Adults in the Room

Having struggled to bestow the values of previous generations on the young, we should not be surprised if they emerge as confused and uncertain adults. By Nick Cater

It is going to be a tough year for students graduating from university, the first in three decades seeking work in a shrinking job market.

Will they find the fortitude to step up, as other Australians have done in hard times? To dig deep into their inner reserves and create their own opportunities?

Possibly not, if a video posted by New South Wales Young Labor last week is any guide to the pre-adult mindset.

“Entering adulthood as a young woman, when the whole system is already set up against you is terrifying,” says one disgruntled student.

Another complains about the rise in tuition fees in the humanities. Redirecting funding to STEM courses discriminates against women, she claims.

“And now ScoMo is cutting JobKeeper in September,” contributes an indignant young man. “We’re being bled dry.”

The first contributor continues her tale of woe. “Unable to use my 12 years of training as a classical musician to find a job, I ended up sending about 10 applications to retail jobs. I heard back from two and only ended up scrounging one by chance.”

Just as undernourished men hawking rabbit meat door to door came to epitomise the Great Depression, perhaps a struggling 20-something virtuoso, thrust into the indignity of retail life, may become the symbol of the COVID-induced recession we’re about to have.

That the video was posted by Young Labor makes it all the more troubling. If young people weighed down with helplessness and entitlement are seeking solace in the ALP, the party is in more trouble than we imagined.

These are the children of Julia Gillard’s higher education revolution, the first to matriculate not by merit but right. At the lower-rung universities in particular, they are deprived of the status of scholars and treated as paying customers.

Universities are no longer places to make the transition to adult life. Quite the reverse. They are quarantined safe spaces where no student should ever be confronted with contrary opinion or discordant facts. Their students are poorly prepared for the tough road ahead.

As taxpayers they can expect to be paying off the debt from COVID-19 government spending until well into middle age.

By then fewer than four out of 10 Australians will be of working age and they will find themselves supporting many more retirees for far longer than any previous generation.

For now, the graduate recruitment programs of major firms in Australia have been largely unaffected by the threat of the COVID-19 economic downturn. Most, however, are hedging their bets.

Short of an economic or medical miracle, we can expect offers to be withdrawn or deferred by the end of the year. In the UK, where induction starts in September, more than a quarter of graduate offers have been rescinded or postponed, according to a survey by graduate employment website Prospects.

Should the 20-somethings surprise us by rising to the challenge, it will be despite, not because of, their parents, who have shielded them from risk and deprived them of the resilience that comes from exposure to the friction of everyday life.

The paradoxes underpinning the condition in which we find ourselves are unpacked in Why Borders Matter, an important new book by sociologist Frank Furedi.

He argues that the denial of national borders, and the eagerness of the cultural trendsetters to describe themselves as citizens of the world, is paralleled by the decline in the social boundaries that allow us to navigate everyday life.

They include the boundary between childhood and adulthood and the denial of the authority the old once had over the young.

Adults have become infantilised and increasingly incapable of setting limits for their children. Children, on the other hand, have become adultified, hoisted to a position of moral command over their supposedly reckless forebears.

The absurdity of this inversion of authority is made clear in Greta Thunberg’s speech to the United Nations in 2018.

“Since our leaders are behaving like children, we will have to take the responsibility they should have a taken a long time ago,” she said.

This is not, as it first appears, a message of empowerment. It is a cry of enfeeblement from a generation that has been deprived of moral guidance and has a fatalistic conviction it has inherited a world on course for extinction.

“Our society is full of lost boys and girls hanging out at the edge of adulthood,” writes Furedi. They were reared by a generation who believed it wrong to say “no” to a rebellious child and tried instead to negotiate.

Since Western societies have struggled to bestow the values of previous generations on the young, we should not be surprised that they emerge as confused and uncertain adults, lacking the resilience to deal with conflict in the workplace with little experience of the trade-offs required in a democracy.

Graduates who grew to rely on safe spaces and de-platforming to avoid conflict on campus are taking that approach with them into the workforce. Corporations, which should know better, comply with the muddled morality of a generation deprived of a deeper set of values.

The COVID-19 crisis has reasserted the need for jurisdictional borders, and even boundaries within nations. It is a development some might think is long overdue.

A more troubling legacy of this crisis, however, is likely to be the hardening of cultural boundaries

It is manifest in the Black Lives Matter campaign with its authoritarian and illiberal streak.

Lockdown and physical isolation for the professional class have reduced the chances of encountering different opinions. Interaction between the educated elite and those blessed with greater pragmatism and street wisdom have been reduced to a minimum.

Instead, human contact of sorts relies increasingly on the internet and social media where one has the luxury of creating one’s own safe space, separated as if by a wall from other ways of viewing the world.

Could the wild ride clinging to the coat-tails of BLM be the first of many dangerous adventures on which the intellectual left embarks in the safety of its own walled garden?

Sheltered as they are from competing moral values, dismissive of tradition, uncertain of our institutions, one fears the answer is yes.