When age and progressophobia correlate

Two random points come across my radar screen this morning bringing to mind an unoriginal interpretation but one which perhaps has more credence than I was according it.  

First is a Bill Maher monologue discussing the epidemic (for which there is no obvious vaccine or even treatment) of progressophobia.

Double click to enlarge.

For the first seven minutes he lays out the case that arguments to the effect that America is more hostile towards racial minorities, LGBT, women, etc. is simply and dramatically incompatible with the facts.  At the seven minute mark he argues that this progressophobia, the incapacity to see just how stellar has been social progress over the past seventy years, is an attribute of Gen Z and Millennials.

Perhaps.  It is clear that there are plenty of long in the tooth progressophobes among consequential Boomers and Gen X such as Pelosi, Schumer, and Biden.  But it makes sense, given the overwhelming professorial skew of university faculties, the only environment in America where proclaiming oneself a Marxist can be a career enhancement, that younger people might be both more exposed to critical communist schools of thought and underexposed to the real facts of progress.  

Then, on a completely different topic, I came across The Church and the culture wars by In the Sight of the Unwise.  

Of all the grimly fascinating things about the Church of England, my favourite is the co-existence of two Very Online Anglican-adjacent communities: one of angry young liberals, convinced it is misogynistic, homophobic, and altogether bigoted, and another of angry young conservatives, convinced it is wet, spineless, and has given up the Gospel altogether in favour of modern social mores. 

The charges are not interesting.  It is that ITSOTU lays this at the feet of young church members in the two Very Online Anglican-adjacent communities.

The heuristic that the young, with little knowledge or experience of the world, are inherently radical and become conservative with age, is age old.  In fact it is captured in an at least hundred-year-old variously attributed adage along the lines of:

If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain.

Both Maher and ITSOTU are suggesting the argument that the wokeism, fanaticism, and extremism we see today are merely the product of generational changes.  The corollary would be that Gen Zers and Millennials will grow out of it.

Perhaps.  It seems to me that this is too simplistic.  Broadly true, certainly, but I do think that the institutional atmosphere of our more "elite" universities have become far more radical and antithetical to Age of Enlightenment values, and far more unwilling to engage with measured realities while preferring to accord "Truth" to lived realities.

Yes, perhaps the greatest wokeism, fanaticism, and extremism are probably seen among the Gen Zers and Millennials and they will eventually grow out of this.  But I suspect we have also, among the 30% who attend university and the 5-10% who attend universities of such prestige and financial resources to free themselves from reality constraints, exposed our young for a couple of generations to among the most concentrated and virulent environments aggressively determined to undermine the progress achieved through Age of Enlightenment values and committed not to Truth and Natural Rights but to repression and coercion.  

Maher and ITSOTU are both right right, just not completely right.  We can't just wait for Gen Zers and Millennials to grow out of it.  We need to have the courage to proselytize the progress of Age of Enlightenment values of the Classical Liberal.