. . .in a survey that has so far tested 14,000 volunteers, Sara Konrath
and her team at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social
Research has found that college students’ self-reported empathy levels
(as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a standardized
questionnaire containing such items as “I often have tender, concerned
feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I try to look at
everybody’s side of a disagreement before I make a decision”) have been
in steady decline over the past three decades—since the inauguration of
the scale, in fact, back in 1979. A particularly pronounced slump has
been observed over the past 10 years. “College kids today are about 40
percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago,”
Konrath reports.More worrisome still, according to Jean Twenge, a professor of
psychology at San Diego State University, is that, during this same
period, students’ self-reported narcissism levels have shot through the
roof. “Many people see the current group of college students, sometimes
called ‘Generation Me,’ ” Konrath continues, “as one of the most
self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident, and individualistic
in recent history.
Now read this review.
What I will submit is that the essence of what we call Individualism is the capacity for individuals to make moral progress, to become, on the inside, better human beings. This stipulation is essential for the concept of personal responsibility to make any sense; it is essential for individuals to feel a sense of SELF that endures when they are alone.
Narcissism, paradoxically, is a fixation with self that arises from NOT feeling a sense of self. You seek what you don’t have. You think about yourself constantly because you have to reassure yourself that you have not in fact vanished. You seek the admiration of others, but when they offer it there is no you to return it. There is never a connection that is stable. The world is always in flux.
I look at things like Twitter, and I see vanity. What can you say worth saying in 100 characters, or whatever it is? When it first came out, I was told by a younger friend that I couldn’t use it, since I would run out of characters before I got to my second comma, which no doubt was and is true.
But I have commented before on this obsessive need for today’s young people to be in CONSTANT contact with their friends, as if they would disappear if they had to go twenty minutes without a text or Facebook post.
I remember listening to a series of lectures on Existentialism, and when he got to Dostoevsky, a point he made about “Notes from an Underground Man” is that Dostoevsky, in that piece, was rejecting the notion of moral progress. This was, to me, a profound notion: what happens when you no longer believe that personal growth is possible? What is the meaning of life for such a person? What CAN be the meaning of life?
I want to be clear: if there is no up or down, there is no way of labeling even sensations. You cannot say pain is worse than pleasure, and if memory serves the narrator of that piece was in many respects a masochist.
A culture of narcissism is the inevitable product of moral pessimism, which itself is the result of both scientism–the curse of our age–and incompetent philosophizing. In turn, as I posted a couple posts ago, radical politics can play the role of ersatz conscience for those otherwise lacking a coherent moral identity.
We are animals, in many respects. This is indisputable. But we are also spiritual beings, which is something that can be SCIENTIFICALLY investigated. It simply hasn’t been by the mainstream. What they do is spend enormous amounts of time criticizing the experiments of others, but ZERO in serious, sincere efforts at duplication.
In an actually scientific world, in an actually rational society, LARGE amounts of money would be spent on projects like that of Gary Schwarz and the Windbridge Institute (among many others). We don’t live in a scientific, rational society. We know this because our thought leaders relentlessly proclaim their rationality and dedication to science. No one is fully rational. Only rational people realize this, though, by adding their emotions to the mix consciously.
In a world characterized by competent philosophy, we would reject any and all need for a SINGLE answer, and accept that many correct answers are both possible and DESIRABLE. That is what I intended with my own essay on Goodness. I have absolute principles, but accept countless iterations of them, countless deployments, countless individual answers, all of which can be discussed and negotiated.
But we have little of this. We have people who cling to traditions like Christianity that really cannot survive in this critical age; and we have people who reject the very notion of individual moral improvement and who, in so doing, condemn us to the pervasive mediocrity on display in front of us, a nation of selfish fools.