In Praise of Youth.

Blogging has made me slightly more optimistic about the road our culture might take in the future. I’m reading a lot of blogs written by young people in their teens and twenties, and I’m surprised by how many of them get it. They see through the lies, the hypocrisy, the greed and the manipulation that goes on. Some of them rant about it quite wonderfully on their blogs.

What concerns me is whether they will be the next generation of decision makers, or whether the decision making will continue to be vested in the hands of those who didn’t get it, but stayed comfortably in the mainstream tugging their forelocks in obeisance to the system. It also worries me that people change when they come out of education and have to earn a living. They climb onto the treadmill, because our highly organised and regulated way of life offers little by way of alternative. And the treadmill is very good at seducing people into what I can only call, for want of a better expression, the suburban mindset.

It is essentially a closed and self-deluding mindset, smug and self-congratulatory, in which any attempt to challenge the status quo is howled down as subversive. What’s more, it offers what it sees as the perfect answer to the questioning of the young: ‘We older people are wiser and more experienced than you. Issues are never black and white, but a succession of shades of grey. You’ll come to see it that way eventually.’ Often they do; it’s how student protesters become bankers and management consultants.

Wisdom permits both approaches. Seeing the shades of grey need not preclude the recognition that they are often a smoke screen, and that looking beyond it is necessary if we are to create a better world. It is perfectly proper that the idealism of youth should be informed by an increasing understanding of the complexities in society, but it doesn’t have to be blunted by it. I hope today’s generation of youth will do better in that regard than mine did.