Matt Lewis writes:
Many of my fellow conservative columnists have lamented in recent weeks that the troubling trend of Western men voyaging to the Middle East to become terrorists has its roots in the stultifying boredom of life in modern capitalistic society.
TheWeek.com‘s Michael Brendan Dougherty’s explored the topic in a post called “How the West produces jihadi tourists.” The New York Times‘ Ross Douthat ventured into similar territory in his “Our thoroughly modern enemies.” National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke was on board, too, in a post titled “Sadly, totalitarianism is exciting.”
“One reason that liberty can be difficult to preserve is that it so often lacks the romance, the heroism, and the sense of involvement that so many appear to crave,” Cooke wrote.
The suggestion that was implicit in each of these columns is that this American life is kinda boring. That’s troubling, and a little like saying marriage is boring. Yes, too many marriages are boring, but that’s often a failure on the part of individuals, not an inherent flaw in the institution. If we do it right, our marriages and lives should be full of purpose and romance. We could say the same for modern life in the West. The fact that our society is too often absent adventure and excitement, that too many lives are bogged down by mundanity and routine, is due to a failure on the part of individuals, and is not necessarily an indictment on the system itself.
Look, people have an intuitive — some would say God-given — drive for purpose. They want to be called to something big. Some of us are lucky enough to experience that, at work, at home, or elsewhere. For others, life fails to deliver on their big dreams. Most learn to accept it. But a terrible few are driven to extremism. That might mean following a charismatic cult leader like Charles Manson, or it might mean becoming an Islamic terrorist.
This lack of purpose is a real problem, and popular American culture has long been all too content to offer the masses bread and circuses rather than purpose and meaning.
This isn’t dissimilar to the phenomenon that drove the 1960’s counterculture movement. As Baylor University Professor Barry Hankins notes in his book, Francis Schaeffer And the Shaping of Evangelical America, the famed evangelical leader believed that
once a society has jettisoned a Christian worldview and any notion of ‘true truth,’ as he called it, there was nothing left but personal peace and affluence. From time to time he said that the hippies of the 1960s looked at their parents’ lives and saw only these two values instead of answers to the deep longings of humankind. With no hope of real meaning and only personal peace and affluence to look forward to, the hippies dropped out of mainstream middle-class culture and turned to drugs or joined the New Left in a violent revolt against mainstream society. [Francis Schaeffer And the Shaping of Evangelical America]
People have an inherent drive for meaning. That’s why George W. Bush was so criticized for not summoning Americans to make big sacrifices after 9/11 — people wanted to do something, and they wanted it to matter. But we live in a me-me-me world where politicians don’t want to ask us to make sacrifices. Our churches don’t want to ask us to make sacrifices. Even our parents don’t want to ask us to make major sacrifices. Doing so seems antithetical to the “do what makes you feel good” culture that seems evermore pervasive in the West. But for many, that life ends up feeling meaningless. …
Sometimes asking people to do things that are hard fills them with purpose. But we rarely do that in modern America.
Going back to ancient times, young men have craved honor and glory. But when there’s no communal higher calling, and no Wild West frontier for those afflicted with wanderlust to conquer, they’re left empty. Playing video games isn’t enough.
It’s not that my fellow conservative commentators aren’t largely correct about why so many angry young men are fleeing the staid comforts of the West for the violent excitement of the Middle East. It’s only to say this: The American Dream needn’t be inherently boring. Ours is a society build on a sense of destiny, sacrifice, and adventure. If we’ve gotten away from that, well, maybe we as a people need to figure out how to get excited again, to recapture the exploratory adventurers’ spirit and national spirit that so animated Americans in generations past.
But even if our American life is kinda boring these days… well, maybe that’s a feature, not a bug. Comfort, routine, steadiness — this lack of excitement should not equate to a life of quiet desperation. A people who believe in shared values, who have a deep faith, who care about their community and fellow citizens, who work hard to take care of themselves and their families, and who believe in the concept of being good neighbors, employees, and citizens — well, it needn’t resemble Revolutionary Road.
Some of this sounds like dialogue from two scenes of a first-season episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation“:
CAPT. JEAN-LUC PICARD: A lot has changed in the past three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We have grown out of our infancy.
RALPH OFFENHOUSE: You’ve got it all wrong. It’s never been about possessions. It’s about power.
PICARD: Power to do what?
RALPH: To control your life, your destiny.
PICARD: That kind of control is an illusion.
RALPH: Really? I’m here, aren’t I? I should be dead but I’m not. …PICARD: This is the twenty fourth century. Material needs no longer exist.
RALPH: Then what’s the challenge?
PICARD: The challenge, Mister Offenhouse, is to improve yourself. To enrich yourself. Enjoy it.
(For those readers who roll their eyes at this self-satisfied morally superior dialogue: This is actually from one of the best episodes of TNG’s generally poor first season, if you can get past the pseudosocialism of the second series at all.)
I tend to squirm when I start hearing of calls for you to sacrifice by those who have no personal stake in that sacrifice. It seems to me that 13 years after 9/11, Americans have sacrificed a lot of their freedom, both in personal and economic ways (gas prices are more than double what they were in 20o1), and not for good reasons or with good results. (Three letters: TSA.) It wasn’t clear to me then, and it’s not clear to me now, what kind of sacrifice George W. Bush should have called on Americans to do. It’s also not clear why Americans should sacrifice to make up for politicians’ past bad decisions. I notice no member of Congress voluntarily giving up their salaries and lush benefits in response to our $16 trillion in debt, for instance.
Said calls for sacrifice always require a followup question: Why? Because we use (someone’s definition of) too many resources? Because Americans are arrogant (by someone’s definition of that word)? Because our freedoms make someone who doesn’t have those freedoms feel bad or angry? Here I thought Barack Obama was supposed to deal with that American-arrogance thing. Apparently those who voted for that were mistaken.
It’s been fashionable for several years to institute some form of national service requirement for young adults. The first response I always have, because this proposal usually comes from people who never did military or any other national service, is: Great idea! You first. (And, by the way: Now, not 40 years ago.) This is supposed to inculcate some drive for service within the mandatorily volunteered. (On the other hand, most drafted servicemen of the Vietnam War era are not likely to have fond memories of their mandatory service, whether or not they went to Vietnam.) Nothing prevents someone from joining the Peace Corps or local volunteer efforts on their own, without the mandatory service hammer.
There is some blame for what Lewis describes upon society as a whole in one specific area, though who knows when this began. This society of ours is increasingly risk-averse. Read the online depictions of growing up in the 1960s and 1970s — you know, kids’ playing all day all over the neighborhood until the streetlights came on, drinking water out of garden hoses, etc. — and 2010s readers wonder how anyone survived a world without air bags in cars and bike helmets. If, as is claimed by quoted authors, young men have a natural drive for adventure and need for meaning, our safety-obsessed society, which reinforces on a daily basis that the world outside your property line is a dangerous place, has worked hard to squelch it. At the same time, our societal obsession with children’s self-esteem at the expense of actual accomplishment has a role too, because that emphasizes that you’re a great person just as you are, with no expectations that you do better and not do the wrong things.
(Here’s an example: Christians are condemned as judgmental when they point out someone’s sin. Their critics say that Jesus Christ didn’t judge, so Christians didn’t either. Those critics have a selective reading of the Bible, because in the cases they bring up — for instance, the woman about to be stoned for adultery — Christ’s statement to the sinner ends with a statement like “Go and sin no more.” Somehow that gets omitted in the story.)
More than anything else, though, if young men are doing bad things, other than blaming their bad decisions on themselves, it’s probably their parents’ fault. I’m not referring to the problems of single-parent families and the crisis of absent fathers, though that has a huge role in our society’s problems.
Parents are their children’s role models, whether the kids want to admit it or not, and their children’s first and longest lasting teachers. Consider what we get from religion — a sense of belonging, a sense that the world does not revolve around you, and, yes, a call to serve others, to use three secular examples. Kids don’t get any of that if they don’t go to church. And, yes, parents must sometimes do the hard thing and force their children to do things the kids may not want to do. If “sometimes asking people to do things that are hard fills them with purpose,” and that’s not being done by society or government, then it’s up to the parents to teach those lessons.
It’s also not an accident that the diminishing interest in the Boy Scouts has a role here. Parents of boys: Which of the 12 parts of the Scout Law — trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent — would you not want your sons to emulate? Or, for that matter, the Boy Scout motto, “Be Prepared,” and slogan, “Do a good turn daily.” And yet, thanks in part to the Scouts’ ban on gay leaders, but also due to men having other things to do, Scouting is on the wane nationwide. There is nothing good about that trend.
Parents are supposed to teach their children to do the right thing(s) because those are the right things to do. But parents need to teach by example. No lesson, except a lesson about power, is taught by telling a child to go out and shovel someone else’s snow. A lesson is taught when children see their parents helping a neighbor or even a stranger. A lesson is taught when children see their parents going out and doing things outside of work, particularly for the benefit of others, instead of sitting in front of a TV or computer being mindlessly entertained.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
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