The Victory of Bread and Circuses

You’ve no doubt heard about it, the phenomenon that is Pokémon Go. In this game teenagers and their slightly older colleagues chase, using their smart phones, mythical vermin across local venues mapped by geographical software, or something approaching that. My own children have thoroughly confused me on the subject.

Combine this latest assault on maturity with the popular culture in general, with a lack of respect for The Church and parents, with the habit of children returning home after college, or never leaving in the first place, and you have a great triumph of the adolescent mentality over the adult perspective. In these days when much is to be confronted over the very future of society, our young men and women, who clamor for respect for their precocious wisdom, are vastly more engaged with childlike folly than they are with the rudimentary questions of the day or of their lives. Questions, logic tells us, which will affect them much more than affect those of us firmly ensconced in middle age.

Why deal with mounting threats to liberty, a collapsing entitlement system, Church issues, and foreign challenges when one can while away the hours innocently chasing a Pikachu (I think it’s called that) across urban locales? Well, to some of us, the answer is obvious. And as Roman Catholics engaged with these questions, the current intellectual status of young adults cannot give us confidence.

But to legions of the young, it is not a problem worthy of attention. In many ways, it is not their fault that they are twenty-six year olds going on fourteen. After all, we raised them. I’ve seen parents of grown children cower before their progeny like frightened rabbits, afraid to cut ties lest the children bellow their victimhood and the one-dimensional parents lose their main reason for living.

Because we have been scared, and academia has aided and abetted in this travesty, to injure the tender feelings of the little dears, we have inadvertently conspired in the mass infantilization of an entire generation of Americans. As such, they are easy pickings for any marketer, charlatan, demagogue, or web messiah who may come around offering them the panacea of eternal liberation from adult duties and responsibilities only in exchange for their mere freedom.

As a college instructor, I’ve seen this firsthand as numbers of my students are functionally illiterate, cannot put a coherent sentence together, and lack the essentials to fully compete in the free marketplace. Their more academically successful contemporaries admit the problem. But ask the poor inarticulate devils of the latest rap video, internet game or Kardashian gossip and they will regale you with detailed comment and analysis.

Now it’s not as if this is the only generation that has taken a flight of fancy. Every generation does so in their own way. However, the force of the internet and social media amplify this today to such a degree to render most other subjects meaningless and thus incomprehensible to these young en masse.

We as Roman Catholics also know the questions facing The Church in the twenty-first century. Well, unless we come up with a really good app, perhaps chasing web-based saints around a monastery to pick up absolution points, it’s increasingly unlikely our heretofore future leaders may take notice.

While they are not taking notice untoward things will transpire that they will one day have to deal with, much to their regret.

As has been said, “If you believe in nothing, you’ll fall for anything.” That seems to be especially true, at the circus.