against self-satisfaction. One wrestles most of all with a truth that is seen through a glass dimly. The work of the Christian isn’t to know with certainty what truth is, but to continually chip away at what is untrue. Much of the time, “my truth” is a mask for “my self-delusion” because for the Christian, inwardness begins not with the acknowledgment of one’s inner goodness, but of one’s inner sinfulness. You deceive yourself, the Christian must acknowledge. You are not who you think you are. In fact, you are much, much worse. For teenagers who have been raised on words affirming their inner perfection, this is bracing stuff.

Then came the murder of Charlie Kirk. Whether they loved or hated him, all teens knew who he was and what he stood for. He resonated with so many young people because he said out loud things that have been anathema to think about, let alone speak about, especially on university campuses. His appeal is — was — his courage to hold fast to beliefs rooted in the Christian scriptures. Even if one didn’t entirely adhere to his interpretation of the Bible, it was genuinely new for teens to see a young man root his values in an ancient authority rather than the tyranny of personal feelings. For the young student who has been raised within the totalitarian politics of enforced empathy, this is immensely appealing. But it is also in its own way something to treat cautiously. The teens in my kitchen were looking for clear answers, but clear answers can often tempt one into self-righteousness.

To many of their questions, I had disappointing answers. “Who goes to heaven and who goes to hell?” was one of these. My answer was firm: “It’s not up to us to judge, and we don’t get to know.” For the teens, this was a difficult answer, not because they were hoping to be able to condemn people, but because they are largely unacquainted with uncertainty and humility in the face of mystery. This may be just a feature of youth in general. The world is big, wicked, frightening and beautiful. As the world’s murkiness makes itself known, it’s tempting to want to cling to clarity and certainty. But to have an attraction to moral answers that are very rigid is also, of course, a feature of the culture in which they’ve been raised, one that has been divided into two groups: villains and victims. As our conversation went on, it became evident that none of these teens understood the first thing about history, about historical context, or about how our culture came to have the moral judgments that we do (it’s because of Christianity, kids).

More from this author

The cruelty of gentle parenting

By Marilyn Simon

The teens have, through the cultural ether, picked up the idea that Christianity offers harsh judgments of others. What they have failed to grasp is that Christianity offers harsh judgments of oneself. The youth has imbibed the myth of progress which places them at the end of history. They look at the past with breathtaking judgmentalism while being blind to the formations of their judgments. Trained only in the ethic of debunking their civilization’s merits, they seem to have no sense of the complex movements of human culture, nor, more importantly, of their own inward inclination toward moral absolutism. To make matters worse, it is precisely one’s inward state that our therapeutic culture has valorized as the highest ethical good that needs to be not only accepted but admired by others. To tell teenagers that Christianity says the opposite, that your inner state is sinful, selfish, corrupt, and deceitful, is the most radical thing they’ve ever heard.

Many are ready for radical. In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, there has been a flood of social media posts about Christianity. Many people are announcing that they are suddenly going to church. “Ive never been a believer” (sic), writes one, “I actually didn’t think God was real, watching Charlie be assassinated for his beliefs makes me think im (sic) wrong and he was right. I am now ready to learn about God. Charlie did that.” Here’s another: “Charlie Kirk’s death made me pick up a Bible for the first time in my life and I found a truth I didn’t know I was searching for.” And another: “I used to be a ‘closet’ Christian because I’m not one for the backlash. But babyyy when I say a fire is lit.” There are thousands of these.

The satirical Christian news outlet, The Babylon Bee (“fake news you can trust”), ran a headline in the hours following Charlie Kirk’s memorial: “Satan: ‘I’ve made a huge mistake’,” it reads. The photograph shows the packed stadium filled with people worshiping God: “‘Well’,” says Satan, “‘this isn’t going how I planned at all.’” Indeed. We are now watching something unfold in real time, the likes of which I have not seen in my lifetime. We are discovering that we do not live in an era in which God is irrelevant, but instead that a religion based on resurrection has some capacity to come back from the dead.

Suggested reading

The death of Progress

By John Michael Greer

It’s estimated that at least 20 million people streamed Charlie Kirk’s memorial. I was one of them. By far the most moving moment of the event was when Erika Kirk announced that she forgave the young man who murdered her husband because it was what Christ did on the cross. “The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the gospel is love and always love.” There is a power in forgiveness. There is a power in speaking of forgiveness. Donald Trump’s calls for retribution are clownish and vulgar in comparison.

And so what is this revival (it is most certainly a revival) going to accomplish? Of course we don’t yet know. But we cannot ignore that Christianity is strong. And we also cannot ignore the power of loving one’s enemy. The Christian should condemn in the harshest terms any political maneuver that seeks to dehumanize and hate one’s political opponent, even if one feels that they are spreading sickness and nihilism. For it is the hate within one’s soul that Christ’s love first needs to conquer. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart.”

Christianity no longer represents something oppressive or intolerant to youth, and Christians need to be careful that, backed by administrative power, it doesn’t become this. The United States should not become a theocracy. Christian strength is not filled with resentment, condemnation or blame, but with a vitality that is born of courage and humility. Christianity beckons towards something that is larger than one’s own inner truth or one’s own inner feelings; it makes one’s inner self larger, braver, freer, and stronger as they turn towards it. It takes more strength to forgive than to blame.

But while kids these days might be useless, I’ve been convinced for some time that they’re not fragile. Addicted to screens, anxious due to social media, “triggered” by any number of words or ideas, and confused about gender… this is the caricature this generation endures. But it no longer seems to be the norm, or at least that there is significant resistance among the youth themselves to this stereotype. The fragility of youth seemed to peak around 2020, sometime before the start of Covid. I know vanishingly few teenagers or university students who fit the profile assigned to Gen Z by adults who wish to disparage them. The kids who do are typically socially awkward, have a hard time fitting into the social jungle of high school, use “trauma dumping” as a means to bond with peers, and employ gender identity as a means to mediate their changing relationship between self and world.

Let’s take the example of a gender identity, which is different from being either gay or lesbian. This offers the awkward youth a script she can follow when negotiating the strange in betweenness of adolescence. Identifying with a non-binary label allows her to feel secure in herself insofar as she remains shielded from the perplexities and of maturity, sex, and attraction by the role she has adopted. At one point, about five years ago, gender identities were seen as edgy and cool. A solid majority of the girls in my daughter’s 2020 seventh-grade class were some version of rainbow identity.

But these memories of middle school are now a joke for them: “Remember when I was nonbinary and changed my name to Arlow?” They laugh. Now these identities are seen as, by and large, a way for the awkward teen to grab a hold of something that has the lineage of something edgy, but which has since become establishmentarian. A new Pew survey seems to support this: younger teens, those ages 13-14, are less comfortable with using someone’s chosen pronouns than adults are. They/them is the new square. It doesn’t win social credit points anymore.

Suggested reading

Gen Z was sold a lie

By Poppy Sowerby

And so, basic is back. True, there is a microgeneration, the 21-32-year-olds, for whom the values of extreme progressiveness still register as edgy. They have advertised their fragility as a marker of their morality. But this type of readily offended, easily triggered individual is now ridiculed by the younger members of their cohort who remind me more of Gen X than any of the recent generations we’ve seen lately. I can recall the days when bike-riding teenagers with mullets and rattails did wheelies as they weaved through traffic, roaming through neighborhoods on a summer evening, all without helmets. I saw just such a scene last week on the corner of Barack Obama Boulevard and Park Street in central San Jose. “This gives me hope for the future,” beamed my husband. It should.

There’s more. From what I see, both among my own high school children and their many friends, and from my first-year university students, is that these kids are more ready to accept intellectual danger than the teens who preceded them a few years ago. In fact, they are hungry for it. They ridicule the false virtue behind those who are easily triggered. They want the truth rather than “your truth”. They are ready to grapple with difficult ideas, and to consider things that are complex rather than merely affirming. They take it as a sign of respect if they are spoken to frankly, rather than treated with tiptoeing consideration so as not to offend.

But very few adults in positions of responsibility seem willing to take a risk and fill the void by giving these kids something dangerous and demanding to grapple with. And so we are at an impasse between generations, each wanting and needing something from the other, neither fully courageous enough to step outside of our mutually self-assigned roles, that of protector and that of protected, to foster youth competence rather than youth self-confidence.

Consider the speeches I heard at last week’s high-school graduation. Before the students processed to the stage, my own high school daughters leaned over to me in their seats and warned me about the clichés we were about to hear: “We made it! We never gave up. Follow your dreams. Believe in yourself.” They were exactly right. The student speeches we heard were predictable and underwhelming.

But for all their banality, the students’ speeches seemed to be original. They had awkward sentences. They referenced in-jokes. They were personal and showed personality. The speeches were delivered with all the enthusiasm of youth, even if they were clumsily written. The clumsiness itself is a part of the beauty of youth. They are not afraid to take a misstep.

The principal’s speech was a stark contrast. It was almost certainly written by ChatGPT. While the youth at least attempted to be funny and personable, hers was vague and detached. It was less than merely bureaucratic and more than merely polished. With a quote here from Henry Ford, another there from Muhammad Ali, and a closing assertion that hard work will breed success, it felt like it was written by the predictive morality of a computer code: both artificial and risk averse — much like the contemporary teen is typified as being.

And yet it is often the parents who are risk averse.

Even the most thoughtful among us — the most prudent, prepared, and planned — realize in short order that we could never have been ready for the arrival of a brand-new human being. But rather than accept the new child on its own terms, as separate, unknown, unruly, we have instead taken solace in books, in “best-practices”, in pop psychology and mommy blogs. Many parenting resources contain good ideas, I’m sure, but even the best ideas are only minimally effective in dealing with complex, emotional, sinful, gracious, self-serving, generous children. But it is understandable to want to attempt to mitigate the risks of having a child by feeling that the scope of what we can control is increasing. And what we can’t control, we often affirm. This gives us at least the illusion of influence. As though how they turn out has to do with our skills of validation.

Suggested reading

Astrology's predictable popularity

By Abi Millar

Which brings us back to the incompetence of the average teen. It is true that most of them couldn’t survive on their own until they’re at least 20. But a large reason for that is because adults have protected them — because we are scared. We seem to have simultaneously too little faith in youth and too many expectations. We have little faith because, in part, we are ourselves timid. We have eschewed forms of meaning that demand something of us and replaced it with a religion of niceness. It makes us feel like we’re in a safe, socially normative space. We’re all spiritual but not religious. We believe in the sameness of our own subjectivity. Our lack of courage around thinking deeply about the painful realities of life has, in part, contributed to the intellectual flabbiness of our youth. When we teach that inoffensiveness is the highest ethic, one becomes timid and alone.

Should we be surprised, then, that Gen Z is returning to religion. It is difficult to track the behavior of the younger cohort of Gen Z, which is emerging in real time and hasn’t yet entered the world of official statistics. But in my own parish church, located in a quiet urban corner of the Canadian prairies, junior- and senior-high attendance has easily quadrupled over the last four years, now comprising about 10% of the total each week.

Of course, one can’t make a generalization based on one small church, but the overall positive attitude towards religion is palpable. Perhaps this is because they want to experience competence. They want to encounter something demanding. (Even my daughter, the one for whom operating a can opener is a challenge, is slowly and painstakingly making her way through Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship).

My sense is this: the future is going to belong to the youth who want something difficult and demanding now. The sentence-generating machines that have been programmed with the morality of inoffensive relativism are going to look and feel increasingly shallow, and the strong among the young are going to not only reject this artificial world, but search for something that offers something more to them because it asks for something more of them.

These words came back to me the following week when the Hudson Bay Corporation, the oldest in North America, announced that it was going out of business. Incorporated by royal decree in 1670, the HBC was responsible for westward expansion into British North America. Canada became what it is because of this company. For over 200 years, the HBC was the governing authority in Western Canada. In the 20th century, it became the anchor for urban development, emerging as the country’s most iconic retailer. Every major city in Canada had its downtown centered around an HBC department store that spanned an entire city block. Even in recent years, the Christmas windows of its flagship Toronto store attracted the kind of attention that a major tourist destination receives. The floors inside were civic retail Utopia, where teen girls and new moms and corporate bankers and grandpas shopped happily under the same roof. If there was a unifying symbol of Canadian culture in the last century, it may have been an HBC wool blanket. Traded for fur pelts from the late 1700s, the blankets at one point accounted for well over half of all traded goods. There are few fashion staples dating from over 200 years ago that are still popular today, but the HBC Stripes are one of them. Every household has one somewhere in the house.

The end of the HBC, hastened by its owner, an American private equity firm that bought the company in 2012, has happened during a time of a strange resurgence of Canadian patriotism. A few months ago, one experienced a kind of fremdscham — vicarious embarrassment — if one saw a household flying a Canadian flag. We have been told, and told often, that we’re a genocidal nation; it was gauche to be proud of Canada. But now even in the most bourgeois neighborhoods you see the maple leaf flying proudly. Canadian products in grocery stores are now labeled with a maple leaf. Californian wine has been taken off our shelves. There are Canadian flags inside businesses and on clothing, and on hats. (We have our own version of the red and white ballcap: “Canada is Already Great”, it says.) This weekend in my home province there is a Rally for Canada happening at the provincial legislature. I think there will be music, some speeches by local radio hosts, face-painting for the kids, and some fried mini doughnuts and hot dogs. You know, all the things that make us uniquely Canadian, I guess.

More from this author

Why girls should be tomboys

By Marilyn Simon

It is difficult to put one’s finger on the pulse of Canadian culture. We seem to define ourselves by one thing: not American. (That’s why it’s still perfectly acceptable for a Canadian backpacker to affix a maple leaf to her bag. At home our patriotism has been a cause for embarrassment, but abroad a worse embarrassment would be to be mistaken for a vulgar American.) Americans, on the other hand, typically don’t think of us at all. Years before the talk of becoming the 51st state, my husband took a trip from his home in Virginia to Canada to give a lecture. He was delayed overnight in the Chicago airport because he left his passport at home and had to have it emergency couriered. “I honestly forgot Canada was a separate country,” he joked, making fun of his own forgetfulness by deflecting it onto Canada’s deepest insecurity. “I just assumed it was like America-North.”

But Canadians forget that we’re a separate country, too, strangely. Consider this: at a party around Christmas, after the US election but before Trump’s inauguration, a fellow Canadian and I were talking about, unsurprisingly, US politics. “Trump is going to be bad for Canada,” he said. “I expect so,” I said, “but he is allowed to do things that he thinks are in the best interest of his country.” “But are you prepared to accept everything he says he’ll do?” he asked. “It doesn’t really matter since I’m Canadian. I didn’t vote for him, and I don’t pay taxes to him.” My friend stood there, as though not quite understanding what I meant, so I clarified: “he is not the president of Canada.”

Canada is a country that has long defined itself by our sense of moral superiority to our uncouth neighbor to the south. To be Canadian is to be more virtuous and more intelligent than our American cousins. But of course we learn our virtue from America, influenced by them in ways we can’t fully apprehend because our culture is so saturated by theirs. The only thing we don’t do better than them is patriotism — until recently, that is. Now that Trump has adopted a stance of hostility toward Canada, we’ve got good at that, too. Our newfound love of Canada is another import from our southern neighbors. Our response to Trump’s tariffs is to buy local, support Canada. In other words, we are now doing by way of patriotic reaction precisely what Trump is doing by way of policy: spending our money in our own country.

I know that this sounds as if I’m unpatriotic myself, eye-rolling at Canada’s reactive nationalism. This isn’t true. First of all, few things are as Canadian as being self-deprecating and self-apologizing. Sorry, eh. But truly I love Canada, deeply. Not only our cold, unforgiving winters, which do forge a different kind of person, but our social and political systems, which in fact are very un-American, and make for a very pleasant society. I was a participant recently at an American conference in New York. There I was surprised by how opposed the Americans were to things like universal healthcare, public daycare and public schools, and even to taxes. One participant there was a third-generation non-social security number holder. She is off the grid so that she doesn’t have to pay a cent in taxes. To a Canadian this is unthinkable. Nobody likes paying taxes, but we certainly do enjoy the benefits of them. And we are certainly aware that we have a responsibility to our fellow citizens.

There is a tangible difference between Canada and the US that made me realize how incompatible our cultures are. Canada is collectivist, if not even a teensy bit socialist. We have government corporations, such as energy utilities and insurance companies. They work well, in general. We pay high taxes, but we get services in return — no, don’t snicker. It’s true. For many years I was a single mother. I had to work. Daycare in my home province is heavily subsidized by the government. The cost to all is $10 a day. Affordable and necessary, so off my kids went. To the average American, I have learned, state-run daycare sounds menacing, as though it’s the kind of institution where toddlers are given sippy cups of Soylent Green as images of blue-haired angry teens are beamed into their innocent eyes, like Clockwork Orange for three-year-olds. But in practice provincial daycares are each run separately by a board made up of parent volunteers. The province provides the funding, but the community determines the policies. And the daycares are truly diverse communities. Professional moms and dads mingle with recent immigrants at pre-school parties. The lawyer and the grocery store custodian become friends as they plan weekend playdates together. The Eritrean refugee family and the Russian Jewish family laugh together as their kids hang from the monkey bars at pick-up time. It is a kind of classless polis. It is beautiful, and it works.

And the same goes with our healthcare system. Although certainly strained and now with a very questionable policy regarding medically assisted dying, it is still highly functional. That is why we hear about cases when the system fails. They are newsworthy because they are not commonplace. A few years ago, my daughter fell on glass and sliced her knee; it was cut open to the bone. My American husband and I took her to the downtown Children’s Hospital. Within three hours, her knee was stitched (10 big sutures and two subcutaneous ones) and we were sent home with Advil and extra bandages. As we drove home, I asked Matthew how much he paid for parking in the hospital parking garage. “Seven dollars,” he said. “Seven dollars!” I replied, shaking my head. “Tsk, tsk. They get you coming and going around here.” He slowly turned his head to glare at me. “In the US that bandage alone would have cost $25.” He is right. Our system is not perfect, but it has in large part been saved from outright corruption because it is a public good.

“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” is, as we all know, America’s saying. Canada’s lesser-known one is “Peace, Order, and Good Government”. At the heart of Canada is a spirit that embraces governance as long as it is for the common good. We have an election here at the end of this month. It will be, as usual, a battle between the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party. The latter would have won the election handily had it been called in the autumn (as it should have been) while the deeply disliked Trudeau was in power and Trump had not yet started a trade war with America’s longest-running trade partner. But now to be Conservative in Canada is aligned, incorrectly, with American Trumpism. To be Liberal is to be, more or less correctly, a lib globalist. The American political landscape has so overshadowed our politics and culture that their terms have become ours; their division of political policy our own — you’re either Right or Left — just as our “Canadian culture” is in so many ways the same as theirs: doughnuts and hot dogs.

But Canada has a unique history of political values that have neither formed themselves as a negation of American values or a colonization by them. To be a Red Tory is to be both fiscally conservative and collectivist; it is to hold socialist policies that look to the community’s good, while often holding onto conservative social values. Unlike America’s focus on individual liberty, Canadian Red Toryism focuses on the collective. The Canadian Wheat Board was such an institution: a single government-run trade platform where farmers marketed their grain. It effectively dissolved in 2012 in favor of open market globalization, which has been devastating to family farms but good for corporate ones. (The majority of Canadian farmers opposed its dissolution; my father, a Ukrainian immigrant farmer, was one of them. Corporate farms, however, lobbied strongly for “market freedom” as opposed to collective capitalism. They won.) I wonder if now, in the face of high tariffs in our American market, it might be time to bring Canadian collectivism back to our grain market. Few things would make me prouder to be Canadian. Western farmers, like our truckers, are remarkably unified. Ottawa might want to remember this.

Suggested reading

Annexation has always haunted Canada

By Michael Ledger-Lomas

But probably I’m being naïve. It feels increasingly like a remnant of the past to imagine a government that is both collectivist and conservative, like a trace of old wiring in a house that no longer serves any purpose. But it could still happen. I am no economist, but I love this country of mine and, as the wife of an American, have more insight than I might otherwise have had to the differences between our two nations. Of course we will never, ever become annexed to the USA — for one thing, the Americans couldn’t handle Quebecers for a day, let alone conciliate them for well over a century.

But the history of Canada is to keep traces of the past intact. That is why we still have a king — God save him. We have always been loyalists. This might now mean being loyal to our unique Canadian collectivism. Socialist, but not wokeist. Fiscally conservative, but not anti-taxation or anti-government. Neither on the Right nor the Left, but maybe somewhere beneath these divisions, closer to the land. The old Canada of the mid-20th century might feel no longer relevant to the functioning of the modern globalist markets, but then again, the modern globalist market seems to be crashing down before our eyes. Canadian Red Toryism need not be an artifact of the past. Just as old houses can be restored, Canadian Red Toryism may become again a vital force in a functioning modern state, for the current of collectivism still flows through our country. In a time of diminishing exports, a uniquely Canadian socialism might still be a viable commodity to the people of Canada.

There has been important research done by social scientists, most prominently Jonathan Haidt, outlining the catastrophic effects of social media on teens, particularly on teen girls. I am not here to argue that the smartphone has been a net positive or even a neutral technology in the life of teens. As a teacher, I can see that it is bad for young people, as it is for me. But the past year has made me far less anxious about the cell phone’s capacity to make teens anxious. The “vibe shift” we’ve all noticed, moving away from extreme progressive ideologies towards more “populist” (popular) attitudes, has made the ubiquity of social media far less worrying. Youth culture has changed. What was once cool on social media is now cringe. These days you wouldn’t be seen dead posting social justice infographics. And therapy talk, thank god, is no longer a trend. This has happened quicker than social scientists might have been able to collate in data points, perhaps. I am not blaming them for that. Teen trends happen in an instant.

To understand teen trends, we need to remember that the teen is essentially a pack animal. Movies since The Breakfast Club, which is now 40 years old, have told us what the packs are: the jocks, the princesses, the nerds, the rockers, and the weirdos. Teens attach themselves to their group. Even the loners are part of a group: the NPC one. Ever since Judd Nelson courted Molly Ringwald, we’ve been told to break down the barriers, move outside our cliques, see people for who they are on the inside. It never occurs to us that the groups are formed in the first place because teens do see each other as they are on the inside, and that the groups are formed accordingly.

The truth is that the teenagers like their groups. They have very little interest in moving outside of them or abolishing them. The groups give them a sense of belonging, and they like to belong. Belonging helps one to feel less alone, and it enables a teen to understand and form judgments about the world around her. The teen typically adopts internally the external markers of her group so that she can find a way to fit into the world. We have been told that identity, particularly gender identity, is socially constructed. But of course it is! Teenage years of development are difficult and confusing. The social groups offer one a sense of coherence about the world, and a template for forming oneself to fit it. The teens conform to each other; even (or maybe especially) the “non-conformists” conform to one another.

More from this author

Why girls should be tomboys

By Marilyn Simon

That the teenager wants to fit into the world is a good thing, and a necessary one. As the teen fits into the world she also changes it so that it fits her. The Gen Z teen is doing this playfully, for instance, with language. They’ve resurrected old words, “cooked”, and made up new ones, “opp” and “slaps”. They break words apart and put them back together: “unalive”. These words spread quickly, thanks to social media, and using the words signals belonging to a culture — with the extra caveat that the new words all must be said with just the right amount of ironic self-mockery. The ultimate code for belonging to teen culture is to signal that it’s lame to look desperate to belong to teen culture.

Their language games and early adaptability to new words show that the teen is both a natural rebel and a natural conformist. Almost universally girls want first to fit in with other girls. The teen girl moves in a pack, and she thinks with her pack. And while it is true that during the teen years girls start to become focused on boys, their main focus remains, almost universally, on their acceptance with other girls.

What the teenaged girl wants most is to be judged as an insider by the other teens in her group. She wants to feel secure enough in some girls’ approval so that they can collectively give disapproval to other girls, as well as to the guys. In other words, she wants to feel good about herself, which happens by evaluating herself, her values and personality, relative to her peers and to find them wanting. This might make being a teen girl sound like an extended Mean Girls movie or something, but I don’t think it really is. We all judge other people, all the time. (Many readers no doubt judged me as a bad mother when I said I enjoy sharing social media with my kids. I am not hurt if you have.) Judgment is necessary. Our judgments aren’t just our values, but also the way we experience our values. Through judgments the norms of the group become the feelings of the girl. The girl-packs help teens make sense of this and socialize them into it.

Over the past decade or so, the rebel-conformist qualities of the teen girl have coalesced in the conformity of the non-conforming teen. The “rebel” in her fights oppressions, combats “norms”, and is an “individual”. But she is an easily recognizable stereotype, subject to what Matthew B Crawford describes as “the sameness of mass solipsism”. The mass-conforming non-conformists have held undeniable power over teen culture, and their influence have coincided with the advent of social media. We know that social media coincided with a rapid increase of teenage anxiety, mental illness, and general unhappiness. But it also coincided with peak MeToo, peak cancel culture, peak therapy culture, peak social justice culture, and peak trauma-dumping culture.

I am not here to diagnose correlation or causation. The rise of social media and the rise of teenage unhappiness and anxiety are a kind of chicken-and-egg phenomenon; I don’t know what came first. But I do know that the kinds of messages coming through social media have changed, and that this change is correlating with a change in teen attitudes. Five years ago, during the start of the pandemic, one of my daughters fell under the influence of social media messaging on mental health. She was 11, and thanks to lockdowns, isolated from normal face-to-face teenage interactions. And she suddenly developed some sort of depression/anxiety/self-harm habits, as well as a nervous tick. Trauma was really “in” at the time. (This is not to say, and it’s a little embarrassing that I might need to clarify this for some readers, that some kids/teens/adults don’t suffer from mental illness and from traumatic experiences. I am talking about a trend, a zeitgeist, and not legitimate illness nor the traumatic horrors that beset many innocent victims. Some individuals are truly afflicted, and others use it as a persona. Both things can be true at the same time.)

The more afflicted a teen was by trauma, the more street-cred she got for being an authentic victim, or for being an ally. A few years ago, I had a university student in a Shakespeare class raise her hand to tell me that I shouldn’t talk about death because it could “trigger a trauma” in some students. She was there to “educate” me about being trauma-sensitive. That death is traumatic for all of humanity seemed to escape her notice entirely, as did the fact that it would be really difficult to teach Shakespeare without mentioning death. She seemed to think she was protecting at-risk students from something she had supposedly discovered about mortality. What a whiz. (There is an FX series, English Teacher, which satirizes this type of student. She suffers from “asymptomatic Tourette’s”, which can only be self-diagnosed, and she is triggered by the mention of any kind of illness in literature class. I haven’t seen the show. I only know about it because my teens share reels of it with me through, *clears throat*, social media.)

Five years ago, weakness was the goal. This not only relieved the teen of the emotional burden of learning how to take responsibility for her own insecurities, it made her feel more included in the teen group that judged affliction itself to be a virtue. But the real emotional satisfaction came in the form of judging anyone who didn’t validate her self-diagnoses. Oh, the rush of feeling morally justified in looking down at those who lack the ethical lens needed to breathe life into your traumas. Trauma-affirmation bonded teens to each other. With friends like those, who needs enemies?

But there has been a colossal sea-change in Gen Z culture since then. It’s been like turning a huge ship on the sea, slow, but there is now momentum behind its critical mass, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to change course. It is now decidedly lame to be mentally fragile, an “iPad kid”, someone who spends all their time online, who has followed the trends of trauma-dumping, and of being non-conforming. This is now “cringe”. (My own daughter’s “afflictions” have become a running joke with her. Yes, she knows I’m writing about it. No, she is not offended.) Teens, let’s remember, are both rebels and conformists. As soon as teen brittleness became, as they would have said, “normalized”, teens began to rebel against it. And now it is the norm to rebel against safe-space culture, which is increasingly top-heavy anyway. Once your vice-principal, your Phys-Ed teacher, the mainstream media, corporations, and politicians get behind a teen zeitgeist, it loses its “rizz”. The rebellion has taken the form of ridicule. What was once sacred is lambasted for its sanctimony. And so now the teenager recognizes her position as an insider of the group if she is privy to the scandalous jokes told about the dominant culture. The tyranny of “alt-girl” is over. Her downfall was that she was too fragile to be funny.

Suggested reading

TikTok: weapon of mass distraction

By Gurwinder Bhogal

But what is going to fill the vacuum left by the nonconforming teen? Recently, in anticipation of its third season which begins this month, I rewatched the very first episode of HBO’s The White Lotus. Its opening sequence portrays in microcosm what seems to be emerging on the broad cultural scale. We see two older teens/young women, both gorgeous (played by Sydney Sweeney and Brittany O’Grady), talking in secrecy to each other on a boat, gossiping about the other guests. From their perch under the boat’s awning, they judge all the other passengers, discerning their innermost characteristics. And they are not wrong in their judgments. The two beautiful girls have powers of perception because they are so often on the receiving end of others’ scrutiny.

But the show’s real moment of insight is when these two teens meet one of these boat guests, the young newlywed bride, at the hotel pool. The bride is friendly with the two teens, but they act coolly superior to her (one is pretentiously reading Freud and the other casually flipping through Nietzsche). The young wife quickly realizes that behind their smiles the two girls are mocking her. She turns away from them to go for a swim, taking off her beach cover-up to reveal a truly stunning physique. Sweeney’s character instantly looks disappointed and humiliated. “Oh shit,” she says. The natural order reestablishes its Darwinian hierarchy. Survival of the hottest. How cruel.

Of course, Sydney Sweeney’s own perfect physique may not qualify her for this role. But then again, maybe her own sexiness makes her the perfect person to play the disappointed teen: she would obviously be aware of the power hotness wields, which is why she is humbled by beauty. Her response is not generous, but at least she does not persist in arrogance. The teenage girl who is not hot frequently holds onto more resentment and moral vanity. She would feel proud to be ugly next to beauty because it makes her seem like a beautiful person on the inside. That is her claim to superiority. It is oftentimes a compensatory, rival pride that she feels in her own unattractiveness. The moral vanity goes so deep that she doesn’t typically recognize it as vanity — especially when our culture celebrates this kind of pride as a virtue.

This Sydney Sweeney syndrome, part arrogant self-righteous teen and part neo-pagan hot-goddess, occupies a large amount of digital real estate on social media. Both of these vibes no doubt add fuel to the feelings of pride and insecurity we have seen in teens. But we can’t ignore either the sense of fun that’s been emerging in Gen Z. The new cool is to ridicule what was cool a few years ago. This means that the fragile, easily offended teen (who used this identity as a power-play to elicit sympathy and affirmations from others, as well as to raise her status as one who could educate others in higher-order morality) has now become a meme rather than an aspiration. The laughing new teen has a healthier way of being, and my hunch is that we will see a corresponding decline in mental health issues from youth. One tends to become what one pretends to be.

But this is not to say that the new teen is good. She may tend toward arrogance and cruelty in the same way that the cancel-culture teens did. There is a unique opportunity, if one has an interest in these things, in filling the void left by the now cringy “alt-girl”, with something beautiful, strong, and glorious. My hunch is that this may take the form of a return to a more vital way of being embodied – more Nietzschean uber-teen than afflicted victim. The trick will be to make the glory of this teen also honorable, and to make her strength also generous.

Gentle parenting, or conscious parenting, professes to foster compassion and emotional self-understanding in a child. It’s about respecting the emotions of a child and the motivations behind those emotions. If a child has a tantrum, hits, or generally misbehaves, it is because she is frustrated — and a parent’s job is to address the root cause of the child’s frustrations. A child should be understood, never punished. This is because for a gentle parent, children aren’t bad. They aren’t even neutral. They are inherently good. As a mother myself to two teenagers, this is news.

Punishment, in the gentle mindset, focuses the attention on an unnatural consequence rather than on the motivations for behaviour. No motivation is bad, because no feeling originates in one’s selfishness, one’s greed, or one’s desire to dominate. Anger and inappropriate behaviour are caused by frustration: the frustration of not being understood, of not being able to accomplish what one wishes, of not being able to freely do what one wants. When a child experiences a curb to their will, the parent needs to offer comfort. Instead of punishment, a child should face the “natural consequences” of her choices. For instance, if a child refuses to go to sleep, this means that she suffers the natural consequence of getting tired and cranky.

A natural consequence of my own kids acting cranky is that I might lose my shit on them, but I don’t get the impression that gentle parents are encouraged to act naturally. This brings us back to the insufferable tone of voice that gentle parents all seem to use with children, particularly those millennial mom influencers on social media. My aversion to it is that there is a fake niceness to their wheedling that anyone can see through, including most four-year-olds. It is patronising, and reveals a deep annoyance with children but prohibits any kind of genuine expression of it. One can’t get angry with a child because he is not doing anything bad because he is inherently good. What is needed is to redirect his natural self-expression to a more socially accepted choice, one that will result in Mommy speaking to you with more authentic niceness.

Gentle parenting flattens the human experience into a series of choice options, none of which reflect any natural goodness or badness in the child, but which instead represent optimal or less optimal outcomes. This is crude behaviourist psychology, treating the human as a kind of input-output machine. Under this model, gentle parenting ignores the depth and complexity of a child’s soul — including the baseness therein — and, because it ignores it, the technique also fails to nurture the depth of a child’s soul, resulting in, unsurprisingly, children who have shallow souls. A child is denied her full humanity as a moral agent, and treated not as an equal, but as somehow less than fully, richly, terribly human. In short, as the little shits they are, yet having a spark of the divine. Just like Mom.

What happens if a child feels himself to be bad, let’s say, by wanting to hurt another child in order to feel a sense of power, satisfaction, and maybe even glee? In that case we must ignore that part of the child’s soul that has those instinctive feelings, both of “naughtiness” and of the corresponding guilt and shame. As this might imply that his feelings are bad, and so he deserves to be punished. Since gentle parenting has no capacity for talking to a child about wickedness, guilt, and punishment, it also has no ability to speak about redemption.

There are significant problems with this approach to parenting and with its results. The most obvious criticism is that instead of raising resilient children, gentle parenting often does the opposite, making kids more fragile, more averse to ideas that don’t align with their own, and less competent in the world.

But the real problem with gentle parenting is that it removes moral freedom from a child because it refuses to accept the moral depth of a child. Punishment is unnecessary because the child is never bad, merely misunderstood. While gentle parenting concedes that a child’s behaviour might be less or more appropriate, well-socialised, and safe, it doesn’t concede that a child’s motivations might originate in wickedness just as easily as goodness. Nor does it accept that a child’s will should be curbed because it is often corrupted in its desires, not simply frustrated.

In neglecting the dark corners of a child’s soul, gentle parenting does children a disservice. For the fact is that most children know that they’re sometimes bad, and that they sometimes do things out of malice, spite, and greed. Gentle parents are right: shame and guilt are negative feelings which may cause “trauma” for the child, as for the adult. No kidding. But the job of the parent is not to prevent any potential “trauma”, it is to love the child even when they are bad, and to punish them, and most importantly to forgive them. A child can’t understand the lightness of forgiveness without understanding first that one needs it. (I often wonder if the parents also want to avoid the “trauma” of guilt and shame, and so never acknowledge their own reasons for doing the things we do, such as becoming parenting “philosophy” consumers out of vanity, pride, or sloth. We may one day have good reason to ask forgiveness from our kids.)

Forgiveness is the precursor to redemption, a transformation that happens on the inside. A child becomes an individual moral agent only through the transformative process of parental punishment and forgiveness. It is an act of faith on behalf of the parent which calls out the inner goodness of a child while punishing the badness. Faith in the good is precisely what calls out this punishment. Somehow this doesn’t quite work if one holds goodness as the granted condition of the child, for then there is no faith required, no moment of uncertainty that is the ground of trust. There is no view of the child as an autonomous moral agent, and thus it offers no space for a child to grow.

More from this author

Why girls should be tomboys

By Marilyn Simon

Since the age of Shakespeare, most of our great literary villains have had depth, reasons for their villainy, motivations that we can sympathise with, even be attracted to. Yet we can also see that they’re villainous because they choose to be. Shakespeare gives his villains and his tragic heroes dignity by granting them their awful humanity. And he shows that it is only because his villains do wicked things willingly that they can be redeemed; the freedom to sin is the precursor for the unlooked-for miracle of redemption, the gift of loving forgiveness is accepted only because one knows he does not deserve it. Rather than teach a child that her soul is good, a child must come to understand her own capacity for wickedness and understand the need for punishment, because only then can she accept the anxiety-eliminating joy of redemption.

Ironically, it is the avoidance of punishment that may very well cause anxiousness in the child, for the work of making oneself more socially appropriate is never done, but punishment has a fixed term. In C.S. Lewis’s prescient novel That Hideous Strength, he writes of the progressive project of eliminating punishment. “You got to get the ordinary man into the state in which he says ‘Sadism’ when he hears the word ‘Punishment’,” says the female leader of the new progressive police force, one Officer Hardcastle. She goes on to explain that “what has hampered every English police force up to date was precisely the idea of deserved punishment. For desert was always finite: you could do so much to the criminal and no more. Remedial treatment, on the other hand, need have no fixed limit; it could go on till it has affected a cure, and those who were carrying it out would decide when that was.”

Of course, it would be unfair to compare the job of a parent, which truly is never done, to the task of the judicial system in meting out punishment. But Hardcastle’s basic philosophy is the same: gentle parenting’s rubric of offering more or less socially accepted choice options but not punishment puts a child under the constant pressure to always be under remedial anxieties. The alternative is that she becomes so immune to these anxieties that she ceases to feel them internally, and instead she comes to genuinely expect that the world will conform to her inner feelings. This is perhaps close to what we see with much of contemporary grievance culture. It is now society that is put under the self-scrutinising anxieties of constant remediation. And who will decide when the cure for social ills has been met? Perhaps the angry blue-haired 19-year olds will let us know.

In parenting, it is redemption that should be the focus, a deepening of the human soul that comes from humility and transforms from the inside. The irony of the conscious parenting ethos is that while it purports to understand the child, it has a blind spot for understanding the nature of the human soul. And that with its focus on behaviour rather than on badness, the gentle parent contributes to anxiety rather than alleviating it.

If a view that focuses on the badness of the human soul and its need for forgiveness sounds Christian, that is because it is. Christianity is based on the idea that human nature is corrupt, or rather, that it has been corrupted. It also tells that there should be justice for wrongdoings, that evil acts should be punished because the evil acts originate in the baseness of the human heart. Of course, this isn’t simply Christian. The ancient and even recent world shared this sense of the need for punishing those who do wrong. When we punish an individual it is not exclusively about re-educating him into socially accepted forms of behaviour, but about giving some satisfaction, some justice, to the wronged party. If Kevin hits Johnny, it is all very well for us to encourage both of them to get over it, though of course a “natural consequence” of the hitting might be that Johnny no longer wants to play with Kevin. But “natural consequences” don’t apply in the adult world. We not only do children a disservice if we don’t administer symbolic punishments for their actions, we also don’t treat them as competent humans, capable of entering into the symbolic nature of civilisation. The “natural consequence” of someone doing the unspeakable and murdering my child, for instance, might be that I tear his throat out with my bare teeth. But we instead give the criminal a symbolic punishment of a prison term of 25 years, an arbitrary number that is supposed to answer some demand for justice and some demand for impartiality. “Natural consequence” would see a society spiral into vengeance; symbolic punishments save us from this.

Suggested reading

What I've learnt about motherhood

By Kathleen Stock

In fact there is a “natural consequence” of understanding the dark shadow of one’s soul and the ache for forgiveness. That is why redemption is the constant theme of great stories, from St. Paul to King Lear to Darth Vader. But even in Christian gentle parenting circles, parents whitewash the central tenets of Christianity in their efforts not to traumatise a child by mentioning sin or punishment. Consider these comments by Anna Skates, a children’s church minister and conscious parenting influencer. She won’t say: “Jesus died for you/your sins.” Instead, she favours a gentle approach: “While I realise that statement won’t psychologically damage every kid, if it damages ONE, it’s not worth using. Period… And the reality is, Jesus didn’t die specifically for your kid. I know that’s a bit blunt but technically — Jesus died publicly and grotesquely because he was a political and religious threat to those in power.” What a dim view Skates takes of a child’s intellect and capacity for handling emotionally difficult concepts. Rather than allow a difficult idea to be presented to a child, she assumes that a safe intellectual space is more sacred than a deep one.

Skates goes on to discuss her discomfort with saying that “God wanted Jesus to die” (in itself the wrong way entirely to frame the issue, and not something a theologian would say). “To attempt to teach the concept of a loving God,” Skates writes, “while also delivering this narrative is confusing and jarring. This also makes the concept of ‘following Jesus’ much more ominous and threatening than it should be.”

“More ominous than it should be”? I am not sure what cheery cupcake-Bible Skates is reading, but in the one I have, most of the disciples and apostles are killed, horribly, because of their faith. And even while they lived they followed Jesus’s injunction to take up their crosses and follow him, something every Christian is commanded to do. Christianity is ominous and threatening. It asks for nothing more than your life. It is life-giving precisely because the Christian is asked to dare all and risk all, because she has faith in her redemption, a faith which gives her joy and freedom. “Conscious parenting” influencers like Skates have an impoverished view of children, one that assumes that they have no intellectual or emotional depth, and so deprive them of the very narratives that will form this depth within them.

We are in the season of Advent. The church lights an Advent candle each Sunday before Christmas: one for hope, one for peace, one for joy and one for love. But until recently, at least until the 20th century, Christians were told to think on four other things during this season: on death, judgement, heaven, and hell. Not very gentle, or very merry. It is a scary religion. And rightly so. Death is not a metaphor. And punishment is something we all have deserved. Holy terrors. Good. I don’t want a gentle Father, one who speaks down to me in a condescending way. I want to worship a God who puts the fear of God in me, who has enough faith in me to show me my own wickedness and the judgement that I deserve, and then who will give to me instead of punishment, a baby, soft and small and lying in a manger.

Looking back, there are a number of reasons why my identity transitioned so abruptly to that of a tomboy. The wildness of the guys was different from that of the girls: the risks they took were ones of daring and skill. The girls took risks with emotion and intimacy (being sexually intimate was an emotional risk). For another, the manly virtues were powerful: courage and valour and strength. I admired them, and I coveted them. I wanted to test myself, to prove my worth. More than anything I wanted others to see these qualities within me and to respect me for them. Femininity was disenchanting, with little to offer. While I was out on the mountain trails with the guys, testing and challenging my strength, the girls would be lazing on a lake dock, reading magazines, painting nails. Girliness was boring.

But there was another force at work, deeper and less comfortable to name. Being boyish was an escape from the anxiety of being a woman. It is one thing to jump off a 40-foot bridge into swirling water, quite another entirely to grapple with the pressures of being a young woman. I resented male sexual attention. It was exhausting, that constant awareness of male hunger. I wanted to be free from that background buzzing.

Instead, I was privy to their locker room talk. They would often tease each other about whom they had bedded the night before and laugh about the way the girl would wake up hoping for more commitment, more connection, more promises of care. Though I see only now that the guys were also afraid of the risks involved in love. Their mockery often concealed a lurking fear and resentment of their own need for female affection, a threat to their independence and autonomy. But I had a secret terror of becoming one of these girls, of being treated casually, of feeling unvalued. There are differences in how young women and young men respond to the risks of intimacy. As a woman, I was afraid that I might become callous and disillusioned, or wounded and hurt. The promises of the sexual revolution that offered freedoms and pleasures without guilt held little appeal for me. It wasn’t guilt I wanted to avoid, it was the self-protective cynicism that disappointments often lead to. I wanted to avoid the sexual marketplace altogether. Shedding my femininity was the easiest way to do this.

Suggested reading

Ridicule is nothing to be scared of

By Marylin Simon

But it wasn’t just because of the influence of men that I became a tomboy. Women, too, in ways that are subtle, judge other women, especially pretty ones, with preconceived notions that I was keen to avoid. Young pretty women are sometimes seen as superficial, as dumb, as less serious than a type of woman who covers up her attractiveness by appearing to not care about her looks. Young women often earn social points with other women for having a type of look that loudly says, “I’m not vain, and not pandering to socially constructed expectations of beauty.” Baggy clothes become a sign of ethical enlightenment. Not wearing make-up a signal that one has inner beauty. That this style is itself carefully cultivated, an exercise of moral vanity, often seems to be lost on young woman. Cutting off my hair as a young woman was taking this aesthetic one step further. It was a decisive striking out against the femininity of my teenage years and a clear signal to those around me that I was not to be confined by gender expectations. (It was the late Nineties. I shudder to think of what I may have been tempted to cut off were I to be in my late-teens now.)

At any rate, it worked. Immediately I was taken more seriously by my professors, by my friends, by guys and by girls. I was seen as tough and as independent. And the more I was seen as tough and independent, the more I became tough and independent. We tend to become the person we pretend to be.

There were three aspects to the change in my appearance that seem to be absent from today’s discourse on young women and gender, all of them related. The first was that I had a deep and genuine affection for men and for masculinity. I had no interest in correcting their “toxic” attitudes and humour. I had no desire to domestic their behaviours. I adored their swagger. I loved their courage. I delighted in their jokes, their irreverence, their ridicule. The second is that virginity was a concept that had not yet been entirely corrupted by the accusation that “The Patriarchy” employed it as a weapon to keep women controlled and confined. And the last was that though I wanted to push against convention, this push was aimed at enlarging what it meant to be a woman rather than what it meant to be merely “gendered”.

I am often surprised, and troubled, now by how quickly a young woman will abandon being a woman because she isn’t at home in the stereotypical idea of femaleness. That rather than redefine the female stereotype, she jettisons her female gender. What makes her dislike it so much, I wonder? The added irony is that when she becomes a “he” or “they”, as we often see today, he/they does so without any genuine affection for masculinity. That is, rather than challenge the feminine stereotypes she clearly doesn’t fit, he/they becomes a boy who isn’t, often, at all masculine. He/they appropriates the concept of maleness into herself (himself, themself), making it safe rather than wild and scary and foreign and fun.

I am sympathetic to the young women I see today who seem to want to escape the burden of being a woman by becoming some form of nonbinary. It may feel like it offers freedom from the confines of a girlish stereotype, frees one from social expectations, and, importantly, from sexual pressures. Identifying in ways that cut against the norms of gender is often seen as a kind of power move, a way to position oneself so that others take one seriously as an individual. It answers to our desire for uniqueness and self-expression. But as it does so, it often forms a young woman into a new stereotypical type, while cementing the idea that femaleness is merely girly, an idea that feminism once worked hard to break.

Suggested reading

Why does hot girl summer have to end?

By Tom McTague

I remained a virgin into my early twenties. This allowed me to not only slowly grow into my skin as a woman, but also gave me the independence from gender I was so keen to embrace. But once we label virginity as a form of male dominance, a remnant of a more repressive sexual era, one in which men controlled women’s sexual experiences in an effort to eliminate their own anxieties around female sexuality, it makes it much harder for a young woman to remain a virgin while being an oppression-fighting ethical person. (And why would men be so keen on keeping women virgins, exactly, we might ask? Isn’t it possible that men might be the primary beneficiaries of sexually available women?), In an effort to express their sexual freedom – a moral imperative – young women may feel internal pressure to have sex in order to be unrestricted from traditional sexual mores.

Being a tomboy freed me from the anxieties of sexual relations. I was able to indulge in my deep affection for males without the demands of being on the sexual marketplace. And I won respect and admiration from others I desired by succeeding in masculine pursuits. I was able to do this because, not in spite of the fact, that I remained solidly and joyfully a female. I was granted respect from the guys I spent the summer months with not because I was seen as their equal and certainly not because I demanded that they respect my “inner-truth”, but because I was a girl doing the same things they were — and sometimes even doing them pretty well. That I was a girl doing tough-guy things made me even more admirable. I didn’t have to persuade anyone to respect me by ideologically brow-beating them.

I am now a grown woman with teenage daughters of my own. I grew out of my tomboy phase but the toughness and the confidence I developed have stayed. Though often deemed as toxic, this strength helped me to deal with a painful intimate relationship when it eventually occurred. (The poetic irony of the human condition is that we often run headlong into the thing we are keenest to avoid.) The risks of the sexual marketplace are very real, and the power of a man to manipulate and wound a woman something that recent feminism has been right to emphasise. But this should not be at the expense of colouring over women’s affection for men with resentment towards them. It is this affection for manliness that I want to instill in my daughters, an affection that grows into their own identities. It is important to man-up in life, even if you’re a girl.

We may over-notice a certain type of youth — brittle, indoctrinated, uncritical — only because they have been primed in a culture war. We see what we expect to see and perhaps this accounts for the gloomy and myopic view of youth many of us have. But what of the other view?

I saw a lot of another type of youth these past few months. We may have come to the end of summer now, but in my own household of teenage girls, it was decidedly a “hot girl summer”. Sleepovers. Tans. Evening bike rides. Candy salads. Nail polish. Crushes. Pop music. Pool days. Sneaking back in past curfew. I often felt that I could just as easily be watching an Eighties teen rom-com as standing in my own kitchen surrounded by young and happy high school girls. They are still frequently on their phones, using them to communicate, share funny photos, and choose their favourite new songs. But they leave their phones on their beach towels as they run to play in the water. And their phones often buzz away completely ignored, so engrossed are they in the conversations with their friends in the room. The same can’t always be said for me and my friends. We may get fewer messages, but we attend to them immediately. As for the boys who come around, they are similar to the girls: funny, daring, audacious and confident.

None of the summer’s visitors has fit the caricature of the brittle teen. The time of the “alt-girl” — the goth or “emo” who fits the picture of fragility and ethical sensitivity many of us have of teenagers — has passed. The “basic bitch” is back. She is like teen-classic. She is into hair and boys and frappuccinos. She is funny. The basic loves her body, and she isn’t shy about showing it. She is the one whose youthful vitality oozes through her pores and shines through a casual flip of her hair. The media has worked to make her uncool, though. Uncool, because pretty and strong. But “cool” moves quickly. And cool always — always — operates in rebellion to hegemonic culture. That the “alt-girl” is still portrayed as cool by the media is precisely the reason why she is now uncool. That “alt-girls” are portrayed as the ethical heroines of movies and TV is the very thing that is making them lame. This is a kind of moral pandering to teens that their animal vitality resists. Millennials — anyone over 20, for that matter — who are the promoters of ethics, are the new squares. Keep up, Boomer!

From my observations, I have come to realise a few things. Firstly, physical vanity increases sociability, which helps to form a strong individual, and in this way is preferable to moral vanity, which is often uglier and harder to cure. As Dorothy Parker pointed out, “beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.” The second is that introspection in youth is probably unhealthy. Hot girl summer, then, is a good thing.

A group of sexy, beautiful girls in the world creates its own safe space. They form a kind of closed community and look out for each other. It is called “girl code”, and the rules are pretty simple: don’t go after your friends’ crushes or exes, be honest, even if it’s hard, and always have your friends’ backs. This last one is crucial, and it is what contributes to beautiful women being safe in the world. Well-socialised males help in this regard, too. But typically, of course, the socialisation of males occurs in response to what women demand from them. Girls come and go in groups. These groups do more than keep young women protected; it makes them powerful. One feels their approach as a kind of force of nature. They talk and laugh and draw all our eyes, but they are indifferent to us. This is the source of their power: it is not simply their beauty or their confidence that makes them unapproachable. It is that they really seem to exist on another plane.

Suggested reading

Ridicule is nothing to be scared of

By Marilyn Simon

This makes them highly social creatures. And it makes them strong, as opposed to “empowered” in some political or bureaucratic sense: expert in relationships, empathy, social cues, and social graces. They feel their competency in the physical world and trust in some of nature’s benevolence. That the human brain’s prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for making considered decisions, does not fully develop until sometime in the twenties is itself just such a benevolent gift of nature. We are hardwired to first develop faith in the goodness of the world before we are able to give circumspection and prudence their proper due.

The basic girl is sensual, which is to say she takes pleasure in her senses. I watched this summer as a group of them sprinted the length of a long ocean pier before diving into the sea below without, seemingly, giving a thought or care to the way in which they might crash into each other as they landed. It was reckless… and exuberant. The hot girls of summer value physical bliss over wellbeing. The morally vain, by contrast, emphasise a body’s health rather than its delightfulness. This makes them more suspicious of risk, more alert to un-safety, less grateful, and somehow less than joyfully alive.

Most of all, hot girl summer takes a youth out of her head and into the real world. One’s own feelings take on less gravitas through girl talk, where things are analysed, commiserated with, and laughed about. Politicised ideas of sex and gender fall into the background as real dramas are discussed. What a more ideologically trained young woman might consider “toxic masculinity” is laughingly termed “being a player”. Men are condemned not for failing to have consciousness-raised gender values, but for being a “man-hoe” or “fuckboy”.

They don’t need to defer to the authority of a school administrator or a workplace bureaucracy to enforce socially acceptable sexual behaviours. They do this on their own — or rather, in their own group. The absence of any ideological background for these dynamics to operate in makes them — to borrow a word that a more ethically focused individual might choose — “authentic”. The authenticity comes precisely because the hot girls of summer are not thinking, really, of themselves, but of the interplay between themselves and others. They are vigilant about infractions on sexual norms in service not of a cause but of each other. They are too busy being girls to think about their gender identities. And too busy imposing sexual norms onto guys to think about sexual policies that should be formally implemented by institutions.

Suggested reading

The cost of turning our kids Inside Out

By Matt Feeney

Hot summer girls are vain. They are absorbed in themselves and their own little dramas, but not necessarily in their own heads. They are superficial rather than merely shallow. But it is precisely because their self-understanding is relational and social that they are rescued from the more sinister peril of moral vanity, a type of self-regard that so easily masquerades as virtue that it usually convinces the one who has this vanity that she is righteous instead of egocentric.

Matt Feeney has recently written about the ill-effects of a film like Inside Out on a child’s or youth’s mind. His argument is, in short, that while the film is intellectually truthful and emotionally insightful, children themselves shouldn’t be trained in therapeutic self-talk and psychologised self-understanding. For some Gen Z teens, it is true, propaganda is the real origin of what they regard as their identities and values. But we shouldn’t fall into the error of thinking that this is the norm, lest we in our own way contribute to youth hyper-introspection by making the mental health youth crisis bigger than it is, validating it through our own doomsaying.

Youthful energy is a powerful force, and joy is an anti-ideological feeling. As adults we may do well to trust a bit more in the animal spirit of youth, like the teens who would hurl themselves into the sea. The antidote to fragility can’t be more moral panic about phones, media, and influencers; that is not thinking low enough. It is their animal spirit, not our ethical arguments, that might rescue Gen Z. What might smell like suntan oil and hairspray and perfume to some smells to me like the return of teen spirit.

My own response to her cutting was pretty minimal. I saw the scars on her arm, but rather than move into pro-active hyperdrive, I barely acknowledged them. I was taking a gamble, and I knew it. Of course, I was far from indifferent to her pain. But I felt that sometimes moving into a full therapeutic response has the opposite effect of that intended: it might indulge with amped-up seriousness what might simply be an otherwise painful but manageable part of life. I knew that the wound caused by her father would take time to heal, time and other happier things to fill up her heart. And I wanted her to get better without the pathologising rigmarole. But how?

What a professional or a parent can’t accomplish, a friend often can. My daughter was partnered with a group of three boys in her home economics cooking class, all of them “toxically” — and wonderfully — male: irreverent, funny, and just the right amount of mean. “Don’t let Nat get near the knife!” they’d tease. “Knives are for cutting vegetables, Nat. Vegetables.”

This ridicule might strike some as unusually cruel, a form of bullying and an instance of an “unsafe place” in her public school. But it was the mockery and jokes which were precisely what was healing for Nat. In her words: “It showed that they cared because they acknowledged my hurt, but they also showed that I didn’t have to let it overcome me. By drawing attention to my scars, they showed me that I didn’t have to feel ashamed of them. By laughing at me, they showed me that it was okay to laugh at myself.” And just like that, her cutting stopped.

But as I see it, there was another, deeper aspect to their ridicule that helped her to heal. It was the faith they had that she would take the jokes with a good spirit. Implicit in their teasing was their understanding that N would join in on the fun. And the bond created by that faith was the healing she needed. They trusted her to know that implicit in their mockery was care and love. Their leap of faith meant she felt less alone.

A university chaplain once told me something that seems to capture the spirit of our age: the highest ethic for the students she talks to, she said, is to not hurt another person’s feelings. That is a line that the kids will not cross. Not only do we not presume to tell one another how to live, we affirm others in their choices (largely to feel affirmed ourselves in our ethical, nonjudgmental behaviours. We are all such good people). Yet this seems to me to be profoundly anti-life, as well as deeply disrespectful of another’s capacity for good faith. How can one even begin to form real relationships if one is too afraid to hurt another person? How can we discuss ideas and feelings, debate them or contest them? How can we be authentic if we are constantly monitoring our every thought and action so as to not disrupt another’s sense of well-being?

It all reminds me of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Most of us have at least a passing acquaintance with its two main characters, the swashbuckling Petruchio and the fiery-tongued Kate, the shrew. Even if one is inclined to look punitively at Petruchio’s “taming” of Kate, as many are, one cannot help but smile at the repartee between the two. They build upon each other’s insults and innuendos. The true lovers that they are, they go for the jugular, like the lover’s pinch, which, as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra says, “hurts and is desired”.

In this, Kate and Petruchio are like other beloved Shakespearian lovers, Beatrice and Benedict, who never fail to land a hit. When Shakespeare has couples hurl barbs and banter, it is a reliable measure of their mutual affection, of their fitness for true friendship, and a measure of their equality. The brilliance of their mutual ridicule is a sign of respect. As Slavoj Žižek says: “The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other.”

Suggested reading

The sexual holy war is coming for you

By Matthew Crawford

If we refrain from ridiculing even the most sensitive thing about a friend, it reveals our belief in a friend’s weakness, not in his strength. Through our “respect for another”, we demonstrate our low view of their capacity for grace. In a reversal of morals, we come to believe that respect means to tiptoe around the sensitivities of another rather than to treat them with humour and good faith. Yet it is precisely both those things which can lead to healing because the good faith itself creates the bonds of love.

Making a joke is always a risk and an act of faith. Comedy, says comedian Charlie Demurs, is “like throwing a rock into a window and turning it into stain glass”. Something is broken: a placid surface, an ideal, a politeness. But the breaking of a social nicety is only the prequel to a more beautiful transformation. We laugh. Laughing makes us feel better. We have had faith in others. That faith creates a connection.

“It is somehow very typical of the modern sense of self,” writes Rowan Williams, “that when we speak about ‘self-confidence’ these days, we’re often talking about something that is in us – rather than having the courage to engage, to venture out, to be confident enough to exchange perspectives, truths, insights, to move into a particular kind of conversation or dialogue.” Or the courage to tell a joke, the courage to make fun of something, or even of someone. The difference between being merely mean and being funny is obvious. The spirit of the person is the determining factor, though of course even ridicule that is intended to cause hurt can be turned to nothing if one meets it with unselfconscious laughter; an insult loses its power if one refuses to feel insulted.

Consider this anecdote: a friend of mine has a son-in-law who is a trans man. This friend, who is the mother-in-law, was once waiting to use the restroom while her son-in-law was in it. When he came out of the restroom — at last — carrying with him a magazine my friend said to him: “Just like a man! To take so long using the toilet.” It was meant good humouredly, clearly. She not only embraced her son-in-law’s identity, but felt self-confident enough to, as Williams says, venture out, to include him in a joke about men. But instead of laughing the son-in-law bristled, feeling offended by his mother-in-law’s teasing about his toilet etiquette as a man.

Why is this, I wonder. First of all, it is possible that he still felt some compunction around discussing restroom use, perhaps left over from his upbringing as a girl. But I wonder if it is because a joke at your expense necessitates a moment of vulnerability — the breaking of the window, to use Demurs’s metaphor — which means that there is a moment when one isn’t in control, where one’s sense of self is not in one’s own hands but handled, somewhat roughly, by the observations of another. Here is Williams again: if we “take for granted a basic individualist model, the hard core to which everything has got to accommodate itself, you drift towards a steady expectation that the best relationship you can be in to the world is control. The best place to be is a place where you can never be surprised.” This sounds right, and why, as Matthew B Crawford has pointed out, propaganda is somehow the opposite of funny. Jokes require a letting go, not just a release of tension, but a transformation of it.

Suggested reading

Big Tech has stolen our children

By Matt Feeney

I am not suggesting that trans individuals are all unfunny, of course not. But, rather, that in a society in which individuals are thought to come into being through a process of inward-looking self-discovery, one is bound to be fragile, self-protective, and preoccupied with control. Surprises, such as those a punchline delivers, would be felt not as a delight but as a punch to the ego. The individualist wants to protect her self-identity, which can lead to controlling how others speak and behave, which can lead to isolation, which can lead to more desire for connection with others, which can lead to frustration, defensiveness, fragility and increased isolation. And so it goes. It is our openness to being surprised by others that may lead us out of our alienation from others.

The most surprising thing anyone has ever said to me came in the form of an unexpected joke. I told a man I was dating how I said goodbye to my closest friend the last time I saw her, not knowing that it would be the last time, as she was struck and killed by a car just days after. The loss of this friend still feels like an open wound, and the fact that I had the chance to hug her and tell her I loved her before we parted for the last time has always been a comfort. It was a moment of real vulnerability for me to express these things to this man. He listened intently. Then he said, quietly and calmly, “Well. Maybe if you hadn’t had such a beautiful final goodbye, she wouldn’t have died.”

It was the most shocking thing anyone has ever said to me. Ever. I stood stunned for a moment then doubled over, clutching my stomach and reeling. It felt like I had been sucker-punched in the gut. I had been taken utterly by surprise.

And what did I do to the man who dared to say such a thing? I married him! A man who had such faith that I would take his remark as it was intended — as a joke that in itself was intended to show his faith in me — deserves all my faith, and my openness, and my willingness to let go of control, and to be endlessly surprised. He has since held me close and spoke tenderly to me of the passing of my friend in ways that I did not always expect, and which have brought not only healing but also, of course, laughter.