Gen Z girls self-identify as liberal at a rate of 40%; boys at 25%. This might not be so bad if it were not for other realities. 71% of this same cohort say they won't date or marry someone from the other side of the divide. Such extreme polarization spells trouble.
A distinct but perhaps not entirely unrelated development is the troubling surge in mental and emotional suffering among this generation, especially girls, which exploded with the new technological world of social media in 2012. Jonathan Haidt has been following this trend closely and shown that the difficulties are strongest for young liberal women.
David French
In a thoughtful piece in the NY Times (Feb. 29, 2024), French acknowledges significant political events like the election of Trump and the #MeToo movement, but gives more weight to deeper, broader cultural developments. With Putnam (Bowling Together) he grieves the breakdown of community at every level and the isolation of the individual; with Haidt (Coddling of the American Mind) he sees that smothering, protective parenting has increased anxiety, risk-aversion, and social insecurity. The broader society, but especially the world inhabited by our youth, is increasingly lonely with less interaction, dating, romance and friendship. Likeminded people enclose themselves in silos, listening to the same sources and reinforcing viewpoints with less and less exchange with other perspectives. This is magnified immensely by the internet and social media. He notes the increase of what he calls "workism" as the conviction that career is the center of one's identity: a 2023 poll found 71% of Americans agreed that "having an enjoyable career/job is very or extremely important for a fulfilling life" while 23% said the same about marriage.
Education, Class, Culture and the Gender Gap
The gender gap in education is also alarming. In 1970, two generations ago, for ages 25-34, 20 % of men and 12 % of women had bachelor degrees...an 8 % gap. In 2020, there was 41% of women and 32% men, a 9 % gap. In our meritocratic, professional society, education is a significant marker of class and culture. This growing divide is problematic: our young women face a choice between "marrying down" and not marrying at all.
Our post-war society (1945-65) was structured around a dominant, expansive "middle class." In the exploding suburbs, teamsters, doctors, lawyers, unionized auto workers and others lived together in shared bourgeois homogeneity. Over the last 50 years, this inclusive class has fractured into the upper and lower echelons: the upper is educated, professional, prestigious, connected, secure in possession of real estate and savings programs, liberal, blue, largely urban/costal, secular and high in self-regard; the lower is blue collar, uneducated, low status, conservative, red, more rural and mid-country, financially precarious, and low in self-esteem. The former disparages the latter as deplorable-MAGA-racists; the later seethes with rage.
What makes things worse is that those in the upper tiers marry within their class. Those, for example, at the lower end of the upper tier (nurses, teachers, small business owners, policemen, unionized workers) enjoy two salaries close to or at six figures each and generous insurance/pension plans. Those in the upper level of the lower tier, the "working poor" miss out on the safety net for the real poor and struggle without permanent employment, insurance or retirement plans.
And so, the gender gap of our young is (among other things) a consequence of our class/culture divide: young women are outperforming men in the competitive, meritocratic arena of a society increasingly removed from farm, factory, and hands-on labor and centered in bureaucracy, professions, health, education, information, media, and technology.
There is high irony here! The progressive "intersectionality narrative" has women, blacks, and LGBTQs as victimized by white males. Actually, those groups are privileged and entitled IF they fit the class/culture mode: educated, liberal, professional, bourgeois. (Example: average combined salary for same-sex married couples is $123,000; for heterosexuals is $96,000). White males are falling into the lower class at alarming rates.
And of course we have the perennial difference in maturity. My personal observation is that a girl in a wholesome family matures into a motherhood-capable woman around age 14; a boy, if fortunate, reaches comparable maturity in his early 50s. (Ok, some exaggeration, but only a little!)
Our society systemically segregates us from each other: the elderly in gated communities or nursing homes; the troubled in prisons and psychiatric wards; the young in schools; the poor in ghettos and the rich in enclaves. Our young people are entrapped with their peers, removed from the older and the younger; and now boys and girls are also increasingly detached from each other. So we have declining rates of marriage and the misfortune of an emergent gender divide, with feelings of victimhood, suspicion and resentment on both sides. Always and everywhere: rupture of connection, isolation, loneliness of the Sovereign Ego.
The Nature of Things
French's analysis, on the sociological level, is accurate. But he does not explore the inner, formal nature of man/woman. Implicitly he seems to accept the nominalism inherent in modernity: that there are no inner essences or forms; that there are only particularities and statistical averages; that any talk of an interior femininity/masculinity is a stereotyping in service of oppressive male chauvinism; that there is no ontological philosophy of gender; and that we can only speak of biological characteristics, cultural constructs and empirical statistics.
"Male and female he created them; in his own image he created him" we read in the Genesis 1. The two are intelligible only in relationship:
- face to face with each other;
- together facing outward towards their children, family, broader society;
- together facing back gratefully to the Past and forward hopefully to the Future; and
- together facing upwards towards heaven.
If you tear masculinity or femininity away from each other, away from children-family-community, and away from God, gender/sex becomes an absurdity, a non-entity, a private or social construct, a raw Nietzchean willfulness raging into the abyss, a bare and meaningless mathematical average.
The masculine and the feminine, in their very distinction from each other, define, complement and complete each other. They are equal in dignity, in giftedness, in finitude. They crave each other. They generously bless each other. In the condition of sin, they crucify each other. In the state of grace they beg pardon, forgive, heal, strengthen, delight each other. In every man/woman meeting, however trivial, the Joy of Adam resounds: "This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh."
The encounter of man and woman is the Great Drama at the very heart of Being. It is the Love Event
...as erotic-romantic-intimate-spousal, filial, fraternal/sororal, maternal/paternal.
...as singular analogue for the Eternal Embrace of the Bridal Church by her Bridegroom.
...as privileged icon of the love between the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit.
...as imaged in the (inferior) Petrine and the (superior) Marian dimensions of the Church.
...as mutuality in the contemplative gaze, delight, the dance of reception/donation, sacrifice ("sacra" holy "facere" make).
...as tenderness, reverence, gratitude, magnanimity within humility, generosity, fruitfulness, abundance, exuberance.
The two sexes, of their very nature, exist in creative, wholesome, thrilling tension with each other: mutual completion, inspiration, affirmation, and delight. The two entertain distinct, contrasting propensities. So it would not be surprising to find different political tendencies. The liberal/conservative binary is not clear, interior or formal as their definitions vary according to context: what is conservative in one time and place may be liberal in another. The traditional/progressive duality has more clarity: the one looking to the past for a revelation and tradition; the other looking to the future for enlightenment and improvement.
"If you are not liberal when you are young you do not have a heart; if you are not conservative when you are old you do not have a brain." If there is a coherence within youthful liberalism and seasoned conservatism, so we can consider the consonance of the feminine with the liberal and the masculine with the conservative.
In our current context, the youthful female psyche...in the dimensions of tenderness, sensitivity, receptivity, generosity, welcome, nurture, acceptance, empathy, physicality and concreteness...understandably resonates with environmental concern, welcome of the immigrant, strong safety net including care for children, restrictions on gun ownership, protection of the authentic autonomy and dignity of women.
Conversely, the male psyche (especially if immature)...as competitive, assertive, individualistic, inclined to authority, tradition, clarity, abstraction, boundaries, hierarchy...intuits more value in economic liberty, secure borders, international assertiveness contra bad actors, and protection of defenseless, innocent human life.
In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt identified six core moral values that influence political orientation: care, fairness, loyalty, liberty, sanctity and authority. While there are complex, contradictory ways that these core values find expression in both camps, (especially liberty and fairness), he finds that liberals lean heavily into care and fairness; conservative more into authority, loyalty and sanctity. And so the argument here is that youthful femininity also inclines to care and fairness as masculinity favors authority, loyalty ad sanctity. And so there is a natural fittingness that girls are more liberal and boys conservative.
Clearly we renounce stereotypes here: of course men are tender and women abstract. All of us have all of these interior qualities even as they gestalt within each of us as femininity or masculinity.
Of great significance is the rich influence each of us receives from others. Ideally each child matures under the influence of one or more mother and father figures. And so, the girl interiorizes strong values from her father and mother both; and likewise for the boy. And we observe the boundless creativity and fluidity as children with the same mother/father interact in diverse, dramatic fashions.
In the course of a seasoned, mature marriage the spouses mutually influence each other so that values that are lacking in each are interiorized from the other, making for balance and integrity in both husband and wife. This same dynamic holds for every relationship, community and organization: friendships, Church, education, business and politics. And so we would expect more exaggeration and imbalance in the young.
Deconstruction of Masculinity
Here we must mention Fleckinstein's guiding conviction: our crisis in virility. Femininity, also under attack, is nevertheless resilient, organic, instinctive, and ontologically-psychologically dense. Masculinity is far more fragile, vulnerable, and dependent upon a cultural itinerary of formation. While both are ontological, created forms, virility is more of a social construct as it depends more on training, motivation, discipline, correction, encouragement, mentoring and camaraderie.
The society-wide, systemic destruction of virility formation leaves our young men adrift: prone to insecurity and indecision or to toxic, vicious machismo. And so, we witness in the Trump phenomenon the emergence of a crude macho politics: irreverent, nationalistic, defensive, raging, xenophobic, chauvinist.
This bipolarity of weakness/viciousness elicits, of course, a feminist liberalism of suspicion, anxiety, and resentment. An unhappy polarization of the sexes!
Conclusion
If isolation is the problem, connection is the solution.
At every level, we desperately need connection: husband and wife, male and female, Marian and Petrine, traditional and progressive, conservative and liberal. Such can happen, however, only within our greater communion, all of us, in the "Communio" of the Holy Trinity, in Christ and his Church. I have found it helpful, in every encounter and engagement, to "triangulate"...to engage the other (my friend, partner, competitor, enemy) in the presence of a "Third", Jesus Christ himself. In that luminous presence, all that is good in the other is enhanced, and all that is bad is overcome.
May our youth engage, at every level of politics, all that is Good, True, Beautiful, Pure and Holy!
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