Photo illustration by Lizzie Chen
By Carson Lane
For Reporting Texas
“Viewpoints” are reported opinion pieces written for Reporting Texas.
In the 8th century B.C., the Greek poet Hesiod lamented, “I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words.”
Not long ago, New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks added to a long tradition of criticizing the moral vision of youth, this time targeting Millennials in his commentary “If It Feels Right.” Pointing to a 2008 study by Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith and a group of graduate students, Brooks criticized the high level of moral individualism in young America. “Now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit,” he wrote. “Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.”
But not a few Millennials will beg to differ.
“I think the researchers got it wrong,” said Valarie Kaur, director of Groundswell, a social action initiative at Auburn Seminary in New York City. “It’s not that we don’t have a shared vocabulary to address moral issues — we just don’t have theirs. My generation is the most open-minded in history.”
Be that as it may, situational ethics have likely been with humans since the beginning. What’s different today is Millennials represent the first generation to grow up in a digitally hip, multicultural environment — one marked by the unprecedented volume of ideas, and competing moral points of view, they encounter in the course of daily life. That has led to a degree of intellectual complexity and, some argue, a generally finer feel for social and cultural diversity than previous generations.
“Nearly half of us are nonwhite or multiracial,” Kaur added. “Most of us support interracial dating, and the majority of us, including conservatives, accept gays and lesbians. We don’t frame our moral commitments in the black-and-white language of previous generations because we’ve inherited the damage that comes from absolutes, whether partisan politics or fundamentalisms.”
According to a 2004 study, “It’s all good: Moral Relativism and the Moral Mind,” conducted by Developmental Testing Service, the Millennial Generation has had access to the Internet and a diverse range of viewpoints and topics during their most inquisitive years. Its members therefore have more flexibility to choose the standards they agree with.
“I think that modern Americans have advanced moral philosophy in many ways,” said Joel Green, a 33-year-old astronomy researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. “We are now much more tolerant of differences because we better understand ourselves, and have some perspective on how much accident or circumstance determines fate, as much as skill or preparation or intelligence.”
More often than not, these beliefs stray from the moral precepts of more traditional generations. “I don’t believe my generation is more or less moral than the generations that follow,” said Kathy Olfers, 43, a stay-at-home mom who is raising teenage Millennials. “I think we may have had an easier time establishing what we believe to be right because we did not have as many choices to make. This generation of young people is bombarded with information, and it is difficult for people who are just forming moral standards to distinguish what is true, false, real or imagined.”
Green agrees. “Each generation is bombarded by new ideas,” he said. “Younger people now are much less expecting of privacy. They are much less bigoted about homosexuality, ethnicity, or drug use. So there are differences, but they are products of our evolving culture, not innate.”
In his column, Brooks warned of moral individualism, in which a person’s moral compass is determined not by either-or teachings inherited from previous generations, but instead created through personal emotion and experience.
According to Rabbi Geoffrey A. Mitelman, that can be a good thing. Writing in the Huffington Post, Mitelman asserted that it is essential for young people to engage moral issues at a critical and personal level. “If we can lead young people to own their sense of morality — rather than feeling like it was ‘given’ to them — we may be able to help them further develop their sense of right and wrong,” he wrote.
This sense of ethics often comes from conflicting sources — not just friends but also television and films. And at least to that degree Millennial moral coordinates may line up with those belonging to Babyboomer parents or grandparents, as well.
“I would be lying if I said the media has not affected my morals,” said Hilary Holmes, 21, a psychology major at UT-Austin. “It would be impossible not to be affected by the media that happens around us unless we fully secluded ourselves from it entirely. At various times in my life, a movie or the Internet probably did affect what my morals were. However, this effect was likely fleeting because morals are not created based on one event, but rather on the way in which we perceive the world.
“More so, my own morality has affected how I read, view and interpret what I see on the Internet and television,” she said.
What would Hesiod have said about that?