J. Budziszewski: Generation disordered

Political philosopher J. Budziszewski has written numerous books including How to Stay Christian in College and On the Meaning of Sex. On May 30 we ran a Q-and-A concerning his own background and critique of Darwinism, but Budziszewski is also a keen observer of contemporary student life.

For 34 years now you’ve taught at The University of Texas at Austin, one of the best state universities. Has the skill level of entering students gotten better or worse? Worse and worse. I’m speaking even of bright students with good equipment upstairs. Few of them have been taught properly to read for arguments. If I ask, “What did the author believe?” they can tell me. If I ask them to explain why he believes it, they’re caught by surprise. Rather than saying, “Oh I see, this sentence expresses a premise, but this one expresses a conclusion,” they see a sequence of disconnected assertions.

How are student attention spans? Shorter and shorter. Watching YouTube and browsing the internet is no preparation for spending a couple of hours working through the argument of a text. You read this for 20 seconds, that for 20 seconds, then you click on a link and do something else.

What are their lives like? More and more disordered. Anything goes, especially concerning sex, even among many young people who call themselves Christians. Twenty years ago, if I’d asked, “Are there any problems with the sexual revolution?” they would have said, “No, it’s fine.” Now they often answer, “No, it’s not working.”

‘Christian morality is a prerequisite for happiness.’

Are they happy? They say they are. One student wrote on a midsemester course survey, “I am living an awesome life.” But in the same class, when I asked, “What’s happiness?” I got strange answers. The first half-dozen answers were variations on “Nothing but the absence of pain.” It was quite difficult to get the students in that group to suggest any positive element in happiness. This tells me that the “awesome life” remark was probably not an honest expression of how that student was experiencing life, but a quietly desperate, “I’ve got to convince myself.”

By material standards they are living an awesome life. But man does not live by bread alone. Philosophers speak of the “hedonistic paradox.” If you pursue truth and friendship for their own sakes, you will enjoy pleasure. If you pursue pleasure for itself, pleasure recedes and you are likely to find pain. Eventually you burn out. Among people who live hedonistic lives, the paradox didn’t used to kick in until much later. But so many of these young people have started in on hedonism so young, and thrown themselves into it so thoroughly, that the paradox kicks in very early. I suspect that this is much of the reason why they can’t suggest any positive element in happiness.

Are you able to get into a discussion of this sort in class? Sure. If you read the great books, you can’t avoid questions like whether happiness and pleasure are the same thing, and how marital order and social order are related. I don’t have to bring them up. My students do. Of course the students won’t talk if they think you are calling them immoral. I humbly suggested to one class that my generation had invented the sexual revolution, but I thought theirs was paying the price.

What happened? A young man said, “I know what you mean.” He said he longed—his word—to love and marry a woman and be faithful to her forever. My heart soared. But then he said, “but I don’t think it’s possible.” Because his own parents hadn’t been able to manage it—parents whom he obviously loved—he didn’t see how he could.

Do your students read your good book, On the Meaning of Sex? Some of them discover it. Occasionally they drop in to talk. Among grad students, for instance, a big question is when to get married.

Is it typical for students to say, “We want to try out marriage so we’ll live together for a while.” Yes, but of course it’s not practice for marriage, since it lacks commitment. It’s the shell of marriage. That statement makes some people angry, yet others tell me, “I’m so glad you explained that. I’ve always been told the old ideas were just arbitrary taboos.” There is a thirst to know the rational basis for traditional sexual norms. Interesting.

Do any of them say, “How come I’m not hearing this anywhere else?” The most poignant such instance was a young man I knew who was trying to work through the guilt of his complicity in his girlfriend’s abortion. He became very angry. “The adults made this legal. They told us it was OK and that’s not true. Why didn’t anybody tell us that it isn’t?”

I understand pornography use is very high among guys, but I’m hearing that young women use it also. I suspect they don’t talk with you about that. I came to realize how high it is not from my own students but from readers who have written to me—mostly young men trying to break free from the habit.

What was your major takeaway? Publicly people may say shame is old-fashioned. Then they get caught up in pornography—and they’re ashamed. Yet they find it enormously difficult to break free. Porn is an addiction.

So there is enormous wringing of hands among many Christians as to what’s happening to people in their 20s and moving away from church activities and we’re losing this whole generation. Do you think these people will come back? Some will come back, and some who have never set foot in a church will come in. Often things have to get worse for a long time before they get better, but there are things we can do to help.

Such as? You can’t stop someone from walking out. But you can teach him well enough that when he considers coming back, he’ll know what he’s returning to. We haven’t a chance of getting people to live a Christian way of life if they think it is just a collection of joy-killing rules. What we should explain is that Christian morality is a prerequisite for happiness, and that it makes us more free, not less—free to do what is good rather than being jerked around by desires. People need to have the vision of the good that temptation is pulling them away from.

Temptation affects not only our actions but our theology. Teens need deeper instruction and honest talk. Very few people fall away from God because the intellectual case against God convinces them. More often, a naive young Christian falls into some sort of sin, doesn’t want to repent, and starts looking for reasons to believe God doesn’t exist. It’s also easier to guard against temptation if you understand how it works and how to avoid it. A young man may intend to remain chaste, yet no one ever explained to him that if he spends a lot of time alone with girls in dark rooms, he’s unlikely to achieve what he’s aiming for.