Connection as Context
When I was in high school my friends and I all joined Columbia and BMG warehouses from which we ordered 12 or so cds for a penny apiece, after agreeing to purchase 6 more at full price throughout the year. The 12 virtually free albums came right away . . . then came the reminders of our commitment to purchase the other full price half dozen.
The standard practice amongst many of the teenagers I knew was to order the 12 free pieces, and as soon as the first prompt to purchase the obligated ones was issued, you responded with the disclosure that you were under 18, and if they persisted in holding you accountable to a contractual arrangement that they had instigated with a minor then you would be informing your lawyer . . . or at least your parents. No reply. Nirvana box set: $0.
Of course, with my father being a pastor, there was absolutely no way I would be informing him. None of us, in fact, had any plans of informing “our lawyers”. This was just one of the common knowledge ways that if you played the minor card to your advantage, there was much to be gained. To my parents’ credit, I was so riddled with guilt that I paid the full price for the remainder of the albums and never told my friends.
Every generation believes they are witnessing their own experience of youth being outmoded by a cockier and less capable next generation. Every generation seems to think that kids are getting worse. As is argued, however, by the Preacher in Ecclesiastes 7, to paint the days of yore with a gilded brush is not only nostalgic, but foolish. The youth are not rebelling more, they are simply rebelling with greater technological efficacy. They are rebelling not only against authority, but against their own biology. The good news is that the best thing for every generation of rebellious youth will be the prayerful and loving presence in space and time of the adults in their lives. The most necessary contribution an adult can make in the lives of these increasingly detached children is to prioritize time in nature to talk about being human.
There is a famous quote from Aristophanes’ characterization of Socrates: “Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.” This was said in the fourth century BC.
In today’s age of prepubescent porn addiction, cyber-bullying, Social Media Anxiety Disorder, de-transitioning, and school shootings, it is amazing that there is anything childlike about childhood at all anymore. At various points in history it was considered appropriate, and even necessary, to treat children simply as adults who wore smaller clothes. We see this encapsulated in many Medieval portraits.
In The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman wisely warns that, beyond the damage of arrested development, the loss of a childhood’s protected innocence bears the fruit of a contextless maturation. It is like a genetically modified tomato that has been forced to mature faster and brighter, but consequently is full of bland water. Children may be allowed to watch Game of Thrones, but their ability to think critically about it does not necessarily follow their exposure to it.
Our culture thinks of it as a sign of privilege, or a right of passage, to expose children to the things of adulthood at an early age. One Youtube video of a 4 year old using vulgar and filthy speech has over 5 million views. I’ve heard people argue that it would be anachronistic and provincial of them to withhold pornography from their children, should their kids take an interest.
If Solomon testified to the axiom that with much knowledge comes much sorrow and responsibility, today’s screenager can testify to the fact that with much access to knowledge comes much abdication of responsibility. Knowledge no longer imposes the weight of responsibility, perhaps because ours is an age in which the meaninglessness of their materialistic origins stories leave them no other option but despair.
Children are increasingly more prone to don an affect of innocence . . . not as a deterrent to having their childhood profaned, but as a buffer from being accountable for their own actions. They have acquired the knowledge that innocence/ignorance is an easy yoke. Like the foreigner pretending to not know the language, or the sex symbol feigning purity, the youth culture in a technological society, whether aware of it or not, has redefined what it means to be inviolable. It is as though childhood itself is simply a pragmatic avatar. The virtual self becomes maculate almost immediately. It is for this cause that adolescence amongst males is so extended in the United States. The men have only one trick . . . play boy.
Robert Bly, in his book, The Sibling Society, humorously recounts a tragic moment of substitute teaching in which a high school student informs him in 2 words or less that being a teacher legally prohibits him from speaking into her life outside the context of his job description, so everyone can think of examples that testify to the fact that older to younger, human to human relationships are becoming nearly extinct. A friend of mine observed some years back that if the fathers of kids today are still children themselves, then the category of widows and orphans has been expanded.
J. Edwin Orr tells the story about D.L. Moody being a young man, eager to move into ministry. He went to his pastor and informed him that he felt called to be a Sunday school teacher. The pastor responded by telling him they had a waiting list of people interested in being teachers, but if he wanted he could add his name to the roster. A frustrated Moody then asked if there was nothing else to be done. “Find a group of unchurched boys,” the minister said, “Bring them to the country, until you can gain control of them. Then you can transition them in as your class.”
This concept of bringing kids to the country until we can gain control of them may seem like an anachronism; but perhaps technopoly has created the need for ancient remedies, or as the prophet Jeremiah said, the recovery of old paths.
Sadly, older relatives, teachers, and mentors are bending over backwards to incarnate the youth culture, in an attempt to connect with kids. It never yields the intended results. As simple as it may seem, the most effective approach to deconstructing a system of busyness and noise that dominates the youthful landscape is not found in the adults learning new lingo, but in giving the children context for the fragmented concepts they are imbibing. How do we do that?
There is no greater advocate we can employ than intercessory prayer, but on the shelf below it are a few essential hand tools. Think of the advice given to Moody, “Take them to the country until you can gain control of them.” In order to give them the country, we need to be prepared to create environments in which our full attention and accrued experiences relate directly to whatever fragment they extend to us, or seem accessible. Shut off the movie and talk about the off-handed comments made in the film. Give them context and the attention that undivided time alone can give. Suggest that human to human to interaction and human to nature interaction are meaningful and that they signify an even greater story. If you have the jurisdiction to require it, limit devices and require nature.
Mortimer Adler describes syntopical reading, which is the ability to read one thing and connect it to various genres, as the goal of all reading. One of our hopes, when we read, is that we learn something which, prior to reading, we did not know. This includes an angle within a present position or an opposing view. When we become syntopical readers, we process a host of books, even from across genre boundaries, that are pertinent to answering the question at hand. In short, a syntopical reader is the type of person with whom you’d like to go out for coffee. This person would notice the ingredient list on the back of the bag of Skittles your vegetarian friend was eating, and inform them that artificial raspberry flavoring contains castoreum which means they are not adhering to their vegetarian diet. How do they know that, one would ask? Because there is no reading that is not relevant.
With the youth that surround us in mind, we should expand our reading lists to include content that touches upon the main points of their own interests. They should not feel opposed by the adult presence in their life; rather, we should be fostering relationships with young people that inspire a curiosity in them to wonder about the adult perspective. Reciprocity has a slow momentum and a very wide arc. There is a reason the Scriptures inform us that the training we invest in children will often only yield a return when they are old.
Where it was once expounded, “Grandpa says . . .”, it is now offered up in its place, “Google says . . .”. The only way to deconstruct this dependence on technology as a mentor is to promote an interest in our perspective, by sharing context. Google, for all its content, is devoid of context. All of this requires that we be people who are interesting and virtuous, not for ourselves alone, but for those with whom we share humanity. As adults, we have a valuable commodity that every young person hungers after -- experience. The artistry enters in figuring out how to connect with those who feel that a span of time has divorced us. We need look no further than the Incarnation.
In Jesus’s day, it was the kids who were stealing Nirvana cds from big business who felt that inviting Jesus to their birthday party was within the realm of possibility. Why was this? Jesus did not sin, but He did not allow humanity’s sin to keep Him from taking on flesh. The Incarnation tells us many things, among which is this . . . if God is not afraid to condescend while on mission, then what is our excuse? Do not let the cultural divide perpetuate a trend of agism in either direction. Young people are not connected, despite all of their wires and networks. To quote E. M. Forster, “Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.”
