If this generation of leaders and politicians had to leave a phrase for posterity, it might be: ‘I only know that I know everything (and you don’t).’
If this generation of leaders and politicians had to leave a phrase for posterity, it might be: ‘I only know that I know everything (and you don’t).’
I n one of P. J. O’Rourke’s most memorable openings, he wrote: “Every generation finds the drug it needs.” The satirist was reminding us of a constant across generations. Sometimes that drug was an actual drug, sometimes an ideology. Today, the rising generation gets high on a uniquely potent narcotic: absolute confidence in their own exceptionalism.
My contemporaries talk as if they invented human rights, democracy, environmentalism, science, and freedom, and believe they have lived through humanity’s most important events because they had to walk around wearing a muzzle in 2020 and because it’s sometimes hot outside. It’s hard to explain to them that we saw the Berlin Wall fall and witnessed the Twin Towers attacks that changed the world, and all without feeling superior to previous generations, who lived the bloody and convulsive 20th century to the fullest.
Just listen to AOC, from an MLK Now event in New York City back in 2019: “Millennials and people, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that will come after us are looking up, and we’re like: ‘The world is gonna end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.’” Or to Nancy Pelosi (not a member of either of these generations by any stretch, but speaking very much in their cant, and to them), marking the anniversary last month of a bill her party muscled through Congress: “When President Biden affixed his signature to the Inflation Reduction Act one year ago today, America not only made history — but we made progress on the most pressing challenge of our times.”
The superiority and messianism exhibited by many young people, but particularly by the leaders of postmodern progressivism, are not only unjustified but demonstrate an ignorance of fundamental historical events. Progress has taken place along a very long time line. Human rights? In 1512, centuries before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Spanish rulers issued the Laws of Burgos, protecting indigenous peoples’ land ownership and prohibiting slavery by decree. Democracy? Solon and his classical Greek contemporaries had some ideas. And a great many minds contributed their life’s work to The Science before Fauci arrived on the scene: Archimedes, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Alexander Fleming, Marie Curie, Einstein, etc.
Movements such as #MeToo or Black Lives Matter may have sounded like an epiphany in the minds of their promoters, but the truth is that they were nothing more than echoes or emulations of other movements that took place some time before: The ’60s had the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, or, a bit further back in time, the Boston Tea Party of 1773 might ring a bell.
All these events, not to mention the world wars, were of greater historical importance than most of what we have experienced so far in the 21st century. Every era has its milestones, and they are important for its contemporaries, but it is becoming irritating that today’s politicians and activist leaders are announcing the discovery of penicillin daily. It is paradoxical that today, when we have more access than ever to historical sources, we show the least interest in understanding them. The idea that we should be ashamed of what our ancestors did just because yesterday’s events, seen through the lens of 2023, are unacceptable to our woke consciences prevails in a large part of public opinion.
Perhaps no one could explain quite like G. K. Chesterton why we should look upon the history of our ancestors with reverence and interest, even if his allusion to the “democracy of the dead” sounds like a slogan for a Halloween T-shirt: “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”
Once upon a time, schools trained us in a kind of virtue that has fallen into disuse: humility. This predisposed students to learn and distanced them from the idea that the world revolves around them because it is indebted to them. Humility helps one to not make a fool of oneself, but it is also the best foundation for wisdom, for a better understanding of the world and history. A wise man said in the fifth century b.c., “I only know that I know nothing.” If our rising generation of leaders and politicians had to leave a phrase for posterity, it would be: “I only know that I know everything (and you don’t).”
I do not know if each generation truly finds the drug it needs, but what I am sure of is that this one needs an antidote. Another wise man, Saint Augustine, once prescribed a course which could be put to use curing the messianism of our era: “Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.”