Young, Liberal and Depressed (Pt. I)

The statistics are alarming. Rusty Reno writes about them in the recent First Things (Paywall):

According to a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, 57 percent of high school girls say they persistently feel sad or hopeless. That’s up from 36 percent a decade ago. For boys, what might be called the nihilism index went up from 21 percent to 29 percent.

Not surprisingly, the number of teenagers reporting that they have seriously considered suicide has also increased, reaching 30 percent for girls.

Why? Reno doesn't think much of what usually passes as reasons for this slide into despair. Instead he argues that it's a consequence of overweening secular progressivism:

[T]oday’s cultural propaganda forbids our acknowledging the obvious fact that the last decade has seen the imposition of gay marriage, “shout your abortion,” transgender ideology, and lots of Rainbow flag-waving. During the same ten years, marijuana has been legalized and “white privilege” has been demonized. Black Lives Matter announces that our country is hopelessly racist; environmental activists tell us we’re on the brink of extinction.

In short, we’ve created a toxic culture.

He goes on to claim that,

The nihilism index should include more than the percentage of teens reporting despair and contemplating suicide. Marriage and fertility rates belong as well, as do drug overdose deaths, murder rates, and mass shootings.

Other factors are relevant, too: workforce participation, civic involvement, religious attendance.

I invite social scientists to give rigorous formulation to a nihilism index, a much-needed measure of how bad secular progressivism has made life for so many people.

Over the last fifteen years, the United States has gone from hosting no pediatric gender clinics that facilitate “transitions” to hosting more than one hundred. Over the same period of time, mental health for young people has declined and the rate of teen suicide has increased.

We have gone from no pot shops to thousands of them—and from 27,000 drug overdose deaths per year to more than 100,000.

Correlation does not prove causation, but it demands investigation.

Whatever you think of the particulars of Reno's indictment it seems plain that for many modernity has drained the meaning out of life.

People used to find meaning in family, church, community and work, but today many families have disintegrated, church no longer seems a realistic option, and neighborhoods are rarely comprised of people who have a generational attachment to them.

All that's left is work, and work by itself doesn't usually satisfy our yearning for purpose, especially when so many work from home, isolated from meaningful human contact.

Indeed, we're evolving into a nation of social isolates, atomized individuals with few, if any, emotional connections to other people.

A sense of loneliness, emptiness and pointlessness is pervasive, and people, including the young, have turned to ersatz emotional and psychological fixes - facebook "friends," drugs, alcohol, pornography, gaming, progressive causes, even bullying - but none of these satisfy the deepest hungers in the human psyche.

Which is why the needle on the "nihilism index" is pointing to the red.

More tomorrow.